Actually, everyone should take a chill. All the charges should be dropped and these people should just work it out. The neighborly thing to do would have been to tell the neighbor not to fly over his property before shooting it out of the sky or anything like that. I think some partial compensation would be appropriate as a civil matter negotiated between the neighbors or in civil small claims court. The only reason that this is being given any attention is because "drone" has become the catch all word for a bunch of techno paranoia.

You are clearly not taking into account the upfront capital costs and bridge maintenance and repairs and changing political situations. Do that, amortise all those costs (real ones, not fake and improbably low ones) and try to answer the same question. A damaged boat doesn't prevent other boats from moving in the ocean and a boat can be used for other purposes if the political climate shuts down one route.

What are you going to move over that bridge that cannot be moved cheaper by a boat and faster by a plane?

Put a train on that maybe? What happens when a multi megaton train filled with oil (what else)? Goes off the rail there? There has to be an economic reason for anything like this, not a political one, because if it is all politics, it will be the most epic bridge to nowhere.

Come up with an economically sound reason first, before coming up with a solution like that.

Isn't the whole point that WE are effectively that program.

We are getting closer and closer to being able to write something more intelligent than ourselves, make sure it's working properly, and then letting it loose.

The concern is that this might only happen once...

for you technologically superior folk..

"Can I completely gut Windows 10 so that it basically just functions like Windows 7 with DX12?"

I own one Windows box. with Windows 7 Professional 64 bit running on it. It is used for exactly 3 things.. Playing Minecraft, and playing various Steam games. Also occasionally downloading mods for those various games from one or two very specific trusted websites.

I have an older box running Arch for everything *else* I want to do, because I'm not stupid enough to trust Microsoft with anything that might potentially have importance.

In the past, before I took the leap into Linux, Whenever I would set up a Windows box, I'd always pop into services.msc and disable a crapload of services.. usually using Blackviper's service guides.. And IE would only get used once to download a real browser, which I would then kit out with adblock and noscript plugins before doing anything else.

And this generally seemed to work pretty well. Even with no always-on antivirus, no security updates (I'd disable Windows Update completely), shut down windows managed firewalls and not replace them... all the things you're generally "not supposed to do".. I'd very rarely run into any kind of problem. (The exceptions being when I'd do something deliberately stupid and risky, fully knowing I shouldn't.. just because my brain went dead for a brief time.)

I found once you gut most of Windows, the security risks drop dramatically. More than enough for me to find tolerable for a dedicated game machine, anyway..

With Windows 10 being the obvious transition to "Software as a Service so we can just keep billing you for renting our product".. (which is where I forsee this going, ultimately..) is it still "old Windows" enough that it can be properly gutted?

I have no use for a sexualized version of Clippy... I have no use for "Edge". I have no use for really any "feature" of Windows 10 besides DX12. And I have a lot of reluctance about some of the features, even when it's only on a machine I use to play some games. So, to free up system resources.. I'd like to rip all that stuff out.. or at least permanently disable it.

Anybody tried playing around with that sort of approach to see if it is still doable? Like disabling Windows Update entirely?

:LISP can build, index, update and use GIANT HOSTS FILES

You lose! Grovel like a worm before the Queen of Programming Languages(TM)!!

Running it on the machine I'm using to post. Our group got the enterprise iso's and cdkey on the 29th. I did a custom install and said no to all of the bullshit options. So far I'm not seeing any ads.

Because your average user isn't a /. Reader or l33t hax0r... The idea of having settings and data synced across multiple PCs appeals to enough people to warrant it being in the box.

As they say in Russian (a rough translation): saving those, who are drowning is up to those who are drowning. They also say: while you can hope that a god will help you, you should help yourself.

Basically there are enough people on the African continent to make it possible for those very people to figure out how to solve their own problems. I don't see African solutions to problems in Indonesia related to Avian Flu as an example.

Fair cop, but consider that the same despots you cite are very active in absconding with any kind of aid that even smells like money. Outside of schools and hospitals (provided mostly by church-based charities, Catholic Relief Services chief among them)? You don't find much other types of aid reaching Africa, mostly because that shiz gets swiped by every corrupt pair of hands that can reach a piece of it.

So, unless you recommend that we re-establish colonial rule, or simply sweep through with a vast army to conquer and administer (most of) the continent as a collective UN-run organization, what exactly do you recommend?

Thank you me!

You're welcome.

That's about it.

Of-course people have these rights. You, as a person, have the right (meaning that you cannot be oppressed by government) to move out of a country and do your business in such a way as to minimise your taxes. Not having an entitlement to do that does not mean you do not, as a person, have the right (protection against government oppression).

Not being able to afford something does not mean you don't have a right to do it, having the right to do it does not mean you are also supposed to be given an entitlement to afford doing it.

Your lack of understanding of the concept of rights is not unique, most people don't get it.

You totally forgot the frustrating bit about actively avoiding medical personnel, because you know, the local village shaman said they were evil.

Some of it is understandable (e.g. bush meat - when you can't buy hamburger at the local grocer, you do what you have to in order to feed your family). Some of it is even semi-understandable with enough ignorance (e.g. fleeing to the US or EU because the infection you just got is a death sentence back home, but you at least have some chance of surviving it in the first world). Much of it however is not.

Actually...

Here in Portland a lot of roads downtown lost square footage thanks to wide swaths of green-painted areas which are bike-only, forcing cars to concentrate themselves into fewer lanes, wearing those portions of the road out faster, etc.

Also, in many locales, bicycles do require a license anyway (mostly to assist in recovering stolen ones). Wouldn't take much to slap a tax on those bad boys, and without much overhead beyond what's already in place.

Pfft! We get that in Portland now...

A huge percentage are frickin' snowflakes demand to be given the same rights and berth as automobiles, then blatantly violate every traffic rule there is. Worst part is when they blow off such things as, oh I dunno, signaling, then get mad when you have to slam on the brakes to avoid turning them into road pizza - then they look at you like *you* did something wrong. Then there's the complete disregard for traffic lights (oh, the light's red? Well I'm a pedestrian now, so screw you and give way as I suddenly pull out of my lane and ride across the crosswalk without warning!)

Mind you, a good share of bicyclists here are perfectly fine with obeying traffic rules, are are easy to share the road with. It's the massive percentage which behave like jackasses and (for instance) demand to use the middle lane (at 10mph) in spite of the really fat bike paths on either side of the road... the urge to turn them into road pizza gets strong, but that only makes them martyrs, and good luck getting a fair trial in this town should you hit one.