Technically that is correct, which was the point of this whole topic. But that is the basic intent and they are about as close as it comes.

Just two comments here, though there are many I could make.

First, income inequality is NOT the real issue. Why should you care who is or is not rich? The PROBLEM is poverty.

Second, my whole point was that it is very easy to show that income inequality has become WORSE, the more statist the U.S has become. I'm not saying that correlation proves causation, but the existence of a correlation is indisputable.

Waze wasn't bad about collecting information until it was acquired by Google.

This is a patently ridiculous assertion. A copyright holder can voluntarily place a work in the public domain (that's what GPL and Creative Commons are all about, for example). In fact that's what this whole discussion is ABOUT. Have you read any of it?

Another patently ridiculous assertion. There doesn't have to be a law "allowing" it. That's not how the law works. It would not be possible only if there were a law against it.

The FACT is, not many years ago Congress passed a law that put millions of works that were formerly in the public domain back under copyright. That is the incident that caused EFF to start pushing for a law that would make that no longer possible.

So you are WAY out in left field.

Don't be a jerk. The question is whether all drones should be restricted just because the President is a candy-ass.

A Federal court has already ruled that the FAA does not have authority to regulate drones, except those that enter "navigable airways". REGARDLESS of whether their use is commercial. Their regulatory authority is limited to interstate commerce, which is the basis for the definition of navigable airways.

The solution to the Whitehouse problem is simply to make it illegal to fly drones THERE. Not to regulate them everywhere else.

The FAA has appealed the court's ruling, but based on evidence and precedent it is pretty clear the FAA will lose that appeal.

Unless they intend to get forgiveness... or default. I am not sure that Greece is "too big to fail" where they can do that.

It is. EU is not a nation, it's a collection of nations, and "European identity" is weak at best. Anti-EU movements are already growing, and won't have any trouble taking power if it starts to look like EU is a threat to the nations people actually identity with.

Ah, Americans and their "mammoth snowstorms" - try living on a rock in the middle of the North Atlantic. You know what we call a snowstorm with gale-force winds and copious precipitation? Tuesday ;) Our last one was... let's see, all weekend. The northwest gets hit by another gale-force storm tomorrow. The southeast is predicted to get hurricane-force winds on Thursday morning.

Here's what the job of someone dispatched to maintain antennae for air traffic control services has to deal with here. ;) (those are guy wires)

There fixed that for you

I don't even the likes of Verizon would act that way. I know short term profits are everything but so are anticipated future earnings, if the cost of fixing the problem was only equal to a few years of fines, they'd fix that rather than putting the anticipated futures fines in their SEC filings.

Now if it was going to be like 10 years or more before the fines exceeded the cost to fix it, than they might just decided to pay the fines as if they are a just another tax.

This certainly explains the observed tendency of economies to collapse randomly no matter how they're run.

However, unlike in game economies, decisions in real economies affect people in addition to economy. Even if austerity actually was a cure to euro's problems, it cannot continue without destroying EU itself. People aren't going to tolerate endless misery just to boost some number, no matter how necessary politicians (who don't share the misery) deem it.

Either EU gets euro to work without austerity, or it has to abandon it. Demanding sacrifices from the common people who's reward is having less say in their own local affairs is quickly discrediting the entire union.

I see people who act like mindless robots when it comes to politics,

"Act like mindless robots" is a bit vague. Can you detail what it entails and how you've studied it?

You did actually study the reasoning behind political behaviour and not just conclude that because your candidate lost, people must be idiots?

fail to understand mathematics, believe in magical sky daddies for which there is no evidence,

People typically hold metaphysical positions based on personal subjective experience and channel these through whatever cultural imagery is available. Obnoxious as the result can be, the strawman of "magical sky fairy" has nothing to do with it.

and do all sorts of other tremendously illogical and irrational things despite the education we attempt to give them; that makes me conclude that most people are hopeless.

Illogical, such as jumping to conclusions the evidence does not warrant? Given the rather obviously non-sequiter nature of ("There exist education that isn't working, therefore no education can") I can only assume you're holding it for irrational reasons, such as egomania.

Trying to psychoanalyze other people over the Internet just makes you look like an idiot in my eyes. It isn't even relevant to the conversation.

...This one's so obvious I'm not even going to bother.

A sun-like star is about 1 1/2 million kilometers in diameter. To blot out all light from such a star that's 10 light years away, a 0,75 kilometer diameter disc could be no more than 1/200.000th of a light year, or around 50 million kilometers (1/3rd the distance between the earth and the sun).

The brightest star in the sky is Sirius A. It has a diameter of 2,4 million km and a distance of 8.6 light years. This means your shade could be no more than 25 million kilometers away.

The sun and the moon both take up about the same amount of arc in the night sky so would be about equally difficult to block; let's go with the sun for a nice supervillian-ish approach. 1,4m km diameter, 150m km distance means it'd be able to block the sun at 800km away. Such an object could probably be kept in a stable orbit at half that altitude, so yeah, you could most definitely block out stars with the thing - including our sun!

It makes sense. We can radiate individual photons for thrust if so desired. We can move individual electrons from one position in a spacecraft to another for tiny adjustments of angle and position if so desired. It seems you're going to be much more limited by your ability to precisely track your target than by your ability to make fine adjustments.

I think a much bigger problem is going to be isolating standing waves from within the shielding material from distorting its perfect rim (with a shield that big and thin, there *will* be oscillations from even the slightest thrust inputs). You need to isolate the rim from the shielding. And you also need to make sure that you can have a rim that can be coiled up for launch but uncoil to such perfection in space.

Tough task... but technically, it should be possible.

I would presume that the bulk material in the inside has no need for accuracy, only the very rim. The question is more of whether you can have a coiled material that when uncoiled (deployment) can return to a shape with that level of accuracy. I would think it possible, but I really don't know.

I would forsee a super-precise rim with just a small bit of light shielding on its inside, deployed via uncoiling, and then attached to a much stronger, less precise uncoiled ring to which the bulk shielding material (and stationkeeping ion thrusters) are attached. The attachment between the two would need to provide for vibration and tension isolation (even the slowest adjustments in angle of such a huge, thin shield are going to set in motion relevant vibrations, you've got almost no damping - you want the structural ring to deal with those and not transfer them through to the precision ring). Not to mention that your shield will be acting as a solar sail whether you like it or not (unless you're at L2... but then your craft better be nuclear powered).

Your telescope behind it is going to need to do some real precision stationkeeping (either extreme precision on the whole spacecraft positioning, or merely "good" positioning of the whole spacecraft plus extreme precision adjustment of the optics within) . This means long development times and costs to demonstrate that you can pull it off before you actually build the shield. But I would think that also possible - just very difficult. If they take the latter route they could probably demonstrate that here on Earth, which would be a big cost-saver.

There were plenty of kids who knew how to write "10 PRINT FART; 20 GOTO 10" or who typed in listings from magazines, and I agree that programming at that level is probably accessible to most people - but you can't equate that level of programming with modern software development.

But you also can't equate being able to read and write these comments - or baking instructions, street signs, or whatever - with writing "War and Peace", "The Lord of the Rings" or $your_favourite_book. "Modern software development" has very little to do with being able to quickly piece together a script to, say, unzipping all the archives in a directory to subdirectories named after themselves, or parsing a file, or customizing a web page with Greasemonkey, or whatever.

Any interface that isn't Turing complete is going to lead users wasting their time doing the same mechanical thing over and over and over again. And any that is, is programming by definition.