I'll let you in on a little secret. I own lots of Blu-ray discs, but I don't actually own a Blu-ray player. I buy the disc (whatever my thoughts on Copyright, it is the law and the content producers do deserve to be paid), then I download a Blu-ray rip of the movie from a torrent site. Toss the file on my media server, and call it a day. They get their money, I don't have to deal with their forced previews and FBI warnings. I really have to wonder what they're thinking. First they complain about piracy, then they respond by making their products worse for legit customers than for pirates.

Anyone know a good petition site we could place a petition on? Maybe try and collect some opposition signatures, get some tech media coverage and -gulp- resist?

You already missed your chance to give your opinion on generic TLDs. If you were opposed to them, you should've said something 3 years ago. Not that ICANN bothered listening with the prospect of millions of dollars of free revenue weighing down the other side of the scale.

I think their application for .dev to be Google-only highlights a major problem with a company like this having control over any TLDs:

No, it highlights the major problem with turning generic words into a TLD ownable by any single entity. I mean the whole idea of making a generic word a TLD was pretty stupid to begin with. But then selling it off for $100,000 or the highest bidder? That was nothing but pure greed on ICANN's part.

Given Google's history (e.g. Android is FOSS), I actually consider them less likely to abuse this than most other companies. In fact I suspect the primary reason they snapped up a lot of these TLDs was to prevent them from falling into the hands of someone they thought might abuse them. Same reason they participated in the wireless spectrum auction - even though they didn't win any spectrum, they did get the FCC to require that the winners not discriminate in the type of traffic sent over that spectrum. A provision which nailed Verizon when they tried to block tethering apps.

This dress thing is actually a simplified version of a really powerful and freaky illusion which unfortunately only works in a darkened room. You take a quilt with different color squares. You can verify in white light that the different colors span the rainbow.

On top of this quilt, you lay a black piece of cardboard which has a cutout allowing you to only see one color patch. Say it's a greenish patch. In the darkened room with the single white light, you can confirm that this single visible patch is green.

Then you put colored filters in front of the light until the patch appears to be red/orange. The light is red/orange, so the green patch now appears red/orange. Makes sense right?

Then you remove the black cardboard so you can see all the color patches. And suddenly that red/orange patch appears green again. Cover it up with the black cardboard again and it'll appear red/orange. Remove the cardboard and it appears green.

What's going on (and also what's going on in the dress photo) is that your brain is using the information of surrounding objects (in the dress pic, it's the background visible to the right) to gauge the amount of light and the color of the light. It then corrects for the color of the light to white balance what you see, and for the brightness to compensate for over/under exposure. So the colors and intensity your eyes see remain the same, just how your brain interprets them changes.

I've been doing white balancing and level adjustments on my photos for over 20 years now. The dress as shown in the photo is white/gold (actually more of a light-blue/gold). You can confirm this with eyedropper measurements in Photoshop.

However, if you look at the sliver of background which appears to the right, you can tell the photo is badly overexposed. If your eye spotted this and your brain compensated for it by interpreting the pic as what might see if you stepped out into bright sunlight after being in a darkened room, the dress will appear blue/black.

There are a series of "craters" in the U.S. as well, though much older. The Carolina bays are elliptical depressions located along the Atlantic seaboard of unknown origin. Theories of the origins being geologic or extraterrestrial impacts have come in and out of favor. Nobody really knows. (And before you say that impact craters are round regardless of the angle of impact, that's true until you get to very shallow impact angles. Then the craters end up being oval.)

The alternative is asking for bankruptcy. Running communications lines is about the most expensive part of any telecommunications / power infrastructure. This is one area where doing the minimum possible is the only financially sound move.

Why are you assuming they'd have to run additional communications lines to gain reliability? All they had to do was put half the lines in one pipe, and the other half in another pipe buried parallel to but (say) 3 feet away. Yes it would've been more expensive, but only slightly. It wasn't just vandalism that was a risk. The failure could've been precipitated by corrosion, a fire, a mouse getting in and chewing cables, etc. All of which make a case for splitting the cables among multiple pipes.

I was opposed to recovery partitions when MS first started using them. But with Win 8 I think they've added enough options that the pros outweigh the cons. It took me a while to find all this info (or rather, learn that MS had even made this possible), so here it is as a PSA:

All Windows 8/8.1 computers come with a restore partition. I highly recommend you buy a 16GB or 32GB USB flash drive and convert that restore partition into a reinstall flash drive.

If you don't like the default recovery partition state (maybe too much crapware installed), you can create a custom recovery partition after you've uninstalled the crapware and installed your programs.

Finally, if you totally screw up, you can still create a Windows 8/8.1 recovery flash drive by using your Windows key and downloading a clean 8-16 GB recovery image from Microsoft.

Microsoft site for creating recovery image.

Instructions for finding your key

I grew up as the only conservative in a family of upper middle class liberals. It always infuriated me that poor people were constantly getting free stuff, and I bought in to the whole poor people are lazy mentality.

Similar conservative here. I never really bought into the "poor people are lazy" meme. The hardest worker I've ever met was a poor Mexican who turned out to be an illegal alien. This guy was so dedicated to doing a good job I would've endorsed him for citizenship in an instant. (Likewise I haven't found the lazy, rich fat cat meme to be true either. The vast majority of rich people I know are some of the hardest working people I've met, frequently sleeping only 4-6 hours a night because they're working the other 18-20 hours. It's like they're always firing on all cylinders and don't know how to let up. Even when on vacation, they'll try to sneak off to get some work done.)

What I have noticed though is that poor people tend to make much worse financial decisions, moreso than not-poor people. e.g. A poor friend asked me for help buying a laptop. I knew he didn't have much money, he knew I knew, so I worked my butt off finding him a great deal. I eventually found him a refurb i3 laptop for $235 (when he sold it 2 years later, it was selling on eBay for $265). I felt satisfied that I'd done a good deed to help a poor person. Then the next week I learned that he'd bought a 64GB iPad for $800 (the extra $100 was to have his name engraved on it). ...

They don't need money. What they need is a systematic, comprehensive, plan for how to get them off the bottom. The single biggest factor keeping poor people poor, is the responsibility for children. As noted, often times, a parent finds themselves as the sole caregiver for children, and they are consequently trapped, as the responsibilities of childrearing often conflict with the responsibilities that employers would place upon employees (such as reliable attendance, and schedule flexibility). The simplest solution to the problem would be to do away with welfare and unemployment benefits entirely and replace them with guaranteed services for their dependents such as 50 hours of weekly daycare

That was exactly my conclusion too after managing a hotel with a lot of low-income employees. So many of them were single parents or were in families where both parents worked, that a good chunk of their income went to babysitting or daycare. Since the hotel usually had empty rooms that could be used for babysitting, I looked into what it would take to start up daycare services for our employees.

OMG. The legal liability and insurance requirements were crippling. Apparently parents are a sue-happy bunch when it comes to the tiniest scratch on their little darlings. Later I talked about it with a friend who ran a daycare center and he pretty much confirmed what I'd found. Liability insurance was his biggest expense, and he was always one lawsuit away from being put out of business. Eventually we just made it a policy where we would comp workers an empty room for a day for emergencies. What they did with the room was their business. If they couldn't find a babysitter and wanted to dump their kids in said room in front of a TV while they worked, and they and co-workers would check in on them every 10-15 minutes, we (management) would look the other way.

It's pretty sad to hear people suggest that sole purpose of a persons time on earth is to work hard and be productive.

Economic activity = sum of (productivity)

Productivity is the fundamental measure of economic output. The more productive the average individual is, the higher the standard of living is (everything produced is also everything consumed). If you're suggesting a person not be as productive as they can, you're advocating that the standard of living be lowered. That's really what all the economic development since the industrial revolution has been about. Leveraging machines and alternate energy sources (i.e. other than human and animal muscle power) to radically increase per-person productivity, which has proportionately increased the standard of living.

If you want to take a break and relax, that's fine. But you'd better be damned sure that your productivity while working is enough to "pay" for that relaxation time. The Germans are great at this (I've worked with them). They work super-hard when they are working and so are very productive. But once they're off work or if they're on vacation, they relax more than most people I've seen. It's ok though because their high productivity while working is more than enough to pay for it.

Money is actually just a (poor) representation of productivity, one whose value in terms of productivity isn't even constant. So thinking about economics in terms of money can result in very misleading conclusions. e.g. If you double everyone's pay, everyone becomes 2x as wealthy, right? Nope. If you double everyone's pay, then prices also double (prices of goods and services are what bring in revenue used to pay people). So in terms of income, it's a wash. Productivity hasn't changed, so fudging with the value of money doesn't change income or expenses. What does change is savings. The doubling of income and prices means the value of anything saved as money is halved. So anyone holding their savings as money (like poor and middle-class people do, instead of in non-monetary assets like real estate or stocks like rich people do) will find their wealth has been halved. Precisely the opposite of what you thought would happen when you doubled wages.

No, it's not obvious. These days the video card takes care of all that. And whether the alpha channel is 0 or 255 the value is going to be read anyway. The performance hit is nil.

Clarification: Most video cards run at 32-bits (4 bytes) per pixel. Because that's a nice round 2^n number which is actually easier for computers to process than the old 24-bits (3 bytes) per pixel.

32-bpp graphics has 256 values (1 byte) for R, G, and B just like 24-bpp graphics. The extra byte in 32-bpp is used to store the alpha channel (transparency). So you're getting it for free anyway, and the video card is using it even with these new "modern" icons (it allows the background to bleed through on parts that are covered by the icon's 32x32 pixel rectangle, but aren't covered by the icon's artwork). Since it's being used anyway, you might as well use it to enhance visibility of borders, edges, and control surfaces.

Just to clarify, some of the Pentium and Celeron CPUs are based on Haswell. Some are based on Bay Trail (Atom). As someone who helps recommend low-end laptops to friends and clients trying to get the best deal for a budget, it's become a hassle having to look up every model number of Pentium or Celeron to verify which type it is.

Your math is comparing apples to oranges.
Specifically you are comparing the cost to apprehend PLUS all the fixed costs of the agency vs the cost to apprehend with a drone.

That's actually exactly how the drone costs were calculated. They took the cost to operate the drones, then added all the fixed costs of the personnel, equipment, and miscellaneous agency overhead. That inflated the drone costs from $2,468 per hour to $12,255 per hour. It's actually your deportation cost which is missing some of the costs they attributed to the drones.

So OP's math was (inadvertently) in fact apples to apples.

That's what I was thinking. Equipping every border patrol unit with a commercial version of the ubiquitous quad-copter

For a given payload, rotary-wing aircraft consume about 2-4x as much fuel as fixed-wing aircraft. The quad-copter is actually an even bigger disadvantage since it's got 4 engines vs 1 on the Predator. (Fewer engines = more efficient. It's why airlines have been transitioning to twin-engine airliners.)

Also, if you read some of the linked docs in TFA, the $28,000 per arrest figure is the cost of the drone + personnel + equipment + overhead. The operating cost of just the drones themselves is about 1/5th that ( $2,468 per flight hour vs $12,255 per flight hour). So since the bulk of the cost is in the support personnel and equipment, changing the type of drone won't alter the cost per arrest much. The vast majority of the cost is still agents and their equipment - whether they be flying a Predator, a quad-copter, or have boots on the ground in the desert border.

You good people are about 5 years behind the times. WTF happened?

Same thing that happens to all early adopters. Earlier technology becomes entrenched, and it's more difficult for newer, better technology to displace it because the old stuff "mostly works good enough." It's why the ratio of wireless to wired phones is higher in Africa than in Europe.