Nobama should take his fucking executive orders and stick them all up his ass.

Typically that doesn't happen after you've hovered a drone over someone's yard.

So the moment the ass with the drone said "are you the SOB who shot down my drone" it's pretty much a different thing ... because the confrontation started when you were hovering over his fenced yard filming his family.

I'm simply not buying the boo hoo argument of the guy with the drone. As TFA said .. flying past is one thing, coming back and hovering is going a little far.

This is like demanding to be allowed on my property to retrieve the camera you illegally placed in my yard.

"Well, I came out and it was down by the neighbor's house, about 10 feet off the ground, looking under their canopy that they've got under their back yard," Merideth said. "I went and got my shotgun and I said, 'I'm not going to do anything unless it's directly over my property.'"

That moment soon arrived, he said.

"Within a minute or so, here it came," he said. "It was hovering over top of my property, and I shot it out of the sky."

In this case, hovering 10 feet off the ground within the borders of his fence isn't some incidental flying overhead, it's pretty much entering your property and filming. And that should be a criminal act.

It's not like the guy was shooting down something 100 feet in the air or just flying past.

By the time the owner of the drone was about to indignantly enter the guy's property, he'd essentially trespassed once already, and knew the guy was armed. If that doesn't tell you to approach with caution you're an idiot.

This isn't random gun nut shoots shit for fun. This is someone responding to something which is flying so far into what is reasonably his private property as to be hard to accept any reason other than the guy running the drone is an ass and a peeping tom.

Do you really need an explanation, considering you just shot down their drone?

Starting with WTF was your drone with a camera doing hovering over my backyard taking pictures of my daughters, and moving on to why in hell shouldn't I be punching you, and advancing to why the hell should you expect to come on my property without me shooting you ...

Yes, absolutely the person operating the drone owes an explanation. Rather a lot, actually.

They took pictures in his backyard with no explanation, and now without explanation they want to come onto his property to discuss this.

Identify yourself, state your purpose, and explain to me why I'm not going to hurt you if you keep walking onto my property. You don't get to act indignant when your shit was hovering over my yard taking pictures. Not even a little.

If I found you in my fenced backyard with a camera, I'm also going to hurt you.

Rule 34.

Some things should not be googled. Ever.

Because the world doesn't want every idiot who thinks he's made a better keyboard constantly mucking about with stuff for the sake of it.

Some of us have been typing for decades, and simply don't care that you think it's time to redesign the keyboard.

"It's time to make some changes to keyboards" -- No, that's your opinion, it isn't fact.

You want a custom keyboard, buy it or make it. But don't be such an arrogant ass as to assume we give a damn about you whining about it. We don't need some damned keyboard designed by a fucking committee.

What a stupid article.

"They asked me, 'Are you the S-O-B that shot my drone?' and I said, 'Yes I am,'" he said. "I had my 40mm Glock on me and they started toward me and I told them, 'If you cross my sidewalk, there's gonna be another shooting.'"

ok that's very aggressive.

You know, I generally don't agree with open carry ... most of the world cringes at that, and it's something Americans cherish.

But if your drone was hovering in my backyard looking at my teenage daughters for no good reason, and if I'd shot it down and you were about to come onto my property in a threatening manner without explanation, I can see the point.

The drone pilot was being an ass, and about to trespass in an aggressive manner.

I actually hope the guy who shot it down just gets a small fine and let go. Because the drone hovering in your backyard isn't the kind of shit we should be accepting.

"Because our rights are being trampled daily," he said. "Not on a local level only - but on a state and federal level."

why did he have to bring the tea party into this?

It is entirely possible to think the Tea Party are loons and also think this guy has a point.

There simply can't be a free for all in which anybody for any reason can be going around peering into peoples private yards and houses just because they want to.

And, I'm sorry, but hovering over someone's backyard with a camera falls in the category of "no bloody way". Not for private citizens, corporations, or law enforcement without a warrant.

The article says 40mm Glock - that is a damn big pistol

Which could only be a typo, or a gun carrier who doesn't understand bullet sizing. And I'm going to assume the guy from Kentucky doing open carry knew what he had, in which case, just blame the reporter.

A 40mm bullet would be just over 1.5" in diameter... that would be an enormous round, and probably not something you could fire from a man-portable weapon.

A frigging .50 cal is a half inch in diameter, so that would be 3x the size.

A 40mm bullet? No way.

Ignore the above, the Glock 40 is what he was open carrying, he did in fact use a shotgun on the drone.

If you read TFA, he was open-carrying a Glock 40, which if Google isn't lying to me is a .40 cal weapon.

A stray .40 caliber bullet isn't birdshot, it's a pretty heavy duty bullet.

This isn't pellets falling out of the sky harmlessly.

You have rather high expectations of the average consumer.

You know what, I don't ... I have exceedingly low expectations of them. I simply don't give a crap any more if people buy this stuff and get hacked.

I tell people I know about the risks, the rest I stopped caring about.

It's not their fault, it's our fault. We need to make products that are secure by default

And for that, I lay the blame squarely at the feet of corporations for not giving a damn, and lawmakers for not holding them accountable.

Yes, I know, it probably makes me a bad person. But I'm afraid my "sympathy-for-the-hacked" is at an all time low, because in a week or so there will be another story just like this one.

I think two cores is enough for most purposes

Really? I'm surprised by that.

Over time I've found the extra cores goes a long way to a better experience.

It means I can be using two browsers, ripping a CD to MP3, possibly streaming through my Apple TV, and still have a responsive system. This may not be 'normal' for most people (which has never been my goal), nor is running the several VMs I always have up with Linux and FreeBSD. But it is actually representative of how I use it.

I don't ever find myself taxing my video card since I'm not a gamer. In fact, I'm pretty sure my video card is a cheapo generic Nvidia with 1GB of RAM (which I'm old enough to be in awe of being cheap and generic), and I couldn't tell you the framerate of anything I've ever done.

But over the years I've found the extra cores means the system can stay more responsive under load without bogging down.

Even for my daily desktop, I find the 8 cores means I can do a bunch of things in parallel without needing to worry about it.

Hell, my wife's 4 year old HP laptop I think has at least 2 cores on it, and it wasn't exactly leading edge when we got it.

Unless you're the kind of person who launches a program, uses it, closes it, and then launches the next program (do people actually do that?) I've found that tons of CPU and RAM means the machine will be more usable for a lot longer than if you went with less. And it usually means your machine can be bloat proof for a lot longer without becoming horribly slow.

If a human is in my backyard, I can say "what the hell are you doing in my backyard", and then tell them to get the hell out.

If a drone is hovering in my backyard, I have no such recourse and have to assume the worse.

This isn't like shooting people and asking questions later. Not even a little.

Not sure about the discharge of the firearm and where he was, but the drone had no business hovering over someone's yard.

My machine is by no means blisteringly fast and I built it for chump change but I've got 500GB of SSD, 16GB of RAM and eight cores. I give a shit about bloat. In principle, I care very much. In practice, it is not really affecting me any more.

Obviously you are concerned about bloat ... which is why you seem to have the same machine as I do. You future proof yourself against bloat by over-building it up front. Worked well for my last machine, which lasted me 5+ years.

Me, my machine is about 5 months old, running Windows 8.1 with Classic Shell installed and all the Metro crap, apps, and the Microsoft store disabled/shoved out of the way, and again with 8 cores and 16GB of RAM.

I have no intention of upgrading this machine to Windows 10 now, possibly not ever. But sure as hell not with that in-place update to what I consider an OS barely out of beta.

My trust in Microsoft to do an in-place upgrade without breaking things or removing functionality I've had to add back is precisely zero. And I've already had to uninstall and block the update which wanted to start nagging me to upgrade.

With 4 cores and 8GB of RAM I happily ran Vista for years (no, really :-), because with huge amounts of resources it was pretty damned good. I expect to do the same on my Windows 8.1 machine.

So far, I don't think a single "feature" Microsoft claims to have "innovated" is either compelling or something I haven't found a 3rd party app to do (like virtual desktops). The digital assistant and some of the other stuff? That gets a big giant "do not want".

Who knows, maybe next summer when Windows 10 has been beta tested and all of the warts fixed I'll consider upgrading while it's still free. But I'm sure as hell not being an early adopter.

The organization's entire reason to exist is to form patent pools to bring together disparate parties and avoid a fractured market where members' technologies don't get adopted due to overly-complex licensing terms or fears of patent suits.

Otherwise known as collusion by predatory trade groups presenting a barrier of entry to new players.

Just because a bunch of CEOs work out a deal to fuck us all over doesn't make it a good thing.

One set of greedy bastards vs another set of greedy bastards isn't good for anybody but greedy bastards. It sure as hell isn't a defense of terribly written and overly broad software patents.

I think that software patents could be a bit more palatable if they also had to provide source code that was proven to compile and work as describe in the patent.

The problem you should not be able to patent an algorithm, and software patents have nothing to do with source code.

Software patents often read as "a system and methodology for doing something we all learned about in school but applied to a specific problem and now you can't do it, suckers".

They're patents on an idea or a solution to a class of problem. They claim ownership of something stupid like "encrypting a bank transaction over an internet link" or some other stupid thing like that.

With software, if somebody patents the idea of compressing a video

See, this is where software patents become bullshit ... you can't patent an idea, you can't patent an algorithm. I can't patent the idea of a flying car, I can patent the specifics of my novel invention.

Compression has existed since people first figured out what the Lev-Zimpel algorithm actually meant. Compression exists as a thing ... making digital stuff smaller by identifying encodings to save space. It's like caching, where you keep copies closer to where you deliver it. It's a concept.

You can't subsequently claim to patent compression of a specific thing. You can patent your implementation, but if you are patenting the idea of compressing video, your patent should be null and void.

What you can't do is patent a "system and methodology for doing something we already do but applied to a specific class thing". Especially when your patent is taking 10 things everybody knows how to do, stringing them together, and simply saying "ta da, patent bitches".

That would be like a carpenter patenting the idea of a fucking table.

Pretty much every software patent I've ever seen falls into the category of claiming an entire idea based on vague notions and existing methods already string together in ways that if you said "I want to do this" any CS undergrad could tell you how to do it at a high level based on the tools which already exist.