Can you please stop starting comments in the subject line?

Anyway, how do you know that it wasn't a drone? A $250 plane, $50 battery and about $400 worth of assorted electronics including a Pixhawk autopilot module, a lidar, and an airspeed detector will get you 30+ minutes of flight time out of a fixed wing aircraft which can definitely carry and subsequently drop a cargo weighing a pound — and handle its own takeoff and landing. Is that enough like a drone for you? Remote telemetry costs more.

Does anyone remember the time when software just WORKED?

I remember those days well. It was just like yesterday.

However, back in those days, our computers ran MS-DOS, and weren't connected to the internet. For the few people who did have internet access (mainly college students), they usually didn't have their own computer hooked up to the internet, they shared some VAX or Unix machine, and mainly used it just for email, USENET, and maybe exchanging files via FTP. Some people used Gopher, though I don't remember what for. Since so few people used networked computers, hacking wasn't much of a problem, and was mostly an activity done by bored college students to see if they could.

Also, I do remember some updates back then, mainly to DOS games. Even back then, the games were buggy, but not too much. I remember some of them using some kind of utility (was it called "Patch"?) to update their software, so the updates could be distributed on BBSs. This software actually worked quite well: it only contained the parts that had changed, and the utility would actually modify the binaries on-disk as necessary. I haven't seen anything like it since, which is a shame since we do so many updates these days. For some strange reason, all our updates now involve distributing a bundle that includes all the changed files (rather than just the changed part of a file), so the update bundle is much larger than it needs to be. If some pathetically slow circa-1992 DOS machine could handle modifying binaries on-disk, why can't modern machines? It would save a huge amoung of bandwidth.

Sure, because there's nothing here that could be explained by market trends.

1. Microsoft's monopoly is cracking badly, though perhaps not in the way most of us imagined. If you look at StatCounter's platform stats it's now 55% desktop, 39% mobile, 6% tablets and the desktop has been losing 10%/year the last few years. And people expect apps for their platform, if you're only on Windows or even Mac/Linux too you're now a dinosaur unless it absolutely requires a traditional desktop.
2. The OS is going to become a commodity, they saw what happened with Android once it hit critical mass. Chromebooks are an early warning. Also that XP and Win7 work "too well" so users aren't interested in upgrading, even though it's an expense maybe twice a decade. That MS Office - their stranglehold on the business market - is now on mobile and tablets is clear proof Microsoft knows this.
3. So their old strongholds are breaking down, where do they want to go next? They want to be the middleman between the app developers and the consumers, like Apple's App Store pioneered and Google Play mimic. To do that you need Win10 everywhere. You must get the snowball rolling that to make money you must be on the MS Shop, the same way you could install apps from other sources on Android but the vast majority don't. If you're not on Google Play, you "don't exist".

As for Intel:
1. Mobile, tablets, convertibles, laptops all need wireless connectivity and it's basically just expected features today like network and sound is on desktops, they used to be add-in cards once but was integrated long ago. And fewer and fewer want the hassle of running cables as WiFi speeds go to hundreds of megabits. It's also a simple way for Intel to steal market share by vertical integration, squeezing out third party chips.
2. And here's the kicker people don't seem to understand, Intel doesn't really make desktop chips anymore. Their mainstream chips are laptop spin-offs which get a higher TDP and a few other modifications, the same way their high end chips are Xeon spin-offs. That is also why they sell grossly overpriced desktop chips with better IGP, even though you can do much cheaper with a dGPU. They're just laptop spin-offs that happen to sell well enough to make a desktop version of.
3. So what's the combined effect? Well, you get the laptop features for "free", whether you want them or not. Same way Intel puts an IGP in every chip killing off much of the second hand GPU market, before you had machines that needed any old graphics card and now you don't. Less resale/reuse value means gaming cards in net cost more. It's an indirect way of using their dominance in the CPU business to expand without running into antitrust problems, at least so far.

Or maybe I'm just a NSA disinformation agent out to discredit the revealing of our secret master plan. But you have to admit the cover story is pretty credible, yes?

So how many layers of chicken wire do you have to hang to completely block cellphones? Is it just one? That stuff is cheap enough to where it's fairly feasible to actually do that.

I don't think the problem is the guns, I think the problem is the mentality, and hiring people with that mentality on purpose. And that mentality is that "civilians" (like the cops are, though they think otherwise) are a lower form of life.

I presume you would need orders of magnitude more energy than is really feasible to ride on a magnetically bottled cushion of plasma. But it would still be a cool inspiration for special effects.

Or maybe it's not a lot of hyperbole. Maybe drug companies don't actually take as much care as you think they do. Maybe you're just making unfounded assumptions because they make you feel better.

The truth is that there isn't a recall every time a defective drug is found; and there is no reason to believe that every defect is detected. The drug manufacturers do not take the care that you think they do; at best, some of them do.

And you're taking it on faith that the pill was made correctly, when it often wasn't. So what's going to change?

But will settle for Hyundai.

Additionally, you can't share the data gathered from living subjects or even deceased individuals when the data includes their DNA and detailed medical history.

There are strict protocols about this.

Which is why I laugh when vendors try to sell me "cloud solutions".

Most of us like soccer more than football. It's a West Coast thing.

Additionally, any copyrights and patents usually derive to the actual research university which first worked on it. Not the PI.

I think you mean the pharmas.

They want you to get a "cure" that keeps you functional but doesn't cure you. Very few scientists want that. They want to both cure it and find out how to turn off the triggers or ameliorate them.