You want scary? The same can be applied to general text on the Internet, tying posters on different sotes together, including anonymous (not your real name avatar) to a site with your real name.

Which the NSA probably has churning away on its databases. Which probably does little more than add confirmation of said links from watching and recording all traffic to any and all of a billion IP addresses.

And I, for one, welcome our new panopticon overlords who won't abuse it, not one of their thousand agents, because they're supposed to check a got-a-warrant box on a piece of paper before choosing to abuse it.

That is 24%. That means your device could be 20% cheaper and they would STILL make more money then anybody else in percentage per product in the electronics world.

It's the bottom end that's the problem with this, not the top end. The bottom, not-Apple, not-iPhone product end, where a guy with some money is sitting there and wondering if he should invest.

Lessee. Taxes on corporate profits look like they're going up. I see a marginal chance at success at best. Screweth it!

A few percent of investment scared off the bottom, and there's your decade of stagnation.

If ping crashes, or even executes arbitrary commands because of a specially crafted command-line, it's not a security vulnerability.

That's a pretty sweeping statement to make. Most interesting security vulnerabilities (IMO) are the results of multiple smaller issues and/or design decisions that can be chained together.

For example, a lot (most?) of the Linux distributions I see have ping's SUID bit set, and it is owned by root. So, yes, ping executing arbitrary commands absolutely *can* be a security vulnerability, because I can potentially use it for local privilege escalation from non-privileged user to root.

"Eventually the CD might not be supported,"

welcome to the 21st century where music is listened to on phones. devices that are obsolete in 2 years but can store all your music on a tiny bitty chip unless you've been torrenting the best music of the past 100,000 years.

as to 'not supported' there are chinese firms still selling 8 track tape playing devices, despite the fact that all of the remaining tapes should have deteriorated now. they also sell vhs decks which the local wal-mart actually has a model on the shelf. blu-ray playback is not going away anytime soon. i have 2 bluray writers, one for the desktop and one usb powered one for the laptop(s). reel to reel tape decks may now be considered obsolete but there are people who still use them in the industry.

there will be pushes to make new fancier stuff, yes. it is called marketing. the vast majority of my cd-rs are still readable and only some of them have bitrot. but i wasn't organized with my cd-rs so i have a considerable number of discs i don't really know if i still have the data or not. most of the data isn't really mission critical and despite losing my music collection about 4 times now (from windows formatted hard drives) the back ups cd-rs and dvds and now 1 bluray, i have only lost 1 song to bitrot 1 song and it was all because i had backups that survived longer than hard drives.

i recommend HDDs and BD-R discs for backup. BD-R while subject to bitrot are still the lowest energy overhead per GB in the consumer space. HDDs are the cheapest per GB but if left running so as to automate backups draws more power and powering off a HDD in the consumer space means you have to be there to power it on for archival use. though there will at some point be a 'smartphone' app to remotely put them to standby via software. this can already be done with a NAS and Wake-on-LAN and a little scripting. but then the energy requirements are significantly higher on a NAS than on a usb hdd. anyways using both media HDD and Blu-ray offers a better chance of not losing everything. flash memory is nice but i wouldn't expect it to last forever, my compact flash devices suffered from an issue where the memory would take more and more power from devices until the cameras running them couldn't power them from fresh batteries, could have been the camera but it is hard to say but i wouldn't consider any flash memory as reliable when compared to hdds and bluray devices.

my second computer was an 80286. it had 1MB of ram, and we had i believe EGA graphics and a serial mouse for gaming and word perfect. for dos word perfect 5.22, think vi and emacs having a child it is what wordperfect for dos behaved like. it had an extensive array of command line abilities (my teacher had a rolodex with all the commands she used) and yes she needed a rolodex to sort the functionality. but it supported a mouse too and had menus, often triggered by the function keys and/or the mouse. but yes even dos apps had mouse support. and the sad thing is, while *bsd supports mouses and multiple mice automatically (or did lat i used it) linux doesn't do this without modifying configuration files, people like in ubuntu don't worry about the tty's anymore but i loved using copy/paste and scroll lock in FreeBSD when i used it... cause i always did all my root work in the ttys instead of x windows. well once i learned that running x as root is bad... somewhere i learned about su, but i know whenever i was setting up freebsd it was from the ttys most of the time...

You have no idea what you're talking about. A passing car is louder than a small, well-tuned quad with quality balanced rotors at ground level. 30' in the air? Barely audible. There are noisier ones. I work with a 25-pound octo that sounds completely horrifying, and I know when and where to operate it. But thanks for speaking out of ignorance - it helps to put all of this stuff in perspective.

Not like there's much room for options. Here's how it's gonna go down:

New Finance Minister nee Valve Employee: Ok, goodbye austerity, hello ballooning spending! Ok, loan us money at tiny rates we can afford. Oh, I think I see some. Let me fire the portal gun at the wall so I can get it.

> Plays host to a system of five small exoplanets

No, it plays host to a system of five planets. Unless you think surgeons, after cutting open a patient, should talk about operating on that there exoliver.

Or, you are yourself a toxic seed planted by The Man in order to foment FUD and make good people not want to be part of these projects. Or something like that. Give it a rest with the absurd conspiracy crap.

I've flown that exact same piece of equipment at 3:00 AM, just for fun. Not on Pennsylvania Ave in downtown DC, of course. But if the guy's a hobby flier up late on a weekend night playing with this quad copter, maybe trying to get a couple of cool scenic night time shots, is that so hard to believe? Or is your tinfoil hat so tight that you're also going to assume I can't possibly have been up late updating firmware, swapping some motors around, and then stepped outside in the low-traffic, peaceful night time hours to test my handiwork? Can't be! I must be an FBI stooge! Please.

The problem is that the incoming drone could easily be flying below tree-top height. Like, 20 feet off the ground. Laser counter measures would be shooting at a target that would have large office buildings and other structures directly behind it.

Just look up the "DC FRZ" - it's illegal to fly any sort of RC device in a 30-mile circle around DCA. That absolutely includes the White House grounds, and large swaths of the surrounding suburbs.

"Income inequality" is a red herring. The real measure is average health and wealth in a nation.

This, by the way, is skyrocketting in the now-world economy as China and India and other nations become more economcally free, and people can better themselves.

You should be happy for capitalism, as it is the cause of this, now that it can operate there, just like it did in the west 150 uears ago with the industrial revolution.

But nobody listens or looks at the bigger picture. They just look at stagnation in the west brought on by spending driving fears of tax increases, making investors say fuck it.

Mexico is a corrupt nation, where you can'tt do anything from build a building to get a driver's license or even pay bills without having to pay for expedited service kickbacks.

Thhat's why they remain full of suckage. As usual, the government fails to secure rights.

Welcome to third world, postapocalyptic status.

I guess the first men to the stars really will be the Chinese, who were opening the trade routes, making business easier, rather than closing them down, like Europe, and now the US.