Balmer isn't head of Microsoft anymore....

So you think that flight time costs have much all to do with the total bill for shuttling the president of the United States around?

You need to get out more often.

Planes last pretty much forever if you want them to. I'm part owner of a 1957 DeHavilland DHC-1 Beaver. It's only three years newer than I am. It's much easier to buy replacement parts for the it than me.

That doesn't explain all those bankruptcies during the dotcom bubble. Rather they built a vast pile of dark fiber (that is, unused backbone fiber cable) and then went bankrupt when the money ran out. Companies like Google have been using that stuff (particularly, the right of ways these days) ever since.

Union contributions are, more or less, under the control of the people who are in the unions, and if you don't agree with a union's political agenda, you have a legal right to withhold that portion of your dues, so your portion of that contribution is 100% under your control.

Corporate contributions, by contrast, are entirely under the control of its board of directors. As a shareholder or normal employee of that corporation, you have no control over your portion of the contribution. Corporate contributions represent a concentration of power in the hands of a few individuals, which makes them fundamentally different.

Real-world LTE speeds only qualify as broadband if you're very close to the tower. By the time you get into two-bar territory (where their LTE network is "available"), you'll be lucky to get EDGE speeds, and at one bar, you'll be lucky to get any data at all. Yet technically, LTE is available in all those places. That's the problem with wireless; the speed falls off a cliff as distance increases.

In a curiously ironic twist, the hardware designed to protect consumer-grade disks from damage ends up destroying them. As I understand it, a number of fairly recent consumer drives exhibit a higher than normal failure rate because the heads break off of the arms when they collide with the park ramp. This is, at least in part, a consequence of making the arms smaller and lighter to improve seek times.

So what? If there's money for these sorts of games, then there's money for independent examination.

I'm aware of two sorts of evidence. First, there's the rhetoric used by the President, for example, "bitter clingers" speech and his statements about the Trayvon Martin shooting indicate he is at least in support of some sort of federal level gun control.

Second, there's the ATF Fast and Furious scandal. On the surface, it's supposedly a sting operation meant to uproot gun smuggling networks in the US in order to assist with the taming of the Cartel war in next door Mexico. In actuality, this sting delivered considerable material support to the Sinaloa Cartel, 2,000 guns guaranteed not to be intercepted plus whatever else the Cartel was able to smuggle out with those weapons (such as laundered money or more guns), a pretext (which turned out to be too flimsy when the scheme was revealed) for introducing additional regulations on gun purchases, and these guns turning up at over 200 murders in Mexico and the US and which are still turning up at crime scenes.

Not at all. Expert opinion is the most common basis for an argument from authority. Let's look at the three examples you gave, the Stern Review, the Garnaut Climate Change Reviews, and the IPCC's series of assessment reports. The first thing to observe is that the first two reports were funded by politicians with a particular agenda and who happened to need a particular outcome of those reports and for which the reports just happen to deliver on that agenda and need.

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair needed a pretext for supporting near future greenhouse gases emission controls. He sets aside public funds for the Stern Review, and (what a coincidence!) the Stern Review just so happens to support his needs of the moment. Same goes for the Garnaut Reviews which happen to fill the same role for former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

IPCC has long been notorious for providing what pro-climate change propaganda is needed as it is needed. For example, we have the "hockey stick" estimate promulgated in the 2001 Third ASsessment Report, extreme weather in the next assessment, and heating of the oceans in the latest one. I wouldn't be surprised to see a sudden confidence by considerable narrowing of the temperature forcing of a doubling of carbon dioxide in the next assessment report.

Each of these reporting sources has consistently exaggerated its conclusions in favor of current carbon dioxide emission reduction. Earlier in this thread, I mentioned the consistent biases of the Stern Review. The Garnaut Reviews are even worse with a claim of only 0.1 to 0.2% of Australia's fossil fuel-dependent GDP lost each year to mitigation policies for AGW. That's ridiculous.

Meanwhile, the IPCC has long been notorious for exaggerating the impact of AGW while simultaneously downplaying the costs of greenhouse gases emissions reduction. For example, I was told by slashdotter Layzej that the IPCC's Third Assessment Report (TAR) predicted a 0.1 to 0.2 C increase in global mean temperature over the few decades after 2001 (using scenario "IS92a").

But when I actually looked at the "Summary for Policy Makers" I see claims of larger near future heating for the scenario in question (of 0.1 C to 0.3 C) with the high end of the initial range of increases presented instead as a median value of this new, unjustified range. I also saw that in this Summary the TAR had obsoleted the scenario in question and was using scenarios that presented more aggressive heating.

In other words, the fine print, which Layzej unearthed was buried deep in the report somewhere, while other, significantly worse and unjustified scenarios were presented for public consumption. Now, that those overly alarmist scenarios are failing, supporters are digging up the hidden, but somewhat more accurate predictions and claiming that the IPCC was right all along.

This sort of dishonesty and misuse of expert opinion is why I term the whole effort an argument from authority. But don't get me wrong I think there's a lot more fallacies at play here than just argument from authority.

My view on this is that "expert opinion" and "peer reviewed and published" doesn't outweigh being deliberately wrong.

At my local bank you need the ATM card to get into the lobby after hours.

Or, at least, some random card with mag stripe. It doesn't appear to make any difference.

Not to mention that there must be hundreds of websites detailing construction and programming of said devices. Dozens of forums. Even advertisements. Perhaps more surprising is that there is more than one manufacturer of small, GPS control multirotored devices available from such nefarious outlets as Amazon.com. An interested person could learn themselves some valuable skills just by using the Internet and even better, contribute positively to the economy by spending money.

I guess I'll go and turn myself in now. That will cause me to spend more money on lawyers, allow the government to expand the incarceration industrial complex, contribute to generation of more laws and in general, help this great country of ours.

It's the American way.

You're hired. Or under arrest.

Things are so confusing these days.

Oops. TMA (Too Many Acronyms).

AMA = Academy of Model Aeronautics as well as the American Medical Association.

You made need additional caffeine to distinguish the two in the last couple of posts.

Actually, this model is pretty widely used. The FAA and the ARRL (American Radio Relay League - amateur radio) work closely together and the ARRL is even responsible for first line enforcement. I'm not sure the AMA is a good example at all since it really doesn't make any broad rules of conduct other than some weak ethics rules. Remember, AMA enrollment in the US is, and has been, below 50% for a very long time. The FAA works closely with a number of industry and private groups including 'hobbyist' pilots (and then goes on to ignore everyone including themselves, but we are talking about the FAA).

But various government agencies do often work with outside groups on an effective basis. Sometimes for the benefit of society, sometimes not.