That's Frahnk-in-steen!

Go to the airport. See how close to a plane you can get (with ticket in hand) before someone demands to see your papers (and x-ray your bags and scan your body/pat you down). Crack a bomb joke and see how that goes for you. When they fondle your junk, be sure to tell them you expect a happy ending.

You may or may not have big trouble if you try to video record cops. Let us know when you get out.

We have a secret court that has decided to continue permitting a spy agency to spy on citizens in their homes in spite of an explicit expiration date on the law.

We have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Most of the people in prison were coerced into waiving their right to a trial.

The executive cannot change the start date of a law, but it can choose to be incredibly slack in enforcing it for a while.

Neither the courts nor the executive can just make up a new law from nothing. That includes continuing a law that no longer exists.

And adblock is just me declining to make the requests they were hoping I would make.

Actually, sendmail is more cohesive. Their error was making the config language a bizarre form of pattern matching amounting to a Turing complete (but bizarre) language.

IOS is LITERALLY bits and pieces bolted together with dabs of glue logic. Different parts have a different mask syntax because they were once separate pieces of software.

I still own the fridge. I may be barred by law from venting the refrigerant to the atmosphere but that law is entirely separate from the question of ownership. As long as I properly recover the refrigerant, I am free to modify it. It's not the manufacturer's choice at all.

Same for the car, it's between me and the law, the manufacturer gets no say.

As for the car electronics, once again, no say for the manufacturer. If the state has a safety concern, it may insist that I get a SAFETY certification IF the car will be driven on public roads. If I have modified the car such that it cannot pass a safety inspection, I may have additional restrictions when I sell it (at least full disclosure of it's usability on public roads).

Yes, in a rational world it is very definitely still your phone. But if you jam the tower or transmit outside the frequencies you are permitted, you may be criminally and civilly liable.

Sure, but the transaction of renting the phone didn't look at all like a purchase either. It looked like a rental and if the phone failed, AT&T would fix or replace it unless it was very clearly abused. Because it was rented, there was no such thing as "out of warranty".

So to modify the statement, "if I just rented it, better send a replacement when it fails".

Of course, then the courts decide that the practice wasn't legal and forced them to allow anything meeting their published technical specs to be plugged in.

This! I find it impossible to believe that the same industry that released movies on VHS (knowing it could be copied) to collect on that long tail would have refused to ever release on DVD. If they had, surely whoever bought their catalog in the fire sale would gave released them.

Note how when CSS was cracked once and for all, they didn't stop releasing on DVD even after Bluray came out.

That's exactly why I want the data to go to MY server at home. I do not EVER want the data to go to the manufacturer's server.

And what';s the deal with cars! Someone should patent the steering wheel, brake on the left, gas to the right. Let someone reverse the pedals and provide a tiller bar for steering. Someone can use steering levers. Won't that be FUN!!!??

The problem is that IOS is a sort of cargo cult system held together with bailing wire and marketed as some sort of cohesive system. Much of it seems to have been acquired from outside, hacked down to a core functionality and them bolted on.

I presume they don't just re-write the parsing because it's all cut/pasted rather than well factored.

Solar energy is actually flabby and watered down as it is typically delivered, especially on shoestring budgets.

When you have access to "mains" 110 or 220 VAC at 10+ amps, you trim it down and deliver it exactly as desired to charge your cells (within the budget constraints of how "smart" you can make the charger) in this scenario, the aged cells can probably be handled safely.

When you have 0.1sqm of budget solar cells delivering your power, and an aged LiIon cell as your storage medium, the electronics between those two are going to have to eek out every possible bit of power delivered by the solar side if you want a chance of the LED light lasting for more than a couple of hours after sunset. The saving grace here is that the solar cell _probably_ won't have enough power to make anything exciting happen in the battery, regardless of how you transform the voltage/current coming from it. The downside is that whoever is making the charger will probably scrap any cell safety considerations and just dump whatever they've got into the cell as "efficiently" as possible - and sooner or later the infinite number of users will hit on an operational scenario that makes it burn.

As the AC said, there's a difference between minimum storage temperature and minimum operational temperature (both of which are above the equilibrium temperature of space.

Let's be more realistic here. People shouldn't be stupid and fly drones at the airport, sure. But they are vastly more likely to cause property damage than death if a collision actually happens.

The last thing we need is 'officials' wetting their pants over yet another 'dire threat' and overreacting again.

The drone's radio control has a limited range and well known frequency range. It should be possible to track the idiots down, fine them, and remind them that if they actually have a collision the damages will well exceed their annual income.

Speaking of actual collisions, there haven't been any anywhere.