On the one hand, it is a majestic airplane, with a good ride, and enough room in it to do whatever you want with it. Flying White House, Flying Pentagon, both been done forever. NEACP (Kneecap, or "Gordo") is another favorite 747 of mine.

On the other hand, the 747 was the airplane that killed Pan Am, and therefore I resent it a bit. True, Trippe went completely bonkers and bought too many too soon -- Pan Am would've been better served by updating its extensive fleet of 707 instead -- but the 747 was more airplane than the world needed then.. and maybe even now. 747 was Pan Am jumping the shark.

And that brings me to the point of this post: While the 747 in Air Force One colors is really nice, no airplane wears that paintjob better than the 707 did. Especially with the check in the tail, which the 747 lacks.

The new one better have a polished underbelly and a blue and silver check in the tail, just like the original Loewy design for Air Force One when it was a 707.

I can't think of a better airplane than the 747 for Air Force One. a 777 doesn't have the cubic footage, the 787 is even smaller. And a civilianized C5 would just be wrong, just plane wrong. As for Airbus, Air France 447 and the one that crashed during the Paris Air Show have left me with a bit of disdain for their particular style of fly-by-wire. I don't think Boeing's take on FBW is as demented. I'd rather fly in a beat-up smokey Super 80 than in any Airbus.

Even TFS says that law enforcement bots are constantly scanning TOR for new content. New content means new leads, more leads mean more arrests. They have no interest in stopping people from committing crimes, because if they put an end to crime, they lose their budget; if they're catching more people committing crimes, the get a bigger budget, so it's in their best interest to leave TOR as it is and keep using it to catch people in the act.

Err... didn't see who the original bad math was done by. I mean "she"... I think...

a few fundamentalist might give up, and more weird space cults will pop up to fill the space. Crazy is a gas that expands to fill the volume of human civilization.

Depends on your definition of "need"

You can enable chord-middle (I don't like it) or setup your .Xdefaults to use a different mouse button or key stroke for past. those xrdb files are ugly, but quite powerful.

I drilled a hole in my trackball and mounted momentary switch for middle click, makes for a cool retro looking button. Since most mouse buttons are a basic switch, it's very easy to keep the original circuit in parallel without any fancy electrical knowledge.

The NSA give you the willies but that of all the others makes you feel warm and cuddly? How exactly is the data gathering performed by the GCHQ, the DGSE, the BND, etc, any different than that done by the NSA?

No, we have all our national equivalents like the GCHQ, the DGSE, the BND, etc, all doing the same data gathering while busily pointing the finger at the NSA as the one who cut the cheese...

the functionality of the devices is about the same

It's very different. On Android, you have to decide whether to grant permission before you've ever run the application, and it's all or nothing. On iOS, you run the application before deciding whether or not to grant it permission. You have the ability to deny permission while still running the application. You can also allow permission for some things but not others.

This functionality is partially available to Android users who root their phones and install the right tools, but that's far from the common case.

I'm sure he used a calculator, seems he simply forgot to divide by 24.

That's why, as the manufacturer of such a system, you refuse to sell it bare. Your customers won't complain if you tell them what the bare cost, cost per disk, and labor cost to install a disk are, and sell disks at cost and with reasonable labor. Make money on your hardware, bring in enough to pay for assembly based on disk install labor.

That's only step one, though. Start ordering disks when you start your first production run of hardware. Order direct from manufacturer, and from as many suppliers as possible, so you get disks from as many batches as possible. Then, continue placing frequent, but small, orders from whoever can get you the disks the cheapest; it may work out that you can get volume pricing from the manufacturer by telling them "I'm going to need X disks over all and am willing to pay for them up front, but I need them shipped (X/52) per week from current stock at the time of shipping, don't set aside my disks out of the current batch to ship at a future date".

It's a bit more labor, but compare serial numbers and attempt to color code by batch. Use colored dot stickers for this. When fetching drives for an installation, try and get an even distribution of colors, so you don't have an excess of drives from any given batch, and always record who has which drives, so if you start getting failure reports that indicate a bad batch, you can proactively alert the customers who have those drives that it might be a good idea to have you swap them even if they still appear to be functioning.

All of that drives up the cost, of course. I'm not going to sit here and to the math to figure out what the cost would be, as there are simply too many assumptions and I have too little time, but if you've nothing better to do and don't mind making a couple dozen, likely provably wrong, assumptions, you can have at it.

That's because there is a limit to how many times they can lie to people, blatantly and without remorse, before the people stop trusting them. My grandparents grew up during a time when this went on, like it does today, but not nearly as much and was not well known (consider Hoover's FBI, or the involuntary radiation exposure experiments carried out against black people, or the use of the CIA to overthrow democratically elected foreign leaders). They saw it as a matter of honor or duty to have trust and faith in the republic and the leaders its processes have put there. That's been shattered and won't be repaired any time soon.

In the personal realm, most people become suspicious of everything someone says after the very first confirmed deliberate deception. The amazing part is that government is given so many chances, that people are so impressed with official symbols and pomp and circumstance that they would ever believe known liars who have never faced any serious consequences for their deceptions.

TFA makes it clear that this is NOT just for Washington DC & not just for hobbyists

The FAA has a list of flight restricted zones where all aircraft are restricted unless explicitly authorized. Phantom already partially respected these regulations but are just tightening up a number of omitted areas.

The idea is that limiting police powers in order to safeguard freedoms (and with them, the balance of power between the individual and the government) is acknowledged as making the job of police harder. The polices' job being harder does, in fact, mean that some number of criminals will go free some of the time, criminals who otherwise would have been caught and prosecuted. This is why absolute security is the antithesis of absolute freedom, so the question then is how to balance the two. When you safeguard liberty as your first priority and assign a lower priority to the effectiveness of law enforcement, you understand that you are taking a higher risk that you yourself will be harmed by a criminal that law enforcement could have stopped.

That's why freedom is not for cowards. The problems you worry about are well known to people who understand and value freedom. They choose freedom anyway. They also realize that the danger with which you're so concerned has been overstated. You're much more likely to be killed by a cop than a terrorist, and any factual inquiry into that based on facts would lead you to the same conclusion. Incidentally, you're also more likely to be injured by lightning. In the last 100 years, many, many more people were killed by their own governments than by any foreign enemy, so the credibility of this danger has been well established. Limited, transparent government is a time-tested manner of managing this danger.

As an aside, if terrorism is truly such a great problem and we want to reduce it in a real and effective manner, we should also stop giving excuses to the people who hate us. It's much easier for an enemy to justify their position, raise their troops' morale, and recruit new members into their brand of exteremism when they can point to concrete acts of ruthless domination the USA has actually committed. Law enforcement would certainly be more effective if its list of potential suspects could be reduced, facilitating a more focused approach on those that remain.

Anyway, the real spirit of freedom, the more value-based, individual, and courageous part that you and so many others keep failing to even recognize, let alone try to understand, is that those who understand freedom realize that a few more guilty men may go free. They consider that a small price to pay, an exchange of a finite quantity that numbers can describe in order go gain something priceless and worthwhile. It's yet another instance of failing to comprehend a viewpoint because you do not personally share it, therefore you get sidetracked by related but irrelevant issues because you have no idea how to articulate a meaningful response to it.

I output Toast.