Small drones don't have much inertia. They can be easily flipped by a small local wind gust. This is a big problem for drones that operate close to buildings, where there are eddies and turbulence as air hits the building. Pass the corner of a building and the wind situation may be completely different.

Very smart and aggressive stability control systems are able to overcome this. See this drone from PSI Tactical, which weighs about 0.5Kg and is supposed to be able to operate in winds up to 30MPH.

Battery storage for bulk power has been talked up for years. Mostly by the wind industry. With solar power, you get peak power and peak air conditioning load around the same time. Wind varies about 4:1 over 24 hours, even when averaged across big areas (California or the eastern seaboard). So the wind guys desperately need to store power generated at 4AM, when it's nearly worthless, so they can resell at 2PM. When the wind farm companies start installing batteries at their own expense, this will be a real technology.

With the US glut of natural gas, this isn't needed right now. Natural gas peaking plants aren't all that expensive to build, and make money even if they only run for maybe 6 hours a day. That covers most peak needs.

There are other ways to store energy. Some of the dams of the California Water Project have reversible turbines, which can run either as pumps or generators. They pump water uphill at night, when power is cheap, and let it down during the afternoon to generate power. Since the dams and pumps are needed for water handling anyway, this adds little cost.

Of course the Koran does not mention bandwidth. But if blasphemy is a capital offense, then certainly anything that enables blasphemy is not halal.

I think the key word is "history" as in centuries ago. Back then, there was stuff like forced conversion in Christianity.

The difference is: that stuff is common in Islam today.

In general, there are 4 stages to Islamic conquest.

1) When they are a tiny minority they only want to live, and worship, in peace.

2) Once they are a bigger minority, they start demanding special laws to respect their religion and culture. This is happening in many European nations right now. These special laws may directly oppose fundamental rights in western countries.

3) Once they are a sizable minority: they drop the mask, and the gloves come off. Time to violently overthrow the existing religion and culture. This has been going on throughout Islamic history. This is going on in Thailand right now.

4) Once Muslims are in charge, it is no different than any other mid-east nation.

Even getting to stage 2 is too much for many Americans. Lots of Americans do not want to give up stuff like freedom of speech, or freedom of press, freedom of religion.

They were brought over from Europe.

So the passenger pigeons were replaced by European pigeons.

That's my understanding.

The Christian fundies' fear of Sharia Law is one of the most ironically amusing things to come out of them in recent years. If they didn't spend so much time railing against our consitutitional separation of church and state, maybe, just maybe they might realize that it's exactly what protects them from such an (unlikely) threat.

NFC payment cards in Australia/Europe cryptographically sign a challenge from the terminal, using basically standard crypto. It's EMV all the way. In-person magstripe payments are carefully controlled and risk analysed to ensure they only occur if, for example, the card is broken - or outright banned.

NFC payments in the USA involve the phone sending regular magstripe data to the terminal, with only the CVC code being some kind of cryptographic derivative - a three digit number (less than 1000). The reason for this crazy setup is so merchants don't have to update their backend/PoS systems that still expect magstripe data. There is no plan to perform a complete upgrade thus old style transactions cannot be phased out. It's a dramatically less secure system.

Your card was declined because they're totally different and incompatible technologies. NFC payment cards from outside the USA aren't the same as "NFC payments" inside the USA (which require mobile phones as far as I can tell).

More importantly, the underlying technology is totally different. VISA Europe is not at all the same as VISA USA. VISA in Europe is a coalition of banks, VISA USA is a private company. America has never rolled out EMV, making its banking industry a ridiculous joke compared to, well, everywhere else. You don't get reports of major European supermarket chains getting their PoS systems hacked and magstripes skimmed like you do in the US, because EMV is a much more secure system.

The NFC payment cards that are rolling out around the world (outside USA) now are basically a variant of EMV/Chip and PIN. The underlying crypto is the same. The card signs a challenge from the terminal. They're upgrading to elliptic curve crypto at the moment actually, not sure if all NFC cards do that or not but it would not surprise me. NFC as tried by Google in America is actually a very minor variant on just sending your magstripe data via radio. I believe the CVC code rotates (three digits of entropy lol) and the tech is based on a Secure Element hard-wired to the NFC radio. But the phone has minimal control over the actual payment transaction, thus doesn't add much value beyond being a big battery, and that's why the tech largely stalled. Also they screwed up the compatibility testing and the terminals were full of bugs that meant transactions just sort of randomly failed.

So don't be fooled. The "NFC payments" that we know outside of North America is totally different to what they call "NFC payments", which is an unfortunate piece of linguistic confusion.

A few years ago, those Google NFC payment terminals were all over Silicon Valley. Nobody used them. Newer credit card terminals show no sign of supporting them, although some apparently have the hardware inside for it.

Another problem is that if the technology just requires the phone's presence, not interaction on the phone, it's insecure. "Near field communication" is only supposed to be up to 20cm, but a 2013 paper at Black Hat demonstrated connectivity at 100cm, which is good enough for crime. If it does require interaction on the phone, the user has to activate the phone, navigate to some app, and deal with the app. This is slower than swiping a credit card.

It's easier to do than card-reader skimmers.

Many ultra-orthodox rabbis who demand their followers not use uncensored smartphones or uncensored internet access. In 2012, a big anti-Internet rally for ultra-orthodox Jews was held in New York. "The siren song of the Internet entices us! It brings out the worst of us!" The event was streamed live and is summarized on YouTube.

There are ultra-orthodox ISPs with filtering. The filtering is very stringent, based on a rabbi-approved whitelist. "That's all you get, and nothing else."

There are kosher cell phones. "Kosher Phone has no camera, no Bluetooth capabilities, no memory card slot and cannot be connected to a computer."

That's in the US. In Israel, kosher cell phones are so locked down that only approved numbers can be called. Even rape crisis centers are blocked.

Here's a tip, my Russian friend: if you want to pretend to be a neutral observer on the Ukrainian conflict in an internet forum, then you'd do better to proofread your post again and again until you manage to remove the little telltale signs that your native language is Russian. No informed reader of your post above is going to be convinced you don't have a significant dog in this fight.

You know, maybe some of us should complain to Slashdot about the Obama/Poroshenko-bots that reliably and consistently troll every single story about this conflict? You know, the ones who imply that anyone who even slightly skeptical about the propaganda we're all being fed, must be Russian or a paid Kremlin propagandist?

Suck on this. I'm a native English speaker from the UK, I have never been to Russia, I have been reading Slashdot for about 14-15 years, posting for most of that time too. And the Anonymous Coward tells it like it is. Poroshenko has claimed Ukraine was invaded like ten times already. He claimed he was being "invaded" by a fucking aid convoy, including after Putin's honesty about it's contents had been verified by international journalists and the Red Cross. In fact he asserted he'd shell said convoy, so the Red Cross chickened out, but the crazy Russians just drove right in there and delivered that aid anyway.

So as a native speaker, please heed my call - let's all stop abusing the English language shall we? We know what an invasion looks like. It looks like what the USA did to Iraq. It looks like Russian flags flying above Kiev and Russian tanks rolling down the streets to the parliament building. It does not look like journalists scrabbling around presenting the testimony of a milkmaid in a farcical attempt to find an army, as the Guardian did only a few days ago. Now condemn Putin for militarily supporting the rebels if you like (though the proof of this is wafer thin as well), just be aware that this is something many countries do, including the ones that are currently being most shrill about Ukraine. So such an argument doesn't have much impact, unfortunately, though I wish we lived in a world where it did.

Right. NASA also still has way too many "centers". Ames (except for the big wind tunnel) and Glenn (except for the test facilities at Sandusky) ought to go.

Quake audio consists mostly of footsteps and bangs. This might be fun for, say, GTA IV/V, where the NPCs have conversations to which you can listen if you're close enough.