As another poster pointed out, it's just posturing for anyone to say they are going to shoot down the drones.

Not from the ground. From another drone. Don't even need to shoot, just get above it and drop something sufficiently nasty on its rotors. Collect the wreckage and sell what's salvageable...maybe even in your Amazon store.

I have one that can carry 2kg...

They're talking 25 kg / 55lbs pound load here, so you're off by more than an order of magnitude.

I solder SMT components by hand as well. Don't even need a microscope; just head-mounted magnifier glasses is plenty. Make sure you have good light and plenty of flux and you're good to go.

But the problem is the board. Sure, if you have a finished design already, and you intend to actually use it in the future, then sending off for a finished PCB is good. But if it's just a hobby, and you're prototyping or just playing around to better understand a particular circuit, then spending a good chunk of money and weeks of time for a board is simply not feasible. You really want to set something up, try it, then tear it down and try the next idea.

With that said, I don't know that this is the answer either. Hand-drawn does not sound precise enough to handle SMT, and a whole separate device just making prototype boards sounds like too much money and space for a hobbyist. Perhaps the answer is desktop mills that become cheap and precise enough that you can use them to cut out boards from copper blanks along with other building tasks. At least that would not be a single-purpose gadget.

The problem is where do you draw the line?

Why is there a line to be drawn?

Photographer refuses to take photographs at a non-white wedding because of "religious" beliefs. Will take photos of any white ceremony.

And? Can the couple still get married? Can they find a photographer? Pretty sure they can. The photographer's bigotry does not pick anyone's pocket or break anyone's leg. It does not interfere with anyone's rights. Let him turn down paying customers and give opportunity to his competition, it's sort of a self-limiting problem.There is no need for any action here, any more than if a Catholic music composer accepts a commission from the diocese but doesn't accept a commission from the local synagogue (or from the Westborough Baptist Church).

Explain to us then the rational opposing position then. Explain to us the pro-discrimination position whereby we should be permitted to discrimination on the basis of race, gender, age, or even sexual orientation when none of those things should matter.

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that all things except what the state have decided are proper should be forbidden.

Yes, among enlightened people race, gender, age, or even sexual orientation should not matter. That does not imply that unenlightened people should be subject to criminal prosecution or lawsuits.

You should be permitted to discriminate in some areas because you should be permitted to do anything you want that does not interfere with the fundamental rights of others. Housing is a fundamental right, so you shouldn't be legally able to discriminate in renting out a house. But hiring a specific person to take your wedding pictures is not a fundamental right, so a photographer should be legally able to turn down a paying customer for whatever reason they want, even bigotry.

Doing the math with the wrong numbers isn't informative. You've ignored the atmospheric losses suffered by ground-based systems -- clouds, dust, the opacity of air. I think you're also being much more generous in estimating the potential lifetime of ground-based systems than space-based ones, which skews your numbers.

It may be that the gains are small enough to not justify the launch costs, though that depends on how much we value land taken up by solar arrays.

Electric heaters are 100% efficient.

Heat pumps give you around 300-500% of the input electrical energy.

It's very inefficient to turn electricity into heat directly. If you wanted heating you'd be better off using a heat pump or other indirect means.

A couple of things, that might set your mind at ease. According to reports:

1. Ms. Clinton did not "forward" material to her private server. People were just emailing to her at her personal email address at "clintonemail.com".
2. Those emails she received considered to be official business, her staff forwarded to the State Department for their IT operators to save.
3. She also produced a huge amount of documents to various Congressional Committees.
4. None of these emails were classified. They appear to have been sent to her unencrypted
5. Sensitive material never went through this email system.
6. Apparently the State Department isn't very good at IT. They only recently were able to figure out how to even just save Secretary Kerry's email; his top staff using the @state.gov address still do not have their email records saved. So by using @clintonemail.com, HRC likely was preserving more email than if she'd saved used an @state.gov address.
7. Personal emails (and presumably spam) was not sent on. But no law covers that anyway.

This is much akin to the media breathlessly discovering that Hillary Clinton also has a private phone number, which maybe official calls were received. Except that because this is "email", it's totally different somehow. (By which I mean, as she's the presumptive Democratic nominee, the nutcases and conspiracy loons are going to do their nutcase conspiracy theorizing, which Blogs and FOX will pick up - because it sells eyeballs.)

door is locked, as per security requirement

There's two kinds of door-lock modes -

- Locked, but can be unlocked with code that crew knows. "Pilot going to bathroom mode."

- Locked, but cannot be unlocked with code. "Hijacking - No one's getting in mode."

In your example, co-pilot suffers seizure, pilot unlocks door with code and flies plane.

What wasn't anticipated was co-pilot putting door in hijack mode then hijacking plane himself.

An L-1011 has 5 seats in the cockpit

1996 called. They want their 20-year-old TriStars back.

The very lack of them finding the plane (MH370) at all means that it more than not it did not crash

No - They haven't found the plane because of the size of the search area.

I'm surprised how few people seem to get this.

The search area is choppy, stormy ocean and is the size of Australia. To put that in perspective, here's a map of Australia overlaid on the USA:

http://keithooper.smugmug.com/...

So imagine you're looking for a seat cushion in Nevada that's bobbing on the water in Illinois.

And if they don't?

Suspension of business. All business. Until the line is connected.

The fact that no attack occured gives the talking heads leeway to claim there was no "terrorist attack."

A terrorist is a person who attempts to bring about political change by "illegitimate" (i.e., non-state) violence.

Mass murder is only terrorism if it is an attack on a political entity, or is an attempt to scare a nation's population into something.

Unless someone says, "We're going to keep crash your planes until you do such-and-such", this isn't terrorism. There's no attempt to bring about political change involved, only murder, motive unknown.

The companies that own the data still think they can gouge the automotive market, even though the mobile prices have been driven down to the floor by the likes of Waze and Google Maps.

Not really. We just licensed Google Maps for an application. Literally cost millions of dollars. Google doesn't give that stuff away for free.