When building walls inside your garage is outlawed, only outlaws will...

I think we are seeing the stage being set for a similar situation with drones.

If the FAA rules allow private drones to fly at low altitudes over private property without consent of the person controlling the property and the legislators don't pass laws restricting this (the FAA doesn't make rules about privacy - safety is their charter), the expectation of privacy will be reduced as more and more private citizens fly drones at the lower altitudes. Then, police will be free to do so as well and peer into your skylight without a warrant (just as they can look in your windows from the street without a warrant).

(Of course, they can probably do everything they need to do with a helicopter from a higher altitude and a good camera/lens anyway.)

In KYLLO v. UNITED STATES , the Supreme Court held in 2001 that:

Where, as here, the Government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a "search" and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant.

in determining that use of a thermal imaging device whose output was used to establish cause for a search warrant was, itself, a search that required a warrant.

By making intrusive surveillance devices available inexpensively (perhaps by showing hobbyists how to build their own), such devices could move (as planes have) into "general public use" and then be usable by police without a warrant to surveil areas normally off-limits to them without a warrant.

In the state I live in, it's sufficient to hand them to the person but if they don't take them, to just drop them on the ground at their feet.

Sorry, I was really responding to your office with a door observation. It's incredibly important and directly related to work. I'd trade all the 'non-work' perks, except salary, for that. I don't mind the non-work stuff, but not at the expense of work stuff or salary.

Amen. Pay me well. Give me an office with a door so I can concentrate on the details of whatever I'm going to foist on our customers (who, in the end, pay me). Provide up-to-date technology tools. Cut out bureaucracy.

Skip the ping-pong table and the pinball machine. If practical, have a credible onsite cafeteria as a timesaver, but no need to make it free.

Seems that if they can push a 2 Gigs for a few hundred dollars, I could get at least get 50Mbit for what I'm paying now.

The ISP's cost of delivering service includes network upgrades, network maintenance, customer service, and bandwidth costs (plus others such as marketing and G&A costs).

The network upgrades are generally not "per customer" but "per area" so if you have the higher speed available, the ISP has already paid the costs of the network upgrades and you just are not yet buying that service but they are hoping you will. You, of course, are using that upgraded network (perhaps resulting in better latency and reliability even though you don't buy additional speed). If the ISP makes the lower tiers cheaper, less people will switch to the higher tiers. Human nature is to be resist large price jumps and accept small ones -- for example, someone who is paying $80 for 150MBPS is probably more likely to jump to paying $120 for 1GBPS service as "it's only 50% more cost" while someone who was paying $30 for 40MBPS service would experience 400% increase in cost to move to $1GBPS and that's an enormous jump. Until they start losing customers to some competitor who is offering 40MBPS for $30, they have little motivation to offer that deal.

Customer service costs are probably about the same for 5MBPS customers as 2GBPS customers -- both complain vocally when their service is down and both require a truck roll to fix a lot of problems.

Bandwidth costs, of course, are probably higher for customers with high bandwidth service, but that isn't probably the main cost to the ISP.

Of course users SHOULD care but most don't or at least don't have the time/inclination to learn.

Why should they care? They should expect the web site provider to Do The Right Thing just as they don't think they should need to be concerned if the process used to grow the material used in the turbine blades of the jet engine on the plane they are flying on was correctly monitored.

"Some" was the key word - first word in the first sentence.

Agreed though, a lot of small businesses don't seem to care (or perhaps know to care) -- and for those, it's may actually be safer because if they are so unaware of security risks that the cloud doesn't give them some cause for concern, they probably would fail miserably at managing their in-house systems securely and reliably.

In general, another factor in the equation is what tax revenue would have been generated on the land consumed by the DC if the DC hadn't been built. In an area where land is plentiful, the land might be (under)utilized for the next five years by something that would generate less net tax revenue.

Some businesses are not comfortable putting their documents in the hands of another party due to security concerns. Some also are hesitant to rely on a service that may go away with relatively short notice.

Google Docs would require additional training as well if they are already using Word/Excel and legacy documents would need to be maintained somewhere.

Google Docs does not import a lot of Word and Excel documents adequately. I've rarely had it import a Word document with sufficient fidelity that I didn't find it necessary to at least touch it up. With Excel documents, I almost always have to do a lot more than "touch up" work to make it whole again. Therefore, it's likely switching to Google Docs would require a lot of effort if some of these documents are "living" documents that change from time to time.

To be fair, you do probably have to disconnect the wiring from the flooded generators as you don't want the electricity from the temporary generators shorting to ground through the flooded generators. And, you do need to connect the temporary generators somehow and, if that contingency was not considered in the existing wiring, you probably need to do some "rewiring".

So, some rewiring may consist of bolt cutters while some may consist of clamping existing cables to the cables of the temporary generators. Neither should be a big deal for on-site electricians though.

Of course, if the United States has nine or more nuclear power plants, nine of them will be "among nine of the poorest performing nuclear plants" -- even if those plants have a exemplary record and exceed every safety requirement. If the United States had exactly nine nuclear power plants, each of them would be "among nine of the poorest performing nuclear plants" AND "among nine of the best performing nuclear plants"

It might not hurt the industry much.

It might hurt Intel though because they would end up hiring less qualified people OR end up extra unqualified people to fill quota. If Intel hires less qualified people, it makes it harder for Intel to win and easier for others in the industry to win. If Intel just hires extra people who are 'diverse', but less qualified, these people will cost Intel money in salary, benefits, and other employee costs without sufficient return and Intel will need to figure out a way to keep them from distracting and/or interfering with the more qualified employees (perhaps Intel could open an entire campus for 'diversity hires' and isolate them to prevent this though).

"less white" might be correct -- maybe AC meant that darker complexioned, i.e. "less white", males should/would be hired.