I wouldn't be so sure about that... The thing is made from very low-weight foam and brushless motors are getting to the point where this is a reality. Those little toy Air Hogs things, for instance, can do this (albeit on a much smaller scale). /Sidebar: wtf has happened to those things? 2 years ago, they were all over the place, now the only thing I ever see are those god-awful 2-axis helicopters.

Are you off of your meds or something?

First, UAVs have got WAYYYYYYY more uses than spying on people. Unmanned utility wire monitoring, atmospheric replacements for satellites, land surveys, search and rescue, etc. etc. etc. Spying is just a little teeny tiny subset of the things you can do with a UAV (for instance, we're using predator drones over the gulf right now to monitor the oil spill...we're doing this because they drones can stay in the air for a very long time).

Second, you're advocating a device that would indiscriminately destroy electronic equipment with a range long enough that it could take out a airplane. Are you fucking insane? People with pacemakers, or artificial hearts...just kill them?

Destroy everybody within 200 yards' telephone, laptop, pager, e-reader, etc. because you're paranoid that some scary OMG GUBBMINT guy is watching you buy a donut?

Stay classy, slashdot.

What the hell does this have to do with the iPhone and its antenna?

Dear Journalists,

Referencing anything to do with the iPhone in an attempt to sound hip and relevant just makes you look stupid.

Signed,
Blhack

Look, Microsoft, I like you, I really do. I use windows XP on my workstation and it seems to work pretty damn well for everything I ever ask of it. You do a lot of research, that's really cool. Bill, you're a cool guy, donating all kinds of money to charity and whatnot; awesome.

But here is the thing, MS, I can download F/OSS stuff for *free*, find out if I like it, and if I do I just keep using it. I don't have to fork over any money, I don't have to register for anything or tell anybody , or do *anything* other than navigate over to sourceforge or wherever else, click download, click install, and then start working.

Your products are not that much better, they just aren't, and as a broke-ass kid, it doesn't make sense for me to spend money on them. I'd rather use the money to buy hardware.

How can you even possibly *not* sanitize the inputs? Python's mysql module, for instance, does the work for you:

cursor.execute("select grade from grades where student = %s", ("bobby; drop table grages"))

would be completely fine.

Gack, that should say "that is sill less than 1000 times".

Even on a cosmic timescale, that isn't very often. The earth is about 4.5 billion years old, no? Life on earth is, what, 3.5 billion years old (at least these are the earliest fossils we can find)?

So if this happens once every 5 million years, that is still only 1000 times that we have traded rocks with Mars.

That's a lot, but if you're talking about the chances of those rocks containing some absurdly rare strain of bacteria that can exist in an environment very much unlike that of the majority of this planet, it starts looking pretty damn unlikely.

Cosmic time scales or not, one every 5 million years is certainly not "constantly".

I apologize for the self-reply (no editing on slashdot, thank taco), but I should clarify.

My move to a new house ended my internet "addiction" because I moved from a suburban housing complex (a "master planned community") to an urban center with things that are within walking/biking distance (Tempe, AZ).

To be honest, my former town is exactly the type of situation that fosters the types of behaviours most of its residents claimed to hate. There was nothing in the town to do (other than grocery shop); it hadn't been allowed to develop organically. Because of this, people stayed in their homes and never interacted with one another. There wasn't a community there at all...just a grouping of houses.

I'm very glad to be gone from it.

Well, personally, I got really into sites like fark (and eventually reddit), but hated a lot of the stuff on them, so I set out to design my own(Although this was the first thing I ever did. A lot of it is very badly designed).

I've since learned CSS, python, javascript (beacuse I wanted to use ajax), mysql, and apache. To further the basketball analogy, I started watching my favorite team on television *all the time* and decided that I wanted to learn to play as well. My first few tries out (like the example linked about) I stumbled a bit, but have since more-or-less figured it out.

Point is, internet isn't all bad, so long as you decide to use it as a tool to educate yourself.

It's about availability and time-investment. My time-investment to play some flash-based fishing game (or dolphin olympics, goddamn you dolphin olympics) is about 5 minutes. My time-investment in fishing or basketball is several hours, plus the frightening reality that I might not be very good at it.

You can impulse-participate in a video game, doing the same thing in real-life requires more commitment.

I thought for a while that I was "addicted" to the internet. I post to blogs a lot, check my twitter like crazy, check the websites I run like crazy etc. etc.

Then I moved to a new house. Rarely if ever do I even power my computer on while I'm at home now. I'd rather be reading or playing with the dog or riding my bicycle.

It turns out I was just bored.

I think kids have set their standards too high. The internet allows the entire world to compete for their attention. Give them something more interesting to obsess over and they will.

In other words, kids are no more "addicted" to the internet than they were at one point addicted to fishing, or basketball, or any other hobbie that kids have ever had.

Yes, like the mac book air. Which was going to *totally* revolutionize the laptop market...except, it's a steaming pile of aluminum dogshit.

I'm sorry, but does android really need saving? I see more and more and more android based phones every day.

The line-in jack will disappear with physical audio. Honestly, unless you're a DJ, it's pretty unlikely that you have any audio that doesn't exist as something digital (MP3, AAC, WAV, etc.)

And if you are a DJ, you should be using a dedicated piece of hardware... Don't get me wrong, this makes me sad (probably because audio is a hobby of mine) but it isn't at all surprising.

Forgive the really really stupid question here, but what kind of staff do DCs really need? IO just opened a MASSIVE datacenter in Phoenix (where I live), and I've been trying to get an out-of-work friend of mine to apply there, but neither of us really know what you *do* in a datacenter.