Followed by: The FBI has seized and taken down a drug-dealing website posing as a technology news website, slashdot.org, for associations with a ring of probable drug dealers.

Probably because Android users can't figure out how to take screenshots (Zing!)

But seriously, as a mobile QA tester, it's a pain in the butt to figure out and remember how to take a screenshot with any given phone, since it isn't standardized, and some phones have no screenshot-taking ability short of connecting it to a dev console.

This was my first thought as well. Why is *Eric Schmidt* so concerned about *private* drone use, as opposed to governmental? Smells like an anti-competitive effort to me.

> If you can't survive and thrive in the very worst conditions this planet has to offer, then you won't do better off outside the atmosphere.

Says who?

> we're not overpopulated now, but in a few generations we will be.

They said that a few generations ago, too. Hell, Thomas Malthus said that we already were, and he said that centuries ago. We always seem to be on the brink of a catastrophic population explosion that will result in mass starvation and misery. Maybe it's time we admit that Malthus was dead wrong.

You might say that we'll soon run out of room, but why is no one saying we ran out of room a long time ago? The natural human condition is to live off the land as nomadic hunters and foragers, in groups of no more than a few hundred, not live sedentarily in cities of many thousands if not millions of people. Is that way of life feasible now, with how many people there are now?

We've been adapting for about 10,000 years, or 500 generations, to live sustainably with overpopulation. We've dealt with famine and plague. We will continue to innovate and find new ways to deal with them. And, as population grows exponentially, so does human innovation, so long as we continue to provide the means for humans to innovate.

As if those are the only two options. Neither of them even make any sense. We are far, far from depleting the Earth's resources, so much that it isn't even in the realm of realistic possibility. And as far as "surviving" on this planet, can we learn to tame and prevent every possible external threat that can take Earth out, like a nearby supernova? Absolutely not.

How about looking at things realistically, rather than in such irrationally absolutist terms? Something, anything could happen to Earth, from nuclear war to unchecked global warming to an increase in volcanic activity to meteorite impact to a freak solar or interstellar event. The survival of humanity, our descendants and the only intelligent species we are aware of, depends on colonizing space. We've lived on Earth as a species for hundreds of thousands of years without coming close to depleting its resources, we are getting quite a lot better at learning to live sustainably without damaging the environment than we were even 40 years ago, and we haven't realized any imagined dystopian futures yet. What precedent is there for imagining that, if it suddenly becomes easier to colonize new worlds that we will simply toss away the ones we're already living on?

Your false dichotomy is both false and terribly ridden with inaccurate smuggled premises.

So if an infant or toddler is too stupid to not eat toys, they deserve whatever they get from these things? Fuck you, you are an asshole. I hope to god that you aren't and won't ever be a parent.

All the arguments in the summary are economic ones. Creating monopolies, raising prices, and market distortions are what patents are for. It's a reward to the creator that is supposed to drive creativity and innovation.

The real argument against gene patents is that they shouldn't be patentable in the first place. They are natural phenomena, not inventions.

It's disappointing how many self-proclaimed Christians ignore what Jesus said in favor of what's in the Old Testament, which was written before Jesus Christ. It's like they don't want to be Christians at all.

> (and the Prada's original UI was vastly inferior).

And isn't that kind of part of the point? There were smartphones around for years before the iPhone came out, but they all sucked horribly. I struggled to do any kind of Internet browsing with my Blackberry Pearl to do the kinds of things that I can do on my iPhone just by talking to it. I had a geek friend who was so proud of his Windows phone that had a stylus. I remember another had an iPaq that could play movies. There were also tablets before the iPad, but no one wanted to use them either. And in both cases, any competition lagged well behind Apple in terms of being able to come up with a product that anyone actually wanted to use.

Apple knows how to make products that people want to actually use. No one else can seem to figure that out without waiting to see what Apple does and copying that.

Yes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_enigma

It's one thing to use it in a military context but the administration refuses to rule out using it in place of law enforcement. Or do you think that the military should be deployed against American citizens on American soil instead of law enforcement? Perhaps we should deploy them against all wanted murderers and rapists since we *know* they're guilty. The government has never been wrong about that before.

I had this problem with iCloud and importing bookmarks from Safari on my Mac to Safari on my iPhone. I tried clearing them off of one, and bam, gone on both, irretrievably so. So annoying. Anyone know what the proper procedure for this is supposed to be? I'm very suspicious of trying to use iCloud now.

It's about time something like this happened. The rights established in the Constitution are binding on the government, wherever you are and whoever you are. There is no provision for different rules at the border or outside the border, nor for citizens as opposed to non-citizens. Any attempt at limiting those rights is in violation of any clear reading of the Constitution, especially attempts to define the border as 100 miles wide, an area that encompasses several whole states and 2/3 of the country's population.

The police don't mete out punishments. If they shoot you, it's ostensibly in self-defense when they are trying to apprehend you. There are major issues when cops are found executing people. A drone can't apprehend you, and you can't surrender to a drone. If you were to put your hands over your head if you are lucky enough to see the drone coming, you just present an easier target.