Everyone I've seen use one uses it to remotely answer the phone, while they try to find where they last laid the phone. It's probably a better match for the tablet-sized phones people don't keep on them.

Giardia comes from animals, and is more dangerous than the things you "fear" that come in drinking water.

I just know there's a homeopathy joke in there somewhere...

Sorry, but there are lots of very specialized yeast strains. You don't use the same yeast for wine as you do for beer, and that's different from the one you use for bread. Etc. San Francisco sourdough bread used to be made from a regionally available wild yeast, but I think things may have changed so that it no longer lives here. Certainly given the urban levels of pollution I wouldn't want to depend on catching a wild yeast. There was one bakery that used to have a baker who kept his culture growing on his hairy chest, but the food & drug people forbade this., even though it had been safe and popular for decades.

You aren't going to get one strain of yeast to take over the world. Particularly not one that's become dependent on being cultured in a lab.

Not in most cookies, but there ARE cookies that use a yeast dough. The problem is the yeast eats most of the sugar, so they aren't very sweet. (Maybe you could call them biscuits?)

Actually, I was just repeating a factoid I'd heard elsewhere. I gratefully accept your correction. (But do note that it doesn't change the point, merely slightly decreases it's significance.)

If by that you mean that clearly written words in the English language have no actual meaning, then sure, I guess. If you mean that the Constitution, and the countless supporting documents and correspondence written to, between and about its authors and the large groups of representatives that agreed on its purpose and amendments to it were just setting us with something that had no actual meaning, then sure. But that's BS, and you know it.

The Constitution makes no such distinctions between one tool and the next. But of course the people who wrote it were very clear that there were some tools that some people would - given a period of power in the congress - try to deny to the public, and so they added amendment that explicitly reminded the government that it cannot act in those areas. The Constitution is built around the concept that the government's powers over what you may or may not do it inherently limited to the things that are enumerated therein, and generally prohibited otherwise, with the states having all such other authority. This isn't a matter of "perspective," and it isn't true for certain tools, and false for other tools. If you think that "drones" (but not, say, chain saws) should be singled out for capricious bans by the federal government despite laws recently passed by the congress explicitly to the contrary, then you're completely missing the point.

Semantic games like that show how completely unserious you are.

A matter decided upon, legislatively. at the municipal, county, and (rarely) state level. Not by capricious extra-legal, counter-constitutional fiat from a political appointee of the White House, as in the case at hand.

Because the FAA, by federal statute (passed by congress, which is made up of representatives of all of the states), is granted that regulatory authority. There is legal precedence for their authority over everything that flies in the air, right down to an inch above the ground. Which doesn't mean that their position on this stuff isn't incredibly absurd. But it's their turf.

Why should the FAA, which is part of the Obama administration, feel any urge whatsoever to enforce or obey laws passed by congress? We have ample precedent of him using the pen and phone about which he so regularly boasts to simply do what he wants anyway, even in direct contradiction of plain language in the laws he swore to uphold. Any expectation that the chief executive of the administration will be asking his immediate (appointed, by him) subordinate (the Secretary of Transportation) to instruct HIS subordinate (Huerta, the director of the FAA) to actually comply with the law, is laughable. The administration takes laws (like their own favorite, the ACA), and completely ignores hard-wired dates and other requirements as it suits them for political leverage with the portion of the voters to whom they pander. Happily, that particular instance is about to be challenged in a civil suit coming out of congress - that's very good news.

We just need another suit, along the same lines, requiring the administration's law breaking at the agency level in the FAA to be discussed in the bright sunshine of court. Something you'd think that the "most transparent administration in history" would applaud, right? Yeah.

You have your entire concept of liberty, and of the constitution, exactly backwards.

Should every new concept, innovation, invention, tool, technique, strategy, and technology be prohibited by default? What the hell is wrong with you? If I come up with a clever new way of slicing deli meat, should I be prohibited from using it or showing someone else how to use it until I've sufficiently begged an un-elected, un-accountable agency bureaucrat to allow me to use it?

And in the case at hand, picture two people standing right next to each other. Each has their hands on the controls of a 4-pound plastic quadcopter carrying a GoPro. Each takes off, sends the little machine up to 45 feet above the same house. Each of them use the device to record the condition of the houses's gutters, sparing somebody a couple hours of putting up a dangerous extension ladder a dozen times. Each of them get the job done in minutes, and land their little quad back down in the driveway right next to each other. You think that one of those two people should be banned from what the both just did, but the other should not. Why? Be very specific.

Yeast with THC sounds like a perfect combination, get high while eating something baked and it could be any bread, a dope bagel, a funny muffin, a nostalgic croissant, the branding possibilities are endless!

Sounds good. To Malaysia and Beyond!

You call that counterbalance?

What's keeping me, a rights owner of a movie that's a real stinker, from silencing everyone who dared to do a negative review of it by carpet bombing any and all media pages with takedown notices for those reviews?

The US learned that it's more profitable to wage than to win wars. At least for the elite few. It's really win-win in every aspect. You get the masses occupied with an external foe, you get the rabble off the street by dumping it into the army (and at the same time make them feel important because they're doing something important) and you can make the elite rich at the same time.

The US also has the economy to fuel the whole shit, unlike Germany in WW2. And also unlike Germany in WW2, they're not dumb enough to actually engage in a war with anyone who could actually fight back.

Really?

Fuck, the terrorists won, they're all over the US already!