All PETA need to do is get a sympathetic judge.

A whole set of them, including the supreme court. If it was as easy as finding one sympathetic judge, then it would have never applied to the people it was intended to.

And yeah, I'm glad some people did get the paper airplane reference.

I don't really think think that CUPS 1.6 does anything like that. Apple merely removed some features which they don't need for their own systems. From what I read there is nothing in that release which would achieve driverless printing. Anyway, I find the article barely readable at best. I appreciate the difficulty of writing in a foreign language - English isn't my first language either - but most of this just doesn't parse.

I would recommend to read this article instead.

Well, it's not like they shot down a drone doing atmospheric research or someone's hobby RC plane. They sent that thing there with the explicit intention to interfere with them. If some kids kick a ball onto my property, I'll give the ball back to them. They are children, they need to play. However if they were to start kicking balls deliberately against my front door with the express purpose of annoying me, then I think I would have a different attitude. (Obviously I wouldn't condone involving guns in a matter like this, but I think it's fair to say that these are different categories.)

[...] which if successful will seriously change everything ...

I'm attempting to build an anti-gravity device out of folded paper just now. If that works it will seriously change everything. Why would it work, though?

IIRC KDE3 had a style guide requesting that splash screens would be all inside the application window. I always thought that was a brilliant idea. Whether an app can be made to load instantaneously might depend on computing power (although I agree with him, that this shouldn't be an issue for modern computers, anymore) but the really annoying thing about Splash screens is that they sit there blocking access to your desktop, just to tell you "look I'm loading". There is certainly never a need for that.

Other than that, I think there are many good usability ideas in smartphone/tablet GUIs which ought to be brought to the desktop. Not the stupid stuff like making a desktop UI look like it was intended to be used with a touchscreen, but doing away with all the superfluous confirmation dialogs. An application should not ask you whether "you really want to quit" you already told it that - instead it should make sure that when you quit nothing bad happens. If you were working on a document but didn't save that yet - then just keep the working copy when the program is closed. Don't overwrite what's in the saved copy and don't throw it away - just restore it when the application is opened again, and suddenly quitting word processor is no longer dangerous. When quitting a music or video player it should remember what you were playing and come back to that when the application is started again. A video player should keep the position basically for every movie it has been playing, so if you come back to it later you can continue to watch from the same position, even if you have watched something else in between.

Remove the danger rather than asking the user twice when doing something dangerous.

Sensible idea, but in the UK you can be forced to tell the court your password. So if you were ever accused of something they could get the private keys of everybody in your address book and decode all your past traffic.

Anyway, they can't store that much data, and they are not actually proposing to: "databases would not record the content of the customerâ(TM)s communications but would store the numbers and email addresses of the sender and the recipient and [...] Facebook communications".

So really the encryption does nothing in this case. If they don't have the content, they can't decrypt it either. Even if it's encrypted they would still have your contact lists. Encryption wouldn't even be an option for Facebook messages, I would think. You could simply switch to Google+, or use "https" for Facebook. However these social networks would obviously still have all the messages stored, and a court could mandate that you hand over the password to the account.

Well that's their plan, and they have every right to go about it the way they think is best. There may be better or more efficient plans to be sure, but lets not forget that *they* are actually doing something (including learning from past mistakes) and if you are doing something you always have the risk of failure. As long as you are just speculating it's much less obvious when you are wrong.

In this particular case: mountainous area, no roads - carrying kerosene on someone's back up the mountain is probably not such a great option. Likely people would just continue to burn the wood growing up there even if they had the stoves available.

It worked for Darl. Cushy job with a great salary for many years, company kept afloat with MS cash, not much to do apart from talking to your lawyers.

Oh come on. They have a problem with deforestation. They get sick from the open fires indoors. Carrying that wood through the mountains is hard labor.

Everyone is happy and goes to bed smelling like campfire smoke. Is there anything better?

Yes.

To clarify why I think the other guys have better solutions: e.g. the first design doesn't need solar cells (just reflectors) and has no batteries (stores heat instead of electricity). That's a lot more low-tech thus probably better suited for the place where they use it, and likely less expensive.