Heard of it, yes. Thankfully I've never got Mono.

It's an airborne wide-spectrum camera, sometimes with parabolic and laser microphones.

People don't tend to have an issue with the helicopters because they're big, noisy, expensive, and take a number of people to operate. Thus, you're only going to deploy them when it's really necessary, and everyone in the area knows it's deployed. Compare that to drones, where you don't know how many there are, where they are, how much information they're gathering, who they're gathering it for, etc.

We haven't even got to the questions yet of the legality of knocking a drone out of the air -- we know the rules for helicopters.

Basically, there's a lot of "undefined" areas surrounding how drones integrate with our current society, and as such, there are a lot of potentials for abuse based on those gaps.

On behalf of the rest of the world... please, don't even suggest such things. Enough countries have already been ruined by the US.

Just remember... innovation isn't limited to features and software development.

Facebook innovations:
back-end data mining for extremely large sets of data (they made hadoop clusters actually work in a useful manner)
creating a business model that tricks a HUGE number of consumers into handing over their marketing data and then not complain too loudly about the resultingabuse
in partnership with Zynga: perfecting the Freemium model.

Those are just three off the top of my head. Nothing earth shattering, but all three were major choke points for the industry before Facebook solved them. Sure, someone else might have solved them if they hadn't (Marconi, Wright Bros, Edison come to mind) but they were in the right place at the right time to make their contributions stick.

Similarly, one of Google's biggest innovations was stolen from Xerox PARC with tweaks: the "20%" rule. The rest is what has fallen out of that.

As mentioned in a previous thread, we haven't tried to figure out their concrete because we haven't had to... they left us the recipe, and it's been discussed through the centuries by anyone remotely interested in the stuff.

It just doesn't have all the properties (structural, cost and availability) that are desirable for most modern construction. Makes good statues / fake rocks though.

scenario: everyone uses torbirdy. A few of those people have their DNS set to 8.8.8.8 (Google). NSA sends someone an innocuous email with a web bug embedded, and that person loads images (has some reason to do so based on message). Message is forwarded. Relationship is now mapped via two different routes, and the identities of the individuals can be pretty easily figured out.

TOR is not anonymous; it never claims to be. It does, however increase the difficulty in trolling metadata, and usually requires a targeted attack to reveal information. Of course, just using Tor may be enough of an indicator in itself in some circumstances (and it's really easy to tell if an endpoint is using Tor).

Remember that "metadata" includes message subjects, and that tracking includes messages sent TO you as well as FROM you. Of course, this is one reason that I usually keep my subject lines pretty generic unless it's something I don't mind broadcasting -- subject lines in email messages are broadcast medium by anyone's definition.

YES... this is what's missing for software patents; for something to be patentable, you must give up copyright and provide working source.

You'll still get people using outdated custom compilers to hang source on, but the working implementation would be understandable and re-creatable for those reading the patent (they'd just have to pay royalties during the limited time).

This is a software patent idea I could actually get behind.

What I find intriguing about the method is that it seems to imply that since the write and read methods are different, you could achieve asynchronous reads and writes -- which could be good or bad, depending on what's happening. Definitely a boost to some custom applications, and a possible revolution in some niche processor architectures. Not sure if it will be viable for generic computation systems.

All this statistic really says though is that the bottom 50% of Americans and the top 50% of Americans have a major income disparity.

Say the top 400 earners combined make 400 billion dollars. Say the bottom 50% make 399 billion dollars. The US population in 2012 was 313.9 million.

That means that averaged across ALL Americans (including newborns, children, people in jail*, etc.) the bottom 50% (which would include ALL those not earning a wage that I just listed), the average annual wage would be ~2.5 million US dollars.

* 1 out of every 142 Americans was in jail in 2002 -- that just blows my mind.

I'd guess that everyone above 50% is earning something, so the average would be significantly higher.

Of course, these numbers are just pulled out of thin air; they just show you that your statistics say almost nothing useful. In reality, the median household wage in 2012 was just over $50,000 (that's median, not average).

In reality, 30% of US households (households, not people) were earning under $35,000/year in 2012. Roughly 9% of households were making over $150,000/year. Just over 2% were making over $250,000/year. Now even this says not much, as cost of living varies widely depending on location. In many places, you can get a really nice house with acreage for $80,000. In other areas, that's how much it would cost one person to subsist in a 1 bedroom apartment for a year (rent plus necessities plus utilities -- the same house would cost upwards of $5 million).

Now compare that to other countries, where the average wage for the 99% is around $1,200/year (yes, that's THOUSAND).

Since most of the boomers would be in the top 50% unaccounted for by the above statistics,

Here's the real info (from Wikipedia, so take it with a grain of salt):

Age of householder

Household income in the United States varies substantially with the age of the person who heads the household. Overall, the median household income increased with the age of householder until retirement age when household income started to decline.[29] The highest median household income was found among households headed by working baby-boomers.[29]

Households headed by persons between the ages of 45 and 54 had a median household income of $61,111 and a mean household income of $77,634. The median income per member of household for this particular group was $27,924. The highest median income per member of household was among those between the ages of 54 and 64 with $30,544 [The reason this figure is lower than the next group is because Pensions and Social Security add to income while a portion of older individuals also have work-related income.]).[29]

The group with the second highest median household income, were households headed by persons between the ages 35 and 44 with a median income of $56,785, followed by those in the age group between 55 and 64 with $50,400. Not surprisingly the lowest income group was composed of those households headed by individuals younger than 24, followed by those headed by persons over the age of 75. Overall, households headed by persons above the age of seventy-five had a median household income of $20,467 with the median household income per member of household being $18,645. These figures support the general assumption that median household income as well as the median income per member of household peaked among those households headed by middle aged persons, increasing with the age of the householder and the size of the household until the householder reaches the age of 64. With retirement income replacing salaries and the size of the household declining, the median household income decreases as well.[29]
Aggregate income distribution

The aggregate income measures the combined income earned by all persons in a particular income group. In 2007, all households in the United States earned roughly $7.723 trillion.[30] One half, 49.98%, of all income in the US was earned by households with an income over $100,000, the top twenty percent. Over one quarter, 28.5%, of all income was earned by the top 8%, those households earning more than $150,000 a year. The top 3.65%, with incomes over $200,000, earned 17.5%. Households with annual incomes from $50,000 to $75,000, 18.2% of households, earned 16.5% of all income. Households with annual incomes from $50,000 to $95,000, 28.1% of households, earned 28.8% of all income. The bottom 10.3% earned 1.06% of all income.

So, this deals with income. Once people hit retirement, the majority lives off of savings, and has virtually no income. Since boomers are hitting this retirement age in droves now, they're taking all that accumulated wealth out of the system, but slowly feeding it back as well. When they die, all that accumulated wealth has to go somewhere; it doesn't just vanish.

I think this officially can be moderated as off-topic at this point; we've gone a LONG way from patent MAD to this thread. But it still provides some interesting back story, when the numbers are placed in context.

I turned on "show hidden characters" after the first hour of using Python... I now keep it enabled in all editors all the time. Keeps you from messing up pretty much all documents (although tab stops can do crazy things to layout still).

Character 0x20 is just a character on screen; nobody said it always had to be a blank.

?

I'm sure there are a few Canadians who could vouch for this, but most seem to go more for NIMBY. It's one reason Canadians don't mind centralized government; that way everyone knows where they are and generally what they're up to, and can avoid them politely.

Well, there's lots of studies on humanity and herd/tribe/pack mentality; it is built right in to us. However, I think you'll find that "American/Not American" is significantly different than "Canadian/Not Canadian" and "Swiss/Not Swiss". But then, there's always "White/Not White" "Rich/Not Rich" "Over 6'/Not Over 6'" "Mandarin Speaking/Not Mandarin Speaking" "Car Owner/Not Car Owner" "Employed/Unemployed" "Educated/Uneducated" ... and the list goes on.

People are treated differently based on where they're born because Us are different than Them -- socially, mostly; Us have different sets of values bred into us, and our society and culture (social, economic, etc.) reflect these differences.

It's actually a pretty effective survival mechanism; our ability to differentiate on so many levels all at once is one reason why we're the ones having such a profound effect on our planet. You could say the same for algae, but they're not as entertaining as humans.

Not in Canada; they just got rid of the penny.

This is likely true, but the slump could also be attributed to the baby boomers; once they all die and wealth gets redistributed, it is possible that everything will go back to the previous trend. Not likely, IMO, but possible. More likely that all the boomers' wealth will go to international corporations, overseas interests, and a privileged few, as has been the trend during the boomer shakedown years.