You say it like it is not an intended feature...

Actually, gasoline engines scale down pretty well nowadays. You lose a bit of efficiency, but if you want to have range, they are still your best bet. A small gasoline RC plane could cross the Atlantic for instance. You can't yet do that with an electrical one (unless you use solar panels of course).

The reasons on why you don't see them in quadcopters are twofolds : First, they indeed are heavier and more complicated. Putting 4 of these in place is harder to do and you need to feed them gasoline, to have 4 valves, this is more complicated. However, on regular RC-helicopters, gasoline engines are very common : a single engine can activate both propellers and there is no need for them to turn at different speeds.

Which brings me to the second point : Quadcopters engines need to change speed very quickly, they also need to stop and start again almost instantly, which a gasoline engine cannot do. You almost need to kickstart it with an electrical engine.

I think quadcopter are much more precise than regular helicopters, but in disaster relief, you don't need precision, you need range.

Bitcoin and anonymity seems to be the most misunderstood thing in this whole mess.
Bitcoin is not by itself anonymous. It doesn't hide IPs, all the transactions are public, all the accounts balances are public. Bitcoin can be anonymous if you never link your identity to a bank account. That is, if you manage to hide your identity while buying bitcoins and while buying stuff with it.

Bitcoin was touted as an anonymous currency because it can be used as such in the dreams of cryptoanarchists who imagine a society of anonymous (or rather, pseudonymous) persons collaboratively earning money and spending it through dematerialized goods. Bitcoin has been made with this very narrow economical niche in mind. Anonymity in bitcoin is good just as long as you don't link a physical identity and address to an account. And then, your whole network of transactions can be discovered (unless you have been really very careful). If you want anonymity for buying physical goods, use cash.

They renamed it low-energy nuclear reaction. A few real physicists and a lot of crackpots are still doing works under that not-yet-too-well-known denomination. IIRC, after the cold fusion debacle, the US Navy made a report on the whole situation, saying it was a small probability of success, high benefits if successful situation, and recommended to fund it moderatly and continue research in a few labs.

It is, but in US it is legal.

But Intel's linux driver is open sourced. This counts as helping!

Don't forget that they would use gasoline instead of solar toys. The energy density of oil is 20 times the one of the best batteries.

Well, giving prizes for these sounded like a very bad idea from the beginning. Don't offer prizes and mak participants pay. Only the very crazy will come and magic will happen.

And if you are the boss of a spy and that this is not part of uour guidelines, just resign. You are a threat to your own country.

However, banning 3d printing as a whole, or mandating devices to check what you are printing, or forbidding the publication of CAD designs, these would be problematic.

The government. Seriously, that is the definition of a public service.

But we are not talking about software here, we are talking about algorithms. Patents cover processes which are abstract entities. I agree with the point you are making but I think it is irrelevant to the current case.

You don't seem to understand that the problem is not with Windows, Linux, Microsoft or Torvalds, but about the driver developers.

Driver developers target Windows. Period. Windows does not develop the ATI driver, the Nvidia driver, provides just a stack for developing the thousands of wireless drivers out there.

If you had a clue about what you are talking about, you would see that driver interfaces in linux are good, are working, are really good to develop with. They are documented, they do change at a pace that's much less insane than Windows'.

Every hardware that does work at all under linux (and honestly, I had more luck with linux in recent times when installing new drivers or usb camera than windows) works because someone in the OSS world wrote a driver for it. This work is not done by Microsoft for windows, so don't compare apples and oranges.

If you want to shout against someone for the lack of graphical cards driver support (that must be it, because, seriously, wireless and sound have been working correctly for ages on most hardware) you will have to shout at ATI and NVidia. The binary blobs you are probably referring to are made by them, not by anyone in the kernel develoment team. And yes, they often break, they often have unfixed bugs. Preferentially shout a bit more at NVidia because while ATI doesn't open source its driver, it at least opens its specifications and allows the OSS driver developer to at least not code blindfolded.

Agreed. I see the two alternatives as two different kind of defeats.

What is their incentive for doing it right anyway? Since when do people check the result of security audits on the smartphone they want to buy?