Well, if it worked, it may or may not have a huge impact. Just because energy is produced does not make it cost effective for energy production. For instance there have been some interesting advances in tabletop fusion, but it requires more energy then it produces. It has some interesting applications for medical equipment as a neutron source but is hardly game changing when it comes to energy production.

You do not need a license to build just any nuclear reactor, but if it produces significant radiation then they start to take notice.

It sounds like they are trying to hurt the particular police force an its abuses of other 'little guys', but also to highlight that people should not be using SAPS's 'whistleblower' system in the first place because it tracks personal data. They really should have anonomized it before posting, but the people in the database were already probably at risk from internal misuse an corruption.

The know what makes their short term investors happy and their stock options valuable....

While we like to mock CEOs, at the end of the day they got to where they are by being good at what they do. The problem is what WE think they should be doing and what actually pays off is pretty out of sync. Right now the job market for CEOs rewards short term profits at the expense of long term viability. Investment in the future is generally punished. Granted the public and the tech community might point out that such behavior hurts the company, the people who actually influence the person's pay and future employment options do not, nor do they care. Long term stability and profits just are not considered priorities.

Farmers, unfortunately, for the most part have very little political voice outside a few very large organizations. They make a great group to trot out in order to make your point or gain points.. and sadly like small business owners they are also generally fairly easy to politically manipulate since they are both specialized and busy so it is easy to spread plausible sounding memes through the communities.

Conversely, discounting the majority of scientific finding because it does not match what a particular group wants does not mean they are right. It does however mean that they have to provide better models then the majority.

Put another way, in science, the majority usually IS right, and there is a well established method for showing otherwise. Thus using majority opinion as an indicator of correctness, while not infallible, is generally pretty good. If nothing else the probability of 3% allowing political belief to influence their conclusions is greater then 97% doing so.

I had initially read it as commenting on the pushy bronies, but I could see how it could be read that way too.

Thing is, that describes the bashers pretty well too. It is not enough that they feel such things threaten their masculinity or adulthood, but they need to loudly proclaim how disturbed the people who have the hobby are and how they should go away. I have never seen the show myself, so I do not have, if you will pardon the expression, a horse in the race here, but from a 3rd party perspective I see a LOT more of that behavior come from the anti bronie crowd then the bronies. Sure I hear of a few really obsessive types who will not let it go till everyone around them watches it, but I see a much larger group droning in the background trying to get people to not watch the show through no small amount of pressure and stigma.

Considering what I see sports fans do....

Because in many people's minds 'this threatens my masculinity' is far worse then colombian drug lords.

Wow, someone was actually able to site an example. I think this is a first in these discussions that I have seen ^_^

Being 'little' does not magically exempt someone from the rules. One can argue for or against how much sense the current patent system makes, but the size of the defendant's operation should not play into the case.

In this case a farmer who typically buys a product found a way to get it cheaper by buying a version of it that was only marked for consumption not growing, then planted it. Essentially he purchased an expired license and tried to use it like it was new, no different then, say, hacking your cable box to keep getting premium channels after you have canceled your service for them. Sure you can physically work around the limits, but just because it is physically possible (and in this case nature plays a role) does not get you out of your legal agreement.

Which touches on a long term problem. As bitcoin support/bridges slowly work their way into other systems, upgrading clients becomes a bigger and bigger problem. For technically inclined individuals this is not a problem, but clients integrated into larger stacks like ecommerce systems or even banking/payroll systems.. well... those tend to change much more slowly and requiring an update in order to be able to use the currency is not a small deal.

Which is one of the weaknesses of bitcoin, the currency and the implementation are intertwined.

Though on the topic of 'importance', that is one of the issues. To be important enough to abuse traditional aircraft you really have to be on the radar so to speak. But for drones? They are much more likely to find their way into personal conflicts.. cop neighbor doesn't like your dog? Date a cop's sibling and you have a fight? In the same way other police powers have slowly found their way into petty personal squabbles, drones could to.

I think the issue many people have, besides the imagery, is drones drastically lower the barrier to abuse by police departments. Putting a fixed wing plan or a helicopter in the air is a fairly big deal, there is paperwork and people involved, there will be fuel and maintenance to deal with, and generally only large departments actually have easy access to them.

Drones on the other hand are much much cheaper to acquire and operate, and will probably be done with much less oversight. And unfortunately the police have a reputation for abusing powers when they are easy to access.

So I think people feel that the main reason current aircraft have not been heavily abused is their relative inaccessibility, and that the problem with drones is not that they add fundamentally new capabilities, but because they make those capabilities cheap and accessible.