I hope these things are at least carrying transponders so they even make a blip on the radar at all.

They'd still show up on radar without a transponder and it would make no sense at all to not have a $200 transponder on $200,000 drone. Without a transponder ATC just wouldn't have any altitude data (if turning off your transponder was all it took to hide from radar, radar would be useless in a war situation where the enemy is trying to hide - obviously not the case - and there would be no need for stealth aircraft). Aircraft are required have to be carrying an altitude reporting transponder to enter most controlled airspace for safety reasons. Aircraft are required to contact ATC prior to entering, and/or stay in continuous contact with ATC also for safety reasons.

The FAA isn't stupid when it comes to safety (you might even say they're borderline paranoid). They won't give arbitrary exceptions to safety-related regulations.

I'm confused - when did pubic wigs enter the equation?

I believe we can simplify out 'gynecologist' from your boolean expression, because consent is not optional even if 'gynecologist' == true. Apparently current implementation substitutes variable 'TSAagent' in its place however.

whoops - There were suppose to be <Off-topic rant> tags around those last two paragraphs. Darn HTML stripping.

people are still spending a LOT of time playing in order to earn this kind of money.

Not necessarily. If you have ISK to invest it doesn't take a lot of time to make more. I've made about 600 million ISK each of the last couple months by spending 15 minutes a day managing my investments. I guess you could argue for 7.5 hours invested per month this is not a very good pay rate but in the MMO scheme of things this is virtually no time at all.

I've come to a point where the game is actually boring because I have more cash than I need and nothing left to work for because skills take so long to train. I have the best gear I can buy for my skills, and my progression to bigger and better things is limited entirely by the flow of time rather than anything that gives me an incentive to play the game. I consider this an immense design flaw. Level 4 missions are boring. Mining is boring. Exploring is marginally interesting in the same way as a sudoku puzzle but ultimately futile because it just nets me more money. Switching to a PvP clone slows down skill training which is admittedly a tough decision in the face of mounting boredom. There is no reason for me to even log in besides managing investments and talking to corpmates. Needless to say I'm looking forward to Diablo3.

Cue some tool replying to this saying "If you can buy everything you need with under X bajillion ISK then you must not have faction module ABC which offers 0.0001% better stats than your meta-level 4 ABC module."

Run-off voting also deserves a mention in this context and combats the same problem described in the parent. It provides a ranking system for candidates rather than a simple binary approve/disapprove, at a cost of extra complexity that would probably confound the stupid 40% mentioned in the parent.

From an anecdote I heard somewhere recently (I think in 'The Knight' episode of Terry Jones' Medieval Lives [highly recommend it, was on Netflix instant, these days who knows]) not only was he hard press to run away, he was hard pressed to even stand up again. The armor, however, was so good at its job you couldn't hurt him while he was on the ground until you brought out the boiling oil.

The article is wrong. The protests are *NOT* in reaction to buying in game items. They are in reaction to buying skill points and faction standings (which is currently NOT possible) and the absurd prices of all the vanity items (lowest end items are around $20). Currently the rate at which you gain skill points is currently determined by your characters ability scores and the absolute best gear you can buy only increases this rate by around 20%. It takes several months worth of skill points to fly the best ships. This is the ONLY factor currently keeping day-1 players out of the game's best ships (money is not a factor because of PLEX as you noted). The WoW/other MMO equivalent would be buying completely leveled and elite geared character directly from Blizzard.

Amusing tidbit: several alliances have declared players wearing the $68 item to be Kill On Sight. Spending that $68 is currently tantamount to putting a bounty on yourself, and the only place in EVE you cannot be attacked is while docked in a station.

The methods used on such shows are hokey at best. If they were serious in the slightest they would have redundant, different-brand pieces of equipment at each location to cross-match their all their evidence (especially "EVPs"). They would never reuse any media, especially analog media (magnetic audio tapes anyone?). They would put new media through some kind of special scrub to ensure there are no pre-existing artifacts. Every piece of electronic equipment would be surrounded by an individual, redundantly grounded Faraday cage. They would give up on the temperature sensing all together because until they can hermetically seal and thermally isolate the building (per The First Law, good luck with that) it means there's a draft or A/C vent nearby. They would let the EMF readings be further evidence they should be using Faraday cages. And they would stop claiming bugs and random pieces of dust are "orbs", give me a break. Lastly they would get the hell out of the place so their compromised psyche can stop feeling "touched" and yielding no real data.

Then again, if they did these things they probably wouldn't have much, if anything, to put on TV to sell commercials.

You could've anyway. If anyone on this site is caught in a crime via their browsing history we're confiscating their geek license.