The dirty little secret of this trend is that it's happening because the employers increasingly getting away with policies that in past times would have been called mistreatment of their workforce. The American workforce has increasingly moved out of the blue collar industries that had fought long and hard for Regulatory and Union protections, to the comparatively unregulated and unprotected world of white collar drudgery. Things like Union protections and Pension Programs are a things of the past, and loyalty (in either direction) has been entirely removed from the equation.

The vast majority of people would not cast off the security of a large organization and take on all the risk of going freelance while there are alternative. But increasingly the Companies are asking for more and more from their employees and giving less and less in return, to the point where the Hassle&Restriction of a large organization out weights diminishing expectation of Job Security that is the whole point.

Just spoke with some somebody who registered under the FAA system before the judge threw it out, this isnt (or at least wasnt then) a property registry at all. The rule simply required the Operator to register have a registration number and to place that number on any drones they fly. It's so that if the drone ends up somewhere it should not be, like (an airport runway, a prison, or maybe the white-house lawn, authorities have a way to trace it back to it's owner.

But it is the same Operator number on every drone you fly; the government knows that you are a drone operator, and you you do something illegal they can figure out it was your drone. But they dont know anything about the type or number of drones you have or anything, only that you are flying them, or at least are interested enough to get your name added to the list. And the fee was only something like $5, so we arent talking about a prohibitive monetary barrier.

I see three benefits:

1) Reinvigorate our Space capabilities. Every-shifting politics and evaporating budgets have left pretty far from what we were in our ability to actually field a viable space program. We have no shuttles, we rely on Russian equipment and/or to launch bother personnel and satellites.

2) Test runs for Mars. All the same challenges of landing a mars mission are present on the Moon, but being so much closer it makes a much better place to test out the systems. If we cant do the moon, a mars trip is suicide. We havent actually tried since the days where the most advanced piece of tech around was a hand-held calculator. It's probably worth trying again with today's tech.

3) Foundations of Industry. A trip to mars has a bunch of challenges that are specific to inter-planetary missions, while the R&D to get a working lunar base would have much broader and more local applications. I agree that the future of lunar travel is going to be in the private sector, but current private technologies (and current International Law) inhibit that for now. However, private companies working under government contract accomplishes much the same thing, without running afoul of legal implications of ownership and profit generation and whatnot.

It really depends on what you want to accomplish with it. I tend to favor the Parallax Propeller chip as it's inexpensive (~$10) and has eight cores which are great for independent/parallel processes as I see in hobby robotics, and their is an open access repository of functioning code "objects" that offer a surprising amount of advanced functionality. But at the end of the day you will have to code and compile everything in one of a few dedicated languages. On the other end of the spectrum, If I want more actual software-side power up to and including the ability to run a true OS like Linux, Rasbery PI seems to be everyone's Go-To these days, great for embedded systems and the like.

I think what is freaking people out is that it's all but literally telling you the recipe, and doing so across a pretty wide spread of departments. For example, if you go to buy Red Iron Oxide powder (Common supply for pottery and ceramic hobbyists), it suggests also buying aluminum powder and magnesium ribbons from way over in "Industrial and Scientific," which is all you need to mix and ignite thermite. The worst example was where stump remover suggested you buy the other ingredients for homemade black powder.

Size and Weight. With existing technology higher actual capacity requires more physical space, which is largely counter to the design trend of phones. The more recent focus on larger screens buys them a little wriggle room of that, but the public is still clamoring for Thinner and Lighter.

In something like a minor theft or a case of drunken vandalism leading to a disagreement then sure, my expectations would be low for actual action. If I were hospitalized enough for there to be medical records (or raped, as the case was in some of the OP examples) it might warrant escalation, for insurance purposes if nothing else. For that matter, if the theft itself involved me loosing my passport, I expect Id need to get somebody from my government involved to recover proof of identity and be able to go home (Im admittedly not much of a world traveler and don't know offhand what the procedure for that would be). I can't say I'd have high hopes for anything to come of it, Im not expecting Seal Team Six to come and extract me from a hostile land like a bad movie, but that wouldn't necessarily stop me from filing the report and expecting it to be logged in some server/file cabinet back home. And I'd sure hope that all my private information wouldnt be included in some mass information dump by activists whose politics don't involve me. Something as simple and innocuous as a standard form to get a replacement passport would likely include things like my Social Security Number, and that sort of thing getting published can haunt you for years.

Why wouldn't they? If, for example, I was mugged (say, both robbed and say beaten with a stick) in a foreign country, I could fully expect the police report to end up in a diplomatic transmission, which would include the stolen identity/credit card information as well as the medical records that described my injuries. Crimes against foreign nationals would often go though the State Department and whatever equivalent the other nation had.

I dont know the circumstances of all the cases described in these cases, but there are plenty of reasonable and legal reasons for a government body to have that information that does not involve Big Brother spying.

It remains to be seen whether the DHS would actually be the ones administering things. They're able to make the classification, and they'd have the opportunity to take on the actual administration if they so chose, but it's at least as likely that they'd designate/create some new government body to do the actual work for a couple reasons.

1)Odds are the TSA has left a bad taste in the mouths of the upper brass of the DHS, so they may not be as eager to jump into things as they once might have. Better to assign the job to some other branch cabinet branch so that if things go as badly it's not on them directly.
2)This is less a matter of security than it is coordination and Standard, developing federal regulations to replace the hodge-podge of State and local level elections boards that currently all do things their own way; it's more akin to OSHA than to the TSA or Border Security.

And that, in my opinion is why it's such a great idea: it elevates and standardizes the process, ensuring that everyone's vote is cast and counted the same way nationa-wide, and in theory take steps to provide vital (and often missing) accountability.

This is a serious question. It seems like they consistently do more harm then good to the box-office of movies in modern times, serving only to spread early negativity and hamper the opening weekend turnout. I understand that once upon a time the film industry needed these curated professionals to have early access to the film to drum up interest and get press in printed media, but in today's world of twitter feeds and social media, I honestly think the film industry would be better served to leave them out of the loop entirely and let the actual target fanbase serve as a first wave of hype-building response. Especially in the case of comic book movies, where you can be fairly sure of a large turnout opening week that is primarily fans already. I, like so many, will go see it regardless, because Im a fan of the existing body of work and want to see for myself how it translates. Good review popping up before opening weekend is in no way going to change that, but a bunch of bad reviews might. It's loose/loose for the studio.