..as a pyrotechnician, honestly, the biggest risk here is the guy's equipment.
As a general rule of thumb, the minimum safety distance for fireworks is 120% of their maximum range - so even if a rack of mortar tubes falls over towards the public, noone is going to get hit.

There's a huge amount of inertia behind the bombs: it's not hard to imagine (or do the sums) to work out the energy required to hurl a 1KG 150m into the air. In a head on collision between a drone and a decent calibre firework, the firework will win every time..

Best point of view I've had:
http://ninjito.com/images/_2013-07-14/qx-te-1.jpg
Up the Eiffel Tower (technical level, non public - "deux et demi").
Fired a line of fireworks off the tower, and then got to watch the show. The 150 and 200mm mortars were popping at about head height. Great experience!

Best I have found is news.ycombinator.com. It's like slashdot was 10 years ago. It's got a slight hipster/startup twist to it, but it sure beats wading through reddit.

Rubbish.
Sony and Samsung have had hi-res laptops for ages

I',m not trying to enter into a pissing contest - all I am attemtping to illustrate is the incfedible support for this movement - it is most definitely larger, and much more intense than occupy ever was.

You can see this in even one clip i shot from last night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZBsdYCOLuY

Actually, connectivity here is pretty damned great. The movement is a lot, lot bigger than the US-Occupy efforts - and is supported by many companies and businesses.

Yesterday for the rallies / riots, TurkCell had installed several mobile cell-repeaters. Even during the most intense of confrontations with the cops, I had perfect cell, data and voice reception.

I flew 3,500km this weekend to support the Turks w/ their cause. It's absolutely not just 'Young Turks' - it's young, old, male, female, working class, middle class, upper class - aethiest, christian, islam - all in it together.

The US-based occupy movements were formed on arguably shaky foundations. This isn't - the park was simply a trigger point for what has been a 10 year gradual decay of rights, liberties and privledges.

It's certainly far from Attaturk's legacy.

You realise that often times train delays are caused by graffiti?

The London Tube essentially killed graffiti by refusing to run any trains with any graffiti at all - panels or throwups.

Obviously, this leads directly to delays.
Furthermore, if the company is dropping 10M on cleaning per year, that's 10M on maintenance that it's (presumably) not spending..

Well, you can.
If you're registered as a primary producer (amount other statuses) you can own certain firearms.

We had a small amount of land with some cows, and had a .22 rifle and a 410 shotgun, all legal.

The .22 couldn't have a semi magazine attached to it, but that was that.

The flipside is the extreme opposite - there's a stretch of road just outside Paris (A86, for those playing at home) - that is a tunnel of about 10km long. It's got a speed camera placed every 1 - 2KM (hidden, with infra-red flashes). Even though it's the same stretch of road, with an incredibly short distance between each camera, if you're doing 10km/h over the limit, you will end up with 6 tickets (at 80EU each) - AND have the points withdrawn.

That is to say, you can lose 500EU + your licence for the same offence?

What's next? Cameras every 20m? Where is the limit?

This beahviour is sadly is very typical of GoPro.

1. I bought a GoPro HD Hero a few years ago, to take video and stills on a car trip from Paris to Mongolia. We were shooting timelapse of the entire trip, to be compiled at the end.
However, when we were in the middle of Kazakhstan, one day, the camera stops working. I poke around, and see that the filenames havd gone up to DCIM_9999.jpg - and worked out that they had never engineered them to loop back to zero, so the unit had a buffer overflow, and wouldn't work.

We finally got phone access to call a friend, who saw similar threads on their forum. GP refused to acknowledge the bug - they said you had to take out the battery for at least 12 hours, and then it would work. Naturally, this didn't work. Their suggestion was: "If you believe" your unit is faulty, you can send it back to GP in the USA, but you will be liable for freight both ways, and customs import again upon reception."

I emailed them, expecting that because they put such a customer-oriented public face forward, that they'd be decent guys. They were absolutely not.
Finally, 6 months later, they released a firmwire upgrade that fixed the issue. The fix wasn't mentioned in the CHANGELOG.

2. Friend driving across the USA, his unit started recording everything in a deep magenta, for no reason, with no fix.

3. Fast forward to this year, doing an enduro motorbike race across africa. Two friends have the new GP3 cameras - which constantly bug. Out of 15 days of riding, they managed to get about 3 hours of video. The unit would power on - when switched to 'video' mode, the screen would freeze, the unit would suck down power, and empty the battery in 20 minutes. This happened on both units, on the latest firmware.

I have been constantly amazed that a company that tries to push an 'extreme' image hates their customers - and the very people that are trying to do 'extreme' stuff. You have the impression they're just guys making hardware for people doing amazing stuff, and they love what they do. This isn't at all the case, as this latest episode only goes to further illustrate.

This was taken sitting on the top of the pyramid of Cheops in Cairo a few weeks ago.

Gibbous moon, 20s exposure - it looks like day.

http://travel.ninjito.com/2013-02-19-Egypt/SLR/qx-cairo-9.jpg

I'm in the 14th (near Montsouris) - yet am on the Raspail exchange (as opposed to the Blvd Brune) exchange.

When I was in australia - I was actually closer to the exchange than here..

With that said, all the exchanges in the 14th are running at capacity:
http://francois04.free.fr/connex_dslam.php?dslam=ras75-7&nra=RAS75&periode=C

I've heard so, so, so many bad things about numericable ( especially how everything is very vague - they say they 'generally' offer FTTB, but there's no fibre in the 14th, so it'll be cable to the building.. ) that I couldn't bring myself to making the switch..

.. I'd love it if they finished rolling out fiber-optic in Paris first.. Depending which arondissement you're in, the only option is super-saturated ADSL (800k/s down, 70k/s up) - or cable, which is even worse..

Well, replying to AC seems like a waste of time... but:
1. Actually, the SMIC (minimum wage) in france is not far from RMI / RSA (Not unempoyment benefits - fixed payments if you don't work. You can get unemployment benefits on top of that)

2. At no point did I say that social support structures were bad. Social support structures are good things. Taxes are good things. Everything in moderation, applied intelligently, is a good thing.

The reality is, social supports come from somewhere: typically, taxes. If a country does not support business and innovation, there's no "Big Business" to tax, and everyone suffers. There's a balance to everything, and in France, the balance skews in one direction.

If by chance one day you became poor, and you only had a minimum wage job, but suddenly you were paying increased taxes because your government had forced all business out of the country, I'd argue that you'd agree.