Patreon is a tip jar, not a replacement for a living wage. Sounds like maybe people are misinformed. Ah well, maybe not everyone can make a living through online media. Big surprise there...

Yes, and we all know how well it works when governments over-regulate rather than being smart about it. People will just ignore the law and continue to fly anyway.

How about something that is totally client-side and does nothing but obscure ads? Load 'em up, use my bandwidth, whatever. Just hide them so they don't annoy me. Would make the blocker technology impossible to detect.

How to make advertising I won't block:

It can't have any movement (graphics, video, the frames, etc), it can't make any sound, it can't appear over, or obscure any content, it can't obscure or interfere with page navigation, and it can't take over 15% of my total screen real-estate regardless of device.

I won't block ads that conform to these rules.

<quote>Blackberries are still being made? Rather, are they still being sold?? I thought that they had a historical hold on corporate world -- and I thought that even that was pretty much gone</quote>

Yep, they used to have a stranglehold on the corporate world, mostly because the executives always had Blackberries (and absolutely loved them) and IT refused to support anything else.

Then the execs all got iOS devices and ditched their blackberries and told IT to support iOS devices (or look for a new job). Now iOS holds a huge part of the corporate world that Blackberry will never get back. That market is gone from Blackberry, forever - they just don't have it in them to make a superior device.

Saw exactly this thing happen at my office. Once the big cheeses got iPhones, it was game over for Blackberry. And having a BYOD policy/project so the company didn't need to buy people phones was great from a budget standpoint.

You are absolutely, 100% correct. It was painfully obvious watching the behind the scenes footage that Lucas had been surrounded by a platoon of "Yes Men", rather than people who would give him honest feedback.

And here's the thing, I think that Lucas did have some really great ideas, but he also had some terrible ones. And without the filter to remove the terrible ones, you got a mashed-up mess.

There were "smartphones" before apple... And I tried many of them, and they all sucked...

So in a way, they created the _modern_ smartphone.

If the whole safety briefing section is just covered in a standard school course "Safety for Air Travel", then we could probably dispense with the safety briefing altogether (not like it's changed much, if at all in the last couple of decades).

-Know where the exits are and the shortest way to get to them
-Know where the safety equipment is, and basic usage
-Keep your seatbelt on unless moving around, even if the light is off.

Use a key that's distributed and at least partially redundant. For example, break the key into 20 sections, and allow decryption with a minimum of at least 11 of those sections present.

Distribute the key sections to geographically diverse, trusted people, in different countries with different governments, with the instructions to keep them somewhere safe, and on a certain date (ie: Jan 1, 2020) publish them online in a known location.

Sure, some people might be jerks, or accidentally publish ahead of time (or not at all), but assuming that (in this case) 55% of the keys are available, the file can be unlocked. Of course, you could change the number of key sections required based on how critical secrecy is vs. security, etc.

Can someone describe the difference between a "drone" and a "RC helicopter" to me?

I was under the impression a "drone" was autonomous, but many of the news stories about "drones" seem to be just RC toys?

Is there any particular reason that MAC addresses need to be (typically) hard-coded to the device? I know it's occasionally handy on physical networks for addressing specific devices for admin reasons, but on portable, wireless connections, seems like more trouble than it's worth.

Why not just have an option to let the device randomly roll a new MAC each time it connects? If it's already in use (highly unlikely), just roll a new one.

(note: I know you can authorize access to specific MAC addresses through many routers/switches/base stations, but it's flimsy security at best as many adapters can have their MACs changed through software).

They could just pay them well, give them a fair amount of responsibility and respect, and, perhaps... not break the law or violate the constitution.

Intel drives have been rock-solid for me.

And just put everything else on a big NAS device.

I suspect that they issue the plates under a different jurisdiction, the same way that if you had plates from another state or country, there could be an overlap in the plate numbers.

One plate for the public, another for politicians - after all, they do seem to live in their own little world.

Unfortunately an IMEI block leaves the rest of the device (aside from the phone) perfectly usable to a thief. There's still enough value in a small device which can take video and photos, browse the web, play games, etc. to make it worth stealing.