It's perfectly legal to operate small balloons below a certain weight limit (I think it's 4 pounds or something like that) in the airspace system. Check youtube for the videos of high school students launching GoPro's high enough to confuse the flat earthers. What I haven't seen yet on youtube is a GoPro recording of a high-school balloon taken out by an F-22, from the balloon's perspective. That would be cool.

The Russians are already making plans to become the breadbasket of the world once global warming thaws out Siberia sufficiently. And after some more ice melts Antarctica--which is the size of the US and Mexico combined--might become nice enough. I might need a new mascot for my Gentoo OS though.

Invariably most decently-sized applications in any language will eventually call some C library code to get something done, which is why having a "C interface" is a high-priority common first task when creating a new language. And the nice thing about C (and C++) that makes it so dreaded is that it's just about the only language with an __asm__ function when you REALLY need to get something done.

Careful. Rats aren't supposed to understand the game.

You have to admire the evil genius of the marketing department flunkie who invented this term. My dumb speakers require no engagement at all other than powering on my receiver when I want to listen to something. The only protocol they support is analog pair. I believe the proper term for the product discussed in this news item is "Audio Bug".

It wasn't just the cover art (and the large canvas of LPs made that art even more impressive), it was also the interior inserts and creative designs that were appealing. Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti with its sliding windows is an obvious example of some of the unique things you could do with album covers.

As for 8-track, no, I don't know anyone who replaced their albums. Although the manufacturers tried (rip 'quadraphonic') I don't recall 8-tracks being much more than a format used mostly for low-quality mobile listening in automobiles, and mostly replaced by cassette tape by the time I was driving. Back then I'd just record my albums onto blank cassette tape. Later, I recorded them onto CD. These days they're digitized in FLAC, but every now and then I'll pull one of my old albums out and spin up my old turntable. They made things to last in those days, and my ears are still analog. I suppose when Elon Musk has sold us all our digital brain implants I'll have to retire it and pay for streaming rights to my old music.

I'm old enough to remember when vinyl was ALL I could buy. I still have my vinyl records, next to my CD collection. Hate the clicks and the pops. Love the cover art. Won't stream anything that I can't download and keep, because rent-seeking corporations can go f*** themselves, and the only way my purchased music collection can disappear some day is in a fire.

I've already seen some proposals being floated by various legislators to limit or even prohibit the buying of residential property by investment firms. IMO these proposals should be given serious consideration, particularly in places where supply/demand can't function correctly due to factors such as drought, lack of buildable land (Tahoe), etc. Otherwise, there will eventually be a political revolt at the very least, and it won't be pretty.

I take it you've never seen the Bay Area "move to a nice rural location and shut the door behind you" mode of operation, have you? The last thing the new owners of that $2M house want is cheap high-density housing next door. And believe me, they're more than capable of paying for the lawyers needed to stop it.

I don't do software subscriptions, period. My understanding is that the entire Adobe Creative Suite including Photoshop (not the dumbed-down Elements) is subscription-only. Am I wrong about that?

And yet people keep renting Adobe products.

That's because it's not about drone delivery. It's about getting third-round funding and cashing out before someone with an aeronautical engineering degree sees your beautiful Photoshop(tm) marketing materials.

The people using flatpack and snap are the same folks who bitterly complain that what's holding Linux back is its lack of uniformity relative to Windows or MacOS. Oh, and they also don't like spending money on security and skilled employees.

I saw some incredibly ingenious schemes for getting beer into dorm rooms without the knowledge of the resident staff when I was at University. I predict these robots will assist the next generation of students in carrying on that time-honored tradition.

Yeah I feel exactly the same way and said as much on a similar story a while back. As pointed out to me by other /. commentators, the problem is that WE the browser users are not Google's customer--Google's customer is the ad buyer. If I just bought a hammer, Google could care less that I'm unlikely to buy another one any time soon. They are ecstatic, however, that they can sell ad space to hammer retailers on pages viewed by 'known hammer buyers'.