It says at the end of the article that the drone owner plans to ask the prosecutor to convene a grand jury over this. I did a little reading and it looks like these were misdemeanor charges. I would assume that the drone's owner is looking to have felony charges brought against him, which would put this back into criminal court at a higher level.

As far as all the complaints about how safe it is to shoot a shotgun in town, the greater worry is where the drone landed after being damaged and that is where the shooter is more in the wrong than the drone operator. Letting him off the hook is setting a bad precedence IMHO.

There is probably a computer club at school, and there is most likely a dedicated IT staff. Talk to them. Our local school sold a bunch of old PCs last year for real deal ($30 for desktops, and $50 for a few servers IIRC). Home computers are used/required by most classes anymore; make this an issue that the school addresses. Look into setting up a program where old school computers are leased/loaned/sold/given to low income families.

Alternatively, you could go down to the local recycling center and look into getting old electronics. People recycle old, still working electronics just because they bought new stuff. If there is a college nearby, check the curbs on recycling day near the end of the semester. I have a friend that did this for years (until he moved). You could also run an ad in the local paper asking for old computers to be donated to the school (You'll probably need permission/help from administration for this).

I have a Toshiba Satellite A45-S250 (built in 2004, Intel P4, 1GB of RAM) that is still usable for most everything I need a laptop for. I was able to get it for free and loaded Gentoo with XFCE on it.

Really, the cheaper the option the more work is going to be required, but it can easily be close to $0 for the hardware.

I've worked on some really odd-ball languages ... the ones that surprised me are:
CA: Gen - This one is crazy ... I had never heard of it until a few years ago, and it's surprising the businesses that use this one.
JCL - This one seems to follow me around a bit. Think DOS, but less automated and for mainframes.
JOVIAL - I almost left this one off the list, but there is a wiki about it, so here you go.

There are some crazier ones out there ... The military seemed to enjoy making new languages with little or no documentation back in the 60s & 70s.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/...

It looks like they have at least one eye witnesses (someone was observed fleeing the scene). Further, any communications to or from the devices would be recorded by the phone company (or ISP for wireless communications). So what are they hoping to find on the devices? A typed confession from the murderer?

I read that as robot barons at first. Much funnier

Well, I was reading a definition of Drone vs. RC Aircraft.

It would seem that if this was a commercial activity (racing for money), then it could well be considered a drone.

Enough to get past HR

I've landed more than one job with a generous helping of confidence and BS

Leggo My Eggo!

I've had more hard drives and power supplies fail on me, but bad and failing motherboards have been the most irritating problems to troubleshoot

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the House majority whip, acknowledged Monday that he spoke at a gathering hosted by white-supremacist leaders while serving as a state representative in 2002

So he confirmed he spoke to a group, but didn't know they were founded by Duke and didn't know they were racist. Where is the lie?

No, But they are watching the swarm to see how popular different torrents are. They may not know that AC#48196463 is interested in Doom 3, but they will know how many people are willing to download it. Its a different metric, but is still very valuable.

And don't worry, if bit torrent usage isn't tracked and correlated with other media consumption now, it will be soon.

Protip: Redhat and IBM are both largish businesses that support open source and have a good chance of getting contracts should the EU be more open source friendly.

It is more likely that Microsoft will remain the default because people generally fear change. Especially when someone's job (usually their own) is on the line. I've worked on showing everyone I can how friendly and useable GNU/Linux is. The only people that enjoy it are my wife and kids. My parents, siblings, and in-laws think its kinda cool, but absolutely refuse to switch. It isn't just that they don't think it's worth their time to try something new. They seem to be genuinely afraid to try anything other than Windows.

They would rather buy new computers than deal with trying Linux. I already told them I am no longer fixing viruses with Windows--they will get Linux if they bug me about software again. So if the virus scanner doesn't take care of it, they just buy a new system.

My workday never ends. I have a laptop with me 24/7 and need to be reachable by cell phone. I get to the office around 8:00 AM, but I may have already been working on a problem for hours beforehand (Usually when our users in Europe break something).

I doubt that this is a budget busting scheme, those usually come out in June and July. When I was in the Air Force (late 90s) in Oklahoma, we had a puzzling issue where January was the month where we had the most at workplace accidents and property damage. We never found a good reason for it, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was just an accident where the plane was dropped into the ocean instead of risking bringing it across a populated area. Plus I would imagine that these things are pretty weather resistant. If it is set down gently in the ocean, the data on it may very well be recoverable, the same wouldn't be true if it slammed into a house or a mountain.

Mark, I'm not sure if I offended you with my post, but if I did, I apologize. I am well aware that Pres. Nixon did. I heard a number around 50,000+ Americans needlessly died because he wanted to be president. IIRC it was president Johnson's library that released audio tapes talking about wiretaps on the South Vietnamese Ambassador that showed Nixon was secretly doing everything he could to keep the war from ending going back to 1968.

I feel really bad for the soldiers that couldn't avoid the draft. My father in law was drafted around 1965 and it earned him a purple heart. He came back missing most of his right lung, a good chunk of his liver, and most of his sanity. He spent over a year at Walter Reed, which he had to be snuck into under cover of night to avoid being attacked by the anti-war protestors. Every once in a while he says something really fucked up about the war and what he went though, but most of the time he won't say anything. He still has night terrors occasionally, even with the battery of medicines he is on to keep him functional. Sometimes I think the dead are the lucky ones.