His intention to earn *some* money is not a problem. There is a clear distinction between "commercial use" of drones versus using them as a hobby.

The difference is this - to be "commercial" there has to be the intention and expectation of *making a profit* from your activities.

If the suggestion that he has made less than 1 dollar from this is true, then he is *not* in any reasonable sense a commercial drone operator.

If, in future, his income took off to the point where he could feasibly make more than his costs in buying and operating the drone and camera, as well as in purchasing his video editing software etc, then and only then could he be considered to be a commercial drone operator.

This is all about what happens when a certain agency or agencies are awarded too much self-determination. What happens is that they end up making decisions which come from narrow-mindedness i.e. inability to see the wider, long-term ramifications of what they are doing, but which, to be fair, are outside the scope of their own purpose.

The missing oversight and reigning in of excess is what, supposedly, the government should be doing, under guidance of the president. But which they haven't done due to to own fear of some major terrorist event which happens to occur on their watch.

Its takes huge courage to stand up to this juggernaut of influences. Who will do that? I don't see anyone in a real position of power putting up their hand. This whole saga will take a long time to play itself out - and the world will be a much more insular place because of it.

This isn't really new. It's been well established that ocean and atmosphere warm at different rates, have their own heat exchange dynamics, and in particular that ocean heat content has been rising continuously while surface temperatures have plateaued.

See, for example: http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...

And a quote from this 8 month old article http://www.nature.com/news/cli...
"NCAR researchers showed that more heat moved into the deep ocean after 1998, which helped to prevent the atmosphere from warming"

It's well known that the heat storage of the oceans is massively greater than the heat storage of the atmosphere. Hence surface temperatures will sooner or later reflect the ongoing increase in heat content of the earth-ocean system.

It's great to have new studies that confirm this - but why tout it as somehow "new"?

Seriously?! This train left the station a long time ago, and is now pretty much at full steam. Are you saying that all Snowden would need to do is stand on the track with his hand up, to stop it? Sorry my friend. It's out of his hands now, and I, for one, am very grateful for every additional leak that serves to further corner the perpetrators of this outrageous lack of accountability, otherwise known as the NSA.