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"how is it you know they have enough to rip the world a new one"

Because they have admitted it:

Martin Van Creveld (Israeli military historian): “We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. . . Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.”

And here:

Golda Meir (former Israeli prime minister): "Israel would be prepared to take the region and the whole world down with it... What would serve the jew-hating world betting in repayment for thousands of years of massacres but a nuclear winter?"

"you really need to get back on your meds and stop reading the conspiracy theory boards."

This is not conspiracy theory; it is conspiracy fact. Try doing some research for a change instead of name calling and spewing your ridiculous prattle.

Here are some good places to start:

Samson Option by Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer prize winner.
Mordechai Vanunu by Peter Hounam

The world is being blackmailed by Israel and her "Samson option". Israel poses the greatest threat to the world, bar none.

Sometimes the truth hurts.

Just yesterday, I put an ancient CRC Math Handbook in a pile to donate to my local public library. One sign of its age is that it's pretty small. I don't know how much use it is at this point: the library might put it on the shelves, sell it, or trash it - who knows?

Although these things arguably are made obsolete by the Internet, the humble printed handbook still has its value. My favorite in the math-table genre has always been Schaum's Outline of Mathematical Handbook of Formulas and Tables, which is very handy for browsing and for refreshing yourself on your favorite page of formulas via another paper gadget, the humble sticky note.

This is what Disney has been doing all along... from Snow White to The LIttle Mermaid, pretty much everything Disney has ever had success with has been bought, borrowed or stolen.

Philip Pullman's Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version retold fifty of these old tales economically and effectively in a lesss than 450 pages. Fireside reads running a bare ten to fifteen minutes each. The fairy tale is not the ballet, the musical comedy, or feature film. Pulllman was careful to remind his readers that the Grimms favored a select few sources who had already hammered the stories which had caught their attention into publishable form.

The most eloquent and persuasive explanation may be found in Niall Ferguson's book "Civilization: The West and the Rest". I highly recommend it.

http://www.amazon.com/Civiliza...
http://www.pbs.org/show/civili...

As to Creationists, well, they are the prototypical pseudoscientists, and much of the anti-science strategy used by the tobacco and fossil fuel industries to attack science is largely lifted from the hard work Creationists put into attacking biology.

Cite please?

The most comprehensive citation would be the book The Merchants of Doubt: http://www.amazon.com/Merchant...
But you could start here: http://scienceblogs.com/denial...

Also includes more advanced ideas, like Bayes' Theorem and Central Limit Theorem, but presented conceptually.

http://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

... here is the next book you need : How to Lie with Statistics ;) http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-...

Here you go! Thank me later. Or maybe not at all; I've done you no favors here.

I read the Gary Kleck piece and he seems to be pretty biased and actually narcissistic in his presentation.

Hmm, then I apologize for choosing a poor link to use. What I got out of that is "for two decades I have been hearing the same criticisms and none of them are invalid" and I guess what you got from it is "narcissistic".

Better then would be to read his actual book. http://www.amazon.com/Point-Blank-Guns-Violence-America/dp/020230762X The American Society of Criminology awarded Professor Kleck the Hindelang award for this book.

And the other URLs you gave are obviously from pro-gun sites so I didn't go there.

Perhaps you didn't realize it, but the Kellerman study was published in an obviously anti-gun publication.

Also, Arthur Kellerman has been a member of at least one anti-gun organization. (The latter link is to an obviously pro-gun web site, but it reproduces a letter to the editor published in a medical journal by a doctor. The doctor is an obviously pro-gun doctor, but he is providing evidence that Kellerman is an obviously anti-gun doctor, and I don't know how I would go about finding a completely unbiased source you would accept who has taken the trouble to research Kellerman and report on his membership in anti-gun organizations.)

Finally, here is a book I recommend: it thoroughly covers the statistics around violence and gun ownership. It concludes that cultural factors are much more important in violence than the number of available firearms. The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy

It's scientists trying to deal with an illness and its causes, rather than folks who started with a point and then used Polya's tactics to justify it.

Oh, really? I have provided multiple links to you showing that Kellerman's study was structurally unsound. We cannot put error bars on its conclusions, it had a small sample size, and it only counted defensive uses of a firearm if they resulted in a dead body (which drastically under-counts defensive uses). Even if you believe that it was intended as an unbiased study, its flaws render its results useless.

Also, its predictions have not been borne out in the following two decades. I have provided evidence for you that the number of guns in the USA rose dramatically since the publication of the Kellerman study, while shootings of all kinds (accidental and intentional) declined dramatically. I am not going to claim that the drastic increase in guns caused the decline in shootings; but pretty clearly if a gun is 43 times more likely to hurt you than to be a benefit, the drastic increase in guns should have been correlated with a drastic increase in harm.

Here's a reference that presents these facts. This Economist article has graphs that show firearms deaths declining drastically since the early 1990s at the same time that the number of firearms in the USA dramatically increased. (By the way, the article ends with a sentence saying that the link between guns and violence "is obvious" despite the clear evidence to the contrary presented in the article. I doubt they cherry-picked any data to try to make firearms look less dangerous.)

Finally, if it is unbiased research you want, I recommend you read the Wright/Rossi/Daly book. The Carter administration funded research into gun control, and Wright and Rossi engaged in the research expecting to prove that gun control prevents violence. Their research showed the opposite, and changed their minds on the subject.

http://www.amazon.com/Ultralif...

but they are crap - it's a lie, they don't last that long - lawsuit waiting to happen, better to keep on throwing out batteries and putting new ones in each year like our grandparents did.

$0.007 per GB

And of course I encrypt the files locally before uploading them. My private key remains private, and I have it backed up as well on physical media in disparate locations, not online.

it is always amazing, or astounding, or something similar.

Amazing.

Astounding.

Something similar?

A hair dryer also softens the decal, which tears. These remove decals very quickly. Most of the residue is gone, and you have no worries about overheating the paint. It's best done with a pneumatic die grinder with a mandrel. After the decal is removed, the use of rubbing compound removes the top layer of oxides from the paint, and only the fussiest of inspections will find any sign that there was ever a decal.

Would you accept Star Wars: The Toaster instead?

You are terrible at searching.

http://www.amazon.com/Stunning-Female-Fiberglass-Realistic-Mannequin/dp/B009Z1ISYA/ref=pd_sim_sbs_201_6?ie=UTF8&dpID=51SrbV%2BYOML&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR112%2C160_&refRID=0BQZR105ZDVTQFHHTMB1

They have binders full of women.

Those wouldn't work for us, where the noise is external and structural and VERY low frequency. Following your lead I poked around a bit and found these, which seem like they might serve the purpose much better. Might....

http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate...

Great book "Meritocracy Myth" shows that most people get their jobs through connections or blind luck, but don't acknowledge that or even recognize it.

Yet ask them why they are successful, and they will tell you it's because they're talented and awesome. Not because they used to go to school with the guy, and really, anyone could do their job.

That's true of most jobs

Even doctors take interns based on connections. Want to be a cardiologist? It helps if daddy is one, or one is a family friend. Because if you can't get a cardiologist willing to intern you, you'll go into a less desirable (less well paying) specialty.

As for getting into medical school: It's a crap shoot. Enrollment staff at one medical school chose applicants like this: "One for the pile, and and one in the bin. One for the pile, and and one in the bin." http://www.amazon.com/Meritocr...

You're trying to say nothing. Knowing modern design patterns *is* good skill

Not really. A lot of people smash their code into design patterns, and then spend 30% of their time refactoring because they've divided their code up incorrectly; they don't understand the underlying structure of what they are trying to build. Eric Evans approaches this idea in Domain Driven Design (although his problem is brevity....if his code looks anything like his English writing, then he has 30 lines of glue code for every line of fundamental code).

Design patterns will not save you. (and can often make your code worse for example, if you start using them reflexively without thinking about whether they are appropriate. In bad cases, you might find a constructor with 10 or 12 dependencies getting injected, or MVC in a server application with no GUI!)

There is no dark matter; all the missing mass has been swallowed up by black holes.

If you think that, I suggest reading this recent book, which suggests that not only does dark matter exist, but also there's a large disk of it in one sector of our galaxy, which the earth passes through every 30-60million years. The gravitational force causes some asteroids/comets to be knocked out of the Oort cloud, which sometimes hit earth, causing a mass extinction.

I have not the knowledge to evaluate the hypothesis, but the author is a well-respected physicist, and the hypothesis is intriguing.

Ok so this is it, lets say you are a developer. Your boss, the "business people," the users of the software, the QA team, those are your customers. Secondary to writing code, you are a sales person, and your product is "please keep paying me money to write code" These are the fluffy, piece of shit MBA books that I live my work life by: Raving Fans
Hug your customers
I used to use a different book for Meetings, but this one is way better, and is even styled as if it is some sort of science: Powerfully Simple Meetings: Your Guide For Fewer, Faster, More Focused Meetings

There are literally millions of books about how to deal with business people, I don't think it even really matters which ones you read. None are written for autistic people, but that is a good thing. Hug your customers is like a movie script for dealing with unreasonable people, which is mostly what you run in to if you think purely logically/logistically.

Also, if you put these on your bookshelf in your office/cubicle next to the programming books, EVEN IF YOU NEVER READ THEM, it will increase the non-technical people's opinion of you by a significant amount.

Ok so this is it, lets say you are a developer. Your boss, the "business people," the users of the software, the QA team, those are your customers. Secondary to writing code, you are a sales person, and your product is "please keep paying me money to write code" These are the fluffy, piece of shit MBA books that I live my work life by: Raving Fans
Hug your customers
I used to use a different book for Meetings, but this one is way better, and is even styled as if it is some sort of science: Powerfully Simple Meetings: Your Guide For Fewer, Faster, More Focused Meetings

There are literally millions of books about how to deal with business people, I don't think it even really matters which ones you read. None are written for autistic people, but that is a good thing. Hug your customers is like a movie script for dealing with unreasonable people, which is mostly what you run in to if you think purely logically/logistically.

Also, if you put these on your bookshelf in your office/cubicle next to the programming books, EVEN IF YOU NEVER READ THEM, it will increase the non-technical people's opinion of you by a significant amount.

Ok so this is it, lets say you are a developer. Your boss, the "business people," the users of the software, the QA team, those are your customers. Secondary to writing code, you are a sales person, and your product is "please keep paying me money to write code" These are the fluffy, piece of shit MBA books that I live my work life by: Raving Fans
Hug your customers
I used to use a different book for Meetings, but this one is way better, and is even styled as if it is some sort of science: Powerfully Simple Meetings: Your Guide For Fewer, Faster, More Focused Meetings

There are literally millions of books about how to deal with business people, I don't think it even really matters which ones you read. None are written for autistic people, but that is a good thing. Hug your customers is like a movie script for dealing with unreasonable people, which is mostly what you run in to if you think purely logically/logistically.

Also, if you put these on your bookshelf in your office/cubicle next to the programming books, EVEN IF YOU NEVER READ THEM, it will increase the non-technical people's opinion of you by a significant amount.

https://www-users.cs.york.ac.u...
A good book, might be a bit hard to find nowadays, uh, nevermind found it on Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/Fairylan...

Basically people hacking genomes to create new drugs to get high on (and other stuffs) been a while since I read it.

It will also make it easier for a rogue individual/nation to wipe us all out. See Frank Herbert's "The White Plague" http://www.amazon.com/White-Pl...

Read this and you'll see the how and why.

The article is like, "Hey! Look! Android! Containers! New execution environments! IDEs!"

Meanwhile I learned to code in Quick Basic 4.5 in a procedural model. I then started doing functional programming in C, and that whole "modular" thing where we break out programs into chunks. Object oriented programming was in relative infancy, and I learned that when it was just wrapping up related stuff into objects.

We now have more complex design patterns. The Gang of Four book and Code Complete are a mess to read; Tony Bevis did a better job writing a clear, concise explanation in C# and Java.

It's not the tools and the languages; it's the method of problem solving. Project Management today is not the same as Project Management in 1980 (I'm CAPM certified). Engineering isn't the same. We've created new construction techniques, not just new materials and tools. Programming hasn't just advanced in terms of languages and system platforms; we've created new methods for writing enormous programs without doing a shitton of refactoring.

I haven't assimilated the new methodologies yet. I can't plan in a grand scale using those tools; my brain knows how to use the old ones and can project at low resolution, then fill in all the gaps at high resolution. I need to burn these new abstract factories and decorators and other bullshit into my contextual thinking before I can just throw down immensely-complex, well-architected computer programs. I know the whole deal with being from the old school, and i know how hard it is to change; I also know what worked for the last set of problems doesn't fit this new set. That's sort of foundational knowledge for me: the correct approach depends on the problem, not on what your favorite tools are.

The article is like, "Hey! Look! Android! Containers! New execution environments! IDEs!"

Meanwhile I learned to code in Quick Basic 4.5 in a procedural model. I then started doing functional programming in C, and that whole "modular" thing where we break out programs into chunks. Object oriented programming was in relative infancy, and I learned that when it was just wrapping up related stuff into objects.

We now have more complex design patterns. The Gang of Four book and Code Complete are a mess to read; Tony Bevis did a better job writing a clear, concise explanation in C# and Java.

It's not the tools and the languages; it's the method of problem solving. Project Management today is not the same as Project Management in 1980 (I'm CAPM certified). Engineering isn't the same. We've created new construction techniques, not just new materials and tools. Programming hasn't just advanced in terms of languages and system platforms; we've created new methods for writing enormous programs without doing a shitton of refactoring.

I haven't assimilated the new methodologies yet. I can't plan in a grand scale using those tools; my brain knows how to use the old ones and can project at low resolution, then fill in all the gaps at high resolution. I need to burn these new abstract factories and decorators and other bullshit into my contextual thinking before I can just throw down immensely-complex, well-architected computer programs. I know the whole deal with being from the old school, and i know how hard it is to change; I also know what worked for the last set of problems doesn't fit this new set. That's sort of foundational knowledge for me: the correct approach depends on the problem, not on what your favorite tools are.

If you want to calculate nuclear yields, I suggest picking up a copy of Samuel Glasstone's The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (that's an Amazon link, but there are a fair number of used copies floating around). I have the revised 1962 edition.

Be sure to pick up a copy that still has the yield computer wheel in the back of the book.

Also, this web page lets you map nuclear bursts using Google maps, and seems to be heavily based on Glasstone.

This book on banana blight was published back in '07. It would be great if there were a map of how the disease has spread since then.

For anyone interested in this topic there's a great book by investigative journalist Gareth Porter that details the whole saga: Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare

It should be pointed out that the evidence which both the US intelligence estimate and the IAEA rely on to determine that there was an Iranian nuclear weapons program prior to 2003 is the so-called "laptop documents" which are fairly clearly forged but for which there are political reasons to ignore that fact.

These forged documents had been used as the basis for a number of inspections by the IAEA of Iranian military facilities. The IAEA's inspections never found any evidence to substantiate the forged documents. Iran permitted such inspections even though they went above and beyond what Iran was required to permit under its NPT agreement. However given that these sorts of inspections were used by the US used to gather detailed targeting data on Iraqi facilities for the Gulf War Iran chose not to allow even more non-required inspections. That's the sole basis of the IAEA's 'concern' and the reason they keep bringing these forged documents up even though they've not been substantiated at all.

As part of the recent nuclear talks Iran insisted that these forged documents be put to rest and not brought up again in the future, which is what this report is supposed to be about.

The linked article by Ariane Tabatabai makes it sound like Iran has now admitted the existence of a nuclear weapons program, but this is false. Instead what Tabatabai is doing is essentially repeating the same cycle of making accusations on the basis of these forged documents and using the previous unsubstantiated accusations as the only 'substantiation'. For example Tabatabai writes:

The IAEA report unsurprisingly indicates that Tehran did have a “coordinated” nuclear weapon development program until 2003.

The report in fact says:

Information available to the Agency prior to November 2011 (i.e., the forged "laptop documents") indicated that Iran had arranged, via a number of different and evolving management structures, for activities to be undertaken in support of a possible military dimension to its nuclear programme. According to this information, the organisational structures covered most of the areas of activity relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device. The information indicated that activities commenced in the late 1980s within Departments of the Physics Research Centre (PHRC) and later, under the leadership of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, became focused in the early 2000s within projects in the AMAD Plan, allegedly managed through the ‘Orchid Office’. Information indicated that activities under the AMAD Plan were brought to a halt in late 2003 and that the work was fully recorded, equipment and work places were either cleaned or disposed of so that there would be little to identify the sensitive nature of the work that had been undertaken. Eventually, according to the information, a new organization known as the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research29 was established by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh and based at the Mojdeh Site near Malek Ashtar University in Tehran.

The report goes on describing Iran's response:

In Iran’s submission of 15 August 2015 under the Road-map, Iran provided the Agency with information concerning a number of organisations described in the 2011 Annex (i.e., the forged "laptop documents") and on their relation and functions. In this regard, Iran, inter alia, denied the existence of a coordinated programme aimed at the development of a nuclear explosive device, and specifically denied the existence of the AMAD Plan and the ‘Orchid Office’ as elements of such a programme.

As far as I can tell the documents Iran submitted don't

Did they have actual science in ancient Greece?

Yes - but it wasn't quite the modern science we know and love (hence "ancient").

Science had to evolve to become what it is today, but it owes a lot to those ancient Greek philosophers.

What if it's impossible for life to form in a binary star system?

Dunno for sure about binary stars, but it's pretty clear that a ternary star system will have serious problems.

Because its common knowledge, there is plenty of facts out there...

Science on reasoning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap

http://www.businessinsider.com/wikileaks-haiti-minimum-wage-the-nation-2011-6

Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349

Crisis of democracy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYFxtNgOeiI

  The real news:

http://therealnews.com/t2/

http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed-Inverted-Totalitarianism/dp/069114589X

http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Government-Surveillance-Security-Single-Superpower/dp/1608463656/

http://www.amazon.com/National-Security-Government-Michael-Glennon/dp/0190206446/

The Citibank memo

http://politicalgates.blogspot.ca/2011/12/citigroup-plutonomy-memos-two-bombshell.html

US distribution of wealth

https://imgur.com/a/FShfb

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

Because its common knowledge, there is plenty of facts out there...

Science on reasoning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap

http://www.businessinsider.com/wikileaks-haiti-minimum-wage-the-nation-2011-6

Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349

Crisis of democracy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYFxtNgOeiI

  The real news:

http://therealnews.com/t2/

http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed-Inverted-Totalitarianism/dp/069114589X

http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Government-Surveillance-Security-Single-Superpower/dp/1608463656/

http://www.amazon.com/National-Security-Government-Michael-Glennon/dp/0190206446/

The Citibank memo

http://politicalgates.blogspot.ca/2011/12/citigroup-plutonomy-memos-two-bombshell.html

US distribution of wealth

https://imgur.com/a/FShfb

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

Because its common knowledge, there is plenty of facts out there...

Science on reasoning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

WIKILEAKS: U.S. Fought To Lower Minimum Wage In Haiti So Hanes And Levis Would Stay Cheap

http://www.businessinsider.com/wikileaks-haiti-minimum-wage-the-nation-2011-6

Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349

Crisis of democracy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYFxtNgOeiI

  The real news:

http://therealnews.com/t2/

http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Incorporated-Managed-Inverted-Totalitarianism/dp/069114589X

http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Government-Surveillance-Security-Single-Superpower/dp/1608463656/

http://www.amazon.com/National-Security-Government-Michael-Glennon/dp/0190206446/

The Citibank memo

http://politicalgates.blogspot.ca/2011/12/citigroup-plutonomy-memos-two-bombshell.html

US distribution of wealth

https://imgur.com/a/FShfb

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

The reason the Left has a credibility problem is that they always seem to resort to lying as part of the basis for their arguments.

I suggest you read this book for some additional insight.

Wouldn't that be more like Bowl of Heaven than Ringworld? The ringworld never really used the sun as a motor except to hold it in place.

pictures: https://www.google.com/search?...

Book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Bowl-Hea...

Why isn't a monitor listed??

A power supply is less then $10.
* http://smile.amazon.com/gp/pro...

You have a similar situation with a lot of people even here on Slashdot claiming they can easily hear the difference between lossless music formats and a quality 320 kbps lossy codec encoding, when all the double blind tests shows otherwise.

Uhhh, if you can't hear the difference it's probably because you aren't using the right equipment to carry the signal: http://www.amazon.com/Diamond-...

Or get decent internet access to start with?

Not everyone uses Cable connections to the internet, and in fact many ISPs are starting to realize that people want to upload stuff, and so are increasing the upload bandwidth to their customers.

I have a 75/75Mbit through FiOS, so uploading isn't an issue, and took a night for my 2TB upload.

For those who can't seem to get decent internet in their area, there is always this for the initial synchronization:
https://aws.amazon.com/importe...
I thought I had read about a more consumer version of that, but that one now looks to be datacenter/petabyte scale. It looks like the snowball costs about $200 a transfer, so it might not be worth the cost.

That is what Amazon Glacier is for.
https://aws.amazon.com/glacier...

On another note, is it really valid to compare a 3.5" drive to a 2.5" drive in price and talk about how expensive the smaller drive is? The comparison should be to a laptop drive, not a full sized spinning rust.

This http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
Or this http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

Compared to this http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
or this http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

Incidentally, I paid $250 for a 1TB SSD just last week, and now the cheapest 1TB is $322, and the one I bought isn't available anymore
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

Fair comparisons: You can buy this for only $21.50 per mph or this for $1180 per mph. Now which one would you rather have?

It would probably be worthwhile for the major airliner manufacturers to get together and standardize the automation modes and what is/isn't controlled in each mode.

Unfortunately the perspectives of both Airbus and Boeing when it comes to automation are too different to allow this. Boeing gives the last word to the pilot, so the automation may warn the pilot it's doing something stupid, but it will still allow it to crash the plane to the ground if it wants. Boeing's idea is "The pilot knows, we only help." Airbus, on the other hand, gives the last decision to the airplane, so you can't slow it down too much and make it crash to the ground, the computer will keep not allow it. Airbus's idea is "We want to get rid of the pilot, so let's take as much decision from him as possible." I know I'm oversimplifying here, but that's the general idea, or so I read, I'm not in the aviation field. The two ideas go right against each other, so it's hard for them to standardize their automation modes. They simply disagree what should the automation be used for.

Airbus's method may sound better in the sense that the computer will fail less than humans. But, obviously, it only works within a certain envelope of conditions the computers feel they can manage. Beyond those conditions, it gives the pilots control. And these are the moments in which either the pilot knows what they're doing, or they're going to do some crap, because it's in less than ideal situations that the computer will provide manual control. Unfortunately, making them fly all the time in automated mode makes them lose their skills, so by the time they need them, they have no idea what they're doing. There's a nice book called The Glass Cage: Automation and Us that discusses not only Airbus vs Boeing, but also other fields where automation has started creeping in. It's worth a read.

And here is a book that claims to describe the creation of the universe and a guide of morality. Both created with an agenda and confirmation bias.

... with pimps who beat them if they don't hustle enough.

In the book Superfreakonomics the authors conducted a study of prostitutes and pimps, and found that the women who worked with pimps were paid better and were less likely to be victims of violence. Some pimps had waiting lists of freelance prostitutes that wanted to join their teams, to benefit from the better working conditions. The authors found that pimps rarely used violence against their own prostitutes.

A few things...

An AC is just that, advisory... not regulatory... it is the FAA trying to make life easier for RC pilots, by giving them suggestions on how to operate so as to AVOID regulation in the first place.

There is also a key point in that AC:

"The aircraft is flown strictly for hobby or recreational use"

Amazon is neither, so the whole thing doesn't even apply to them.

Amazon's drones are going to be regulated, and soon, any other commercial drone is going to be as well. They have to be, their numbers will just keep growing.

General aviation didn't require a whole lot of rules either in the early days, there were so few people doing it. Even today there aren't THAT many planes, but there are enough that rules are required.

The time for regulations for drones has arrived.

As a side note: Yes, we all know that the $50 quad copter that you fly in your yard is not the issue here, even the FAA knows that. No one, anywhere, really cares about those.

It is the ones that go above the tree line, the ones that can fly to 200ft or more, the ones that you can fly beyond visual range, and the ones that you fly over OTHER people, that are the concern.

This:
http://www.amazon.com/UDI-U818...
Is not a concern

This:
https://youtu.be/Q4RRYiLItww?t...
Is... Watch how high it goes and how far it goes...

Those are going to end up regulated, they have to be, thousands of them will end up in the skies and we can either choose to regulate them now, or after they kill people.

The smart answer is now.

Fabulous. We now have the missing technology for the pheromone-based killer drone swarms featured in Daniel Suarez's Kill Decision

Seriously someone should have read the manual before actually BUILDING them.

What do you plan to do on the machine? Program? Surf the web? Use it to monitor something? Play games?

Right. Can't make much of a recommendation without knowing the use case. You can slap a $32 Sempron 3850 in a $28 motherboard with a $40 SSD and 4GB of RAM and have the beginnings of a reasonable web browsing/email computer for $120. Or you could bump up that processor up to an Athlon 5350 and double the RAM for another $40 and have an okay basic computer. Then you could probably do all of those things, except for maybe playing many of the latest and greatest games, without too much trouble.

What do you plan to do on the machine? Program? Surf the web? Use it to monitor something? Play games?

Right. Can't make much of a recommendation without knowing the use case. You can slap a $32 Sempron 3850 in a $28 motherboard with a $40 SSD and 4GB of RAM and have the beginnings of a reasonable web browsing/email computer for $120. Or you could bump up that processor up to an Athlon 5350 and double the RAM for another $40 and have an okay basic computer. Then you could probably do all of those things, except for maybe playing many of the latest and greatest games, without too much trouble.