Oh, I get it. You hate Bush and think people in his administration did something wrong, and so that makes it cool when Hillary does it. That's some awesome moral compass you have there.
Nonsense, Mr/s Clinton apologist. Well before that law was passed, there was already a requirement to retain all official communications, including emails. She set this up specifically to get around such scrutiny, and did it the moment that she was named as the nominee for the job. Her use of a false name on the registration and cash payment to the consultant just contributes to the atmosphere (and reality) of deliberate avoidance of the legal requirements.
A law the speaks directly to the matter of forwarding along private messages from private mailboxes that get occasionally used in connection with official duties doesn't mean that the already existing laws about retaining all official communication didn't already exist. They did. She chose not to establish an official mailbox at State. Her personal mail account on her phony-name-registered domain WAS BY DEFAULT her official email channel. And she did not in any way comply with the existing laws that required ongoing official storage of her communications within government systems and available for things like FOIA requests. Countless FOIA requests for her correspondence were in fact completely ignored because of this deliberate loophole that she established (look! no official records of my communication exist because there are no records!).
And because it's her own private email sandbox, SHE gets to decide which messages she should or shouldn't pass along for official archiving per the law. We as her employers have no recourse to see if her judgement on the matter is or was sound, or even legally correct. This was a deliberate act on her part to avoid legally mandated scrutiny of her communications as a government official. Combine that with her panhandling for donations from foreign governments (WHILE she was Secretary of State!) to fund the foundations from which her family drew income and which did things like fly them around the world in luxury accommodations, and you can see why she might indeed want to dodge the law and hide her communications.
Wow, you were really straining to make that unrelated political rant seem on topic.
Not at all. I think it's humorous (or would be, if it didn't contribute to a large body of evidence about the Clinton way of doing things) to think that one of Obama's would-be (at the time) cabinet secretaries, the moment she was named for the job, ran out and paid cash to have a personal mail server set up under a false registrant's name, specifically so that nobody could ever know which or her emails was, or wasn't part of her official legacy in that job - despite the law requiring her to make all such communication part of her ongoing records at State. That she did this under the table, and never even set up an official mailbox at State, and was magically able, for years, to avoid FOIA requests for her official communications, is just fantastically corrupt. The parallels with some IT guy in Mexico being asked to set up a shadow communications platform for a corrupt cartel there aren't imaginary, they're actually interesting.
It's topical because new of Clinton's furtive behavior along these lines is breaking right now, and it's a related topic. The main point of interest for this audience is the notion of being asked (or forced, in the example of TFA) to set up systems under dubious conditions (legality-wise), and keeping mum to avoid the sort of heat that can come down on them from the people who want the work done.
I wonder if that's the same guy who worked under a fictitious name, for cash, to set up the private e-mail server and domain that Hillary Clinton used for HER back-channel communications, in lieu of an official mailbox, throughout her entire tenure as Secretary of State. It has to be odd to be an IT consultant with a high profile customer like that and be unable to mention the gig on your CV. We've all worked under NDAs, but I guess working for a well-funded person or group that insists you actually use a fake name with the registrars and take cash (if you're lucky!) for the job would certainly take on a different flavor.
OK, and digging loose change out of your couch cushions is you making use of a banking platform.
Everybody involved here knows that "investment" means something very specific when you're handing money to a company to use in the formation and growth of their business. What happens when you funnel money towards a favored project through Kickstarter is no more an investment than losing some change in your couch is you making a bank deposit.
There's nothing wrong with Kickstarter or with people on both ends of the gift-giving making use of it. But it's not an investment. If you're one of these people that thinks you've just "invested" money when you go to see a movie, then the term - to you - is so absurdly broad as to have no meaning, especially not in the context of an actual discussion about business finance and project funding.
That is one thing that it absolutely is NOT. It's a donation platform, and some people asking for donations offer some incentives in exchange for your generosity. That's it. There is no investment. People who've given money are not vested in any way, except perhaps emotionally.
He just demonstrates to Muslims that even a non-Muslim can tell ISIS isn't Muslim
More than a quarter of British Muslims recently polled said they support militant Islamists who attack westerners they consider out of line with jihaddi sensibilities. That's 27% who applaud the slaughter of magazine publishers by ISIS-associated Muslim fanboys/girls. Those people think that ISIS is very Muslim, and is in fact a better example of practicing Islam than the more "moderate" groups who don't practice or support such violence. What is it, exactly, that you think Obama is demonstrating to those millions of people who simply laugh at his assessment of the Muslim-ness of one group or the next?
bombs don't differentiate whether someone is Muslim or not
With whom are you having that debate? Bombs aren't supposed to make distinctions between innocent people and medieval-minded wackadoos following the Koran's guidance and lopping heads off of the local insufficiently-Islmaic villagers. It's human intel, targeting, and decisions that make that distinction.
totally misunderstand the meaning of the words others say
No, you're just annoyed that someone actually paid attention to the words someone said.
So, here you are, twisting and turning, trying to avoid the actual commented-on issue, which asserts that Obama has the power to "take away" Islamist street cred, or bestow it. Limit your comments to whether that's actually true, or not. Which Muslim, in which country, is going to be thinking one moment that ISIS adherents are strictly faithful Muslims fighting the good fight against evil things like women who want to read and write, and then based on something Obama says, change their mind and decide that position (and thus ISIS) is no longer actually Islamic? What kind of person do you think holds ISIS as being defender of the faith but who also holds Obama as someone they should listen to as an authority on what is, or is not, authentically Muslim? Can you point to a single person, anywhere, who holds both positions?
You've just made them even happier with their choices. You fundamentally misunderstand what makes them tick. They want you to hate them. They're banking on it. They need you to hate them, and they're willing to do things like roast people alive in order to make you hate them even more.
Or he is smarter and more strategic than you are. By refusing to acknowledge ISIS as 'real' Islam he takes away ISIS primary claim to legitimacy and hands that legitimacy to the moderate Muslims (ie Jordan) that will join in the fight against ISIS.
Do you really think that an organization of many thousands of people which slaughters other Muslims for being insufficiently Muslim will give a rat's ass whether or not a politician in the US considers them to be sufficiently Muslim? Obama can no more "take away" their embrace of fundamental Islam than he can turned to by millions of other Muslims as an authority on whether they are legitimately following the Koran. What nonsense, to even suggest such a thing.
People like the Jordanians will demonstrate their "legitimacy" through their own actions, not through having the president of the United States proclaiming their particular adherence to their own cherry-picked passages in the Koran as being the "right" one. Would you consider Obama to be also a strategic genius for weighing in on which groups in Israel or Brooklyn or Poland are legitimately Jewish? Please.
He's not talking about the ACTUAL dress, he's talking about the photographic portrayal of a dress is the crappily exposed and presented JPG that everyone is looking at. The dress, as recorded in the JPG, is a barely-blue-tinted light grey, and the black elements have a demonstrably uneven RGB that makes them look gold (because that data represents a color low on blue... which is to say, it's a golden hue).
Doesn't matter. What matters is why the officers understand they've been dispatched to the scene, and what they believe they're seeing when they arrive.
Obviously you're able to tell a real gun from a replica at a distance while someone waving it around, but most people can't, including cops, until they have it in hand, personally. You might be comfortable risking other people's lives by making them assume that all guns are toys until they've been shot at, but people who actually do have, as a feature of their daily job, other people assaulting and trying to kill them, probably wouldn't want you armchairing on their behalf.
The solution? Actual thinking parents not sending their kid out into public to act stupid with a replica gun. To teach a kid that when they see a cop car rolling up, to perhaps consider not looking crazy and waiving said replica gun around. This is a 100% lapse on the part of parents and a completely crappy position for the cops to have been put in. I know that you would be safe, because you would omnipotent and know, from a distance, that the replica gun wasn't real, and that if it was real, the universe's special karma system would protect you from the laws of physics because you are A Better Person Than Cops Are, and bullets wouldn't be able to hurt you.
If you're that unable to grasp the difference between the possibility that someone might be carrying a weapon (say, in a violin case), and cops responding to someone's alarmed call about a guy brandishing a gun in public, and having that gun waved at them as they arrive on the scene, then you are completely out of touch with reality. Cops get killed, more often than you seem to know (or perhaps not as often as you'd like?) for misjudging the risk to their lives as they come upon such scenes or make a traffic stop. If you did that all day, every day, and some of your colleagues died doing what you have to do for your job, you might look at it a little differently.
You're probably thinking that the police should have just hidden behind their magic bullet-proof cruiser doors like in the movies, right? Yeah.
That kid shouldn't be dead. I blame his parents, 100%.
People generally don't know they are ignorant until AFTER they are educated. You think those in the middle ages knew they were ignorant while they were doing medieval things?
Which has what to do with Islamist groups that seek out and destroy schools and educators because they are schools and educators? If your point is that they can't help themselves because they are ignorant, then you're indirectly also saying that they must be forced to overcome that ignorance (since they act, aggressively, to destroy the institutions that would gladly educate them if they showed up wanting an education). And forcing them to be educated means... using force. It means physically protecting schools, teachers, and students with rough men willing to use violence to beat back the school destroying people and organizations.
In the meantime, other cultures seem to have nicely figured out how to avoid embracing medieval sensibilities. They used to be anti-education theocracies, too. But they're not, now. What changed? Why can't these Islamist groups and their millions of Muslim apologists and funding sources do the same?
Mr. Laden didn't carry out the attacks himself: he got grunts to it.
Yeah, he conned a bunch of uneducated, down-on-their-luck grunts into abandoning their personal sense of decency and agreeing to kill thousands of people - not because their religious convictions told them it was the right thing to do, but because... they just couldn't find work?
That must have been the case with "grunts" like Mohamed Atta, right? Totally uneducated. Well, except for going to college to study architecture, and spending time at the Technical University of Hamburg. You know where he met with other poor grunts who could only afford to do things like fly back and forth between Germany and various middle eastern destinations, spend time training in Afghanistan, and so on. He traveled to Spain for some meetings, then - the poor, uneducated, desperate guy! - flew to Maryland, where he met up with fellow grunt Hani Hanjour, then off to other destinations where the fellow grunts were living in various states of perfectly comfortable. They didn't just round up some scruffy guys from some poverty-stricken village in the desert and talk them into this because they had no options. These were people who were dedicated to the world view preached by Bin Laden and their intellectual fellows in the Taliban. Focusing on the leaders IS important, because it's what they say and stand for that thousands and thousands of their compatriots - including those living comfortably in western nations, where they've been educated and employed - find agreeable enough to follow.
This whole notion that the guys running, say, the media production facilities, newsletter operations, and logistics for groups like ISIS as they line up insufficiently hardline Muslims and of course western hostages out of whom they can't squeeze enough cash, and lop off their heads or burn them alive... that the guys doing that are doing so because they're not happy with the local employment prospects... that would be really funny if it weren't so dark and just plain evil. Not enough schools? Of course not! These are the people who are dragging the teachers out into the street and shooting them in the head before they burn down the schools. The problem isn't lack of foreign investment, it's cultural rot in the form of their local religion crashing headlong into the rest of the world's more contemporary ways of life. These guys don't want modern jobs, they want medieval jobs.
If this were late December, this would be an article about the physics of Santa Claus having to travel to so many households per second that he'd be essentially a ball of flaming plasma. Which is to say, a singularly pointless thought experiment. But apparently it's not singular. We've gone past the pointlessness singularity. Paging Mr. Kurzweil!
Most high-end apartments and office buildings (the sort of places where you'd find enough clients to make this sort of delivery interesting) don't have their rooftops (or, their entire rooftops) open to the public. Otherwise you'd have the public messing with their HVAC, dishes, and everything else). And it should be trivial, using bluetooth or another close proximity protocol, to have the drone ring the doorbell with a pre-assigned key.
I can see this being useful for document tubes being delivered (instead of having a guy on a bicycle race through the ground traffic doing the usual gotta-have-this-delivered-RIGHT-NOW courier thing), and other specialty tasks.
The thinking is that a truck could roll into a defined area with, say, a dozen small packages to deliver, and have drones fan out to several places at once (presumably, destinations that routinely take such deliveries, and are well suited to it). That's a driver/truck magnifier.
I can see some businesses installing what amounts to a drone delivery doggie-door/coal-chute on their roof tops, possibly with coded locks, that allow stuff to be dropped off with a straight shot down to a mail room or catch bin in a loading dock area. If you have a dozen business tenants in a small building like that, you know that Amazon (for example) is going to be delivering small boxes with things like phones, batteries, disk drives, ink carts, etc., on a daily basis.
Excellent! So, now we can have a core group of smart, hard working people, and they can be slaves to the completely uneducated leisure class. That's going to be super-duper successful, and will definitely inspire more people to study hard.
What good are robots if no one has a job earning money to buy the products made by the robots?
It's OK, the left has a plan for that. Just raise taxes on the remaining people who have jobs, and give that money to everyone else. This is always plan A (and plan B, and plan C). Ideally, there would only be one single productive person, to cut down on the paperwork.
So you're saying that even though the roofing guy has every last skill he needs to in order to fly a plastic toy multirotor a couple dozen feet in the air to help reduce the risks and costs in his business, you're suggesting that he constantly arrange for a third party with a pilot's license to show up and bill him to do that exact same three minute task.
You're so busy calling someone else a moron that you can't see how transparently you're trying to set up rent-seeking protection for pilots who will expect each of those visits (to where the roofing guy is already traveling anyway!) to fetch him hundreds of dollars. At which point the roofer would be better off hiring day labor to do a multi-man ladder setup for each sales pitch, which completely defeats the purpose of using readily available technology to speed business and make a given single person more productive.
I suppose you're also going to suggest that he hire a full-time FCC-approved HAM to follow him around and make sure he's using his mobile phone, truck CB, and any other emitting devices according to regs, right? I mean, there are plenty of professionals skilled in the use of radio communication devices, so it's crazy for the roofer to even OWN a cell phone when he could hire a professional with a HAM license to do all his on site communications, right? And YOU'RE the one saying that someone else is like a "creationist?"
Do you have any idea how ridiculous it is (of course you do) to make thousands of contractors run out and spend hundreds or thousands a week to bring in hired pilots to fly 4-pound plastic toy RC copters 30 feet off the ground for them? Do you understand how absurd that is, or how absurd you come across for suggesting that's better than them doing it for themselves? Of course you do, and you're just trolling. Why, is the question. You must be a licensed pilot who's worried about losing some old-school AP business, huh?
people motivated by money will go a lot further than people motivated by leisure
You mean, like those guys who video themselves on motorcycles weaving through traffic at 120mph, compared to professional drivers? Or (more topically) the guys who fly RC machines beyond LOS in the clouds or around national monuments or through moving traffic 10' off the ground, or who (like Pirker) buzz pedestrians, buzz police cars, etc., all to stir up YouTube traffic for fun? Compared to, say, a farmer who wants to look for crop damage, a local volunteer who wants to support LEOs in a rural search and rescue, or a tower maintenance climber who wants to reduce his chances of dying in the course of pursuing very dangerous work (compared to, say, un-paid people who BASE jump off of structures, frequently killing themselves)?
Recreational jackasses do dangerous stuff all the time. Almost every example of someone flying an RC machine in a stupid manner is an example of a (usually noob) hobbyist being clueless, not a working person with their business on the line being carefully about what they're doing.
If the rules had been more lax back when congress passed a law saying the FAA needed to make it so, you'd see a country (just like countries all around the world who aren't paralyzed by the need to spend years hand-wringing over thousands of new regulations every year) where the average person would already have seen their local landscapers, construction contractors, S&R teams, artists, realtors, and farmers making regular use of this incredibly useful technology. Instead, we get what we have now - uninformed fools who can't make the distinction between a quad for bridge inspection and a predator drone. Who think that someone with an ultra-wide angle lens mounted on a tiny sensor is going to be able to read their bank web site password while stealthily hovering outside their kitchen window, but haven't thought about what someone on the ground with a $100 spotting scope can see while leaning over a fence.
Every year the administration breaks the law by deliberately dragging this process out past their legal deadlines, they're making it harder, not easier, to make this all work sensibly. The administration should be out showing off these business opportunities - which require no poorly assigned tax dollars, unlike the billions that have been poured into failed warm-and-fuzzy initiatives like bankrupt solar companies, which the administration has repeatedly fallen all over themselves to quickly finance, and to exempt, with lighting speed, from any number of the sort of regulatory burdens they're just shrugging about in this sector.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I get it. You hate Bush and think people in his administration did something wrong, and so that makes it cool when Hillary does it. That's some awesome moral compass you have there.
Nonsense, Mr/s Clinton apologist. Well before that law was passed, there was already a requirement to retain all official communications, including emails. She set this up specifically to get around such scrutiny, and did it the moment that she was named as the nominee for the job. Her use of a false name on the registration and cash payment to the consultant just contributes to the atmosphere (and reality) of deliberate avoidance of the legal requirements.
A law the speaks directly to the matter of forwarding along private messages from private mailboxes that get occasionally used in connection with official duties doesn't mean that the already existing laws about retaining all official communication didn't already exist. They did. She chose not to establish an official mailbox at State. Her personal mail account on her phony-name-registered domain WAS BY DEFAULT her official email channel. And she did not in any way comply with the existing laws that required ongoing official storage of her communications within government systems and available for things like FOIA requests. Countless FOIA requests for her correspondence were in fact completely ignored because of this deliberate loophole that she established (look! no official records of my communication exist because there are no records!).
And because it's her own private email sandbox, SHE gets to decide which messages she should or shouldn't pass along for official archiving per the law. We as her employers have no recourse to see if her judgement on the matter is or was sound, or even legally correct. This was a deliberate act on her part to avoid legally mandated scrutiny of her communications as a government official. Combine that with her panhandling for donations from foreign governments (WHILE she was Secretary of State!) to fund the foundations from which her family drew income and which did things like fly them around the world in luxury accommodations, and you can see why she might indeed want to dodge the law and hide her communications.
Wow, you were really straining to make that unrelated political rant seem on topic.
Not at all. I think it's humorous (or would be, if it didn't contribute to a large body of evidence about the Clinton way of doing things) to think that one of Obama's would-be (at the time) cabinet secretaries, the moment she was named for the job, ran out and paid cash to have a personal mail server set up under a false registrant's name, specifically so that nobody could ever know which or her emails was, or wasn't part of her official legacy in that job - despite the law requiring her to make all such communication part of her ongoing records at State. That she did this under the table, and never even set up an official mailbox at State, and was magically able, for years, to avoid FOIA requests for her official communications, is just fantastically corrupt. The parallels with some IT guy in Mexico being asked to set up a shadow communications platform for a corrupt cartel there aren't imaginary, they're actually interesting.
It's topical because new of Clinton's furtive behavior along these lines is breaking right now, and it's a related topic. The main point of interest for this audience is the notion of being asked (or forced, in the example of TFA) to set up systems under dubious conditions (legality-wise), and keeping mum to avoid the sort of heat that can come down on them from the people who want the work done.
I wonder if that's the same guy who worked under a fictitious name, for cash, to set up the private e-mail server and domain that Hillary Clinton used for HER back-channel communications, in lieu of an official mailbox, throughout her entire tenure as Secretary of State. It has to be odd to be an IT consultant with a high profile customer like that and be unable to mention the gig on your CV. We've all worked under NDAs, but I guess working for a well-funded person or group that insists you actually use a fake name with the registrars and take cash (if you're lucky!) for the job would certainly take on a different flavor.
Kickstarter is an investment platform.
OK, and digging loose change out of your couch cushions is you making use of a banking platform.
Everybody involved here knows that "investment" means something very specific when you're handing money to a company to use in the formation and growth of their business. What happens when you funnel money towards a favored project through Kickstarter is no more an investment than losing some change in your couch is you making a bank deposit.
There's nothing wrong with Kickstarter or with people on both ends of the gift-giving making use of it. But it's not an investment. If you're one of these people that thinks you've just "invested" money when you go to see a movie, then the term - to you - is so absurdly broad as to have no meaning, especially not in the context of an actual discussion about business finance and project funding.
Kickstarter is an investment platform
That is one thing that it absolutely is NOT. It's a donation platform, and some people asking for donations offer some incentives in exchange for your generosity. That's it. There is no investment. People who've given money are not vested in any way, except perhaps emotionally.
He just demonstrates to Muslims that even a non-Muslim can tell ISIS isn't Muslim
More than a quarter of British Muslims recently polled said they support militant Islamists who attack westerners they consider out of line with jihaddi sensibilities. That's 27% who applaud the slaughter of magazine publishers by ISIS-associated Muslim fanboys/girls. Those people think that ISIS is very Muslim, and is in fact a better example of practicing Islam than the more "moderate" groups who don't practice or support such violence. What is it, exactly, that you think Obama is demonstrating to those millions of people who simply laugh at his assessment of the Muslim-ness of one group or the next?
bombs don't differentiate whether someone is Muslim or not
With whom are you having that debate? Bombs aren't supposed to make distinctions between innocent people and medieval-minded wackadoos following the Koran's guidance and lopping heads off of the local insufficiently-Islmaic villagers. It's human intel, targeting, and decisions that make that distinction.
totally misunderstand the meaning of the words others say
No, you're just annoyed that someone actually paid attention to the words someone said.
Probably not, but ISIS is not the audience. Everyone else is. Ponder it a bit more.
And "everyone else" is going to look to Obama as the arbiter of what is, and is not, proper interpretation of the Koran? Really?
So, here you are, twisting and turning, trying to avoid the actual commented-on issue, which asserts that Obama has the power to "take away" Islamist street cred, or bestow it. Limit your comments to whether that's actually true, or not. Which Muslim, in which country, is going to be thinking one moment that ISIS adherents are strictly faithful Muslims fighting the good fight against evil things like women who want to read and write, and then based on something Obama says, change their mind and decide that position (and thus ISIS) is no longer actually Islamic? What kind of person do you think holds ISIS as being defender of the faith but who also holds Obama as someone they should listen to as an authority on what is, or is not, authentically Muslim? Can you point to a single person, anywhere, who holds both positions?
You've just made them even happier with their choices. You fundamentally misunderstand what makes them tick. They want you to hate them. They're banking on it. They need you to hate them, and they're willing to do things like roast people alive in order to make you hate them even more.
Or he is smarter and more strategic than you are. By refusing to acknowledge ISIS as 'real' Islam he takes away ISIS primary claim to legitimacy and hands that legitimacy to the moderate Muslims (ie Jordan) that will join in the fight against ISIS.
Do you really think that an organization of many thousands of people which slaughters other Muslims for being insufficiently Muslim will give a rat's ass whether or not a politician in the US considers them to be sufficiently Muslim? Obama can no more "take away" their embrace of fundamental Islam than he can turned to by millions of other Muslims as an authority on whether they are legitimately following the Koran. What nonsense, to even suggest such a thing.
People like the Jordanians will demonstrate their "legitimacy" through their own actions, not through having the president of the United States proclaiming their particular adherence to their own cherry-picked passages in the Koran as being the "right" one. Would you consider Obama to be also a strategic genius for weighing in on which groups in Israel or Brooklyn or Poland are legitimately Jewish? Please.
He's not talking about the ACTUAL dress, he's talking about the photographic portrayal of a dress is the crappily exposed and presented JPG that everyone is looking at. The dress, as recorded in the JPG, is a barely-blue-tinted light grey, and the black elements have a demonstrably uneven RGB that makes them look gold (because that data represents a color low on blue ... which is to say, it's a golden hue).
Doesn't matter. What matters is why the officers understand they've been dispatched to the scene, and what they believe they're seeing when they arrive.
Obviously you're able to tell a real gun from a replica at a distance while someone waving it around, but most people can't, including cops, until they have it in hand, personally. You might be comfortable risking other people's lives by making them assume that all guns are toys until they've been shot at, but people who actually do have, as a feature of their daily job, other people assaulting and trying to kill them, probably wouldn't want you armchairing on their behalf.
The solution? Actual thinking parents not sending their kid out into public to act stupid with a replica gun. To teach a kid that when they see a cop car rolling up, to perhaps consider not looking crazy and waiving said replica gun around. This is a 100% lapse on the part of parents and a completely crappy position for the cops to have been put in. I know that you would be safe, because you would omnipotent and know, from a distance, that the replica gun wasn't real, and that if it was real, the universe's special karma system would protect you from the laws of physics because you are A Better Person Than Cops Are, and bullets wouldn't be able to hurt you.
If you're that unable to grasp the difference between the possibility that someone might be carrying a weapon (say, in a violin case), and cops responding to someone's alarmed call about a guy brandishing a gun in public, and having that gun waved at them as they arrive on the scene, then you are completely out of touch with reality. Cops get killed, more often than you seem to know (or perhaps not as often as you'd like?) for misjudging the risk to their lives as they come upon such scenes or make a traffic stop. If you did that all day, every day, and some of your colleagues died doing what you have to do for your job, you might look at it a little differently. You're probably thinking that the police should have just hidden behind their magic bullet-proof cruiser doors like in the movies, right? Yeah. That kid shouldn't be dead. I blame his parents, 100%.
10x what they gave Tamir Rice
Right, because he was already waving a gun around when they showed up.
People generally don't know they are ignorant until AFTER they are educated. You think those in the middle ages knew they were ignorant while they were doing medieval things?
Which has what to do with Islamist groups that seek out and destroy schools and educators because they are schools and educators? If your point is that they can't help themselves because they are ignorant, then you're indirectly also saying that they must be forced to overcome that ignorance (since they act, aggressively, to destroy the institutions that would gladly educate them if they showed up wanting an education). And forcing them to be educated means ... using force. It means physically protecting schools, teachers, and students with rough men willing to use violence to beat back the school destroying people and organizations.
In the meantime, other cultures seem to have nicely figured out how to avoid embracing medieval sensibilities. They used to be anti-education theocracies, too. But they're not, now. What changed? Why can't these Islamist groups and their millions of Muslim apologists and funding sources do the same?
Mr. Laden didn't carry out the attacks himself: he got grunts to it.
Yeah, he conned a bunch of uneducated, down-on-their-luck grunts into abandoning their personal sense of decency and agreeing to kill thousands of people - not because their religious convictions told them it was the right thing to do, but because ... they just couldn't find work?
... that the guys doing that are doing so because they're not happy with the local employment prospects ... that would be really funny if it weren't so dark and just plain evil. Not enough schools? Of course not! These are the people who are dragging the teachers out into the street and shooting them in the head before they burn down the schools. The problem isn't lack of foreign investment, it's cultural rot in the form of their local religion crashing headlong into the rest of the world's more contemporary ways of life. These guys don't want modern jobs, they want medieval jobs.
That must have been the case with "grunts" like Mohamed Atta, right? Totally uneducated. Well, except for going to college to study architecture, and spending time at the Technical University of Hamburg. You know where he met with other poor grunts who could only afford to do things like fly back and forth between Germany and various middle eastern destinations, spend time training in Afghanistan, and so on. He traveled to Spain for some meetings, then - the poor, uneducated, desperate guy! - flew to Maryland, where he met up with fellow grunt Hani Hanjour, then off to other destinations where the fellow grunts were living in various states of perfectly comfortable. They didn't just round up some scruffy guys from some poverty-stricken village in the desert and talk them into this because they had no options. These were people who were dedicated to the world view preached by Bin Laden and their intellectual fellows in the Taliban. Focusing on the leaders IS important, because it's what they say and stand for that thousands and thousands of their compatriots - including those living comfortably in western nations, where they've been educated and employed - find agreeable enough to follow.
This whole notion that the guys running, say, the media production facilities, newsletter operations, and logistics for groups like ISIS as they line up insufficiently hardline Muslims and of course western hostages out of whom they can't squeeze enough cash, and lop off their heads or burn them alive
If this were late December, this would be an article about the physics of Santa Claus having to travel to so many households per second that he'd be essentially a ball of flaming plasma. Which is to say, a singularly pointless thought experiment. But apparently it's not singular. We've gone past the pointlessness singularity. Paging Mr. Kurzweil!
Most high-end apartments and office buildings (the sort of places where you'd find enough clients to make this sort of delivery interesting) don't have their rooftops (or, their entire rooftops) open to the public. Otherwise you'd have the public messing with their HVAC, dishes, and everything else). And it should be trivial, using bluetooth or another close proximity protocol, to have the drone ring the doorbell with a pre-assigned key. I can see this being useful for document tubes being delivered (instead of having a guy on a bicycle race through the ground traffic doing the usual gotta-have-this-delivered-RIGHT-NOW courier thing), and other specialty tasks.
The thinking is that a truck could roll into a defined area with, say, a dozen small packages to deliver, and have drones fan out to several places at once (presumably, destinations that routinely take such deliveries, and are well suited to it). That's a driver/truck magnifier.
I can see some businesses installing what amounts to a drone delivery doggie-door/coal-chute on their roof tops, possibly with coded locks, that allow stuff to be dropped off with a straight shot down to a mail room or catch bin in a loading dock area. If you have a dozen business tenants in a small building like that, you know that Amazon (for example) is going to be delivering small boxes with things like phones, batteries, disk drives, ink carts, etc., on a daily basis.
Excellent! So, now we can have a core group of smart, hard working people, and they can be slaves to the completely uneducated leisure class. That's going to be super-duper successful, and will definitely inspire more people to study hard.
It's true. Nobody should have to work. Everyone should just get everything they need from ... oh, wait, nobody's working. Huh.
What good are robots if no one has a job earning money to buy the products made by the robots?
It's OK, the left has a plan for that. Just raise taxes on the remaining people who have jobs, and give that money to everyone else. This is always plan A (and plan B, and plan C). Ideally, there would only be one single productive person, to cut down on the paperwork.
So you're saying that even though the roofing guy has every last skill he needs to in order to fly a plastic toy multirotor a couple dozen feet in the air to help reduce the risks and costs in his business, you're suggesting that he constantly arrange for a third party with a pilot's license to show up and bill him to do that exact same three minute task. You're so busy calling someone else a moron that you can't see how transparently you're trying to set up rent-seeking protection for pilots who will expect each of those visits (to where the roofing guy is already traveling anyway!) to fetch him hundreds of dollars. At which point the roofer would be better off hiring day labor to do a multi-man ladder setup for each sales pitch, which completely defeats the purpose of using readily available technology to speed business and make a given single person more productive. I suppose you're also going to suggest that he hire a full-time FCC-approved HAM to follow him around and make sure he's using his mobile phone, truck CB, and any other emitting devices according to regs, right? I mean, there are plenty of professionals skilled in the use of radio communication devices, so it's crazy for the roofer to even OWN a cell phone when he could hire a professional with a HAM license to do all his on site communications, right? And YOU'RE the one saying that someone else is like a "creationist?"
Do you have any idea how ridiculous it is (of course you do) to make thousands of contractors run out and spend hundreds or thousands a week to bring in hired pilots to fly 4-pound plastic toy RC copters 30 feet off the ground for them? Do you understand how absurd that is, or how absurd you come across for suggesting that's better than them doing it for themselves? Of course you do, and you're just trolling. Why, is the question. You must be a licensed pilot who's worried about losing some old-school AP business, huh?
people motivated by money will go a lot further than people motivated by leisure
You mean, like those guys who video themselves on motorcycles weaving through traffic at 120mph, compared to professional drivers? Or (more topically) the guys who fly RC machines beyond LOS in the clouds or around national monuments or through moving traffic 10' off the ground, or who (like Pirker) buzz pedestrians, buzz police cars, etc., all to stir up YouTube traffic for fun? Compared to, say, a farmer who wants to look for crop damage, a local volunteer who wants to support LEOs in a rural search and rescue, or a tower maintenance climber who wants to reduce his chances of dying in the course of pursuing very dangerous work (compared to, say, un-paid people who BASE jump off of structures, frequently killing themselves)?
Recreational jackasses do dangerous stuff all the time. Almost every example of someone flying an RC machine in a stupid manner is an example of a (usually noob) hobbyist being clueless, not a working person with their business on the line being carefully about what they're doing.
If the rules had been more lax back when congress passed a law saying the FAA needed to make it so, you'd see a country (just like countries all around the world who aren't paralyzed by the need to spend years hand-wringing over thousands of new regulations every year) where the average person would already have seen their local landscapers, construction contractors, S&R teams, artists, realtors, and farmers making regular use of this incredibly useful technology. Instead, we get what we have now - uninformed fools who can't make the distinction between a quad for bridge inspection and a predator drone. Who think that someone with an ultra-wide angle lens mounted on a tiny sensor is going to be able to read their bank web site password while stealthily hovering outside their kitchen window, but haven't thought about what someone on the ground with a $100 spotting scope can see while leaning over a fence.
Every year the administration breaks the law by deliberately dragging this process out past their legal deadlines, they're making it harder, not easier, to make this all work sensibly. The administration should be out showing off these business opportunities - which require no poorly assigned tax dollars, unlike the billions that have been poured into failed warm-and-fuzzy initiatives like bankrupt solar companies, which the administration has repeatedly fallen all over themselves to quickly finance, and to exempt, with lighting speed, from any number of the sort of regulatory burdens they're just shrugging about in this sector.