They're becoming increasingly rare, and therefore expensive, but you can still get all of those features in used cars. The lead additive for gas is very hard to find in first world countries, but there are still places you can get that to complete the primitive automobile experience.
Don't forget, older cars are also easier to fix after a crash because they don't have those stupid crumple zones that newer cars have. Instead of trying to minimize impact to the owner, who is obviously the most expendable part of an old car during a crash, older cars maximize their own well being, knowing that there will always be a new owner. Older cars have the strongest anti-hacker technology available and many are immune to the effects of an EMP.
However, don't forget that modern cars have some benefits also. Older cars rarely have appropriate surfaces to affix your iPad so all of your music, movies and games are right in front of you during your boring commute. While the obvious solution of attaching them to the windshield with velcro is simple, most older cars have non-vertical windshields making it harder to reach controls at the bottom of the screen.
Many high end newer cars are susceptible to hacking, in the near future making it possible to steal and deliver the car to a chop shop or international shipper all from the comfort of mom's basement. Compare that with the intrinsic security of the '74 Ford Pinto - entirely immune to theft, even if left in the worst part of town with the doors unlocked and keys in the ignition.
This tangent brought to you by the Coalition for Reductio Ad Absurdum.
On the other side of that process, Comcast is betting that doing all of that will take you a few hundred hours of your time, as well as considerable expense to collect $1,775.
IIRC, you can't ask for legal fees or reimbursement for your time in small claims court.
I'll bet Comcast also knows how long someone has to file a lawsuit, whether in small claims court or not. If they can keep pushing off the issue a few months at a time, they'll hit that limit. It's the same game as telling the guy to go back to his bank to dispute the transaction when they're well aware that it's long past the time he can do that successfully.
The moral of the story is that the legal system is on their side and they know it. If you look past the extremely uncommon large judgements (which will be appealed and otherwise delay payment indefinitely), you'll find a lot of time and money goes into collecting relatively little money. IMO, every time you have to deal with our legal system, you lose.
If someone tells you they'll send a check in 3 months, you may want to look at how long you have to dispute a transaction. In most cases, after 3 months you're out of luck and they know it.
If the rep laughs at you and says it'll be 3 months, that suggests that this kind of stuff happens all the time and they have a canned response to delay you.
There are a lot of seedy companies that will pull scams like this and just wait out the clock until it's too late. That's why it's important to review your statements and dispute transactions right away if you suspect they're wrong. If it turns out you were wrong, you can cancel the dispute and no harm, no foul.
If you go to most manufacturers and tell them you don't have a job, but you want to buy a decent car so you can work as an Uber driver, they probably wouldn't give you a lease based on an intention to work.
Whereas, if this deal with Toyota integrates with Uber, they can look at your past Uber driving history and determine if you're a good risk, and if you don't provide enough rides and won't be able to make payments, they can monitor that and terminate the lease to reduce their exposure.
The funds would never have been available for those purposes anyway.
No government would fund those, else how would they convince people of the need to raise taxes? Do you think it's a coincidence that education, law enforcement, etc are always underfunded, no matter how many times those reasons are used to justify new taxes, bonds, etc?
If the net result is that the FBI spends that much less time and resources going after people who violate federal statutes against pot in states where it was been legalized, lets call it a reduced-loss for society as a whole and move on.
Microsoft uses BSD code. They couldn't do that with GPL code.
I don't like Microsoft or their products, but I would rather they use BSD code written by people who understand what they're doing than have Microsoft, yet again, reinvent the wheel.
When there's no possibility of the end result being open sourced, would you rather someone commercially benefit from using BSD code, or live with whatever fundamental security holes they can introduce starting from scratch?
Sometimes, "freedom" has to include the freedom to be a douchebag.
I sat next to a guy in a physics class that only showed up for tests with his HP 48G, plugged in the numbers and passed. That's when I bought one and learned to program it. Not because it was easy to pass physics tests, but because it was a good calculator and that was one of its many capabilities. I still have more than one of those today.
I had engineering teacher that said if you knew enough about your calculator to store notes on it, and the subject matter well enough to know what to store, you would probably make a good engineer.
The FBI doesn't need specific data from the phone to convict the dead guy. They don't expect the phone to contain a video of the guy committing mass murder, to nicely tie up the investigation and prosecute the dead guy in court.
They want whatever information is on it so they can find other potential terrorists. That is rather non-specific. They already have backups and other information provided by Apple and others. The request for help in retrieving whatever else may be on the phone sounds exactly like a fishing expedition. There's a lot of non-mass-murder-related-data that would exist on a phone.
The argument here is whether or not the government can compel a company to produce a new tool and precedent that is potentially harmful to that company. There's no danger of this suspect rising from the dead to commit mass murder while Apple and the FBI take this through the courts. Both sides have reasonable and unreasonable aspects to their positions. This is why the courts exist, to resolve how we, as a society, will address these conflicts.
There are people who believe the FBI needs Apple to help so they can catch the terrorists. Nevermind that they know who it was and he's been dead this whole time.
It is somewhat reassuring that the result wasn't more heavily skewed towards "FBI should investigate terrorists", suggesting more than a knee-jerk reaction to the whole issue.
It's good to see a few people on this thread having similar experiences to yours. The vast majority of experienced professionals I've talked to about jury duty have been dismissed.
I've gone to jury duty interested in seeing the whole process end to end, but always get dismissed. The process would seem more impartial if they needed a compelling reason to dismiss a juror.
One time, I got dismissed from a jury because I was taking a Japanese class in college. The defense attorney took umbrage with that class in particular, though he forgot what college I was attending, my major, and my line of work, because he had to ask all of those questions a second time. I can only assume that his defense was based on the idea that white people should not be sued by Indians when the white guy rear ends the Indian guy.
Another time, in a drug possession case, one prospective juror came out and told the judge he thought it was immoral to lock people up for victimless crimes. At least that seemed like a legitimate reason someone could not be fair and impartial.
I had a physics teacher who told us he would miss class for as much as a week, until they found out he was a physics teacher and dismissed him.
I've also been excused from every jury where I've been selected and went through the questions to potential jurors.
You're right that there's nothing about the system that provides conclusive proof that there is a bias. However, it seems an odd coincidence that every analytical person I've talked to about jury duty has been excused every time. The plural of anecdote is data.
If their argument is that the data is harmless, they should be required to publish everything they collect.
Let private citizens look through the data and have the same harmless view of police and politicians cell phone data. I'm sure there would be a big market for data about the location of every cell phone that spent more than 5 minutes in close proximity to a police station, how recently that occurred and how frequently it happens. It would be a great way to find undercover officers, speed traps, and confidential informants. Sure, that data would be most likely used to help commit crimes, but isn't that already happening when it leads to criminal charges by way of parallel construction?
Yes, El Chapo was able to hide in the natural blind spot this surveillance created. However, the NSA spokesperson said "Not an issue, he's the DEA's problem. Let me make this perfectly clear: his shenanigans are clearly not our department."
But once you know that chain of events, the NSA can justify why they need surveillance data on everyone who ever ate a pizza, took an english class, walked on a floor, or cast a shadow.
The data is there, all known terrorists show up in one or more of those groups.
All of the delivery drones I've seen are based on the helicopter model, so there's no technical requirement that they descend before they get to their destination. However, flying lower nearby the destination, as you suggest, would be a more efficient path.
If someone tried to make delivery drones from a plane, which would require it to descend prior to the destination, the package would have to be dropped. That combined with decreased maneuverability would make plane-like drones a poor choice for deliveries. Those drones are better suited for photography of large areas.
While eyewitness testimony is questionable, people testify under oath to those statements.
Any data used by a court should be questioned just a rigorously. At a minimum, the following questions seem relevant:
1. Is the device collecting this data certified? 2. Is the flight data collected in a tamper-evident manner? 3. When and where was the device calibrated? 4. Was the flight data collected at the time of the incident or provided by the drone owner at a later date?
Without this information, the judge would likely consider the data as heresay.
If the data was uploaded in real time to the device manufacturers server and the owner of the drone has read-only access to the data, then calibration would be the only missing point. That calibration could be done at a later time to determine how accurate the data should be. e.g., my watch will give me altitude, based on air pressure, suggesting that weather can effect the margin of error on that measurement. Whether the drones altitude was appropriate depends on the reported altitude and the margin of error.
TFA says this was part of a pattern of behavior, not a single event, so the specific data points for this particular flight may not affect the judges decision.
Events like this remind me of the movie Brazil, with a hint of Idiocracy.
They will probably conclude that he failed to file the correct paperwork, send notarized copies to the school, the school district, state governor, CIA, NSA, FBI and the POTUS. He also didn't get explicit written permission from each of those entities to demonstrate his electronics project to his teacher. Children need to know there are procedures to follow, and those aren't documented anywhere or taught to them. It's clearly their fault for not knowing how things really work, especially for anyone who can be categorized in any way, such as ethnic sounding names or non-albino pigmentation.
If this kind of situation isn't dealt with harshly, you never know what the next kid will do. Today it was a harmless electronics project, tomorrow it could be a harmless electronics project powered by a potato. Combining electronics and biology is an inconceivable danger we cannot allow to happen.
In high school, I showed the teacher in charge of the computer lab how to get the admin password from the network server. I told him it could be done on the console by anyone in a few minutes and showed that it took less than 5 minutes. I also told him that removing the keyboard and monitor from the server and making it physically difficult to access would prevent others from doing the same in the future. And here, 25 years later I'm working for a large financial institution, reading stories about security and posting on Slashdot. Come on people - posting on Slashdot? Is that the kind of future we want for our children?
For those under 35, please disregard this post unless you have received special training on recognizing sarcasm and humor.
Netflix pays royalties based on what movies get watched. The more people who watch something, the more the producer gets paid.
I'd definitely agree that a monthly entertainment expense would be popular if a similar model was used across content providers. If Amazon has content that Netflix doesn't, it would be nice to not have to pay two subscriptions to switch between them.
Likewise, if both have the same content but one has a better content delivery, the one that serves the customers best should get paid more. Screw Netflix's bad download rates that can be gotten around by stopping and restarting the video from a different server. That shows that their infrastructure, not my connection is the limiting factor.
Same thing could apply to free services like youtube. Skip the lame commercials and take a slice of that $50/month pie for those who produce good content. I don't think most people are against paying for something they like, but when it's a lot more work for the user, it's not going to happen.
Of course, the problem is that companies that provide content want the fixed monthly fee so they have a budget to work from. It's a lot harder to run a business if you don't know how much you can invest in infrastructure, content, etc. Companies like Netflix and Amazon would have to work together and pool resources to make it mutually beneficial. Oh wait, Netflix runs on Amazon Web Services already.
Subscriptions for services make sense and most people are used to these. Subscriptions for physical objects like phones just seems like a way to feed junkie consumerism. While addiction is a great thing for the bottom line, I think there's an adverse affects on the way people act in many other parts of their lives.
I like that when something is paid off, the Total Cost of Ownership keeps going down. Many things in life benefit from the not-disposable mentality. I take care of my phones and they last a long time and stay in good condition. This is just a matter of common sense to me, even though my employer pays for my phone entirely, so I don't actually save a penny on not smashing it every time a new one comes out. Other people seem to have 'accidents' within weeks of new phone releases, but that usually appears to be part of a larger pattern of poor decisions.
Airsoft pistols are not legally classified as firearms. I would recommend against declaring one and hoping to explain how you're scamming the system if your bag ever disappears. Why give someone (who is probably already annoyed to be dealing with a lost luggage report) a reason to figure out whether or not it's illegal to declare a non-firearm as a firearm?
There are plenty of options, for anyone who isn't a felon. Blank guns and black powder pistols are available via mail order with no additional paperwork. For anyone who is not adverse to filling out a 4473, there are many options in the ~$100 range, and many worth actually having and using for ~$300. Think of the cost as a one time investment in baggage insurance.
Every time I've flown with a firearm, it only takes me a few extra minutes to check my bag with one of the ticketing agents, fill out the declaration card, and have my bag x-rayed. Even flying out of California, I've never run into an airline employee that wasn't familiar with the process for checking firearms. East coast could be different, I've never flown there.
Indeed, more information *can* yield a clearer picture of the event, situation, etc.
However, more data also simplifies the job of cherry picking data points to prove some totally random theory.
Hope drives the former, while laziness drives the latter.
Anything you say can *and* will be used against you in a court of law (except in cases where you're exempt from the extra paperwork of courts). That takes on a more ominous tone when you can't control the massive volume of data being collected and generated about everything you ever do.
I suspect the better people quit because mediocrity was being rewarded, which means the workload on people who don't do a crap job becomes impossible.
Of course, the longer term issue is also that the company is going to collapse and those who see it coming will jump ship before the whole company collapses and there are that many other people looking for jobs. "Company went out of business and I didn't see it coming" isn't a great response to "why did you leave your last job?"
Energy weapons and their relationship to individuals can be similar to bullets. If there's one with your name on it, there's nothing you can do about it. It's all the ones addressed "To Whom It May Concern" that you want to avoid.
Slashdot Mirror
Hint: the belief that a better path is "why don't we kill all..." is the source, not solution to the problem.
They're becoming increasingly rare, and therefore expensive, but you can still get all of those features in used cars. The lead additive for gas is very hard to find in first world countries, but there are still places you can get that to complete the primitive automobile experience.
Don't forget, older cars are also easier to fix after a crash because they don't have those stupid crumple zones that newer cars have. Instead of trying to minimize impact to the owner, who is obviously the most expendable part of an old car during a crash, older cars maximize their own well being, knowing that there will always be a new owner. Older cars have the strongest anti-hacker technology available and many are immune to the effects of an EMP.
However, don't forget that modern cars have some benefits also. Older cars rarely have appropriate surfaces to affix your iPad so all of your music, movies and games are right in front of you during your boring commute. While the obvious solution of attaching them to the windshield with velcro is simple, most older cars have non-vertical windshields making it harder to reach controls at the bottom of the screen.
Many high end newer cars are susceptible to hacking, in the near future making it possible to steal and deliver the car to a chop shop or international shipper all from the comfort of mom's basement. Compare that with the intrinsic security of the '74 Ford Pinto - entirely immune to theft, even if left in the worst part of town with the doors unlocked and keys in the ignition.
This tangent brought to you by the Coalition for Reductio Ad Absurdum.
On the other side of that process, Comcast is betting that doing all of that will take you a few hundred hours of your time, as well as considerable expense to collect $1,775.
IIRC, you can't ask for legal fees or reimbursement for your time in small claims court.
I'll bet Comcast also knows how long someone has to file a lawsuit, whether in small claims court or not. If they can keep pushing off the issue a few months at a time, they'll hit that limit. It's the same game as telling the guy to go back to his bank to dispute the transaction when they're well aware that it's long past the time he can do that successfully.
The moral of the story is that the legal system is on their side and they know it. If you look past the extremely uncommon large judgements (which will be appealed and otherwise delay payment indefinitely), you'll find a lot of time and money goes into collecting relatively little money. IMO, every time you have to deal with our legal system, you lose.
If someone tells you they'll send a check in 3 months, you may want to look at how long you have to dispute a transaction. In most cases, after 3 months you're out of luck and they know it.
If the rep laughs at you and says it'll be 3 months, that suggests that this kind of stuff happens all the time and they have a canned response to delay you.
There are a lot of seedy companies that will pull scams like this and just wait out the clock until it's too late. That's why it's important to review your statements and dispute transactions right away if you suspect they're wrong. If it turns out you were wrong, you can cancel the dispute and no harm, no foul.
It may help newer or aspiring Uber drivers.
If you go to most manufacturers and tell them you don't have a job, but you want to buy a decent car so you can work as an Uber driver, they probably wouldn't give you a lease based on an intention to work.
Whereas, if this deal with Toyota integrates with Uber, they can look at your past Uber driving history and determine if you're a good risk, and if you don't provide enough rides and won't be able to make payments, they can monitor that and terminate the lease to reduce their exposure.
The robots will do all of those jobs. And who's going to manufacture and repair the robots? Other robots.
The solution is that simple, it's robots all the way down.
The funds would never have been available for those purposes anyway.
No government would fund those, else how would they convince people of the need to raise taxes? Do you think it's a coincidence that education, law enforcement, etc are always underfunded, no matter how many times those reasons are used to justify new taxes, bonds, etc?
If the net result is that the FBI spends that much less time and resources going after people who violate federal statutes against pot in states where it was been legalized, lets call it a reduced-loss for society as a whole and move on.
Microsoft uses BSD code. They couldn't do that with GPL code.
I don't like Microsoft or their products, but I would rather they use BSD code written by people who understand what they're doing than have Microsoft, yet again, reinvent the wheel.
When there's no possibility of the end result being open sourced, would you rather someone commercially benefit from using BSD code, or live with whatever fundamental security holes they can introduce starting from scratch?
Sometimes, "freedom" has to include the freedom to be a douchebag.
I sat next to a guy in a physics class that only showed up for tests with his HP 48G, plugged in the numbers and passed. That's when I bought one and learned to program it. Not because it was easy to pass physics tests, but because it was a good calculator and that was one of its many capabilities. I still have more than one of those today.
I had engineering teacher that said if you knew enough about your calculator to store notes on it, and the subject matter well enough to know what to store, you would probably make a good engineer.
The FBI doesn't need specific data from the phone to convict the dead guy. They don't expect the phone to contain a video of the guy committing mass murder, to nicely tie up the investigation and prosecute the dead guy in court.
They want whatever information is on it so they can find other potential terrorists. That is rather non-specific. They already have backups and other information provided by Apple and others. The request for help in retrieving whatever else may be on the phone sounds exactly like a fishing expedition. There's a lot of non-mass-murder-related-data that would exist on a phone.
The argument here is whether or not the government can compel a company to produce a new tool and precedent that is potentially harmful to that company. There's no danger of this suspect rising from the dead to commit mass murder while Apple and the FBI take this through the courts. Both sides have reasonable and unreasonable aspects to their positions. This is why the courts exist, to resolve how we, as a society, will address these conflicts.
There are people who believe the FBI needs Apple to help so they can catch the terrorists. Nevermind that they know who it was and he's been dead this whole time.
It is somewhat reassuring that the result wasn't more heavily skewed towards "FBI should investigate terrorists", suggesting more than a knee-jerk reaction to the whole issue.
It's good to see a few people on this thread having similar experiences to yours. The vast majority of experienced professionals I've talked to about jury duty have been dismissed.
I've gone to jury duty interested in seeing the whole process end to end, but always get dismissed. The process would seem more impartial if they needed a compelling reason to dismiss a juror.
One time, I got dismissed from a jury because I was taking a Japanese class in college. The defense attorney took umbrage with that class in particular, though he forgot what college I was attending, my major, and my line of work, because he had to ask all of those questions a second time. I can only assume that his defense was based on the idea that white people should not be sued by Indians when the white guy rear ends the Indian guy.
Another time, in a drug possession case, one prospective juror came out and told the judge he thought it was immoral to lock people up for victimless crimes. At least that seemed like a legitimate reason someone could not be fair and impartial.
I had a physics teacher who told us he would miss class for as much as a week, until they found out he was a physics teacher and dismissed him.
I've also been excused from every jury where I've been selected and went through the questions to potential jurors.
You're right that there's nothing about the system that provides conclusive proof that there is a bias. However, it seems an odd coincidence that every analytical person I've talked to about jury duty has been excused every time. The plural of anecdote is data.
If their argument is that the data is harmless, they should be required to publish everything they collect.
Let private citizens look through the data and have the same harmless view of police and politicians cell phone data. I'm sure there would be a big market for data about the location of every cell phone that spent more than 5 minutes in close proximity to a police station, how recently that occurred and how frequently it happens. It would be a great way to find undercover officers, speed traps, and confidential informants. Sure, that data would be most likely used to help commit crimes, but isn't that already happening when it leads to criminal charges by way of parallel construction?
Yes, El Chapo was able to hide in the natural blind spot this surveillance created. However, the NSA spokesperson said "Not an issue, he's the DEA's problem. Let me make this perfectly clear: his shenanigans are clearly not our department."
But once you know that chain of events, the NSA can justify why they need surveillance data on everyone who ever ate a pizza, took an english class, walked on a floor, or cast a shadow.
The data is there, all known terrorists show up in one or more of those groups.
Come on, do you really think the federal government can implement a system that won't let people register random drones to other people?
I would expect a record number of registrations to Barack Obama and Mickey Mouse.
All of the delivery drones I've seen are based on the helicopter model, so there's no technical requirement that they descend before they get to their destination. However, flying lower nearby the destination, as you suggest, would be a more efficient path.
If someone tried to make delivery drones from a plane, which would require it to descend prior to the destination, the package would have to be dropped. That combined with decreased maneuverability would make plane-like drones a poor choice for deliveries. Those drones are better suited for photography of large areas.
While eyewitness testimony is questionable, people testify under oath to those statements.
Any data used by a court should be questioned just a rigorously. At a minimum, the following questions seem relevant:
1. Is the device collecting this data certified?
2. Is the flight data collected in a tamper-evident manner?
3. When and where was the device calibrated?
4. Was the flight data collected at the time of the incident or provided by the drone owner at a later date?
Without this information, the judge would likely consider the data as heresay.
If the data was uploaded in real time to the device manufacturers server and the owner of the drone has read-only access to the data, then calibration would be the only missing point. That calibration could be done at a later time to determine how accurate the data should be. e.g., my watch will give me altitude, based on air pressure, suggesting that weather can effect the margin of error on that measurement. Whether the drones altitude was appropriate depends on the reported altitude and the margin of error.
TFA says this was part of a pattern of behavior, not a single event, so the specific data points for this particular flight may not affect the judges decision.
Events like this remind me of the movie Brazil, with a hint of Idiocracy.
They will probably conclude that he failed to file the correct paperwork, send notarized copies to the school, the school district, state governor, CIA, NSA, FBI and the POTUS. He also didn't get explicit written permission from each of those entities to demonstrate his electronics project to his teacher. Children need to know there are procedures to follow, and those aren't documented anywhere or taught to them. It's clearly their fault for not knowing how things really work, especially for anyone who can be categorized in any way, such as ethnic sounding names or non-albino pigmentation.
If this kind of situation isn't dealt with harshly, you never know what the next kid will do. Today it was a harmless electronics project, tomorrow it could be a harmless electronics project powered by a potato. Combining electronics and biology is an inconceivable danger we cannot allow to happen.
In high school, I showed the teacher in charge of the computer lab how to get the admin password from the network server. I told him it could be done on the console by anyone in a few minutes and showed that it took less than 5 minutes. I also told him that removing the keyboard and monitor from the server and making it physically difficult to access would prevent others from doing the same in the future. And here, 25 years later I'm working for a large financial institution, reading stories about security and posting on Slashdot. Come on people - posting on Slashdot? Is that the kind of future we want for our children?
For those under 35, please disregard this post unless you have received special training on recognizing sarcasm and humor.
Netflix pays royalties based on what movies get watched. The more people who watch something, the more the producer gets paid.
I'd definitely agree that a monthly entertainment expense would be popular if a similar model was used across content providers. If Amazon has content that Netflix doesn't, it would be nice to not have to pay two subscriptions to switch between them.
Likewise, if both have the same content but one has a better content delivery, the one that serves the customers best should get paid more. Screw Netflix's bad download rates that can be gotten around by stopping and restarting the video from a different server. That shows that their infrastructure, not my connection is the limiting factor.
Same thing could apply to free services like youtube. Skip the lame commercials and take a slice of that $50/month pie for those who produce good content. I don't think most people are against paying for something they like, but when it's a lot more work for the user, it's not going to happen.
Of course, the problem is that companies that provide content want the fixed monthly fee so they have a budget to work from. It's a lot harder to run a business if you don't know how much you can invest in infrastructure, content, etc. Companies like Netflix and Amazon would have to work together and pool resources to make it mutually beneficial. Oh wait, Netflix runs on Amazon Web Services already.
Subscriptions for services make sense and most people are used to these. Subscriptions for physical objects like phones just seems like a way to feed junkie consumerism. While addiction is a great thing for the bottom line, I think there's an adverse affects on the way people act in many other parts of their lives.
I like that when something is paid off, the Total Cost of Ownership keeps going down. Many things in life benefit from the not-disposable mentality. I take care of my phones and they last a long time and stay in good condition. This is just a matter of common sense to me, even though my employer pays for my phone entirely, so I don't actually save a penny on not smashing it every time a new one comes out. Other people seem to have 'accidents' within weeks of new phone releases, but that usually appears to be part of a larger pattern of poor decisions.
Airsoft pistols are not legally classified as firearms. I would recommend against declaring one and hoping to explain how you're scamming the system if your bag ever disappears. Why give someone (who is probably already annoyed to be dealing with a lost luggage report) a reason to figure out whether or not it's illegal to declare a non-firearm as a firearm?
There are plenty of options, for anyone who isn't a felon. Blank guns and black powder pistols are available via mail order with no additional paperwork. For anyone who is not adverse to filling out a 4473, there are many options in the ~$100 range, and many worth actually having and using for ~$300. Think of the cost as a one time investment in baggage insurance.
Every time I've flown with a firearm, it only takes me a few extra minutes to check my bag with one of the ticketing agents, fill out the declaration card, and have my bag x-rayed. Even flying out of California, I've never run into an airline employee that wasn't familiar with the process for checking firearms. East coast could be different, I've never flown there.
Indeed, more information *can* yield a clearer picture of the event, situation, etc.
However, more data also simplifies the job of cherry picking data points to prove some totally random theory.
Hope drives the former, while laziness drives the latter.
Anything you say can *and* will be used against you in a court of law (except in cases where you're exempt from the extra paperwork of courts). That takes on a more ominous tone when you can't control the massive volume of data being collected and generated about everything you ever do.
I suspect the better people quit because mediocrity was being rewarded, which means the workload on people who don't do a crap job becomes impossible.
Of course, the longer term issue is also that the company is going to collapse and those who see it coming will jump ship before the whole company collapses and there are that many other people looking for jobs. "Company went out of business and I didn't see it coming" isn't a great response to "why did you leave your last job?"
Energy weapons and their relationship to individuals can be similar to bullets. If there's one with your name on it, there's nothing you can do about it. It's all the ones addressed "To Whom It May Concern" that you want to avoid.