It'd at least be consistent if you boycotted sites that used ads [...] unless you are intending to cause harm as a method of protest
No, I don't boycott any sites and I don't wish harm on anyone (unless they deserve it:-) But I believe my position is reasonably consistent - see below.
If you don't support the revenue model, don't use the resources provided which are based on that revenue model
Only in part. You are missing one very important detail here. Imagine Slashdot that is financed by ads; however nobody posts and there is nothing to read. How many visitors would that Web site gather? I'd be surprised if that would be more than zero.
So the answer here is obvious. The value of Slashdot is created by the posters. Without your comment and my comment and our debate there would be no value in the site. Even if editors post articles, these same articles are available in a million other places. I don't know about everyone, but I personally value the discussion. So I'm paying in the same coin, by writing the content for free. It is, IMO, immeasurably more valuable contribution, considering the abysmally low ad performance, especially between geeks.
You can see the truth of it on the example of Technocrat.net. I don't know if you were visiting this site of BP - it was a good decade ago. They called Slashdot "that other site", having their noses in stratosphere. In the end/. is still with us, but technocrat.net is not. Why? Because they had too small an audience, not enough contributors (outside of cts:-) and basically the site was too smart for its own good. Same with kuro5hin.org; right now their front page is NSFW. The psychology of both sites is the same - small groups trolling each other. Slashdot is not one of them because the noise from a few trolls is overwhelmed by millions of almost sensible comments from hundreds of thousands of nearly sane geeks:-)
It's incredibly arrogant of people to block ads simply because they dislike advertisements on an idealogical basis.
I block each and every ad because I will *never* click on any of them. Serving them to me would be a waste of bits, and it would annoy me too. I don't buy things because they are advertised. I buy things that I need, and when I do my research I never ask the manufacturer about quality of his product.
Perhaps some people can sustain a thoughtful conversation while reading a newspaper while listening to the music while watching TV while assembling a computer. I can't. If I'm browsing the Web for something, that's all I'm doing. Distractions are not tolerated. If one day AdBlock disappears I will disable all scripting in the browser and will disable downloading of images. It will be back to Lynx. Since I primarily need text, this won't affect me. The Slashdot's own CSS has been broken in this browser for years, I'm reading it as plain text and that's how I like it. Besides, what is there to see, Slashdot doesn't allow inline images, unlike every other blog:-)
What are the odds the people in office in 1953 are still in office
The USA is not a dictatorship where everything depends on the will of one man. The USA is ruled by the immortal collective of politicians. Old politicians die, young politicians enter, but the "hive mind" remains the same. This can be easily seen from the fact that the US policy hasn't changed substantially since 1900's.
People still say things like this makes to make themselves feel superior?
People say that [they don't watch TV] because they discovered how much free time they recover by forgoing the stupid box. Some of that time they may spend on the Internet, but at least they can choose the level of stupid that they are comfortable with.
not once have they actually shown the crash site. just parts.
How much would it satisfy you to see a rocky terrain, a little pit in the ground, and a bunch of unrecognizable pieces of metal scattered around?
If you have parts you can fake the crash site. Because of that the value of showing a picture of a crash site is zero. It doesn't even matter if the picture is a small JPEG or a huge RAW file - the photos themselves can be real.
Parts themselves are harder to fake. What you have left then is sources of those parts (as you pointed out.)
Perhaps; but that's irrelevant. You are getting actors who are working from professionally written scripts. You don't know who writes the script, and you don't vote for those writers, or against them.
Actors are disposable; if Obama fails the reelection then it's OK too - there are others ready to take the crown for a while and then, four years later, disappear into the sunset, all set for life.
why are you using a free email account to be the key to owning your domain name? Run your own email server!
You shouldn't have a contact email on the domain that is being administered. Your suggestion is good only if you have several domains registered by different registrars, and if your email is very reliable (with reverse DNS and such.) Then you can cross-link these records. For everyone else Gmail is a rational choice; it's free, it's reliable, and it's always there.
Article says "They're still researching options, but the tentative plan is for a high-speed fixed wireless connection with a satellite backup."
They will have fun running a link at several GHz over 24+ miles (as it is required to escape US EEZ.) First of all, it's too far - the beam will have to go underwater at some point, for any reasonable height of the antenna. But if they manage to install the shore part on some mountain then still they need to maintain alignment of the ship-based dish to the fixed dish while the ship is moving.
Regardless, it's a pointless exercise that will go nowhere. SV software startups do not need face time with anyone. The customer is often faceless, like millions of Dropbox users or Skype users or any other users of software. What coders need is comfortable cubicles on land, and conference rooms, and internet that is too cheap to meter.
I have a strong feeling this would be awfull. It would be used for everything except tech start-ups.
Meth labs, perhaps?
Because who can do coding on a moving ship? Why would you need to do coding on a ship if your Internet link over satellite will cost you $1 per byte? You'd be better off staying where you came from and using Skype for telepresence.
Coders are seldom even needed for high level meetings. Only a couple of people in a company are tasked with maintaining contact with customers. The rest are cubicle dwellers.
At least, long enough to matter if you're actively trying to conceive.
It's much cheaper to form a habit of climbing a tall tower every month and throwing a couple thousand dollars up in the air. You spend an hour doing that and then you are free for the rest of the month.
Also you will become famous. Hardly anyone became famous only for having a child, though the child costs more.
if you talk to people in China about it, they're the first to tell you its better to be ten years old and making four dollars a day than being ten years old and starving.
The current response goes like that:
If a child works he doesn't have time to go to school
Nobody starves in the USA
There can be a counter-argument, of course:
School is of no use to many anyway
Work is good; workers clearly understand where their daily bread is coming from, as opposed to pampered children living on other people's money (see OWS.)
Work is usually creative; most people are happy that their work is wanted and appreciated.
Perhaps nobody is starving in the USA today, but how long will that last? Those who live on public assistance don't have any stores of wealth as backup for a rainy day.
Traditionally and historically children started working as early as they could (starting with managing a flock of geese, I guess.) The school, if at all available, was the Sunday affair, and for some reason instead of calculus children were given some holy book (good luck decoding that.)
In my time, when I went to school myself, it was hard work. I'd gladly work at a lathe making some bolts instead of sitting in a bunch of courses that I had (and have) no affinity to, like literature or music or painting (modulo engineering drawings) or any sort of physical exercise beyond breathing. Those courses gave me nothing of value. All that I ever learned in those areas was learned willingly, independently, and in its own time. You just can't take a serious book written by a middle-aged writer about some serious love affair and then teach the subject to children. At best they will memorize your explanation and will mechanistically recite it whenever asked. However a grown man (outside of Slashdot) would be able to tell all about it in his own words.
You even have routing algorithms via phone apps that help you get from any arbitrary point to another point the fastest way or with fewest stops or with shortest walking distance.
In other words, you have routing algorithms that help you arrange your life around the convenience of the machine. Not the other way around. What a nice idea:-)
Here are some thoughts on all that. Not really a debate, just an illustration. Some of the below may be even wrong, however improbable that may sound:-)
"Service restored within days" - perhaps. But that's in case of flooding, to which the infrastructure (especially one that is mounted high on poles and towers) is relatively immune. You need to provide power, but that's basically all. Cables aren't afraid of water.
The situation can be very different after an earthquake. Those cables can be physically torn along a 100 mile long, 1" wide crack in the ground. Even if towers have power they can't deliver the data to anywhere else. You can talk to the tower, if you wish, but not to the switch that decides who calls who. The towers are connected with fiber; that cable is easy to break and pretty hard to repair, especially in bad conditions.
There is one more consideration. Katrina was a local event, completely harmless to anyone not at the center of the storm. Help was coming because help was sent. However in case of widespread emergency - say, a nuclear strike, or even a large riot - anyone who can help will be doing his best to run for the hills. Nobody will be coming to save you. If evacuation is required hams will quickly arrange for a convoy, with some people providing trucks and SUVs and with other people providing weapons and ammo, and yet other group of people will bring food and fuel... A convoy of a hundred vehicles is hard to attack; but if you go alone you will lose your car, your supplies and probably your life before you even get out of the city.
There is yet another possible consideration. Public communications can be intentionally disabled. This can be done by rioters, or this can be done by the natural damage done to the infrastructure, or this can be done by the government for any one out of several likely and good reasons. London riots demonstrated how much the modern communication technology aids rioters in forming flash mobs, evading the police, and planning new attacks. If the phone service is intentionally shut down it won't coming back up any time soon until the order had been restored.
without practice simply having an amateur radio is completely useless.
You can say that about anything - a car, a gun, a fishing rod, a bicycle. Humans are genetically programmed to only eat and reproduce; everything else requires practice.
within 2 weeks there was signal in most of the affected region
Unfortunately you can be killed within one minute if you get into a wrong place (with natural or human hazards.) Radios allow your group to communicate. FRS radios are good, but they have limited range and only few have universal charging connectors. A 2m HT will let you communicate over a large flat area. An HF radio will let you communicate anywhere. Most of ham gear is powered by 13.8V which is the voltage of a car battery. There are many solar power sources, and a whole class for the Field Day.
You do realize that amateur radio has a much bigger use than that in a disaster right?
I'm sure he knows that. But emergency situations are important enough (such as your life may depend on them) to pay a little bit of attention to the matter and keep a spare battery in a safe place. This won't hurt your CQ WW contesting and you don't have to sign up for ARES or RACES. Just be aware where your local repeaters are and how long their backup batteries can last.
Isn't it the responsibility of everyone, especially those in the military, to refuse to obey unjust orders?
He leaked, say, 100K documents, out of which one (or ten) depict war crimes. The prosecution will charge him with leaking of 99,990 documents - all other documents, those that he had no business leaking and that don't reveal any atrocities.
It will be a tall order to explain why he had to disclose so many diplomatic cables that cite names and private opinions that were told in secret, tete a tete. The harm caused to the prestige of the USA can be easily demonstrated; but that would be not even required because Manning violated his orders. If you take a rifle, fire it randomly and manage to not kill anyone it doesn't make you innocent; quite the opposite. So by the letter of the law he will be found guilty. And absence of the war crime documents in the prosecution's package will make it impossible for him to refer to those war crimes for justification of his act.
More likely, we will see a slow trend towards computer-assisted human driving.
That would be ten times as hard as overnight switching to automatic driving. Computers in cars can talk to each other, report their speed, position and intention. There would be no surprises, short of hardware failures.
However a self-driving car that drives among human drivers has to posess an AI that is comparable to human mind. I pick up clues to other driver's intentions all the time. For example, if a car shifts to the left side of the lane and the driver looks over his left shoulder he probably going to change lane. A robot car that doesn't understand what it sees will be left without those clues - even if its crude rangefinders and such can detect such minute movements.
Besides, who wants to let the computer drive if the driver is ultimately responsible? If I'm responsible then I'm driving; or if the computer is responsible then I'm not touching anything.
One possible migration strategy is lanes or roads that allow only automated driving. This promotes the technology but leaves some road space for older cars (of which we have too many to just discard and replace overnight.)
Well, women held jobs for far longer than a century, of course. But the most basic reasoning in the parent post is probably correct: women became a power in politics after they became power in general and were able to have their voices heard. That required a few changes in the society, all the way from "barefoot & pregnant in the kitchen" to CEO jobs in large corporations.
If the uptake were greater, as it is in, for example, Germany
Then the USA would be Germany, size-wise and culture-wise.
I, personally, live 3 miles horizontally and 1300 feet vertically away from the nearest bus stop. Even if the bus comes every 30 seconds and is free and goes wherever I ask the driver to go, I physically can't get to and from the bus stop from my home in a reasonable time even if I carry nothing. The weather could be pretty bad too; if there is ice on the road I'd be skidding all the way downhill; guess that takes care of one half of the way:-)
I could, of course, exchange my 8 acre property for a 100 sq. ft. studio in the city, on the 37th floor, but that's the difference in lifestyle, culture and even cost that forms the difference between highly urbanized Germany and largely rural USA.
How would you like your Internet if all packets from all users are bundled into supermegapackets, each 10 Gb long, and then sent to all routers in the world, sequentially, on the odd chance that one byte out of those 10 Gb is addressed to that router? (The supermegapacket, like a bus, doesn't know where its passengers need to go.) You'd insert your packets when the supermegapacket goes by your home router; that'd be something like once per minute, or even more frequently in some special cases. Packets for you would disembark at the same time.
Well, of course if you think that one "delivery route" for the whole world is not enough then at certain routers (very few!) the supermegapacket can be taken apart, and its components can be repackaged into other supermegapackets that go to other routes. This only takes another minute per transfer - plenty fast, if you ask me.
Since that is also stupid, you will be reducing the size of supermegapackets more and more, and you will be increasing the number of routes until you arrive at the status quo.
Personal cars are popular because they offer 100% availability and because they offer point to point connection, at the shortest (or fastest) route that you control. They are also pretty cheap; bus tickets can be very expensive and you are typically charged per ride, not per day. So one day of shopping can result in spending more on the bus than on the goods.
the judge will determine that: 1. You're still the operator.
That will not happen if you legally buy a self-driving car that is approved by the government for autonomous use and sold as such. You can't be charged with any sort of driving if you have no legal duty to drive this car. A chaffeur-driven car is a good example. If anything happens, the car + the chaffeur are responsible, not you in the back seat.
The only way, IMO, for you to get into trouble in a self-driving car is by illegally importing it or modifying or building, and using it in such way without the government's approval. This doesn't just apply to self-driving; you can't build a random monster car and drive it; it has to be street-legal.
What you are referring to is energy concentrated in a small part of the body as opposed to the whole body. The scanners distribute the energy over the whole body
That's not what I read. Most of the energy of the scanner is absorbed by the skin, and the analogy is very much correct. I'm not copying the entire content of that URL here, please go there and have a look - the letter with concerns is written not by a couple of nerds in a basement but by scientists (unless membership in the National Academy of Sciences means nothing.) Let me just cite one small paragraph:
"Unlike other scanners, these new devices operate at relatively low beam energies (28keV). The majority of their energy is delivered to the skin and the underlying tissue. Thus, while the dose would be safe if it were distributed throughout the volume of the entire body, the dose to the skin may be dangerously high."
any breakdown with the scanning mechanism will be immediately evident in the image.
That would be of little consolation to you. Let's imagine a real world scenario: the scanning stops - because, for example, someone shoved a blob of chewing gum into the gears. The machine starts working slower, slower and finally stops, with the X-ray beam focused on something totally unimportant, like your eyes or your brain (upper or lower:-) Let's say the interlocks failed and the beam is not shut off.
What would you expect from a team of inept users of this technology? Do you believe they have a clue how the machine works? Do you think they care to know? Maybe there is one geek in the whole TSA, and he is not operating the machines anyway.
The operator sees that the image is bad or incomplete. What do you think will happen? The operator WILL REPEAT THE SCAN - again and again and again, potentially burning raster tattoos into your skin with the X-ray beam. Only after several attempts he will give up. You will not be told what happened. You will be told to go to another machine or you will be molested by hand. You will not know what just occurred, and the TSA will get rid of you as fast as they can (or not, even if they themselves have no idea what they just did to you.) In any case, you will be getting radiation burns on your body within days, and good luck matching this to any specific machine in any specific airport. TSA will tell you that "safety of passengers is #1 concern of TSA and nothing like what happened to you could possibly happen to anyone, you included."
Only those who are already felons. Those who yet aren't are a hair's breadth from becoming one. They are playing with fire, and that doesn't even include the police. A brawl between several OWSers can end up with someone dead; this has already happened in Oakland, as reported.
In Oregon, assaulting a police officer will get you a minimum of 14 days, and since it's a class C felony there's a max of 5 years and $125,000 fine.
That would be probably so if one violator is caught on otherwise good and quiet day, when the police has plenty of time to spend on him.
However case of mass disturbances it's very hard to prove who did what to who. If an arbitrary number of OWSers form a circle and each points to the guy to the right of him the police will have to release them all. There is strength in numbers.
I see. And these guys are just out there to have fun. They don't think much is at stake.
All I can see is a game. Do you see any sensible plan in their actions? Something that can be really, you know, accomplished by what they are doing? They look and act as children, but instead of ice cream they want other people's money so that someone can teach them for free. So far all their accomplishments consist of making noise and stink. (They probably also exchanged every communicable disease under the Sun, but that's their personal problem.)
They haven't formed the angry mob yet though, at the present "people" can only be heard starting to talk about forming said angry mob. Therefore, something has to be done.
Well, reading them the Riot Act would be a good start. If that fails, other provisions of the said act shall be implemented. The 99% of the country don't want the OWSers. Not because everything in the government is peachy but because OWS doesn't seem to be capable of any positive action. All that OWS is brewing is a bloodbath. Now, what would that accomplish and who would benefit?
Slashdot Mirror
It'd at least be consistent if you boycotted sites that used ads [...] unless you are intending to cause harm as a method of protest
No, I don't boycott any sites and I don't wish harm on anyone (unless they deserve it :-) But I believe my position is reasonably consistent - see below.
If you don't support the revenue model, don't use the resources provided which are based on that revenue model
Only in part. You are missing one very important detail here. Imagine Slashdot that is financed by ads; however nobody posts and there is nothing to read. How many visitors would that Web site gather? I'd be surprised if that would be more than zero.
So the answer here is obvious. The value of Slashdot is created by the posters. Without your comment and my comment and our debate there would be no value in the site. Even if editors post articles, these same articles are available in a million other places. I don't know about everyone, but I personally value the discussion. So I'm paying in the same coin, by writing the content for free. It is, IMO, immeasurably more valuable contribution, considering the abysmally low ad performance, especially between geeks.
You can see the truth of it on the example of Technocrat.net. I don't know if you were visiting this site of BP - it was a good decade ago. They called Slashdot "that other site", having their noses in stratosphere. In the end /. is still with us, but technocrat.net is not. Why? Because they had too small an audience, not enough contributors (outside of cts :-) and basically the site was too smart for its own good. Same with kuro5hin.org; right now their front page is NSFW. The psychology of both sites is the same - small groups trolling each other. Slashdot is not one of them because the noise from a few trolls is overwhelmed by millions of almost sensible comments from hundreds of thousands of nearly sane geeks :-)
It's incredibly arrogant of people to block ads simply because they dislike advertisements on an idealogical basis.
I block each and every ad because I will *never* click on any of them. Serving them to me would be a waste of bits, and it would annoy me too. I don't buy things because they are advertised. I buy things that I need, and when I do my research I never ask the manufacturer about quality of his product.
Perhaps some people can sustain a thoughtful conversation while reading a newspaper while listening to the music while watching TV while assembling a computer. I can't. If I'm browsing the Web for something, that's all I'm doing. Distractions are not tolerated. If one day AdBlock disappears I will disable all scripting in the browser and will disable downloading of images. It will be back to Lynx. Since I primarily need text, this won't affect me. The Slashdot's own CSS has been broken in this browser for years, I'm reading it as plain text and that's how I like it. Besides, what is there to see, Slashdot doesn't allow inline images, unlike every other blog :-)
But I think in this case, it's more appropriate to say, "What took them so long?"
It was probably night in Iran when the Virtual Embassy was announced.
What are the odds the people in office in 1953 are still in office
The USA is not a dictatorship where everything depends on the will of one man. The USA is ruled by the immortal collective of politicians. Old politicians die, young politicians enter, but the "hive mind" remains the same. This can be easily seen from the fact that the US policy hasn't changed substantially since 1900's.
People still say things like this makes to make themselves feel superior?
People say that [they don't watch TV] because they discovered how much free time they recover by forgoing the stupid box. Some of that time they may spend on the Internet, but at least they can choose the level of stupid that they are comfortable with.
not once have they actually shown the crash site. just parts.
How much would it satisfy you to see a rocky terrain, a little pit in the ground, and a bunch of unrecognizable pieces of metal scattered around?
If you have parts you can fake the crash site. Because of that the value of showing a picture of a crash site is zero. It doesn't even matter if the picture is a small JPEG or a huge RAW file - the photos themselves can be real.
Parts themselves are harder to fake. What you have left then is sources of those parts (as you pointed out.)
Better comedians than clowns.
Perhaps; but that's irrelevant. You are getting actors who are working from professionally written scripts. You don't know who writes the script, and you don't vote for those writers, or against them.
Actors are disposable; if Obama fails the reelection then it's OK too - there are others ready to take the crown for a while and then, four years later, disappear into the sunset, all set for life.
why are you using a free email account to be the key to owning your domain name? Run your own email server!
You shouldn't have a contact email on the domain that is being administered. Your suggestion is good only if you have several domains registered by different registrars, and if your email is very reliable (with reverse DNS and such.) Then you can cross-link these records. For everyone else Gmail is a rational choice; it's free, it's reliable, and it's always there.
Article says "They're still researching options, but the tentative plan is for a high-speed fixed wireless connection with a satellite backup."
They will have fun running a link at several GHz over 24+ miles (as it is required to escape US EEZ.) First of all, it's too far - the beam will have to go underwater at some point, for any reasonable height of the antenna. But if they manage to install the shore part on some mountain then still they need to maintain alignment of the ship-based dish to the fixed dish while the ship is moving.
Regardless, it's a pointless exercise that will go nowhere. SV software startups do not need face time with anyone. The customer is often faceless, like millions of Dropbox users or Skype users or any other users of software. What coders need is comfortable cubicles on land, and conference rooms, and internet that is too cheap to meter.
I have a strong feeling this would be awfull. It would be used for everything except tech start-ups.
Meth labs, perhaps?
Because who can do coding on a moving ship? Why would you need to do coding on a ship if your Internet link over satellite will cost you $1 per byte? You'd be better off staying where you came from and using Skype for telepresence.
Coders are seldom even needed for high level meetings. Only a couple of people in a company are tasked with maintaining contact with customers. The rest are cubicle dwellers.
At least, long enough to matter if you're actively trying to conceive.
It's much cheaper to form a habit of climbing a tall tower every month and throwing a couple thousand dollars up in the air. You spend an hour doing that and then you are free for the rest of the month.
Also you will become famous. Hardly anyone became famous only for having a child, though the child costs more.
if you talk to people in China about it, they're the first to tell you its better to be ten years old and making four dollars a day than being ten years old and starving.
The current response goes like that:
There can be a counter-argument, of course:
Traditionally and historically children started working as early as they could (starting with managing a flock of geese, I guess.) The school, if at all available, was the Sunday affair, and for some reason instead of calculus children were given some holy book (good luck decoding that.)
In my time, when I went to school myself, it was hard work. I'd gladly work at a lathe making some bolts instead of sitting in a bunch of courses that I had (and have) no affinity to, like literature or music or painting (modulo engineering drawings) or any sort of physical exercise beyond breathing. Those courses gave me nothing of value. All that I ever learned in those areas was learned willingly, independently, and in its own time. You just can't take a serious book written by a middle-aged writer about some serious love affair and then teach the subject to children. At best they will memorize your explanation and will mechanistically recite it whenever asked. However a grown man (outside of Slashdot) would be able to tell all about it in his own words.
You even have routing algorithms via phone apps that help you get from any arbitrary point to another point the fastest way or with fewest stops or with shortest walking distance.
In other words, you have routing algorithms that help you arrange your life around the convenience of the machine. Not the other way around. What a nice idea :-)
Here are some thoughts on all that. Not really a debate, just an illustration. Some of the below may be even wrong, however improbable that may sound :-)
"Service restored within days" - perhaps. But that's in case of flooding, to which the infrastructure (especially one that is mounted high on poles and towers) is relatively immune. You need to provide power, but that's basically all. Cables aren't afraid of water.
The situation can be very different after an earthquake. Those cables can be physically torn along a 100 mile long, 1" wide crack in the ground. Even if towers have power they can't deliver the data to anywhere else. You can talk to the tower, if you wish, but not to the switch that decides who calls who. The towers are connected with fiber; that cable is easy to break and pretty hard to repair, especially in bad conditions.
There is one more consideration. Katrina was a local event, completely harmless to anyone not at the center of the storm. Help was coming because help was sent. However in case of widespread emergency - say, a nuclear strike, or even a large riot - anyone who can help will be doing his best to run for the hills. Nobody will be coming to save you. If evacuation is required hams will quickly arrange for a convoy, with some people providing trucks and SUVs and with other people providing weapons and ammo, and yet other group of people will bring food and fuel... A convoy of a hundred vehicles is hard to attack; but if you go alone you will lose your car, your supplies and probably your life before you even get out of the city.
There is yet another possible consideration. Public communications can be intentionally disabled. This can be done by rioters, or this can be done by the natural damage done to the infrastructure, or this can be done by the government for any one out of several likely and good reasons. London riots demonstrated how much the modern communication technology aids rioters in forming flash mobs, evading the police, and planning new attacks. If the phone service is intentionally shut down it won't coming back up any time soon until the order had been restored.
And you might feel unwelcome if you're LGBT; they're, um, a little on the conservative side.
I'm curious how would they know? Especially over the radio?
without practice simply having an amateur radio is completely useless.
You can say that about anything - a car, a gun, a fishing rod, a bicycle. Humans are genetically programmed to only eat and reproduce; everything else requires practice.
within 2 weeks there was signal in most of the affected region
Unfortunately you can be killed within one minute if you get into a wrong place (with natural or human hazards.) Radios allow your group to communicate. FRS radios are good, but they have limited range and only few have universal charging connectors. A 2m HT will let you communicate over a large flat area. An HF radio will let you communicate anywhere. Most of ham gear is powered by 13.8V which is the voltage of a car battery. There are many solar power sources, and a whole class for the Field Day.
You do realize that amateur radio has a much bigger use than that in a disaster right?
I'm sure he knows that. But emergency situations are important enough (such as your life may depend on them) to pay a little bit of attention to the matter and keep a spare battery in a safe place. This won't hurt your CQ WW contesting and you don't have to sign up for ARES or RACES. Just be aware where your local repeaters are and how long their backup batteries can last.
Isn't it the responsibility of everyone, especially those in the military, to refuse to obey unjust orders?
He leaked, say, 100K documents, out of which one (or ten) depict war crimes. The prosecution will charge him with leaking of 99,990 documents - all other documents, those that he had no business leaking and that don't reveal any atrocities.
It will be a tall order to explain why he had to disclose so many diplomatic cables that cite names and private opinions that were told in secret, tete a tete. The harm caused to the prestige of the USA can be easily demonstrated; but that would be not even required because Manning violated his orders. If you take a rifle, fire it randomly and manage to not kill anyone it doesn't make you innocent; quite the opposite. So by the letter of the law he will be found guilty. And absence of the war crime documents in the prosecution's package will make it impossible for him to refer to those war crimes for justification of his act.
More likely, we will see a slow trend towards computer-assisted human driving.
That would be ten times as hard as overnight switching to automatic driving. Computers in cars can talk to each other, report their speed, position and intention. There would be no surprises, short of hardware failures.
However a self-driving car that drives among human drivers has to posess an AI that is comparable to human mind. I pick up clues to other driver's intentions all the time. For example, if a car shifts to the left side of the lane and the driver looks over his left shoulder he probably going to change lane. A robot car that doesn't understand what it sees will be left without those clues - even if its crude rangefinders and such can detect such minute movements.
Besides, who wants to let the computer drive if the driver is ultimately responsible? If I'm responsible then I'm driving; or if the computer is responsible then I'm not touching anything.
One possible migration strategy is lanes or roads that allow only automated driving. This promotes the technology but leaves some road space for older cars (of which we have too many to just discard and replace overnight.)
Well, women held jobs for far longer than a century, of course. But the most basic reasoning in the parent post is probably correct: women became a power in politics after they became power in general and were able to have their voices heard. That required a few changes in the society, all the way from "barefoot & pregnant in the kitchen" to CEO jobs in large corporations.
There is a simple test for that. If Reuters can sue the US Government and win then they indeed have that right; otherwise they don't.
If the uptake were greater, as it is in, for example, Germany
Then the USA would be Germany, size-wise and culture-wise.
I, personally, live 3 miles horizontally and 1300 feet vertically away from the nearest bus stop. Even if the bus comes every 30 seconds and is free and goes wherever I ask the driver to go, I physically can't get to and from the bus stop from my home in a reasonable time even if I carry nothing. The weather could be pretty bad too; if there is ice on the road I'd be skidding all the way downhill; guess that takes care of one half of the way :-)
I could, of course, exchange my 8 acre property for a 100 sq. ft. studio in the city, on the 37th floor, but that's the difference in lifestyle, culture and even cost that forms the difference between highly urbanized Germany and largely rural USA.
Mass transportation is much more realistic.
How would you like your Internet if all packets from all users are bundled into supermegapackets, each 10 Gb long, and then sent to all routers in the world, sequentially, on the odd chance that one byte out of those 10 Gb is addressed to that router? (The supermegapacket, like a bus, doesn't know where its passengers need to go.) You'd insert your packets when the supermegapacket goes by your home router; that'd be something like once per minute, or even more frequently in some special cases. Packets for you would disembark at the same time.
Well, of course if you think that one "delivery route" for the whole world is not enough then at certain routers (very few!) the supermegapacket can be taken apart, and its components can be repackaged into other supermegapackets that go to other routes. This only takes another minute per transfer - plenty fast, if you ask me.
Since that is also stupid, you will be reducing the size of supermegapackets more and more, and you will be increasing the number of routes until you arrive at the status quo.
Personal cars are popular because they offer 100% availability and because they offer point to point connection, at the shortest (or fastest) route that you control. They are also pretty cheap; bus tickets can be very expensive and you are typically charged per ride, not per day. So one day of shopping can result in spending more on the bus than on the goods.
the judge will determine that: 1. You're still the operator.
That will not happen if you legally buy a self-driving car that is approved by the government for autonomous use and sold as such. You can't be charged with any sort of driving if you have no legal duty to drive this car. A chaffeur-driven car is a good example. If anything happens, the car + the chaffeur are responsible, not you in the back seat.
The only way, IMO, for you to get into trouble in a self-driving car is by illegally importing it or modifying or building, and using it in such way without the government's approval. This doesn't just apply to self-driving; you can't build a random monster car and drive it; it has to be street-legal.
What you are referring to is energy concentrated in a small part of the body as opposed to the whole body. The scanners distribute the energy over the whole body
That's not what I read. Most of the energy of the scanner is absorbed by the skin, and the analogy is very much correct. I'm not copying the entire content of that URL here, please go there and have a look - the letter with concerns is written not by a couple of nerds in a basement but by scientists (unless membership in the National Academy of Sciences means nothing.) Let me just cite one small paragraph:
any breakdown with the scanning mechanism will be immediately evident in the image.
That would be of little consolation to you. Let's imagine a real world scenario: the scanning stops - because, for example, someone shoved a blob of chewing gum into the gears. The machine starts working slower, slower and finally stops, with the X-ray beam focused on something totally unimportant, like your eyes or your brain (upper or lower :-) Let's say the interlocks failed and the beam is not shut off.
What would you expect from a team of inept users of this technology? Do you believe they have a clue how the machine works? Do you think they care to know? Maybe there is one geek in the whole TSA, and he is not operating the machines anyway.
The operator sees that the image is bad or incomplete. What do you think will happen? The operator WILL REPEAT THE SCAN - again and again and again, potentially burning raster tattoos into your skin with the X-ray beam. Only after several attempts he will give up. You will not be told what happened. You will be told to go to another machine or you will be molested by hand. You will not know what just occurred, and the TSA will get rid of you as fast as they can (or not, even if they themselves have no idea what they just did to you.) In any case, you will be getting radiation burns on your body within days, and good luck matching this to any specific machine in any specific airport. TSA will tell you that "safety of passengers is #1 concern of TSA and nothing like what happened to you could possibly happen to anyone, you included."
They're felons all of a sudden?
Only those who are already felons. Those who yet aren't are a hair's breadth from becoming one. They are playing with fire, and that doesn't even include the police. A brawl between several OWSers can end up with someone dead; this has already happened in Oakland, as reported.
In Oregon, assaulting a police officer will get you a minimum of 14 days, and since it's a class C felony there's a max of 5 years and $125,000 fine.
That would be probably so if one violator is caught on otherwise good and quiet day, when the police has plenty of time to spend on him.
However case of mass disturbances it's very hard to prove who did what to who. If an arbitrary number of OWSers form a circle and each points to the guy to the right of him the police will have to release them all. There is strength in numbers.
I see. And these guys are just out there to have fun. They don't think much is at stake.
All I can see is a game. Do you see any sensible plan in their actions? Something that can be really, you know, accomplished by what they are doing? They look and act as children, but instead of ice cream they want other people's money so that someone can teach them for free. So far all their accomplishments consist of making noise and stink. (They probably also exchanged every communicable disease under the Sun, but that's their personal problem.)
They haven't formed the angry mob yet though, at the present "people" can only be heard starting to talk about forming said angry mob. Therefore, something has to be done.
Well, reading them the Riot Act would be a good start. If that fails, other provisions of the said act shall be implemented. The 99% of the country don't want the OWSers. Not because everything in the government is peachy but because OWS doesn't seem to be capable of any positive action. All that OWS is brewing is a bloodbath. Now, what would that accomplish and who would benefit?