I thought sales would be huge because people like horses more than cars. Somebody please help!
The old Henry Ford saying goes (not that he necessarily said it) "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses". Point being, you never know what a consumer will do (even if you are that consumer) when presented with a new/different set of choices. Consumers are flocking away from physical keyboards when given the choice. Consumers overwhelmingly prefer thinner phones (since no matter how much more you charge, you can't get a slide out keyboard phone to be nearly as thin as one without) so when presented with the choice, they gladly give up the keyboard (if they ever wanted it) for a thinner phone.
Jesus this submission is so sad. Bennett, you overlooked the #1 rule of consumers... FIRST IMPRESSION IS EVERYTHING. If someone sees a lineup of ten phones in a showroom, nine of them thin and svelte and made of nice tightly constructed materials, while the tenth is twice as thick in order to accommodate the keyboard, they will immediately gravitate away from it. Yet, you overlooked this obvious decision point. Add to that the other rather obvious trend of smartphones: everyone wants to be Apple. The more your phone looks like an iPhone (to hell with what the courts think, amiright) the better it will sell. A slide out keyboard? Steve Jobs would come back to life as a zombie and have a personal sit-down to fire everyone at Apple if that ever happened. He would even skip eating their inferior, clunk-loving brains out of principal. So there you have it, please take a few more minutes to think through your next submission, and maybe you will actually have something insightful to say.
p.s. onscreen keyboards really do work great if you give them a chance. machine learning techniques by Google and Swype are getting pretty good at learning how and what you type, to allow for very fast and reliable input under even less than ideal conditions.
I guess one more... try to access it directly from the USB using a computer and special drivers and software designed to reflash a non-booting tablet... (ie. rooting your system).
Access via ADB doesnt require root to get to the point where you can confirm/deny the existence of functioning memory. It looks like the Transformer line has an out of band update method by installing a microSD card with the flash zip, and doing a startup with certain buttons pressed. If it can be coaxed through this process (even with a dead screen) it would wipe any previous user data. Watching the device state via the USB port and ADB would be helpful to know if the device is likely to respond in that kind of scenario.
Do you get the ADB device to register if you plug it in to a PC via USB and turn it on? That would be your only hope to wiping it assuming the screen is damaged but the SoC/flash still works to some extent. Also, have you tried opening it up? A similar thing happened to my Nexus device, and after popping the back cover off it turns out that the drop caused the battery to slide to one side, and come unplugged. Relocating the battery, adding a little more double sided tape, and snapping it all back together had it good as new in under 5 minutes.
Because NASA isn't in charge of the energy sector? They monitor and advise. DOE via FERC is in charge of the electrical sector. The ES-ISAC, run by the FERC-appointed ERO, NERC, and the regional Reliability Coordinators (PeakRC in the western US, formerly the WECC RC).
More to the point, there are NERC standards being developed which deal with geomagnetic disturbances. A TPL and EOP standard: http://www.nerc.com/pa/Stand/P...
The bigger issue is cost. We can prepare for anything, but at what cost? Are you ready for your electricity rates to double to cover a 12% chance in the next 10 years? It's a tough balanacing act.
Why would rates double as a result of putting into place a plan (and probably a few layers of communications systems on top of already existing infrastructure) to mitigate the problem before it starts? Oh right, because we would have to pay for a team at NASA, a team at FERC, a team at each of the regional ISO, etc. to all do the same thing? Ugh. Put NASA in charge, they got us to the moon damnit. If rocket scientists cant fix it, no one can.
Roll eyes and move on. I'm sorry you don't know how nuclear power plants work, nor how solar flares cause damage, but get with the program, son.
Critical electrical components in nuclear power plants are more than sufficiently shielded from electrical spikes, and EMPs don't cause magical explosions. Nor, if a melt down were somehow to occur, an explosion an expected outcome.
Actually professor you might want to take a second look at those figures. A nuclear plant relies entirely on *already produced electricity* for safe operation. With a normally functioning grid, this is not an issue. Take that out of the picture (in a scenario like a CME hit) and it will have to fall back on site generators (the local turbine generation is likely to go down with the grid) which hopefully will have been isolated from the effects of the CME and can be instantly switched in to the site system to take over and shut the plant down. However, if any of those switching components went bad during the CME hit, it could be hours before they are repaired, which starts to push the cooling safety margins to the limit (the plant is, after all, still producing heat as if it had a job to do). There are certainly good disaster plans in effect at nuclear plants for situations similar to this, but do you really want to test them all at once? There are bound to be holes. Mushroom cloud style explosions are out of the question, but we know from experience with Fukushima that all kinds of bad things can happen (including lots of little explosions of errant hydrogen) when plants go dark and can't be shut down safely.
Really? This would be devastating? We can't live without electricity, electronics, water pumps? It's amazing we're here today!
Yes, it very likely would. All those urban areas that grew as big and relatively healthy as they did, thanks to clean water and efficient sewage systems? If that wasn't brought back online, fast, they'd start moving toward their pre-sanitation population levels. The hard way.
Same would apply for agricultural areas and yields that depend on powered irrigation. Unless that was brought back online, and quickly enough to avoid damage to the crop, you'd see yields plummet toward historical levels, with population following suit shortly thereafter. Very unpleasant.
Hopefully there would be enough enough backup systems to restore function relatively quickly; but if not things would be unlikely to go well.
Generator-powered factories producing generators would suddenly be very very valuable.
The real question we should be asking is; why doesn't NASA have the authority to order a nationwide grid shutdown in the event that one of their several satellites dedicated strictly to predicting and identifying solar disruptions actually works and warns us before it happens? We have spent billions on this already, why not put that to use instead of fear mongering about how long it would take to manufacture a bunch of high voltage transformers?
Until the vendors who are building this system get their company name in the headlines, the status quo will continue.
The other key information is this: The SSA has 65,000 employees and is in charge of a staggering $736B per year (as of 2011, and it continues to rise). And we are here having a pissing match about all the reasons that $300M is too much to spend on the system that is supposed to make sense of over 300 million "customers" (1 dollar per customer?) One half of one percent of their annual budget is too much to get this right? Most corps spend upwards of 10% of their annual revenue on IT, and surely the SSA is not most corps but the scope of what they do is really impossible to underestimate so a project in the hundreds of millions shouldn't make anyone flinch.
The real missing key information is exactly why this kind of story is surprising, on any level, to anyone? My gut says it's the fake shock of someone who would protest anything that came out of the SSA.
These government agencies need to hire some developers for whom a few million hits is just another day. Something like girlsgonewild.com gets more traffic than healthcare.gov, and handles it with two well-configured commodity servers.
Something tells me that with girlsgonewild.com, the "interaction" is mostly "client-side" so the, er, "workload" is actually minimal. And the use case count, I believe, still stands at 1, and they are at best appealing to exactly half of the US population. It's a bit different than a place like the Social Security Administration, an org that has taken on the unenviable task of managing retirement and disability insurance for *every goddamn american* which is a pretty ludicrous scope. If raw horsepower were the issue, yes bring in outside help. The real problem (or at least one of them) is that of all 65,000 employees, many of them have a specific task since the aforementioned scope is so grand. Try finding a way to economize when you are basically building a system for a small clerical office, and then doing it about 15,000 times with each iteration just different enough from the last to require constant rewrites.
"What was the experience of riding a bicycle has become the equivalent of traveling by jumbo jet; replete with the delays, inspections, limitations on personal choices, and sudden, unexplained cancellations — all at a significantly higher cost."
You can't exactly get everywhere you need to go via bicycle these days. Blame globalization.
"Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States..."
Whoopsie, wrong questionnaire.
Here is the form you were looking for: "are you or have you ever posted to Slashdot as Anonymous Coward? Ok next question: Are you or have you ever browsed slashdot at -1?"
but any other area where the experience is worse than stock android of the equivalent version just seems weird.
Where do you think Samsung and LG stick all the junior devs and QAs? And then pull them off the moment they start making better design choices, to go work on more lucrative projects? Yep, the shitphones. The only choice with the bottom of the barrel phones is to go directly to stock android (which is pretty easy if you have an hour or so to kill and can follow basic instructions) so for Bennett to spend so much time wondering out loud why cheap phones are cheap is the weird part. How about an article on the cheapest phone you can turn into an AOSP/Cyanogen handset with good results? Nah, why bother; that would't start a flamewar!
I'm not sure. It was at 32000 feet when they last had contact, which means it wasn't quite at cruising altitude, but it was still several miles up. The 777's cruising speed is mach.84, about 630 MPH. I'm not going to do the math (i'd love it if one of you aerospace guys would, especially since we know where it landed and the last known altitude and the great circle between Schipol and Kuala Lumpur), but I think it would be safe to say that on the ascent it would be going about 350-450 MPH. I can't see terrorists getting their hands on that kind of hardware. Both Ukraine and Russia on the other hand...
FWIW the last flighttrack data showed a speed of 490 kts (564mph), altitude of 33,000 feet (a common cruising alt if there is turbulence at 35k+) Lat 48.088 Lon 38.6359.
How about they actually solve a murder, rape, or kidnapping once in a while? 35% of murders don't get solved
The second sentence contradicts the first. They do solve murders quite often; 65% of the time in fact.
Its actually more nuanced, only 2/3rd (65%) of all murder cases nationally see a single *arrest* which is to say that they have a decent suspect in mind. Not every arrest turns into a conviction, naturally, so the actual "solved" rate is much lower, below 50% for a lot of places. Here's a recent stat to help you plan your next murder: "In 2008, police solved 35 percent of the homicides in Chicago, 22 percent in New Orleans and 21 percent in Detroit. Yet authorities solved 75 percent of the killings in Philadelphia, 92 percent in Denver and 94 percent in San Diego." As you might expect, areas with lower murder rates overall saw a higher solve rate.
Plus, it really eliminates the need to own so many cars. The car can do multiple duty, and borrowing a car is much more practical when it can pick you up at your door (whether it is shared between neighbors or is actually a taxi).
Parking becomes much easier to optimize when cars can drop and pick people up anywhere, and park themselves. There is no need for parking locations to be within a short walk of every destination.
You can also split up cargo vs personnel transport. Passenger vehicles could be smaller and optimized for passengers, with cargo vehicles being big boxes on wheels. You could take a bus to the grocery store and send your 12 bags home in a cargo vehicle while you take a bus back, or a 1-person car, etc. People don't need to own a vehicle large enough to make that trip they make once a month - they can rent for that.
Endless possibilities for transportation when you don't need people in the loop.
You hit on the solution to the very problem. To operate in passenger-less mode simply require that the car be reciving destination instructions from an approved souce (such as some big, audit-able company) who would be a fair bit less likely to greenlight rolling-bomb commands on their cars.
THis is basic statistics learned by every doctor in medical school. specificity and sensitivity, prevalence, pretest and post test probability and false positive/true negative, false negative/true positive. They all factor in to deciding to use a medical test. Every person who comes in and demands a test ussually gets a lecture on this (at least from me) (at work have to post as AC)
Statistics aside there are two more pressing questions: 1, are patients with MCI more likely to convert (10% or greater) in subsequent years? 2, is there a preventative process that can be used by those that test positive, that is safe for the general population? In other words, do we get to narrow our treatment focus with these results, even a little bit? We can piss and moan about statistics but at the end of the day, who really gives a fuck if you were right about the onset of someone's dementia, unless you can do something about it?
1. Increase of cost. Adding a pole for the near side would add cost.
At least here in Sweden we have poles on both sides as people will be crossing the street in both directions. Yours work differently?
In the US the poles are installed at/past the sidewalk line opposite the roadway, in other words when you are standing to cross you cannot see the pole on your side because it is behind you. So, either you would have to get people to stand behind the pole, or have them turn around and look at the number before crossing (taking attention away from watching turning traffic, which a pedestrian must be very careful for).
Email requires bandwidth, and you can't distribute it through a CDN like you can with downloads. It's cheap for spammers because they anonymize their email, but security notifications say they come from microsoft.com. Now consider that you have BILLIONS of emails to send. That can get costly.
Why can't you distribute it via a CDN, exactly? I mean someone like Microsoft has either direct control over, or actually runs their own CDN servers: firing up a SMTP service (to route mail based on proximity to destination MX) should be the easy part.
I can't imagine Microsoft has to pay Microsoft for Microsoft products. Accounting may want them to move the money around, but that's stupid and pointless because it doesn't actually cost them money to give it to themselves.
If the cost license doesn't get you, then the compute cycles, ram allocations, and administrators' salaries will.../troll
My point was merely that Alexander's CV has very little on it that isn't either irrelevant to his potential customers (at least I hope our financial sector isn't looking for armored warfare expertise...) or closely connected to a series of fed jobs that just keep getting more heavily classified as time goes on.
Hmm let's see if you can pick out the spot where he would be versed only in armored warfare expertise or looking at secret documents all day (this is his CV for the past 15 years): Director of the National Security Agency (DIRNSA) Chief of the Central Security Service (CHCSS) Commander of the United States Cyber Command Commanding General of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command Director of Intelligence (J-2), United States Central Command Deputy Director for Intelligence (J-2) for the Joint Chiefs of Staff Head of the Army Intelligence and Security Command
Do you think it's possible, after working (ostensibly successfully) as the head of so many organizations, that he knows nothing about management, leadership, best practices, and nonclassified security methodologies (of which there are many)? Do you honestly think he spent 10 years, as the head of these orgs, pushing top secret papers across his desk instead of having his underlings take care of all of that? Come on. Furthermore, I think a lot of commentators on this thread have a complete misunderstanding of what a high-level consulting firm does. Hint, it has nothing to do with configuring firewalls and antivirus apps. Big multinationals will gladly pay $1M for advice as simple as "choose off the shelf security package A, instead of B" as long as it comes from someone whose credentials are beyond repute. He doesn't have to say anything about top secret operations, techniques, or sources, he just has to put his name behind something.
It is? Odd that someone as insignificant as me has it in his contract that any kind of "internal knowledge" he gains (and, bluntly, if an exploit isn't considered internal knowledge in a TLA, what is?) must not be used outside of very well defined areas of work for at the very least 2 years, while someone as the NSA head honcho gets a free pass to use such knowledge as he pleases.
It's hard to imagine that the banking industry is seen as competing with the NSA (in the sense that a non-compete would be enforceable)... Or is it?
So the poor general can't participate in the usual dance of former Washington insiders who use cronyism and connections to enrich themselves after 'serving' in government?
There should be a name for that... like 401(c)... where c stands for crony capitalism.
What's more hilarious is that, apparently, the only thing to General Alexander's credit as head of the NSA was his ability to keep secrets. He was literally "the most powerful cyber-lord in the world" (for lack of a better term) and his only qualification was keeping secrets? He didn't bring anything to the table in terms of management skills, best practices, or good judgement via foresight? Because that's what you have to read into a statement like "..Without the classified information he acquired in his former position, he literally would have nothing to offer to you." Kind of sad, mostly for the US military apparatus that apparently promotes from within, those that have no real skills to offer except keeping their mouth shut about what they did/saw/heard.
Not really, you're thinking about Politicians rather than police.
On one hand, damn all lawyers! The corporation stance is stupid legal wrangling. On the other hand, I'd never become a cop due to the incredibly ridiculous amount of liability, red tape, blatantly lying "news" channels and papers, and blame for having to enforce bad laws.
Go do some ride-alongs with your local police to see what they put up with.
It's not that the SWAT officers, their commanders, or anyone else is necessarily contriving a system where they get all the power and none of the oversight. SWAT teams are very expensive to hire, train, equip, and maintain. Hence, they need to be shared by many police districts. When the state cannot organize them any better than at the county and muni level, the solution is left up to the counties and munis to work out. And this is what they chose because it was the only thing that fit, a shared cost for shared resources.
That being said, the state really needs to intervene, now that it is painfully obvious the county/muni system doesnt work, and give them a structure (joint departments) that makes it possible. There is already too much overhead from the hundreds of different law enforcement orgs that dot each state, figuring this out is a step in the direction toward making the entire system more organized, and more accountable.
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I thought sales would be huge because people like horses more than cars. Somebody please help!
The old Henry Ford saying goes (not that he necessarily said it) "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses". Point being, you never know what a consumer will do (even if you are that consumer) when presented with a new/different set of choices. Consumers are flocking away from physical keyboards when given the choice. Consumers overwhelmingly prefer thinner phones (since no matter how much more you charge, you can't get a slide out keyboard phone to be nearly as thin as one without) so when presented with the choice, they gladly give up the keyboard (if they ever wanted it) for a thinner phone.
Jesus this submission is so sad. Bennett, you overlooked the #1 rule of consumers... FIRST IMPRESSION IS EVERYTHING. If someone sees a lineup of ten phones in a showroom, nine of them thin and svelte and made of nice tightly constructed materials, while the tenth is twice as thick in order to accommodate the keyboard, they will immediately gravitate away from it. Yet, you overlooked this obvious decision point. Add to that the other rather obvious trend of smartphones: everyone wants to be Apple. The more your phone looks like an iPhone (to hell with what the courts think, amiright) the better it will sell. A slide out keyboard? Steve Jobs would come back to life as a zombie and have a personal sit-down to fire everyone at Apple if that ever happened. He would even skip eating their inferior, clunk-loving brains out of principal. So there you have it, please take a few more minutes to think through your next submission, and maybe you will actually have something insightful to say.
p.s. onscreen keyboards really do work great if you give them a chance. machine learning techniques by Google and Swype are getting pretty good at learning how and what you type, to allow for very fast and reliable input under even less than ideal conditions.
I guess one more... try to access it directly from the USB using a computer and special drivers and software designed to reflash a non-booting tablet... (ie. rooting your system).
Access via ADB doesnt require root to get to the point where you can confirm/deny the existence of functioning memory. It looks like the Transformer line has an out of band update method by installing a microSD card with the flash zip, and doing a startup with certain buttons pressed. If it can be coaxed through this process (even with a dead screen) it would wipe any previous user data. Watching the device state via the USB port and ADB would be helpful to know if the device is likely to respond in that kind of scenario.
Do you get the ADB device to register if you plug it in to a PC via USB and turn it on? That would be your only hope to wiping it assuming the screen is damaged but the SoC/flash still works to some extent. Also, have you tried opening it up? A similar thing happened to my Nexus device, and after popping the back cover off it turns out that the drop caused the battery to slide to one side, and come unplugged. Relocating the battery, adding a little more double sided tape, and snapping it all back together had it good as new in under 5 minutes.
Because NASA isn't in charge of the energy sector? They monitor and advise. DOE via FERC is in charge of the electrical sector. The ES-ISAC, run by the FERC-appointed ERO, NERC, and the regional Reliability Coordinators (PeakRC in the western US, formerly the WECC RC).
More to the point, there are NERC standards being developed which deal with geomagnetic disturbances. A TPL and EOP standard: http://www.nerc.com/pa/Stand/P...
The bigger issue is cost. We can prepare for anything, but at what cost? Are you ready for your electricity rates to double to cover a 12% chance in the next 10 years? It's a tough balanacing act.
Why would rates double as a result of putting into place a plan (and probably a few layers of communications systems on top of already existing infrastructure) to mitigate the problem before it starts? Oh right, because we would have to pay for a team at NASA, a team at FERC, a team at each of the regional ISO, etc. to all do the same thing? Ugh. Put NASA in charge, they got us to the moon damnit. If rocket scientists cant fix it, no one can.
Roll eyes and move on. I'm sorry you don't know how nuclear power plants work, nor how solar flares cause damage, but get with the program, son.
Critical electrical components in nuclear power plants are more than sufficiently shielded from electrical spikes, and EMPs don't cause magical explosions. Nor, if a melt down were somehow to occur, an explosion an expected outcome.
Actually professor you might want to take a second look at those figures. A nuclear plant relies entirely on *already produced electricity* for safe operation. With a normally functioning grid, this is not an issue. Take that out of the picture (in a scenario like a CME hit) and it will have to fall back on site generators (the local turbine generation is likely to go down with the grid) which hopefully will have been isolated from the effects of the CME and can be instantly switched in to the site system to take over and shut the plant down. However, if any of those switching components went bad during the CME hit, it could be hours before they are repaired, which starts to push the cooling safety margins to the limit (the plant is, after all, still producing heat as if it had a job to do). There are certainly good disaster plans in effect at nuclear plants for situations similar to this, but do you really want to test them all at once? There are bound to be holes. Mushroom cloud style explosions are out of the question, but we know from experience with Fukushima that all kinds of bad things can happen (including lots of little explosions of errant hydrogen) when plants go dark and can't be shut down safely.
Really? This would be devastating? We can't live without electricity, electronics, water pumps? It's amazing we're here today!
Yes, it very likely would. All those urban areas that grew as big and relatively healthy as they did, thanks to clean water and efficient sewage systems? If that wasn't brought back online, fast, they'd start moving toward their pre-sanitation population levels. The hard way.
Same would apply for agricultural areas and yields that depend on powered irrigation. Unless that was brought back online, and quickly enough to avoid damage to the crop, you'd see yields plummet toward historical levels, with population following suit shortly thereafter. Very unpleasant.
Hopefully there would be enough enough backup systems to restore function relatively quickly; but if not things would be unlikely to go well.
Generator-powered factories producing generators would suddenly be very very valuable.
The real question we should be asking is; why doesn't NASA have the authority to order a nationwide grid shutdown in the event that one of their several satellites dedicated strictly to predicting and identifying solar disruptions actually works and warns us before it happens? We have spent billions on this already, why not put that to use instead of fear mongering about how long it would take to manufacture a bunch of high voltage transformers?
Until the vendors who are building this system get their company name in the headlines, the status quo will continue.
The other key information is this: The SSA has 65,000 employees and is in charge of a staggering $736B per year (as of 2011, and it continues to rise). And we are here having a pissing match about all the reasons that $300M is too much to spend on the system that is supposed to make sense of over 300 million "customers" (1 dollar per customer?) One half of one percent of their annual budget is too much to get this right? Most corps spend upwards of 10% of their annual revenue on IT, and surely the SSA is not most corps but the scope of what they do is really impossible to underestimate so a project in the hundreds of millions shouldn't make anyone flinch.
The real missing key information is exactly why this kind of story is surprising, on any level, to anyone? My gut says it's the fake shock of someone who would protest anything that came out of the SSA.
These government agencies need to hire some developers for whom a few million hits is just another day. Something like girlsgonewild.com gets more traffic than healthcare.gov, and handles it with two well-configured commodity servers.
Something tells me that with girlsgonewild.com, the "interaction" is mostly "client-side" so the, er, "workload" is actually minimal. And the use case count, I believe, still stands at 1, and they are at best appealing to exactly half of the US population. It's a bit different than a place like the Social Security Administration, an org that has taken on the unenviable task of managing retirement and disability insurance for *every goddamn american* which is a pretty ludicrous scope. If raw horsepower were the issue, yes bring in outside help. The real problem (or at least one of them) is that of all 65,000 employees, many of them have a specific task since the aforementioned scope is so grand. Try finding a way to economize when you are basically building a system for a small clerical office, and then doing it about 15,000 times with each iteration just different enough from the last to require constant rewrites.
"What was the experience of riding a bicycle has become the equivalent of traveling by jumbo jet; replete with the delays, inspections, limitations on personal choices, and sudden, unexplained cancellations — all at a significantly higher cost."
You can't exactly get everywhere you need to go via bicycle these days. Blame globalization.
"Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States..."
Whoopsie, wrong questionnaire.
Here is the form you were looking for: "are you or have you ever posted to Slashdot as Anonymous Coward? Ok next question: Are you or have you ever browsed slashdot at -1?"
we have a subversive on our hands!!!
I don't accept that throwing them away (the ones we know about) is the only counter. Hell, we can spare a few grams of payload and put one in space.
And wind up with *super*smallpox? Good fucking plan, Einstein!
Actually, good fucking plan. Let's do it.
but any other area where the experience is worse than stock android of the equivalent version just seems weird.
Where do you think Samsung and LG stick all the junior devs and QAs? And then pull them off the moment they start making better design choices, to go work on more lucrative projects? Yep, the shitphones. The only choice with the bottom of the barrel phones is to go directly to stock android (which is pretty easy if you have an hour or so to kill and can follow basic instructions) so for Bennett to spend so much time wondering out loud why cheap phones are cheap is the weird part. How about an article on the cheapest phone you can turn into an AOSP/Cyanogen handset with good results? Nah, why bother; that would't start a flamewar!
I'm not sure. It was at 32000 feet when they last had contact, which means it wasn't quite at cruising altitude, but it was still several miles up. The 777's cruising speed is mach .84, about 630 MPH. I'm not going to do the math (i'd love it if one of you aerospace guys would, especially since we know where it landed and the last known altitude and the great circle between Schipol and Kuala Lumpur), but I think it would be safe to say that on the ascent it would be going about 350-450 MPH. I can't see terrorists getting their hands on that kind of hardware. Both Ukraine and Russia on the other hand...
FWIW the last flighttrack data showed a speed of 490 kts (564mph), altitude of 33,000 feet (a common cruising alt if there is turbulence at 35k+) Lat 48.088 Lon 38.6359.
How about they actually solve a murder, rape, or kidnapping once in a while? 35% of murders don't get solved
The second sentence contradicts the first. They do solve murders quite often; 65% of the time in fact.
Its actually more nuanced, only 2/3rd (65%) of all murder cases nationally see a single *arrest* which is to say that they have a decent suspect in mind. Not every arrest turns into a conviction, naturally, so the actual "solved" rate is much lower, below 50% for a lot of places. Here's a recent stat to help you plan your next murder: "In 2008, police solved 35 percent of the homicides in Chicago, 22 percent in New Orleans and 21 percent in Detroit. Yet authorities solved 75 percent of the killings in Philadelphia, 92 percent in Denver and 94 percent in San Diego." As you might expect, areas with lower murder rates overall saw a higher solve rate.
Plus, it really eliminates the need to own so many cars. The car can do multiple duty, and borrowing a car is much more practical when it can pick you up at your door (whether it is shared between neighbors or is actually a taxi).
Parking becomes much easier to optimize when cars can drop and pick people up anywhere, and park themselves. There is no need for parking locations to be within a short walk of every destination.
You can also split up cargo vs personnel transport. Passenger vehicles could be smaller and optimized for passengers, with cargo vehicles being big boxes on wheels. You could take a bus to the grocery store and send your 12 bags home in a cargo vehicle while you take a bus back, or a 1-person car, etc. People don't need to own a vehicle large enough to make that trip they make once a month - they can rent for that.
Endless possibilities for transportation when you don't need people in the loop.
You hit on the solution to the very problem. To operate in passenger-less mode simply require that the car be reciving destination instructions from an approved souce (such as some big, audit-able company) who would be a fair bit less likely to greenlight rolling-bomb commands on their cars.
I don't see how this is any different from our current rich/poor housing divide.
Clearly, it's the part about the dome... http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...
THis is basic statistics learned by every doctor in medical school. specificity and sensitivity, prevalence, pretest and post test probability and false positive/true negative, false negative/true positive. They all factor in to deciding to use a medical test. Every person who comes in and demands a test ussually gets a lecture on this (at least from me) (at work have to post as AC)
Statistics aside there are two more pressing questions: 1, are patients with MCI more likely to convert (10% or greater) in subsequent years? 2, is there a preventative process that can be used by those that test positive, that is safe for the general population? In other words, do we get to narrow our treatment focus with these results, even a little bit? We can piss and moan about statistics but at the end of the day, who really gives a fuck if you were right about the onset of someone's dementia, unless you can do something about it?
I can see a few issues with this.
1. Increase of cost. Adding a pole for the near side would add cost.
At least here in Sweden we have poles on both sides as people will be crossing the street in both directions. Yours work differently?
In the US the poles are installed at/past the sidewalk line opposite the roadway, in other words when you are standing to cross you cannot see the pole on your side because it is behind you. So, either you would have to get people to stand behind the pole, or have them turn around and look at the number before crossing (taking attention away from watching turning traffic, which a pedestrian must be very careful for).
Email requires bandwidth, and you can't distribute it through a CDN like you can with downloads. It's cheap for spammers because they anonymize their email, but security notifications say they come from microsoft.com. Now consider that you have BILLIONS of emails to send. That can get costly.
Why can't you distribute it via a CDN, exactly? I mean someone like Microsoft has either direct control over, or actually runs their own CDN servers: firing up a SMTP service (to route mail based on proximity to destination MX) should be the easy part.
I can't imagine Microsoft has to pay Microsoft for Microsoft products. Accounting may want them to move the money around, but that's stupid and pointless because it doesn't actually cost them money to give it to themselves.
If the cost license doesn't get you, then the compute cycles, ram allocations, and administrators' salaries will... /troll
My point was merely that Alexander's CV has very little on it that isn't either irrelevant to his potential customers (at least I hope our financial sector isn't looking for armored warfare expertise...) or closely connected to a series of fed jobs that just keep getting more heavily classified as time goes on.
Hmm let's see if you can pick out the spot where he would be versed only in armored warfare expertise or looking at secret documents all day (this is his CV for the past 15 years):
Director of the National Security Agency (DIRNSA)
Chief of the Central Security Service (CHCSS)
Commander of the United States Cyber Command
Commanding General of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command
Director of Intelligence (J-2), United States Central Command
Deputy Director for Intelligence (J-2) for the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Head of the Army Intelligence and Security Command
Do you think it's possible, after working (ostensibly successfully) as the head of so many organizations, that he knows nothing about management, leadership, best practices, and nonclassified security methodologies (of which there are many)? Do you honestly think he spent 10 years, as the head of these orgs, pushing top secret papers across his desk instead of having his underlings take care of all of that? Come on. Furthermore, I think a lot of commentators on this thread have a complete misunderstanding of what a high-level consulting firm does. Hint, it has nothing to do with configuring firewalls and antivirus apps. Big multinationals will gladly pay $1M for advice as simple as "choose off the shelf security package A, instead of B" as long as it comes from someone whose credentials are beyond repute. He doesn't have to say anything about top secret operations, techniques, or sources, he just has to put his name behind something.
It is? Odd that someone as insignificant as me has it in his contract that any kind of "internal knowledge" he gains (and, bluntly, if an exploit isn't considered internal knowledge in a TLA, what is?) must not be used outside of very well defined areas of work for at the very least 2 years, while someone as the NSA head honcho gets a free pass to use such knowledge as he pleases.
It's hard to imagine that the banking industry is seen as competing with the NSA (in the sense that a non-compete would be enforceable)... Or is it?
So the poor general can't participate in the usual dance of former Washington insiders who use cronyism and connections to enrich themselves after 'serving' in government?
There should be a name for that... like 401(c)... where c stands for crony capitalism.
What's more hilarious is that, apparently, the only thing to General Alexander's credit as head of the NSA was his ability to keep secrets. He was literally "the most powerful cyber-lord in the world" (for lack of a better term) and his only qualification was keeping secrets? He didn't bring anything to the table in terms of management skills, best practices, or good judgement via foresight? Because that's what you have to read into a statement like "..Without the classified information he acquired in his former position, he literally would have nothing to offer to you." Kind of sad, mostly for the US military apparatus that apparently promotes from within, those that have no real skills to offer except keeping their mouth shut about what they did/saw/heard.
Not really, you're thinking about Politicians rather than police.
On one hand, damn all lawyers! The corporation stance is stupid legal wrangling. On the other hand, I'd never become a cop due to the incredibly ridiculous amount of liability, red tape, blatantly lying "news" channels and papers, and blame for having to enforce bad laws.
Go do some ride-alongs with your local police to see what they put up with.
It's not that the SWAT officers, their commanders, or anyone else is necessarily contriving a system where they get all the power and none of the oversight. SWAT teams are very expensive to hire, train, equip, and maintain. Hence, they need to be shared by many police districts. When the state cannot organize them any better than at the county and muni level, the solution is left up to the counties and munis to work out. And this is what they chose because it was the only thing that fit, a shared cost for shared resources.
That being said, the state really needs to intervene, now that it is painfully obvious the county/muni system doesnt work, and give them a structure (joint departments) that makes it possible. There is already too much overhead from the hundreds of different law enforcement orgs that dot each state, figuring this out is a step in the direction toward making the entire system more organized, and more accountable.