You know, if you swap the two wires on a polarized plug ("double insulated"), you can easily electrocute someone. There's only so much you can do when the wrong thing gets hooked up in the wrong place... You'd need all the circuitry of a switching power supply in every single USB socket.
Amazon has gotten better about such things. You no longer have to go through the foreign support people with the forms and scripts. They now have a direct contact for unsafe product issues:
I would add UL (underwriters laboratories) and several others. UL moves a bit slow and reactive instead of proactive, but they certainly are zealous about protecting their brand. Products with their mark, that test out unsafe, will be quickly dropped from Amazon and elsewhere.
Unfortunately, this doesn't help with all those 2GB USB flash drives from China, which are labeled and firmware hacked to appear to have 64+ gigabytes of usable space.
They closes thing they get to a subsidy is what the government buys from them for their own use, for the reserve, and what they give out to poor people to heat.
Last I heard (2013), oil companies were getting on the order of $5.1 billion in subsidies for exploration. https://newrepublic.com/articl...
Categorization of oil under the tax code as a form of domestic manufacturing eligible for a 6% deduction of net income, claiming foreign royalty payments as a credit against American taxes, and deducting numerous costs associated with the drilling process is absolutely an insane handout that other energy suppliers are excluded from. http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/29/...
By comparison, research and development for solar energy was given only $302 million; and wind energy just $123 million. http://www.reuters.com/article...
I'd rather make a decision that turns out to be wrong later than waffle about possible alternatives for too long.
Lovely... That's how we get major changes of things like the audio subsystem; default schedulers that (suck, and) keep changing and getting more tweaks; spinning through one just-slightly-better file system after another; breaking binary compatibility over and over again; constant incompatible changes to better suit some random person's idea of what minor feature is worth completely upending decades of good design, legacy and stability (eg: KMS, Wayland, etc.); contortions and change after change to its design to suit the design constraints of the latest mainframe IBM is developing; etc. And dare I mention the nightmare of dealing with an initrd, which is more of a side-effect of some of the above?
Not that other systems have done perfectly well without going through all these continual changes and contortions.
"You cannot have improvement without change, but you sure as heck can have change without improvement!" https://slashdot.org/comments....
Correlation is not causation. The article ended with numerous explanations for the effect at the bottom, which don't equate to voters being swayed by money. It's quite likely that the effect is reversed, and donors enthusiastically give lots of money to heavy favorites. And a 9% of big-spending incumbents being ejected is actually impressive.
the way money dictates outcomes in US politics, you really don't have a democracy anymore.
There are innumerable cases of the candidate with the most money LOSING the election. Most recently, Jeb Bush's presidential candidacy crashed and burned in dramatic fashion, as he spent more campaign money than all the others in the race.
Money doesn't dictate outcomes, it just helps a little, and in a very close race, that little bit can be just enough.
the real issue for me is why use a dated technology when a superior one proven in the field exists?
If you'd really like to know (as opposed to just ranting like most others here), it's a question of replacement expenses.
Whether you get converted to fiber depends on the cost of labor, the local housing density, and property prices.
In a dense city, copper pairs don't have to run very far to each customer, so maintenance on the lines isn't expensive enough to make replacement a priority. Additionally, labor costs are high, and it takes a lot of man-hours to run new fiber alongside all the old copper, and even more if you have to do that last mile across the neighborhood to the home (this is why AT&T often does fiber to the neighborhood, but leaves copper/DSL from the fiber junction box to the home). And the high property prices means each time you find you need to rip up a road, or install a box, it can get very costly.
So, in dense cities, you can expect the old copper pairs to stay in-use for a long time, or at best getting fiber to the neighborhood in some areas, which will give you the option of higher DSL speeds (ala. U-Verse). Much of Europe is in this category, and won't see universal deployment of fiber for a long time.
In the suburbs or less-dense cities, lines run further per subscriber, which means copper line maintenance costs are higher, labor isn't as expensive as in dense cities, and property costs are lower as well. Plus it's easier to convince (read: bribe) the city council. These are the areas where you can expect extensive fiber deployments, and commonly fiber-to-the-home with no copper lines left at all.
Note that this (fiber deployment) is actually BAD in several ways... Slower DSL is much cheaper than FIOS for entry-level internet access (your grandmother doesn't need a 50Mbps connection to check her e-mail), on the order of $15 vs $50 per month, but YMMV. And once those copper lines are cut, you no longer have a century of telcom regulations protecting you from the misbehavior of your phone company. Those regulations are the only reason why DSL dropped to $15/mo in the first place.
Then in rural areas with low population density, only wireless is really viable (and maybe not even that, depending on terrain). The profits just aren't there. If copper lines were previously installed (thanks to subsidies like the USF) expect them to be the only wired option, and your provider will just let them rot and never fix them, no matter how much you complain. That's where that century of telcom regulations comes in handy, and you'll be able to complain to public utility commissions and the like, to force their hand. But for anything faster, you'll want to look for LTE deployments, even if you have to installed a fixed cellular antenna on a pole well above your roof, just to get ANY signal from the cell tower.
You must have had a HORRIBLE civics teacher, to lead you to believe that "a defendant should be able to sit silently and find himself acquitted". What did your civics teacher tell you the defense lawyer was even meant for?
It is the prosecutor's job to PROVE guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
Yes, but "beyond reasonable doubt" doesn't meant the prosecution has "100% sure, absolutely irrefutable and infallible proof". Indeed the defense lawyer's job is to explain and negate the evidence that might otherwise look like evidence of guilt.
Energy storage systems benefit coal and nuclear just as much as wind and solar. Don't think that cheap storage technology will make wind and sun competitive with coal, nuclear, natural gas, or whatever else comes along.
No.
Coal and nuclear are done. They are no longer economically competitive, and storage won't change that.
Natural gas won't benefit from storage... It is competitive right now in big part because it doesn't need storage.
Solar and wind are highly competitive, and storage will improve that competitiveness further.
The only thing that can save solar from becoming worth less than it already is would be some sort of leap in production techniques that makes them exceedingly cheap to produce.
Solar-thermal uses mirrors. Mirrors are dirt cheap. But even at that, PV panels are so inexpensive (and falling more) that they are competitive with solar-thermal.
Solar doesn't need "sav[ing]". It's already well on its way to taking-over.
I will believe that solar power is competitive only when
Fortunately, reality is unaffected by your biases.
Nuclear is currently the cleanest tech we have, it is cleaner than wind/solar/tidal
Solar-thermal is far cleaner than nuclear. Building a turbine and some mirrors isn't too destructive. Uranium mining and huge quantities of cement, on the other hand...
Yes I support nuclear energy, it is the only viable solution to meet the world's energy demands and the need for clean energy.
That's patently false. Solar can provide much more energy than humans can consume, even with centuries of demand and population growth, matches demand patterns, and can be much more quickly and inexpensively installed than nuclear plants.
Nuclear is a possibly viable option, if all the permitting, insurance, supply and disposal issues can be resolved, but it's absolutely, unequivocally NOT the "only viable solution".
in 5/10 years when gas is back at $5-8/gallon and NG prices spike back up,
Analysts say the US has got a century of natural gas supply available. Even if demand grows more than expected, it's unlikely prices will significantly climb in our lifetimes.
Similarly, the US shale/oil sands development can be restarted quickly once prices rise, and again analysts say those supplies will keep oil prices from rising to 100/barrel ever again, which should keep gasoline below $4 for the foreseeable future.
we will be experiencing rolling blackouts as we fight to stabilize wind/etc or still wondering why the air quality sucks
Rolling blackouts are a short-term solution for supply or distribution shortages. They are easily eliminated by just raising prices, until demand drops, or other supplies or better infrastructure can be built.
Likely a bit of both if the wind farms in TX are an example.
Texas wind farms have weird economics because of the subsidies. We hear about negative electrical rates, but they are only negative to 2/3rds of the subsidy price... i.e. if the subsidies were reduced by 2/3rds, Texas would occasionally have periods of free electricity, but rates would never go negative. And if the subsidies were eliminated entirely, things would look normal, and wind farms would just partially shut-down (maybe an opportunity for maintenance?) whenever electrical demand is too low to consume their entire output.
Still, it's good counter evidence to your claim. Clearly, Texas already has enough electrical supply, and isn't in need of nuclear power plants. Given time, the same will be true for most of the country. The economics are working out so wind and solar (and energy storage) keep getting more appealing, but it simply takes time for those big facilities to be built. Once they are, the price of NG can go through the roof, with only minor and ever-decreasing effects on your electrical bill. It's unlikely that nuclear will be economical by the time they can be brought online, thanks to the rapid spread of these competing renewable technologies.
I am against nuclear power for the same reason I am against the death penalty. Both require a level perfection and infallibility that humans are incapable of reaching.
I absolutely DESPISE people who oppose the death penalty on those grounds... As if executing someone (after numerous appeals over several years) is terribly inhumane, but hey, leaving them to rot in a jail cell for 30+ years is perfectly A-OK...
I support the death penalty precisely because it forces the legal system to continue improving. Somehow those facing execution are media darlings that get all the legal help in the world, while those with life sentences are largely ignored and get little assistance, no matter how loudly they profess their innocence.
he had to prove his innocence instead of the State having to prove his guilt.
You're spouting nonsense... They did have ample evidence indicating his guilt. It has always fallen to the defendant to provide a defense, and counter / refute the state's (otherwise-compelling) incriminating evidence.
It's a disturbing trend where we're proving innocence as opposed to relying on the State to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
You don't seem to know what "beyond a reasonable doubt" means... It has never meant "100% sure, absolutely irrefutable and infallible proof". It's a very high standard of evidence, but never has anyone pretended innocent men never look guilty beyond a reasonable doubt... Hence the critical NEED for defense lawyers for the accused, from the very start of legal systems.
Given the time that has passed, the case should have not been prosecuted unless it was so air-tight that an alibi would not have made a difference.
It's ridiculous to put such an impossibly high burden on the prosecution in any circumstances. A huge number of guilty criminals would never be punished, because they were minimally able to hide their crimes behind a tiny sliver of possible doubt.
In addition, I don't believe ANY case can EVER be so airtight that an iron-clad alibi would still result in a conviction. Eyewitnesses can easily make mistakes.... plenty of people LOOK quite similar, so even video evidence could be faulty. Similarly, NO form of forensic evidence is free of "collisions", where two people, out of a pool of millions, have practically identical features (e.g. fingerprints, DNA, etc.).
Just ask the National Academies: "no studies have been conducted of large populations to determine how many sources might share the same or similar features." http://www8.nationalacademies....
Or ask Brandon Mayfield how he feels about the accuracy of fingerprint evidence:
With a little practice, you could press the button to mimic pulse-dialing and actually make outbound calls on that phone
It's actually quite a bit easier than that if you ever need to do it... Just tap the hook-switch over and over, just as fast as your finger is able to, until it starts ringing.
You see, the highest pulse value is 10 for a 0, so tapping-out anything more than 10 pulses will immediately dial a zero and connect your call to an operator (before tapping even stops). You can just tell the operator the phone number and ask her to connect you.
I'm pretty sure this was common knowledge back before touch-tone phones. Every old black & white film that happened to include a phone call being unexpectedly disconnected, subsequently showed the other party tapping the hook-switch frantically and shouting "Operator! Operator! The line went dead!"
The only issue, today, is that some (more recently installed?) phone systems no longer accept pulse dialing at all, so I wouldn't want to depend on that party trick.
Seems like you should be using official zoning maps from the city for something like this...
Hell no! Nobody else was looking at the zoning maps. The number on the street, mailbox, etc., is more likely the source of info they used to start with. Grabbing a city map, which was updated to show news housing numbers, possibly years before the post office and homeowners have updated their own information, is a more likely recipe for disaster than what happened here.
I'm the one who is being "put out" by having to travel for the company, so the very least they can do is provide me with comfortable lodging and decent food.
And you're welcome to demand that they do that... and refuse to travel if they don't do so. You might lose your job, but hey, if your company doesn't treat you well, that's not much of a downside.
However, I've seen far too many people abusing expense accounts. You might just want Denny's, but given the opportunity, many people will find the nearest 5-star restaurant, where a meal costs in excess of your daily salary. Ditto for luxury hotel bookings. Of course you'll say their abuse should be eliminated, while your level of abuse (expecting better than fast-food meals) is okay, but they'll use the same "I'm being put-out" reasoning you do, and those with more modest standards will feel the same about you, as you do to the more serious abusers.
I would much rather have flat-rate allowances. Then those who go cheap can pocket the extra cash (that's plenty of incentive to tolerate "being 'put out'"), while those who want extra luxuries can put some of their own money in to pay for it... Just like they'd have to if they didn't have a business-trip excuse.
they've sent me on the trip to perform some sort of service that is valuable to the company, and not so that I can waste my time trying to save them a few hundred dollars.
Even on a business trip, you're not working 16-hour days... You've got plenty of down-time to do some of the very, very basic meal prep I've listed. In fact some of the options I've listed require ZERO prep time, anyhow.
The money you save isn't some ephemeral cash "the company" can choose to spit out, or disappears into the wind... Instead, it's money that should instead be going into your salary, or other business-related expenses which benefit your workplace.
Do you take an oven, hob, microwave, fridge-freezer and store cupboard with you when you go on a trip?
Most motel/hotels have a microwave conveniently available for anyone to use.
Many hotels have mini-refrigerators in-room for the mini-bars, with plenty of free space for your own (food & drink) items.
Of course you don't need any of that, because a tiny immersion heater can boil all the water you want, which is all you need to cook ramen, eggs, instant rice, potatoes, oatmeal, spaghetti, macaroni, etc. Or can be used to warm-up anything pre-cooked which can be submerged in boiling water, like cans of stew/chili/soup/et al., or any boil-in-bag meals like MREs, etc., or anything you'd like to pre-cook at home and package in a boiling bag (then freeze).
And if that's not good enough, you CAN easily pack with you enough small camping gear (pot, skillet, spatula, stove) to do some serious improvised cooking wherever you are.
Plenty of other options if you don't want a hot meal, such as muffins, donuts, peanut butter pretzels, nuts, crackers with cans of spray cheese (or dry cheese) and preserved meats like beef jerky or hard dry salami. Energy/cereal/granola bars, chex/trail-mix, and Boost/Ensure/Slimfast/Nutrament meal drinks are options, too.
Then lots of ready-to-eat cold foods that will stay good in an ice-chest (with ice), like yogurt/cottage cheese, potato salad, sandwiches, salads, milk (e.g. for cereal), butter (for bread), etc.
Someone proactively made the decision to risk lives in the first case. In the other two cases, people made the wrong choices and it lead to deaths.
In all three cases: "people made the wrong choices and it lead to deaths."
we should not punish someone criminally for the second two issues unless you can show intentional negligence or malfeasance on the part of the people in charge.
The term you're looking for is involuntary manslaughter, and it's every bit a crime as willful murder.
Both of the others were very active failures, actually. From the under-engineering of the levy & seawall system in New Orleans, to decades of approved of building permits for single-story houses without any flood protection in areas which were significantly below sea level. Add to that a completely dysfunctional evacuation (which FORCED many people to stay behind) even when the severity of the hurricane was known to be in excess of what the levies were designed to withstand. Then no one being informed when the levy/seawalls were breached that night, so everyone went to sleep on dry land with no news of the looming danger, and all woke up in the ocean, many fighting for their lives (and losing)...
But where is the list of names of the managers who were *directly responsible for the deaths of the Challenger crew*? These people are guilty of **murder**. Yet we never see their names anywhere, they're just referred to as anonymous "managers".
How many people die aboard Challenger, and how many people died after Hurricane Katrina, or were killed on Sept 11, 2001? All of which were negligence, and in all cases, those who were responsible for mass manslaughter are anonymous and unpunished.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, if you swap the two wires on a polarized plug ("double insulated"), you can easily electrocute someone. There's only so much you can do when the wrong thing gets hooked up in the wrong place... You'd need all the circuitry of a switching power supply in every single USB socket.
Amazon has gotten better about such things. You no longer have to go through the foreign support people with the forms and scripts. They now have a direct contact for unsafe product issues:
I would add UL (underwriters laboratories) and several others. UL moves a bit slow and reactive instead of proactive, but they certainly are zealous about protecting their brand. Products with their mark, that test out unsafe, will be quickly dropped from Amazon and elsewhere.
Unfortunately, this doesn't help with all those 2GB USB flash drives from China, which are labeled and firmware hacked to appear to have 64+ gigabytes of usable space.
Last I heard (2013), oil companies were getting on the order of $5.1 billion in subsidies for exploration. https://newrepublic.com/articl...
Categorization of oil under the tax code as a form of domestic manufacturing eligible for a 6% deduction of net income, claiming foreign royalty payments as a credit against American taxes, and deducting numerous costs associated with the drilling process is absolutely an insane handout that other energy suppliers are excluded from. http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/29/...
By comparison, research and development for solar energy was given only $302 million; and wind energy just $123 million. http://www.reuters.com/article...
Lovely... That's how we get major changes of things like the audio subsystem; default schedulers that (suck, and) keep changing and getting more tweaks; spinning through one just-slightly-better file system after another; breaking binary compatibility over and over again; constant incompatible changes to better suit some random person's idea of what minor feature is worth completely upending decades of good design, legacy and stability (eg: KMS, Wayland, etc.); contortions and change after change to its design to suit the design constraints of the latest mainframe IBM is developing; etc. And dare I mention the nightmare of dealing with an initrd, which is more of a side-effect of some of the above?
Not that other systems have done perfectly well without going through all these continual changes and contortions.
"You cannot have improvement without change, but you sure as heck can have change without improvement!" https://slashdot.org/comments....
Correlation is not causation. The article ended with numerous explanations for the effect at the bottom, which don't equate to voters being swayed by money. It's quite likely that the effect is reversed, and donors enthusiastically give lots of money to heavy favorites. And a 9% of big-spending incumbents being ejected is actually impressive.
There are innumerable cases of the candidate with the most money LOSING the election. Most recently, Jeb Bush's presidential candidacy crashed and burned in dramatic fashion, as he spent more campaign money than all the others in the race.
Money doesn't dictate outcomes, it just helps a little, and in a very close race, that little bit can be just enough.
If you'd really like to know (as opposed to just ranting like most others here), it's a question of replacement expenses.
Whether you get converted to fiber depends on the cost of labor, the local housing density, and property prices.
In a dense city, copper pairs don't have to run very far to each customer, so maintenance on the lines isn't expensive enough to make replacement a priority. Additionally, labor costs are high, and it takes a lot of man-hours to run new fiber alongside all the old copper, and even more if you have to do that last mile across the neighborhood to the home (this is why AT&T often does fiber to the neighborhood, but leaves copper/DSL from the fiber junction box to the home). And the high property prices means each time you find you need to rip up a road, or install a box, it can get very costly.
So, in dense cities, you can expect the old copper pairs to stay in-use for a long time, or at best getting fiber to the neighborhood in some areas, which will give you the option of higher DSL speeds (ala. U-Verse). Much of Europe is in this category, and won't see universal deployment of fiber for a long time.
In the suburbs or less-dense cities, lines run further per subscriber, which means copper line maintenance costs are higher, labor isn't as expensive as in dense cities, and property costs are lower as well. Plus it's easier to convince (read: bribe) the city council. These are the areas where you can expect extensive fiber deployments, and commonly fiber-to-the-home with no copper lines left at all.
Note that this (fiber deployment) is actually BAD in several ways... Slower DSL is much cheaper than FIOS for entry-level internet access (your grandmother doesn't need a 50Mbps connection to check her e-mail), on the order of $15 vs $50 per month, but YMMV. And once those copper lines are cut, you no longer have a century of telcom regulations protecting you from the misbehavior of your phone company. Those regulations are the only reason why DSL dropped to $15/mo in the first place.
Then in rural areas with low population density, only wireless is really viable (and maybe not even that, depending on terrain). The profits just aren't there. If copper lines were previously installed (thanks to subsidies like the USF) expect them to be the only wired option, and your provider will just let them rot and never fix them, no matter how much you complain. That's where that century of telcom regulations comes in handy, and you'll be able to complain to public utility commissions and the like, to force their hand. But for anything faster, you'll want to look for LTE deployments, even if you have to installed a fixed cellular antenna on a pole well above your roof, just to get ANY signal from the cell tower.
You must have had a HORRIBLE civics teacher, to lead you to believe that "a defendant should be able to sit silently and find himself acquitted". What did your civics teacher tell you the defense lawyer was even meant for?
Yes, but "beyond reasonable doubt" doesn't meant the prosecution has "100% sure, absolutely irrefutable and infallible proof". Indeed the defense lawyer's job is to explain and negate the evidence that might otherwise look like evidence of guilt.
That's pure nonsense. I can't imagine where you pulled that from.
Not at all. Nuclear Winter would completely reverse Global Warming, and then some.
Of course once we see an ice age coming on, we'll be digging-up all the fossil fuels and burning them as quickly as we can to try and reverse it.
There is "4,000 megatonnes (8,800Ã--109 lb) of uranium contained in sea water." We are not going to run out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
No.
Coal and nuclear are done. They are no longer economically competitive, and storage won't change that.
Natural gas won't benefit from storage... It is competitive right now in big part because it doesn't need storage.
Solar and wind are highly competitive, and storage will improve that competitiveness further.
Solar-thermal uses mirrors. Mirrors are dirt cheap. But even at that, PV panels are so inexpensive (and falling more) that they are competitive with solar-thermal.
Solar doesn't need "sav[ing]". It's already well on its way to taking-over.
Fortunately, reality is unaffected by your biases.
Solar-thermal is far cleaner than nuclear. Building a turbine and some mirrors isn't too destructive. Uranium mining and huge quantities of cement, on the other hand...
That's patently false. Solar can provide much more energy than humans can consume, even with centuries of demand and population growth, matches demand patterns, and can be much more quickly and inexpensively installed than nuclear plants.
Nuclear is a possibly viable option, if all the permitting, insurance, supply and disposal issues can be resolved, but it's absolutely, unequivocally NOT the "only viable solution".
Analysts say the US has got a century of natural gas supply available. Even if demand grows more than expected, it's unlikely prices will significantly climb in our lifetimes.
Similarly, the US shale/oil sands development can be restarted quickly once prices rise, and again analysts say those supplies will keep oil prices from rising to 100/barrel ever again, which should keep gasoline below $4 for the foreseeable future.
Rolling blackouts are a short-term solution for supply or distribution shortages. They are easily eliminated by just raising prices, until demand drops, or other supplies or better infrastructure can be built.
Texas wind farms have weird economics because of the subsidies. We hear about negative electrical rates, but they are only negative to 2/3rds of the subsidy price... i.e. if the subsidies were reduced by 2/3rds, Texas would occasionally have periods of free electricity, but rates would never go negative. And if the subsidies were eliminated entirely, things would look normal, and wind farms would just partially shut-down (maybe an opportunity for maintenance?) whenever electrical demand is too low to consume their entire output.
Still, it's good counter evidence to your claim. Clearly, Texas already has enough electrical supply, and isn't in need of nuclear power plants. Given time, the same will be true for most of the country. The economics are working out so wind and solar (and energy storage) keep getting more appealing, but it simply takes time for those big facilities to be built. Once they are, the price of NG can go through the roof, with only minor and ever-decreasing effects on your electrical bill. It's unlikely that nuclear will be economical by the time they can be brought online, thanks to the rapid spread of these competing renewable technologies.
I absolutely DESPISE people who oppose the death penalty on those grounds... As if executing someone (after numerous appeals over several years) is terribly inhumane, but hey, leaving them to rot in a jail cell for 30+ years is perfectly A-OK...
I support the death penalty precisely because it forces the legal system to continue improving. Somehow those facing execution are media darlings that get all the legal help in the world, while those with life sentences are largely ignored and get little assistance, no matter how loudly they profess their innocence.
You're spouting nonsense... They did have ample evidence indicating his guilt. It has always fallen to the defendant to provide a defense, and counter / refute the state's (otherwise-compelling) incriminating evidence.
You don't seem to know what "beyond a reasonable doubt" means... It has never meant "100% sure, absolutely irrefutable and infallible proof". It's a very high standard of evidence, but never has anyone pretended innocent men never look guilty beyond a reasonable doubt... Hence the critical NEED for defense lawyers for the accused, from the very start of legal systems.
It's ridiculous to put such an impossibly high burden on the prosecution in any circumstances. A huge number of guilty criminals would never be punished, because they were minimally able to hide their crimes behind a tiny sliver of possible doubt.
In addition, I don't believe ANY case can EVER be so airtight that an iron-clad alibi would still result in a conviction. Eyewitnesses can easily make mistakes.... plenty of people LOOK quite similar, so even video evidence could be faulty. Similarly, NO form of forensic evidence is free of "collisions", where two people, out of a pool of millions, have practically identical features (e.g. fingerprints, DNA, etc.).
Just ask the National Academies: "no studies have been conducted of large populations to determine how many sources might share the same or similar features."
http://www8.nationalacademies....
Or ask Brandon Mayfield how he feels about the accuracy of fingerprint evidence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontl...
It's actually quite a bit easier than that if you ever need to do it... Just tap the hook-switch over and over, just as fast as your finger is able to, until it starts ringing.
You see, the highest pulse value is 10 for a 0, so tapping-out anything more than 10 pulses will immediately dial a zero and connect your call to an operator (before tapping even stops). You can just tell the operator the phone number and ask her to connect you.
I'm pretty sure this was common knowledge back before touch-tone phones. Every old black & white film that happened to include a phone call being unexpectedly disconnected, subsequently showed the other party tapping the hook-switch frantically and shouting "Operator! Operator! The line went dead!"
The only issue, today, is that some (more recently installed?) phone systems no longer accept pulse dialing at all, so I wouldn't want to depend on that party trick.
Your flippant reaction is misplaced. I sincerely doubt there was anything of value left in that duplex:
From TFA: "the tornado busted the house's windows, ripped the floor and tore away some part of the ceiling, leaving some portions exposed to the sky."
Sound like a place you'd be leaving your family photos (unguarded while you're living elsewhere)?
Of course if there was anything of value inside the house, that might have clued-in the demolition crew to their mistake in the first place.
Hell no! Nobody else was looking at the zoning maps. The number on the street, mailbox, etc., is more likely the source of info they used to start with. Grabbing a city map, which was updated to show news housing numbers, possibly years before the post office and homeowners have updated their own information, is a more likely recipe for disaster than what happened here.
And you're welcome to demand that they do that... and refuse to travel if they don't do so. You might lose your job, but hey, if your company doesn't treat you well, that's not much of a downside.
However, I've seen far too many people abusing expense accounts. You might just want Denny's, but given the opportunity, many people will find the nearest 5-star restaurant, where a meal costs in excess of your daily salary. Ditto for luxury hotel bookings. Of course you'll say their abuse should be eliminated, while your level of abuse (expecting better than fast-food meals) is okay, but they'll use the same "I'm being put-out" reasoning you do, and those with more modest standards will feel the same about you, as you do to the more serious abusers.
I would much rather have flat-rate allowances. Then those who go cheap can pocket the extra cash (that's plenty of incentive to tolerate "being 'put out'"), while those who want extra luxuries can put some of their own money in to pay for it... Just like they'd have to if they didn't have a business-trip excuse.
Even on a business trip, you're not working 16-hour days... You've got plenty of down-time to do some of the very, very basic meal prep I've listed. In fact some of the options I've listed require ZERO prep time, anyhow.
The money you save isn't some ephemeral cash "the company" can choose to spit out, or disappears into the wind... Instead, it's money that should instead be going into your salary, or other business-related expenses which benefit your workplace.
Most motel/hotels have a microwave conveniently available for anyone to use.
Many hotels have mini-refrigerators in-room for the mini-bars, with plenty of free space for your own (food & drink) items.
Of course you don't need any of that, because a tiny immersion heater can boil all the water you want, which is all you need to cook ramen, eggs, instant rice, potatoes, oatmeal, spaghetti, macaroni, etc. Or can be used to warm-up anything pre-cooked which can be submerged in boiling water, like cans of stew/chili/soup/et al., or any boil-in-bag meals like MREs, etc., or anything you'd like to pre-cook at home and package in a boiling bag (then freeze).
And if that's not good enough, you CAN easily pack with you enough small camping gear (pot, skillet, spatula, stove) to do some serious improvised cooking wherever you are.
Plenty of other options if you don't want a hot meal, such as muffins, donuts, peanut butter pretzels, nuts, crackers with cans of spray cheese (or dry cheese) and preserved meats like beef jerky or hard dry salami. Energy/cereal/granola bars, chex/trail-mix, and Boost/Ensure/Slimfast/Nutrament meal drinks are options, too.
Then lots of ready-to-eat cold foods that will stay good in an ice-chest (with ice), like yogurt/cottage cheese, potato salad, sandwiches, salads, milk (e.g. for cereal), butter (for bread), etc.
In all three cases: "people made the wrong choices and it lead to deaths."
The term you're looking for is involuntary manslaughter, and it's every bit a crime as willful murder.
Both of the others were very active failures, actually. From the under-engineering of the levy & seawall system in New Orleans, to decades of approved of building permits for single-story houses without any flood protection in areas which were significantly below sea level. Add to that a completely dysfunctional evacuation (which FORCED many people to stay behind) even when the severity of the hurricane was known to be in excess of what the levies were designed to withstand. Then no one being informed when the levy/seawalls were breached that night, so everyone went to sleep on dry land with no news of the looming danger, and all woke up in the ocean, many fighting for their lives (and losing)...
N64 cartridges were many times more expensive than PSX (CD) games, so PSX and Saturn were really MUCH CHEAPER than the n64.
How many people die aboard Challenger, and how many people died after Hurricane Katrina, or were killed on Sept 11, 2001? All of which were negligence, and in all cases, those who were responsible for mass manslaughter are anonymous and unpunished.