But there is something fundamentally wrong with human beings since in any large undertaking you can be sure that some of them will NOT do the right thing for whatever reason: personal profit, or just plain stupidity.
So, what do you advocate? Killing them all, or just killing the profit motive? Destroying greed and venality? Good luck on getting those turkeys to vote for that Christmas!
And we don't have a clue about how to do that.
Back to the primordial slime for vertebrates then! I hold out fairly high hopes for the cephalopod molluscs, particularly if you use the ones with external skeletons, eyes, good brains, and at least some potential for getting out of the water.
See the signature line. I haven't changed it for ages.
Top uses:
cancer treatment -- cheap radiation treatments
Doses far too low, and more importantly, undirected.
food irradiation center
Doses ridiculously too low.
radiology center -- x-ray you while you're walking through. Gamma rays free of charge. Drink the water if you want a PET scan.
Errr, you do know that X-rays, gamma rays, and positrons are three different things? It's written on the back of your Geek card, somewhere in one of the microdots. What do you mean - you've left your electron microscope in your other leather-elbow-patched jacket?
urology center -- cheaper than a vasectomy
Doses far too low for effective sterilisation, so it'd actually be negatively effective because of the increased birth defect rate.
You get the idea.
No, I don't. Are you trying to be sarcastic, but haven't made it to chapter 2 of "Sarcasm for Dummies" (chapter 4 of the American edition)?
2. It was somewhere I'd otherwise want to go. Not speaking Ukrainian or even Russian, the language barrier is a bigger obstacle than the price
Hmmm, I shall have to consult with the wife on this ; going back "home" to the ÐÐÑÐ (thank you, SlashDot's pathetic inability to handle non-Latin characters) might be an option. OTOH, going back to share a country with her mother might be a discouragement to the wife.
Fukushima wasn't even a little bit scary compared to a certain little Russian event... you know, the worst known to man... you know, the one that is pretty much safe to live at and has been for a while... which is far less than 40 years...
What, you mean the one that my wife was working in the fields around 40 miles downwind from, for a week following the "event", and she didn't die an immediate, screaming, horrible death. In fact, she still hasn't died a screaming, horrible death. In fact, we're not sure if there have been any adverse health effect that can be unambiguously laid at the door of that "event", because her health is within the normal range of health variations.
Radiation is dangerous. So is driving fast, being a member of a species that lives on one planet without adequate meteorite deflection technologies, or breathing oxygen. As for eating too much of the wrong stuff - positively lethal!
Because radiation (and all those other things) is dangerous, doesn't mean that it is instantly utterly lethal. Don't let your "dread" (which the characteristics of radiation are undeniably good at triggering) overrule your head!
because fibre is much easier to break/snap than copper
If that's an issue (I stopped pulling cables for work before fibre was even "extremely rare", let alone commonplace ; I know that I don't know.), then wouldn't it be plausible to make the conductors of (say) steel with a thick(ish) copper coating, to combine the mechanical stiffness of the steel with the (relative, but should be unimportant) corrosion resistance of the copper? Or, taking a strand from power lines, aluminium conductors with the fibre stranded between the three (power, return and ground)?
Old military electronics always had wires laced (maybe they still do this, haven't been into any new equipment).
It's laced with a heavy waxed cloth, similar to extra wide tooth floss.
It's not just the military, and it's not dead. NASA still secure much/ most of the cabling on spacecraft using "lacing" (as our ITs call it on this side of the pond). Hmmm ; searching for the pages I saw not-long ago... the knots (this article has been re-used several times, including by the Planetary Society, who at least cite their sources), there is a detailed NASA standard available here.
Different ITs (instrumentation technicians) I've worked with have had different styles. Some would lace ; some would use hundreds of (sefl-extinguishing) plastic tie-wraps. Generally I found that the lacing was neater, and more flexible. But most ITs didn't have the skill or training to use it (I'd struggle to follow that NASA spec ; but I'm not an IT.)
Someone mentioned aircraft mechanics damaging wiring that should be laced, by using tie-wraps. The NASA spec covers this : "9.6.2 Plastic straps are usually installed by tooling. Tooling shall be tension-controlled to meet the strap-tightening requirements previously stated (Requirement)." Which is exactly what my better ITs (not coincidentally, the lacing ones) have always specified too. Not that most of our staff paid the slightest attention, and since a tie-wrap torque-setting tool could cost several days pay, few of our managers would wear the cost of the tools for the field staff.
If they can still be using it after some 10 years without going through a cycle of force upgrades... that's a huge loss of revenue for the vendor.
They should have moved onto a time-limited licensing revenue base years ago, if not decades ago. As it stands, they only get one fee from the customer, but if they're on a yearly (or better, monthly) license, enforced by software or hardware as appropriate, then they'd have recovered many times the original license fee from the customer. And they'd have been able to enforce upgrading too - every time the customer re-licenses, they establish a new contract, including new terms. People pretty rapidly stop reading the release notes, so you'd be able to insert the mandatory upgrade notices into them years in advance of their implementation.
It's not ALL about revenue from the software rental (as opposed to software sales) income stream being good for the developing company. Often it's good for the customer, as these rental fees are normally a tax-deductible expense, which can offset a lot of other income.
What? That's not the problem? But this is Slashdot, home of software coders and support nerds. What is not to like about regular (and eventually larger) revenue streams coupled with the knowledge that customers who don't carry out upgrades to your cycle don't need to be supported?
(Please check the calibration on your sarcasm detector ; it should be reading 50%.)
*I* can remove the WiFi card from a laptop ; *you* can remove a WiFi card from a laptop ; but can you trust your IT guy to remember to remove the card before air-freighting a new laptop to replace a burned-out one at the job site?
We don't have a PFY (or hundreds of laptops ; I mentioned "half-dozen" size orders) ; we have an IT guy who objects to being called into the office to work on weekends, even if the only flight to the destination leaves that afternoon, and the next flight will go out after the job is finished and the operators and equipment return. That is part of the reason that I was in the office doing hardware specification when I should have been at home on leave. I don't do that these days ; it doesn't earn you any benefits and causes even more hassle at home.
Not possible. All machines are owned by different companies. Getting agreement to install any software on any of them is practically impossible, and the local operators are never (repeat : "never") given admin access to any of their machines specifically to make it impossible for any unauthorised software to be installed.
I could install software (including drivers) on the laptop because I can get the Admin keys for that... but that's not much help.
Besides, I do actually simultaneously need the displays of
what is happening in the pump and pits room (company 1) ;
with the down-hole equipment, (several km away, across an up-to 2 bit/s comms link ; provided by company 2) ;
while I do my work on the laptop (company 3) and ;
I communicate with the client's using their internet-connected computer (company 4). I haven't even mentioned the facility we're on, which is provided by company 5. But their underlying network is fairly transparent.
I suppose it would be theoretically possible to incorporate all these functions into one computer, but that would assume that the same configuration of companies, services, requirements and software versions/ dependencies/ conflicts would recur in less than a few years, and last for more than a couple of months. Which just doesn't happen. In the real world.
Actually, I mis-speak : (company 2) brought (company 1) a couple of years ago ; but these divisions haven't merged, and haven't even got as far as using the same languages (broken English and French versus good English and Norwegian), let alone expenses forms. So I doubt that software unification is looming in the near future. The last comparable merger, it took about 6 years to replace one division's software with the others, and to re-train most of the operators.
Just injecting reality into your image of "organic debris in the sea = oil" ; you may have been joking, but I see so many nutcases in this line of work that it's hard to tell if someone really believes what they appear to be saying on that subject.
Some guy ("Victim") woke up in a street in London, minus his wallet and laptop (but not phone?). He suspects that his drink was spiked (there is a take-home message, apart from the message to avoid London until after the nukes redevelop it).
About the same time as "Victim" was regaining consciousness, his laptop was being used to set up accounts online, using the his missing credit cards. While unconscious, "Victim"s bank cards had been used, suggesting either "shoulder surfing" or coercion of the PIN while "spiked".
Crime reports were made, but the police couldn't find CCTV of any of the places where the bank cards were used, of the unconscious "Victim", or anything relevant ; massive Police inaction.
The laptop had Hidden software for activating the camera, reporting locations, allowing remote monitoring, etc, allowing "Victim" to see the new possessor of the laptop, to see what he was doing, and to follow his various, fairly sordid online and offline (over-tissue) activities.
Even given this continuing stream of data, the Police have done nothing about finding the perp.
"Victim" is not a happy bunny. So he has produced a NSFW blog of the (alleged) perp's activities.
There is a hint that the perp is, or poses as, a police officer, and a hint that this may be why the real police have been ineffectual. Or maybe they're just incompetent, and the perp is just a poseur.
Memo to self : don't walk around London with a laptop, and don't let your drink out of your hand. But you knew that anyway.
the geeks don't like to take the time to make things work anymore
Sorry, but geeks do take the time to make things work.
A lot of people who call themselves "geeks" don't take the time to make things work, but that's because they're not geeks, just people who call themselves geeks. Similarly, I can go to any random lunatic asylum and round up a herd of people who call themselves "God" (or trivial variants of that), but the only way to tell if they really are God (or a close approximation) is to throw them in the lake and see if they can walk out without getting their feet wet.
I remember a colleague saying that there was no better way to kill a hobby than to get it as a job.
I remember having the same conversations as a child with family, friends and teachers - mostly people wiser than me at that time. And so, you know, I actually followed their advice and do something for a living which is not my hobby. (Or not my main hobby, at least.)
There is this thing about advice... if you don't listen to it and don't follow it, that's your responsibility, not the responsibility of the people who gave you the advice that you've asked for.
This "Schilderswijk" where the cabinet was discovered is a notorious low-income suburb. It's more likely to be native intelligence spying on locals in fear of extremists.
Which is precisely the point that TFA seems to be making in it's last (translated) sentence:
Omroep West [the reporter] reported earlier that would be for the war in Syria. Schilderswijk in the youth recruited
Which may be racial profiling, "postcode prejudice", and all sorts of unpleasant things, but "random/ universal, undirected, completely unfounded surveillance" it is not.
with the exception of not reading him his Miranda (somebody needs to be FIRED for screwing that up) they acted VERY professionally.
The way it was reported here (Norway) was that it was a planned option, checked out by their lawyers and approved by SCOTUSA some years ago.
So... he's on a plane to Lybia ^H^H^H^H Syria ^H^H^H^H Egypt ^H^H^H^H^H... damn, it's getting hard to find somewhere to render people^H^H^H^H^H terrorists to, ordinarily or extraordinarily... Gitmo, no that's closed for new arrivals. Chechnya? Azerbaijan - they're nasty enough?
Something does stink about the affair, including the absence of the Miranda declaration. But that's a stink coming from a far higher level than an arresting officer or six forgetting a standard procedure.
And just as a fr'instance... having failed over three major domestic terrorism cases now, when do you expect the FBI to be barred from investigating any domestic terrorism cases, ever? And who is going to catch that hat (and budget) when it lands?
The specialized units like SWAT and the bomb squad, the higher ups, they're probably incredibly intelligent and expertly trained. The ones standing around at the street corners doing guard duty, not so much.
You can afford to have police officers standing around on street corners "guarding" stuff? Not possible here : a policeman costs 3-4 times what a security guard does, and an armed policeman almost infinitely what an armed security guard does (outside the military, I don't think I've ever heard of an armed security guard, and armed bodyguards are vanishingly rare). By the time that you're seeing a policeman "standing around", you've already got dozens of officers and civilian staff working in the background on threat assessment, surveillance, intelligence collation, CCTV monitoring (you're talking about somewhere important enough to (sometimes) get a police guard ; the CCTV was installed years ago! Or installed decades ago and regularly upgraded.)... and much other "stuff".
Even our fairly low-level grunt police are generally scooting around in a vehicle worth 9 months to a year's pay ; it's not efficient to have them standing around pulling their communal plonker.
We went through this years ago with the realisation that an officer on the beat would come within 100m (i.e. 2-3 street corners, and out of hearing range) of a crime being committed around once a decade. The "bobby on the beat" may be a picturesque and confidence-inspiring sight, but they are not an efficient use of manpower or budget.
and how many military personnel died in the past ten years?
What have the military dying abroad got to do with civilians dying on the streets at home? Or are you counting only the military killed on-base by their "comrades in arms"?
Use the keyboard AND the mouse simultaneously? It's bad enough having to find room on my already cluttered desk (3 desktops + monitors + 1 laptop + 4 mice + handover/ events diary + this shift's operations paperwork) in 1.3sq.m of desk space, but having to find space for each mouse when I need to move to each system... it's almost as bad as the other shift being wrong-handed!
I'll agree that there are a small number of tasks for which mice are appropriate, but not many.
I'm quite proud of my immoral acts (by some peoples measures ; I don't necessarily have the same morals as you), but I really don't give a shit one way or the other about my amoral acts.
The Thinkpads that IBM designed (hell a lot of things that IBM designed) were high water marks for the industry. Lenovo assembled them but they have not shown me that they, as a company, are anymore committed to producing such a high quality product now that they are responsible for the brand than are any of the other mainland shit companies.
The last time I had to do anything with specifying hardware for work, I needed quotes for getting a modest number of laptops which were WiFi-free (interference with explosive devices ; needs to be free from deliberately broadcast RF). I approached about 6 companies, including Lenovo, looking for pricing on getting such machines in batches of a half-dozen-ish. Of the people I approached, Lenovo were the ONLY ones to actually come back and ask for more details.
My Boss stuck with Dell shite machines (better the devil you know) and took the risk on killing his employees if the WiFi got used at the wrong time ; but Lenovo got major brownie points from me for actually replying.
Hawaii (and to a similar extent Puerto Rica, also considered as a pilot plant site) has some pretty steep submarine gradients - up to a couple of degrees (note), making deep cool water relatively easily available relatively close inshore - under a megametre.
But, where are they going to find such a gradient off the Chinese coast? Without getting into a territorial fight with Indonesia, the Philippines, or Taiwan? (The Gulf of Bohai is far too shallow to consider.)
.
(note) Yes, this should be of concern to people living on coasts facing Hawaii. And here I am sitting on a boat above the Storegga Slide headwall, whose tsunami washed into my home city a few thousand years ago. But the tsunami never got within 10m vertically of my new house, and I assess the odds of a repetition as being around 1% in my lifetime, so I'm cool with these risks. "of concern" does not equal "blind panic".
A fraction of a percent of That matter, if not brought up, would turn into oil, of which maybe one half we could extract, in a couple of hundred generations. It would be biologically wasted.
Fixed that for you
Of course, injecting some reality may sound like "pissing on the parade", but that doesn't stop it being reality.
They are *NOT* a problem in oceans. Indeed, deliberate iron fertilization projects have been suggested http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization as a means of reducing atmospheric CO2.
.. and they have been tried - several times, on several scales - and IF they work at all, they are certainly not the rip-roaring runaway successes that they were talked up to be before the experiments were tried (by, it should be said, some of their more vocal proponents ; people with personal interests in promoting their runaway rip-roaring successes).
These blooms are a nice idea. Why they didn't work isn't clear (to me ; I'm a geologist and my biology starts with the organism's fossilisation), but there are obviously more complex and subtle things going on than the original proponents expected.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll get the flensing knives. The blunt set.
So, what do you advocate? Killing them all, or just killing the profit motive? Destroying greed and venality? Good luck on getting those turkeys to vote for that Christmas!
Back to the primordial slime for vertebrates then! I hold out fairly high hopes for the cephalopod molluscs, particularly if you use the ones with external skeletons, eyes, good brains, and at least some potential for getting out of the water.
See the signature line. I haven't changed it for ages.
Doses far too low, and more importantly, undirected.
Doses ridiculously too low.
Errr, you do know that X-rays, gamma rays, and positrons are three different things? It's written on the back of your Geek card, somewhere in one of the microdots. What do you mean - you've left your electron microscope in your other leather-elbow-patched jacket?
Doses far too low for effective sterilisation, so it'd actually be negatively effective because of the increased birth defect rate.
No, I don't. Are you trying to be sarcastic, but haven't made it to chapter 2 of "Sarcasm for Dummies" (chapter 4 of the American edition)?
Hmmm, I shall have to consult with the wife on this ; going back "home" to the ÐÐÑÐ (thank you, SlashDot's pathetic inability to handle non-Latin characters) might be an option. OTOH, going back to share a country with her mother might be a discouragement to the wife.
What, you mean the one that my wife was working in the fields around 40 miles downwind from, for a week following the "event", and she didn't die an immediate, screaming, horrible death. In fact, she still hasn't died a screaming, horrible death. In fact, we're not sure if there have been any adverse health effect that can be unambiguously laid at the door of that "event", because her health is within the normal range of health variations.
Radiation is dangerous. So is driving fast, being a member of a species that lives on one planet without adequate meteorite deflection technologies, or breathing oxygen. As for eating too much of the wrong stuff - positively lethal!
Because radiation (and all those other things) is dangerous, doesn't mean that it is instantly utterly lethal. Don't let your "dread" (which the characteristics of radiation are undeniably good at triggering) overrule your head!
Cats aren't alive?
Boy, are you in for a scratching!
If that's an issue (I stopped pulling cables for work before fibre was even "extremely rare", let alone commonplace ; I know that I don't know.), then wouldn't it be plausible to make the conductors of (say) steel with a thick(ish) copper coating, to combine the mechanical stiffness of the steel with the (relative, but should be unimportant) corrosion resistance of the copper? Or, taking a strand from power lines, aluminium conductors with the fibre stranded between the three (power, return and ground)?
It's not just the military, and it's not dead. NASA still secure much/ most of the cabling on spacecraft using "lacing" (as our ITs call it on this side of the pond). Hmmm ; searching for the pages I saw not-long ago ... the knots (this article has been re-used several times, including by the Planetary Society, who at least cite their sources), there is a detailed NASA standard available here.
Different ITs (instrumentation technicians) I've worked with have had different styles. Some would lace ; some would use hundreds of (sefl-extinguishing) plastic tie-wraps. Generally I found that the lacing was neater, and more flexible. But most ITs didn't have the skill or training to use it (I'd struggle to follow that NASA spec ; but I'm not an IT.)
Someone mentioned aircraft mechanics damaging wiring that should be laced, by using tie-wraps. The NASA spec covers this : "9.6.2 Plastic straps are usually installed by tooling. Tooling shall be tension-controlled to meet the strap-tightening requirements previously stated (Requirement)." Which is exactly what my better ITs (not coincidentally, the lacing ones) have always specified too. Not that most of our staff paid the slightest attention, and since a tie-wrap torque-setting tool could cost several days pay, few of our managers would wear the cost of the tools for the field staff.
They should have moved onto a time-limited licensing revenue base years ago, if not decades ago. As it stands, they only get one fee from the customer, but if they're on a yearly (or better, monthly) license, enforced by software or hardware as appropriate, then they'd have recovered many times the original license fee from the customer. And they'd have been able to enforce upgrading too - every time the customer re-licenses, they establish a new contract, including new terms. People pretty rapidly stop reading the release notes, so you'd be able to insert the mandatory upgrade notices into them years in advance of their implementation.
It's not ALL about revenue from the software rental (as opposed to software sales) income stream being good for the developing company. Often it's good for the customer, as these rental fees are normally a tax-deductible expense, which can offset a lot of other income.
What? That's not the problem? But this is Slashdot, home of software coders and support nerds. What is not to like about regular (and eventually larger) revenue streams coupled with the knowledge that customers who don't carry out upgrades to your cycle don't need to be supported?
(Please check the calibration on your sarcasm detector ; it should be reading 50%.)
*you* can remove a WiFi card from a laptop ;
but can you trust your IT guy to remember to remove the card before air-freighting a new laptop to replace a burned-out one at the job site?
We don't have a PFY (or hundreds of laptops ; I mentioned "half-dozen" size orders) ; we have an IT guy who objects to being called into the office to work on weekends, even if the only flight to the destination leaves that afternoon, and the next flight will go out after the job is finished and the operators and equipment return. That is part of the reason that I was in the office doing hardware specification when I should have been at home on leave. I don't do that these days ; it doesn't earn you any benefits and causes even more hassle at home.
Damn ; "clients", not "client's" ; copy/ paste/ rearrange/ grammatical error !
I could install software (including drivers) on the laptop because I can get the Admin keys for that ... but that's not much help.
Besides, I do actually simultaneously need the displays of
I suppose it would be theoretically possible to incorporate all these functions into one computer, but that would assume that the same configuration of companies, services, requirements and software versions/ dependencies/ conflicts would recur in less than a few years, and last for more than a couple of months. Which just doesn't happen. In the real world.
Actually, I mis-speak : (company 2) brought (company 1) a couple of years ago ; but these divisions haven't merged, and haven't even got as far as using the same languages (broken English and French versus good English and Norwegian), let alone expenses forms. So I doubt that software unification is looming in the near future. The last comparable merger, it took about 6 years to replace one division's software with the others, and to re-train most of the operators.
Just injecting reality into your image of "organic debris in the sea = oil" ; you may have been joking, but I see so many nutcases in this line of work that it's hard to tell if someone really believes what they appear to be saying on that subject.
Some guy ("Victim") woke up in a street in London, minus his wallet and laptop (but not phone?). He suspects that his drink was spiked (there is a take-home message, apart from the message to avoid London until after the nukes redevelop it).
About the same time as "Victim" was regaining consciousness, his laptop was being used to set up accounts online, using the his missing credit cards. While unconscious, "Victim"s bank cards had been used, suggesting either "shoulder surfing" or coercion of the PIN while "spiked".
Crime reports were made, but the police couldn't find CCTV of any of the places where the bank cards were used, of the unconscious "Victim", or anything relevant ; massive Police inaction.
The laptop had Hidden software for activating the camera, reporting locations, allowing remote monitoring, etc, allowing "Victim" to see the new possessor of the laptop, to see what he was doing, and to follow his various, fairly sordid online and offline (over-tissue) activities.
Even given this continuing stream of data, the Police have done nothing about finding the perp.
"Victim" is not a happy bunny. So he has produced a NSFW blog of the (alleged) perp's activities.
There is a hint that the perp is, or poses as, a police officer, and a hint that this may be why the real police have been ineffectual. Or maybe they're just incompetent, and the perp is just a poseur.
Memo to self : don't walk around London with a laptop, and don't let your drink out of your hand. But you knew that anyway.
Sorry, but geeks do take the time to make things work.
A lot of people who call themselves "geeks" don't take the time to make things work, but that's because they're not geeks, just people who call themselves geeks. Similarly, I can go to any random lunatic asylum and round up a herd of people who call themselves "God" (or trivial variants of that), but the only way to tell if they really are God (or a close approximation) is to throw them in the lake and see if they can walk out without getting their feet wet.
I remember having the same conversations as a child with family, friends and teachers - mostly people wiser than me at that time. And so, you know, I actually followed their advice and do something for a living which is not my hobby. (Or not my main hobby, at least.)
There is this thing about advice ... if you don't listen to it and don't follow it, that's your responsibility, not the responsibility of the people who gave you the advice that you've asked for.
Which is precisely the point that TFA seems to be making in it's last (translated) sentence :
Which may be racial profiling, "postcode prejudice", and all sorts of unpleasant things, but "random/ universal, undirected, completely unfounded surveillance" it is not.
The way it was reported here (Norway) was that it was a planned option, checked out by their lawyers and approved by SCOTUSA some years ago.
So ... he's on a plane to Lybia ^H^H^H^H Syria ^H^H^H^H Egypt ^H^H^H^H^H ... damn, it's getting hard to find somewhere to render people^H^H^H^H^H terrorists to, ordinarily or extraordinarily ... Gitmo, no that's closed for new arrivals. Chechnya? Azerbaijan - they're nasty enough?
Something does stink about the affair, including the absence of the Miranda declaration. But that's a stink coming from a far higher level than an arresting officer or six forgetting a standard procedure.
And just as a fr'instance ... having failed over three major domestic terrorism cases now, when do you expect the FBI to be barred from investigating any domestic terrorism cases, ever? And who is going to catch that hat (and budget) when it lands?
You can afford to have police officers standing around on street corners "guarding" stuff? Not possible here : a policeman costs 3-4 times what a security guard does, and an armed policeman almost infinitely what an armed security guard does (outside the military, I don't think I've ever heard of an armed security guard, and armed bodyguards are vanishingly rare). By the time that you're seeing a policeman "standing around", you've already got dozens of officers and civilian staff working in the background on threat assessment, surveillance, intelligence collation, CCTV monitoring (you're talking about somewhere important enough to (sometimes) get a police guard ; the CCTV was installed years ago! Or installed decades ago and regularly upgraded.) ... and much other "stuff".
Even our fairly low-level grunt police are generally scooting around in a vehicle worth 9 months to a year's pay ; it's not efficient to have them standing around pulling their communal plonker.
We went through this years ago with the realisation that an officer on the beat would come within 100m (i.e. 2-3 street corners, and out of hearing range) of a crime being committed around once a decade. The "bobby on the beat" may be a picturesque and confidence-inspiring sight, but they are not an efficient use of manpower or budget.
What have the military dying abroad got to do with civilians dying on the streets at home? Or are you counting only the military killed on-base by their "comrades in arms"?
Use the keyboard AND the mouse simultaneously? It's bad enough having to find room on my already cluttered desk (3 desktops + monitors + 1 laptop + 4 mice + handover/ events diary + this shift's operations paperwork) in 1.3sq.m of desk space, but having to find space for each mouse when I need to move to each system ... it's almost as bad as the other shift being wrong-handed!
I'll agree that there are a small number of tasks for which mice are appropriate, but not many.
I'm quite proud of my immoral acts (by some peoples measures ; I don't necessarily have the same morals as you), but I really don't give a shit one way or the other about my amoral acts.
The last time I had to do anything with specifying hardware for work, I needed quotes for getting a modest number of laptops which were WiFi-free (interference with explosive devices ; needs to be free from deliberately broadcast RF). I approached about 6 companies, including Lenovo, looking for pricing on getting such machines in batches of a half-dozen-ish. Of the people I approached, Lenovo were the ONLY ones to actually come back and ask for more details.
My Boss stuck with Dell shite machines (better the devil you know) and took the risk on killing his employees if the WiFi got used at the wrong time ; but Lenovo got major brownie points from me for actually replying.
But, where are they going to find such a gradient off the Chinese coast? Without getting into a territorial fight with Indonesia, the Philippines, or Taiwan? (The Gulf of Bohai is far too shallow to consider.)
.
(note) Yes, this should be of concern to people living on coasts facing Hawaii. And here I am sitting on a boat above the Storegga Slide headwall, whose tsunami washed into my home city a few thousand years ago. But the tsunami never got within 10m vertically of my new house, and I assess the odds of a repetition as being around 1% in my lifetime, so I'm cool with these risks. "of concern" does not equal "blind panic".
Fixed that for you
Of course, injecting some reality may sound like "pissing on the parade", but that doesn't stop it being reality.
.. and they have been tried - several times, on several scales - and IF they work at all, they are certainly not the rip-roaring runaway successes that they were talked up to be before the experiments were tried (by, it should be said, some of their more vocal proponents ; people with personal interests in promoting their runaway rip-roaring successes).
These blooms are a nice idea. Why they didn't work isn't clear (to me ; I'm a geologist and my biology starts with the organism's fossilisation), but there are obviously more complex and subtle things going on than the original proponents expected.