And they have to be able to work without totally relying on totally accurate GPS and (up to date) Maps since there will always be lag time between the real world and map updates.
We drive by relatively simple sets of mental rules... Go in this direction and don't hit stuff. Obey signs along the way. If you think you are lost or hitting bad traffic, then consult a map or look for a sign to see if there is a better way. Know when you are near the next turn or destination and when you need to find some parking.
Yes, pretty much none of that should be part of a decision tree. Human drivers don't have time to think like that and they don't.
I recall a friend describing to me his thought process before he hit an animal in the road.... It was BS. I was there, he didn't get past "What the...." and probably more like "Wh..." People make up all sorts of things after they get into an accident because they run through the scenario over and over again in their minds.
Having fast sensor/processing reaction times is better than having human regret after the fact.
The important thing in all this is to keep it simple. There are numerous special interests that want to push regulators towards their own proprietary and expensive "solutions" to problems that don't exists.
The last 60 years is littered with popular mechanics articles about guide wires in the roads or wireless beacons that need to be installed everywhere to make driverless cars a reality. The one lesson in all of this history should be that if you need specialized infrastructure or special roads to make it a reality then it is a dead end technology. Hopefully regulators don't get swayed into expensive dead end demo proof of concepts on special tracks. Roads need to work for both computer and human drivers. And that means smart cars need to work on dumb roads using the least amount of processing power and least number of sensors.
Yes, that is why I said if they aren't actually doing business in a country then it is more clearly a tax dodge. But most countries exclude overseas income kept overseas from local taxation as a matter of policy. It isn't a tax dodge, just common sense.
This isn't just a money grab, it's about curtailing extreme abuse of the system. These companies benefit from the services paid for by taxation (infrastructure, education, healthcare, legal system etc.) but contribute almost nothing back. Certainly nothing like what the law intended.
On the one hand, yes sure if they are actually illegally not paying taxes then I have no argument against that. If those are the taxes that the country has democratically decided. If a company just has a physical address and doesn't really do business in a country and then yes we are likely dealing with some level of fraudulent behavior just moving money around and laundering it in the lowest taxed placed.
But for the most part what we are talking about are companies following the letter of the law to avoid corporate income taxes, while still paying boatloads in taxes in sales/vat, income and property taxes. It is simply a fallacy, a plain lie, to say these companies are not paying any taxes in the countries where they operate and do business. And if they are following the letter of the law in avoiding taxes wherever permissible, then good for them and it is up to those countries to democratically decide whether or not they want to increase or lower taxes.
Simply put, if people are being employed at a physical location and/or buying the company's products and services inside that country then they are likely already paying their fair share through that myriad of taxes.
I support transparency as a way for democratic nations to decide whether or not their laws are working, so requiring companies to further report their balance sheets on a country by country basis should help lawmakers determine if the laws they have crafted are working as intended.
But ultimately, it is only right to tax income, sales/vat, and property that are actually located or transactions that take place inside that country. Otherwise, you are simply saying that commerce between countries cannot take place without a huge tax penalty.
Doesn't Capitalism always show the right way to do it without that pesky government influence.
How is the government trying to encourage competition not a free market? This isn't an example of government "generosity", this is an example of the government trying to encourage competition in a previously uncompetitive market for launch services.
Well, actually, we don't need to leave it to a bunch of internet commenters to decide this issue -- there is an actual process described as "equities review" which the Executive Branch is responsible for, when a cyber vulnerability is known, but not yet disclosed to the public:
The considerations described here (in whether to reveal or keep secret a vulnerability) cover:
-- How much is the vulnerable system used in the core internet infrastructure, in other critical infrastructure systems, in the U.S. economy, and/or in national security systems? -- Does the vulnerability, if left unpatched, impose significant risk? -- How much harm could an adversary nation or criminal group do with knowledge of this vulnerability? -- How likely is it that we would know if someone else was exploiting it? -- How badly do we need the intelligence we think we can get from exploiting the vulnerability? -- Are there other ways we can get it? -- Could we utilize the vulnerability for a short period of time before we disclose it? -- How likely is it that someone else will discover the vulnerability? -- Can the vulnerability be patched or otherwise mitigated?
In this case, I might argue that this is becoming so well known (though the technical specifics have not been revealed), that the FBI/US had better tell Apple to make sure that other users of the affected phones can be secured -- while the intelligence value of the exploit is rapidly decreasing due to its publicity.
In bureaucratic speak all that means that as long as you can write a well worded memo of justification then you can do whatever you want.
Anyone willing to give a tl;dr explanation for those of us who don't want to get lost on Wikipedia for the next couple hours?
A day late, but: A proxy fight is when the owners of 50.1% of the voting shares get together and try to install new management starting with the board of directors. This happens at the annual meeting when the board is usually just rubber stamped by shareholders.
I didn't even go to yahoo.com after this story. I Googled yahoo and read about yahoo on Wikipedia.:) Yahoo's relevance isn't just about web design anymore.
Yahoo lost as a Big Internet company when it outsourced search to Microsoft/Bing and focused on content.
FTFY...
Bing/Microsoft was 2009. Outsourcing to Google came first and then again later. When they bought their long time search engine provider Inktomi in 2003 they should have focused on providing search in-house, but instead they used Google search results, then went back to their own and then Microsoft/Bing and then Google. Instead of competing with Google when they lost market share they just went in a different direction. Seems they were critically late by about 3 or 4 years late in their strategic decision between 1999 and 2004 and by then Google had won search and they just surrendered.
The only thing a proxy fight can do is devalue the company even more. Just as the stupid fight to oust Marissa Meyer has devalued the company. Yahoo lost as a Big Internet company when it outsourced search to Google and focused on content. Content is hard, expensive, competitive and very hit or miss. By the time you know whether or not you have a winning combination you may have already moved on to try something else. And as far as I can tell Yahoo has just a few brand/content offerings that are very popular with everything else just kind puttering along. The Internet needs some more non-Facebook-Google-Twitter Internet companies to remain vital and it is too bad Yahoo has been on the long slide down.
...hearings held in secret and away from the public gaze, the person said that the tech companies hit by these demands are losing 'most of the time...
Can some one explain to me how this behavior by our [democratic] government, is very very different as compared to similar action taken by "those regimes" to the east? I mean, I do not see the difference here!
We "Aspire" to be better... Americans aspire towards Liberty, Freedom of Speech, Free elections and when we fall short we are supposed to feel bad about it. For over two centuries we have been unsteadily moving towards our ideals. Belief in Liberty had to overcome the realities of slavery and then Jim Crow laws. Belief in Freedom of Speech is always under continuous assault by those with power to coerce. Our rights to privacy and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures have come under increasing attack lately, but have always been at the mercy of the fears and threats of the day. Our right to bear arms to defend ourselves have steadily eroded in the past 30 or 40 years or so. Democracy is just as beholden to the Party bosses that manipulate local elections and local press with casual ease. And good old fashioned corruption is still a big problem in the US as it is everywhere else in the world... These things ebb and flow with the times.
What we are supposed to do as Americans is draw inspiration from the dreams of our founders for Life Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness and not give into the cynicism that this is 'just the way it is'
There were some recent articles on autonomous cars about a Rand Corp. study that said they would need to drive 275 autonomous million miles without a fatality to prove they were safe for the public. Even though regular cars with human drivers have a fatality on average of every 80 million miles or so. That means people were actually arguing that autonomous cars needed to prove themselves over 3 times safer than existing cars in order for them to be allowed on the roads.
In other words we can't save thousands of lives until it is proven we can save tens of thousands of lives. Like saying 'sorry, those airbags and seat belts only save thousands of lives, so let's take em out'.
People don't think of overall safety, they get fixated on arbitrary relative safety. Rand Corp. apparently picked a number out of a hat. Maybe it is liability concern, or somebody figured out their company or industry can't compete in a safer future. Whatever it is, it is the kind of thinking that gets more people killed because people are covering their asses.
I agree if we are talking about tax money being used. Taxpayer subsidies undermine the free market and ultimately undermine the service being offered if those services are competing with other public priorities for tax dollars instead of being supported by the fees paid by customers.
That said it seems there should be a way to get loans to build out fiber without needing billions in wall street investment. Regulations are taylor made to the business model of needing large scale capital investment on speculation. Rather than the incremental small scale organic approach that would foster competition.
Something like a kick starter for fiber rollouts at the neighborhood, small city or regional level. Or a coop model where customers provide the upfront capital. Say something like $400 set up fee if enough neighbors sign on.
So here is the thing. If the paper is a deliverable of the Federal contract... meaning that it is something sent to the Federal Government as part of the research grant, then yes absolutely the Federal government should be making those papers available to the public.
Notice I said it was on the Federal government to provide access. Has anyone submitted a FOIA request to the sponsoring agencies for research papers? Those papers could then be put online by whomever.
reduce the kinds of societal tensions that can really be disruptive and destructive to people's lives
All sorts of disruptive and destructive things are tolerated every day; hundreds of H1-Bs displace citizens from their livelyhoods, small midwest communities are expected to absorb Syrian immigrants into their schools and hospitals without complaint, property owners in border states live in fear of smugglers unimpeded handcuffed border patrol... Funny how we only indulge this "societal tension" language when it's comfy SF gentry being disrupted. In all other cases it's `racism' and/or `intolerance.'
Most people do actually agree there need to be limits on legal immigration because there is a limit on how many people can come here and be assimilated. It has just become politically incorrect among a vocal minority of liberal and press elites to agree to any limits on immigration. Limits on immigration are the law of the land because rightly people understood that with unbridled immigration you would have societal disruption, discord and even violence.
I think *you* need to distinguish between rented and owned property - if you rent, then no you don't have a right to live there, you have a privilege in being allowed to live there by the owner, who can under some certain circumstances, withdraw the privilege.
If you want a right to live somewhere specific, then buy.
In the ideal, sure. But fundamentally rent and ownership are both temporary control of real property defined by laws and regulations. People are not free to create whatever contracts they like. That is just reality. Government puts many reasonable (and unreasonable) constraints on the types of contracts that it will enforce or allow and limits on the kinds of ownership that will be recognized by courts.
No one has a "right" to live anywhere. Ridiculous.
I think if I came to where you and your family lived, knocked on the door and said to be out in 30 or 60 days and you couldn't afford to stay in the area near family, near friends, near schools your kids went to, near jobs that supported your family. I don't think you would just shrug and say well no one has a "right" to live anywhere.
I think you need to distinguish between an idealized free market system and a free market system with some controls and moderation that actually works to reduce the kinds of societal tensions that can really be disruptive and destructive to people's lives.
The article, written and hosted by instituto lula itself, should be taken with a grain of salt The institute is already under investigation because of massive cases corruption. Also, someone leaked that the police would be seizing the institute, and they emptied it from most of its documents. Its like watergate in here, and the judge presiding the investigation has a lot of popular support because he is finally going for people which seemed to be untouchable in the past.
Yes, this sounds like the police were worried that the sys admin was going to delete the server or something so they just demanded the admin passwords. Sure that would give them access to all the accounts, but it seems reasonable if there was a reasonable fear that the admin wasn't going to comply with the order. Yes the police should only look at the accounts that the courts ordered them to.
Now it looks like Slashdot has been used to spin coverage towards some false privacy debate when this is about corruption.
i think the easiest thing to do is not to monitor emissions at all. Instead focus on tracking activities that create emissions. for ex. to cover the transportation sector you could track the amount of gasoline or diesel that is sold. similar for electricity generation, track how much coal / NG is getting burned. There are trickier sectors which require much more attention to track, but when you've taken care of the 90%, you can focus on the 10%. For example, fugitive emissions from methane leaking from our pipe infrastructure. Or, area source emissions from things like landfills or other places where biological breakdown creates methane.
Efficiency is relative so you can't just measure overall fuel consumption if you care about figuring out ways of reducing emissions. But yes, you could just measure overall fuel consumption and figure it will be burned in the next two years or so and get some pretty good overall estimates. Although those numbers can also be fudged +/- 30% probably with creative bookkeeping. I think the important thing is to do as much estimating and measuring as possible at each level and then see where your numbers don't quite add up.
but you can't monitor emissions, other than through spot checks. you can monitor air quality, but there's no straight line between emissions and air quality.
You could do continuous monitoring of point source emissions, but the point is that if you are estimating total emissions from sporadic monitoring of local emissions then your estimates are highly suspect. You need both kinds of monitoring to know what you are missing.
"GHGSat is building and will launch and operate the world’s first satellite capable of monitoring greenhouse gas (GHG) and air quality gas (AQG) emissions from any industrial site in the world."
It's built and launching shortly.
Great for Greenhouse gases, but what about air quality monitoring? For full monitoring including air quality we would need a comprehensive system of ground based sensors. Perhaps mounted at various levels of communications towers to get readings at near ground level and slightly above where air quality actually effects people's health directly.
Slashdot Mirror
And they have to be able to work without totally relying on totally accurate GPS and (up to date) Maps since there will always be lag time between the real world and map updates.
We drive by relatively simple sets of mental rules... Go in this direction and don't hit stuff. Obey signs along the way. If you think you are lost or hitting bad traffic, then consult a map or look for a sign to see if there is a better way. Know when you are near the next turn or destination and when you need to find some parking.
Yes, pretty much none of that should be part of a decision tree. Human drivers don't have time to think like that and they don't.
I recall a friend describing to me his thought process before he hit an animal in the road.... It was BS. I was there, he didn't get past "What the ...." and probably more like "Wh..." People make up all sorts of things after they get into an accident because they run through the scenario over and over again in their minds.
Having fast sensor/processing reaction times is better than having human regret after the fact.
They will have detailed records
Yes. Messing with a driver-less car would be stupid. Smile for the camera, because it will show up on your arrest warrant for reckless driving.
The important thing in all this is to keep it simple. There are numerous special interests that want to push regulators towards their own proprietary and expensive "solutions" to problems that don't exists.
The last 60 years is littered with popular mechanics articles about guide wires in the roads or wireless beacons that need to be installed everywhere to make driverless cars a reality. The one lesson in all of this history should be that if you need specialized infrastructure or special roads to make it a reality then it is a dead end technology. Hopefully regulators don't get swayed into expensive dead end demo proof of concepts on special tracks. Roads need to work for both computer and human drivers. And that means smart cars need to work on dumb roads using the least amount of processing power and least number of sensors.
Yes, that is why I said if they aren't actually doing business in a country then it is more clearly a tax dodge. But most countries exclude overseas income kept overseas from local taxation as a matter of policy. It isn't a tax dodge, just common sense.
This isn't just a money grab, it's about curtailing extreme abuse of the system. These companies benefit from the services paid for by taxation (infrastructure, education, healthcare, legal system etc.) but contribute almost nothing back. Certainly nothing like what the law intended.
On the one hand, yes sure if they are actually illegally not paying taxes then I have no argument against that. If those are the taxes that the country has democratically decided. If a company just has a physical address and doesn't really do business in a country and then yes we are likely dealing with some level of fraudulent behavior just moving money around and laundering it in the lowest taxed placed.
But for the most part what we are talking about are companies following the letter of the law to avoid corporate income taxes, while still paying boatloads in taxes in sales/vat, income and property taxes. It is simply a fallacy, a plain lie, to say these companies are not paying any taxes in the countries where they operate and do business. And if they are following the letter of the law in avoiding taxes wherever permissible, then good for them and it is up to those countries to democratically decide whether or not they want to increase or lower taxes.
Simply put, if people are being employed at a physical location and/or buying the company's products and services inside that country then they are likely already paying their fair share through that myriad of taxes.
I support transparency as a way for democratic nations to decide whether or not their laws are working, so requiring companies to further report their balance sheets on a country by country basis should help lawmakers determine if the laws they have crafted are working as intended.
But ultimately, it is only right to tax income, sales/vat, and property that are actually located or transactions that take place inside that country. Otherwise, you are simply saying that commerce between countries cannot take place without a huge tax penalty.
Doesn't Capitalism always show the right way to do it without that pesky government influence.
How is the government trying to encourage competition not a free market? This isn't an example of government "generosity", this is an example of the government trying to encourage competition in a previously uncompetitive market for launch services.
Well, actually, we don't need to leave it to a bunch of internet commenters to decide this issue -- there is an actual process described as "equities review" which the Executive Branch is responsible for, when a cyber vulnerability is known, but not yet disclosed to the public:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/blo...>href=https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/04/28/heartbleed-understanding-when-we-disclose-cyber-vulnerabilities
The considerations described here (in whether to reveal or keep secret a vulnerability) cover:
-- How much is the vulnerable system used in the core internet infrastructure, in other critical infrastructure systems, in the U.S. economy, and/or in national security systems?
--
Does the vulnerability, if left unpatched, impose significant risk?
--
How much harm could an adversary nation or criminal group do with knowledge of this vulnerability?
--
How likely is it that we would know if someone else was exploiting it?
--
How badly do we need the intelligence we think we can get from exploiting the vulnerability?
--
Are there other ways we can get it?
--
Could we utilize the vulnerability for a short period of time before we disclose it?
--
How likely is it that someone else will discover the vulnerability?
--
Can the vulnerability be patched or otherwise mitigated?
In this case, I might argue that this is becoming so well known (though the technical specifics have not been revealed), that the FBI/US had better tell Apple to make sure that other users of the affected phones can be secured -- while the intelligence value of the exploit is rapidly decreasing due to its publicity.
In bureaucratic speak all that means that as long as you can write a well worded memo of justification then you can do whatever you want.
Anyone willing to give a tl;dr explanation for those of us who don't want to get lost on Wikipedia for the next couple hours?
A day late, but: A proxy fight is when the owners of 50.1% of the voting shares get together and try to install new management starting with the board of directors. This happens at the annual meeting when the board is usually just rubber stamped by shareholders.
I didn't even go to yahoo.com after this story. I Googled yahoo and read about yahoo on Wikipedia. :) Yahoo's relevance isn't just about web design anymore.
Yahoo lost as a Big Internet company when it outsourced search to Microsoft/Bing and focused on content.
FTFY...
Bing/Microsoft was 2009. Outsourcing to Google came first and then again later. When they bought their long time search engine provider Inktomi in 2003 they should have focused on providing search in-house, but instead they used Google search results, then went back to their own and then Microsoft/Bing and then Google. Instead of competing with Google when they lost market share they just went in a different direction. Seems they were critically late by about 3 or 4 years late in their strategic decision between 1999 and 2004 and by then Google had won search and they just surrendered.
The only thing a proxy fight can do is devalue the company even more. Just as the stupid fight to oust Marissa Meyer has devalued the company. Yahoo lost as a Big Internet company when it outsourced search to Google and focused on content. Content is hard, expensive, competitive and very hit or miss. By the time you know whether or not you have a winning combination you may have already moved on to try something else. And as far as I can tell Yahoo has just a few brand/content offerings that are very popular with everything else just kind puttering along. The Internet needs some more non-Facebook-Google-Twitter Internet companies to remain vital and it is too bad Yahoo has been on the long slide down.
...hearings held in secret and away from the public gaze, the person said that the tech companies hit by these demands are losing 'most of the time...
Can some one explain to me how this behavior by our [democratic] government, is very very different as compared to similar action taken by "those regimes" to the east? I mean, I do not see the difference here!
We "Aspire" to be better... Americans aspire towards Liberty, Freedom of Speech, Free elections and when we fall short we are supposed to feel bad about it. For over two centuries we have been unsteadily moving towards our ideals. Belief in Liberty had to overcome the realities of slavery and then Jim Crow laws. Belief in Freedom of Speech is always under continuous assault by those with power to coerce. Our rights to privacy and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures have come under increasing attack lately, but have always been at the mercy of the fears and threats of the day. Our right to bear arms to defend ourselves have steadily eroded in the past 30 or 40 years or so. Democracy is just as beholden to the Party bosses that manipulate local elections and local press with casual ease. And good old fashioned corruption is still a big problem in the US as it is everywhere else in the world... These things ebb and flow with the times.
What we are supposed to do as Americans is draw inspiration from the dreams of our founders for Life Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness and not give into the cynicism that this is 'just the way it is'
The key issue with public transport is frequency, not speed.
More speed is one factor towards having a higher frequency of service.
There were some recent articles on autonomous cars about a Rand Corp. study that said they would need to drive 275 autonomous million miles without a fatality to prove they were safe for the public. Even though regular cars with human drivers have a fatality on average of every 80 million miles or so. That means people were actually arguing that autonomous cars needed to prove themselves over 3 times safer than existing cars in order for them to be allowed on the roads.
In other words we can't save thousands of lives until it is proven we can save tens of thousands of lives. Like saying 'sorry, those airbags and seat belts only save thousands of lives, so let's take em out'.
People don't think of overall safety, they get fixated on arbitrary relative safety. Rand Corp. apparently picked a number out of a hat. Maybe it is liability concern, or somebody figured out their company or industry can't compete in a safer future. Whatever it is, it is the kind of thinking that gets more people killed because people are covering their asses.
I agree if we are talking about tax money being used. Taxpayer subsidies undermine the free market and ultimately undermine the service being offered if those services are competing with other public priorities for tax dollars instead of being supported by the fees paid by customers.
That said it seems there should be a way to get loans to build out fiber without needing billions in wall street investment. Regulations are taylor made to the business model of needing large scale capital investment on speculation. Rather than the incremental small scale organic approach that would foster competition.
Something like a kick starter for fiber rollouts at the neighborhood, small city or regional level. Or a coop model where customers provide the upfront capital. Say something like $400 set up fee if enough neighbors sign on.
Every human activity has a cost. Nothing is free in this world.
Who will pay to publish and host these papers? Advertisement? How well did that turn out for the Internet?
Oh who oh who would do such a thing?
So here is the thing. If the paper is a deliverable of the Federal contract... meaning that it is something sent to the Federal Government as part of the research grant, then yes absolutely the Federal government should be making those papers available to the public.
Notice I said it was on the Federal government to provide access. Has anyone submitted a FOIA request to the sponsoring agencies for research papers? Those papers could then be put online by whomever.
reduce the kinds of societal tensions that can really be disruptive and destructive to people's lives
All sorts of disruptive and destructive things are tolerated every day; hundreds of H1-Bs displace citizens from their livelyhoods, small midwest communities are expected to absorb Syrian immigrants into their schools and hospitals without complaint, property owners in border states live in fear of smugglers unimpeded handcuffed border patrol... Funny how we only indulge this "societal tension" language when it's comfy SF gentry being disrupted. In all other cases it's `racism' and/or `intolerance.'
Most people do actually agree there need to be limits on legal immigration because there is a limit on how many people can come here and be assimilated. It has just become politically incorrect among a vocal minority of liberal and press elites to agree to any limits on immigration. Limits on immigration are the law of the land because rightly people understood that with unbridled immigration you would have societal disruption, discord and even violence.
I think *you* need to distinguish between rented and owned property - if you rent, then no you don't have a right to live there, you have a privilege in being allowed to live there by the owner, who can under some certain circumstances, withdraw the privilege.
If you want a right to live somewhere specific, then buy.
In the ideal, sure. But fundamentally rent and ownership are both temporary control of real property defined by laws and regulations. People are not free to create whatever contracts they like. That is just reality. Government puts many reasonable (and unreasonable) constraints on the types of contracts that it will enforce or allow and limits on the kinds of ownership that will be recognized by courts.
No one has a "right" to live anywhere. Ridiculous.
I think if I came to where you and your family lived, knocked on the door and said to be out in 30 or 60 days and you couldn't afford to stay in the area near family, near friends, near schools your kids went to, near jobs that supported your family. I don't think you would just shrug and say well no one has a "right" to live anywhere.
I think you need to distinguish between an idealized free market system and a free market system with some controls and moderation that actually works to reduce the kinds of societal tensions that can really be disruptive and destructive to people's lives.
The article, written and hosted by instituto lula itself, should be taken with a grain of salt The institute is already under investigation because of massive cases corruption.
Also, someone leaked that the police would be seizing the institute, and they emptied it from most of its documents. Its like watergate in here, and the judge presiding the investigation has a lot of popular support because he is finally going for people which seemed to be untouchable in the past.
Yes, this sounds like the police were worried that the sys admin was going to delete the server or something so they just demanded the admin passwords. Sure that would give them access to all the accounts, but it seems reasonable if there was a reasonable fear that the admin wasn't going to comply with the order. Yes the police should only look at the accounts that the courts ordered them to.
Now it looks like Slashdot has been used to spin coverage towards some false privacy debate when this is about corruption.
i think the easiest thing to do is not to monitor emissions at all. Instead focus on tracking activities that create emissions. for ex. to cover the transportation sector you could track the amount of gasoline or diesel that is sold. similar for electricity generation, track how much coal / NG is getting burned. There are trickier sectors which require much more attention to track, but when you've taken care of the 90%, you can focus on the 10%. For example, fugitive emissions from methane leaking from our pipe infrastructure. Or, area source emissions from things like landfills or other places where biological breakdown creates methane.
Efficiency is relative so you can't just measure overall fuel consumption if you care about figuring out ways of reducing emissions. But yes, you could just measure overall fuel consumption and figure it will be burned in the next two years or so and get some pretty good overall estimates. Although those numbers can also be fudged +/- 30% probably with creative bookkeeping. I think the important thing is to do as much estimating and measuring as possible at each level and then see where your numbers don't quite add up.
but you can't monitor emissions, other than through spot checks. you can monitor air quality, but there's no straight line between emissions and air quality.
You could do continuous monitoring of point source emissions, but the point is that if you are estimating total emissions from sporadic monitoring of local emissions then your estimates are highly suspect. You need both kinds of monitoring to know what you are missing.
http://www.ghgsat.com/
"GHGSat is building and will launch and operate the world’s first satellite capable of monitoring greenhouse gas (GHG) and air quality gas (AQG) emissions from any industrial site in the world."
It's built and launching shortly.
Great for Greenhouse gases, but what about air quality monitoring? For full monitoring including air quality we would need a comprehensive system of ground based sensors. Perhaps mounted at various levels of communications towers to get readings at near ground level and slightly above where air quality actually effects people's health directly.