This could pose a problem for evolution in court because one can no longer claim "evolution predicts a tree of life".
Not sure why. It's moving past where Evolution was taught when I was in High School, but in college and since this sort of stuff started popping up, first noticed with Bacteria, which turn out to share DNA quite often.
Indeed, I believe that the more complex methods of DNA transfer existing only weakens young-earth creationist arguments. Leaves them with less wiggle-room in trying to refute Evolution.
Remember, the core theory of 'evolution' doesn't require only the sexual method of DNA sharing, though that's perhaps the easiest to explain to kids. Bacteria sharing chunks of DNA coding for antibiotic resistance is getting into advanced territory.
Finding out that 'life' is more of a messy ball with lots of weird interconnects is more in line with what you'd expect from evolution than some sort of 'neat' process controlled by some sort of designer.
I think applying a "who cares if they keep the method a secret" test to requests for software patents would solve a lot of what's wrong with the current situation.
This is an interesting standard because the biggest reason I can see for people not to care if they keep it secret is because there's numerous other groups coming out with nearly identical solutions - to me this means that the potential patent fails the 'non-obvious' test. Otherwise there's things like it's already been used in the past, etc...
To me, the biggest patents I hate is where they go 'standard practic on a computer' or 'something we've done on computers for ages, but now we're doing it on a tablet or smartphone.
Not so. For the hundredth time, false equivalence.
This is not a counter-argument to my point. There's a reason I said 'a bit', IE the simile isn't exact. I know that, try not to nitpick.
This is why the whole media circus affair annoys me to no end: people constantly spout stupid shit like "well people were killed with these guns, so this program caused people to die, because otherwise the murderers wouldn't have guns!"
Very nice, but at this point you're arguing against a strawman, since my argument was very much less authorative than 'wouldn't have guns'. At most I implied that they wouldn't have as many of the same power and quality.
To repeat: Without the ATF letting the guns through, the Cartels would be stuck using less ideal procurement methods - we know they're not as ideal because they DID buy and use the guns from the dealers. Why would that purchase method be 'ideal' for at least some guns? My thoughts are cost, quality, and availability. Lower cost means they can obtain more guns for the price. They weren't buying cheap guns though, so maybe quality was an ideal factor - while semiautomatic(their illegal sources can get them full auto) the ARs were probably more accurate and possibly reliable than the illegal sources. Availability was probably also a factor - illegal sources are probably less reliable of a source than purchasing. Plus smuggling them back into Mexico isn't likely a big deal, given that they can just operate their smuggling system backwards; I don't think what cash they send back to Mexico takes up as much space, so otherwise the transport systems would just be deadheading back into Mexico.
If the officer had faced an AK or even a handgun instead of an AR he might still be alive. Or, given the butterfly effect, he may never have come into conflict that day. Of course, with the butterfly effect the effect of no F&F might have cost lives, though on the balance that's unlikely.
On the balance I maintain that I believe that F&F as executed did more harm than good - wasted resources in a failed investigation/sting operation, easier arming of cartel forces, etc...
Actually, I find geekoid's mentioning of commercial kitchens particularly apt.
However, I was listing about Uber and such a couple weeks ago, and I found out that at least in some cities Uber drivers are operating under the limo/contract car laws, IE they are inspected and regulated, just not quite as tightly as taxis. However, as such they're not allowed to respond to flag hails just on the street; rides have to be pre-arranged. Which Uber technically does...
I include that here because I try to avoid responding to AC's.
My take on this: 1. The initial drop in usage seems to be mostly from needing to set up alternative channels - IE the black market took time to become established. 2. The long term drop might be due to increased costs, much like how increasing taxes on cigarettes results in lower usage. 3. Cirrhosis rates, because they depend upon the abuse of alcohol, might not be indicative, since increased prices will affect heavy drinkers more than light drinkers. 4. While prohibition resulted in a long term 40% drop, we've managed over a 50% drop with tobacco. without prohibition, soley by taxes and education. 5. As Portugal has shown, legalization can have many positive benefits.
What, you don't have a deposit box already? It's where I keep all sorts of important stuff like house records, vehicle titles, insurance documents, etc... Tossing the code/scratch card in there would be easy.
If you don't have one, you should have somewhere where you keep important records(taxes and such), keep it there.
Regardless, there were no negative effects measurable, and logic indicates extreme likelihood that no negative effects exist.
I'd say dead people are measurable negative effects, it's just a bit like pollution deaths - did this particular death result from factory A, B, or C? We can't tell. The Mexican cartels do have multiple ways to obtain firearms, and firearms from F&F have been traced to a number of murders, including the murder of at least one federal officer, and I believe a few state officers. While not 100% indicative of causation, it is a correlation.
Logically speaking, the cartels were obtaining the firearms from the USA because they were the 'best choice' - whether by availability, price, quality, whatever. Maybe if they hadn't been able to get those firearms they would have been stuck with a handgun or AK type rifle and lacked the accuracy/power to kill the agent. I agree, we don't know for sure, but given the body count making it harder for the cartels to obtain the guns probably would have saved some lives.
The real problem is budgetary: we wasted money to less effect than expected, and it's questionable if the gains were worth the costs. As I understand, the costs were minimal, but still.
I suggest rereading my post, where I said things like "What really pisses me off is that not only did the program fail, their actual plan read a bit like the underpant gnome's business plan." Previous incarnations of this program DID coordinate with Mexican police authorities, DID perform much more intense tracking, etc... They actually caught people. This one basically ignored that institutional knowledge, and basic logic should of told them it wasn't going to work.
Occasional failure is to be expected. I just expect the failure to be from something like the Cartel doing something unexpected, equipment failure, or even a low level agent screwing up. The plan for the operation itself should be well thought out, and in this case the problems were evident just from reading the plan, failure would have been expected just from that. Solyndra had a better business plan in comparison.
The real problem is budgetary: we wasted money to less effect than expected, and it's questionable if the gains were worth the costs. As I understand, the costs were minimal, but still.
My position is that our default position should be to not provide firearms to organized crime unless it's part of a *competent* sting operation. The costs were minimal because the effort put in was minimal, insufficient to have a realistic chance of tracing the firearms to higher level personnel in the cartel and effect arrests. Basically, if you're going to do it, do it right.
Browsing wiki on Part Number, I can't help but think of the number of times I've looked up a part number and seen 'actual design may vary'. It's guaranteed to fit and work, but not to look identical to others of it's kind. For users of parts, sometimes they're more concerned with functionality than identical design.
It might not even have been a safety update. The part might have been 'cheapened' at a chinese factory. It might of been produced by a different factory. It could have been a 'non-safety' change for whatever reason, IE the company didn't see it as affecting safety.
Error, invalid question? I didn't describe any fatalities. Matter of fact, I specifically mentioned non-fatal accidents, just ones where the car ended up being mangled beyond recognition. I did so because that's what swb was talking about: horrific looking accidents where you wouldn't expect survivors. Those are NOT typical accidents, survival or otherwise. Neither is 100+mph through two concrete barriers and a tree, much less with the driver surviving, being able to exit the vehicle under his own power elevates it to 'astonishing'.
As for the Tesla, to date that I'm aware of there have been NO fatalities(knock on wood) to the occupants of a Tesla in an accident. There have been fatalities to people HIT by a Tesla, but the occupants in those cases were fine*.
*Alive and relatively unharmed, though I understand a couple of them are facing serious legal consequences to their actions.
I'd argue that a selection of accidents chosen for shock value on how mangled the car is while the people inside survived* would also tend to not select 'typical accidents', which I believe would be a relative low speed rear-ending.
I've seen such pictures where I'm looking at the vehicle and going 'how could anybody FIT in that crushed wreck?'
Of course, that today's cars are designed to collapse helps with the shock value - modern cars designed for safety will happily deform into a crazy mess in order to prevent all the intrusion into the passenger cabin they can while lowering the accelleration the passengers experience during the crash.
Prevent intrusion into the cabin and humans can survive incredible amounts of acceleration, as John Stapp proved.
*Even if 'survived' includes missing limbs, permanent injury, and length hospital stays.
Indeed, like many other car companies, Volvo has probably started building their vehicles down to a price, thus can't do the 6 car thing anymore.
Either that or Volvo knows their roofs are that strong and use more powerful presses during testing.
I don't reply to AC's(don't even read them normally), but I'm impressed with Tesla's safety record. With as many cars on the road as long as they've had them, their 'no fatality/no permanent disability' record is becoming impressive.
The press thing was only one of the safety results I remember.
Oh, and for the number of Teslas the roof can withstand - we know it's a minimum of 4, since the press broke at that point, it's probably higher.
Oh and any enemy wanting to take out your power or know where you are would just find and shoot down the flippin' blimp and then you...
... fire up your diesel generator?
The military is already flying blimps in combat zones, typically sensor platforms to give good 'eye in the sky' intel for a base and it's surrounding area. Also, it's more difficult than you think to target something that's pretty far up in the sky, and if insurgents/terrorists have that capability I'm more worried about them targetting manned aircraft with that capability than trying to take out a floating generator.
Meanwhile getting diesel fuel to bases located within combat zones is expensive and dangerous. To the point that something like this would be justified at the point it's avoided it's mass in diesel fuel burned, which shouldn't take all that long, really.
Back on the civilian side, same concept with remote Alaska needs - some areas the diesel fuel needs to be flown in, and that's rather expensive.
But it puts us in a better position to gain intelligence.
Not in this case. The F&F plan had major gaps in it which doomed it to failure(no significant intel gain, much less any busts). Part of what makes it inexcusable is that there had been previous programs along the same lines, but they actually worked because the US police agencies were actually working with Mexican police agencies to keep the tracking up when the weapons crossed the border. This didn't happen in F&F.
If a truck or two slipped the net I could understand it, but they literally had no plan for how to keep the tracking up when the weapons crossed the border, nor did they bust them at the border to recover the illegal weapons because they couldn't track further.
To make it clear: I'm less pissed about the program(previous versions worked) than I am about screwing up the plan such that it couldn't work. If they had coordinated with the Mexican police it would have been a fine program.
Given the response your post created, I wish to point out that I didn't say that the Mexicans wouldn't have gotten the guns a different way, much less that the lives lost to those guns would have been saved.
Note that I emphasized 'lost track of the guns'. If the program had produced results(arrests&convictions) I would be a lot happier with the program, even if a few guns were lost and a federal agent lost his life to one of them(bad stuff happens). What really pisses me off is that not only did the program fail, their actual plan read a bit like the underpant gnome's business plan. IE they didn't have a plan to track the guns when they crossed the border, which was an expected part given that they were dealing with Mexican cartels. Giving them a big fat ??? between 'sell guns to cartels' and 'convictions!'.
probably limited lifetime - so don't diesel generators, especially if you're using them for prime power. Big - not a problem in remote areas Fragile - Remember Bigalow? The guy designing/building Inflatable space stations? A ballon doesn't have to be fragile if you build it out of the right materials.
Expense - part of the reason for the $1/kwh electricity is the cost of moving diesel into the area. Often it has to be flown in! If the turbine system can avoid fuel having to be brought in that way, it's a massive saved expense. Supports aren't trivial: Agreed; but do they cost more than the pad & structure you'd want for the diesel generators? Wind x tether pushing down - could be by design, designed around, - if the wind is strong enough to push the generator down into less windy conditions, obviously the unit is getting enough wind to produce maximum power. Multiple close balloons - engineering issue for the specific site. Reeling in system - not too hard today. Dropping cable across a city - You do realize that these are intended for remote sites, right? If the need is big enough or the development dense enough, you go with other means of power production, such as more traditional wind turbines.
Worse, sometimes avoiding something isn't an option, much like how they recommend you DON'T try to dodge wildlife because of the probability that you'll lose control/roll the vehicle if you try. Sometimes the lane next to you might be unoccupied. Perhaps the object successfully passed under the semi(or even just fell off the vehicle in front of you), but you're built too low to avoid it, etc...
One can go on about proper following distance, of course.
*Operation Fast&Furious, where the ATF actually ordered a number of gun stores to sell to obvious Mexican cartel related straw purchasers in order to bust cartel leaders and such, then lost track of the guns.
I think I know the accident you speak of - it wasn't so much a 'metal spike' as a caltrop in the form of a trailer hitch on the road - One of those 3-ball types from some reports. I don't think it really weighed 50 pounds as I think it was a hitch like this one, putting it closer to 40 pounds(or less), given the shipping weight of 44 pounds.
As for mild steel - not unless it was bought from some shady chinese store.
That's basically what it amounts to. If you see a rusty trailer hitch in the road, try not to hit it so hard that it lifts your car up into the air.
I'd tend to say 'try not to drive over stuff, especially big bits of metal'.
Haven't they already broken the safety tests by being beyond the test limitations?
Let's see, they had to come up with extraordinary measures in order to flip the Tesla for that safety test, they broke the crush machine at somewhere around the equivalent of 4 teslas stacked on top of the roof.
Thus far the Tesla has taken full advantage of it's electric design to make a vehicle that sneers at standard impact tests.
The law is not quite that simple. Minors are allowed to enter into agreements/contracts of their own will, and companies are allowed to do so. After all, a verbal contract is created every time a kid orders a soda or something from a fast food place.
However, in general minors are only allowed to enter what I'd call 'trivial contracts', and even then enjoy a larger amount of protection. Facebook allowing 13 year olds to sign up for a free service is legal(in most areas). Now, if it had some clause in it saying that 'if you badmouth facebook you agree to be charged $400', courts would be even less sympathetic to it if enforced against a child than an adult.
The end result is that companies have to be careful about the contracts they enter into with minors - the child has most of the power/protection. It's viewed as their responsibility to make sure the deal is equitable for the child, and realize that if anything goes wrong, it'll be them getting soaked, not the kid(generally speaking).
If they still view it as worth the risk they can generally still legally contract with the kid.
However, when it comes to legal matters, a different set of protections pop up for minors, and that's where the problem of her being pressured for her password comes in.
Oh if you want a fascinating exercise, go look up precisely why schools use bells.
My google search says that it's to keep students/teachers on time. Psychological warfare? Hardly. Using bells to signal time/events has centuries of tradition behind it. Electronic bell systems are cheap, reliable, and efficient.
If you think about it, you realize that this problem is too widespread and too systematic, too uniform to be the result of a few isolated bad actors.
If I think about it, I realize that we have over 100k primary schools in the USA. 100k is fairly significant to me, because if you look at individuals with that many people you're statistically going to have quite a few crimes, even a few murders. With 100k schools, you're going to have some 'bad eggs', and there will be enough of them to generate a 'horrible school scandal' every week or so even if there are only a 'few isolated bad actors'. Add in the occasional international bad school incident(such as from the UK), and short memories so that a repeat incident from a single school and/or even just a follow up on a previous incident is seen as a new one and you have even more frequent impacts on the public concious.
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This could pose a problem for evolution in court because one can no longer claim "evolution predicts a tree of life".
Not sure why. It's moving past where Evolution was taught when I was in High School, but in college and since this sort of stuff started popping up, first noticed with Bacteria, which turn out to share DNA quite often.
Indeed, I believe that the more complex methods of DNA transfer existing only weakens young-earth creationist arguments. Leaves them with less wiggle-room in trying to refute Evolution.
Remember, the core theory of 'evolution' doesn't require only the sexual method of DNA sharing, though that's perhaps the easiest to explain to kids. Bacteria sharing chunks of DNA coding for antibiotic resistance is getting into advanced territory.
Finding out that 'life' is more of a messy ball with lots of weird interconnects is more in line with what you'd expect from evolution than some sort of 'neat' process controlled by some sort of designer.
I think applying a "who cares if they keep the method a secret" test to requests for software patents would solve a lot of what's wrong with the current situation.
This is an interesting standard because the biggest reason I can see for people not to care if they keep it secret is because there's numerous other groups coming out with nearly identical solutions - to me this means that the potential patent fails the 'non-obvious' test. Otherwise there's things like it's already been used in the past, etc...
To me, the biggest patents I hate is where they go 'standard practic on a computer' or 'something we've done on computers for ages, but now we're doing it on a tablet or smartphone.
Not so. For the hundredth time, false equivalence.
This is not a counter-argument to my point. There's a reason I said 'a bit', IE the simile isn't exact. I know that, try not to nitpick.
This is why the whole media circus affair annoys me to no end: people constantly spout stupid shit like "well people were killed with these guns, so this program caused people to die, because otherwise the murderers wouldn't have guns!"
Very nice, but at this point you're arguing against a strawman, since my argument was very much less authorative than 'wouldn't have guns'. At most I implied that they wouldn't have as many of the same power and quality.
To repeat: Without the ATF letting the guns through, the Cartels would be stuck using less ideal procurement methods - we know they're not as ideal because they DID buy and use the guns from the dealers. Why would that purchase method be 'ideal' for at least some guns? My thoughts are cost, quality, and availability. Lower cost means they can obtain more guns for the price. They weren't buying cheap guns though, so maybe quality was an ideal factor - while semiautomatic(their illegal sources can get them full auto) the ARs were probably more accurate and possibly reliable than the illegal sources. Availability was probably also a factor - illegal sources are probably less reliable of a source than purchasing. Plus smuggling them back into Mexico isn't likely a big deal, given that they can just operate their smuggling system backwards; I don't think what cash they send back to Mexico takes up as much space, so otherwise the transport systems would just be deadheading back into Mexico.
If the officer had faced an AK or even a handgun instead of an AR he might still be alive. Or, given the butterfly effect, he may never have come into conflict that day. Of course, with the butterfly effect the effect of no F&F might have cost lives, though on the balance that's unlikely.
On the balance I maintain that I believe that F&F as executed did more harm than good - wasted resources in a failed investigation/sting operation, easier arming of cartel forces, etc...
2nd paragraph then - 'you should have somewhere'.
Most fire resistant safes don't protect well against theft. Still, toss the card in your fire safe and call it a day.
I have one as well. Important documents go into the safe. Critical documents go in the box.
Actually, I find geekoid's mentioning of commercial kitchens particularly apt.
However, I was listing about Uber and such a couple weeks ago, and I found out that at least in some cities Uber drivers are operating under the limo/contract car laws, IE they are inspected and regulated, just not quite as tightly as taxis. However, as such they're not allowed to respond to flag hails just on the street; rides have to be pre-arranged. Which Uber technically does...
I include that here because I try to avoid responding to AC's.
Do you happen to have a citation on this? Google isn't pulling anything up.
My take on this:
1. The initial drop in usage seems to be mostly from needing to set up alternative channels - IE the black market took time to become established.
2. The long term drop might be due to increased costs, much like how increasing taxes on cigarettes results in lower usage.
3. Cirrhosis rates, because they depend upon the abuse of alcohol, might not be indicative, since increased prices will affect heavy drinkers more than light drinkers.
4. While prohibition resulted in a long term 40% drop, we've managed over a 50% drop with tobacco. without prohibition, soley by taxes and education.
5. As Portugal has shown, legalization can have many positive benefits.
What, you don't have a deposit box already? It's where I keep all sorts of important stuff like house records, vehicle titles, insurance documents, etc... Tossing the code/scratch card in there would be easy.
If you don't have one, you should have somewhere where you keep important records(taxes and such), keep it there.
Regardless, there were no negative effects measurable, and logic indicates extreme likelihood that no negative effects exist.
I'd say dead people are measurable negative effects, it's just a bit like pollution deaths - did this particular death result from factory A, B, or C? We can't tell. The Mexican cartels do have multiple ways to obtain firearms, and firearms from F&F have been traced to a number of murders, including the murder of at least one federal officer, and I believe a few state officers. While not 100% indicative of causation, it is a correlation.
Logically speaking, the cartels were obtaining the firearms from the USA because they were the 'best choice' - whether by availability, price, quality, whatever. Maybe if they hadn't been able to get those firearms they would have been stuck with a handgun or AK type rifle and lacked the accuracy/power to kill the agent. I agree, we don't know for sure, but given the body count making it harder for the cartels to obtain the guns probably would have saved some lives.
The real problem is budgetary: we wasted money to less effect than expected, and it's questionable if the gains were worth the costs. As I understand, the costs were minimal, but still.
I suggest rereading my post, where I said things like "What really pisses me off is that not only did the program fail, their actual plan read a bit like the underpant gnome's business plan." Previous incarnations of this program DID coordinate with Mexican police authorities, DID perform much more intense tracking, etc... They actually caught people. This one basically ignored that institutional knowledge, and basic logic should of told them it wasn't going to work.
Occasional failure is to be expected. I just expect the failure to be from something like the Cartel doing something unexpected, equipment failure, or even a low level agent screwing up. The plan for the operation itself should be well thought out, and in this case the problems were evident just from reading the plan, failure would have been expected just from that. Solyndra had a better business plan in comparison.
The real problem is budgetary: we wasted money to less effect than expected, and it's questionable if the gains were worth the costs. As I understand, the costs were minimal, but still.
My position is that our default position should be to not provide firearms to organized crime unless it's part of a *competent* sting operation. The costs were minimal because the effort put in was minimal, insufficient to have a realistic chance of tracing the firearms to higher level personnel in the cartel and effect arrests. Basically, if you're going to do it, do it right.
Browsing wiki on Part Number, I can't help but think of the number of times I've looked up a part number and seen 'actual design may vary'. It's guaranteed to fit and work, but not to look identical to others of it's kind. For users of parts, sometimes they're more concerned with functionality than identical design.
It might not even have been a safety update. The part might have been 'cheapened' at a chinese factory. It might of been produced by a different factory. It could have been a 'non-safety' change for whatever reason, IE the company didn't see it as affecting safety.
Error, invalid question? I didn't describe any fatalities. Matter of fact, I specifically mentioned non-fatal accidents, just ones where the car ended up being mangled beyond recognition. I did so because that's what swb was talking about: horrific looking accidents where you wouldn't expect survivors. Those are NOT typical accidents, survival or otherwise. Neither is 100+mph through two concrete barriers and a tree, much less with the driver surviving, being able to exit the vehicle under his own power elevates it to 'astonishing'.
As for the Tesla, to date that I'm aware of there have been NO fatalities(knock on wood) to the occupants of a Tesla in an accident. There have been fatalities to people HIT by a Tesla, but the occupants in those cases were fine*.
*Alive and relatively unharmed, though I understand a couple of them are facing serious legal consequences to their actions.
I'd argue that a selection of accidents chosen for shock value on how mangled the car is while the people inside survived* would also tend to not select 'typical accidents', which I believe would be a relative low speed rear-ending.
I've seen such pictures where I'm looking at the vehicle and going 'how could anybody FIT in that crushed wreck?'
Of course, that today's cars are designed to collapse helps with the shock value - modern cars designed for safety will happily deform into a crazy mess in order to prevent all the intrusion into the passenger cabin they can while lowering the accelleration the passengers experience during the crash.
Prevent intrusion into the cabin and humans can survive incredible amounts of acceleration, as John Stapp proved.
*Even if 'survived' includes missing limbs, permanent injury, and length hospital stays.
Indeed, like many other car companies, Volvo has probably started building their vehicles down to a price, thus can't do the 6 car thing anymore.
Either that or Volvo knows their roofs are that strong and use more powerful presses during testing.
I don't reply to AC's(don't even read them normally), but I'm impressed with Tesla's safety record. With as many cars on the road as long as they've had them, their 'no fatality/no permanent disability' record is becoming impressive.
The press thing was only one of the safety results I remember.
Oh, and for the number of Teslas the roof can withstand - we know it's a minimum of 4, since the press broke at that point, it's probably higher.
Oh and any enemy wanting to take out your power or know where you are would just find and shoot down the flippin' blimp and then you ...
... fire up your diesel generator?
The military is already flying blimps in combat zones, typically sensor platforms to give good 'eye in the sky' intel for a base and it's surrounding area. Also, it's more difficult than you think to target something that's pretty far up in the sky, and if insurgents/terrorists have that capability I'm more worried about them targetting manned aircraft with that capability than trying to take out a floating generator.
Meanwhile getting diesel fuel to bases located within combat zones is expensive and dangerous. To the point that something like this would be justified at the point it's avoided it's mass in diesel fuel burned, which shouldn't take all that long, really.
Back on the civilian side, same concept with remote Alaska needs - some areas the diesel fuel needs to be flown in, and that's rather expensive.
But it puts us in a better position to gain intelligence.
Not in this case. The F&F plan had major gaps in it which doomed it to failure(no significant intel gain, much less any busts). Part of what makes it inexcusable is that there had been previous programs along the same lines, but they actually worked because the US police agencies were actually working with Mexican police agencies to keep the tracking up when the weapons crossed the border. This didn't happen in F&F.
If a truck or two slipped the net I could understand it, but they literally had no plan for how to keep the tracking up when the weapons crossed the border, nor did they bust them at the border to recover the illegal weapons because they couldn't track further.
To make it clear: I'm less pissed about the program(previous versions worked) than I am about screwing up the plan such that it couldn't work. If they had coordinated with the Mexican police it would have been a fine program.
Given the response your post created, I wish to point out that I didn't say that the Mexicans wouldn't have gotten the guns a different way, much less that the lives lost to those guns would have been saved.
Note that I emphasized 'lost track of the guns'. If the program had produced results(arrests&convictions) I would be a lot happier with the program, even if a few guns were lost and a federal agent lost his life to one of them(bad stuff happens). What really pisses me off is that not only did the program fail, their actual plan read a bit like the underpant gnome's business plan. IE they didn't have a plan to track the guns when they crossed the border, which was an expected part given that they were dealing with Mexican cartels. Giving them a big fat ??? between 'sell guns to cartels' and 'convictions!'.
probably limited lifetime - so don't diesel generators, especially if you're using them for prime power.
Big - not a problem in remote areas
Fragile - Remember Bigalow? The guy designing/building Inflatable space stations? A ballon doesn't have to be fragile if you build it out of the right materials.
Expense - part of the reason for the $1/kwh electricity is the cost of moving diesel into the area. Often it has to be flown in! If the turbine system can avoid fuel having to be brought in that way, it's a massive saved expense.
Supports aren't trivial: Agreed; but do they cost more than the pad & structure you'd want for the diesel generators?
Wind x tether pushing down - could be by design, designed around, - if the wind is strong enough to push the generator down into less windy conditions, obviously the unit is getting enough wind to produce maximum power.
Multiple close balloons - engineering issue for the specific site.
Reeling in system - not too hard today.
Dropping cable across a city - You do realize that these are intended for remote sites, right? If the need is big enough or the development dense enough, you go with other means of power production, such as more traditional wind turbines.
Worse, sometimes avoiding something isn't an option, much like how they recommend you DON'T try to dodge wildlife because of the probability that you'll lose control/roll the vehicle if you try. Sometimes the lane next to you might be unoccupied. Perhaps the object successfully passed under the semi(or even just fell off the vehicle in front of you), but you're built too low to avoid it, etc...
One can go on about proper following distance, of course.
My first thought was 'Given Fast&Furious*, yes'.
*Operation Fast&Furious, where the ATF actually ordered a number of gun stores to sell to obvious Mexican cartel related straw purchasers in order to bust cartel leaders and such, then lost track of the guns.
I think I know the accident you speak of - it wasn't so much a 'metal spike' as a caltrop in the form of a trailer hitch on the road - One of those 3-ball types from some reports. I don't think it really weighed 50 pounds as I think it was a hitch like this one, putting it closer to 40 pounds(or less), given the shipping weight of 44 pounds.
As for mild steel - not unless it was bought from some shady chinese store.
That's basically what it amounts to. If you see a rusty trailer hitch in the road, try not to hit it so hard that it lifts your car up into the air.
I'd tend to say 'try not to drive over stuff, especially big bits of metal'.
Haven't they already broken the safety tests by being beyond the test limitations?
Let's see, they had to come up with extraordinary measures in order to flip the Tesla for that safety test, they broke the crush machine at somewhere around the equivalent of 4 teslas stacked on top of the roof.
Thus far the Tesla has taken full advantage of it's electric design to make a vehicle that sneers at standard impact tests.
As a minor, the agreement is null and void.
The law is not quite that simple. Minors are allowed to enter into agreements/contracts of their own will, and companies are allowed to do so. After all, a verbal contract is created every time a kid orders a soda or something from a fast food place.
However, in general minors are only allowed to enter what I'd call 'trivial contracts', and even then enjoy a larger amount of protection. Facebook allowing 13 year olds to sign up for a free service is legal(in most areas). Now, if it had some clause in it saying that 'if you badmouth facebook you agree to be charged $400', courts would be even less sympathetic to it if enforced against a child than an adult.
The end result is that companies have to be careful about the contracts they enter into with minors - the child has most of the power/protection. It's viewed as their responsibility to make sure the deal is equitable for the child, and realize that if anything goes wrong, it'll be them getting soaked, not the kid(generally speaking).
If they still view it as worth the risk they can generally still legally contract with the kid.
However, when it comes to legal matters, a different set of protections pop up for minors, and that's where the problem of her being pressured for her password comes in.
Oh if you want a fascinating exercise, go look up precisely why schools use bells.
My google search says that it's to keep students/teachers on time. Psychological warfare? Hardly. Using bells to signal time/events has centuries of tradition behind it. Electronic bell systems are cheap, reliable, and efficient.
If you think about it, you realize that this problem is too widespread and too systematic, too uniform to be the result of a few isolated bad actors.
If I think about it, I realize that we have over 100k primary schools in the USA. 100k is fairly significant to me, because if you look at individuals with that many people you're statistically going to have quite a few crimes, even a few murders. With 100k schools, you're going to have some 'bad eggs', and there will be enough of them to generate a 'horrible school scandal' every week or so even if there are only a 'few isolated bad actors'. Add in the occasional international bad school incident(such as from the UK), and short memories so that a repeat incident from a single school and/or even just a follow up on a previous incident is seen as a new one and you have even more frequent impacts on the public concious.
Also, if the cab carries two different passengers, cab drivers get payment from each.
Changing this, maybe so that each passenger only pays 75% or whatever, would fix the urge to have their own taxi. Saving ~$10 can do that.