Weren't some of those celebrities who had their private cloud accounts hacked with saucy photos claiming that it was a form of rape, others have been convicted and sentenced to a decade in prison for similar acts. Sounds like that, or more, is the least that should be expected for these officers. Sadly I would bet that they'll claim firing them is more than enough "punishment". Wasn't that BART police officer who shot an unarmed, handcuffed, restrained individual in the back out on the streets in less than a year? And after he got our he had the gall to even ask for his job back.
Something about this doesn't add up, $40,000 distributed between 8 employees is about $5,000 per employee over about 3.5 Months. Assuming that they all worked the Sept 8 - Dec 21 window that figures out to about 15 weeks, or about $333.33 a week that they weren't paid I'm guessing to get them to minimum wage (all BEFORE taxes). Even figuring an average of 100 hours a week that puts their minimum wage pay in California at about $900, where as at $1.21 it would only have been $121 a $779 difference. Those "special bonuses" must have been pretty hefty. Somehow this doesn't sound as nefarious as the Labor Department is making it out to be. It could be some cultural thing, kind of like how in the US waitresses aren't paid much of anything but they make it up and more in tips. In any case they were underpaid by US standards, but not nearly as much as the Labor Department is claiming, and assuming that they weren't trying to skirt US Taxes by claiming to be under India's auspices. US taxes alone would eat up that $333 difference and put them right back in the same boat they were in as before if India's taxes are far more lax.
I see you're new to the US, Welcome! Things here rarely are canceled because they're "holding the responsible party's feet to the fire". Projects can go orders of magnitude over their budgets, with less capabilities then promised and and still continue unquestioned (F-35, Big Dig, Bridge to Nowhere, Afghan command center, Solyndra). The only thing that really stops a project is if it doesn't have enough political clout and the money is wanted by those who do or it is proven beyond all doubt that it will never come to fruition.
I've got it loaded, but not expecting much of anything interesting in a "live" feed. Any earth based telescopes aren't going to have the resolution to see anything interesting and any Mars based assets are going to take a few days to send any decent resolution photos.
If you're referring to the "Chinese curse" "may you live in interesting times" you might want to look up its etymology. Apparently here has never been a similar widely used saying in Chinese history, our wide usage of it in the US appears to date back to Robert Kennedy using it in a speech. No one seems to be quite sure where he got it from.
Hopefully this setup won't be as cheesy as Robot Combat League, while I didn't watch the show from the clips I've seen it was like a big version of "Rockem Sockem Robots, with fake sparks & some manufactured damage instead of a spring loaded head. While it sounds like this competition will have its own simulated damage hopefully it will be a lot more realistic and more quantifiable than the random whaling that seemed to be RCL.
It looks interesting, but why in the world are they piloted mechs? Remote control them with a simulated cockpit so you don't have to make a bunch of convoluted rules so no one is injured. If things take off and the tech improves you can also ramp things up from a simple paintball game type setup to bots that can actually inflict damage.
I find it amusing how people continuously claim to "know" what is and isn't possible based on our infinitesimally short stint into the sciences. We have had electricity in any meaningful fashion for what, 120 years? I'm not saying that cold fusion is possible, and even if it is it may take a society that has been advancing technologically for over a million years to achieve it. But we aren't even children when it comes to knowing the intricacies of the universe, we're a few cells dividing. Claiming what is or isn't possible is premature to say the least.
Wouldn't a person holed up in a bunker be in an very effective self quarantine? If they had the disease whether or not they recovered it would be contained which is a lot different than an Ebola contact nurse who jumps on a commercial airliner despite symptoms. Both are crazy but one is at risk of infecting no one, one just put thousands of people at two airports and on a tightly confined aircraft at risk. So which is more dangerous?
Obviously its cheaper, how could what is effectively a generator with some propellers and an inexhaustible free fuel source be more expensive than something that needs a massive infrastructure of fuel mining, refinement, transport & waste disposal? True, wind does currently have one glaring drawback, it is not an "on demand" power source and must be either used when it is in abundance or stored for later use. But in the long run I think renewables are going to be a no brainer. Fossil fuels are going to have a place for our foreseeable future as well as a backup/baseload/niche energy source but with even moderate advances in energy storage technology renewables in their various forms are probably going to provide a majority of our energy in the coming decades.
Hospitals..... One of the most contagious places in an area. Being in an environment with the highest concentration of infected people is bad enough, but hospital employees have been known to have less than stellar hygiene. I think an entire technology product sector has had to be created just to encourage employees to wash their hands regularly. http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
It goes quite handily with all of the other terms they've corrupted. Like that recent story about how information doesn't count as being "collected" until its looked at (mass surveillance), the "shall not/no law/nor shall/limited time" portions of the constitution have mostly been rendered into "whatever you think its necessary" and the (re)interpretation of the "interstate commerce" clause would be laughable if it wasn't so tragic.
Are they insane? Wasn't there a run on creating laws in many states just to stop high school students from making fake facebook pages to harass? This act not only could result in job loss, public humiliation, harassment & other life changing events but in threats and even death if an angry drug dealer/user came after her. This officer even misused private information collected for the limited purposes of serving as evidence in a trial. This officer and anyone associated with this heinous act should be charged with identity theft, property theft, libel, unauthorized access to a computer system (remember violating a TOS is now considered to be a crime) and fraud.
Its of course not a perfect measure, but the ability to communicate would probably be the easiest guidepost as to what we should/shouldn't eat. Language of some sort is required for a society/culture to develop and without society/culture creatures often act on a purely instinctual level. I don't think we have any concrete evidence of a non-human species on Earth having a language, the closest possibilities would be certain cetaceans. I am sure there are other guideposts (personality, intelligence, problem solving, etc) but communication should be the easiest to recognize.
I think we're a LONG way from needed to know information the "down to the tree/building level", but I would be very surprised if they aren't using reflectivity and intensity characteristics from satellite photography (usually about 3 meter resolution). I would think that kind of information would tell them the heat generation/absorption/water evaporation of a particular area reasonably well, they may even have to simplify the data so they can compute it "real time". I work with mapping quite a bit and I can tell you that working at that level uses up a lot of processing power, even mapping small areas. I've seen water flow models running on a very high end PC for an area of only a few square miles take an hour or more at those resolutions.
Where are you that weathermen are reliable enough for you to want to keep them around. Around me there's a running joke that you'd be more accurate at predicting the weather throwing a darts blindfolded at a board with all of the seasonal weather possibilities.
I can understand some limits, home/business owners back feeding power onto the power grid could under limited circumstances cause some issues and where they are allowed to back feed forcing utilities to pay more than they would for wholesale electricity sounds a bit much. But complaining that people aren't using enough electricity is ludicrous, the strain on utilities during the mid-day was one of the pushes for peak metering. One of the biggest causes of those higher loads are AC systems, which are used most heavily at the same time where solar is at its peak. Now utilities are arguing the opposite, that they need to up rates because people are drawing less power during those peak hours? Hopefully the technology/economics will develop to a point where completely off grid systems are feasible, at that point we can just let the market figure figure things out
I imagine it differs from state to state at least somewhat, but here in Michigan I think you can go about 3 years without paying your taxes, maybe 4 or 5 if you pay parts of them, before your property has a "Sheriffs Deed" recorded on it effectively making it property of the State/County/City/Village government. Then said municipality can auction it off, keep it for public use or sell it to someone specific. If you're living on the property at the time the Sheriffs deed is filed what happens varies from municipality to municipality, mine for example just auctions the property off a few months later whether or not the previous owners are still occupying it. It is up to anyone who purchases it at auction what to do about any inhabitants (rent, evict, etc). Its not a perfect process to be sure, but people get multiple warnings (mailed, newspaper, posted & signage) & years of leeway so it seems to be pretty reasonable.
I don't care how warm and friendly a scientist is, I just want them to not form/publish erroneous theories. I realize the scientific process isn't perfect, but these days its getting so bad in some areas (especially medicine related) that half of the published papers are disproven a few years later because of egregious mistakes our outright falsified data.
Unfortunately space combat is all but inevitable, humans are a long way (probably thousands or hundreds of thousands of years) from outgrowing our stupidity as the events of the last few decades make quite clear. It definitely won't be anything like Star Trek/Star Wars but some form of combat is likely, either that or we're going to become extinct on this planet. A few shows/Anime have tried to imagine what space combat would be like (Babylon 5, Starship Operators, Planetes, etc), but most forsake some level of reality for story telling (sound effects for example). As with most things it will probably vary with the technology & tactics of the time. At times it will probably be stand off battles with groups of large ships pecking away at each other from a distance with railguns/energy weapons. A few decades later it might be stealth battles with smaller individual ships sneaking around trying to locate the opposing ships or decimating the other sides resources. A few decades later it might be long range missiles. Each side will come up with a weapon and the other will counter it and vice versa.
I can definitely see the applications for some stuff. Such as dog tracking collars, remote weather stations, stolen item tracking, etc. But I don't want my fridge, HVAC, TV, stove or any other major appliances connected to a mobile network. I like my stove to just heat/cook my food, I don't want to risk it catching a virus so the hacker can either extort money from me to use it again or try to use it to burn my house down for lulz (unlikely I know, but I'm sure some would try).
And what exactly were these "milestones"? The only one that I can really confirm is the Critical Design Review, which Boeing only recently completed (no word on how close SpaceX is). Even if they aren't neck and neck with Boeing on their paperwork they should get some points owing to the fact that they're actually flying at least a version of their hardware (ISS Resupply) when Boeing is just testing out components.
Real world situations are rarely so cut and dry as "we can't handle the entire load, so we can't handle any of it". Being able to at least transfer the communications/information to another center(s) would allow for directing of a portion of the flights. A very similar thing happens every day with inclement weather, with flights being slowed, redirected or delayed.
NASA didn't really have any other choice. They couldn't give the entire contract to Boeing without risking falling into the same defense contractor cost plus revolving door situation that has held back our space program for decades. They couldn't give the entire contract to SpaceX without causing an uproar in the "space belt" congressmen/women that could possibly scuttle the entire CCtCap/CCDev/CCDev2 program (which they've been trying to do anyway). So they took a middle of the road approach, with both SpaceX and Boeing providing launch services they keep enough political support to keep the program afloat but down the road having the two compared side by side either encourages Boeing to keep its prices reasonable to stay in the game or gives NASA the evidence to say "hey, we've got two proven launch systems and one is costing us a whole lot more than the other, why are we still using them" in a public congressional budget hearing. SNC just had the position of being the lesser of the two second chair choices, not saying its right but that's politics unfortunately.
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Weren't some of those celebrities who had their private cloud accounts hacked with saucy photos claiming that it was a form of rape, others have been convicted and sentenced to a decade in prison for similar acts. Sounds like that, or more, is the least that should be expected for these officers. Sadly I would bet that they'll claim firing them is more than enough "punishment". Wasn't that BART police officer who shot an unarmed, handcuffed, restrained individual in the back out on the streets in less than a year? And after he got our he had the gall to even ask for his job back.
Something about this doesn't add up, $40,000 distributed between 8 employees is about $5,000 per employee over about 3.5 Months. Assuming that they all worked the Sept 8 - Dec 21 window that figures out to about 15 weeks, or about $333.33 a week that they weren't paid I'm guessing to get them to minimum wage (all BEFORE taxes). Even figuring an average of 100 hours a week that puts their minimum wage pay in California at about $900, where as at $1.21 it would only have been $121 a $779 difference. Those "special bonuses" must have been pretty hefty. Somehow this doesn't sound as nefarious as the Labor Department is making it out to be. It could be some cultural thing, kind of like how in the US waitresses aren't paid much of anything but they make it up and more in tips. In any case they were underpaid by US standards, but not nearly as much as the Labor Department is claiming, and assuming that they weren't trying to skirt US Taxes by claiming to be under India's auspices. US taxes alone would eat up that $333 difference and put them right back in the same boat they were in as before if India's taxes are far more lax.
I see you're new to the US, Welcome! Things here rarely are canceled because they're "holding the responsible party's feet to the fire". Projects can go orders of magnitude over their budgets, with less capabilities then promised and and still continue unquestioned (F-35, Big Dig, Bridge to Nowhere, Afghan command center, Solyndra). The only thing that really stops a project is if it doesn't have enough political clout and the money is wanted by those who do or it is proven beyond all doubt that it will never come to fruition.
I've got it loaded, but not expecting much of anything interesting in a "live" feed. Any earth based telescopes aren't going to have the resolution to see anything interesting and any Mars based assets are going to take a few days to send any decent resolution photos.
If you're referring to the "Chinese curse" "may you live in interesting times" you might want to look up its etymology. Apparently here has never been a similar widely used saying in Chinese history, our wide usage of it in the US appears to date back to Robert Kennedy using it in a speech. No one seems to be quite sure where he got it from.
Hopefully this setup won't be as cheesy as Robot Combat League, while I didn't watch the show from the clips I've seen it was like a big version of "Rockem Sockem Robots, with fake sparks & some manufactured damage instead of a spring loaded head. While it sounds like this competition will have its own simulated damage hopefully it will be a lot more realistic and more quantifiable than the random whaling that seemed to be RCL.
It looks interesting, but why in the world are they piloted mechs? Remote control them with a simulated cockpit so you don't have to make a bunch of convoluted rules so no one is injured. If things take off and the tech improves you can also ramp things up from a simple paintball game type setup to bots that can actually inflict damage.
I find it amusing how people continuously claim to "know" what is and isn't possible based on our infinitesimally short stint into the sciences. We have had electricity in any meaningful fashion for what, 120 years? I'm not saying that cold fusion is possible, and even if it is it may take a society that has been advancing technologically for over a million years to achieve it. But we aren't even children when it comes to knowing the intricacies of the universe, we're a few cells dividing. Claiming what is or isn't possible is premature to say the least.
Wouldn't a person holed up in a bunker be in an very effective self quarantine? If they had the disease whether or not they recovered it would be contained which is a lot different than an Ebola contact nurse who jumps on a commercial airliner despite symptoms. Both are crazy but one is at risk of infecting no one, one just put thousands of people at two airports and on a tightly confined aircraft at risk. So which is more dangerous?
Obviously its cheaper, how could what is effectively a generator with some propellers and an inexhaustible free fuel source be more expensive than something that needs a massive infrastructure of fuel mining, refinement, transport & waste disposal? True, wind does currently have one glaring drawback, it is not an "on demand" power source and must be either used when it is in abundance or stored for later use. But in the long run I think renewables are going to be a no brainer. Fossil fuels are going to have a place for our foreseeable future as well as a backup/baseload/niche energy source but with even moderate advances in energy storage technology renewables in their various forms are probably going to provide a majority of our energy in the coming decades.
Hospitals..... One of the most contagious places in an area. Being in an environment with the highest concentration of infected people is bad enough, but hospital employees have been known to have less than stellar hygiene. I think an entire technology product sector has had to be created just to encourage employees to wash their hands regularly.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
It goes quite handily with all of the other terms they've corrupted. Like that recent story about how information doesn't count as being "collected" until its looked at (mass surveillance), the "shall not/no law/nor shall/limited time" portions of the constitution have mostly been rendered into "whatever you think its necessary" and the (re)interpretation of the "interstate commerce" clause would be laughable if it wasn't so tragic.
Are they insane? Wasn't there a run on creating laws in many states just to stop high school students from making fake facebook pages to harass? This act not only could result in job loss, public humiliation, harassment & other life changing events but in threats and even death if an angry drug dealer/user came after her. This officer even misused private information collected for the limited purposes of serving as evidence in a trial. This officer and anyone associated with this heinous act should be charged with identity theft, property theft, libel, unauthorized access to a computer system (remember violating a TOS is now considered to be a crime) and fraud.
Its of course not a perfect measure, but the ability to communicate would probably be the easiest guidepost as to what we should/shouldn't eat. Language of some sort is required for a society/culture to develop and without society/culture creatures often act on a purely instinctual level. I don't think we have any concrete evidence of a non-human species on Earth having a language, the closest possibilities would be certain cetaceans. I am sure there are other guideposts (personality, intelligence, problem solving, etc) but communication should be the easiest to recognize.
I think we're a LONG way from needed to know information the "down to the tree/building level", but I would be very surprised if they aren't using reflectivity and intensity characteristics from satellite photography (usually about 3 meter resolution). I would think that kind of information would tell them the heat generation/absorption/water evaporation of a particular area reasonably well, they may even have to simplify the data so they can compute it "real time". I work with mapping quite a bit and I can tell you that working at that level uses up a lot of processing power, even mapping small areas. I've seen water flow models running on a very high end PC for an area of only a few square miles take an hour or more at those resolutions.
Where are you that weathermen are reliable enough for you to want to keep them around. Around me there's a running joke that you'd be more accurate at predicting the weather throwing a darts blindfolded at a board with all of the seasonal weather possibilities.
"Security overreaction/faulty airport exit/wholly inadequate security measure causes Airport evacuation" would be a far more accurate headline.
I can understand some limits, home/business owners back feeding power onto the power grid could under limited circumstances cause some issues and where they are allowed to back feed forcing utilities to pay more than they would for wholesale electricity sounds a bit much. But complaining that people aren't using enough electricity is ludicrous, the strain on utilities during the mid-day was one of the pushes for peak metering. One of the biggest causes of those higher loads are AC systems, which are used most heavily at the same time where solar is at its peak. Now utilities are arguing the opposite, that they need to up rates because people are drawing less power during those peak hours? Hopefully the technology/economics will develop to a point where completely off grid systems are feasible, at that point we can just let the market figure figure things out
I imagine it differs from state to state at least somewhat, but here in Michigan I think you can go about 3 years without paying your taxes, maybe 4 or 5 if you pay parts of them, before your property has a "Sheriffs Deed" recorded on it effectively making it property of the State/County/City/Village government. Then said municipality can auction it off, keep it for public use or sell it to someone specific. If you're living on the property at the time the Sheriffs deed is filed what happens varies from municipality to municipality, mine for example just auctions the property off a few months later whether or not the previous owners are still occupying it. It is up to anyone who purchases it at auction what to do about any inhabitants (rent, evict, etc). Its not a perfect process to be sure, but people get multiple warnings (mailed, newspaper, posted & signage) & years of leeway so it seems to be pretty reasonable.
I don't care how warm and friendly a scientist is, I just want them to not form/publish erroneous theories. I realize the scientific process isn't perfect, but these days its getting so bad in some areas (especially medicine related) that half of the published papers are disproven a few years later because of egregious mistakes our outright falsified data.
Unfortunately space combat is all but inevitable, humans are a long way (probably thousands or hundreds of thousands of years) from outgrowing our stupidity as the events of the last few decades make quite clear. It definitely won't be anything like Star Trek/Star Wars but some form of combat is likely, either that or we're going to become extinct on this planet. A few shows/Anime have tried to imagine what space combat would be like (Babylon 5, Starship Operators, Planetes, etc), but most forsake some level of reality for story telling (sound effects for example). As with most things it will probably vary with the technology & tactics of the time. At times it will probably be stand off battles with groups of large ships pecking away at each other from a distance with railguns/energy weapons. A few decades later it might be stealth battles with smaller individual ships sneaking around trying to locate the opposing ships or decimating the other sides resources. A few decades later it might be long range missiles. Each side will come up with a weapon and the other will counter it and vice versa.
I can definitely see the applications for some stuff. Such as dog tracking collars, remote weather stations, stolen item tracking, etc. But I don't want my fridge, HVAC, TV, stove or any other major appliances connected to a mobile network. I like my stove to just heat/cook my food, I don't want to risk it catching a virus so the hacker can either extort money from me to use it again or try to use it to burn my house down for lulz (unlikely I know, but I'm sure some would try).
And what exactly were these "milestones"? The only one that I can really confirm is the Critical Design Review, which Boeing only recently completed (no word on how close SpaceX is). Even if they aren't neck and neck with Boeing on their paperwork they should get some points owing to the fact that they're actually flying at least a version of their hardware (ISS Resupply) when Boeing is just testing out components.
Real world situations are rarely so cut and dry as "we can't handle the entire load, so we can't handle any of it". Being able to at least transfer the communications/information to another center(s) would allow for directing of a portion of the flights. A very similar thing happens every day with inclement weather, with flights being slowed, redirected or delayed.
NASA didn't really have any other choice. They couldn't give the entire contract to Boeing without risking falling into the same defense contractor cost plus revolving door situation that has held back our space program for decades. They couldn't give the entire contract to SpaceX without causing an uproar in the "space belt" congressmen/women that could possibly scuttle the entire CCtCap/CCDev/CCDev2 program (which they've been trying to do anyway). So they took a middle of the road approach, with both SpaceX and Boeing providing launch services they keep enough political support to keep the program afloat but down the road having the two compared side by side either encourages Boeing to keep its prices reasonable to stay in the game or gives NASA the evidence to say "hey, we've got two proven launch systems and one is costing us a whole lot more than the other, why are we still using them" in a public congressional budget hearing. SNC just had the position of being the lesser of the two second chair choices, not saying its right but that's politics unfortunately.