Because the US "justice" system is such a shining example for the world. Threatening college students with decades of prison for "stealing" public research papers. Approving no-knock warrants resulting in hundreds if not thousands of innocent deaths. Militarization of police forces and the use of SWAT teams for even the most benign crimes. Crushing people pirating a few songs/movies with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. Yes, the rest of the world would do well to emulate us.
I hang around in survivalists circles a little bit and there's a little bit of a saying there "If you can survive a zombie apocalypse you can survive almost anything" The idea of walking undead creatures with a taste for human flesh is very unlikely (not impossible, but unlikely), but the skills & tools for surviving one will prepare you for a variety of situations (natural disaster, civil unrest, economic collapse, etc). The idea of the military preparing for mass numbers of "zombies" (civilians) rising up and assaulting them is not very settling. There are not many situations in which this kind of training would be necessary except for a civilian uprising, save for some of the aspects of dealing with an defending from assault with limited resources, a breakdown of communications & no backup.
I think Boeing needs to focus a little more on getting people/materials to space and a little less on the aesthetics of their cabin design. From what I gather the already high costs of their United Launch Alliance rockets for the DoD have increased 60% in the last few years. Some estimates put their launches at $380 Million each not including some of the fixed production/facilities maintenance (~$1B). SpaceX can launch the same payloads in the $56 - 90 Million per launch range.
This is hardly new, scientists have been playing around with plasma windows & fields for quite some time. They're currently only a few inches in size but could be scaled up to larger dimensions, the problem is power and the pretty powerful magnetic & electrical fields needed to create them.
This entire article is one long buzzword, I feel like I'm sitting in a motivational seminar just reading it. I like the general idea of giving everyday objects an ability to query and be queried, but to be any more than a novelty you'd need to automate the query code somehow (OCR, Bar code/reader, RFID, etc). But you've also got a pretty big cataloging & logistical issue, you have to code & catalog everything you might use (lamp posts, manhole covers, post boxes, stores, etc) and maintain that database. The next big problem is keeping it going over the long term, I work in local government and given the history in my field (mapping) I can tell you that there is a tendency for the interest in maintaining a project to ebb and flow quite significantly. Back in the 80s a massive amount of money was spent (at the state/federal level) to create some pretty detailed mapping, most of which was put on a shelf and forgot about, then in the 90s interest returned and tens of thousands of dollars were spent to digitize our information (local), then it sat on some hard drives for a decade and a half gathering dust, then interest returned & I was brought in to, convert, update & maintain the information. Each time the data had to basically be completely redone due to changes in format, methodology and/or technology. And each time significant amounts of money, time & resources were lost. Its all fine and dandy to create this kind of information/interactivity, but you have to make sure that its kept current, useful & active. Otherwise it is doomed to failure.
Isn't this the same department that crashed a drone into their own armored vehicle full of SWAT personnel during a photo op? This seems a lot less like mechanical difficulties and more like inexperienced/inept officers who are blaming everything on their new, expensive, unnecessary toys.
The New York Post one is my favorite, and a prime example of how idiotic this belief that "if you were arrested the police must have had a reason" mindset. The officers hit a parked car with a guy in passenger seat going the wrong way and they blame it on him! And without video evidence he likely would have been convicted of destruction of public property, resisting arrest & disorderly conduct.
Even better, Just stumbled across this when checking ABC news. Apparently one officers idea of "crowd control" is to trip and shove high school girls at a football game.
"presumably after the guy already did something wrong and tried to resist arrest."
Is that anything like the below case, where a passenger in a car where the driver did run stayed in the car and waited for police to return. After they came back he slowly exited the car with his hands up and made no attempt to flee or resist and they still chucked him to the ground, pinned him down, tased him, punched and kicked him multiple times and then heaved him face first into the back of a police cruiser with his hands cuffed behind his back?
I imagine the only thing keeping it from going mainstream is the ability to make sure it doesn't record any pesky illegal/immoral activity by police/upper government officials. Kind of like that license plat reader system that was suspended indefinitely in Boston because a reporter was able to get a severely limited dataset from the system and still find "mistakes" (ignoring a stolen motorcycle that went past the same intersection regularly while using the system primarily to write tickets, ignoring the most dense area for overdue tickets the police employee parking lot, etc). Or like all of those police dash cams that have a tendency to have malfunctions/accidents when they might have caught "misconduct" (Hollywood Florida framing, Michael DeHerra Beating, Mark Byrge Arrest,Anthony Warren beating & the Prince George’s County, Maryland incident where SEVEN dashcams "malfunctioned" at once.)
That doesn't change the fact that they tried to and still are legally able to pursue these "debts" with no real recourse for those who are targeted. This stinks of a temporary hold to let the controversy die down so it can be reintroduced at a slower pace next time, if you're boiling frogs alive you bring the temperature up slowly so they don't jump out of the pot.
I'm all for lofty science projects with a moderate likelihood of failure but it seems like every one of these large scale projects of late fail to live up to their promises, don't provide significant scientific information AND cost 4 times what they were originally projected to cost. One of those conditions every other project would be quite acceptable but all three of them on a vast majority of projects? Sounds like either a massive waste of taxpayer money or a "legalized" form of embezzlement to me.
Thats starting to change, ballistic parachutes are becoming more common place on small private aircraft giving a pretty significant margin of safety. Even with a complete failure of the airframe passengers can walk away from the remnants of the aircraft.
You might want to flip through some of the youtube videos of commercial aircraft landing in even moderate weather conditions, you might be surprised how hair raising their landings are when seen from the right angle.
Would such a device have really made a difference? Currently it looks like one of two scenarios, either someone commandeered the plane (growing increasingly unlikely) and disabled all of the communications systems or there was a sudden catastrophic failure that either destroyed the plane in midair or crippled all of its systems. I find it highly unlikely that this system could upload a meaningful amount of data through a satellite connection (not known for their reliability) in such a short time if it was a catastrophic failure or if it was a failure of all systems who's to say that it wouldn't have taken out such a device as well.
These **AA agencies truly have no shame, hopefully this little "oversight" lands a boot so far up the MPAA's rear that they'll think twice about their brazen and often completely false/misleading statements for decades to come. Sadly I'm not betting on it, they'll probably use some circular reasoning to "justify" why they can take advantage of off-shoring but others shouldn't, but one can always hope. At a bare minimum they've given the actual artists ammunition to use against them.
Perhaps they should focus on one incredibly ambitions plan instead of eight separate ones. I'm also a bit curious how big the receivers would have to be earthside to collect the beamed energy. I don't know if they've invented the microwave equivalent of a laser which is probably what would be needed to to keep the receivers less than 20 miles wide.
I can't say that I'm really a fan of the National Ignition Facility. The PR side of it is "a grand search into fusion power research", but the reality seems to be nuclear weapons research. Coupled with the fact that the project has had massive mismanagement and cost overruns from an original ~$1 Billion estimate to costing over $4.2 Billion. Advanced research is never predictable to be sure, and some cost overrun/failure is to be expected but a four fold increase in costs AND no ignition? Sounds like we're not getting much bang for our research bucks.
I am aware of that as a matter of law, but the premise was that a person can't be tried for the same crime multiple times in the US. That is false because there are stacks of cases where people are tried 2, 3, 4 or even more times, the law may say that the previous trial "didn't occur" but that doesn't erase the fact that it did. And there is technically no limitation to the number of times a person can be retried as long as a prosecutor can make enough of a case to avoid a verdict of not guilty (despite an hour of searching I still can't find the legal requirements of a finding of "not guilty" by a jury, is it 50%?). There are even cases where prosecutors have purposely caused (or attempted to cause) mistrials to prevent possible not guilty verdicts so they can retry a person in the future.
Tell that to the "Liberty City 7", that group of destitute morons that the FBI conned into becoming "terrorists". The charges and evidence were so laughable that two separate juries wouldn't vote to convict. It took a third, hand picked jury to finally convict some of them of some of the charges after two weeks of deliberations and two uncooperative jurors being replaced.
In some cases you would be right, there are definitely cases where a department acknowledged that there had been misconduct and was open with the fact & any evidence they had. However there are also MANY cases (Michael Deherra Beating, Hollywood FL framing, etc) where there were obvious instances of personnel not involved with the misconduct covering for those misbehaving by destroying and/or editing evidence. On officer video could have very positive impact on both punishing criminals and punishing officer misconduct, but only if the video is streamed to a third party database that provides access equally to police, prosecution, defendants & reporters. And there are SEVERE penalties for having "accidents" with your video equipment at an "inopportune" time.
I'm highly dubious as to the real world applications of this system. Every other laser "weapon" has turned out to be highly ineffective, prone to failure & unable to meet any of its design goals. Just look at the ABL (Airborne Laser), they burnt over $5 Billion and were well on their way to burning more until some in the military hierarchy noticed that you would need dozens of them positioned inside even a small enemies airspace to be effective.
Nuclear "earthquakes" are a hiccup compared to the real thing, the shaking only lasts a second or so and is only experienced in a comparatively small area. The 2011 Tohoku earthquake was equivalent to a 9,320 Gigaton explosion in terms of energy released and lasted about 6 minutes.
My geology is a little rusty, but I don't think any amount of human activity can "create" full fledged earthquakes. Some activities can encourage an already building earthquake to occur before it would naturally, but not create one from nothing or even enhance one that is building. In some cases this could actually be a plus, it would probably be preferable to have a few 6.0 quakes that you can roughly predict rather than one 8.5 quake that you don' t have a clue when it will occur.
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Because the US "justice" system is such a shining example for the world. Threatening college students with decades of prison for "stealing" public research papers. Approving no-knock warrants resulting in hundreds if not thousands of innocent deaths. Militarization of police forces and the use of SWAT teams for even the most benign crimes. Crushing people pirating a few songs/movies with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. Yes, the rest of the world would do well to emulate us.
I hang around in survivalists circles a little bit and there's a little bit of a saying there "If you can survive a zombie apocalypse you can survive almost anything" The idea of walking undead creatures with a taste for human flesh is very unlikely (not impossible, but unlikely), but the skills & tools for surviving one will prepare you for a variety of situations (natural disaster, civil unrest, economic collapse, etc). The idea of the military preparing for mass numbers of "zombies" (civilians) rising up and assaulting them is not very settling. There are not many situations in which this kind of training would be necessary except for a civilian uprising, save for some of the aspects of dealing with an defending from assault with limited resources, a breakdown of communications & no backup.
I think Boeing needs to focus a little more on getting people/materials to space and a little less on the aesthetics of their cabin design. From what I gather the already high costs of their United Launch Alliance rockets for the DoD have increased 60% in the last few years. Some estimates put their launches at $380 Million each not including some of the fixed production/facilities maintenance (~$1B). SpaceX can launch the same payloads in the $56 - 90 Million per launch range.
This is hardly new, scientists have been playing around with plasma windows & fields for quite some time. They're currently only a few inches in size but could be scaled up to larger dimensions, the problem is power and the pretty powerful magnetic & electrical fields needed to create them.
This entire article is one long buzzword, I feel like I'm sitting in a motivational seminar just reading it. I like the general idea of giving everyday objects an ability to query and be queried, but to be any more than a novelty you'd need to automate the query code somehow (OCR, Bar code/reader, RFID, etc). But you've also got a pretty big cataloging & logistical issue, you have to code & catalog everything you might use (lamp posts, manhole covers, post boxes, stores, etc) and maintain that database. The next big problem is keeping it going over the long term, I work in local government and given the history in my field (mapping) I can tell you that there is a tendency for the interest in maintaining a project to ebb and flow quite significantly. Back in the 80s a massive amount of money was spent (at the state/federal level) to create some pretty detailed mapping, most of which was put on a shelf and forgot about, then in the 90s interest returned and tens of thousands of dollars were spent to digitize our information (local), then it sat on some hard drives for a decade and a half gathering dust, then interest returned & I was brought in to, convert, update & maintain the information. Each time the data had to basically be completely redone due to changes in format, methodology and/or technology. And each time significant amounts of money, time & resources were lost. Its all fine and dandy to create this kind of information/interactivity, but you have to make sure that its kept current, useful & active. Otherwise it is doomed to failure.
Isn't this the same department that crashed a drone into their own armored vehicle full of SWAT personnel during a photo op? This seems a lot less like mechanical difficulties and more like inexperienced/inept officers who are blaming everything on their new, expensive, unnecessary toys.
http://gizmodo.com/5890507/pol...
The New York Post one is my favorite, and a prime example of how idiotic this belief that "if you were arrested the police must have had a reason" mindset. The officers hit a parked car with a guy in passenger seat going the wrong way and they blame it on him! And without video evidence he likely would have been convicted of destruction of public property, resisting arrest & disorderly conduct.
Even better, Just stumbled across this when checking ABC news. Apparently one officers idea of "crowd control" is to trip and shove high school girls at a football game.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/video...
"presumably after the guy already did something wrong and tried to resist arrest."
Is that anything like the below case, where a passenger in a car where the driver did run stayed in the car and waited for police to return. After they came back he slowly exited the car with his hands up and made no attempt to flee or resist and they still chucked him to the ground, pinned him down, tased him, punched and kicked him multiple times and then heaved him face first into the back of a police cruiser with his hands cuffed behind his back?
http://www.bringmethenews.com/...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I imagine the only thing keeping it from going mainstream is the ability to make sure it doesn't record any pesky illegal/immoral activity by police/upper government officials. Kind of like that license plat reader system that was suspended indefinitely in Boston because a reporter was able to get a severely limited dataset from the system and still find "mistakes" (ignoring a stolen motorcycle that went past the same intersection regularly while using the system primarily to write tickets, ignoring the most dense area for overdue tickets the police employee parking lot, etc). Or like all of those police dash cams that have a tendency to have malfunctions/accidents when they might have caught "misconduct" (Hollywood Florida framing, Michael DeHerra Beating, Mark Byrge Arrest,Anthony Warren beating & the Prince George’s County, Maryland incident where SEVEN dashcams "malfunctioned" at once.)
That doesn't change the fact that they tried to and still are legally able to pursue these "debts" with no real recourse for those who are targeted. This stinks of a temporary hold to let the controversy die down so it can be reintroduced at a slower pace next time, if you're boiling frogs alive you bring the temperature up slowly so they don't jump out of the pot.
I'm all for lofty science projects with a moderate likelihood of failure but it seems like every one of these large scale projects of late fail to live up to their promises, don't provide significant scientific information AND cost 4 times what they were originally projected to cost. One of those conditions every other project would be quite acceptable but all three of them on a vast majority of projects? Sounds like either a massive waste of taxpayer money or a "legalized" form of embezzlement to me.
Thats starting to change, ballistic parachutes are becoming more common place on small private aircraft giving a pretty significant margin of safety. Even with a complete failure of the airframe passengers can walk away from the remnants of the aircraft.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You might want to flip through some of the youtube videos of commercial aircraft landing in even moderate weather conditions, you might be surprised how hair raising their landings are when seen from the right angle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Federal (FAA) banning of this service for "safety" reasons in 3....2.........1.................
Would such a device have really made a difference? Currently it looks like one of two scenarios, either someone commandeered the plane (growing increasingly unlikely) and disabled all of the communications systems or there was a sudden catastrophic failure that either destroyed the plane in midair or crippled all of its systems. I find it highly unlikely that this system could upload a meaningful amount of data through a satellite connection (not known for their reliability) in such a short time if it was a catastrophic failure or if it was a failure of all systems who's to say that it wouldn't have taken out such a device as well.
These **AA agencies truly have no shame, hopefully this little "oversight" lands a boot so far up the MPAA's rear that they'll think twice about their brazen and often completely false/misleading statements for decades to come. Sadly I'm not betting on it, they'll probably use some circular reasoning to "justify" why they can take advantage of off-shoring but others shouldn't, but one can always hope. At a bare minimum they've given the actual artists ammunition to use against them.
Perhaps they should focus on one incredibly ambitions plan instead of eight separate ones. I'm also a bit curious how big the receivers would have to be earthside to collect the beamed energy. I don't know if they've invented the microwave equivalent of a laser which is probably what would be needed to to keep the receivers less than 20 miles wide.
I can't say that I'm really a fan of the National Ignition Facility. The PR side of it is "a grand search into fusion power research", but the reality seems to be nuclear weapons research. Coupled with the fact that the project has had massive mismanagement and cost overruns from an original ~$1 Billion estimate to costing over $4.2 Billion. Advanced research is never predictable to be sure, and some cost overrun/failure is to be expected but a four fold increase in costs AND no ignition? Sounds like we're not getting much bang for our research bucks.
I am aware of that as a matter of law, but the premise was that a person can't be tried for the same crime multiple times in the US. That is false because there are stacks of cases where people are tried 2, 3, 4 or even more times, the law may say that the previous trial "didn't occur" but that doesn't erase the fact that it did. And there is technically no limitation to the number of times a person can be retried as long as a prosecutor can make enough of a case to avoid a verdict of not guilty (despite an hour of searching I still can't find the legal requirements of a finding of "not guilty" by a jury, is it 50%?). There are even cases where prosecutors have purposely caused (or attempted to cause) mistrials to prevent possible not guilty verdicts so they can retry a person in the future.
"nopee. the first court is the only court"
Tell that to the "Liberty City 7", that group of destitute morons that the FBI conned into becoming "terrorists". The charges and evidence were so laughable that two separate juries wouldn't vote to convict. It took a third, hand picked jury to finally convict some of them of some of the charges after two weeks of deliberations and two uncooperative jurors being replaced.
In some cases you would be right, there are definitely cases where a department acknowledged that there had been misconduct and was open with the fact & any evidence they had. However there are also MANY cases (Michael Deherra Beating, Hollywood FL framing, etc) where there were obvious instances of personnel not involved with the misconduct covering for those misbehaving by destroying and/or editing evidence. On officer video could have very positive impact on both punishing criminals and punishing officer misconduct, but only if the video is streamed to a third party database that provides access equally to police, prosecution, defendants & reporters. And there are SEVERE penalties for having "accidents" with your video equipment at an "inopportune" time.
I'm highly dubious as to the real world applications of this system. Every other laser "weapon" has turned out to be highly ineffective, prone to failure & unable to meet any of its design goals. Just look at the ABL (Airborne Laser), they burnt over $5 Billion and were well on their way to burning more until some in the military hierarchy noticed that you would need dozens of them positioned inside even a small enemies airspace to be effective.
Nuclear "earthquakes" are a hiccup compared to the real thing, the shaking only lasts a second or so and is only experienced in a comparatively small area. The 2011 Tohoku earthquake was equivalent to a 9,320 Gigaton explosion in terms of energy released and lasted about 6 minutes.
My geology is a little rusty, but I don't think any amount of human activity can "create" full fledged earthquakes. Some activities can encourage an already building earthquake to occur before it would naturally, but not create one from nothing or even enhance one that is building. In some cases this could actually be a plus, it would probably be preferable to have a few 6.0 quakes that you can roughly predict rather than one 8.5 quake that you don' t have a clue when it will occur.