The increasing number of people who work from home must have some bearing here (altho it could be negligible at this point). I expect in the next few decades this will have a substantial negative impact on the value of office space as well as reduce traffic. Where I work, there's actually no necessity for anyone to physically be present - it could all be done remotely, but I think the hold up is the shift in people's thinking this requires more so than any technological hurdle - there's the social aspect and the "get out of the house" aspect and the "I can't be around my spouse and kids _all_ the time!" aspect and just plain old inertia. In the meantime, our 500+ people keep congregating in large downtown buildings unnecessarily, for which we pay better than $250K/mo, and our front-line people conduct 99% of their business via email and phone.
Walking across the road can have "catastrophic consequences" if you happen to trip and fall in such a way that you become paralyzed. Dancing can have "catastrophic consequences" - in fact, there was a case very recently whereby a guy fell on the woman he was dancing with and paralyzed her.
Your notion that the authorities ought to be able to stop you and question you and scan your person and vehicle for no good reason in the hopes they'll discover some "crime" is rather shocking to me. That ain't the way things ought to work in a free society. Then again, as near as I can tell, the UK and it's surveillance state is on the bleeding edge of the march to 1984.
If your argument is that you don't mind (and in fact seem to encourage) unprompted police scrutiny, would you feel the same way about them coming to your home and poking around for no good reason, just in case they might find something? If you're not OK with that, then your argument is one of degrees, not principle. And if you are OK with that, please don't ever run for office or join the local constabulary.
Firstly, I'm not advocating _anyone_ drink and drive - I don't do it, ever, full stop. But I stand by my opposition to laws based on probabilities. An "impaired" person is definitely not _certain_ to cause damage, and in fact I think it's safe to say the odds are rather against - I'm willing to bet for each drunk driver who gets in an accident of some sort, there are 1,000+ who make it home safely - I see this happen all the time. I'm certainly not arguing it is prudent, but there's no victim if the person doesn't hit anything/anyone.
I appreciate that groups like MADD and others who make a buck based on fear of drunk driving have waged an extraordinarily successful PR campaign on the issue; I just don't think reality matches the perception they've created. And I certainly don't buy it as an excuse to waive the requirement of probable cause on a wholesale basis while setting up police checkpoints in an ostensibly free country.
The SCOTUS ruled (6-3) these roadblocks do indeed violate the Fourth Amendment (Michigan Dept. of State Police v. Sitz), but that's OK because the government has a "substantial government interest" to reduce drunk driving. It is a very wrong and scary decision - imagine applying that logic to other constitutional protections: "It's OK to suppress free speech because the government has a 'substantial government interest' in keep things peaceful"; "It is OK to ignore due process because the government has a 'substantial government interest' in reducing crime."
Drunk driving laws are some of the most bizarre, irrational laws on the books. If a person is intoxicated, drives home and arrives without incident, there is no victim. The laws are predicated upon "probability", and it's tantamount to saying "statistically, left-handed people are slightly more likely to commit crimes, therefore we should pre-emptively jail them." (I made that up for the sake of illustration; my apologies to all the lefty-freaks).
According to MADD (a rather dubious organization at best), 10,839 will die due to drunken driving in 2010 (http://www.madd.org/statistics/). Now, I'm no fan of people dying, and if you're one of those 10,839 it sucks to be you, but inconveniencing hundreds of thousands of motorists with what should be unconstitutional search and seizure (the Michigan Dept. of State Police v. Sitz case, in which the SCOTUS found DUI checkpoints violate the Fourth Amendment, but not enough to really bother with, because the "substantial government interest" warranted the constitutional violations, is clearly an incorrect decision) ain't right.
To put that number in context, it represents somewhere around 0.003613% of the population. More than three times as many people killed themselves in 2005 (http://www.suicide.org/suicide-statistics.html#2005). 15,000 people were murdered in 2009; 89,000 were raped; 806,843 were assaulted (http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm). And yet often 10 or more police officers per instance spend hours stopping every car, without any probable cause. Beyond the farce of a criminal law based on probability, it is a horrible misuse of resources. It's right up there with all the "think of the children" things one mustn't question in polite society.
Typically the insurance company gets ownership of any damaged goods it pays to replace (this is known as salvage). I'm not familiar with the peculiarities of satellite insurance tho - salvage may very well not apply (or it may be in the insurance contract but not acted upon as a matter of practicality) because it seems to me it's generally an all or nothing proposition: either the satellite launches and operates successfully or it is permanently lost (the present case, surely an oddity, notwithstanding). And it isn't as tho an insurer would hop a space shuttle and go claim their salvage such that they could sell it for scrap metal...actually, here's what wiki says: "Another aspect of satellite insurance is the procedure attached to salvage. Though it is impossible to obtain monetary value from the wreckage in the event of an actual total loss or constructive total loss, many insurers rely on sharing any revenue which may be obtainable from the failed satellite with the insured." https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Satellite_insurance
It's safe to say the satellite's owner would also carry liability insurance, such that any harm done to other satellites (or anything, really) results in compensation to the injured third party.
I believe the Kno's underlying OS is Ubuntu 9.10 - (it's a single or dual screen 14.1" tablet intended for students, which allows annotations/notes/etc. - see here: http://www.kno.com/the-kno/specs (altho a Web Kit layer runs everything and the user doesn't have direct access to Ubuntu)).
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The increasing number of people who work from home must have some bearing here (altho it could be negligible at this point). I expect in the next few decades this will have a substantial negative impact on the value of office space as well as reduce traffic. Where I work, there's actually no necessity for anyone to physically be present - it could all be done remotely, but I think the hold up is the shift in people's thinking this requires more so than any technological hurdle - there's the social aspect and the "get out of the house" aspect and the "I can't be around my spouse and kids _all_ the time!" aspect and just plain old inertia. In the meantime, our 500+ people keep congregating in large downtown buildings unnecessarily, for which we pay better than $250K/mo, and our front-line people conduct 99% of their business via email and phone.
Walking across the road can have "catastrophic consequences" if you happen to trip and fall in such a way that you become paralyzed. Dancing can have "catastrophic consequences" - in fact, there was a case very recently whereby a guy fell on the woman he was dancing with and paralyzed her.
Your notion that the authorities ought to be able to stop you and question you and scan your person and vehicle for no good reason in the hopes they'll discover some "crime" is rather shocking to me. That ain't the way things ought to work in a free society. Then again, as near as I can tell, the UK and it's surveillance state is on the bleeding edge of the march to 1984. If your argument is that you don't mind (and in fact seem to encourage) unprompted police scrutiny, would you feel the same way about them coming to your home and poking around for no good reason, just in case they might find something? If you're not OK with that, then your argument is one of degrees, not principle. And if you are OK with that, please don't ever run for office or join the local constabulary.
Firstly, I'm not advocating _anyone_ drink and drive - I don't do it, ever, full stop. But I stand by my opposition to laws based on probabilities. An "impaired" person is definitely not _certain_ to cause damage, and in fact I think it's safe to say the odds are rather against - I'm willing to bet for each drunk driver who gets in an accident of some sort, there are 1,000+ who make it home safely - I see this happen all the time. I'm certainly not arguing it is prudent, but there's no victim if the person doesn't hit anything/anyone.
I appreciate that groups like MADD and others who make a buck based on fear of drunk driving have waged an extraordinarily successful PR campaign on the issue; I just don't think reality matches the perception they've created. And I certainly don't buy it as an excuse to waive the requirement of probable cause on a wholesale basis while setting up police checkpoints in an ostensibly free country.
The SCOTUS ruled (6-3) these roadblocks do indeed violate the Fourth Amendment (Michigan Dept. of State Police v. Sitz), but that's OK because the government has a "substantial government interest" to reduce drunk driving. It is a very wrong and scary decision - imagine applying that logic to other constitutional protections: "It's OK to suppress free speech because the government has a 'substantial government interest' in keep things peaceful"; "It is OK to ignore due process because the government has a 'substantial government interest' in reducing crime."
Drunk driving laws are some of the most bizarre, irrational laws on the books. If a person is intoxicated, drives home and arrives without incident, there is no victim. The laws are predicated upon "probability", and it's tantamount to saying "statistically, left-handed people are slightly more likely to commit crimes, therefore we should pre-emptively jail them." (I made that up for the sake of illustration; my apologies to all the lefty-freaks).
According to MADD (a rather dubious organization at best), 10,839 will die due to drunken driving in 2010 (http://www.madd.org/statistics/). Now, I'm no fan of people dying, and if you're one of those 10,839 it sucks to be you, but inconveniencing hundreds of thousands of motorists with what should be unconstitutional search and seizure (the Michigan Dept. of State Police v. Sitz case, in which the SCOTUS found DUI checkpoints violate the Fourth Amendment, but not enough to really bother with, because the "substantial government interest" warranted the constitutional violations, is clearly an incorrect decision) ain't right.
To put that number in context, it represents somewhere around 0.003613% of the population. More than three times as many people killed themselves in 2005 (http://www.suicide.org/suicide-statistics.html#2005). 15,000 people were murdered in 2009; 89,000 were raped; 806,843 were assaulted (http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm). And yet often 10 or more police officers per instance spend hours stopping every car, without any probable cause. Beyond the farce of a criminal law based on probability, it is a horrible misuse of resources. It's right up there with all the "think of the children" things one mustn't question in polite society.
Typically the insurance company gets ownership of any damaged goods it pays to replace (this is known as salvage). I'm not familiar with the peculiarities of satellite insurance tho - salvage may very well not apply (or it may be in the insurance contract but not acted upon as a matter of practicality) because it seems to me it's generally an all or nothing proposition: either the satellite launches and operates successfully or it is permanently lost (the present case, surely an oddity, notwithstanding). And it isn't as tho an insurer would hop a space shuttle and go claim their salvage such that they could sell it for scrap metal...actually, here's what wiki says: "Another aspect of satellite insurance is the procedure attached to salvage. Though it is impossible to obtain monetary value from the wreckage in the event of an actual total loss or constructive total loss, many insurers rely on sharing any revenue which may be obtainable from the failed satellite with the insured." https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Satellite_insurance It's safe to say the satellite's owner would also carry liability insurance, such that any harm done to other satellites (or anything, really) results in compensation to the injured third party.
"...compelling world-overpopulation issue"? You could fit everyone on the earth in the state of Texas and they'd each have over 1,000 sq ft.
I believe the Kno's underlying OS is Ubuntu 9.10 - (it's a single or dual screen 14.1" tablet intended for students, which allows annotations/notes/etc. - see here: http://www.kno.com/the-kno/specs (altho a Web Kit layer runs everything and the user doesn't have direct access to Ubuntu)).