Almost nobody wants to stop law abiding, responsible people from being able to defend themselves-- that argument is ridiculous.
Wait what? That goes completely against the sorts of gun legislation that gets passed in California.
The situation you describe is just as much the fault of the gun banners as the crazies. I'm about as right-wing as you can get about this kind of stuff, but in a perfect world I'd be all for things like background checks (especially if they check mental health), mandatory training (hell, teach gun safety in schools alongside sex-ed ("kids are gonna do it anyway, so might as well teach them to be safe about it" amirite?) ), etc. The problem is that the gun banning crowd always hijacks reasonable regulation and uses it as a way to harass law abiding gun owners.
A great example is the california handgun safety certificate. It started as a test you had to pass in order to own a handgun (originally it might have been any firearm, I wasn't a gun owner at the time it went through). It involved a multiple choice test with some decently challenging questions, and a portion in which you demonstrate safe handling to an instructor. There was a small fee (ostensibly to cover administration costs), and it was good for a lifetime once you got it. The legislation passed, and within a few years it was changed to something you have to renew every 5 years (paying the fee each time), and they dropped the safe handling demonstration. Now it's basically a backdoor tax on owning handguns with no real benefit.
Another fun one is the 10 day waiting period. Initially it was there so that there was time for all of the background check stuff to come through. Now that it's computerized, the check is basically instant but the anti-gun crowd insist on keeping the 10 day waiting period. That combined with the FFL requirements means that when I bought a shotgun from my friend for $100, I paid $150 (FFL fee + tax), had to wait 10 days, and make two trips to a pretty out of the way gun shop. That one really annoys me because had we decided not to be honest, we could have saved time, money, and hassle by making the swap in his garage for cash and no one would have ever known.
The obvious gotcha in those statistics is that a large majority of the mass shootings happen in "gun free zones". In stark contrast to the shooter, your typical responsible ccw holder is likely to be obeying the law and not carrying there.
Another interesting thing is that security guard/off-duty/retired police are often exempt from those kinds of zones*. I'd be curious to know if the locations in which an armed authority intervened were gun free zones or not.
*depending on state and local laws. They also might just ignore the sign since being a cop is a get out of jail free card for that kind of stuff.
Being trained with guns is no good if you're not armed. Outside of the training range, there are few on base who are actually carrying guns, and even fewer who actually have live ammo.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to say. The first three examples you list are things that don't require general AI. e.g. a factory requires a highly repetitive and very repeatable task performed over and over again. Humans spend several man-years designing and programming the automation to work exactly right, this isn't an example of AI. Services work the same way. Taking a fastfood order follows a basic script. It's a highly repeatable and very repetitive task that does not require general AI. Drones just flat out aren't an example of AI.
We're already living in a world where toaster-dumb A.I. is being added to all sorts of IoT widgets and it's already causing a lot of headaches.
I think that when people talk about potential AI problems in this context, they're talking about the BS misconceptions from Hollywood about what AI is and/or is not. Not some poorly thought out, poorly implemented, and poorly secured IoT toster.
By outsourcing, you get the benefits of scale, and the client only pays a fee per call, so can manage costs better.
We're talking about a fast food restaurant. The costs of the call center infrastructure, fragility introduced to the system (ever been to a drive thru when the speaker is broken and there's a worker standing there taking orders by hand? Good luck doing that if you've got a call center), etc. really outweigh the savings from not having a minimum wage worker (who presumably can be cleaning or interfacing with dine-in customers or whatever when not busy taking orders).
You get ice cream machine broken/rude operator issues even with local workers, so this makes no difference.
Did you not read the justification after the ice cream machine breaking example? The entire point is that a remote order taker wouldn't know it was broken and would take the order, whereas a local person would and could inform the customer. The entire point about rude local workers is that you can handle it rather than file some random complaint to be filed away as a statistic against some faceless remote worker somewhere (if in fact, they were actually rude. It could have just been an asshole customer, at which point having local people is great because presumably a good manager would know his people and know the correct side to take).
I don't know why they didn't move forward with it. Perhaps the network infrastructure wasn't up to the task at the time, or maybe the independent operators didn't want to turn that function over to the corporate overlords.
Because while I'm sure it works well for 90% of the use case in which the order follows a preset script, it's not very adaptable. e.g. if their ice cream machine goes down, that somehow needs to get communicated to the remote order takers in a timely fashion. There could also be problems such as if the remote order taker is rude (or perceived by a rude customer as rude), the people at the window taking the money will take the heat for it without really knowing if the customer is an asshole or they just got unlucky and had to deal with a bad order taker. It's just a lot of overhead, coordination, and unnecessary complexity for something that's really handled just as easily by minimum wage workers locally.
Just how oblivious are you? Some zero-effort googling shows a chipset on a lenovo that wasn't supported: http://www.linux.org/threads/t...
And a good number of common wireless cards (broadcom specifically?) are "supported" but usually require a weekend of wading through various forum posts and how-to guides of dubious quality in order to get the thing to cooperate.
I've yet to install linux on a laptop that didn't have issues with either the wireless and/or the wired ethernet that required jumping through quite a few hoops to make work.
30 years ago, no one would have believe crazy claims about FEMA building concentration camps, yet these days those kinds of ideas are very commonplace among the right-wing.
People did, you just never heard of it because the places they exchanged such information and ideas weren't visible to you. Had you hung out in the right circles, you would have encountered it eventually. Also keep in mind that even though while nutty conspiracy theories now have more visibility, the truth also has a lot more visibility. The best counter to this kind of stuff is to make the counter-argument and let the most well reasoned viewpoint win out, not to censor the craziness.
I didn't attack anyone. You need to grow as pair of testicles.
Not only is that sentence by itself self-contradictory, but it's completely untrue. You implied he's dumb because certain hardware didn't work on linux (in reality this is the fault of the manufacturer and/or the linux community), and called him a troll for daring to say something truthful but negative about your OS.
Your post is an excellent example of why linux never got the market share it really should have. Instead of attempting to fix the problem (or hell, even just expressing sympathy), you attack the person talking about the problem and go so far as to call them a troll. Video and wifi are notorious for not working out of the box on various linux distros (yes, we know it's the hardware vendors fault in a lot of cases), there's no harm in acknowledging it. By insulting the people who encounter these kinds of issues, you drive away a lot of potential users and reinforce the perception that these issues aren't going to be fixed anytime in the near future.
I have 5 windows 7 machines, and of those one of them (a laptop) continues trying to force me to update to windows 10 to the point that it's already reserved several gb of the (very limited) ssd for the download. It's especially annoying because it'll attempt to resume the download at random times, and since it's a laptop it's not always on the most stable of internet connections.
Two of my other machines have attempted to download it, but I actually use those enough that I spent the time scrubbing out all traces of the windows 10 advertising updates and blocking them as best I could. So far those machines haven't been bothered, but they're also a few months behind in normal updates (it's set to manual currently) so I can't say for sure how affected they are.
You *cannot* refuse to perform a commanded operation when the driver is in control of the vehicle.
Yes you can. ABS refuses to stop if it senses the wheels locking up. Traction control refuses to give full power to a wheel if it senses slippage. There's no reason that the blind spot detector can't refuse to let you switch lanes if it detects a motorcycle there.
And if flat out refusing the command has you worried (in which case, why don't fully autonomous cars also have you worried?), it could just provide the refusal as making the steering wheel hard to turn in that direction rather than flat out locking it.
I would love to have a car capable of sport-driving that could also be fully autonomous. Sometimes I want to enjoy the drive, other times I want to enjoy the view.
I feel like those two things are mutually exclusive (depending on your definition of sport-driving). All of the things required for a sporty car (small, lightweight, lots of internal bracing, good balance, as much power from as little engine as possible) conflict with all of the space and weight considerations of the sensors/electronics/actuators that would be required to make something fully autonomous.
They are implemented, that's the point. What I'm saying to do is implement them more. e.g. lane assist generally just beeps at you or vibrates the wheel on the side you're drifting. The next step would be for it to actually control the steering unless you explicitly override it. Blind spot detection also just beeps at you if you signal and/or drift lanes while there's something there. The enhanced version just flat out wouldn't let you do it.
As for the rest of your point, I disagree inherently. I don't trust people to be smart enough to know when they should "Twitch the wheel" and then go back to reading the news. I know too many people who can't even tell they haven't hung their phone up for me to be able to trust that they've let the system properly take control.
Yet you trust that they'd let a self driving car take control? (assuming that self driving cars have a manual function, which would be asinnie not to include). The whole point of the system I was describing is that the car is in control, it's just that the car has no executive function and allows the driver to guide it. If the driver were to bail out while swerving down the freeway at 80mph, the car would revert to a basic lane following behavior, presumably coming to a stop once it runs out of freeway and encounters another car at a traffic light (at which point the adaptive cruise control would perform an emergency braking maneuver so as to not hit the car in front).
Think of it more like a self driving car in which the user can press buttons to give it turn by turn directions.
See, to me, this is bass-ackwards. The point of the autonomous automobile is to remove the driver from the equation of basic transportation, or to at least have the option to do so when one doesn't feel like driving.
Unrelated to TFA and your point about sport driving (which I agree with completely), the current goal of autonomous vehicles is backwards imo. Rather than shoot for sensationalism (full autonomy), they should be going for things augmenting driver abilities. Lane assist, brake assist, adaptive cruise control, traction control, active stability system, etc. As you integrate those technologies and give them more and more control over the car, what you'd end up with then is a car that basically is driving itself but with the "driver" making the decisions. Twitch the wheel and the car automatically signals, checks its blind spot, then moves over a lane if safe, at which point the driver goes back to reading the morning news as the adaptive cruise maintains safe following distance (pair the system up with a tablet and it could overlay lane status so the "driver" maintains some degree of situational awareness as fed to them by the car). The car could even alter driving modes based on current circumstances, e.g. upon exiting the freeway, the driver is given full manual control until they enter a parking lot and attempt to pull into a space, at which point the car detects it and offers to take over.
I'm an engineer but I work on cars and fish. And plenty of people who do manual labor play videogames.
That's the entire point. If you were a construction worker you couldn't bill your commute time, you couldn't work on your car, and you couldn't fish. So then what, you play candy crush the entire train ride and consider it a good use of your time?
The key thing here is that many people do things in their down time that aren't possible to do on a bus or train, and the productive things they have on their list that are possible to do on a bus or train don't take up anywhere near the entire duration of the trip. As such, your assertion that they can just do other things while commuting so as to not "waste" the time is laughable unless applied to a very specific subset of people.
Now on your transit commute (and some day soon in your computer-driven car) you can be doing a lot of the stuff you'd have been doing if your were sitting around your house: reading, shopping, blogging, playing games. That's just as true for a welder taking public transit as it is for a consulting software engineer.
No it isn't. You're falling into the same trap that every public transit advocate does and thinking that everyone is similar to you and a one size fits all solution will work. People with the kinds of jobs that require a physical presence often don't have hobbies or pasttimes that are conducive to working on while riding a bus, unless the bus makes accommodations for tieing fly's, reloading ammunition, or working on cars while in transit. There are plenty of people who don't shop online (at least not to the point of spending 2 hours a day doing that), don't play games, don't blog, and don't read (at least not 2 hours a day worth of material). Spending half of that transit time driving themself would be significantly more productive.
That's great public transit works for you, but you're doing your viewpoint a disservice by insisting it's great for everyone.
That's nice you had a job that lets you bill those kinds of hours, but you seem to be falling into the trap of assuming that what worked for you will work for everyone else also. That's clearly not the case, unless you can explain to me how someone like a welder is going to be able to bill his hours spent commuting over public transportation.
Ironically enough, the logic in your initial post can be used to invalidate whatever argument you're trying to make here. Subtlety isn't really high on the list of things associated with marines; so yes, I would expect a marine performing a legal and aboveboard entry to a building with multiple marines stacked up behind him ready to open fire on whoever is inside to simply shoot the lock off. Much in the same way that I would expect repeatedly bashing a lock with a sledgehammer to open it. But that's loud and obvious B&E is not what we're talking about. I would not expect someone trying to quietly steal a bike to shoot the lock off. It's loud, it's kind of hard to hide a shotgun (especially while riding a stolen bike), and it's really hard to maintain plausible deniability if you're noticed by the authorities. On the other hand, carrying a medium sized screwdriver with which to tap a lock open is significantly easier to carry, conceal, and explain.
Did you actually watch the video? He just rapidly taps on the side with a small hammer for about 5 seconds and it pops open. Nothing like a shotgun or mining pick involved.
Watch the video. He taps it rapidly about 10 times on the side with a tiny hammer to jiggle the internals and it just pops open in less than 5 seconds.
Yep. Anything that can get the actual space part of the vehicle cheaply up past 10km and then let it go the rest of the way based on conventional means is the way to go.
The other option instead of an aircraft could be a linear accelerator up the side of a mountain. 1G over a 10km track comes out to a 1600km/h endspeed. This would be about 1/3rd of the velocity required for a very low earth orbit, and spit the launch vehicle out above the thickest bit of the atmosphere. If the track is sealed at the bottom, the internal air pressure can be kept at that of the opening at the top. I have no idea what the upper theoretical limit of a linear motor is, but the chinese maglev hits somewhere close to 600km/h, so I would guess that 1200km/h in less than half the air density is reasonable (you could even let air in the back at the moment of launch to help push it hyperloop style).
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Almost nobody wants to stop law abiding, responsible people from being able to defend themselves-- that argument is ridiculous.
Wait what? That goes completely against the sorts of gun legislation that gets passed in California.
The situation you describe is just as much the fault of the gun banners as the crazies. I'm about as right-wing as you can get about this kind of stuff, but in a perfect world I'd be all for things like background checks (especially if they check mental health), mandatory training (hell, teach gun safety in schools alongside sex-ed ("kids are gonna do it anyway, so might as well teach them to be safe about it" amirite?) ), etc. The problem is that the gun banning crowd always hijacks reasonable regulation and uses it as a way to harass law abiding gun owners.
A great example is the california handgun safety certificate. It started as a test you had to pass in order to own a handgun (originally it might have been any firearm, I wasn't a gun owner at the time it went through). It involved a multiple choice test with some decently challenging questions, and a portion in which you demonstrate safe handling to an instructor. There was a small fee (ostensibly to cover administration costs), and it was good for a lifetime once you got it. The legislation passed, and within a few years it was changed to something you have to renew every 5 years (paying the fee each time), and they dropped the safe handling demonstration. Now it's basically a backdoor tax on owning handguns with no real benefit.
Another fun one is the 10 day waiting period. Initially it was there so that there was time for all of the background check stuff to come through. Now that it's computerized, the check is basically instant but the anti-gun crowd insist on keeping the 10 day waiting period. That combined with the FFL requirements means that when I bought a shotgun from my friend for $100, I paid $150 (FFL fee + tax), had to wait 10 days, and make two trips to a pretty out of the way gun shop. That one really annoys me because had we decided not to be honest, we could have saved time, money, and hassle by making the swap in his garage for cash and no one would have ever known.
The obvious gotcha in those statistics is that a large majority of the mass shootings happen in "gun free zones". In stark contrast to the shooter, your typical responsible ccw holder is likely to be obeying the law and not carrying there.
Another interesting thing is that security guard/off-duty/retired police are often exempt from those kinds of zones*. I'd be curious to know if the locations in which an armed authority intervened were gun free zones or not.
*depending on state and local laws. They also might just ignore the sign since being a cop is a get out of jail free card for that kind of stuff.
Being trained with guns is no good if you're not armed. Outside of the training range, there are few on base who are actually carrying guns, and even fewer who actually have live ammo.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to say. The first three examples you list are things that don't require general AI. e.g. a factory requires a highly repetitive and very repeatable task performed over and over again. Humans spend several man-years designing and programming the automation to work exactly right, this isn't an example of AI. Services work the same way. Taking a fastfood order follows a basic script. It's a highly repeatable and very repetitive task that does not require general AI. Drones just flat out aren't an example of AI.
We're already living in a world where toaster-dumb A.I. is being added to all sorts of IoT widgets and it's already causing a lot of headaches.
I think that when people talk about potential AI problems in this context, they're talking about the BS misconceptions from Hollywood about what AI is and/or is not. Not some poorly thought out, poorly implemented, and poorly secured IoT toster.
By outsourcing, you get the benefits of scale, and the client only pays a fee per call, so can manage costs better.
We're talking about a fast food restaurant. The costs of the call center infrastructure, fragility introduced to the system (ever been to a drive thru when the speaker is broken and there's a worker standing there taking orders by hand? Good luck doing that if you've got a call center), etc. really outweigh the savings from not having a minimum wage worker (who presumably can be cleaning or interfacing with dine-in customers or whatever when not busy taking orders).
You get ice cream machine broken/rude operator issues even with local workers, so this makes no difference.
Did you not read the justification after the ice cream machine breaking example? The entire point is that a remote order taker wouldn't know it was broken and would take the order, whereas a local person would and could inform the customer. The entire point about rude local workers is that you can handle it rather than file some random complaint to be filed away as a statistic against some faceless remote worker somewhere (if in fact, they were actually rude. It could have just been an asshole customer, at which point having local people is great because presumably a good manager would know his people and know the correct side to take).
I don't know why they didn't move forward with it. Perhaps the network infrastructure wasn't up to the task at the time, or maybe the independent operators didn't want to turn that function over to the corporate overlords.
Because while I'm sure it works well for 90% of the use case in which the order follows a preset script, it's not very adaptable. e.g. if their ice cream machine goes down, that somehow needs to get communicated to the remote order takers in a timely fashion. There could also be problems such as if the remote order taker is rude (or perceived by a rude customer as rude), the people at the window taking the money will take the heat for it without really knowing if the customer is an asshole or they just got unlucky and had to deal with a bad order taker. It's just a lot of overhead, coordination, and unnecessary complexity for something that's really handled just as easily by minimum wage workers locally.
Just how oblivious are you? Some zero-effort googling shows a chipset on a lenovo that wasn't supported: http://www.linux.org/threads/t...
And a good number of common wireless cards (broadcom specifically?) are "supported" but usually require a weekend of wading through various forum posts and how-to guides of dubious quality in order to get the thing to cooperate.
I've yet to install linux on a laptop that didn't have issues with either the wireless and/or the wired ethernet that required jumping through quite a few hoops to make work.
30 years ago, no one would have believe crazy claims about FEMA building concentration camps, yet these days those kinds of ideas are very commonplace among the right-wing.
People did, you just never heard of it because the places they exchanged such information and ideas weren't visible to you. Had you hung out in the right circles, you would have encountered it eventually. Also keep in mind that even though while nutty conspiracy theories now have more visibility, the truth also has a lot more visibility. The best counter to this kind of stuff is to make the counter-argument and let the most well reasoned viewpoint win out, not to censor the craziness.
It would also thrash your ssd something terrible :P
I didn't attack anyone. You need to grow as pair of testicles.
Not only is that sentence by itself self-contradictory, but it's completely untrue. You implied he's dumb because certain hardware didn't work on linux (in reality this is the fault of the manufacturer and/or the linux community), and called him a troll for daring to say something truthful but negative about your OS.
Your post is an excellent example of why linux never got the market share it really should have. Instead of attempting to fix the problem (or hell, even just expressing sympathy), you attack the person talking about the problem and go so far as to call them a troll. Video and wifi are notorious for not working out of the box on various linux distros (yes, we know it's the hardware vendors fault in a lot of cases), there's no harm in acknowledging it. By insulting the people who encounter these kinds of issues, you drive away a lot of potential users and reinforce the perception that these issues aren't going to be fixed anytime in the near future.
I have 5 windows 7 machines, and of those one of them (a laptop) continues trying to force me to update to windows 10 to the point that it's already reserved several gb of the (very limited) ssd for the download. It's especially annoying because it'll attempt to resume the download at random times, and since it's a laptop it's not always on the most stable of internet connections.
Two of my other machines have attempted to download it, but I actually use those enough that I spent the time scrubbing out all traces of the windows 10 advertising updates and blocking them as best I could. So far those machines haven't been bothered, but they're also a few months behind in normal updates (it's set to manual currently) so I can't say for sure how affected they are.
You *cannot* refuse to perform a commanded operation when the driver is in control of the vehicle.
Yes you can. ABS refuses to stop if it senses the wheels locking up. Traction control refuses to give full power to a wheel if it senses slippage. There's no reason that the blind spot detector can't refuse to let you switch lanes if it detects a motorcycle there.
And if flat out refusing the command has you worried (in which case, why don't fully autonomous cars also have you worried?), it could just provide the refusal as making the steering wheel hard to turn in that direction rather than flat out locking it.
All zero people.
Lawrence Torcello blows a hole in that claim: http://gawker.com/arrest-clima...
Though you're right, there (thankfully) doesn't seem to be a significant number of people who agree with him.
I would love to have a car capable of sport-driving that could also be fully autonomous. Sometimes I want to enjoy the drive, other times I want to enjoy the view.
I feel like those two things are mutually exclusive (depending on your definition of sport-driving). All of the things required for a sporty car (small, lightweight, lots of internal bracing, good balance, as much power from as little engine as possible) conflict with all of the space and weight considerations of the sensors/electronics/actuators that would be required to make something fully autonomous.
Which one of those aren't implemented yet?
They are implemented, that's the point. What I'm saying to do is implement them more. e.g. lane assist generally just beeps at you or vibrates the wheel on the side you're drifting. The next step would be for it to actually control the steering unless you explicitly override it. Blind spot detection also just beeps at you if you signal and/or drift lanes while there's something there. The enhanced version just flat out wouldn't let you do it.
As for the rest of your point, I disagree inherently. I don't trust people to be smart enough to know when they should "Twitch the wheel" and then go back to reading the news. I know too many people who can't even tell they haven't hung their phone up for me to be able to trust that they've let the system properly take control.
Yet you trust that they'd let a self driving car take control? (assuming that self driving cars have a manual function, which would be asinnie not to include). The whole point of the system I was describing is that the car is in control, it's just that the car has no executive function and allows the driver to guide it. If the driver were to bail out while swerving down the freeway at 80mph, the car would revert to a basic lane following behavior, presumably coming to a stop once it runs out of freeway and encounters another car at a traffic light (at which point the adaptive cruise control would perform an emergency braking maneuver so as to not hit the car in front).
Think of it more like a self driving car in which the user can press buttons to give it turn by turn directions.
See, to me, this is bass-ackwards. The point of the autonomous automobile is to remove the driver from the equation of basic transportation, or to at least have the option to do so when one doesn't feel like driving.
Unrelated to TFA and your point about sport driving (which I agree with completely), the current goal of autonomous vehicles is backwards imo. Rather than shoot for sensationalism (full autonomy), they should be going for things augmenting driver abilities. Lane assist, brake assist, adaptive cruise control, traction control, active stability system, etc. As you integrate those technologies and give them more and more control over the car, what you'd end up with then is a car that basically is driving itself but with the "driver" making the decisions. Twitch the wheel and the car automatically signals, checks its blind spot, then moves over a lane if safe, at which point the driver goes back to reading the morning news as the adaptive cruise maintains safe following distance (pair the system up with a tablet and it could overlay lane status so the "driver" maintains some degree of situational awareness as fed to them by the car). The car could even alter driving modes based on current circumstances, e.g. upon exiting the freeway, the driver is given full manual control until they enter a parking lot and attempt to pull into a space, at which point the car detects it and offers to take over.
I'm an engineer but I work on cars and fish. And plenty of people who do manual labor play videogames.
That's the entire point. If you were a construction worker you couldn't bill your commute time, you couldn't work on your car, and you couldn't fish. So then what, you play candy crush the entire train ride and consider it a good use of your time?
The key thing here is that many people do things in their down time that aren't possible to do on a bus or train, and the productive things they have on their list that are possible to do on a bus or train don't take up anywhere near the entire duration of the trip. As such, your assertion that they can just do other things while commuting so as to not "waste" the time is laughable unless applied to a very specific subset of people.
Now on your transit commute (and some day soon in your computer-driven car) you can be doing a lot of the stuff you'd have been doing if your were sitting around your house: reading, shopping, blogging, playing games. That's just as true for a welder taking public transit as it is for a consulting software engineer.
No it isn't. You're falling into the same trap that every public transit advocate does and thinking that everyone is similar to you and a one size fits all solution will work. People with the kinds of jobs that require a physical presence often don't have hobbies or pasttimes that are conducive to working on while riding a bus, unless the bus makes accommodations for tieing fly's, reloading ammunition, or working on cars while in transit. There are plenty of people who don't shop online (at least not to the point of spending 2 hours a day doing that), don't play games, don't blog, and don't read (at least not 2 hours a day worth of material). Spending half of that transit time driving themself would be significantly more productive.
That's great public transit works for you, but you're doing your viewpoint a disservice by insisting it's great for everyone.
That's nice you had a job that lets you bill those kinds of hours, but you seem to be falling into the trap of assuming that what worked for you will work for everyone else also. That's clearly not the case, unless you can explain to me how someone like a welder is going to be able to bill his hours spent commuting over public transportation.
Ironically enough, the logic in your initial post can be used to invalidate whatever argument you're trying to make here. Subtlety isn't really high on the list of things associated with marines; so yes, I would expect a marine performing a legal and aboveboard entry to a building with multiple marines stacked up behind him ready to open fire on whoever is inside to simply shoot the lock off. Much in the same way that I would expect repeatedly bashing a lock with a sledgehammer to open it. But that's loud and obvious B&E is not what we're talking about. I would not expect someone trying to quietly steal a bike to shoot the lock off. It's loud, it's kind of hard to hide a shotgun (especially while riding a stolen bike), and it's really hard to maintain plausible deniability if you're noticed by the authorities. On the other hand, carrying a medium sized screwdriver with which to tap a lock open is significantly easier to carry, conceal, and explain.
Did you actually watch the video? He just rapidly taps on the side with a small hammer for about 5 seconds and it pops open. Nothing like a shotgun or mining pick involved.
Watch the video. He taps it rapidly about 10 times on the side with a tiny hammer to jiggle the internals and it just pops open in less than 5 seconds.
Yep. Anything that can get the actual space part of the vehicle cheaply up past 10km and then let it go the rest of the way based on conventional means is the way to go.
The other option instead of an aircraft could be a linear accelerator up the side of a mountain. 1G over a 10km track comes out to a 1600km/h endspeed. This would be about 1/3rd of the velocity required for a very low earth orbit, and spit the launch vehicle out above the thickest bit of the atmosphere. If the track is sealed at the bottom, the internal air pressure can be kept at that of the opening at the top. I have no idea what the upper theoretical limit of a linear motor is, but the chinese maglev hits somewhere close to 600km/h, so I would guess that 1200km/h in less than half the air density is reasonable (you could even let air in the back at the moment of launch to help push it hyperloop style).