Well, if Google lost m kids' baby pictures you could say the same thing. The monetary and cultural value of those pictures is zero, but they're still important to me.
Asking whether journalism is about facts or truth is like asking whether rocket science is about physics or design. The answer is, "yes."
You can't judge opinions of the truth until you've got your facts right AND you have a wide enough selections of facts to know you aren't dealing with cherry-picked data. It's not enough to merely check the facts, you have to put the effort into assembling a comprehensive, cross-cutting selection of them.
In the absence of facts, anyone's opinion is as good as anyone else's. And certain peoples' opinions are considerably more influential, so the new, relatively fact-poor state of public dialog serves their interests nicely.
No, politicians sometimes lie, if (a) deception in the matter in question would be in their self-interest and (b) they can get away with it. Since "news" sources no longer can "afford fact checking" (i.e., they can't afford to actually do journalism), we can take (b) for granted.
Until the 1990s, nearly all US states had highly restrictive concealed-carry permit issuance [citation]. The legislative roadblocks to collecting research data on gun ownership and use hobbles any response to a demand for more direct citations, but the combined number of guns manufactured and imported into the US has risen from 3.5 million (net of exports) to about 16 million in 2013 (4.5x); the same figure for handguns has gone from 1.5 million to 8.6 million (5.7x) [citation]. Compare this to the US population growth of 240.1 to 316.5 (1.3x) and it's clear that (a) guns are a lot more popular and (b) handguns relatively even more popular than long guns.
And since over the same time advocacy of concealed and open carry has successfully liberalized most states' laws regarding carrying handguns, I'd say that the burden of proof here is on you if you believe cops are no more likely to encounter an armed person during a traffic stop than they were thirty years ago.
Second, there is the sorry state of the relationship between police and minorities. This itself is nothing new, but the focus of minority anger on police is new.
With all due respect... a/s/l? If you're old enough to remember the early 90's and the LA Riots, you'll realize that "minority anger on police" is very much not new.
Note the newly bolded bit above. I didn't say that minority of resentment of cops didn't exist. I'm saying it's an area of greater focus for activists.
In an era of social media, the poisoned atmosphere created by clumsily intrusive police tactics spreads far beyond the places that employ them.
Actually, I think this is the root of the problem -- added and abetted by sensationalist media and our generally increasing cultural propensity for cocooning with like-minded individuals.
I think it's simplistic to assign blame to any single "root", unless it is the very concept of race itself. But if it were not for race, we'd dream up some other basis for having trouble getting along. More fundamental is that the minimally adequate standard of professionalism for police is very high; if police have even a fraction of the share of incompetents and sociopaths (about 5% in the general population) the impact of that would be staggering. Oh, and of course there's the proliferation of cell phone cameras.
Is there a specific reason this interaction deserved to be highlighted above others (in a neutral sense)?
Whenever someone is killed by an agent of the state without recourse to due process of law, I'd say that goes to the front of the queue for attention, whether the killing was justifiable, a failure of training, or outright murder. The answer isn't for people to not talk about it. People do jump to conclusions, and they do it both ways -- e.g. that the dead person deserved it, or that the cop executed.
No. Replacing human police officers with RoboCop will not help the situation, and will not help mend American culture going forward.
Sometimes I want to take all the app-focused millennials in Silicon Valley, sit them down, and force them to watch a bunch of back-to-back Dystopian science fiction films from the 70s and 80s.
I was born in January 1961, so I'm hardly a millennial. But if fear of personal injury is a factor in police shootings of innocent citizens, then why not consider employing the assistance of Officer Drone?
While I support this philosophy when confronted with a new development, we're not talking about a new development here. Officers have been approaching motor vehicles in traffic stops for about a hundred years now. It's always had an element of danger for the cop, which of course also means it has an element of danger for the driver being stopped as well.
We have to start by asking, what elements in the problem we are addressing are new?
I think there are two. The first is that people in the car are much, much more likely to be armed than they were a generation ago. Depending on how you look at things this may or may not be a problem per se; many people of course are now carrying legally. But legal or not, the chances that someone in the car is armed raises the stakes for cops in traffic stops.
Second, there is the sorry state of the relationship between police and minorities. This itself is nothing new, but the focus of minority anger on police is new. I think this has its genesis in new policing tactics like broken windows stop-and-frisk, which if you think about them are an experiment in intrusive government behavior control, albeit with good intentions. Unfortunately this puts police in an adversarial position with the public, and violates Peelian Principle numbers 2-7 in order to promote principle #1. In an era of social media, the poisoned atmosphere created by clumsily intrusive police tactics spreads far beyond the places that employ them.
I think technology may help with the first problem: approaching a car in which the occupants may very possibly be armed and either hostile or intoxicated. An app, sure, maybe even a robot.
As for the poisoned atmosphere there's a lot of hard, boring, not very exciting work to be done to fix that. But ultimately you have a choice: you can either change the police, or you can change all of society. Probably we should do both; but reforming the police is in the short term more feasible.
String theory, multiple universes, complexity, quantum teleportation... these are to Physics what Division I football is to college, which is to say, it sells tickets and opens purse strings.
No, you're thinking of longstanding military rivalries with technologically advanced and bittery ideologically hostile states.
The point about details is a good one. We won't know if the killing of Micah Johnson was justified until we know the details. He undoubtedly deserved it but that's irrelevant. Police bring people to justice; or if they have to they kill people who pose an imminent threat to others. But in no circumstance should they ever mete out justice.
Killing a suspect has to be on the decision tree somewhere -- e.g. when an armed person has hostages and a police sniper has a clear shot. However, that doesn't mean you get to kill someone because you're pissed, even (or perhaps especially) when you're very justifiably pissed. You should follow the procedure you carefully thought out before you ended up in the heat of the moment.
If you do follow the procedure and you get to the kill-the-suspect box on the flowchart, you should just do it, then go home and try sleep soundly, knowing you did a difficult job as well anyone could be expected to do it. But if you don't follow the procedure you're guilty of manslaughter, albeit possibly with extenuating circumstances.
How you feel about doing it doesn't come into the decision one way or another, because people in highly charged emotional situations are lousy judges of what should be done. Micah Johnson was pissed, possibly justifiably, over the shooting of Philando Castile, so it seemed perfectly reasonable to him to go out and kill five guys who had absolutely nothing to do with it.
That's what we're up against: reptilian brain thinking armed with advanced ape technology. So the rule has to be that the reptilian brain doesn't get to decide what to do. Even when it feels like the right thing; what your primitive brain wants always feels like the right thing.
If the Dallas cops did what their training and policy says they should do, but simply did it creatively, I commend them. If they cut corners, then it's a disciplinary, possibly a criminal matter. In our society everyone is supposed to restrain themselves and act lawfully. Even the cops.
I have no use for one, but something about the thing makes me want to throw a conductive blanket over it to muffle its RF output, then throw the helpless thing in the back of a pickup truck and whisk it away.
The value proposition is as simple as can be, in fact you can quantify it: it's fifty bucks in your pocket.
I took this deal on the Kindle Paperwhite, and I have to say it works for me. Whether this is a good deal for you on a phone depends on how attached you are to your particular favorite lock screen. I expect many people aren't.
Well, I thought the door thing was overkill; as an engineer it struck me as a "neat" demo feature but a real potential PITA, and it turns out I was right.
Well, it really boils down to this: vendor lock-in is a bitch.
It'd be nice if, when you choose to hitch your future to a vendor, that vendor responded by treating you with respect. But do you really expect that to happen? Microsoft is kicking users' asses onto the update treadmill because (a) it benefits them, and (b) their customers can't do anything about it. That's the Microsoft way, because it knows that its users outrage is impotent. There is nothing they can do to resist; short of living with software that no longer gets security updates or abandoning all their current investment in software and training.
So when Microsoft decided to force people to update, it did like it always does, especially when it's time to "refresh" a user interface, because there's no negative consequences other than a few hard words.
When Canonical tried that with Unity I simply switched from Ubuntu to Xubuntu, and then decided I preferred Xubuntu with Mate so I could have gone with Mint. Or if I was sufficiently upset about systemd I could install Devuan. It's all feasible because there's competition for people who want a Debian-based distro.
Ultimately the Three Laws were a literary device. Asimov was tired of stories where robots run amok, so he made up rules that would, on the face of it, make robots running amok seem impossible. He then used these rules to make superior robots-run-amok stories.
What makes those stories interesting is that they're all about how our simplistic reasoning leads us to dismiss real possibilities too quickly. Most people simply assume things work they way they were designed to work, but smart people realize that purposes can be gamed as long as the letter of the rules aren't broken. It is true that Asimov introduced a 0th Law, but the other laws remain in effect; robots in his stories are conflicted. In Jeff Vintar's screenplay the 0th law simply overrides the other laws; the lower priority rules are in effect nullified, which doesn't happen in Asimov's stories. The screenplay was a bog-standard robots run amok story with a little Asimovian window dressing thrown in, nowhere as good as anything Asimov did. Because Jeff Vintar isn't anywhere near as smart as Isaac Asimov.
But then again, neither am I, and probably not you either.
I very much doubt Asimov thought that people would ever build something like the Three Laws into technology in such a fundamental way; that was just a literary device that enabled him to display his astounding cleverness. I don't think it'll ever happen either, for the simple reason that killing people will be a driving for in the adoption of autonomous robot technology.
Swagger is nice but it is a workaround for what is really a mess: REST. HTTP was not intended to be used an an application level API, nor were XML or JSON. These are all bastard approaches.
This is (a) a matter of opinion and (b) completely irrelevant to the bug in question, which is a problem with input sanitation which is a perennial source of security bugs recognized as far back as 1974 in the first edition of Elements of Programming Style.
Now as to the bastard-y of HTML as an API -- having actually read RFC 2616 myself and implemented some of it in raw TCP sockets for some very early mobile to server data connections, I beg to differ. REST is precisely what HTTP was designed to do. People who didn't read the RFCs simply went with what seemed simplest to them, which by in large was using GET and PUT interchangeably since they seemed to be just two ways of doing the same thing. That was very common practice in 2000 when Roy Fielding wrote his famous doctoral dissertation, the arguably most significant contribution of which is simply pointing out what had been the intended semantics of HTTP all along.
Having tried my hand at SOAP and XML-RPC, I can also say why REST over JSON has been so successful: they make the programmer's job easier, which is what architecture is supposed to do.
"Architecture" has almost become a synonym for making things awkward and unnecessarily complicated, but what good architecture does is separate concerns so you don't have to deal with overwhelming amounts of detail at once. Of course good architecture has never stopped anyone from bolluxing themselves up and handing a steaming pile of logic turds over to someone else.
Amtrak's Acela service uses an overhead caternary cable system running from Boston to DC.
The reason it's not used elsewhere is that in most places intercity train traffic doesn't have its own tracks; they use spare capacity on freight tracks. You need 20 feet track clearance for a double-stacked container train, and high speed rail power lines are typically about 5m above the track-- about a meter shy of that. In some places in the Northeast corridor there's just barely enough room to squeeze a double stack freight car beneath, but you'd need another meter of clearance for safety. That pretty much means that existing electric passenger rail systems aren't compatible with double-stack freight.
As for the freight locomotives themselves, in the distant future we may see them electrified but for the foreseeable future it doesn't make economic sense. Big diesel engines are reasonably efficient; freight rail companies can pass their fuel costs on to customers; and the investment required to electrify track is enormous. Put those together and there simply is no economic case for electrifying freight. Without electrified freight, most of the long haul tracks won't support electrified passenger service.
Except you haven't really answered the substance of the question; only the form. Yes, you're technically correct, but the real problem is this: who do the people negotiating these agreements work for? Whose interests are they protecting?
So the substance of "why" here is not the formality of what an organization established by an international agreement is; it's why do the people behind those agreements get to decide? And by in large the answer is this: it's very profitable to be the person making the decisions, easily profitable enough to pay for the armies of lawyers, financial analysts and lobbyists it takes to capture control of the process.
Voters rightfully want to control their country's own destiny without having to cater to some international rule-making body a thousand miles away.
Understandable that you don't want to have to kow-tow to some bloodless bureaucrats, but the first rule or radical change ought to be to consider what's going to replace what you're getting rid of.
Scotland's balance of payments is highly dependent upon oil prices, which are currently low. But when Scottish independence was on the table, there was talk of Scotland's financial sector relocating to London. But in a situation where Scotland was part of the EU but the rest of the UK was not, the shoe would be on the other foot. Many American companies maintain a presence in the UK to have a foothold in the EU; in a post-Brexit/post Scottish independence world the place to be would be Scotland, and the economic impact of that would be scaled by the relatively low population of Scotland - about 5.3 million. That's fewer people than live in Greater London (8.5 million).
Well, to be fair there's a huge gap between seeing there's a problem and understanding the nature of that problem.
The problem is to understand problems you need quite a bit of education -- but to see that there's problems in the first place you need to be free from indoctrination. But indoctrination is one of the main reasons our society educates people: to protect itself from dangerous ideas.
Well, with a politician as un-charismatic as Clinton, it doesn't take much to generate a scandal; if you were going to salt the documents then all it would take is light hand.
That said, having looked at them myself I see no actual revelations. The strategy documents you could easily reverse engineer from the commonplace lines of attack the Republicans have been using and the public responses. The donor list contains no revelations, either.
So the document corpus doesn't appear to have been salted. It's just an occasion to rehash the same points which can be argued from what was already public record.
Well, not many because the vast majority of those people are flying toy quadcopters that weigh about 1-2 kg. Picture drones that are near the top of the spec range listed above -- 55 pounds traveling at 100 mph and 400 feet of altitude. There aren't many people flying drones like those -- yet. But if there were millions of them drone fatalities would be a commonplace event.
Clearly there should be unlicensed (but still regulated for things like privacy) drones at the low end of the mass/energy scale, and then some kind of graduated licensing scheme that kicks in when you get to scales that pose a serious risk of injury or property damage.
What's wrong with that is blurring the line between what the car may be able to do under certain conditions and what users can count on the car to be able to do. In other words in this case the problem isn't the car, but the way the car is being promoted. It's marketing abuse of the safety margins the engineers put into the thing.
As an engineer you could feel really proud that the idiot in question did something stupid with the car you designed and the car didn't let him down. That's because it's a very good car. But when management takes that incident and starts claiming that your very good car can function as a boat, that turns your very good car into a very bad, and probably dangerous boat. And because users are encouraged to have the mindset that the car can do more than it's supposed to, sooner or later someone is going to be let down by that very bad "boat" -- possibly let down with extreme prejudice.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if Google lost m kids' baby pictures you could say the same thing. The monetary and cultural value of those pictures is zero, but they're still important to me.
Asking whether journalism is about facts or truth is like asking whether rocket science is about physics or design. The answer is, "yes."
You can't judge opinions of the truth until you've got your facts right AND you have a wide enough selections of facts to know you aren't dealing with cherry-picked data. It's not enough to merely check the facts, you have to put the effort into assembling a comprehensive, cross-cutting selection of them.
In the absence of facts, anyone's opinion is as good as anyone else's. And certain peoples' opinions are considerably more influential, so the new, relatively fact-poor state of public dialog serves their interests nicely.
No, politicians sometimes lie, if (a) deception in the matter in question would be in their self-interest and (b) they can get away with it. Since "news" sources no longer can "afford fact checking" (i.e., they can't afford to actually do journalism), we can take (b) for granted.
Citation needed on this one.
Until the 1990s, nearly all US states had highly restrictive concealed-carry permit issuance [citation]. The legislative roadblocks to collecting research data on gun ownership and use hobbles any response to a demand for more direct citations, but the combined number of guns manufactured and imported into the US has risen from 3.5 million (net of exports) to about 16 million in 2013 (4.5x); the same figure for handguns has gone from 1.5 million to 8.6 million (5.7x) [citation]. Compare this to the US population growth of 240.1 to 316.5 (1.3x) and it's clear that (a) guns are a lot more popular and (b) handguns relatively even more popular than long guns.
And since over the same time advocacy of concealed and open carry has successfully liberalized most states' laws regarding carrying handguns, I'd say that the burden of proof here is on you if you believe cops are no more likely to encounter an armed person during a traffic stop than they were thirty years ago.
Second, there is the sorry state of the relationship between police and minorities. This itself is nothing new, but the focus of minority anger on police is new.
With all due respect... a/s/l? If you're old enough to remember the early 90's and the LA Riots, you'll realize that "minority anger on police" is very much not new.
Note the newly bolded bit above. I didn't say that minority of resentment of cops didn't exist. I'm saying it's an area of greater focus for activists.
In an era of social media, the poisoned atmosphere created by clumsily intrusive police tactics spreads far beyond the places that employ them.
Actually, I think this is the root of the problem -- added and abetted by sensationalist media and our generally increasing cultural propensity for cocooning with like-minded individuals.
I think it's simplistic to assign blame to any single "root", unless it is the very concept of race itself. But if it were not for race, we'd dream up some other basis for having trouble getting along. More fundamental is that the minimally adequate standard of professionalism for police is very high; if police have even a fraction of the share of incompetents and sociopaths (about 5% in the general population) the impact of that would be staggering. Oh, and of course there's the proliferation of cell phone cameras.
Is there a specific reason this interaction deserved to be highlighted above others (in a neutral sense)?
Whenever someone is killed by an agent of the state without recourse to due process of law, I'd say that goes to the front of the queue for attention, whether the killing was justifiable, a failure of training, or outright murder. The answer isn't for people to not talk about it. People do jump to conclusions, and they do it both ways -- e.g. that the dead person deserved it, or that the cop executed.
No. Replacing human police officers with RoboCop will not help the situation, and will not help mend American culture going forward.
Sometimes I want to take all the app-focused millennials in Silicon Valley, sit them down, and force them to watch a bunch of back-to-back Dystopian science fiction films from the 70s and 80s.
I was born in January 1961, so I'm hardly a millennial. But if fear of personal injury is a factor in police shootings of innocent citizens, then why not consider employing the assistance of Officer Drone?
While I support this philosophy when confronted with a new development, we're not talking about a new development here. Officers have been approaching motor vehicles in traffic stops for about a hundred years now. It's always had an element of danger for the cop, which of course also means it has an element of danger for the driver being stopped as well.
We have to start by asking, what elements in the problem we are addressing are new?
I think there are two. The first is that people in the car are much, much more likely to be armed than they were a generation ago. Depending on how you look at things this may or may not be a problem per se; many people of course are now carrying legally. But legal or not, the chances that someone in the car is armed raises the stakes for cops in traffic stops.
Second, there is the sorry state of the relationship between police and minorities. This itself is nothing new, but the focus of minority anger on police is new. I think this has its genesis in new policing tactics like broken windows stop-and-frisk, which if you think about them are an experiment in intrusive government behavior control, albeit with good intentions. Unfortunately this puts police in an adversarial position with the public, and violates Peelian Principle numbers 2-7 in order to promote principle #1. In an era of social media, the poisoned atmosphere created by clumsily intrusive police tactics spreads far beyond the places that employ them.
I think technology may help with the first problem: approaching a car in which the occupants may very possibly be armed and either hostile or intoxicated. An app, sure, maybe even a robot.
As for the poisoned atmosphere there's a lot of hard, boring, not very exciting work to be done to fix that. But ultimately you have a choice: you can either change the police, or you can change all of society. Probably we should do both; but reforming the police is in the short term more feasible.
String theory, multiple universes, complexity, quantum teleportation... these are to Physics what Division I football is to college, which is to say, it sells tickets and opens purse strings.
No, you're thinking of longstanding military rivalries with technologically advanced and bittery ideologically hostile states.
The point about details is a good one. We won't know if the killing of Micah Johnson was justified until we know the details. He undoubtedly deserved it but that's irrelevant. Police bring people to justice; or if they have to they kill people who pose an imminent threat to others. But in no circumstance should they ever mete out justice.
Killing a suspect has to be on the decision tree somewhere -- e.g. when an armed person has hostages and a police sniper has a clear shot. However, that doesn't mean you get to kill someone because you're pissed, even (or perhaps especially) when you're very justifiably pissed. You should follow the procedure you carefully thought out before you ended up in the heat of the moment.
If you do follow the procedure and you get to the kill-the-suspect box on the flowchart, you should just do it, then go home and try sleep soundly, knowing you did a difficult job as well anyone could be expected to do it. But if you don't follow the procedure you're guilty of manslaughter, albeit possibly with extenuating circumstances.
How you feel about doing it doesn't come into the decision one way or another, because people in highly charged emotional situations are lousy judges of what should be done. Micah Johnson was pissed, possibly justifiably, over the shooting of Philando Castile, so it seemed perfectly reasonable to him to go out and kill five guys who had absolutely nothing to do with it.
That's what we're up against: reptilian brain thinking armed with advanced ape technology. So the rule has to be that the reptilian brain doesn't get to decide what to do. Even when it feels like the right thing; what your primitive brain wants always feels like the right thing.
If the Dallas cops did what their training and policy says they should do, but simply did it creatively, I commend them. If they cut corners, then it's a disciplinary, possibly a criminal matter. In our society everyone is supposed to restrain themselves and act lawfully. Even the cops.
... Oh, wait. They're talking about the time the trip will take after the project is completed.
I have no use for one, but something about the thing makes me want to throw a conductive blanket over it to muffle its RF output, then throw the helpless thing in the back of a pickup truck and whisk it away.
Don't feel bad. I used Debian 0.9 when that was a thing. I dowloaded it over a 2400 baud modem onto a stack of floppies, haha!
No, seriously, I actually did that. I also got X to work on a Hercules Graphics Card, and if you even know what that is, you're old.
The value proposition is as simple as can be, in fact you can quantify it: it's fifty bucks in your pocket.
I took this deal on the Kindle Paperwhite, and I have to say it works for me. Whether this is a good deal for you on a phone depends on how attached you are to your particular favorite lock screen. I expect many people aren't.
Well, I thought the door thing was overkill; as an engineer it struck me as a "neat" demo feature but a real potential PITA, and it turns out I was right.
Well, it really boils down to this: vendor lock-in is a bitch.
It'd be nice if, when you choose to hitch your future to a vendor, that vendor responded by treating you with respect. But do you really expect that to happen? Microsoft is kicking users' asses onto the update treadmill because (a) it benefits them, and (b) their customers can't do anything about it. That's the Microsoft way, because it knows that its users outrage is impotent. There is nothing they can do to resist; short of living with software that no longer gets security updates or abandoning all their current investment in software and training.
So when Microsoft decided to force people to update, it did like it always does, especially when it's time to "refresh" a user interface, because there's no negative consequences other than a few hard words.
When Canonical tried that with Unity I simply switched from Ubuntu to Xubuntu, and then decided I preferred Xubuntu with Mate so I could have gone with Mint. Or if I was sufficiently upset about systemd I could install Devuan. It's all feasible because there's competition for people who want a Debian-based distro.
Ultimately the Three Laws were a literary device. Asimov was tired of stories where robots run amok, so he made up rules that would, on the face of it, make robots running amok seem impossible. He then used these rules to make superior robots-run-amok stories.
What makes those stories interesting is that they're all about how our simplistic reasoning leads us to dismiss real possibilities too quickly. Most people simply assume things work they way they were designed to work, but smart people realize that purposes can be gamed as long as the letter of the rules aren't broken. It is true that Asimov introduced a 0th Law, but the other laws remain in effect; robots in his stories are conflicted. In Jeff Vintar's screenplay the 0th law simply overrides the other laws; the lower priority rules are in effect nullified, which doesn't happen in Asimov's stories. The screenplay was a bog-standard robots run amok story with a little Asimovian window dressing thrown in, nowhere as good as anything Asimov did. Because Jeff Vintar isn't anywhere near as smart as Isaac Asimov.
But then again, neither am I, and probably not you either.
I very much doubt Asimov thought that people would ever build something like the Three Laws into technology in such a fundamental way; that was just a literary device that enabled him to display his astounding cleverness. I don't think it'll ever happen either, for the simple reason that killing people will be a driving for in the adoption of autonomous robot technology.
Swagger is nice but it is a workaround for what is really a mess: REST. HTTP was not intended to be used an an application level API, nor were XML or JSON. These are all bastard approaches.
This is (a) a matter of opinion and (b) completely irrelevant to the bug in question, which is a problem with input sanitation which is a perennial source of security bugs recognized as far back as 1974 in the first edition of Elements of Programming Style.
Now as to the bastard-y of HTML as an API -- having actually read RFC 2616 myself and implemented some of it in raw TCP sockets for some very early mobile to server data connections, I beg to differ. REST is precisely what HTTP was designed to do. People who didn't read the RFCs simply went with what seemed simplest to them, which by in large was using GET and PUT interchangeably since they seemed to be just two ways of doing the same thing. That was very common practice in 2000 when Roy Fielding wrote his famous doctoral dissertation, the arguably most significant contribution of which is simply pointing out what had been the intended semantics of HTTP all along.
Having tried my hand at SOAP and XML-RPC, I can also say why REST over JSON has been so successful: they make the programmer's job easier, which is what architecture is supposed to do.
"Architecture" has almost become a synonym for making things awkward and unnecessarily complicated, but what good architecture does is separate concerns so you don't have to deal with overwhelming amounts of detail at once. Of course good architecture has never stopped anyone from bolluxing themselves up and handing a steaming pile of logic turds over to someone else.
Amtrak's Acela service uses an overhead caternary cable system running from Boston to DC.
The reason it's not used elsewhere is that in most places intercity train traffic doesn't have its own tracks; they use spare capacity on freight tracks. You need 20 feet track clearance for a double-stacked container train, and high speed rail power lines are typically about 5m above the track-- about a meter shy of that. In some places in the Northeast corridor there's just barely enough room to squeeze a double stack freight car beneath, but you'd need another meter of clearance for safety. That pretty much means that existing electric passenger rail systems aren't compatible with double-stack freight.
As for the freight locomotives themselves, in the distant future we may see them electrified but for the foreseeable future it doesn't make economic sense. Big diesel engines are reasonably efficient; freight rail companies can pass their fuel costs on to customers; and the investment required to electrify track is enormous. Put those together and there simply is no economic case for electrifying freight. Without electrified freight, most of the long haul tracks won't support electrified passenger service.
Except you haven't really answered the substance of the question; only the form. Yes, you're technically correct, but the real problem is this: who do the people negotiating these agreements work for? Whose interests are they protecting?
So the substance of "why" here is not the formality of what an organization established by an international agreement is; it's why do the people behind those agreements get to decide? And by in large the answer is this: it's very profitable to be the person making the decisions, easily profitable enough to pay for the armies of lawyers, financial analysts and lobbyists it takes to capture control of the process.
Voters rightfully want to control their country's own destiny without having to cater to some international rule-making body a thousand miles away.
Understandable that you don't want to have to kow-tow to some bloodless bureaucrats, but the first rule or radical change ought to be to consider what's going to replace what you're getting rid of.
Well, there's some interesting twists here.
Scotland's balance of payments is highly dependent upon oil prices, which are currently low. But when Scottish independence was on the table, there was talk of Scotland's financial sector relocating to London. But in a situation where Scotland was part of the EU but the rest of the UK was not, the shoe would be on the other foot. Many American companies maintain a presence in the UK to have a foothold in the EU; in a post-Brexit/post Scottish independence world the place to be would be Scotland, and the economic impact of that would be scaled by the relatively low population of Scotland - about 5.3 million. That's fewer people than live in Greater London (8.5 million).
Well, to be fair there's a huge gap between seeing there's a problem and understanding the nature of that problem.
The problem is to understand problems you need quite a bit of education -- but to see that there's problems in the first place you need to be free from indoctrination. But indoctrination is one of the main reasons our society educates people: to protect itself from dangerous ideas.
The password misuse isn't by medical staff. It's IT that is abusing standard password policies that aren't designed for man-rated procedures.
Well, with a politician as un-charismatic as Clinton, it doesn't take much to generate a scandal; if you were going to salt the documents then all it would take is light hand.
That said, having looked at them myself I see no actual revelations. The strategy documents you could easily reverse engineer from the commonplace lines of attack the Republicans have been using and the public responses. The donor list contains no revelations, either.
So the document corpus doesn't appear to have been salted. It's just an occasion to rehash the same points which can be argued from what was already public record.
Well, not many because the vast majority of those people are flying toy quadcopters that weigh about 1-2 kg. Picture drones that are near the top of the spec range listed above -- 55 pounds traveling at 100 mph and 400 feet of altitude. There aren't many people flying drones like those -- yet. But if there were millions of them drone fatalities would be a commonplace event.
Clearly there should be unlicensed (but still regulated for things like privacy) drones at the low end of the mass/energy scale, and then some kind of graduated licensing scheme that kicks in when you get to scales that pose a serious risk of injury or property damage.
What's wrong with that is blurring the line between what the car may be able to do under certain conditions and what users can count on the car to be able to do. In other words in this case the problem isn't the car, but the way the car is being promoted. It's marketing abuse of the safety margins the engineers put into the thing.
As an engineer you could feel really proud that the idiot in question did something stupid with the car you designed and the car didn't let him down. That's because it's a very good car. But when management takes that incident and starts claiming that your very good car can function as a boat, that turns your very good car into a very bad, and probably dangerous boat. And because users are encouraged to have the mindset that the car can do more than it's supposed to, sooner or later someone is going to be let down by that very bad "boat" -- possibly let down with extreme prejudice.
Bernie Sanders.