What's amazing to me is how people - regardless of their political affiliation - always know exactly what happened in any situation from a brief news account.
How many of us are working on machines with mind-bogglingly complex microarchitectures that provide the illusion of a modestly-upgraded 8086 CPU to the software running on them?
If there's one constant in human nature, it's that people will perform feats of astonishing ingenuity and resourcefulness in order to avoid change.
While what you say about this not being an election is true, this actually raises an interesting question: if the number of comments support a certain position has no effect on the outcome, why was this bot campaign conducted?
There are broadly speaking two possible answers. The first is that the people who orchestrated the campaign do not understand how these regulatory decisions will be made. The second possibility is that they *do* understand, but believe that the appearance of widespread public support will either influence those decisions, or provide some kind of useful pretext for making unpopular decisions.
The corpus callosum isn't the only connection between the left and right half of the brain.
The architecture of the human brain is a bit like an onion; at the core is the basal ganlia -- also popularly known as the "reptilian brain". Outside/above that is the limbic system, called the "paleomammalian complex" in the triune brain theory. Above that is the neocortex, the part we tend to indentify ourselves with because it does all the cool stuff that more primitive organisms can't, like language.
The corpus callosum sits roughly in the middle of the limbic system -- the middle of the middle if you will. Just above it is the cingulate gyrus, responsible for processing emotions, learning, linking behavior to goals. The cingulate gyrus is the anatomicaly lowest part of the brain that doesn't have its own connections between hemispheres. I find that fascinating and suggestive. Immediately below the corpus callosum is the septum pellucidum, which is a thin, midline structure. Every part of the brain below the septum pellucidum is richly connected across sides.
This situation is like a company run by partners. The partners don't talk to each other, but they share subordinates, including a secretary who keeps them up to date on what each other is doing. The secretary quits, and the company is at least temporarily less coordinated, but the other subordinates still talk to each other and over time may take up some of the communication burden.
One of the big difference in brain science today from when I studied it thirty years ago is that we know the brain is much more plastic than we ever imagined. There have been well-documented cases of people with brain injuries doing things they taught me was impossible back then, like people who lost an entire brain hemisphere regaining some motor control on the affected side. The only way this would be physically possible is for the remaining hemisphere to radically remodel itself.
Anyhow cross visual field object awareness is a good candidate for function restoration, because the nerves from the eyes enter the brain well below the level of the corpus callosum; there are no direct connections from the optic nerves to the cortex. How that awareness comes about/is restored is an open question. It could be that the cortexes develop other way of communicating, or it could be that the hemisphere you're talking to develops awareness of stuff that would normally be processed by the other side.
Well, I think it's pretty certain that if you could magically make all the guns in a city disappear, the homicide and the suicide rates would go down.
But legally proscribing the sale of a thing in a narrow geographic area doesn't do much, particularly when you can go over the state line and have someone without a felony conviction make a straw purchase for you.
Well for one thing you'll find merging with high speed traffic a lot easier in the Tesla. It's practically speaking a better car in ways that you'll appreciate practically every day, unless you are going on a long, multi-day trip.
The thing is, I think the difference in day to day utility between the top of the line flagship phones and much cheaper second or third tier phones has for many years been minimal. It's all about showroom appeal. Wow, look at how big that screen is, and the saturated colors. And it's so thin, I can't wait to put a clunky case on it. Then you get it home and few months later you're avoiding using that huge screen so your battery makes it through the day. And it's big hunk of glass you're carrying around all the time; does that really offset the fact that it's a bit better for watching movies on?
Recently I think users are starting to wise up, because manufacturers are starting to pay more attention to battery life, and that's definitely worth paying a premium for. For some of us (namely us fly fisherman) IP67 is a big deal. And more capable cameras are actually useful to a lot of people. But gee-whiz showroom appeal is still a big deal. Manufacturers could make a much better phone for less money if that weren't a factor.
And will those apps simulate the sun as well so you can bring it down to the horizon?
Let's be clear in any case what problem we're solving. A sextant is an essential tool (along with a chronometer) in determining latitude and longitude -- position on the Earth. This is where Mercator projection maps are handy: it helps you choose a heading that will get you somewhere you can't see.
What's going on here is that ships are running into each other in crowded sea lanes. So somehow the instruments available to the people piloting these ships plus their own eyes aren't enough to prevent a collisions that old-school pilots would have avoided. And I'm fairly sure this is not because it's not physically possible to process the information. It may be that reliance on technology to do most of the hard work has reduced the pilot's habitual engagement and awareness.
There is another solution, which is to have the ships completely robotically piloted. You'd still train pilots to handle ships manually for unusual situation, but you wouldn't count on having perfect human attention directing the ship 7x24.
The ranking you have given Chicago is based on its membership in an arbitrary set of cities chosen for a wikipedia table. If you include *all* municipalities with a population of at least 25,000 (e.g. large enough that a small spate of murders doesn't have a big statistical effect) then Chicago does *not* crack the top 30.
Here are the top ten using the 25,000 cutoff:
10 Camden, NJ: 42/100,000 9 New Orleans, LA 42/100,000 8 Detroit, MI: 44/100,000 7 Flint, MI : 47/100,000 6 Petersburg, VA: 49/100,000 5 Baltimore, MD: 55/100,000 4 St. Louis, MO: 60/100,000 3 Gary, IN: 65/100,000 2 Chester, PA: 67/100,000 1 East St. Louis, IL: 71/100,000
Chicago, at 18 murders / 100,000 population isn't even close. However, while Chester PA is an extremely dangerous place to live, you can't maintain a media narrative of a murder epidemic with a city of only 34,000 people.
What sets Chicago aside from all the cities on this top ten list is that is larger; not only larger, but massively larger, 2.72 million. If you choose a large enough population it will generate a regular stream of murders, relatively consistently from year to year. It's like comparing the absolute number of murders in California to those in Louisiana; Louisiana is much, much more dangerous, but it has about 10% of the population. Some years will be more murder-y than others there, whereas California is statistically large enough it will produce over 2000 murders/year like clockwork.
Now Chicago has the highest murder rate among the largest cities in the US, but not by much:
New York 8.5 million 3/100,000 Los Angeles 3.97 million 7/100,000 Chicago pop 2.72 million 15/100,000 Houston pop 2.29 million, 13/100,000 Phoenix pop 1.56 million, 7/100,000
Now the interesting thing here is that the murder rate and absolute number of murders in Houston are very, very close to that of Chicago, but you never hear about the murder epidemic in Houston. It's because this is a narrative being pushed by Fox News, the propaganda arm of the Republican Party, and Houston is in a red state.
Well, your argument about complexity is essentially circular. "Complexity" refers to the resources needed to produce a thing (program length, storage space, time etc.).
You can prove something is inherently simple by example, but you can't prove it is inherently complex that way. Avoiding that particular pitfall is responsible for a lot of verbal yoga in computer science. Solutions have complexity; problems only have best known solutions.
In 3001, Arthur C. Clarke postulated a future in which nobody really understood how anything works.
This is entirely plausible to me given my experience growing up along with computers. I started learning about computers in the 1970s by messing around with primitive ICs; I learned to do stuff like build adders out of flip-flops. And I learned about each new technology when it came in; I programmed in assembly language on some of the earliest popular 8 bit microprocessors, but also in FORTRAN and LISP on early time sharing systems like Multics an Unix v7. I set up very early networks (back in the coax ethernet days) and configured some of the earliest network firewalls. I've been using Linux since Debian 0.93 -- the release that introduced dpkg. I was using HTML before cgi-bin was introduced, and have followed developments in web application and security ever since.
I have closely followed computers, networks, software and systems for forty years, giving me an abstraction-down-to-nut-and-bolts understanding of computers that no millennial will ever have. And you know what I say?
Big deal. It's almost never a practical advantage. There are millennials who have developed an understanding of the emergent behavior of high level systems that I'll probably never match.
Trying to have it both ways, are you? It's the liberals who are racist; you're just someone who sanctimoniously believes that "the blacks" deserve to die because they're doing it to themselves.
Well, if you are a white person you are much more likely to be killed by white people. "Black on black" crime is a product of the same factors that drive white on white crime: de facto segregation. And while it's true black on black crime is a little more common than white on white crime, the effect disappears if you control by economic class.
I went to school with a lot of guys from South Boston. Southie has become a kind of a movie cliche; most of the people there are perfectly normal. The kernel of truth in the movie myth, though, is that there are a bunch of guys (white guys) who are disturbingly violent. When I was a kid I used to walk by an auto shop on my way to the MDC pool. Years later it came out the Irish Mob used to chop people up and dissolve them in acid there.
But nobody says, "Those white people are animals.". They understand the "thugs" are outliers. In fact, those thugs are often held up as folk heroes, which is really no different than what happens on the black side of the house.
Yes, but Chicago is an enormous city; if you add up the homicides over the course of the year and divide by population, it has nowhere near the top murder rate in the country. In fact it doesn't even crack the top 30.
This is the problem with people's use of statistics: they still react emotionally to the most provocative arrangement of the facts.
Daisywheel with a fresh wheel is your best bet for covering your tracks. Over time identifiable damage occurs to the plastic coating of the daisywheel, so changing your daisy wheel every couple of weeks will effectively cover your tracks.
Typeballs aren't a panacea. While they more uniformly manufactured than type elements in a conventional typewriter, damage through mishandling can occur. Swapping typeballs helps, but over time Selectric type machines develop patterns of misalignments that several correlated sets of characters. The motion of the typeball also creates characteristic irregularities in the embossing of characters into the page. Frequent servicing of your machine will make it harder to trace any document to a specific machine, but a forensic examination of a sample of sheets known to have been typed on your machine will reveal you've been monkeying with it.
Now here's another possibility -- an old serial port laser printer hooked up to a dumb terminal. In most cases the imaging drum was part of the toner cartridge and regularly replaced. Some of those old serial laser printers had postscript interpreters, so you could even "edit" your document after a fashion.
Especially if you count suicides. But when we're talking mass shootings, long guns with very large magazines are more common, and when we're talking about mass sniping, handguns aren't a factor at all.
There is really only one radical (and bound to be unpopular) thing you could do to reduce the harm created by mass shootings: ban detachable magazines. It would take a long time to have any measurable effect given the number of guns that use them currently in circulation, but in any case we're talking about rare events, relative to population size.
You are absolutely correct, so I'll make a stab at an indelible fact....
The guy was crazy.
There, I said it. Crazy dude gonna do crazy dude stuff. T
It is probably worth remembering that one of the first (and only) things this Congress did was to overturn Obama-era rules that restricted gun sales to people with certain severe mental illnesses. Now granted those rules wouldn't have caught this guy, because they only applied to people with very severe and obvious delusions. Statistically your likelihood of running into one of these people toting a gun is practically nil, but eventually someone is going to.
Congress did this in the same act that repealed the rule that required coal mines to monitor water quality in adjacent streams.
We just have to resign ourselves to the fact that this is the trade-off we've chosen. The universe doesn't owe us solutions that make us completely happy. The best you usually get is some kind of utilitarian trade-off.
Events like this are the price of your enjoyment of your being able to enjoy high-power semi-automatic weapons with large, interchangeable magazines. That doesn't make what happened here you fault in any way; given that what happened here is possible you might as well go ahead and enjoy yourself. But where one thing is possible the other is also.
So here's the trade-off: in return for your being able to indulge responsibly in what is a perfectly innocent hobby, someone you don't know is going to die or be injured in a horrific incident like this.
And don't give me any good-guy-with-a-gun BS; it's not that it never happens, but it only happens often enough to be worth factoring into policy in fantasies. Both sides of the gun control debate are statistically irrational; your chance of being murdered today is near a historic low. And buying a gun with a 30 round magazine because you might "need" is is like buying the FHM "100 Sexiest Women Alive" issue because you might want to have sex with one of them.
So it really boils down to philosophy, not security. What we are willing to give up (or force other people to give up) in order to prevent a few rare and horrible events?
Best of all, these eagles are listed as endangered and are protected by Australian law. In fact IIRC, the sections of the law that pertain to endangered species impose a "strict liability" standard on actions that injure a member of that species. That means you don't even have to intend to inure one of these eagles. Just being careless can get you serious prison time.
So pretty much those drone operators have to suck it up.
While I agree with your characterization of the for-profit prison system and it's malignant relationship with politics, I think it's jumping to conclusion that it is "the" problem in this situation.
For example the drone-assisted escape alluded to in the summary took place at a state-owned and state-operated prison in South Carolina.
I suspect a deeper problem with our prisons, which is that they're essential public institutions that aren't very glamorous or attractive (to normal people) as a career path. Do you even know the career path for becoming a prison warden? You start out as a prison guard, which in South Carolina (just to stick with that example) means starting out at $12 / hour, for a job that is difficult, stressful, and unpleasant. After many years of working your way up through the ranks, you may be one of the very few who make it to the lofty position of warden. The warden of the institution where the drone escape was staged makes a princely 50,000 / year.
Which is not to pick on the warden of Lieber Correctional Institution; for all I know he is a consummate professional doing a very hard job for not much money. But if you step back and look at the entire prison system, the idea that you could improve it by squeezing more economic efficiencies out of it seems pretty far-fetched.
On the other hand, it wouldn't be hard to provide some kind of whitelist procedure; or better yet a way of slotting email verified from certain domains into certain algorithmic tracks.
Slashdot Mirror
What's amazing to me is how people - regardless of their political affiliation - always know exactly what happened in any situation from a brief news account.
How many of us are working on machines with mind-bogglingly complex microarchitectures that provide the illusion of a modestly-upgraded 8086 CPU to the software running on them?
If there's one constant in human nature, it's that people will perform feats of astonishing ingenuity and resourcefulness in order to avoid change.
While what you say about this not being an election is true, this actually raises an interesting question: if the number of comments support a certain position has no effect on the outcome, why was this bot campaign conducted?
There are broadly speaking two possible answers. The first is that the people who orchestrated the campaign do not understand how these regulatory decisions will be made. The second possibility is that they *do* understand, but believe that the appearance of widespread public support will either influence those decisions, or provide some kind of useful pretext for making unpopular decisions.
The corpus callosum isn't the only connection between the left and right half of the brain.
The architecture of the human brain is a bit like an onion; at the core is the basal ganlia -- also popularly known as the "reptilian brain". Outside/above that is the limbic system, called the "paleomammalian complex" in the triune brain theory. Above that is the neocortex, the part we tend to indentify ourselves with because it does all the cool stuff that more primitive organisms can't, like language.
The corpus callosum sits roughly in the middle of the limbic system -- the middle of the middle if you will. Just above it is the cingulate gyrus, responsible for processing emotions, learning, linking behavior to goals. The cingulate gyrus is the anatomicaly lowest part of the brain that doesn't have its own connections between hemispheres. I find that fascinating and suggestive. Immediately below the corpus callosum is the septum pellucidum, which is a thin, midline structure. Every part of the brain below the septum pellucidum is richly connected across sides.
This situation is like a company run by partners. The partners don't talk to each other, but they share subordinates, including a secretary who keeps them up to date on what each other is doing. The secretary quits, and the company is at least temporarily less coordinated, but the other subordinates still talk to each other and over time may take up some of the communication burden.
One of the big difference in brain science today from when I studied it thirty years ago is that we know the brain is much more plastic than we ever imagined. There have been well-documented cases of people with brain injuries doing things they taught me was impossible back then, like people who lost an entire brain hemisphere regaining some motor control on the affected side. The only way this would be physically possible is for the remaining hemisphere to radically remodel itself.
Anyhow cross visual field object awareness is a good candidate for function restoration, because the nerves from the eyes enter the brain well below the level of the corpus callosum; there are no direct connections from the optic nerves to the cortex. How that awareness comes about/is restored is an open question. It could be that the cortexes develop other way of communicating, or it could be that the hemisphere you're talking to develops awareness of stuff that would normally be processed by the other side.
Well, I think it's pretty certain that if you could magically make all the guns in a city disappear, the homicide and the suicide rates would go down.
But legally proscribing the sale of a thing in a narrow geographic area doesn't do much, particularly when you can go over the state line and have someone without a felony conviction make a straw purchase for you.
Well for one thing you'll find merging with high speed traffic a lot easier in the Tesla. It's practically speaking a better car in ways that you'll appreciate practically every day, unless you are going on a long, multi-day trip.
The thing is, I think the difference in day to day utility between the top of the line flagship phones and much cheaper second or third tier phones has for many years been minimal. It's all about showroom appeal. Wow, look at how big that screen is, and the saturated colors. And it's so thin, I can't wait to put a clunky case on it. Then you get it home and few months later you're avoiding using that huge screen so your battery makes it through the day. And it's big hunk of glass you're carrying around all the time; does that really offset the fact that it's a bit better for watching movies on?
Recently I think users are starting to wise up, because manufacturers are starting to pay more attention to battery life, and that's definitely worth paying a premium for. For some of us (namely us fly fisherman) IP67 is a big deal. And more capable cameras are actually useful to a lot of people. But gee-whiz showroom appeal is still a big deal. Manufacturers could make a much better phone for less money if that weren't a factor.
And will those apps simulate the sun as well so you can bring it down to the horizon?
Let's be clear in any case what problem we're solving. A sextant is an essential tool (along with a chronometer) in determining latitude and longitude -- position on the Earth. This is where Mercator projection maps are handy: it helps you choose a heading that will get you somewhere you can't see.
What's going on here is that ships are running into each other in crowded sea lanes. So somehow the instruments available to the people piloting these ships plus their own eyes aren't enough to prevent a collisions that old-school pilots would have avoided. And I'm fairly sure this is not because it's not physically possible to process the information. It may be that reliance on technology to do most of the hard work has reduced the pilot's habitual engagement and awareness.
There is another solution, which is to have the ships completely robotically piloted. You'd still train pilots to handle ships manually for unusual situation, but you wouldn't count on having perfect human attention directing the ship 7x24.
The ranking you have given Chicago is based on its membership in an arbitrary set of cities chosen for a wikipedia table. If you include *all* municipalities with a population of at least 25,000 (e.g. large enough that a small spate of murders doesn't have a big statistical effect) then Chicago does *not* crack the top 30.
Here are the top ten using the 25,000 cutoff:
10 Camden, NJ: 42/100,000
9 New Orleans, LA 42/100,000
8 Detroit, MI: 44/100,000
7 Flint, MI : 47/100,000
6 Petersburg, VA: 49/100,000
5 Baltimore, MD: 55/100,000
4 St. Louis, MO: 60/100,000
3 Gary, IN: 65/100,000
2 Chester, PA: 67/100,000
1 East St. Louis, IL: 71/100,000
Chicago, at 18 murders / 100,000 population isn't even close. However, while Chester PA is an extremely dangerous place to live, you can't maintain a media narrative of a murder epidemic with a city of only 34,000 people.
What sets Chicago aside from all the cities on this top ten list is that is larger; not only larger, but massively larger, 2.72 million. If you choose a large enough population it will generate a regular stream of murders, relatively consistently from year to year. It's like comparing the absolute number of murders in California to those in Louisiana; Louisiana is much, much more dangerous, but it has about 10% of the population. Some years will be more murder-y than others there, whereas California is statistically large enough it will produce over 2000 murders/year like clockwork.
Now Chicago has the highest murder rate among the largest cities in the US, but not by much:
New York 8.5 million 3/100,000
Los Angeles 3.97 million 7/100,000
Chicago pop 2.72 million 15/100,000
Houston pop 2.29 million, 13/100,000
Phoenix pop 1.56 million, 7/100,000
Now the interesting thing here is that the murder rate and absolute number of murders in Houston are very, very close to that of Chicago, but you never hear about the murder epidemic in Houston. It's because this is a narrative being pushed by Fox News, the propaganda arm of the Republican Party, and Houston is in a red state.
Well, your argument about complexity is essentially circular. "Complexity" refers to the resources needed to produce a thing (program length, storage space, time etc.).
You can prove something is inherently simple by example, but you can't prove it is inherently complex that way. Avoiding that particular pitfall is responsible for a lot of verbal yoga in computer science. Solutions have complexity; problems only have best known solutions.
In 3001, Arthur C. Clarke postulated a future in which nobody really understood how anything works.
This is entirely plausible to me given my experience growing up along with computers. I started learning about computers in the 1970s by messing around with primitive ICs; I learned to do stuff like build adders out of flip-flops. And I learned about each new technology when it came in; I programmed in assembly language on some of the earliest popular 8 bit microprocessors, but also in FORTRAN and LISP on early time sharing systems like Multics an Unix v7. I set up very early networks (back in the coax ethernet days) and configured some of the earliest network firewalls. I've been using Linux since Debian 0.93 -- the release that introduced dpkg. I was using HTML before cgi-bin was introduced, and have followed developments in web application and security ever since.
I have closely followed computers, networks, software and systems for forty years, giving me an abstraction-down-to-nut-and-bolts understanding of computers that no millennial will ever have. And you know what I say?
Big deal. It's almost never a practical advantage. There are millennials who have developed an understanding of the emergent behavior of high level systems that I'll probably never match.
Hikers shmikers. Every time I use my GPS to navigate in my car and can feel my brain cells rotting away...
... from ideas about what is possible derived from observing the universe in operation.
This only works if you take this as an axiom: what is possible in our universe is impossible in any possible universe.
All I ask for is a tall ship and a satellite constellation to steer her by...
Trying to have it both ways, are you? It's the liberals who are racist; you're just someone who sanctimoniously believes that "the blacks" deserve to die because they're doing it to themselves.
Well, if you are a white person you are much more likely to be killed by white people. "Black on black" crime is a product of the same factors that drive white on white crime: de facto segregation. And while it's true black on black crime is a little more common than white on white crime, the effect disappears if you control by economic class.
I went to school with a lot of guys from South Boston. Southie has become a kind of a movie cliche; most of the people there are perfectly normal. The kernel of truth in the movie myth, though, is that there are a bunch of guys (white guys) who are disturbingly violent. When I was a kid I used to walk by an auto shop on my way to the MDC pool. Years later it came out the Irish Mob used to chop people up and dissolve them in acid there.
But nobody says, "Those white people are animals.". They understand the "thugs" are outliers. In fact, those thugs are often held up as folk heroes, which is really no different than what happens on the black side of the house.
Yes, but Chicago is an enormous city; if you add up the homicides over the course of the year and divide by population, it has nowhere near the top murder rate in the country. In fact it doesn't even crack the top 30.
This is the problem with people's use of statistics: they still react emotionally to the most provocative arrangement of the facts.
Old fart who actually remembers this crap here.
Daisywheel with a fresh wheel is your best bet for covering your tracks. Over time identifiable damage occurs to the plastic coating of the daisywheel, so changing your daisy wheel every couple of weeks will effectively cover your tracks.
Typeballs aren't a panacea. While they more uniformly manufactured than type elements in a conventional typewriter, damage through mishandling can occur. Swapping typeballs helps, but over time Selectric type machines develop patterns of misalignments that several correlated sets of characters. The motion of the typeball also creates characteristic irregularities in the embossing of characters into the page. Frequent servicing of your machine will make it harder to trace any document to a specific machine, but a forensic examination of a sample of sheets known to have been typed on your machine will reveal you've been monkeying with it.
Now here's another possibility -- an old serial port laser printer hooked up to a dumb terminal. In most cases the imaging drum was part of the toner cartridge and regularly replaced. Some of those old serial laser printers had postscript interpreters, so you could even "edit" your document after a fashion.
Especially if you count suicides. But when we're talking mass shootings, long guns with very large magazines are more common, and when we're talking about mass sniping, handguns aren't a factor at all.
There is really only one radical (and bound to be unpopular) thing you could do to reduce the harm created by mass shootings: ban detachable magazines. It would take a long time to have any measurable effect given the number of guns that use them currently in circulation, but in any case we're talking about rare events, relative to population size.
You are absolutely correct, so I'll make a stab at an indelible fact....
The guy was crazy.
There, I said it. Crazy dude gonna do crazy dude stuff. T
It is probably worth remembering that one of the first (and only) things this Congress did was to overturn Obama-era rules that restricted gun sales to people with certain severe mental illnesses. Now granted those rules wouldn't have caught this guy, because they only applied to people with very severe and obvious delusions. Statistically your likelihood of running into one of these people toting a gun is practically nil, but eventually someone is going to.
Congress did this in the same act that repealed the rule that required coal mines to monitor water quality in adjacent streams.
Oh, everyone will agree to that.
What you'll never get anyone to do is stop blaming people who look guilty to them.
We just have to resign ourselves to the fact that this is the trade-off we've chosen. The universe doesn't owe us solutions that make us completely happy. The best you usually get is some kind of utilitarian trade-off.
Events like this are the price of your enjoyment of your
being able to enjoy high-power semi-automatic weapons with large, interchangeable magazines. That doesn't make what happened here you fault in any way; given that what happened here is possible you might as well go ahead and enjoy yourself. But where one thing is possible the other is also.
So here's the trade-off: in return for your being able to indulge responsibly in what is a perfectly innocent hobby, someone you don't know is going to die or be injured in a horrific incident like this.
And don't give me any good-guy-with-a-gun BS; it's not that it never happens, but it only happens often enough to be worth factoring into policy in fantasies. Both sides of the gun control debate are statistically irrational; your chance of being murdered today is near a historic low. And buying a gun with a 30 round magazine because you might "need" is is like buying the FHM "100 Sexiest Women Alive" issue because you might want to have sex with one of them.
So it really boils down to philosophy, not security. What we are willing to give up (or force other people to give up) in order to prevent a few rare and horrible events?
Best of all, these eagles are listed as endangered and are protected by Australian law. In fact IIRC, the sections of the law that pertain to endangered species impose a "strict liability" standard on actions that injure a member of that species. That means you don't even have to intend to inure one of these eagles. Just being careless can get you serious prison time.
So pretty much those drone operators have to suck it up.
I don't see this as an either/or. It's the low value we set on that job allows that attitude to prevail.
While I agree with your characterization of the for-profit prison system and it's malignant relationship with politics, I think it's jumping to conclusion that it is "the" problem in this situation.
For example the drone-assisted escape alluded to in the summary took place at a state-owned and state-operated prison in South Carolina.
I suspect a deeper problem with our prisons, which is that they're essential public institutions that aren't very glamorous or attractive (to normal people) as a career path. Do you even know the career path for becoming a prison warden? You start out as a prison guard, which in South Carolina (just to stick with that example) means starting out at $12 / hour, for a job that is difficult, stressful, and unpleasant. After many years of working your way up through the ranks, you may be one of the very few who make it to the lofty position of warden. The warden of the institution where the drone escape was staged makes a princely 50,000 / year.
Which is not to pick on the warden of Lieber Correctional Institution; for all I know he is a consummate professional doing a very hard job for not much money. But if you step back and look at the entire prison system, the idea that you could improve it by squeezing more economic efficiencies out of it seems pretty far-fetched.
Sure. And if people start *reporting* spam coming out of formerly whitelisted domains, you must un-whitelist them.
On the other hand, it wouldn't be hard to provide some kind of whitelist procedure; or better yet a way of slotting email verified from certain domains into certain algorithmic tracks.