I see a couple of motivations for Elsevier in doing this. One is that it encourages people to pay to see entire journal articles when they're cited on Wikipedia. The other is about image and trying to look good by donating access to otherwise expensive journals. Effectively, these editors are being compensated for writing on Wikipedia, which is a form of paid editing. I don't think it's strictly prohibited, but Wikipedia must disclose this in order to remain credible. Furthermore, those editors shouldn't be editing any articles about Elsevier or their journals because it's a conflict of interest. Also, despite this partnership, citing only Elsevier journals to provide sources for a statement must be discouraged unless a more accessible source isn't available. It's very difficult for other editors to verify the information in those sources due to the cost. If Wikipedia upholds its own guidelines, I don't think this is really a problem. But the guidelines must be upheld.
I suppose it's possible that the FAA could issue a COA and allow a drone operator to fly outside of the view of an observer. I'm not aware of such a thing so far. The observer and the pilot don't necessarily have to be the same person, but my understanding is that someone has to be able to see the aircraft at all times so that see-and-avoid is possible. In my experience, operating in a COA region that allows for flight above 400 feet, it's required to issue a NOTAM indicating that such drone flights are taking place. Because of the difference in regulations for flights above 400 feet and those below, recreational pilots generally don't need NOTAMs saying that those areas must be avoided. I'm not sure that geofencing is a good idea and it might not be practical in many cases. For example, some drones are programmed to avoid going within five miles of some airports. However, it's legal to fly in those areas provided that permission has been granted by the airport. Also, there's nothing to stop a person from building a drone, using open source software, and circumventing such restrictions. I'd actually prefer some kind of certification being required to operate a drone. It need not have all the requirements of a pilot's license, but operators need to understand the rules and be able to properly see and avoid other aircraft.
First, this isn't new. Software-based no-fly zones already exist in drones, such as over the DC area. See this story from the Washington Post about this already being done. The difference is that such zones are static, not dynamic.
A NOTAM is a notice to airmen of potential hazards to aircraft. If police or firefighters need exclusive access to a portion of airspace, they need to issue a NOTAM indicating that all other aircraft should avoid that area. This is already done for military training operations, for example. Other events that might present hazards such as fireworks, hot-air balloons, and air shows issue NOTAMs so pilots know to avoid those areas. In reality, what needs to happen is that drones obey NOTAMs and any such restrictions included within, whether temporary or permanent. And the issue involving DC wouldn't have been a problem had the drones simply obeyed NOTAM 0/8326.
It's not clear to me how that information will be transmitted to drones in real-time, though. Other aircraft generally aren't programmed to specifically avoid areas under NOTAM no-fly restrictions, mostly because pilots are expected to be trained to obey them. So either there has to be a way for drones to automatically download and obey NOTAMs or their operators need to be able to receive NOTAMs and manually comply with them. The latter solution is difficult right now because anyone can operate a drone for recreational purposes under 400 feet in areas without flight restrictions. There are basically two options, and they're not mutually exclusive: 1) require some kind of certification to legally operate a drone that shows they understand the rules and can do so safely or 2) program drones to automatically comply with NOTAMs.
The article says that the whisky had lower amounts of compounds that are typically extracted from the oak. Most of what I could find online is pretty light on the details of what's different chemically, but there was definitely more done than tasting.
Government spending is highly scrutinized because 1) the taxes to pay for it takes money away from citizens and business who could spend the money in other places and 2) the federal government has incurred over 18 trillion dollars in debt. If the debt reaches a point where lenders to the US become concerned about the ability of the US to repay their money, those interest rates will rise. Not only does this make it more expensive to for the government to borrow and repay debt, but other interest rates are pegged to those rates, including the rates for private citizens and businesses to borrow money from banks. There's a lot of waste and fraud both within government and in government contracts to businesses. While it's true that there needs to be much more auditing of government contracts, that does not justify wasteful spending within the government. A dollar wasted is still a dollar wasted, whether it's within a government department or in a government contract.
As for the auditing of private business, I disagree that it should be permitted. The issue you're describing occurs as a result of a lack of competition, either through a monopoly that has arisen from acquisitions or competitors failing or a government-granted monopoly such as a utility. Competition is extremely effective at reducing prices for consumers, improving the quality of service, and eliminating waste by businesses. Deregulation of utilities is a better solution than audits. However, anti-trust laws must be strongly enforced to ensure a persistent state of competition, or else the market will move toward a monopoly that may not be in the interest of consumers.
I don't think anyone would consider the "security practices" described in the article summary to be reasonable. That's also a pretty extreme example. I'd like to think that most businesses have better security practices than this. However, security encompasses a wide variety of things including encryption, applying patches for vulnerabilities, controlling who has access to systems and data, passwords, etc... What one person considers reasonable security might not be considered reasonable by others. If you don't define what constitutes "reasonable" security practices, it's very subjective. When fines can be issued for something that's subjective, it allows for the possibility of selective enforcement and abuse. I also don't think this is necessary, either. We have laws to punish criminals who steal data. Businesses can also be punished for poor security practices though a civil suit for negligence. Why do we need the FTC when there are already ways to accomplish the intended effect?
What constitutes sufficiently strong security practices? This seems subjective unless there are clear rules published. Obviously we'd agree that the practices in the summary are truly awful, but there are plenty of data breaches that don't seem quite as egregious. Are there going to be standards for applying patches to vulnerable software? What about human error such as tricking someone to giving out data they shouldn't or losing hard drives with data? Unless clear standards are published, this seems like an opportunity for selective enforcement. Also, while I understand it's a different agency, the US government is one of the worst offenders in terms of poor security practices. Who will hold the IRS accountable for their data breach, for example? It's hypocritical for the government to hold businesses accountable when they're an awful offender, too.
There are plenty of possible impacts to this, and I'm not sure the overall result will be to cool the Earth. There are two obvious processes by which clouds can impact the temperature. Clouds can reflect solar radiation back out into space, which is a cooling effect. However, clouds can also absorb the infrared radiation emitted by the Earth. Some of that gets emitted back down to the surface, which is a warming effect.
During the day, clouds reflect more solar radiation back out into space than they absorb and emit toward the surface. The overall result of clouds during the day is cooling. We know that temperatures don't get as warm during the day under an overcast sky than they would in clear and sunny conditions.
At night, there's no incoming solar radiation, so the effect of albedo is zero. However, the Earth is still emitting infrared radiation, so the clouds can still absorb and emit this radiation. This results in warming. Temperatures tend to stay up at night when there is cloud cover. The coldest winter nights occur when the skies are clear, not cloudy.
Could increasing the cloud cover during the day lead to more cloud cover at night, too? I don't know for sure, but it definitely seems very possible. I suspect this would probably offset some of the gains from increasing the albedo.
I also see another problem here. Not only will this increase the cloud cover, but some of the water droplets will evaporate and increase the water vapor. Water vapor content varies greatly from one place to another and has a relatively short residence time in the atmosphere, on the order of several days. The short residence time means that other greenhouse gases such as methane and carbon dioxide get much more attention. However, water vapor is a very potent greenhouse gas, roughly 50 times as potent as carbon dioxide.
Increasing cloud cover during the day, absent the other factors, would lead to cooling. It's an interesting idea, but I'm skeptical of its merit. It's not obvious to me which of the aforementioned factors would win out. I'd like to see some evidence that this should work. Fortunately, it shouldn't be too hard to estimate the effects with a computer model. Simply run the model as usual, except the code has been modified to include a source of cloud droplets at the desired times and places. I'd want to see this simulated with many different microphysics schemes because those are parameterized instead of being explicitly resolved in a model, and the choice of a microphysics scheme can have a large impact on how the model simulates some meteorological phenomena such as thunderstorms.
When a stingray is deployed, it doesn't just cause the suspect's phone to connect to the bogus tower. It affects all of the phones in the area, which can inform the police of people other than the suspect who are present in the same area and to obtain the locations of those phones, too. There's no guarantee that the police don't look at that data or retain it.
Let's say hypothetically that use of a stingray to find a suspect falls doesn't require a warrant. There's probably reasonable suspicion or probable cause. I don't agree with this, but let's assume it. What about the stingray recording information about people in the area who aren't suspects? There's no reasonable suspicion, so do the police have the right to collect that data about those people, too? What happens to that data? Can it be used against you? Using a stingray allows for the rights of non-suspects to be violated by police.
A reasonable expectation of privacy is also a factor here. Courts have ruled that information voluntarily disclosed to a third party doesn't have an expectation of privacy. An example is dialing a phone number gives that information to the phone company voluntarily. The Supreme Court ruled in 1979 in Smith v. Maryland that there is no expectation of privacy in this case. Arguably, when your phone connects to a cell phone tower, you're giving your approximate location to the phone company, indicating you're within range of the tower. Unlike dialing a phone number, connecting to a particular tower isn't something users control. However, there's always the ability to opt out by turning on airplane mode or turning off the phone. That said, phones use the minimum power needed to connect to towers. A phone operating under normal conditions isn't particularly useful for triangulating its signal. There's no way to be certain how much power the phone is using to transmit, and therefore no way to establish the distance from the tower to the phone. A stingray addresses this by forcing phones to increase their transmit power so it's possible to establish their distance and triangulate the signal. This isn't something that's voluntarily being disclosed, so there ought to be a reasonable expectation of privacy. In this instance, the information isn't voluntarily being disclosed to a third party. Rather, the police are taking action to force phones to effectively disclose information they otherwise wouldn't. It's quite possibly an important distinction here.
Do you like the idea that the police can force your phone to divulge information that can be used to locate you precisely when you have a reasonable expectation of privacy? Do you like the idea that it's not clear what happens to the data from the phones of people who aren't suspects? Do you like the idea that this could potentially be used against you?
You said a lot of good things in your post, but I'd like to add to it a bit. Your explanation of why we've made more gains in track forecasting than intensity forecasting is correct. You're also correct about the scale-dependence of the predicting the atmosphere.
Once we get down to a horizontal grid spacing of 4 km or so, we no longer parameterize thunderstorms. The grid spacing is sufficient to explicitly resolve them, so we turn the cumulus parameterization off. In older and coarser models, there is an assumption made of hydrostatic balance. In most cases, this is a good assumption. At a large scale, the atmosphere is in hydrostatic balance. Air pressure decreases as you go up in the atmosphere. The pressure gradient force (PGF) is an acceleration from high to low pressure, so there is an upward PGF. In hydrostatic balance, the upward PGF is balanced out by the downward acceleration from gravity. This allows for vertical motion but no vertical accelerations. In models that assume hydrostatic balance, there are in practice vertical accelerations that arise from other equations, but the models don't explicitly predict dw/dt (the change in vertical velocity with respect to time). You can always have a prognostic equation for dw/dt, but with a coarse horizontal grid spacing, there's not a big difference in the forecast if the model is hydrostatic or non-hydrostatic. The difference start to become more significant around the 4 km horizontal grid spacing mark. A thunderstorm is most definitely not in hydrostatic balance, so we wouldn't want to simulate it as if it were.
The deep moist convection in the inner core of a hurricane modulates intensity beyond eyewall cycles. Hot towers around the inner core of a storm are associated with rapid intensification. Hot towers are intense storms that generate enough heat within them that the cloud tops rise higher in the atmosphere. A great example of this is Hurricane Humberto in 2007, which set a record for the most rapid decrease in minimum central pressure as it intensified off the coast of Texas. The best video of this I could find is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ilz5t1WwMZY, which shows the infrared satellite with data from land-based radars in Texas overlaid. The rapid cooling of the cloud tops and stronger radar echoes show the hot towers that led to the rapid intensification of Humberto. In addition to eyewall replacement cycles, we can explicitly simulate things like the development of hot towers around the core of the storm.
If we can reduce the uncertainty in hurricane strength forecasts, we can hopefully get people to evacuate sooner when it's necessary and have fewer false alarms. If we're confident that a major hurricane will strike, people probably ought to evacuate regardless of whether it's going to be a category 3 or a category 5 storm. However, if the range is from a strong tropical storm to a category 3 storm, people may be more reluctant to evacuate. The latter is generally a more common situation than the former.
NHC forecasters consider a very large number of models when making hurricane forecasts. Many of these aren't run by NOAA. Here's an old list: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/modelsummary.shtml. NHC has used the NOGAPS model for a long time. NOGAPS is a global model developed and run by the US Navy. If a NASA model can make useful predictions, NHC forecasters will certainly use it.
Nothing excuses Ray Nagin's incompetence once hurricane watches and warnings were issued for Louisiana. Although Nagin did encourage evacuation, he also promised residents who didn't evacuate that, "we will take care of you." The city didn't keep that promise and it certainly gave people incentive to stay when they might have otherwise evacuated. Furthermore, the hurricane wasn't actually what killed people in New Orleans. The levees broke because they weren't properly designed and maintained, despite ample warning. It was known back in 1965 that the levees and flood walls were inadequate and improvements were estimated to be complete by 1978. By 2005, the work was still incomplete with an estimated finish in 2015. Much of the levee and flood wall design issues can be blamed on the Army Corps of Engineers. Had the levees been designed and maintained properly so they didn't break, almost nobody would have died in New Orleans. There's plenty of blame to go around and not all of it belongs with people who chose to ride out an indirect hit from what had then weakened to a category 3 hurricane.
However, it's absolutely false that the forecast models in 2005 were adequate. The models weren't capable of resolving the storms at the inner core of hurricanes and couldn't provide forecasters with guidance about the rapid intensification of Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. The grid spacing of models in 2005 was simply incapable of resolving the inner core of hurricanes, which is essential to accurately predicting intensity. Instead, intensity forecasts relied on statistical models that do well in a wide variety of situations, but not during those rapid intensification cycles. The intensity forecasts for those storms was particularly awful and the forecast tracks of Katrina and Rita left a lot to be desired.
Actually, no, that's not correct at all. Even as Katrina was crossing south Florida, three day forecasts were pretty far off. The forecasts certainly didn't call for it to become a major hurricane. Here are some forecast graphics for you:
The three day forecast called for a category 2 hurricane moving in the general direction of Panama City, FL. The rapid intensification of a number of hurricanes that year wasn't predicted well. You can animate the graphics for yourself, if you'd like. Here's a link: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/KATRINA_graphics.shtml.
The rapid intensification of Rita wasn't forecast well at all. Forecasts predicted it hitting south Texas for awhile rather than near the Texas/Louisiana border. Rita was forecast to become a major hurricane, but not as strong as it became.
The forecast track of Wilma was actually really good. However, the rapid intensification from a minimal category 1 hurricane to a 175 mph category 5 hurricane in 24 hours wasn't forecast at all.
All the NHC forecasts for 2005 are archived at http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/. If you look at the strongest hurricanes that year, you'll see that the rapid intensification cycles were pretty much not in the official forecasts at all. The track forecasts weren't great, but generally were just within the margin of error.
The hurricane forecasts in 2005 left a lot to be desired. Pretty much nobody knew several days before those storms how bad they were going to be.
The resolution of the model is the spacing between horizontal grid points. Vertical levels are treated separately. A typical model now uses on the order of 50-100 vertical levels, which has increased substantially in recent years. Models tend to use sigma or eta levels, which are a vertical coordinate system that is terrain following, at least in the lower levels of the atmosphere. The grids are also vertically stretched, resulting in more grid points in the lower levels of the atmosphere. This is necessary because of the complexity in simulating the planetary boundary layer and interactions with the surface. Also, shrinking the distance between grid points requires a corresponding decrease in the model time step. If you cut the distance between grid points in half, typically you'll also need to cut your time step in half, too.
I'm going to agree with the AC above me and say yes, increasing the resolution will generally result in a better forecast. There are two areas that generally can improve weather models: better initial conditions for the model and higher resolution.
Hurricane tracks are primarily influenced by large areas of high and low pressure and the accompanying upper-level winds. Even a coarse model with grid points every 50 km will probably produce a reasonably accurate representation of large features. Adding to the resolution might help a bit, but it's not likely to improve the forecasting of hurricane tracks that much.
Hurricane intensity, however, is driven by the storms in the inner core of the hurricane. They typically form a ring around the eye of the storm and are referred to as the eyewall. They're basically thunderstorms but without a lot of lightning, typically less than 10 flashes per hour. Inside those storms, large amounts of water vapor condense, and when this happens, latent heat is released. The latent heat comes from the energy that's no longer being used to keep the molecules of water apart once the state changes from gas to liquid. This heat warms the air, causing the column of air to expand upward. When this happens, you get high pressure at the top of the hurricane, and air spirals out from there. Air is flowing out of the core of the storm at the upper levels, so there's less air to press down on the surface. This causes the surface pressure to fall and the hurricane intensifies. These storms are small, on the order of 20 km across, but they're really important to predicting hurricane intensity. If the model has its grid points spaced 50 km apart, you may not have any grid points to resolve the storms. One of the newer hurricane models, the HWRF, now goes down to a grid point spacing of 2 km. There are a lot more grid points from which to represent the storms in the inner core of the hurricane. That allows much better prediction of hurricane intensity.
For a few decades, hurricane track forecasting had improved quite a bit as the global models could better predict the high and low pressure systems that drive hurricane tracks. During a lot of that time, predictions of hurricane intensity didn't get a lot better. Only within the past decade or so have we seen bigger improvements in forecasting hurricane intensity. That's largely a result of more computing power and models that are able to directly simulate what's going on in the inner core of the hurricane.
I do agree with the AC that it's not as simple as changing a couple of numbers in a configuration file to get a higher resolution and automatically getting a better forecast. There is something of an art to modeling. Even with a really high resolution grid, there are still processes that can't directly be simulated or are on a smaller scale than the grid. We still have to parameterize those. But improving the resolution is generally a good thing.
You're committing a logical fallacy here in the form of a false dichotomy. One can support an individual right to bear arms while still supporting reasonable gun control to keep guns away from truly crazy people. There's a compelling government interest in keeping arms away from people who will use them to commit violent crimes. Surely we can find a middle ground that allows law abiding citizens to have guns while making it illegal for criminals ("unregulated crazies") to have them.
The first amendment would also prohibit any and all restrictions on speech. There couldn't be any ban on violent threats. Defamatory speech would be completely legal. Speech that incites undue panic, the typical example given being shouting "fire!" in a crowded theatre, would also be legal. After all, Congress couldn't ban those things, and the 14th amendment would prevent the states from doing so. By your logic, anyone who argues there ought to be reasonable restrictions on speech doesn't believe in the first amendment.
It's obvious that nearly all freedoms must have restrictions, otherwise they lend themselves to anarchy, which is ultimately contrary to freedom. The framers of the Constitution understood this. The courts have always understood this. They have to weigh freedom between reasonable and necessary restrictions in order to maintain order.
In a 1938 decision on United States vs. Carolene Products Co., the Supreme Court indicated the need for varying levels of judicial scrutiny in footnote four. In practice, this has led to rational basis review (lowest standard), intermediate scrutiny, and strict scrutiny (highest standard). Because gun control involves a fundamental right, the right to keep and bear arms, cases are subjected to intermediate scrutiny and arguably deserve to be reviewed under the standards of strict scrutiny. Regardless of this distinction between intermediate and strict scrutiny, the point is that there are specific tests for judicial review when a court has to balance constitutionally-protected freedoms against the need to maintain order. Understanding the need to maintain some order and that freedoms aren't unlimited is not contrary to supporting the Bill of Rights.
That's not accurate. The purpose of the militia is described in Article 1, Section 8. The authors of the Constitution wanted to limit the ability of the government to maintain a standing army during peacetime, but they recognized there would be a need to defend the country quickly if attacked by a foreign or external power. The militia fill that role. They felt that a standing army during peacetime was contrary to freedom. The second amendment points out that it's only possible to achieve the goal of a well-regulated militia if the people have the right to keep and bear arms. It states the preference for militia rather than a standing army because the former was deemed more consistent with a free society. It doesn't state that participation in a militia is a prerequisite for possessing the individual right to bear arms. And yes, it's an individual right, regardless of scope. The ability to regulate arms doesn't come from the "well-regulated militia" clause, but from the understanding that absolute individual freedom results in anarchy rather than a truly free society. Restrictions of Constitutional freedoms are permitted when they pass the strict scrutiny tests. This is what defines the scope of the freedom, not the "well-regulated militia" clause.
I don't think you understand the second amendment. The ability of the government to place reasonable restrictions on arms doesn't come from the "well-regulated militia" part of the second amendment. There have to be some restrictions on freedom to prevent anarchy, which itself is contrary to freedom. Reasonable restrictions on second amendment freedoms, or that of any other amendment, must pass strict scrutiny. There are three components to this:
1) There must be a compelling state interest in the restrictions, to achieve a particular goal.
2) The restrictions must be narrowly tailored to achieve that particular goal rather than being overly broad.
3) It must be the least restrictive means to achieve that goal.
The authors of the Bill of Rights believed that a standing army was contrary to freedom. Instead, militia would have a key role in defending the United States from attack from external or foreign powers while a national army was assembled to defend the country. In practice, it is necessary to have some standing army, especially as warfare has advanced technologically. However, militia still have a role, both in the form of organized and well-regulated citizens militias and state militias such as the national guard. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution describes the federal government's powers in organizing and maintaining a military in addition to their interactions with militia.
The authors of the second amendment also noted that European countries that banned arms tended to be less free than those that permitted citizens to have arms. Furthermore, and somewhat related is the ability to use arms to protect against tyranny. The second amendment clearly goes beyond supporting the right of citizens to organize militia, though it specifically mentions that the existence of such militia requires the right to keep and bear arms. This is hardly the only reason for the right to keep and bear arms, and certainly discussions as the Bill of Rights was being constructed demonstrate the intent.
Also, "the right of the people" occurs specifically in the first and fourth amendments. In the contexts of those amendments, especially the fourth, it is clear that this language refers to an individual right. With respect to the first amendment right to peaceably assemble, it wouldn't make sense to say that the whole group would have that right but individuals within could still have that right denied. This part of the first amendment also references the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. While assembly is done as a group and petitioning is typically something that is done with multiple signatories, there is still an individual right to participate in such things and the first amendment doesn't make sense if this is interpreted differently. Additionally, the right to petition protects the right to contact government officials, to lobby, and even to go to court if necessary. This part of the Constitution is what allows individuals and groups to sue the government if their rights are being violated. The fourth amendment definitely is an individual right to be free from illegal search and seizure. It doesn't make sense at all that a collective right to be free from such things would exist, but the government could still conduct illegal searches and seizures against individuals. This sort of reasoning was noted by Justice Scalia when he wrote the majority opinion in DC v. Heller, which specifically dealt with the second amendment. Even the dissenting opinions written by Justices Stevens and Breyer agreed that an individual right exists, though Stevens argued it only exists in the context of participation with a militia. It isn't in question whether it's an individual right.
The second amendment is an individual right, not a collective right limited to well-regulated militia. The Supreme Court has ruled on this. The restrictions on freedom in this case don't come from the "well-regulated militia" clause, but from strict scrutiny and the obvious truth
Open source weather prediction involves obtaining the data and running a numerical model.
There are a lot of acronyms for weather models in the comments such as the HWRF, HRRR, RAP, and NAM. All of the those models are actually various configurations of the Weather Research & Forecasting (WRF) model. Other models like the GFS, UkMet, and ECMWF are different and aren't based on the WRF. You can download WRF and compile it yourself. It's actually not that hard. The site is http://www2.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users/. WRF is in the public domain and so are the tools that you're most likely to need in order to run WRF.
WRF isn't usually a global model, so you'll need something to provide the initial and lateral boundary conditions for the model. That's usually data from another model. The data from the HRRR, HWRF, RAP, NAM, and GFS are all also in the public domain. The appropriate choice here depends on what you're planning to do with the model, but there's no shortage of public domain data.
The real limiting factor is the availability of computing resources. Current numerical models in their typical configurations can require hundreds of cores to run and each core needs several GB of RAM. High-quality numerical modeling is computationally expensive, which limits who is practically able to do this. But licensing, availability of software, and access to data aren't issues at all.
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I see a couple of motivations for Elsevier in doing this. One is that it encourages people to pay to see entire journal articles when they're cited on Wikipedia. The other is about image and trying to look good by donating access to otherwise expensive journals. Effectively, these editors are being compensated for writing on Wikipedia, which is a form of paid editing. I don't think it's strictly prohibited, but Wikipedia must disclose this in order to remain credible. Furthermore, those editors shouldn't be editing any articles about Elsevier or their journals because it's a conflict of interest. Also, despite this partnership, citing only Elsevier journals to provide sources for a statement must be discouraged unless a more accessible source isn't available. It's very difficult for other editors to verify the information in those sources due to the cost. If Wikipedia upholds its own guidelines, I don't think this is really a problem. But the guidelines must be upheld.
I suppose it's possible that the FAA could issue a COA and allow a drone operator to fly outside of the view of an observer. I'm not aware of such a thing so far. The observer and the pilot don't necessarily have to be the same person, but my understanding is that someone has to be able to see the aircraft at all times so that see-and-avoid is possible. In my experience, operating in a COA region that allows for flight above 400 feet, it's required to issue a NOTAM indicating that such drone flights are taking place. Because of the difference in regulations for flights above 400 feet and those below, recreational pilots generally don't need NOTAMs saying that those areas must be avoided. I'm not sure that geofencing is a good idea and it might not be practical in many cases. For example, some drones are programmed to avoid going within five miles of some airports. However, it's legal to fly in those areas provided that permission has been granted by the airport. Also, there's nothing to stop a person from building a drone, using open source software, and circumventing such restrictions. I'd actually prefer some kind of certification being required to operate a drone. It need not have all the requirements of a pilot's license, but operators need to understand the rules and be able to properly see and avoid other aircraft.
First, this isn't new. Software-based no-fly zones already exist in drones, such as over the DC area. See this story from the Washington Post about this already being done. The difference is that such zones are static, not dynamic.
A NOTAM is a notice to airmen of potential hazards to aircraft. If police or firefighters need exclusive access to a portion of airspace, they need to issue a NOTAM indicating that all other aircraft should avoid that area. This is already done for military training operations, for example. Other events that might present hazards such as fireworks, hot-air balloons, and air shows issue NOTAMs so pilots know to avoid those areas. In reality, what needs to happen is that drones obey NOTAMs and any such restrictions included within, whether temporary or permanent. And the issue involving DC wouldn't have been a problem had the drones simply obeyed NOTAM 0/8326.
It's not clear to me how that information will be transmitted to drones in real-time, though. Other aircraft generally aren't programmed to specifically avoid areas under NOTAM no-fly restrictions, mostly because pilots are expected to be trained to obey them. So either there has to be a way for drones to automatically download and obey NOTAMs or their operators need to be able to receive NOTAMs and manually comply with them. The latter solution is difficult right now because anyone can operate a drone for recreational purposes under 400 feet in areas without flight restrictions. There are basically two options, and they're not mutually exclusive: 1) require some kind of certification to legally operate a drone that shows they understand the rules and can do so safely or 2) program drones to automatically comply with NOTAMs.
They actually did a precise chemical analysis, in addition to tasting the whisky.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/04/science/space-whisky-glass.html?_r=0
The article says that the whisky had lower amounts of compounds that are typically extracted from the oak. Most of what I could find online is pretty light on the details of what's different chemically, but there was definitely more done than tasting.
Government spending is highly scrutinized because 1) the taxes to pay for it takes money away from citizens and business who could spend the money in other places and 2) the federal government has incurred over 18 trillion dollars in debt. If the debt reaches a point where lenders to the US become concerned about the ability of the US to repay their money, those interest rates will rise. Not only does this make it more expensive to for the government to borrow and repay debt, but other interest rates are pegged to those rates, including the rates for private citizens and businesses to borrow money from banks. There's a lot of waste and fraud both within government and in government contracts to businesses. While it's true that there needs to be much more auditing of government contracts, that does not justify wasteful spending within the government. A dollar wasted is still a dollar wasted, whether it's within a government department or in a government contract.
As for the auditing of private business, I disagree that it should be permitted. The issue you're describing occurs as a result of a lack of competition, either through a monopoly that has arisen from acquisitions or competitors failing or a government-granted monopoly such as a utility. Competition is extremely effective at reducing prices for consumers, improving the quality of service, and eliminating waste by businesses. Deregulation of utilities is a better solution than audits. However, anti-trust laws must be strongly enforced to ensure a persistent state of competition, or else the market will move toward a monopoly that may not be in the interest of consumers.
I don't think anyone would consider the "security practices" described in the article summary to be reasonable. That's also a pretty extreme example. I'd like to think that most businesses have better security practices than this. However, security encompasses a wide variety of things including encryption, applying patches for vulnerabilities, controlling who has access to systems and data, passwords, etc... What one person considers reasonable security might not be considered reasonable by others. If you don't define what constitutes "reasonable" security practices, it's very subjective. When fines can be issued for something that's subjective, it allows for the possibility of selective enforcement and abuse. I also don't think this is necessary, either. We have laws to punish criminals who steal data. Businesses can also be punished for poor security practices though a civil suit for negligence. Why do we need the FTC when there are already ways to accomplish the intended effect?
What constitutes sufficiently strong security practices? This seems subjective unless there are clear rules published. Obviously we'd agree that the practices in the summary are truly awful, but there are plenty of data breaches that don't seem quite as egregious. Are there going to be standards for applying patches to vulnerable software? What about human error such as tricking someone to giving out data they shouldn't or losing hard drives with data? Unless clear standards are published, this seems like an opportunity for selective enforcement. Also, while I understand it's a different agency, the US government is one of the worst offenders in terms of poor security practices. Who will hold the IRS accountable for their data breach, for example? It's hypocritical for the government to hold businesses accountable when they're an awful offender, too.
There are plenty of possible impacts to this, and I'm not sure the overall result will be to cool the Earth. There are two obvious processes by which clouds can impact the temperature. Clouds can reflect solar radiation back out into space, which is a cooling effect. However, clouds can also absorb the infrared radiation emitted by the Earth. Some of that gets emitted back down to the surface, which is a warming effect.
During the day, clouds reflect more solar radiation back out into space than they absorb and emit toward the surface. The overall result of clouds during the day is cooling. We know that temperatures don't get as warm during the day under an overcast sky than they would in clear and sunny conditions.
At night, there's no incoming solar radiation, so the effect of albedo is zero. However, the Earth is still emitting infrared radiation, so the clouds can still absorb and emit this radiation. This results in warming. Temperatures tend to stay up at night when there is cloud cover. The coldest winter nights occur when the skies are clear, not cloudy.
Could increasing the cloud cover during the day lead to more cloud cover at night, too? I don't know for sure, but it definitely seems very possible. I suspect this would probably offset some of the gains from increasing the albedo.
I also see another problem here. Not only will this increase the cloud cover, but some of the water droplets will evaporate and increase the water vapor. Water vapor content varies greatly from one place to another and has a relatively short residence time in the atmosphere, on the order of several days. The short residence time means that other greenhouse gases such as methane and carbon dioxide get much more attention. However, water vapor is a very potent greenhouse gas, roughly 50 times as potent as carbon dioxide.
Increasing cloud cover during the day, absent the other factors, would lead to cooling. It's an interesting idea, but I'm skeptical of its merit. It's not obvious to me which of the aforementioned factors would win out. I'd like to see some evidence that this should work. Fortunately, it shouldn't be too hard to estimate the effects with a computer model. Simply run the model as usual, except the code has been modified to include a source of cloud droplets at the desired times and places. I'd want to see this simulated with many different microphysics schemes because those are parameterized instead of being explicitly resolved in a model, and the choice of a microphysics scheme can have a large impact on how the model simulates some meteorological phenomena such as thunderstorms.
When a stingray is deployed, it doesn't just cause the suspect's phone to connect to the bogus tower. It affects all of the phones in the area, which can inform the police of people other than the suspect who are present in the same area and to obtain the locations of those phones, too. There's no guarantee that the police don't look at that data or retain it.
Let's say hypothetically that use of a stingray to find a suspect falls doesn't require a warrant. There's probably reasonable suspicion or probable cause. I don't agree with this, but let's assume it. What about the stingray recording information about people in the area who aren't suspects? There's no reasonable suspicion, so do the police have the right to collect that data about those people, too? What happens to that data? Can it be used against you? Using a stingray allows for the rights of non-suspects to be violated by police.
A reasonable expectation of privacy is also a factor here. Courts have ruled that information voluntarily disclosed to a third party doesn't have an expectation of privacy. An example is dialing a phone number gives that information to the phone company voluntarily. The Supreme Court ruled in 1979 in Smith v. Maryland that there is no expectation of privacy in this case. Arguably, when your phone connects to a cell phone tower, you're giving your approximate location to the phone company, indicating you're within range of the tower. Unlike dialing a phone number, connecting to a particular tower isn't something users control. However, there's always the ability to opt out by turning on airplane mode or turning off the phone. That said, phones use the minimum power needed to connect to towers. A phone operating under normal conditions isn't particularly useful for triangulating its signal. There's no way to be certain how much power the phone is using to transmit, and therefore no way to establish the distance from the tower to the phone. A stingray addresses this by forcing phones to increase their transmit power so it's possible to establish their distance and triangulate the signal. This isn't something that's voluntarily being disclosed, so there ought to be a reasonable expectation of privacy. In this instance, the information isn't voluntarily being disclosed to a third party. Rather, the police are taking action to force phones to effectively disclose information they otherwise wouldn't. It's quite possibly an important distinction here.
Do you like the idea that the police can force your phone to divulge information that can be used to locate you precisely when you have a reasonable expectation of privacy? Do you like the idea that it's not clear what happens to the data from the phones of people who aren't suspects? Do you like the idea that this could potentially be used against you?
You said a lot of good things in your post, but I'd like to add to it a bit. Your explanation of why we've made more gains in track forecasting than intensity forecasting is correct. You're also correct about the scale-dependence of the predicting the atmosphere.
Once we get down to a horizontal grid spacing of 4 km or so, we no longer parameterize thunderstorms. The grid spacing is sufficient to explicitly resolve them, so we turn the cumulus parameterization off. In older and coarser models, there is an assumption made of hydrostatic balance. In most cases, this is a good assumption. At a large scale, the atmosphere is in hydrostatic balance. Air pressure decreases as you go up in the atmosphere. The pressure gradient force (PGF) is an acceleration from high to low pressure, so there is an upward PGF. In hydrostatic balance, the upward PGF is balanced out by the downward acceleration from gravity. This allows for vertical motion but no vertical accelerations. In models that assume hydrostatic balance, there are in practice vertical accelerations that arise from other equations, but the models don't explicitly predict dw/dt (the change in vertical velocity with respect to time). You can always have a prognostic equation for dw/dt, but with a coarse horizontal grid spacing, there's not a big difference in the forecast if the model is hydrostatic or non-hydrostatic. The difference start to become more significant around the 4 km horizontal grid spacing mark. A thunderstorm is most definitely not in hydrostatic balance, so we wouldn't want to simulate it as if it were.
The deep moist convection in the inner core of a hurricane modulates intensity beyond eyewall cycles. Hot towers around the inner core of a storm are associated with rapid intensification. Hot towers are intense storms that generate enough heat within them that the cloud tops rise higher in the atmosphere. A great example of this is Hurricane Humberto in 2007, which set a record for the most rapid decrease in minimum central pressure as it intensified off the coast of Texas. The best video of this I could find is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ilz5t1WwMZY, which shows the infrared satellite with data from land-based radars in Texas overlaid. The rapid cooling of the cloud tops and stronger radar echoes show the hot towers that led to the rapid intensification of Humberto. In addition to eyewall replacement cycles, we can explicitly simulate things like the development of hot towers around the core of the storm.
If we can reduce the uncertainty in hurricane strength forecasts, we can hopefully get people to evacuate sooner when it's necessary and have fewer false alarms. If we're confident that a major hurricane will strike, people probably ought to evacuate regardless of whether it's going to be a category 3 or a category 5 storm. However, if the range is from a strong tropical storm to a category 3 storm, people may be more reluctant to evacuate. The latter is generally a more common situation than the former.
NHC forecasters consider a very large number of models when making hurricane forecasts. Many of these aren't run by NOAA. Here's an old list: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/modelsummary.shtml. NHC has used the NOGAPS model for a long time. NOGAPS is a global model developed and run by the US Navy. If a NASA model can make useful predictions, NHC forecasters will certainly use it.
Nothing excuses Ray Nagin's incompetence once hurricane watches and warnings were issued for Louisiana. Although Nagin did encourage evacuation, he also promised residents who didn't evacuate that, "we will take care of you." The city didn't keep that promise and it certainly gave people incentive to stay when they might have otherwise evacuated. Furthermore, the hurricane wasn't actually what killed people in New Orleans. The levees broke because they weren't properly designed and maintained, despite ample warning. It was known back in 1965 that the levees and flood walls were inadequate and improvements were estimated to be complete by 1978. By 2005, the work was still incomplete with an estimated finish in 2015. Much of the levee and flood wall design issues can be blamed on the Army Corps of Engineers. Had the levees been designed and maintained properly so they didn't break, almost nobody would have died in New Orleans. There's plenty of blame to go around and not all of it belongs with people who chose to ride out an indirect hit from what had then weakened to a category 3 hurricane.
However, it's absolutely false that the forecast models in 2005 were adequate. The models weren't capable of resolving the storms at the inner core of hurricanes and couldn't provide forecasters with guidance about the rapid intensification of Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. The grid spacing of models in 2005 was simply incapable of resolving the inner core of hurricanes, which is essential to accurately predicting intensity. Instead, intensity forecasts relied on statistical models that do well in a wide variety of situations, but not during those rapid intensification cycles. The intensity forecasts for those storms was particularly awful and the forecast tracks of Katrina and Rita left a lot to be desired.
Actually, no, that's not correct at all. Even as Katrina was crossing south Florida, three day forecasts were pretty far off. The forecasts certainly didn't call for it to become a major hurricane. Here are some forecast graphics for you:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/graphics/AT12/10.AL1205W5.GIF
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/graphics/AT12/10.AL1205I.GIF
The three day forecast called for a category 2 hurricane moving in the general direction of Panama City, FL. The rapid intensification of a number of hurricanes that year wasn't predicted well. You can animate the graphics for yourself, if you'd like. Here's a link: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/KATRINA_graphics.shtml.
The rapid intensification of Rita wasn't forecast well at all. Forecasts predicted it hitting south Texas for awhile rather than near the Texas/Louisiana border. Rita was forecast to become a major hurricane, but not as strong as it became.
The forecast track of Wilma was actually really good. However, the rapid intensification from a minimal category 1 hurricane to a 175 mph category 5 hurricane in 24 hours wasn't forecast at all.
All the NHC forecasts for 2005 are archived at http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2005/. If you look at the strongest hurricanes that year, you'll see that the rapid intensification cycles were pretty much not in the official forecasts at all. The track forecasts weren't great, but generally were just within the margin of error.
The hurricane forecasts in 2005 left a lot to be desired. Pretty much nobody knew several days before those storms how bad they were going to be.
The resolution of the model is the spacing between horizontal grid points. Vertical levels are treated separately. A typical model now uses on the order of 50-100 vertical levels, which has increased substantially in recent years. Models tend to use sigma or eta levels, which are a vertical coordinate system that is terrain following, at least in the lower levels of the atmosphere. The grids are also vertically stretched, resulting in more grid points in the lower levels of the atmosphere. This is necessary because of the complexity in simulating the planetary boundary layer and interactions with the surface. Also, shrinking the distance between grid points requires a corresponding decrease in the model time step. If you cut the distance between grid points in half, typically you'll also need to cut your time step in half, too.
I'm going to agree with the AC above me and say yes, increasing the resolution will generally result in a better forecast. There are two areas that generally can improve weather models: better initial conditions for the model and higher resolution.
Hurricane tracks are primarily influenced by large areas of high and low pressure and the accompanying upper-level winds. Even a coarse model with grid points every 50 km will probably produce a reasonably accurate representation of large features. Adding to the resolution might help a bit, but it's not likely to improve the forecasting of hurricane tracks that much.
Hurricane intensity, however, is driven by the storms in the inner core of the hurricane. They typically form a ring around the eye of the storm and are referred to as the eyewall. They're basically thunderstorms but without a lot of lightning, typically less than 10 flashes per hour. Inside those storms, large amounts of water vapor condense, and when this happens, latent heat is released. The latent heat comes from the energy that's no longer being used to keep the molecules of water apart once the state changes from gas to liquid. This heat warms the air, causing the column of air to expand upward. When this happens, you get high pressure at the top of the hurricane, and air spirals out from there. Air is flowing out of the core of the storm at the upper levels, so there's less air to press down on the surface. This causes the surface pressure to fall and the hurricane intensifies. These storms are small, on the order of 20 km across, but they're really important to predicting hurricane intensity. If the model has its grid points spaced 50 km apart, you may not have any grid points to resolve the storms. One of the newer hurricane models, the HWRF, now goes down to a grid point spacing of 2 km. There are a lot more grid points from which to represent the storms in the inner core of the hurricane. That allows much better prediction of hurricane intensity.
For a few decades, hurricane track forecasting had improved quite a bit as the global models could better predict the high and low pressure systems that drive hurricane tracks. During a lot of that time, predictions of hurricane intensity didn't get a lot better. Only within the past decade or so have we seen bigger improvements in forecasting hurricane intensity. That's largely a result of more computing power and models that are able to directly simulate what's going on in the inner core of the hurricane.
I do agree with the AC that it's not as simple as changing a couple of numbers in a configuration file to get a higher resolution and automatically getting a better forecast. There is something of an art to modeling. Even with a really high resolution grid, there are still processes that can't directly be simulated or are on a smaller scale than the grid. We still have to parameterize those. But improving the resolution is generally a good thing.
You're committing a logical fallacy here in the form of a false dichotomy. One can support an individual right to bear arms while still supporting reasonable gun control to keep guns away from truly crazy people. There's a compelling government interest in keeping arms away from people who will use them to commit violent crimes. Surely we can find a middle ground that allows law abiding citizens to have guns while making it illegal for criminals ("unregulated crazies") to have them.
The first amendment would also prohibit any and all restrictions on speech. There couldn't be any ban on violent threats. Defamatory speech would be completely legal. Speech that incites undue panic, the typical example given being shouting "fire!" in a crowded theatre, would also be legal. After all, Congress couldn't ban those things, and the 14th amendment would prevent the states from doing so. By your logic, anyone who argues there ought to be reasonable restrictions on speech doesn't believe in the first amendment.
It's obvious that nearly all freedoms must have restrictions, otherwise they lend themselves to anarchy, which is ultimately contrary to freedom. The framers of the Constitution understood this. The courts have always understood this. They have to weigh freedom between reasonable and necessary restrictions in order to maintain order.
In a 1938 decision on United States vs. Carolene Products Co., the Supreme Court indicated the need for varying levels of judicial scrutiny in footnote four. In practice, this has led to rational basis review (lowest standard), intermediate scrutiny, and strict scrutiny (highest standard). Because gun control involves a fundamental right, the right to keep and bear arms, cases are subjected to intermediate scrutiny and arguably deserve to be reviewed under the standards of strict scrutiny. Regardless of this distinction between intermediate and strict scrutiny, the point is that there are specific tests for judicial review when a court has to balance constitutionally-protected freedoms against the need to maintain order. Understanding the need to maintain some order and that freedoms aren't unlimited is not contrary to supporting the Bill of Rights.
That's not accurate. The purpose of the militia is described in Article 1, Section 8. The authors of the Constitution wanted to limit the ability of the government to maintain a standing army during peacetime, but they recognized there would be a need to defend the country quickly if attacked by a foreign or external power. The militia fill that role. They felt that a standing army during peacetime was contrary to freedom. The second amendment points out that it's only possible to achieve the goal of a well-regulated militia if the people have the right to keep and bear arms. It states the preference for militia rather than a standing army because the former was deemed more consistent with a free society. It doesn't state that participation in a militia is a prerequisite for possessing the individual right to bear arms. And yes, it's an individual right, regardless of scope. The ability to regulate arms doesn't come from the "well-regulated militia" clause, but from the understanding that absolute individual freedom results in anarchy rather than a truly free society. Restrictions of Constitutional freedoms are permitted when they pass the strict scrutiny tests. This is what defines the scope of the freedom, not the "well-regulated militia" clause.
I don't think you understand the second amendment. The ability of the government to place reasonable restrictions on arms doesn't come from the "well-regulated militia" part of the second amendment. There have to be some restrictions on freedom to prevent anarchy, which itself is contrary to freedom. Reasonable restrictions on second amendment freedoms, or that of any other amendment, must pass strict scrutiny. There are three components to this:
The authors of the Bill of Rights believed that a standing army was contrary to freedom. Instead, militia would have a key role in defending the United States from attack from external or foreign powers while a national army was assembled to defend the country. In practice, it is necessary to have some standing army, especially as warfare has advanced technologically. However, militia still have a role, both in the form of organized and well-regulated citizens militias and state militias such as the national guard. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution describes the federal government's powers in organizing and maintaining a military in addition to their interactions with militia.
The authors of the second amendment also noted that European countries that banned arms tended to be less free than those that permitted citizens to have arms. Furthermore, and somewhat related is the ability to use arms to protect against tyranny. The second amendment clearly goes beyond supporting the right of citizens to organize militia, though it specifically mentions that the existence of such militia requires the right to keep and bear arms. This is hardly the only reason for the right to keep and bear arms, and certainly discussions as the Bill of Rights was being constructed demonstrate the intent.
Also, "the right of the people" occurs specifically in the first and fourth amendments. In the contexts of those amendments, especially the fourth, it is clear that this language refers to an individual right. With respect to the first amendment right to peaceably assemble, it wouldn't make sense to say that the whole group would have that right but individuals within could still have that right denied. This part of the first amendment also references the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. While assembly is done as a group and petitioning is typically something that is done with multiple signatories, there is still an individual right to participate in such things and the first amendment doesn't make sense if this is interpreted differently. Additionally, the right to petition protects the right to contact government officials, to lobby, and even to go to court if necessary. This part of the Constitution is what allows individuals and groups to sue the government if their rights are being violated. The fourth amendment definitely is an individual right to be free from illegal search and seizure. It doesn't make sense at all that a collective right to be free from such things would exist, but the government could still conduct illegal searches and seizures against individuals. This sort of reasoning was noted by Justice Scalia when he wrote the majority opinion in DC v. Heller, which specifically dealt with the second amendment. Even the dissenting opinions written by Justices Stevens and Breyer agreed that an individual right exists, though Stevens argued it only exists in the context of participation with a militia. It isn't in question whether it's an individual right.
The second amendment is an individual right, not a collective right limited to well-regulated militia. The Supreme Court has ruled on this. The restrictions on freedom in this case don't come from the "well-regulated militia" clause, but from strict scrutiny and the obvious truth
Open source weather prediction involves obtaining the data and running a numerical model.
There are a lot of acronyms for weather models in the comments such as the HWRF, HRRR, RAP, and NAM. All of the those models are actually various configurations of the Weather Research & Forecasting (WRF) model. Other models like the GFS, UkMet, and ECMWF are different and aren't based on the WRF. You can download WRF and compile it yourself. It's actually not that hard. The site is http://www2.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users/. WRF is in the public domain and so are the tools that you're most likely to need in order to run WRF.
WRF isn't usually a global model, so you'll need something to provide the initial and lateral boundary conditions for the model. That's usually data from another model. The data from the HRRR, HWRF, RAP, NAM, and GFS are all also in the public domain. The appropriate choice here depends on what you're planning to do with the model, but there's no shortage of public domain data.
The real limiting factor is the availability of computing resources. Current numerical models in their typical configurations can require hundreds of cores to run and each core needs several GB of RAM. High-quality numerical modeling is computationally expensive, which limits who is practically able to do this. But licensing, availability of software, and access to data aren't issues at all.