Citizen science is awesome. Science is one of the few things things that humans have created that creates real hope our species can go far. Science should be as accessible as possible to individuals, whether or not they want to participate in academics or formal research efforts. That being said, I think that that "citizen science" is about viable as "citizen ASIC design". Not much low hanging fruit for an individual in his garage at this point.
The industries profits are fairly reasonable, if I remember. I don't have a citation, but I think that the profit margins in the pharmaceutical industry aren't really all that high. Despite the Shkreli's of the world, drug makes are generally not lighting cuban cigars with gold plated yachts. Modern drugs require expensive facilities, well-paid scientists, and very exacting manufacturing facilities. Oh, and only 1 out of 10 actually makes money.
I really like this guy's stuff. In terms of being a "futurist" he's the real deal. He, and others, were thinking about these sorts of things well before sci-fi writers were processing these concepts into stories that normal folk could actually digest. I'd bet money that some fraction of his predictions will actually come to pass. However, his timing is off. Way off. Centuries off.
By now, he was predicting that we'd be uploading our consciousnesses into the net, and everyone would be near-immortal due to nanotechnology. We'll get there..... in 500-1000 years. Same goes for this. UBI in two decades? Sorry, my prediction is that we'll still be burning gasoline and natural gas and most governmental and economic systems will look almost exactly like they do now. 100 years is more likely for UBI.
I agree with you that our visa system is messed up. We benefit in the long run if we can bring the best and brightest from abroad into this country, and keep them here permanently. We should acknowledge that this will actually make life a tad harder for the bright people already here, due to increased competition. It's worth it in the long run.
However, I also detect an undertone of this: "Gee, I would really like to have top notch people in the top 5% of the human population in terms of technical skills, But I want to pay them barely enough to be in the middle class." Sorry, the business types can wish for this all they want. Not gonna happen. Top skills demand either top dollar or other sweet perks that make up for a lower salary. Get over it, and fork out the pay necessary to hire the skills you need. Or make due with lower skilled workers and pay them less. Pick one.
Meh. Hyperbole much? In reality, rights aren't absolute. We've actually got pretty darn good privacy freedoms in the USA. It's just not an absolute right to privacy under ANY situation. Same for the right to free speech. Great freedom of speech, just not quite ANY speech in ANY situation. Same goes for freedom to bear arms, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, life, liberty happiness and all the rest. Not saying our country is perfect. Far from it. Lots of work to be done. We should call out problems when we see it. However, just cause something's less than perfect doesn't mean it's total crap. Lots of people on this forum tend to be binary - something is either perfect or worthless. Sorry, life is rarely black and white.
Meh. Why so mad at Facebook and Zuckerberg? Anyone who bothers to think about Facebook with more than 3 neurons firing effectively will see it for what it is. First- kudos to Zuckerberg for leading the development of BY FAR the most successful socializing service on the internet. We're called "social animals" for a reason. Facebook is extremely effective at meeting a deep-seated human need for connection. Second - it doesn't charge users, so it's got to make money some other way. Companies don't run on air, moisture and dreams, they run on dollars. Third - anyone who has even the most RUDIMENTARY understanding of the internet would realize that Facebook is using your data to sell ads, and that anything posted there might as well be considered public domain.
Google self-driving cars run literally millions of miles and the worst accident they get into is one of their cars getting rear-ended by somebody else. Uber gets into the game, and 3 months later they've killed someone. Can't say I'm surprised. Google is generally a responsible company. Uber uses a "break things, move fast, skirt the laws and let someone else pick up the wreckage" business model. Expect quite a bit more of this. I'm not opposed to rapid development of new tech like this. Sometimes, accidents will happen. 100% safety isn't a physical possibility. It's just that nobody should be surprised when outfits like Uber rack up an impressive body count.
What Trump says he will do in the future is always going to be better than what Obama's real accomplishments. On paper. Maybe. If all those discredited assumptions and flat-out fabrications actually come to pass. Which they will. Totally. Trust him. Only he can fix our problems. It'll be yuge.
Obamacare quadrupled your wife's health insurance? Are you sure that's not hyperbole? A number pretty close to 60% increase in premiums is the typical number. Of course, the ACA also required that the insurance packages provide more benefits. Better insurance, higher costs. We can debate the merits elsewhere, but I'd be interested to hear details about the 4x increase.
Actually, the predictive ability of a scientific field is an excellent measure of it's maturity. Biology, weather modeling, certain fields of physics and chemistry are still very young and immature. Lots of things fundamental things are not understood yet and these branches of science can't reliably predict the detailed behavior of things. As a field develops, the predictive capability grows, and can eventually predict the future with great precision. Usually, the mature scientific fields spawn a similarly related engineering field. Example: climate science is not a mature field. It cant predict global weather with precision yet. There is no field called "weather engineering". One the other hand, electronic, mechanical and thermal physics are so precisely developed that we have these applied scientist types called "mechanical, aerospace and electrical engineers" who can design a huge commercial jetliner, with literally over a million parts, and predict how it will fly and operate with incredible precision before it even leaves the ground.
Russia deserves every ounce of antipathy from the Western world that it gets. I have no beef with ordinary Russians at all. However, their government is autocratic, kleptocratic, violent, crafty and sneaky. Russia can't stand toe-to-toe with the modern Western world, and they can't bring themselves to admit that it's a superior system, so they pride themselves on screwing with Western countries in just about any underhanded way they can get away with. Russia has absolutely no ambition to make the world a better place.
Russia has a long history of designing the "biggest, longest, most powerful" weapons. Occasionally, they actually try to build or prototype them. Usually they make a big bang and then rot. They pretty much always turn out to be too expensive to maintain, or too impractical to use effectively, or a logistical nightmare, or have some other critical flaw. I would be surprised if this ever gets fielded.
Won't be too long. Eventually, yes. It will probably get down to that. Kind of like seat belts. The science and engineering eventually just became overwhelming in terms of how effective they were. Eventually, society decided to require them. A lot of libertarian types thought it was the end of the world. Life went on and seat belts were a benefit, and not an option.
The science behind AGW will eventually build up to the point that so much of humanity recognizes the danger that society will move to require that people deal with it. At that point, it won't be optional.
Some things just..... aren't...... optional.
In your example, the robot doesn't care if it gets blown up. Therefore, you reason that the people in charge will not care much about civilian casualties. Nothing could be further from the truth. The chain of command will be EXTRA careful to avoid casualties like that. They'll program the robot to be very conservative about firing on anyone who might be a civilian. Robot gets blown up? "Meh, we're out 150 kilodollars. No biggie. Nothing is more effective at swelling the enemy ranks than a few well-publicized atrocities. Let's avoid those at all costs."
This is already in play in US drones. From what I understand, there are strict limits to the number of civilian casualties that are acceptable in a drone operation. If there's any chance that number will be surpassed, the military will fly the drone home, or just nose-dive it into a patch of empty land and destroy it. Yes, any number of civilian deaths above zero is bad. But, from what I read, drone operations kill FAR fewer civilians than similar human-flown missions. Let's shoot for zero deaths in the long-run, but in the meantime how about using the option that's least-civilian-killy?
Robots can be programmed to be far less trigger-happy than a fresh, jittery 19 year old marine or a 34 year old veteran with several tours of duty under his belt who just wants to make it back alive.
There should be more of this in the US. Lots more. In fact, we should reinstate bi-yearly air raid drills for schools and businesses. For everyone within 100 miles of a strategically important target. That would be 95% of the population I bet. Remember that the nukes are wayyyyyy more powerful nowadays? It needs to be made perfectly clear to the US population that if our great leader pops his top and starts a nuclear confrontation, people have a 10% chance of survival, and that's only IF they manage to get to a shelter.
A ton of people in this country have forgotten that the world is connected. They think that they can just ignore the rest of the world and they will be fine. Personally, I think that a lot of this has to do with the fact that WW2 is fading into the rearview mirror. Up until the last decade, there were a lot of vets from that war still around. People who were actually in Japan after the bombs and saw it with their own eyes. Lots of people who lost friends and family members fighting overseas. The population generally understood that what happens on the other side of the planet can come home to roost on their own doorsteps. We've largely forgotten this, and we elected an unstable, unqualified, angry leader and put him in charge of the nuclear arsenal. Because hey, we don't really believe anymore that what happens on the other side of the world can actually impinge on our lives in any real way.
The entire US population needs a brutal reminder of how small the world actually has become. We all ought to spend some time practicing the soothing art of putting our heads between our legs and kissing our asses goodbye. Let all those conservative rural parents and grandparents spend some time answering awkward questions from the kids about the air raids drills they get at school.
This might draw a lot of hate, but Mac comes pretty close to what you want. Old mac, swap to new mac. Time machine actually works as advertised. It's like cutting and pasting your environment into the new machine.
If you're sensitive to a few hundred bucks, then mac isn't for you. For me, I spend literally thousands of hours in front of my machines. The few extra hundred bucks my imac cost were well worth it. SSD swap-in and it's very snappy.
Microcenter basically IS what radio shack used to be, to a very large extent.
Yes, way way incredibly wayyyy back they were an actual electronic component shop, but that's back in the stone ages. Microcenter has some of that stuff too.
So many people here hating the cops. I'm not a knee-jerk cop supporter. Sometimes cops go bad, and those should be treated as the criminals they are. Cops don't get a pass on truly bad behavior.
That being said. People need to take a deep breath and look at policing in the US as a profession.
Put yourself in this position. Here's your job. When someone is smeared in their own hepatits-ridden feces and walking down the middle of the highway with a shotgun you get called to deal with it. When there's a huge brawl at the local bar and nobody knows how many guns there are in the seething crowd, you get called to deal with it. Unsure the best approach? Too bad, everyone expects you to deal with it and you can't screw up in any way at all. Every domestic disturbance in the worst section of town, you get to deal with it. Drugs flooding the neighborhoods along with gangs..... guess who? And you get to work all this out in a country that is SWIMMING in guns. More guns than people. Who has a gun? Who knows? Nobody really does. You certainly don't. But god forbid you shoot anyone. Half the population immediately assumes you're some sort of John Wayne admirer itching to shoot a brown person. Even if you're a minority yourself, you still get the hatred.
Half the population thinks you're corrupt and evil, but they still call you when they are neck deep in the worst situation of their own creation, and expect you to deal with it with the utmost professionalism. Slip up once? You might kill someone, wind up dead yourself, wind up on the front cover of cnn and fox, and your career could be over. For the privilege of this wonderful career? 40k per year plus pension, a bit better once you're a senior officer.
Again, bad behavior doesn't get a pass.
But this swatting situation...... sorry people, reality check here. We live in a country where there are more guns than people. The cops are called to deal with the hairiest, deadliest, toughest situations and they have no choice but to walk into it assuming that everyone is packing. So, no surprise that they're on hair-trigger alert. Occasionally, very rarely, one of them is going to overreact and someone is probably going to die.
Did the cops set up our society this way? Nope. Hundreds of years ago we collectively decided that everyone should be packing. That's just the way it is. But the cops have to deal with it daily.
Sorry, but the serial swatter is to blame for this death, not the police. There will surely be an inquiry and it might be determined that one specific police officer failed to follow procedure under the pressure of the situation, resulting in a civilian death. However, the swatter essentially made a career of weaponizing the police against whoever he didn't like. The blame is squarely on his shoulders, and I very much hope that he gets enough prison time that he's old and tired by the time he gets out.
Ok, I'll bite. Here's my theories.
I'm in the "ultrasonic or electromagnetic attack" camp, but I suspect that a phased-array system is being used to try to focus the energy at the heads of the people while they sleep. Aiming phased arrays is somewhat non-trivial, so the spot of focus isn't perfect and has lots of local minima and maxima. Given the lack of knowledge about the exact insides of the room and what's in the walls, the instigator probably can't control the exact shape of the focused spot even if they completely understand the performance of their device. This explains the range of symptoms. Some consular personnel were hit with maxima in the ears, some on the eyes, some on the brain, etc. etc.
Maybe there's a chemical explanation - something toxic to nerves. But some of the people had concussions. Can a person get a concussion from a chemical? Outside of my expertise....
It'll be interesting to eventually find out who is doing this. I would say that it requires doctorate-level skill in either physics, or mechanical or electrical engineering to do something like this, so we're talking about smart people. But there are a lot of those around nowadays, in lots of parts of the world.
This isn't the work of a first-rate or even second-rate intelligence agency. As far as espionage/sabotage goes, this is super-sloppy work. Who would be so dumb as to try this on US people... and so many times...... one wrong move and the US will get a person in custody, or capture the tricked-out van that's doing this, or intercept a cell phone call, and figure out who's behind it. At that point, if it's sponsored by a country, there will probably be holy hell to pay. A small terrorist group? This seems a bit out of the ability of most terrorist types. Most of them can barely put a simple bomb together properly.
I've got no good theory on who's doing it, but I'd bet a paycheck that the US intelligence agencies already know.
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Citizen science is awesome. Science is one of the few things things that humans have created that creates real hope our species can go far. Science should be as accessible as possible to individuals, whether or not they want to participate in academics or formal research efforts. That being said, I think that that "citizen science" is about viable as "citizen ASIC design". Not much low hanging fruit for an individual in his garage at this point.
The industries profits are fairly reasonable, if I remember. I don't have a citation, but I think that the profit margins in the pharmaceutical industry aren't really all that high. Despite the Shkreli's of the world, drug makes are generally not lighting cuban cigars with gold plated yachts. Modern drugs require expensive facilities, well-paid scientists, and very exacting manufacturing facilities. Oh, and only 1 out of 10 actually makes money.
I really like this guy's stuff. In terms of being a "futurist" he's the real deal. He, and others, were thinking about these sorts of things well before sci-fi writers were processing these concepts into stories that normal folk could actually digest. I'd bet money that some fraction of his predictions will actually come to pass. However, his timing is off. Way off. Centuries off.
By now, he was predicting that we'd be uploading our consciousnesses into the net, and everyone would be near-immortal due to nanotechnology. We'll get there..... in 500-1000 years. Same goes for this. UBI in two decades? Sorry, my prediction is that we'll still be burning gasoline and natural gas and most governmental and economic systems will look almost exactly like they do now. 100 years is more likely for UBI.
I agree with you that our visa system is messed up. We benefit in the long run if we can bring the best and brightest from abroad into this country, and keep them here permanently. We should acknowledge that this will actually make life a tad harder for the bright people already here, due to increased competition. It's worth it in the long run.
However, I also detect an undertone of this: "Gee, I would really like to have top notch people in the top 5% of the human population in terms of technical skills, But I want to pay them barely enough to be in the middle class." Sorry, the business types can wish for this all they want. Not gonna happen. Top skills demand either top dollar or other sweet perks that make up for a lower salary. Get over it, and fork out the pay necessary to hire the skills you need. Or make due with lower skilled workers and pay them less. Pick one.
Meh. Hyperbole much? In reality, rights aren't absolute. We've actually got pretty darn good privacy freedoms in the USA. It's just not an absolute right to privacy under ANY situation. Same for the right to free speech. Great freedom of speech, just not quite ANY speech in ANY situation. Same goes for freedom to bear arms, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, life, liberty happiness and all the rest. Not saying our country is perfect. Far from it. Lots of work to be done. We should call out problems when we see it. However, just cause something's less than perfect doesn't mean it's total crap. Lots of people on this forum tend to be binary - something is either perfect or worthless. Sorry, life is rarely black and white.
Meh. Why so mad at Facebook and Zuckerberg? Anyone who bothers to think about Facebook with more than 3 neurons firing effectively will see it for what it is. First- kudos to Zuckerberg for leading the development of BY FAR the most successful socializing service on the internet. We're called "social animals" for a reason. Facebook is extremely effective at meeting a deep-seated human need for connection. Second - it doesn't charge users, so it's got to make money some other way. Companies don't run on air, moisture and dreams, they run on dollars. Third - anyone who has even the most RUDIMENTARY understanding of the internet would realize that Facebook is using your data to sell ads, and that anything posted there might as well be considered public domain.
Google self-driving cars run literally millions of miles and the worst accident they get into is one of their cars getting rear-ended by somebody else. Uber gets into the game, and 3 months later they've killed someone. Can't say I'm surprised. Google is generally a responsible company. Uber uses a "break things, move fast, skirt the laws and let someone else pick up the wreckage" business model. Expect quite a bit more of this. I'm not opposed to rapid development of new tech like this. Sometimes, accidents will happen. 100% safety isn't a physical possibility. It's just that nobody should be surprised when outfits like Uber rack up an impressive body count.
What Trump says he will do in the future is always going to be better than what Obama's real accomplishments. On paper. Maybe. If all those discredited assumptions and flat-out fabrications actually come to pass. Which they will. Totally. Trust him. Only he can fix our problems. It'll be yuge.
Obamacare quadrupled your wife's health insurance? Are you sure that's not hyperbole? A number pretty close to 60% increase in premiums is the typical number. Of course, the ACA also required that the insurance packages provide more benefits. Better insurance, higher costs. We can debate the merits elsewhere, but I'd be interested to hear details about the 4x increase.
Actually, the predictive ability of a scientific field is an excellent measure of it's maturity. Biology, weather modeling, certain fields of physics and chemistry are still very young and immature. Lots of things fundamental things are not understood yet and these branches of science can't reliably predict the detailed behavior of things. As a field develops, the predictive capability grows, and can eventually predict the future with great precision. Usually, the mature scientific fields spawn a similarly related engineering field. Example: climate science is not a mature field. It cant predict global weather with precision yet. There is no field called "weather engineering". One the other hand, electronic, mechanical and thermal physics are so precisely developed that we have these applied scientist types called "mechanical, aerospace and electrical engineers" who can design a huge commercial jetliner, with literally over a million parts, and predict how it will fly and operate with incredible precision before it even leaves the ground.
Russia deserves every ounce of antipathy from the Western world that it gets. I have no beef with ordinary Russians at all. However, their government is autocratic, kleptocratic, violent, crafty and sneaky. Russia can't stand toe-to-toe with the modern Western world, and they can't bring themselves to admit that it's a superior system, so they pride themselves on screwing with Western countries in just about any underhanded way they can get away with. Russia has absolutely no ambition to make the world a better place.
Russia has a long history of designing the "biggest, longest, most powerful" weapons. Occasionally, they actually try to build or prototype them. Usually they make a big bang and then rot. They pretty much always turn out to be too expensive to maintain, or too impractical to use effectively, or a logistical nightmare, or have some other critical flaw. I would be surprised if this ever gets fielded.
Won't be too long. Eventually, yes. It will probably get down to that. Kind of like seat belts. The science and engineering eventually just became overwhelming in terms of how effective they were. Eventually, society decided to require them. A lot of libertarian types thought it was the end of the world. Life went on and seat belts were a benefit, and not an option. The science behind AGW will eventually build up to the point that so much of humanity recognizes the danger that society will move to require that people deal with it. At that point, it won't be optional. Some things just..... aren't...... optional.
In your example, the robot doesn't care if it gets blown up. Therefore, you reason that the people in charge will not care much about civilian casualties. Nothing could be further from the truth. The chain of command will be EXTRA careful to avoid casualties like that. They'll program the robot to be very conservative about firing on anyone who might be a civilian. Robot gets blown up? "Meh, we're out 150 kilodollars. No biggie. Nothing is more effective at swelling the enemy ranks than a few well-publicized atrocities. Let's avoid those at all costs." This is already in play in US drones. From what I understand, there are strict limits to the number of civilian casualties that are acceptable in a drone operation. If there's any chance that number will be surpassed, the military will fly the drone home, or just nose-dive it into a patch of empty land and destroy it. Yes, any number of civilian deaths above zero is bad. But, from what I read, drone operations kill FAR fewer civilians than similar human-flown missions. Let's shoot for zero deaths in the long-run, but in the meantime how about using the option that's least-civilian-killy? Robots can be programmed to be far less trigger-happy than a fresh, jittery 19 year old marine or a 34 year old veteran with several tours of duty under his belt who just wants to make it back alive.
There should be more of this in the US. Lots more. In fact, we should reinstate bi-yearly air raid drills for schools and businesses. For everyone within 100 miles of a strategically important target. That would be 95% of the population I bet. Remember that the nukes are wayyyyyy more powerful nowadays? It needs to be made perfectly clear to the US population that if our great leader pops his top and starts a nuclear confrontation, people have a 10% chance of survival, and that's only IF they manage to get to a shelter. A ton of people in this country have forgotten that the world is connected. They think that they can just ignore the rest of the world and they will be fine. Personally, I think that a lot of this has to do with the fact that WW2 is fading into the rearview mirror. Up until the last decade, there were a lot of vets from that war still around. People who were actually in Japan after the bombs and saw it with their own eyes. Lots of people who lost friends and family members fighting overseas. The population generally understood that what happens on the other side of the planet can come home to roost on their own doorsteps. We've largely forgotten this, and we elected an unstable, unqualified, angry leader and put him in charge of the nuclear arsenal. Because hey, we don't really believe anymore that what happens on the other side of the world can actually impinge on our lives in any real way. The entire US population needs a brutal reminder of how small the world actually has become. We all ought to spend some time practicing the soothing art of putting our heads between our legs and kissing our asses goodbye. Let all those conservative rural parents and grandparents spend some time answering awkward questions from the kids about the air raids drills they get at school.
This might draw a lot of hate, but Mac comes pretty close to what you want. Old mac, swap to new mac. Time machine actually works as advertised. It's like cutting and pasting your environment into the new machine. If you're sensitive to a few hundred bucks, then mac isn't for you. For me, I spend literally thousands of hours in front of my machines. The few extra hundred bucks my imac cost were well worth it. SSD swap-in and it's very snappy.
Microcenter basically IS what radio shack used to be, to a very large extent. Yes, way way incredibly wayyyy back they were an actual electronic component shop, but that's back in the stone ages. Microcenter has some of that stuff too.
So many people here hating the cops. I'm not a knee-jerk cop supporter. Sometimes cops go bad, and those should be treated as the criminals they are. Cops don't get a pass on truly bad behavior. That being said. People need to take a deep breath and look at policing in the US as a profession. Put yourself in this position. Here's your job. When someone is smeared in their own hepatits-ridden feces and walking down the middle of the highway with a shotgun you get called to deal with it. When there's a huge brawl at the local bar and nobody knows how many guns there are in the seething crowd, you get called to deal with it. Unsure the best approach? Too bad, everyone expects you to deal with it and you can't screw up in any way at all. Every domestic disturbance in the worst section of town, you get to deal with it. Drugs flooding the neighborhoods along with gangs..... guess who? And you get to work all this out in a country that is SWIMMING in guns. More guns than people. Who has a gun? Who knows? Nobody really does. You certainly don't. But god forbid you shoot anyone. Half the population immediately assumes you're some sort of John Wayne admirer itching to shoot a brown person. Even if you're a minority yourself, you still get the hatred. Half the population thinks you're corrupt and evil, but they still call you when they are neck deep in the worst situation of their own creation, and expect you to deal with it with the utmost professionalism. Slip up once? You might kill someone, wind up dead yourself, wind up on the front cover of cnn and fox, and your career could be over. For the privilege of this wonderful career? 40k per year plus pension, a bit better once you're a senior officer. Again, bad behavior doesn't get a pass. But this swatting situation...... sorry people, reality check here. We live in a country where there are more guns than people. The cops are called to deal with the hairiest, deadliest, toughest situations and they have no choice but to walk into it assuming that everyone is packing. So, no surprise that they're on hair-trigger alert. Occasionally, very rarely, one of them is going to overreact and someone is probably going to die. Did the cops set up our society this way? Nope. Hundreds of years ago we collectively decided that everyone should be packing. That's just the way it is. But the cops have to deal with it daily. Sorry, but the serial swatter is to blame for this death, not the police. There will surely be an inquiry and it might be determined that one specific police officer failed to follow procedure under the pressure of the situation, resulting in a civilian death. However, the swatter essentially made a career of weaponizing the police against whoever he didn't like. The blame is squarely on his shoulders, and I very much hope that he gets enough prison time that he's old and tired by the time he gets out.
Ok, I'll bite. Here's my theories. I'm in the "ultrasonic or electromagnetic attack" camp, but I suspect that a phased-array system is being used to try to focus the energy at the heads of the people while they sleep. Aiming phased arrays is somewhat non-trivial, so the spot of focus isn't perfect and has lots of local minima and maxima. Given the lack of knowledge about the exact insides of the room and what's in the walls, the instigator probably can't control the exact shape of the focused spot even if they completely understand the performance of their device. This explains the range of symptoms. Some consular personnel were hit with maxima in the ears, some on the eyes, some on the brain, etc. etc. Maybe there's a chemical explanation - something toxic to nerves. But some of the people had concussions. Can a person get a concussion from a chemical? Outside of my expertise.... It'll be interesting to eventually find out who is doing this. I would say that it requires doctorate-level skill in either physics, or mechanical or electrical engineering to do something like this, so we're talking about smart people. But there are a lot of those around nowadays, in lots of parts of the world. This isn't the work of a first-rate or even second-rate intelligence agency. As far as espionage/sabotage goes, this is super-sloppy work. Who would be so dumb as to try this on US people... and so many times...... one wrong move and the US will get a person in custody, or capture the tricked-out van that's doing this, or intercept a cell phone call, and figure out who's behind it. At that point, if it's sponsored by a country, there will probably be holy hell to pay. A small terrorist group? This seems a bit out of the ability of most terrorist types. Most of them can barely put a simple bomb together properly. I've got no good theory on who's doing it, but I'd bet a paycheck that the US intelligence agencies already know.