Just to politely point out that the United States is not the only ScanEagle operator in the region. Several coalition nations including Canada, Poland, Australia and the Netherlands operate ScanEagle platforms and could very well be using them in theater to support operations in Afghanistan. Also, this particular type of drone is not as big of a deal; considering it was originally designed to help fishermen find schools of fish, this isn't exactly the pinnacle of drone technology.
The Boeing Company's engineers, programmers and IT specialists in the Seattle region have been unionized since 1946 (SPEEA - IFPTE Local 2001). However, the notable difference is that this is a large engineering base (~22,000 members) dealing with a single employer; there's no way Boeing would be able to replace that many engineers in the event of a strike. So yes, unionization is possible for large companies where the sheer size and specialization prohibits easy replacement. However, if I'm understanding what the OP is arguing, it would be much harder to set something up in a geographical region like Silicon Valley; unlike a factory, a startup or small development shop could easily pick up and move to another area like Austin or RTP in North Carolina. You would also have to be extremely aggressive in breaking a lot of different parties that normally pride themselves on their independence to ensure that ONLY unionized developers are hired: new college hires, startup companies, venture capitalists, etc. I'm not sure if the tech industry is ready to turn on itself like that. You may be able to do it for highly specialized skillsets, say, a union of senior database administrators or something, but again, this would require a complete culture change that would essentially box out and even blacklist anyone who tries to take up a "union" job without being a member. Not sure if the tech world can handle that.
As the article itself has pointed out, Tesla still hasn't passed the biggest test facing it: whether or not they can mass produce the vehicle. The numbers stated, only 250 out of 15,000 preorders delivered, says everything. Once Tesla gets over that hump, I think then they truly deserve the kudos.
NEXT week, voters in Massachusetts will decide whether to adopt an assisted-suicide law. As a good pro-choice liberal, I ought to support the effort. But as a lifelong disabled person, I cannot.
There are solid arguments in favor. No one will be coerced into taking a poison pill, supporters insist. The “right to die” will apply only to those with six months to live or less. Doctors will take into account the possibility of depression. There is no slippery slope.
Fair enough, but I remain skeptical. There’s been scant evidence of abuse so far in Oregon, Washington and Montana, the three states where physician-assisted death is already legal, but abuse — whether spousal, child or elder — is notoriously underreported, and evidence is difficult to come by. What’s more, Massachusetts registered nearly 20,000 cases of elder abuse in 2010 alone.
My problem, ultimately, is this: I’ve lived so close to death for so long that I know how thin and porous the border between coercion and free choice is, how easy it is for someone to inadvertently influence you to feel devalued and hopeless — to pressure you ever so slightly but decidedly into being “reasonable,” to unburdening others, to “letting go.”
Perhaps, as advocates contend, you can’t understand why anyone would push for assisted-suicide legislation until you’ve seen a loved one suffer. But you also can’t truly conceive of the many subtle forces — invariably well meaning, kindhearted, even gentle, yet as persuasive as a tsunami — that emerge when your physical autonomy is hopelessly compromised.
I was born with a congenital neuromuscular weakness called spinal muscular atrophy. I’ve never walked or stood or had much use of my hands. Roughly half the babies who exhibit symptoms as I did don’t live past age 2. Not only did I survive, but the progression of my disease slowed dramatically when I was about 6 years old, astounding doctors. Today, at nearly 50, I’m a husband, father, journalist and author.
Yet I’m more fragile now than I was in infancy. No longer able to hold a pencil, I’m writing this with a voice-controlled computer. Every swallow of food, sometimes every breath, can become a battle. And a few years ago, when a surgical blunder put me into a coma from septic shock, the doctors seriously questioned whether it was worth trying to extend my life. My existence seemed pretty tenuous anyway, they figured. They didn’t know about my family, my career, my aspirations.
Fortunately, they asked my wife, who knows exactly how I feel. She convinced them to proceed “full code,” as she’s learned to say, to keep me alive using any and all means necessary.
From this I learned how easy it is to be perceived as someone whose quality of life is untenable, even or perhaps especially by doctors. Indeed, I hear it from them all the time — “How have you survived so long? Wow, you must put up with a lot!” — even during routine office visits, when all I’ve asked for is an antibiotic for a sinus infection. Strangers don’t treat me this way, but doctors feel entitled to render judgments and voice their opinions. To them, I suppose, I must represent a failure of their profession, which is shortsighted. I am more than my diagnosis and my prognosis.
This is but one of many invisible forces of coercion. Others include that certain look of exhaustion in a loved one’s eyes, or the way nurses and friends sigh in your presence while you’re zoned out in a hospital bed. All these can cast a dangerous cloud of depression upon even the most cheery of optimists, a situation clinicians
When you read the article, you could replace chemistry with just about any other subject in the curriculum. Why should I waste time studying the writing of dead Englishmen? The intellectual musings of dead Greeks? Why should I waste time learning the dismal science, economics? The history civilizations that disappeared millennia ago? Why should I have to be stuck in a classroom for an entire year wasting time learning things that may at most help me with a Trivial Pursuit game years down the road when I could be studying things that would allow me to make a full contribution to society?
I wonder if you could start using something like this for commercial aircraft. With careful scheduling, you can have aircraft flying in adhoc formations when they are traveling the same corridors.
I seriously doubt that. If large defense contractors wanted to sell an ASAT weapon, they'd try to sell a product they've already developed (more profitable). You know, like the stuff that they've already developed in 1985 (ASM-135 ASAT) or stuff they fired about four years ago (RIM-161 Standard Missile 3).
Wouldn't a civilization advanced enough to pull off an engineering feat like a Dyson Sphere also have advanced their engineering sufficiently to find more efficient power sources?
I can see this in a few steps. You'll start with the larger manufacturers expanding the use of 3D printing and then the shift to smaller and mid-sized manufacturers. Then you may see things like auto-body shops and parts suppliers begin to move into the realm. At least for the next ten, twenty years, it may be more of a Kinkos model where you'll have small, franchised 3D print shops that print up components and parts for you. We may eventually get to home printing, but in order for this to be successful, you'd need 3D printers that can print a much larger variety of goods. However, to produce this broader range, we'll need to figure out a better way to distribute the wider range of raw materials at a cheap cost. If you remember, it took a while for even color inkjets to reach an affordable price.
Which is actually completely misleading. The United States spent $941B in education, approximately 15% of total government spending which is much more than than the defense budget or total defense spending combined with veterans benefits. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/
Maybe that's not enough or maybe it's not spent efficiently, but statements like yours are very misleading. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you are not familiar with how the United States is government. The United States is a highly decentralized country, and education spending is the responsibility of the state, county and municipal governments, not the national Federal government. Therefore, looking at Federal spending on education and complaining that we're not spending enough is unfair because you're ignoring almost half of all government spending in the United States.
You got it slightly wrong. What happens is that the NYSE hires away the top STEM talent, leaving little for software houses, technology companies, manufacturers, etc. Those companies aren't going to be able to match salaries offered by Wall Street.
If people start lobbing nuclear weapons around, then it's a completely different war, and if anyone has any experience using nuclear weapons, it's the United States.
Or maybe you make a public announcements because you're afraid that security experts are going to figure out that it was your company's database that was compromised and would rather preempt it to try and control the message. You know, kind of like how David Schuetz, a third party, figured it out, and then Blue Toad decided to work with him to make the announcement themselves rather than have multiple security experts make announcements about it.
"What STR did manage to pull off with three textbook publishers was this: STR convinced those publishers that two diagrams in their books -- one about the evolution of horses, and the other about archeopteryx -- and the text accompanying them were scientifically incorrect. Notice the claim here: the claim was not that the diagrams were against creationism. The claim was that the diagrams were scientifically incorrect."
"And you know what? Technically, they were right! The diagram above showing the evolution of horses is horribly outdated, and the pictures no longer comport with the current scientific consensus. The text accompanying archeopteryx said archeopteryx is the middle step between dinosaurs and birds, which is also technically incorrect -- archeopteryx is considered a close relative to the true ancestral birds, not itself a true ancestral bird. So the three textbook companies decided that they would drop the two diagrams in the next edition of their textbooks."
"Pay close attention to what actually happened here. What got dropped was two diagrams and the accompanying texts about evolution that were scientifically incorrect -- not the theory of evolution. It is not possible for the textbook publishers to drop the discussion about the theory of evolution, because that would violate MEST guidelines. Further, not even the decision to drop the two diagrams was final, because MEST still had to approve the new textbooks that the publishers proposed to make."
"But of course, STR nutcases thought they scored a huge victory for creationism, and started trumpeting their "victory." By and large, Korean media yawned -- exactly one national newspaper (and a relatively minor one at that) covered the story, and even that story made it quite clear that all that got dropped were diagrams. But the Nature magazine decided to run with the story, with a sensational headline that read: "South Korea surrenders to creationist demands," and here we are -- Korea is branded as a dumb country that doesn't believe in evolution."
Basically, it didn't become a problem until foreigners misunderstood what happened and trumpeted it as the beginning of creationism in Korea. The Korean government responded not because of creeping creationism but to save face in front of the international community. If anything, this whole misunderstanding may in fact work in favor of creationists in Korea because now it has drawn attention to what had been a fringe, ignored cause from other creationist movements overseas.
There was an interesting study conducted built around the recent research on Eastern and Western cognition. People were initially "primed" with a series of photos relating to one culture or the other. For example, people from East Asia who had previous exposure to Western society were shown pictures of cowboys and the Statue of Liberty while Westerners who had experience working with East Asians were shown images representing Eastern culture like pagodas and pandas. They were then immediately provided with a series of exercises that had been previously developed to examine the cognitive approach. By "priming" individuals, the researchers found that temporarily, they would think like the culture they were primed with instead of the default approach they normally rely upon. It shows that while we may be trained in one way or another by our culture, we are by no means limited to thinking that way.
It's been tried but no one is interested. In 2001, Boeing pitched the idea of a near-supersonic aircraft that would travel Mach 0.98 with the fuel efficiency similar to existing aircraft at the time. However, airlines balked at it, saying that they were more interested increased fuel efficiency and lower operating costs instead. Therefore, Boeing scrapped the development for their Sonic Cruiser and used the technology to design the B787 Dreamliner instead.
The problem with talks about competition is this: in order to trigger the sort of competition that caused Comcast to make this move is that you need someone to make the massive infrastructure investment necessary to lay the fiber, build the system, etc. Even if you freed up a market, there are not a lot of investors who have the money and experience. Assuming you find an investor, there are probably only a limited number of markets that have the sufficient population density to make it a profitable venture. That's why Verizon FIOS did a limited rollout: the capital costs are so high that there are only a few markets where they could make this work. Even if you did something like force Verizon to allow competitors onto its fiber, that would serve to only further disincentivize them to aggressively expand their network. So unless you find an investor willing to take such a risk or unless a new, disruptive technology is deployed that can bypass the infrastructure costs, it doesn't solve the problem.
Personally, I too am irritated with all the excess of human interest stories, especially in the case of American Ninja Warrior where I'm sure they have PLENTY of footage to fill up the time.
However, the reason they did it is probably for the same reason that NBC adds human interest stories to the Olympics: because people want them. Believe it or not, most Americans actually do want the human interest stories to help humanize athletes. Otherwise, it's people watching a whole slew of sports that they barely understand. I'm not saying that this is a good thing, but this is why it happens. People don't enjoy watching just straight feeds of raw sporting footage.
Yeah, you know, the craziest thing about high tech is the Silicon Valley model, which sort of became dominant in the U.S., replaced the model where IT people used to be groomed and trained from within. And the Silicon Valley model of hiring just in time for what you need came about largely because they were able to poach talent away from these bigger companies that had spent a lot of time training and developing people.
The implication is that the Silicon Valley approach to personnel management helped destroy the traditional system, and it makes a lot of sense when you talk with people who work in the industry. Traditionally, companies would train and develop college hires and employees because they could reasonably expect their employees to stay with them for a set period of time, guaranteeing an ROI on their investment. However, many of these new start ups basically came in throwing around money and stock options, stealing people groomed by these companies. Even employees who would be required to pay back tuition and training costs would still make the jump because the poaching firm would pay for it. The companies that developed these employees then have incentive to give up on the practice and resort to the same sort of poaching.
When I talk with college hires before the floor fell beneath the economy, I saw that mentality: I'll go work for X firm long enough to get training from them and then jump ship to go make big money in start ups or consultancies. If you're a large firm, why would you invest in grooming employees if this is the mentality that the best and brightest are embracing? If the pool is ready to jump ship for the next big salary bump, why should you pay for expensive training and development? Only problem is that we've now begun to exhaust the pool of experienced employees and the "shortage" emerges.
One would think that organizations as large as NWF and ACS have their own in-house legal teams as well as powerful law firms on retainer who, just because of the level of money they operate with, are used to battling much larger and more dangerous legal threats than these jokers. Carreon may have just picked a fight with entities possessing legal firepower and political capital far beyond what he's capable of battling against, especially for a bs case like this.
"Domestic proliferation isn’t the same as domestic spying, however. Most — if not all — of these military bases would make poor surveillance centers. Many of the locations are isolated, far from civilian populations. Almost half of the bases on the map work only with the relatively small Raven and Shadow drones; their limited range and endurance make them imperfect spying tools, at best. It’s safe to assume that most of the bases are just used for military training."
In summary, these bases are for storing and training with drones and are poorly situated for domestic surveillance. That is, unless the military is worried about a moose uprising.
A lot of the discussion here seems to be focused on the fear that a failed explosion is going to rain fire down upon local communities or some other fear and terror, but the real issue driving all the talk about insurance is the payload itself. The real concern is whether or not: a) will my satellite make it into space without being destroyed and b) when it gets to space, will the rocket do what it claims and put it into proper orbit? When you consider that these satellites cost hundreds of millions of dollars, take years to build and delay or loss can make or break a company, any prudent businessman would want to make sure that they have some kind of protection (insurance) to mitigate any potential losses. This is doubly true for a company that doesn't have an established track record for successful launches or has proven that it can, for the most part, make you whole if they screw up the launch.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to politely point out that the United States is not the only ScanEagle operator in the region. Several coalition nations including Canada, Poland, Australia and the Netherlands operate ScanEagle platforms and could very well be using them in theater to support operations in Afghanistan. Also, this particular type of drone is not as big of a deal; considering it was originally designed to help fishermen find schools of fish, this isn't exactly the pinnacle of drone technology.
Honestly though, no different than an air strike from an F-16 or a AC-130. Still dropping death from a long distance away.
If you can figure out a way to convince the Syrian government and rebels to do so, I'm sure we can get you a Nobel Peace Prize for your effort.
The Boeing Company's engineers, programmers and IT specialists in the Seattle region have been unionized since 1946 (SPEEA - IFPTE Local 2001). However, the notable difference is that this is a large engineering base (~22,000 members) dealing with a single employer; there's no way Boeing would be able to replace that many engineers in the event of a strike. So yes, unionization is possible for large companies where the sheer size and specialization prohibits easy replacement. However, if I'm understanding what the OP is arguing, it would be much harder to set something up in a geographical region like Silicon Valley; unlike a factory, a startup or small development shop could easily pick up and move to another area like Austin or RTP in North Carolina. You would also have to be extremely aggressive in breaking a lot of different parties that normally pride themselves on their independence to ensure that ONLY unionized developers are hired: new college hires, startup companies, venture capitalists, etc. I'm not sure if the tech industry is ready to turn on itself like that. You may be able to do it for highly specialized skillsets, say, a union of senior database administrators or something, but again, this would require a complete culture change that would essentially box out and even blacklist anyone who tries to take up a "union" job without being a member. Not sure if the tech world can handle that.
As the article itself has pointed out, Tesla still hasn't passed the biggest test facing it: whether or not they can mass produce the vehicle. The numbers stated, only 250 out of 15,000 preorders delivered, says everything. Once Tesla gets over that hump, I think then they truly deserve the kudos.
I'm neutral on the issue, but I think it's worth looking at an alternate view on the issue: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/opinion/suicide-by-choice-not-so-fast.html (Pay Wall)
NEXT week, voters in Massachusetts will decide whether to adopt an assisted-suicide law. As a good pro-choice liberal, I ought to support the effort. But as a lifelong disabled person, I cannot.
There are solid arguments in favor. No one will be coerced into taking a poison pill, supporters insist. The “right to die” will apply only to those with six months to live or less. Doctors will take into account the possibility of depression. There is no slippery slope.
Fair enough, but I remain skeptical. There’s been scant evidence of abuse so far in Oregon, Washington and Montana, the three states where physician-assisted death is already legal, but abuse — whether spousal, child or elder — is notoriously underreported, and evidence is difficult to come by. What’s more, Massachusetts registered nearly 20,000 cases of elder abuse in 2010 alone.
My problem, ultimately, is this: I’ve lived so close to death for so long that I know how thin and porous the border between coercion and free choice is, how easy it is for someone to inadvertently influence you to feel devalued and hopeless — to pressure you ever so slightly but decidedly into being “reasonable,” to unburdening others, to “letting go.”
Perhaps, as advocates contend, you can’t understand why anyone would push for assisted-suicide legislation until you’ve seen a loved one suffer. But you also can’t truly conceive of the many subtle forces — invariably well meaning, kindhearted, even gentle, yet as persuasive as a tsunami — that emerge when your physical autonomy is hopelessly compromised.
I was born with a congenital neuromuscular weakness called spinal muscular atrophy. I’ve never walked or stood or had much use of my hands. Roughly half the babies who exhibit symptoms as I did don’t live past age 2. Not only did I survive, but the progression of my disease slowed dramatically when I was about 6 years old, astounding doctors. Today, at nearly 50, I’m a husband, father, journalist and author.
Yet I’m more fragile now than I was in infancy. No longer able to hold a pencil, I’m writing this with a voice-controlled computer. Every swallow of food, sometimes every breath, can become a battle. And a few years ago, when a surgical blunder put me into a coma from septic shock, the doctors seriously questioned whether it was worth trying to extend my life. My existence seemed pretty tenuous anyway, they figured. They didn’t know about my family, my career, my aspirations.
Fortunately, they asked my wife, who knows exactly how I feel. She convinced them to proceed “full code,” as she’s learned to say, to keep me alive using any and all means necessary.
From this I learned how easy it is to be perceived as someone whose quality of life is untenable, even or perhaps especially by doctors. Indeed, I hear it from them all the time — “How have you survived so long? Wow, you must put up with a lot!” — even during routine office visits, when all I’ve asked for is an antibiotic for a sinus infection. Strangers don’t treat me this way, but doctors feel entitled to render judgments and voice their opinions. To them, I suppose, I must represent a failure of their profession, which is shortsighted. I am more than my diagnosis and my prognosis.
This is but one of many invisible forces of coercion. Others include that certain look of exhaustion in a loved one’s eyes, or the way nurses and friends sigh in your presence while you’re zoned out in a hospital bed. All these can cast a dangerous cloud of depression upon even the most cheery of optimists, a situation clinicians
When you read the article, you could replace chemistry with just about any other subject in the curriculum. Why should I waste time studying the writing of dead Englishmen? The intellectual musings of dead Greeks? Why should I waste time learning the dismal science, economics? The history civilizations that disappeared millennia ago? Why should I have to be stuck in a classroom for an entire year wasting time learning things that may at most help me with a Trivial Pursuit game years down the road when I could be studying things that would allow me to make a full contribution to society?
I wonder if you could start using something like this for commercial aircraft. With careful scheduling, you can have aircraft flying in adhoc formations when they are traveling the same corridors.
I seriously doubt that. If large defense contractors wanted to sell an ASAT weapon, they'd try to sell a product they've already developed (more profitable). You know, like the stuff that they've already developed in 1985 (ASM-135 ASAT) or stuff they fired about four years ago (RIM-161 Standard Missile 3).
Wouldn't a civilization advanced enough to pull off an engineering feat like a Dyson Sphere also have advanced their engineering sufficiently to find more efficient power sources?
I can see this in a few steps. You'll start with the larger manufacturers expanding the use of 3D printing and then the shift to smaller and mid-sized manufacturers. Then you may see things like auto-body shops and parts suppliers begin to move into the realm. At least for the next ten, twenty years, it may be more of a Kinkos model where you'll have small, franchised 3D print shops that print up components and parts for you. We may eventually get to home printing, but in order for this to be successful, you'd need 3D printers that can print a much larger variety of goods. However, to produce this broader range, we'll need to figure out a better way to distribute the wider range of raw materials at a cheap cost. If you remember, it took a while for even color inkjets to reach an affordable price.
Which is actually completely misleading. The United States spent $941B in education, approximately 15% of total government spending which is much more than than the defense budget or total defense spending combined with veterans benefits. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/ Maybe that's not enough or maybe it's not spent efficiently, but statements like yours are very misleading. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you are not familiar with how the United States is government. The United States is a highly decentralized country, and education spending is the responsibility of the state, county and municipal governments, not the national Federal government. Therefore, looking at Federal spending on education and complaining that we're not spending enough is unfair because you're ignoring almost half of all government spending in the United States.
You got it slightly wrong. What happens is that the NYSE hires away the top STEM talent, leaving little for software houses, technology companies, manufacturers, etc. Those companies aren't going to be able to match salaries offered by Wall Street.
If people start lobbing nuclear weapons around, then it's a completely different war, and if anyone has any experience using nuclear weapons, it's the United States.
Or maybe you make a public announcements because you're afraid that security experts are going to figure out that it was your company's database that was compromised and would rather preempt it to try and control the message. You know, kind of like how David Schuetz, a third party, figured it out, and then Blue Toad decided to work with him to make the announcement themselves rather than have multiple security experts make announcements about it.
I didn't realize until now that the link wasn't posted. Give credit to where credit is due.
http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2012/07/no-evolution-in-korea.html
I think it's worth reposting this:
No Evolution in Korea?
"What STR did manage to pull off with three textbook publishers was this: STR convinced those publishers that two diagrams in their books -- one about the evolution of horses, and the other about archeopteryx -- and the text accompanying them were scientifically incorrect. Notice the claim here: the claim was not that the diagrams were against creationism. The claim was that the diagrams were scientifically incorrect."
"And you know what? Technically, they were right! The diagram above showing the evolution of horses is horribly outdated, and the pictures no longer comport with the current scientific consensus. The text accompanying archeopteryx said archeopteryx is the middle step between dinosaurs and birds, which is also technically incorrect -- archeopteryx is considered a close relative to the true ancestral birds, not itself a true ancestral bird. So the three textbook companies decided that they would drop the two diagrams in the next edition of their textbooks."
"Pay close attention to what actually happened here. What got dropped was two diagrams and the accompanying texts about evolution that were scientifically incorrect -- not the theory of evolution. It is not possible for the textbook publishers to drop the discussion about the theory of evolution, because that would violate MEST guidelines. Further, not even the decision to drop the two diagrams was final, because MEST still had to approve the new textbooks that the publishers proposed to make."
"But of course, STR nutcases thought they scored a huge victory for creationism, and started trumpeting their "victory." By and large, Korean media yawned -- exactly one national newspaper (and a relatively minor one at that) covered the story, and even that story made it quite clear that all that got dropped were diagrams. But the Nature magazine decided to run with the story, with a sensational headline that read: "South Korea surrenders to creationist demands," and here we are -- Korea is branded as a dumb country that doesn't believe in evolution."
Basically, it didn't become a problem until foreigners misunderstood what happened and trumpeted it as the beginning of creationism in Korea. The Korean government responded not because of creeping creationism but to save face in front of the international community. If anything, this whole misunderstanding may in fact work in favor of creationists in Korea because now it has drawn attention to what had been a fringe, ignored cause from other creationist movements overseas.
There was an interesting study conducted built around the recent research on Eastern and Western cognition. People were initially "primed" with a series of photos relating to one culture or the other. For example, people from East Asia who had previous exposure to Western society were shown pictures of cowboys and the Statue of Liberty while Westerners who had experience working with East Asians were shown images representing Eastern culture like pagodas and pandas. They were then immediately provided with a series of exercises that had been previously developed to examine the cognitive approach. By "priming" individuals, the researchers found that temporarily, they would think like the culture they were primed with instead of the default approach they normally rely upon. It shows that while we may be trained in one way or another by our culture, we are by no means limited to thinking that way.
It's been tried but no one is interested. In 2001, Boeing pitched the idea of a near-supersonic aircraft that would travel Mach 0.98 with the fuel efficiency similar to existing aircraft at the time. However, airlines balked at it, saying that they were more interested increased fuel efficiency and lower operating costs instead. Therefore, Boeing scrapped the development for their Sonic Cruiser and used the technology to design the B787 Dreamliner instead.
The problem with talks about competition is this: in order to trigger the sort of competition that caused Comcast to make this move is that you need someone to make the massive infrastructure investment necessary to lay the fiber, build the system, etc. Even if you freed up a market, there are not a lot of investors who have the money and experience. Assuming you find an investor, there are probably only a limited number of markets that have the sufficient population density to make it a profitable venture. That's why Verizon FIOS did a limited rollout: the capital costs are so high that there are only a few markets where they could make this work. Even if you did something like force Verizon to allow competitors onto its fiber, that would serve to only further disincentivize them to aggressively expand their network. So unless you find an investor willing to take such a risk or unless a new, disruptive technology is deployed that can bypass the infrastructure costs, it doesn't solve the problem.
Personally, I too am irritated with all the excess of human interest stories, especially in the case of American Ninja Warrior where I'm sure they have PLENTY of footage to fill up the time.
However, the reason they did it is probably for the same reason that NBC adds human interest stories to the Olympics: because people want them. Believe it or not, most Americans actually do want the human interest stories to help humanize athletes. Otherwise, it's people watching a whole slew of sports that they barely understand. I'm not saying that this is a good thing, but this is why it happens. People don't enjoy watching just straight feeds of raw sporting footage.
An interesting comment from the linked article:
Yeah, you know, the craziest thing about high tech is the Silicon Valley model, which sort of became dominant in the U.S., replaced the model where IT people used to be groomed and trained from within. And the Silicon Valley model of hiring just in time for what you need came about largely because they were able to poach talent away from these bigger companies that had spent a lot of time training and developing people.
The implication is that the Silicon Valley approach to personnel management helped destroy the traditional system, and it makes a lot of sense when you talk with people who work in the industry. Traditionally, companies would train and develop college hires and employees because they could reasonably expect their employees to stay with them for a set period of time, guaranteeing an ROI on their investment. However, many of these new start ups basically came in throwing around money and stock options, stealing people groomed by these companies. Even employees who would be required to pay back tuition and training costs would still make the jump because the poaching firm would pay for it. The companies that developed these employees then have incentive to give up on the practice and resort to the same sort of poaching.
When I talk with college hires before the floor fell beneath the economy, I saw that mentality: I'll go work for X firm long enough to get training from them and then jump ship to go make big money in start ups or consultancies. If you're a large firm, why would you invest in grooming employees if this is the mentality that the best and brightest are embracing? If the pool is ready to jump ship for the next big salary bump, why should you pay for expensive training and development? Only problem is that we've now begun to exhaust the pool of experienced employees and the "shortage" emerges.
One would think that organizations as large as NWF and ACS have their own in-house legal teams as well as powerful law firms on retainer who, just because of the level of money they operate with, are used to battling much larger and more dangerous legal threats than these jokers. Carreon may have just picked a fight with entities possessing legal firepower and political capital far beyond what he's capable of battling against, especially for a bs case like this.
From the article:
"Domestic proliferation isn’t the same as domestic spying, however. Most — if not all — of these military bases would make poor surveillance centers. Many of the locations are isolated, far from civilian populations. Almost half of the bases on the map work only with the relatively small Raven and Shadow drones; their limited range and endurance make them imperfect spying tools, at best. It’s safe to assume that most of the bases are just used for military training."
In summary, these bases are for storing and training with drones and are poorly situated for domestic surveillance. That is, unless the military is worried about a moose uprising.
A lot of the discussion here seems to be focused on the fear that a failed explosion is going to rain fire down upon local communities or some other fear and terror, but the real issue driving all the talk about insurance is the payload itself. The real concern is whether or not: a) will my satellite make it into space without being destroyed and b) when it gets to space, will the rocket do what it claims and put it into proper orbit? When you consider that these satellites cost hundreds of millions of dollars, take years to build and delay or loss can make or break a company, any prudent businessman would want to make sure that they have some kind of protection (insurance) to mitigate any potential losses. This is doubly true for a company that doesn't have an established track record for successful launches or has proven that it can, for the most part, make you whole if they screw up the launch.