I guess "standards" is pushing it a bit - they're approved on a case-by-case basis for experimental use, just like a lot of planes people fly in are.
No, safety standards aren't differentiated for "running published airline routes".
My mistake. Looks like the term is "conducts airplane operations as a commercial operator engaged in intrastate common carriage of persons or property for compensation or hire in air commerce, or as a direct air carrier" (14 CFR 119.21(a))
However, the standards certainly are different for that vs just giving somebody a ride in your plane.
if we accept that these are digital fly by wire aircraft (and they are), they will promptly become $100K creatures if they are required to meet any modern nation's standards for fly by wire aircraft.
Maybe - it remains to be seen how things are standardized. Also, building the first one will likely be expensive, but as with anything aviation-related the prices get more manageable as you scale up.
Presumably they'll just drop them on your doorstep, just like how most people get their other parcels. Unless somebody is home all day long it isn't terribly practical to sign for them.
Well, when you think about it what causes people to be in prison are behavior problems, and the reason that mental problems are, well, problems, is because they tend to cause behavior problems.
I think that better treatment for mental problems is part of the solution. Most people in the US have health plans that don't cover much treatment for mental problems. If you see a psychiatrist chances are that you're going to pay more out of pocket, and be limited to so many visits/etc. If you're an airline pilot and see a psychiatrist then you'll lose your job, so you just tough it up and deal with it (hopefully - apparently the flying public prefers being unaware of their pilots uncontrolled neurosis than being aware of their controlled neurosis, or at least their elected officials think they do).
I think that prisons/asylums/etc really should have the same goals: 1. Contain people who are a danger to themselves/others in a safe place. 2. Get those people into a state where they are no longer a danger to themselves or others.
The methods of treatment and prognosis no doubt will vary between the average mob boss and somebody with severe clinical depression. However, when you get down to the root of it they're basically just people who can't be trusted with the same level of responsibility of just living out in society as the average person.
We do everybody a disservice today with the way we treat both criminals and the insane. The current system doesn't help them at all, and it is costly to taxpayers as well who end up having to deal with the problems and the high expense of locking people up. To me it isn't about being "soft on crime" but treating the root cause of the problem. If a murderer can be treated and let out in three weeks and we can be confident that they won't commit another crime then I don't have a problem with that. If a kid steals a candy bar and there is medical evidence that he'll never be able to go a day without stealing something for the rest of his life even with every treatment available, then lock him up indefinitely until that changes. It isn't about punishments that fit the crime - it is about managing people who aren't capable of managing themselves until they're able to manage themselves again.
Most things on the drone will be spendy, and well packaged. Shoot them down, pawn the goods, rinse, repeat.
Why not just shoot the driver of a UPS truck and drive off with it while you're at it? Oh yeah, the police don't care too much for people shooting at other people or their property...
Good job bad weather only means "wind" instead of you know: rain. And wind substantially lowers the range.
The weather resistance depends on how beefy the thing is - if you're flying below freezing through precipitation or clouds/mist then ice becomes a big problem too.
I don't think that wind should affect range much, unless these things rely on being able to refuel before the return leg (which seems unlikely). A head/tailwind would not affect range at all since it would benefit the aircraft as much as it costs it. A crosswind would reduce range, but if you had your warehouses arranged suitably you might be able to avoid too many crosswind trips. Plus these things probably wouldn't fly very high, so that will tend to reduce the impact of wind.
Holy cow - one pound to lock up a shopping cart? In the US those carts typically require 25 cents.
Oh, and they usually design them so that they don't contain coins at all when they're parked, probably because at one point in time they had the same issue.
Hate to break it to you, but the only aircraft that have to meet the safety standards that Boeing and Airbus meet are those running published airline routes.
The news helicopter flying overhead is regulated to a lower standard. The private jet carrying some CEO across the country is regulated to a lower standard. Larry Elison flying his own personal jet is regulated to an even lower standard still, and the guy buzzing over your house in the plane he built himself is regulated to the lowest standard of all.
That said, there are standards, and the FAA has standards for drones as well. The level of rigor largely depends on: 1. How heavy the plane is (a little RC aircraft might give your kid a cut if it crashed into them, a cessna would squish them like a bug). 2. Whether the operation is recreational or commercial (flying is expensive, so not too many people are put at risk if their free airplane ride is a bit risky - but self-sustaining operations are a different story). 3. Whether a commercial operation involves an airline route (if the CEO is paying for the plane he is riding on, chances are he's going to not be cheap on the maintenance budget - when you just buy a plane ticket you're at the mercy of the megacorp maintaining the plane).
For the most part commercial operations tend to be much safer than flying, and recreational operations tend to be about as safe as riding a motorcycle - more hazardous than a car, but not outside the realm of normal activity. Planes by their very nature tend to be fairly light, so their damage potential for those not in the cabin is actually pretty low when compared to the analogous ground-based activity (cars, trucks, trains, freighters, etc).
I'm sure the FAA would consider this a commercial operation and regulate it accordingly. Right now the regulations are actually so tight that anything but experimental/developmental use is impractical (usually you have to have human operators able to take manual control, observers watching the drone, etc). I imagine that they'll only remove the leash when somebody comes up with a system that is fairly robust. Besides, a drone capable of carrying a package any distance is going to be expensive - you wouldn't just want to be losing them due to failures all the time.
Imagine having a study where you have 400 kids. Half are controls and get no vaccine, and half are experimental and get the vaccine.
However, this isn't just two groups of 200 kids - these are 40 groups of ten kids each. For the first pair of control/experimental groups you check for cancer, for the next one you check for heart damage, for the next one you check for liver damage, and so on.
So, suppose you get to one group and you find that 3 of the 10 experimental kids have been hit by cars, and none of the control kids were. You run the numbers and it turns out that this has greater than 95% significance so you publish a study demonstrating that vaccines cause kids to be run over by cars.
The problem with this sort of logic is that you really did 20 separate experiments at once, and you found that one of them reached some conclusion with 95% confidence. Well, 95% confidence means that you only have a 1/20 chance of reaching a conclusion due to chance alone, so it shouldn't be surprising that if you do 20 experiments you find something "significant."
BTW, unless it's illegal, I don't care about the sexual preferences of my congress persons.
And I guess that matters once you get to select who the members of congress are. However, right now the US is a democracy and most of the voters do care, so being able to control access to this information gives somebody the power to decide who gets elected.
130 million russians (and shrinking, population wise and economically) versus 1.3 billion chinese (and growing, population wise and economically) sounds like good odds
The Russians aren't Americans.
Somebody takes hostages in the US, they get on the phone and try to talk them down. Somebody takes a movie theater full of hostages in Russia and they gas the place and send in the Spetsnaz (with a number of deaths). Complain to a minister about your husband dying on a sub and you get injected with a tranquilizer on national TV, and then end up explaining to the world that they were just giving you your heart medication.
China messes with the US and they end up at the bargaining table. China messes with Russia and Putin gives them a call and asks to talk to somebody sane before he does something drastic in retaliation.
And relative populations doesn't really matter until you get to the occupation phase. It isn't like they're going to go running across Siberia on foot charging down the machine gun emplacements. When you want to put soldiers on every street corner the numbers matter. However, when you're busy trying to blow up tanks and aircraft what matters is how many tanks and aircraft you have and their capabilities.
I've heard it argued that the only real way to find compromise is to do the deals in the back room. The problem is that you're not even allowed to talk about compromise in politics since things are so polarized, but the final law had a TON of compromise in it.
So, you hash things out in a back room, and then everybody stands up and talks about how wonderful the resulting product is in lockstep. You don't have to talk about the bazillion compromises that were proposed and never accepted, just the ones that made it into the final agreement.
The real problem is with voters who care more about sound bites than good policy. Our politicians pander to what gets them elected.
Tend to agree. How much fish does a small country need, anyway? It makes more sense to have sea territory based on land territory than based on some arbitrary distance. Why should some populous European nation that is landlocked have zero access to coastal waters, and some little peninsula have a huge EEZ?
Tend to agree - people forget that China needs the US at least as much as the US needs China. The last thing they want to do is get US mothers to go on a buy-American kick - their economy would melt down overnight. Nobody else is buying all those iPhones/etc...
Geez, I don't have the time to edit this Wikipedia thingy. Can't I pay someone to do it for me?
Seriously -- and I'm just playing Devil's advocate here so don't flame me -- but don't companies pay people in their communications departments to edit wikis related to their business? So, is it any different if you outsource it?
Editing Wikipedia is a bit of a specialty these days. Even Jimbo had trouble creating a stub without it getting deleted.
Anybody can add a sentence to an article. However, if some company for a flat fee would watch a list of articles of interest to my company, keep them friendly for me, and deal with all the edit wars on the talk page without bothering me with the details I could see that being worth something.
Any time I try to contribute to wikipedia it's just reverted by some 15 year old control freak. What we need is an open platform where anyone can contribute.
That's like asking how the RIAA manages to sue people - anytime I've gone to court I get buried in a ton of procedure and documentation. Well, if you did nothing but sue people all day long, chances are you'd have a good system in place for dealing with all that.
If you ran a business that did nothing but astroturf Wikipedia all day then you'd have marketing/content experts who do the authoring. You'd have an operations team that monitors all the pages you're astroturfing to make sure your messages get/remain there. When somebody else changes one of your messages you'd have an army of people and their sockpuppets to revert those changes and mount a full-scale war on the Talk pages. When somebody reverts your changes you'd likely have an army of specialists to mount a war. They would be experts in the ins-and-outs of WP:ADNAUSEUM, and you'd probably even have an R&D team working on getting policies created that work more towards your goals. Maybe you'd even work on infiltrating the admin community.
Oh, and those 15 year olds are the whole reason that companies like this are in business. If it were easy to astroturf then nobody would have to hire professionals to do it for them.
Half of modern business thrives on red tape. Red tape makes it hard for newcomers to get in, but established players have economies of scale that let them deal with that. If you want to ship one package from the US to Indonesia and follow all the rules, you have to dig through a ton of crazy local laws/etc. If you ship 1000 packages a day there then you just create another order in your trade management system and your army of experts expends an extra 2 minutes processing it.
Isn't that kind of like saying that the average commercial building has surveillance cameras vulnerable to a water gun filled with paint? This stuff is designed to watch traffic, or survey land, and so on. If they need to suppress a riot they'll probably send in the APCs.
This is a fairly solved problem, actually. Serious navigation systems continuously estimate their performance, and have redundant sensors/etc. When an airliner is approaching an airport via clouds the pilot will not attempt the approach if the navigation system reports that its accuracy isn't sufficient to guarantee the avoidance of obstacles (the required performance gets tighter as you get closer to the ground, up to the max of Cat III ILS which basically can land a plane with no visibility at all which means being accurate within a meter or two).
If the INS says that it should be good within 200m, and the GPS signal disagrees by 3km, chances are the GPS is being messed with. Also, I'm not sure how vulnerable GPS is to replay attacks, but military units would be able to authenticate the signal using the encrypted channel which civilian receivers cannot use.
GPS also isn't the only navigation system out there - maybe deep in enemy territory it is, but as it gets closer to home it would probably have access to other beacons.
They'd never kill you. That would require somebody to make a decision that there is no chance that you know something of value. That's WAY too much responsibility for anybody with the power to actually make that decision to assume. They'll just play with you like a toy until you die of natural causes, and you'll probably get better healthcare than the average American for that time.
But, it isn't exactly treatment I'd sign up for all the same!
Yup, and people are routinely detained for longer than that by immigration all the time.
Hang on - we have to x-ray your underwear to ensure it doesn't contain any classified materials. Oh, gee, look at this - a warrant just came in for your arrest...
Well, then why regulate what oxygenate is used? I think the only concern with MTBE was that you could tell when tanks were leaking. Oh, and it makes money for methanol manufacturers and not ethanol manufacturers.
The whole concept of private sector efficiency isn't really understood well by the general public.
The private sector can be VERY efficient, and it can also be incredibly wasteful. Why is this the case?
What makes the private sector incredibly efficient is a darwinian selection process, where start-ups are formed, and virtually all fail, and the ones that grow into companies are ones that have developed incredibly efficient and effective business models, or which provide products that are simply without peer. Everybody talks about Google - nobody talks about the other 5000 search engines that didn't make it - all of which in retrospect were basically a waste of resources. Then those few successful companies have the opportunity to expand and generally remain efficient for a fairly long time.
However, after some period of time there is turnover, industries change, and the start-up of yesterday is the Buggywhip manufacturer of today depending on government handouts. I've long said here that companies run great under their founder, fairly well under the founder's hand-picked successor, and then it all goes downhill once the executive search committee picks the leaders after that.
If the government bid out contracts by having 2000 companies fully build out competing solutions, pick the best one, and then give that one a big windfall, chances are that they'd end up with a really nice solution in the end (or at least the decision-makers would get some really nice bribes). I don't think such a system would ever be workable for assigning contracts unless the government is buying a service already available on the market. The market doesn't lie - nobody can prop up a company with a bad business model indefinitely. Government selection committees can easily lie - they're easily manipulated, they're small, etc.
Unfortunately, I don't really have any solutions here beyond better accountability for those who make these kinds of decisions.
If DuPont wants to lead in biofuels, DuPont should pay for the research to lead in biofuels. "Another country could lead this" is code for "give us free taxpayer money because $2 billion or $3 billion annual profit isn't enough for us."
Absolute profit doesn't really tell you anything - it is all about return-on-investment. If I have to spend $1M to make $1M+$1 dollars, I'll go out of business, even though I am making a profit and could even make a billion dollars a year if I simply invested a quadrillion dollars a year.
Companies that are making money won't expand into new areas unless they can get a larger return on that investment than they would get from making that investment elsewhere, such as in financial investments or in their existing markets.
If you want them to grow their own market, then you have to give them a mechanism like patents to allow them to monetize that investment. Patents aren't exactly popular around here.
I think it makes more sense to identify areas where investment benefits the common good and go ahead and make those investments and license the resulting technologies royalty-free to any company that wants to exploit them (at least in domestic companies, or in countries that reciprocate).
Ethanol is a replacement for MTBE. MTBE is banned in California and New York. It contaminates ground water when underground gasoline storage tanks leak.
Yeah, because the gasoline isn't a contamination issue at all when the underground storage tanks leak.
You just can't taste the gasoline, so nobody complains about that. Talk about fixing the symptom! We should be adding (harmless) foul-tasting compounds to gasoline to detect well-water contamination, just as we add odorants to natural gas to detect leaks.
Slashdot Mirror
a) No, the FAA doesn't yet have standards for UAVs
http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/uas/uas_faq/index.cfm?print=go
I guess "standards" is pushing it a bit - they're approved on a case-by-case basis for experimental use, just like a lot of planes people fly in are.
No, safety standards aren't differentiated for "running published airline routes".
My mistake. Looks like the term is "conducts airplane operations as a commercial operator engaged in intrastate common carriage of persons or property for compensation or hire in air commerce, or as a direct air carrier" (14 CFR 119.21(a))
However, the standards certainly are different for that vs just giving somebody a ride in your plane.
if we accept that these are digital fly by wire aircraft (and they are), they will promptly become $100K creatures if they are required to meet any modern nation's standards for fly by wire aircraft.
Maybe - it remains to be seen how things are standardized. Also, building the first one will likely be expensive, but as with anything aviation-related the prices get more manageable as you scale up.
Presumably they'll just drop them on your doorstep, just like how most people get their other parcels. Unless somebody is home all day long it isn't terribly practical to sign for them.
Well, when you think about it what causes people to be in prison are behavior problems, and the reason that mental problems are, well, problems, is because they tend to cause behavior problems.
I think that better treatment for mental problems is part of the solution. Most people in the US have health plans that don't cover much treatment for mental problems. If you see a psychiatrist chances are that you're going to pay more out of pocket, and be limited to so many visits/etc. If you're an airline pilot and see a psychiatrist then you'll lose your job, so you just tough it up and deal with it (hopefully - apparently the flying public prefers being unaware of their pilots uncontrolled neurosis than being aware of their controlled neurosis, or at least their elected officials think they do).
I think that prisons/asylums/etc really should have the same goals:
1. Contain people who are a danger to themselves/others in a safe place.
2. Get those people into a state where they are no longer a danger to themselves or others.
The methods of treatment and prognosis no doubt will vary between the average mob boss and somebody with severe clinical depression. However, when you get down to the root of it they're basically just people who can't be trusted with the same level of responsibility of just living out in society as the average person.
We do everybody a disservice today with the way we treat both criminals and the insane. The current system doesn't help them at all, and it is costly to taxpayers as well who end up having to deal with the problems and the high expense of locking people up. To me it isn't about being "soft on crime" but treating the root cause of the problem. If a murderer can be treated and let out in three weeks and we can be confident that they won't commit another crime then I don't have a problem with that. If a kid steals a candy bar and there is medical evidence that he'll never be able to go a day without stealing something for the rest of his life even with every treatment available, then lock him up indefinitely until that changes. It isn't about punishments that fit the crime - it is about managing people who aren't capable of managing themselves until they're able to manage themselves again.
Most things on the drone will be spendy, and well packaged. Shoot them down, pawn the goods, rinse, repeat.
Why not just shoot the driver of a UPS truck and drive off with it while you're at it? Oh yeah, the police don't care too much for people shooting at other people or their property...
Good job bad weather only means "wind" instead of you know: rain. And wind substantially lowers the range.
The weather resistance depends on how beefy the thing is - if you're flying below freezing through precipitation or clouds/mist then ice becomes a big problem too.
I don't think that wind should affect range much, unless these things rely on being able to refuel before the return leg (which seems unlikely). A head/tailwind would not affect range at all since it would benefit the aircraft as much as it costs it. A crosswind would reduce range, but if you had your warehouses arranged suitably you might be able to avoid too many crosswind trips. Plus these things probably wouldn't fly very high, so that will tend to reduce the impact of wind.
It's a simple question of weight ratios. A one kilogram octocoptor could not carry a three kilogram PS4.
Depends on whether the PS4 is region-coded to Europe or Africa.
Holy cow - one pound to lock up a shopping cart? In the US those carts typically require 25 cents.
Oh, and they usually design them so that they don't contain coins at all when they're parked, probably because at one point in time they had the same issue.
Hate to break it to you, but the only aircraft that have to meet the safety standards that Boeing and Airbus meet are those running published airline routes.
The news helicopter flying overhead is regulated to a lower standard. The private jet carrying some CEO across the country is regulated to a lower standard. Larry Elison flying his own personal jet is regulated to an even lower standard still, and the guy buzzing over your house in the plane he built himself is regulated to the lowest standard of all.
That said, there are standards, and the FAA has standards for drones as well. The level of rigor largely depends on:
1. How heavy the plane is (a little RC aircraft might give your kid a cut if it crashed into them, a cessna would squish them like a bug).
2. Whether the operation is recreational or commercial (flying is expensive, so not too many people are put at risk if their free airplane ride is a bit risky - but self-sustaining operations are a different story).
3. Whether a commercial operation involves an airline route (if the CEO is paying for the plane he is riding on, chances are he's going to not be cheap on the maintenance budget - when you just buy a plane ticket you're at the mercy of the megacorp maintaining the plane).
For the most part commercial operations tend to be much safer than flying, and recreational operations tend to be about as safe as riding a motorcycle - more hazardous than a car, but not outside the realm of normal activity. Planes by their very nature tend to be fairly light, so their damage potential for those not in the cabin is actually pretty low when compared to the analogous ground-based activity (cars, trucks, trains, freighters, etc).
I'm sure the FAA would consider this a commercial operation and regulate it accordingly. Right now the regulations are actually so tight that anything but experimental/developmental use is impractical (usually you have to have human operators able to take manual control, observers watching the drone, etc). I imagine that they'll only remove the leash when somebody comes up with a system that is fairly robust. Besides, a drone capable of carrying a package any distance is going to be expensive - you wouldn't just want to be losing them due to failures all the time.
Actually, what they did was a bit different.
Imagine having a study where you have 400 kids. Half are controls and get no vaccine, and half are experimental and get the vaccine.
However, this isn't just two groups of 200 kids - these are 40 groups of ten kids each. For the first pair of control/experimental groups you check for cancer, for the next one you check for heart damage, for the next one you check for liver damage, and so on.
So, suppose you get to one group and you find that 3 of the 10 experimental kids have been hit by cars, and none of the control kids were. You run the numbers and it turns out that this has greater than 95% significance so you publish a study demonstrating that vaccines cause kids to be run over by cars.
The problem with this sort of logic is that you really did 20 separate experiments at once, and you found that one of them reached some conclusion with 95% confidence. Well, 95% confidence means that you only have a 1/20 chance of reaching a conclusion due to chance alone, so it shouldn't be surprising that if you do 20 experiments you find something "significant."
http://xkcd.com/882/
BTW, unless it's illegal, I don't care about the sexual preferences of my congress persons.
And I guess that matters once you get to select who the members of congress are. However, right now the US is a democracy and most of the voters do care, so being able to control access to this information gives somebody the power to decide who gets elected.
honest question:
why don't they just go after siberia?
130 million russians (and shrinking, population wise and economically) versus 1.3 billion chinese (and growing, population wise and economically) sounds like good odds
The Russians aren't Americans.
Somebody takes hostages in the US, they get on the phone and try to talk them down. Somebody takes a movie theater full of hostages in Russia and they gas the place and send in the Spetsnaz (with a number of deaths). Complain to a minister about your husband dying on a sub and you get injected with a tranquilizer on national TV, and then end up explaining to the world that they were just giving you your heart medication.
China messes with the US and they end up at the bargaining table. China messes with Russia and Putin gives them a call and asks to talk to somebody sane before he does something drastic in retaliation.
And relative populations doesn't really matter until you get to the occupation phase. It isn't like they're going to go running across Siberia on foot charging down the machine gun emplacements. When you want to put soldiers on every street corner the numbers matter. However, when you're busy trying to blow up tanks and aircraft what matters is how many tanks and aircraft you have and their capabilities.
I've heard it argued that the only real way to find compromise is to do the deals in the back room. The problem is that you're not even allowed to talk about compromise in politics since things are so polarized, but the final law had a TON of compromise in it.
So, you hash things out in a back room, and then everybody stands up and talks about how wonderful the resulting product is in lockstep. You don't have to talk about the bazillion compromises that were proposed and never accepted, just the ones that made it into the final agreement.
The real problem is with voters who care more about sound bites than good policy. Our politicians pander to what gets them elected.
Tend to agree. How much fish does a small country need, anyway? It makes more sense to have sea territory based on land territory than based on some arbitrary distance. Why should some populous European nation that is landlocked have zero access to coastal waters, and some little peninsula have a huge EEZ?
Tend to agree - people forget that China needs the US at least as much as the US needs China. The last thing they want to do is get US mothers to go on a buy-American kick - their economy would melt down overnight. Nobody else is buying all those iPhones/etc...
Geez, I don't have the time to edit this Wikipedia thingy. Can't I pay someone to do it for me?
Seriously -- and I'm just playing Devil's advocate here so don't flame me -- but don't companies pay people in their communications departments to edit wikis related to their business? So, is it any different if you outsource it?
Editing Wikipedia is a bit of a specialty these days. Even Jimbo had trouble creating a stub without it getting deleted.
Anybody can add a sentence to an article. However, if some company for a flat fee would watch a list of articles of interest to my company, keep them friendly for me, and deal with all the edit wars on the talk page without bothering me with the details I could see that being worth something.
Any time I try to contribute to wikipedia it's just reverted by some 15 year old control freak. What we need is an open platform where anyone can contribute.
That's like asking how the RIAA manages to sue people - anytime I've gone to court I get buried in a ton of procedure and documentation. Well, if you did nothing but sue people all day long, chances are you'd have a good system in place for dealing with all that.
If you ran a business that did nothing but astroturf Wikipedia all day then you'd have marketing/content experts who do the authoring. You'd have an operations team that monitors all the pages you're astroturfing to make sure your messages get/remain there. When somebody else changes one of your messages you'd have an army of people and their sockpuppets to revert those changes and mount a full-scale war on the Talk pages. When somebody reverts your changes you'd likely have an army of specialists to mount a war. They would be experts in the ins-and-outs of WP:ADNAUSEUM, and you'd probably even have an R&D team working on getting policies created that work more towards your goals. Maybe you'd even work on infiltrating the admin community.
Oh, and those 15 year olds are the whole reason that companies like this are in business. If it were easy to astroturf then nobody would have to hire professionals to do it for them.
Half of modern business thrives on red tape. Red tape makes it hard for newcomers to get in, but established players have economies of scale that let them deal with that. If you want to ship one package from the US to Indonesia and follow all the rules, you have to dig through a ton of crazy local laws/etc. If you ship 1000 packages a day there then you just create another order in your trade management system and your army of experts expends an extra 2 minutes processing it.
Isn't that kind of like saying that the average commercial building has surveillance cameras vulnerable to a water gun filled with paint? This stuff is designed to watch traffic, or survey land, and so on. If they need to suppress a riot they'll probably send in the APCs.
This is a fairly solved problem, actually. Serious navigation systems continuously estimate their performance, and have redundant sensors/etc. When an airliner is approaching an airport via clouds the pilot will not attempt the approach if the navigation system reports that its accuracy isn't sufficient to guarantee the avoidance of obstacles (the required performance gets tighter as you get closer to the ground, up to the max of Cat III ILS which basically can land a plane with no visibility at all which means being accurate within a meter or two).
If the INS says that it should be good within 200m, and the GPS signal disagrees by 3km, chances are the GPS is being messed with. Also, I'm not sure how vulnerable GPS is to replay attacks, but military units would be able to authenticate the signal using the encrypted channel which civilian receivers cannot use.
GPS also isn't the only navigation system out there - maybe deep in enemy territory it is, but as it gets closer to home it would probably have access to other beacons.
They'd never kill you. That would require somebody to make a decision that there is no chance that you know something of value. That's WAY too much responsibility for anybody with the power to actually make that decision to assume. They'll just play with you like a toy until you die of natural causes, and you'll probably get better healthcare than the average American for that time.
But, it isn't exactly treatment I'd sign up for all the same!
Yup, and people are routinely detained for longer than that by immigration all the time.
Hang on - we have to x-ray your underwear to ensure it doesn't contain any classified materials. Oh, gee, look at this - a warrant just came in for your arrest...
Well, then why regulate what oxygenate is used? I think the only concern with MTBE was that you could tell when tanks were leaking. Oh, and it makes money for methanol manufacturers and not ethanol manufacturers.
The whole concept of private sector efficiency isn't really understood well by the general public.
The private sector can be VERY efficient, and it can also be incredibly wasteful. Why is this the case?
What makes the private sector incredibly efficient is a darwinian selection process, where start-ups are formed, and virtually all fail, and the ones that grow into companies are ones that have developed incredibly efficient and effective business models, or which provide products that are simply without peer. Everybody talks about Google - nobody talks about the other 5000 search engines that didn't make it - all of which in retrospect were basically a waste of resources. Then those few successful companies have the opportunity to expand and generally remain efficient for a fairly long time.
However, after some period of time there is turnover, industries change, and the start-up of yesterday is the Buggywhip manufacturer of today depending on government handouts. I've long said here that companies run great under their founder, fairly well under the founder's hand-picked successor, and then it all goes downhill once the executive search committee picks the leaders after that.
If the government bid out contracts by having 2000 companies fully build out competing solutions, pick the best one, and then give that one a big windfall, chances are that they'd end up with a really nice solution in the end (or at least the decision-makers would get some really nice bribes). I don't think such a system would ever be workable for assigning contracts unless the government is buying a service already available on the market. The market doesn't lie - nobody can prop up a company with a bad business model indefinitely. Government selection committees can easily lie - they're easily manipulated, they're small, etc.
Unfortunately, I don't really have any solutions here beyond better accountability for those who make these kinds of decisions.
If DuPont wants to lead in biofuels, DuPont should pay for the research to lead in biofuels. "Another country could lead this" is code for "give us free taxpayer money because $2 billion or $3 billion annual profit isn't enough for us."
Absolute profit doesn't really tell you anything - it is all about return-on-investment. If I have to spend $1M to make $1M+$1 dollars, I'll go out of business, even though I am making a profit and could even make a billion dollars a year if I simply invested a quadrillion dollars a year.
Companies that are making money won't expand into new areas unless they can get a larger return on that investment than they would get from making that investment elsewhere, such as in financial investments or in their existing markets.
If you want them to grow their own market, then you have to give them a mechanism like patents to allow them to monetize that investment. Patents aren't exactly popular around here.
I think it makes more sense to identify areas where investment benefits the common good and go ahead and make those investments and license the resulting technologies royalty-free to any company that wants to exploit them (at least in domestic companies, or in countries that reciprocate).
Ethanol is a replacement for MTBE. MTBE is banned in California and New York. It contaminates ground water when underground gasoline storage tanks leak.
Yeah, because the gasoline isn't a contamination issue at all when the underground storage tanks leak.
You just can't taste the gasoline, so nobody complains about that. Talk about fixing the symptom! We should be adding (harmless) foul-tasting compounds to gasoline to detect well-water contamination, just as we add odorants to natural gas to detect leaks.
THANK YOU!!!!!!
That could come in really handy...