The ISIS situation is actually the USA's fault and they really ought to go do something about though. The USA removed the stabilizing force in Iraq (despite Saddam Hussein's faults, he did keep the peace in Iraq) and then left a weakened government when they withdrew their troops.
Nobody likes nation building. Going in an bombing and then pulling out is "easy." You don't have to deal with all the indigenous populations that hate each other, and so on. Building a stable nation is messy - if there are two tribes of indians that hate each other you have to either get rid of one, or change their culture so that they don't hate each other any longer. If the nation speaks 3 languages, you probably need to get them on one language, and that means picking which one wins.
All of that stuff is morally questionable, and nobody wants to do it. So, we basically leave fragmented nations which unsurprisingly devolve into civil wars until one side or another kills everybody else off and ends up with a single language/culture/etc which is stable, or they manage to draw up internal borders and turn into multiple countries.
If you're not willing to do nation building then you really need to think twice about going in to begin with. You can't win hearts and minds if the "citizens" you're trying to liberate all hate each other almost as much as they hate you.
That's a foolproof way to tell them apart. It's pretty impossible for a military plane to claim to be Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17.
Whenever I order a military plane to perform a military action against the enemy, I always make sure that the pilot will honestly identify itself so that the enemy is properly informed of my hostile intentions.
Operating a military aircraft using a civilian transponder designation would be a violation of the Geneva Conventions. Then again, so is placing your army in the middle of cities forcing the enemy to shell the city to get to you.
Does anybody punish you for violating the Geneva Conventions? No. However, doing it is a great way to get civilians killed. That is why most civilized nations respect them.
In any case, military aircraft would generally not broadcast a transponder code at all over hostile territory, as it makes the aircraft visible at far greater range to anybody looking for it.
I would bet BUK system does have the capability, you can listen to the transponder signals with a hacked 20$ TV dongle ffs(been there done that). However using the capability to make sure target is not civilian is very much optional.
That $20 dongle is listening for ADS-B broadcasts over MODE-S, not MODE-C transponder codes. The ADS-B broadcast is actually much more informative, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if a 1970s air defense radar wasn't equipped to receive it as it is MUCH newer.
Some here are questioning whether the radar could even pick up MODE-C in the configuration that was in use. I couldn't vouch for that one way or another without a much better understanding of the SA-11 system.
If they intended to start shooting at random planes at high altitude, you'd think they'd tell somebody about it so that civilian flights could be diverted. Maybe publish a NOTAM or something if they've claiming sovereignty over that airspace? Or, are they too busy taking over police stations?
I think there is a third, and perhaps more likely explanation: Parts of the Russian military is not under the control of the government. Putin is not exactly stupid, and what is happening in that area is rapidly becoming stupid, so I think it is a reasonable guess that he hasn't got things under his control.
The Russian military is exactly where Putin wants them to be. They're along the border so that they can invade Ukraine once the conditions are right. If Ukraine fires on the Russians then it will be called a provocation and the tanks will stream across the border.
Putin isn't playing dumb here at all. He got the message from the EU loud and clear that they could care less about Russia invading Ukraine, and that the US is pretty upset about it but doesn't really have the power to do anything without getting into a shooting war, which they won't actually do. So, how is shelling the Ukrainians dumb? If the EU doesn't care about commandos taking over cities, the annexation of Crimea, Russian fighters shooting down Ukrainian aircraft, rebels shooting down airliners, and a nearly full-scale war raging in Easter Ukraine, then why would they care about a few shells landing on military units?
Well, when somebody invades a city, and you want to drive them out, how do you do it without shelling the city? The only way cities don't get shelled is if armies don't take refuge in them.
Sure, it is a lousy deal for the civilians, but it isn't like the Ukraine asked the Russians to invade.
You're jumping from Russia trying to annex Ukraine to Russia trying to invade Alaska. They're more likely to send the tanks rolling into Germany first, and they'll probably annex China long before then.
Russia vs Ukraine is like most of the wars the US has gotten into over the last 20 years - find some little country and push it around since it can't really do anything to hurt you back. Russia doesn't have the navy to threaten the US in a serious way in a conventional war, and the reverse is definitely not the case. There is little reason for Russia to get into a shooting war with the US, and certainly no reason for the US to get into a shooting war with Russia either.
I think the Europeans are making the bigger mistake here, but this is one big case of short-term thinking. Nobody wants to suffer the short-term loss to deal with Russia, and everybody is likely to take advantage of their neighbors if they try to do something about it. If the US cuts off all loans to Russia, the London banks will just step in to make a fortune in their place, etc.
Well, sending troops to the region won't in itself cost a huge amount, depending on what they're doing.
Having them actually in a position to invade Russia would cost a pretty penny, and actually starting a war with Russia would be INSANELY expensive, especially once you start taking into account the cost of rebuilding things like Wall Street and downtown DC, assuming nobody goes completely bonkers and decides to kill everybody on the planet.
If you can't see why he is 100% right to be outraged at all the time wasted and all the problems caused by the sloth it takes to make this kind of incompetent mistake, just accept the fact that as a software developer you'd make a great janitor and change careers.
You're equating personality with skill. I can behave like an asshole while being completely incompetent, or I can behave like a nice person while being competent, or anything in-between. Aggressiveness and competency are orthogonal.
Sorry, but in an environment driven by praise and scorn more than money, this type of feedback is not only effective, but also probably essential. The absolute sharpest development environment I've ever worked in (in 16 years as a professional programmer) was an environment of harsh, ultra critical abuse and genuine unadulterated excitement and praise on success.
You're missing the fact that there are many competent developers out there who do not want to work in such an environment. Treating people in this manner is likely to result in not receiving their potential contributions.
Willingness to tolerate abuse or dish it out isn't the same as competence.
Shouldn't we be designing reactors to handle any quake that is reasonably likely to occur? Japan is highly prone to earthquakes - I'd expect any reactor design to account for a very strong one.
They do, but you have to prescribe a specific requirement in the license and that is on the regulator.
My issue is with the statement, "the reactors near Fukushima experienced major quakes beyond their design basis." That suggests to me that regulators set a design basis requirement smaller than earthquakes that have subsequently hit the region.
Obviously they have to set some kind of design threshold, since no machine can withstand an earthquake of such magnitude that it destroys the earth and half the solar system with it. I'd just expect them to take the largest earthquake in known history in that area, and add a safety factor to it. I wouldn't expect the plant to ever actually experience such an event within our lifetimes.
I'm sure the images were heavily edited, if for no other reason than to hide the imaging capabilities the US has.
I'm sure the UK and Germany have their own satellites/etc, and there are commercial services as well. They can easily go looking for themselves, and probably have done so already.
Nations like Iran and N. Korea act like mental patients who failed to take their meds. I'm not certain these nations should be allowed to chew gum much less have anything to do with nuclear power.
If my next door neighbor runs over a kid with their car because they don't look backwards when reversing, the solution isn't to remove the reverse gear from every car in the world.
You can't use the existence of N Korea as a rationale to constrain the behavior or legitimate governments.
What I saw with my own eyes could best be described as straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel.
I don't have any experience in the nuclear industry, but this sort of thing is common where satisfying inspectors/etc are concerned.
There is a lot more emphasis on looking busy than being safe. If you try to introduce a product in a regulated space and your testing is documented on two pages of paper an inspector would laugh at you and deny your application to market the product. On the other hand, if you produced 10k pages of documentation, but ignored testing some likely failure mode, chances are it would get rubber-stamped. If one of those 10k pages of documentation were missing an initial/date or signature, they (or an internal auditor) would probably catch it.
It is just the bikeshedding problem in another guise. The people charged with oversight can't possibly properly supervise the work - they just are woefully understaffed to do that. So, they just get a sense for how impressive the documentation looks and assume that if there are problems they'd be apparent. That is why anybody about to be inspected by a regulator doubles-down on the housekeeping - a tidy shop is more likely to get less poking-around.
It will, in fact the reactors near Fukushima experienced major quakes beyond their design basis..
Is anybody else concerned that anything like a nuclear reactor could ever encounter a major quake beyond their design basis?
Shouldn't we be designing reactors to handle any quake that is reasonably likely to occur? Japan is highly prone to earthquakes - I'd expect any reactor design to account for a very strong one.
We're not talking about a freak incident like a comet impact that destroys all of Japan. We're talking about an earthquake in one of the most earthquake-prone regions on Earth. I'd expect a reactor in an inactive region to be designed to withstand a major quake just as a matter of course.
Well, it isn't a myth so much as an untested hypothesis. If you posted on your facebook page "Aunt Nelly is on her way to Tacoma, she's running late and not arriving until the 4th instead of the 1st" and you don't have an Aunt Nelly who has some reason to be in Tacoma that would be suspicious.
My main beef with the technology is that it is getting applied to all kinds of things other than serious threats of mass-casualties, and that when there is a serious threat of terrorism/etc we don't give the terrorists a proper trial.
Perhaps we can capture terrorists without all this surveillance, and perhaps we should not bother to try. Whether the surveillance actually works is a bit hard to say without actually having access to the data.
don't use advanced warrant-less surveillance technology for matters other than serious national security threats.
Don't use it at all.
The only problem with this is the asymmetry of modern warfare/terrorism/etc.
Suppose a terrorist manages to get their hands on a nuclear bomb, and you believe they intend to destroy a city.
Which is the lesser evil? Tapping lots of phones simply to capture the terrorist, or letting them blow up a city?
It certainly is a slippery slope. What if the target is a bus, or an individual, or corrupting a minor with drugs, or sleeping with somebody of the wrong gender?
A non forgetting society is a harsh society which I refuse. So excuse me if I think the slope was slippery before, when nothing was forgotten. Having a right to be forgotten remove a bit of that slope and make it more horizontal.
Society is just as harsh in your proposed solution - you just make it harder for them to act that way by denying it information.
You could just as easily go the opposite route. Just post defaming information online about everybody who ever lived, in copious amounts, so that it is impossible for anybody to figure out what information is real and what information is not. Then, heaven forbid, people will actually have to get to know people instead of just blacklisting them because of some photos on Facebook or whatever.
That is just obfuscation. Not making the baseband firmware open-source certainly makes it more annoying to mess with that stuff, but it certainly doesn't make it impossible. It is misguided in any case, as anybody can build a cell phone jammer/spoofer/cloner/whateverer out of their own parts running whatever code they want to.
But, I have no doubt that the clowns at the FCC would give any company that wanted to implement an open-source baseband a hard time, so even though it really doesn't make the device any more secure companies will do it so that they can sell their products.
It seems like there is a simple solution to this sort of problem: don't use advanced warrant-less surveillance technology for matters other than serious national security threats. The DEA doesn't need to tap every cell phone in LA, and so on.
If there is evidence that somebody has smuggled a nuclear bomb into NYC, then by all means tap whatever you have to tap until the bomb is recovered. However, this sort of approach shouldn't be the norm. If anything the NSA/etc are already going too far even in the pursuit of legitimate national security threats. There is no reason at all to be using these kinds of technologies to go after people like drug dealers.
I paid for connectivity at a certain bandwidth. I get that it is oversubscribed, and I have no expectation of running a server that sucks down data at 50Mbps 24x7. However, if I'm actively watching an online video stream with my own eyeballs I expect to get 50Mbps, because that is what I paid for. They have other services at lower costs, and if I were only paying for one of those I'd only expect to get what I paid for.
When I pay FedEx to deliver a 1 pound package at 10AM the next morning for $70, I don't expect to get an apology about rush-hour traffic. I expect my package to arrive on time, because rush-hour traffic is something that exists every day and FedEx should allow for it and price their service accordingly. If there is an earthquake that destroys the roads then I can understand a few excuses.
When you're an ISP with millions of customers, congestion is just an ordinary part of doing business and you're expected to manage it. Anybody competent will see the need to upgrade long before they hit 100% saturation.
"It's kinda like you asking me how far you have to walk to get to the nearest bus stop and me telling you the distance in angstroms."
No, it isn't. Angstroms are not an SI unit. It's more like asking how far the next town is, and getting an answer in meters instead of km.
More like nanometers. Bq is measuring events on an atomic scale. nm is actually a little too big, but it is getting close.
When diluted into even a pond (let alone an ocean) trillions of Bq aren't actually all that much. People eat about 9 trillion Bq of potassium each year from bananas alone, so if humanity collectively drank the entire pacific ocean they might double their dose (and have one heck of a sewer bill).
That's great for you, but what would you do if you were a disabled and mentally retarded orphan? How would your personal retirement savings look then? Now, consider that the difference between somebody who can't walk without a walker and somebody who can win an olympic dash is entirely a matter of degree, with there being examples of individuals at every point in-between. Then consider that between somebody who can't figure out how to tie their shoes and a Nobel-prizewinner you can find somebody demonstrating some level of intelligence in-between. Then consider that between an orphan and the Gates family you can find examples of kids that start out with just about any level of parental support in-between.
We need to come up with a national approach to retirement/etc benefits that works for everybody - not just those who are both good at earning money AND good at investing it.
With steady advances in technology and increased specialization in the workforce we just keep raising the bar for the kinds of skills and talents somebody needs to have to earn their own way. Eventually, not even you would have been able to hold down a job.
Tutorials are also wanting. Android Studio has an online tutorial, but it doesn't match the current version of the application. They even made/. a little while ago about having an online course (free to women) on Android Studio, but it ALSO doesn't match the current version of the application.
I get that they're changing it frequently, but that just means that they have to update the documentation. I'm not talking about anything extensive either - we're talking about a Hello World tutorial. What does somebody who understands Android but wants to learn the new IDE need help with? That would be the exact functions they keep tweaking but leaving out of the tutorials.
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The ISIS situation is actually the USA's fault and they really ought to go do something about though. The USA removed the stabilizing force in Iraq (despite Saddam Hussein's faults, he did keep the peace in Iraq) and then left a weakened government when they withdrew their troops.
Nobody likes nation building. Going in an bombing and then pulling out is "easy." You don't have to deal with all the indigenous populations that hate each other, and so on. Building a stable nation is messy - if there are two tribes of indians that hate each other you have to either get rid of one, or change their culture so that they don't hate each other any longer. If the nation speaks 3 languages, you probably need to get them on one language, and that means picking which one wins.
All of that stuff is morally questionable, and nobody wants to do it. So, we basically leave fragmented nations which unsurprisingly devolve into civil wars until one side or another kills everybody else off and ends up with a single language/culture/etc which is stable, or they manage to draw up internal borders and turn into multiple countries.
If you're not willing to do nation building then you really need to think twice about going in to begin with. You can't win hearts and minds if the "citizens" you're trying to liberate all hate each other almost as much as they hate you.
That's a foolproof way to tell them apart. It's pretty impossible for a military plane to claim to be Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17.
Whenever I order a military plane to perform a military action against the enemy, I always make sure that the pilot will honestly identify itself so that the enemy is properly informed of my hostile intentions.
Operating a military aircraft using a civilian transponder designation would be a violation of the Geneva Conventions. Then again, so is placing your army in the middle of cities forcing the enemy to shell the city to get to you.
Does anybody punish you for violating the Geneva Conventions? No. However, doing it is a great way to get civilians killed. That is why most civilized nations respect them.
In any case, military aircraft would generally not broadcast a transponder code at all over hostile territory, as it makes the aircraft visible at far greater range to anybody looking for it.
I would bet BUK system does have the capability, you can listen to the transponder signals with a hacked 20$ TV dongle ffs(been there done that). However using the capability to make sure target is not civilian is very much optional.
That $20 dongle is listening for ADS-B broadcasts over MODE-S, not MODE-C transponder codes. The ADS-B broadcast is actually much more informative, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if a 1970s air defense radar wasn't equipped to receive it as it is MUCH newer.
Some here are questioning whether the radar could even pick up MODE-C in the configuration that was in use. I couldn't vouch for that one way or another without a much better understanding of the SA-11 system.
If they intended to start shooting at random planes at high altitude, you'd think they'd tell somebody about it so that civilian flights could be diverted. Maybe publish a NOTAM or something if they've claiming sovereignty over that airspace? Or, are they too busy taking over police stations?
I think there is a third, and perhaps more likely explanation: Parts of the Russian military is not under the control of the government. Putin is not exactly stupid, and what is happening in that area is rapidly becoming stupid, so I think it is a reasonable guess that he hasn't got things under his control.
The Russian military is exactly where Putin wants them to be. They're along the border so that they can invade Ukraine once the conditions are right. If Ukraine fires on the Russians then it will be called a provocation and the tanks will stream across the border.
Putin isn't playing dumb here at all. He got the message from the EU loud and clear that they could care less about Russia invading Ukraine, and that the US is pretty upset about it but doesn't really have the power to do anything without getting into a shooting war, which they won't actually do. So, how is shelling the Ukrainians dumb? If the EU doesn't care about commandos taking over cities, the annexation of Crimea, Russian fighters shooting down Ukrainian aircraft, rebels shooting down airliners, and a nearly full-scale war raging in Easter Ukraine, then why would they care about a few shells landing on military units?
Well, when somebody invades a city, and you want to drive them out, how do you do it without shelling the city? The only way cities don't get shelled is if armies don't take refuge in them.
Sure, it is a lousy deal for the civilians, but it isn't like the Ukraine asked the Russians to invade.
You're jumping from Russia trying to annex Ukraine to Russia trying to invade Alaska. They're more likely to send the tanks rolling into Germany first, and they'll probably annex China long before then.
Russia vs Ukraine is like most of the wars the US has gotten into over the last 20 years - find some little country and push it around since it can't really do anything to hurt you back. Russia doesn't have the navy to threaten the US in a serious way in a conventional war, and the reverse is definitely not the case. There is little reason for Russia to get into a shooting war with the US, and certainly no reason for the US to get into a shooting war with Russia either.
I think the Europeans are making the bigger mistake here, but this is one big case of short-term thinking. Nobody wants to suffer the short-term loss to deal with Russia, and everybody is likely to take advantage of their neighbors if they try to do something about it. If the US cuts off all loans to Russia, the London banks will just step in to make a fortune in their place, etc.
Well, sending troops to the region won't in itself cost a huge amount, depending on what they're doing.
Having them actually in a position to invade Russia would cost a pretty penny, and actually starting a war with Russia would be INSANELY expensive, especially once you start taking into account the cost of rebuilding things like Wall Street and downtown DC, assuming nobody goes completely bonkers and decides to kill everybody on the planet.
I didn't know the moon was millions of kilometers away? By lunar orbit, do they mean some other planet's moon?
That has to be a mistake. Perhaps they meant 10 seconds? Even that seems pretty long for a lunar orbit - I think EME is only 2 seconds.
10 minutes would be more like Mars I think (round-trip).
If you can't see why he is 100% right to be outraged at all the time wasted and all the problems caused by the sloth it takes to make this kind of incompetent mistake, just accept the fact that as a software developer you'd make a great janitor and change careers.
You're equating personality with skill. I can behave like an asshole while being completely incompetent, or I can behave like a nice person while being competent, or anything in-between. Aggressiveness and competency are orthogonal.
Sorry, but in an environment driven by praise and scorn more than money, this type of feedback is not only effective, but also probably essential. The absolute sharpest development environment I've ever worked in (in 16 years as a professional programmer) was an environment of harsh, ultra critical abuse and genuine unadulterated excitement and praise on success.
You're missing the fact that there are many competent developers out there who do not want to work in such an environment. Treating people in this manner is likely to result in not receiving their potential contributions.
Willingness to tolerate abuse or dish it out isn't the same as competence.
Shouldn't we be designing reactors to handle any quake that is reasonably likely to occur? Japan is highly prone to earthquakes - I'd expect any reactor design to account for a very strong one.
They do, but you have to prescribe a specific requirement in the license and that is on the regulator.
My issue is with the statement, "the reactors near Fukushima experienced major quakes beyond their design basis." That suggests to me that regulators set a design basis requirement smaller than earthquakes that have subsequently hit the region.
Obviously they have to set some kind of design threshold, since no machine can withstand an earthquake of such magnitude that it destroys the earth and half the solar system with it. I'd just expect them to take the largest earthquake in known history in that area, and add a safety factor to it. I wouldn't expect the plant to ever actually experience such an event within our lifetimes.
I'm sure the images were heavily edited, if for no other reason than to hide the imaging capabilities the US has.
I'm sure the UK and Germany have their own satellites/etc, and there are commercial services as well. They can easily go looking for themselves, and probably have done so already.
Thatta boy, blame the civilians.
Uh, the Ukrainian air traffic control system is run by civilians.
The plane was just about to cross into Russia. Why didn't the Russians close their airspace either?
Seems like the rebels being issued heavy antiaircraft weaponry was a recent development. Previously they were more into mobbing police buildings.
Nations like Iran and N. Korea act like mental patients who failed to take their meds. I'm not certain these nations should be allowed to chew gum much less have anything to do with nuclear power.
If my next door neighbor runs over a kid with their car because they don't look backwards when reversing, the solution isn't to remove the reverse gear from every car in the world.
You can't use the existence of N Korea as a rationale to constrain the behavior or legitimate governments.
What I saw with my own eyes could best be described as straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel.
I don't have any experience in the nuclear industry, but this sort of thing is common where satisfying inspectors/etc are concerned.
There is a lot more emphasis on looking busy than being safe. If you try to introduce a product in a regulated space and your testing is documented on two pages of paper an inspector would laugh at you and deny your application to market the product. On the other hand, if you produced 10k pages of documentation, but ignored testing some likely failure mode, chances are it would get rubber-stamped. If one of those 10k pages of documentation were missing an initial/date or signature, they (or an internal auditor) would probably catch it.
It is just the bikeshedding problem in another guise. The people charged with oversight can't possibly properly supervise the work - they just are woefully understaffed to do that. So, they just get a sense for how impressive the documentation looks and assume that if there are problems they'd be apparent. That is why anybody about to be inspected by a regulator doubles-down on the housekeeping - a tidy shop is more likely to get less poking-around.
It will, in fact the reactors near Fukushima experienced major quakes beyond their design basis..
Is anybody else concerned that anything like a nuclear reactor could ever encounter a major quake beyond their design basis?
Shouldn't we be designing reactors to handle any quake that is reasonably likely to occur? Japan is highly prone to earthquakes - I'd expect any reactor design to account for a very strong one.
We're not talking about a freak incident like a comet impact that destroys all of Japan. We're talking about an earthquake in one of the most earthquake-prone regions on Earth. I'd expect a reactor in an inactive region to be designed to withstand a major quake just as a matter of course.
Well, it isn't a myth so much as an untested hypothesis. If you posted on your facebook page "Aunt Nelly is on her way to Tacoma, she's running late and not arriving until the 4th instead of the 1st" and you don't have an Aunt Nelly who has some reason to be in Tacoma that would be suspicious.
My main beef with the technology is that it is getting applied to all kinds of things other than serious threats of mass-casualties, and that when there is a serious threat of terrorism/etc we don't give the terrorists a proper trial.
Perhaps we can capture terrorists without all this surveillance, and perhaps we should not bother to try. Whether the surveillance actually works is a bit hard to say without actually having access to the data.
don't use advanced warrant-less surveillance technology for matters other than serious national security threats.
Don't use it at all.
The only problem with this is the asymmetry of modern warfare/terrorism/etc.
Suppose a terrorist manages to get their hands on a nuclear bomb, and you believe they intend to destroy a city.
Which is the lesser evil? Tapping lots of phones simply to capture the terrorist, or letting them blow up a city?
It certainly is a slippery slope. What if the target is a bus, or an individual, or corrupting a minor with drugs, or sleeping with somebody of the wrong gender?
However, I think that it is a legitimate debate.
A non forgetting society is a harsh society which I refuse. So excuse me if I think the slope was slippery before, when nothing was forgotten. Having a right to be forgotten remove a bit of that slope and make it more horizontal.
Society is just as harsh in your proposed solution - you just make it harder for them to act that way by denying it information.
You could just as easily go the opposite route. Just post defaming information online about everybody who ever lived, in copious amounts, so that it is impossible for anybody to figure out what information is real and what information is not. Then, heaven forbid, people will actually have to get to know people instead of just blacklisting them because of some photos on Facebook or whatever.
That is just obfuscation. Not making the baseband firmware open-source certainly makes it more annoying to mess with that stuff, but it certainly doesn't make it impossible. It is misguided in any case, as anybody can build a cell phone jammer/spoofer/cloner/whateverer out of their own parts running whatever code they want to.
But, I have no doubt that the clowns at the FCC would give any company that wanted to implement an open-source baseband a hard time, so even though it really doesn't make the device any more secure companies will do it so that they can sell their products.
It seems like there is a simple solution to this sort of problem: don't use advanced warrant-less surveillance technology for matters other than serious national security threats. The DEA doesn't need to tap every cell phone in LA, and so on.
If there is evidence that somebody has smuggled a nuclear bomb into NYC, then by all means tap whatever you have to tap until the bomb is recovered. However, this sort of approach shouldn't be the norm. If anything the NSA/etc are already going too far even in the pursuit of legitimate national security threats. There is no reason at all to be using these kinds of technologies to go after people like drug dealers.
I don't care if it is malice or laziness.
I paid for connectivity at a certain bandwidth. I get that it is oversubscribed, and I have no expectation of running a server that sucks down data at 50Mbps 24x7. However, if I'm actively watching an online video stream with my own eyeballs I expect to get 50Mbps, because that is what I paid for. They have other services at lower costs, and if I were only paying for one of those I'd only expect to get what I paid for.
When I pay FedEx to deliver a 1 pound package at 10AM the next morning for $70, I don't expect to get an apology about rush-hour traffic. I expect my package to arrive on time, because rush-hour traffic is something that exists every day and FedEx should allow for it and price their service accordingly. If there is an earthquake that destroys the roads then I can understand a few excuses.
When you're an ISP with millions of customers, congestion is just an ordinary part of doing business and you're expected to manage it. Anybody competent will see the need to upgrade long before they hit 100% saturation.
"It's kinda like you asking me how far you have to walk to get to the nearest bus stop and me telling you the distance in angstroms."
No, it isn't. Angstroms are not an SI unit. It's more like asking how far the next town is, and getting an answer in meters instead of km.
More like nanometers. Bq is measuring events on an atomic scale. nm is actually a little too big, but it is getting close.
When diluted into even a pond (let alone an ocean) trillions of Bq aren't actually all that much. People eat about 9 trillion Bq of potassium each year from bananas alone, so if humanity collectively drank the entire pacific ocean they might double their dose (and have one heck of a sewer bill).
That's great for you, but what would you do if you were a disabled and mentally retarded orphan? How would your personal retirement savings look then? Now, consider that the difference between somebody who can't walk without a walker and somebody who can win an olympic dash is entirely a matter of degree, with there being examples of individuals at every point in-between. Then consider that between somebody who can't figure out how to tie their shoes and a Nobel-prizewinner you can find somebody demonstrating some level of intelligence in-between. Then consider that between an orphan and the Gates family you can find examples of kids that start out with just about any level of parental support in-between.
We need to come up with a national approach to retirement/etc benefits that works for everybody - not just those who are both good at earning money AND good at investing it.
With steady advances in technology and increased specialization in the workforce we just keep raising the bar for the kinds of skills and talents somebody needs to have to earn their own way. Eventually, not even you would have been able to hold down a job.
Tutorials are also wanting. Android Studio has an online tutorial, but it doesn't match the current version of the application. They even made /. a little while ago about having an online course (free to women) on Android Studio, but it ALSO doesn't match the current version of the application.
I get that they're changing it frequently, but that just means that they have to update the documentation. I'm not talking about anything extensive either - we're talking about a Hello World tutorial. What does somebody who understands Android but wants to learn the new IDE need help with? That would be the exact functions they keep tweaking but leaving out of the tutorials.