Here's the automated rate: U.S. elevators make 18 billion passenger trips per year. Those trips result in about 27 deaths annually,
I have never seen, nor have I heard of, an elevator accident that happened because one elevator detected someone in the shaft that it had to avoid so it swerved into the next shaft and was hit by a passing elevator. Nor have I seen or heard of an elevator accident where one elevator slammed on the brakes to keep from hitting someone in the shaft and was run into by a following elevator.
Perhaps comparing elevator automation to automobile automation is a bit of a stretch?
Half the point of self driving cars is that they can go slower because I don't need to focus. Go 40 mph (64 kph) for all I care.
Yes, that would be remarkably safer than the current situation. Imagine a freeway where 20% of the cars are AV, and 20% of the cars are going 40MPH instead of the 65MPH speed limit.
No, I contend that half the point of AV is NOT that they can go slow because the passenger doesn't care how soon he gets to the destination. I think that's absolute nonsense.
- The emergency breaking system was deactivated at a software level,
The software saw the woman, and applied the breaks.
How does software that has been deactivated apply the brakes?
Using the logic in your comment, EVERY AV accident will be the fault of a human, so there will never be an AV accident where we can blame the AV. AV are perfect.
Well, you know, if I applied "drone" logic to these AV, I'd be gettin' my shotgun out and blastin' away at any of them durn things that gets anywhere near me or my property. Stinkin' perverts lookin' in the window of my 16 year old daughter's bedroom...
The ironic thing is, safety critical situations are generally caused by humans.
Yeah, that stupid, arrogant woman crossing the street where she shouldn't have been. It's all her fault. She was deliberately trying to ruin the perfect safety record of AV. She got what she deserved.
I would think that if the weather is too bad for autonomous vehicles, it's also too bad for human drivers...
Well, you might think that. You might be wrong. Humans have a lot of experience driving in snow and stuff. Yes, there are a lot of really funny videos of what happens on icy roads, but I don't think an AV can deal with zero traction on a hill any better than a human could.
I've lived and visited some places where many of the locals really shouldn't be licensed to drive, ever... It would be a great place to test self-driving cars
Yeah, right, let's put automated cars on the roads where you think the people would be less able to react to them properly. NIMBY?
I like this from the summary: "or barring vehicles from traveling above safe speeds,". Sense of deja vu. Who was it that wrote "the book" on the Corvair, wasn't it? "Unsafe at any speed". Yes, I know, Google is my alleged friend, but we're currently not on speaking terms for privacy violations.
Advertisers capitalized on the media coverage of military drones by calling these toys "drones", though they can in no way fly autonomously.
With a simple app on an Android phone (Pix4D) a DJI Phantom series "drone" can fly completely autonomously, from take-off through landing.
Talking about laws for "drones" is pointless, or worse, highly misleading, unless you first define which kind of "drone" you're talking about.
Isn't it great, then, that laws dealing with "drones" don't actually call them that and do, indeed, define exactly what is covered?
Section 336 is about model aircraft,
Part 107 is more important as a sign of how the FAA treats "drone" pilots as compared to "real" pilots, and no, they do not require nearly as much training or demonstrated ability from an RPV licensee as a PP-SEL.
The right to ignore blaring crap is manifest. I thank their inventors and truly and sincerely hope they make millions for their creativity.
Thanks for the laugh. Here's something even funnier, from the Kickstarter page:
IRL Glasses put you in the driver's seat to control when and how you engage with screens.
I'm already in the driver's seat to control when and how I engage. If I don't want to engage, I don't look at it, or I turn it off. Problem solved, for free. No creativity necessary.
The only place I can see these being even remotely necessary is on aircraft where the operators have put in-seat-back displays that you cannot shut off, or keep turning back on by themselves after you turn them off. The free solution to this is to rip the cover off the in-flight magazine or on-board-catalog and cover the display.
I was an SWL (short wave listener) from the 1950s until about 1990 and I can't recall any "pirate" radio station that could possibly interfere with emergency services or air traffic control.
You appear to have a ham callsign as your ID. Words like "harmonic" and "spurious emission" should be familiar to you.
Most "pirate" broadcasters operated on frequencies in the domestic AM and FM broadcast bands
They had their primary emissions there. The fifth harmonic of 92 MHz is 460MHz, which is a US public safety allocation.
or in the Maritime Mobile bands.
The Maritime Mobile bands are involved in safety of marine operations, and indeed, people use those frequencies for emergency traffic.
None of the "pirate" stations wanted to interfere with anyone else
Maybe. Maybe not. But "want" is not "didn't". If wishes were horses then beggars would ride. The guy who thought it was a great idea to have a mobile cell jammer in his car to try to prevent other people from legal use of their phones in their cars "wished" he hadn't interfered with police and fire communications, I bet -- but didn't consider it until after he was caught.
because then they would suffer interference too. (Radio interference is a two-way street, you see.)
No, I don't see. If I am operating on 3.900MHz and getting splatter from the third harmonic of a pirate AM station on 1.300MHz, how is my operation interfering with him?
I think the Ofcom statement is simply a regurgitation of some self-serving bureaucratic mythology.
The fact that you don't understand the technology doesn't mean the regulators of that technology are ignorant. The fact that you understand so little about radio and yet appear to have a license to use it unsupervised does say something about Canada's licensing system.
So, they used the phrase "could interfere" with regards to emergency broadcasts. That sounds like excuse wording. At the very least it's unclear wording. Why not 'did' or 'sometimes' interfered?
In the past, some did, sometimes. For the future, you use future tense words like "could".
We're at the tail end here. DID it interfere with critical infrastructure,
No, dear, it is an ongoing problem, not the tail end.
or was that an excuse used to attack interference with purely commercial broadcasters?
You don't believe that interfering with licensed broadcasters is a bad thing?
Ro Khanna is the real deal. An actual populist who refuses corporate PAC money. He doesn't fear Big Tech because he doesn't take their money.
But his job depends on Big Tech employees voting for him. Money means nothing if you don't have the votes to win. A lot of his constituents work at companies whose business model includes massive data collection, are married to people who work at those companies, or sell stuff to people who do.
If a nuke is headed my way, there's *nothing* such a message could do to help.
"A launch of high level EMP nuclear devices has been detected. ETA is ten minutes over the west coast, 20 minutes over Kansas..." There's a lot of mitigation you can do in ten or twenty minutes to help reduce the damage to your electronic devices. Just unplugging things is going to help alot. You might even pull all the circuit breakers as an immediate first step, that's going to take what, a minute at most? Turning your cellphone off and wrapping it in Al foil will take another minute -- which means you may have a working cell phone tomorrow.
Obama's nominee was put forth OVER HALF A YEAR BEFORE THE DAMN ELECTION. There was no 'lame duck' about it.
Some people call anything after the midterms "lame duck", but during the last year certainly is "lame duck" by any definition.
fuck everyone else we won't even attempt to compromise'
You mean like the compromise to call for another background investigation to get Kavanaugh approved by the judiciary committee, which resulted in a demand for more background investigation after the compromise investigation was over? Flake was inexperienced in the process; he's learning the hard way.
You understand that it was the conservatives that held open the Supreme court for 10 months when Obama was President right?
I remember a lame duck President hoping he'd get his nominee through the process before he left office. I do not remember that nominee facing ginned-up accusations of sexual misconduct and "drinking problems" from 36 years prior to his nomination, while he was still in high school, nor do I recall a demand for unending FBI investigations into his alleged misbehavior from 36 years ago. "Just another 20 people you should interview, what's another 20 people?" That's an actual question from an actual (I assume) news reporter at the Senate press conference this morning.
Maybe it happened and the news media of the time just ignored it?
You know what happens when a Democrat is accused of sexual misconduct? They quit because the party pressures them into it. Al Franken
You're presenting this like it is a positive quality. If Al Franken did nothing, then his party pressuring him to resign is a Bad Thing. It's pandering to baseless accusation and innuendo. It's virtue signaling. "Look at how virtuous all us Democrats are, we forced Franken to resign at the first hint of trouble." Like I said, that's not a good thing.
Kavanaugh has enough black marks against him
Unsubstantiated and unproved "black marks", to the extent that people who the accuser claimed were there and observing the activity deny being there at all. Accusations are accusations, not proof. Unfortunately for Franken, there were pictures.
Now we're defanging them and hoping what?
There is nothing in the proposed regulation that defangs the EPA. Hyperbole much? Apparently not, you're terrible at it.
Do you still believe Sadam had something to do with 9/11 and had chemical or nuclear weapons?
Don't know and don't care about his involvement in 9/11. I do remember laughing my ass off watching Wolf Blitzer live on CNN diving out of view because of incoming SCUD missiles carrying chemical weapons from Iraq (run by Saddam), so I know from reliable sources he had chemical weapons.
I also know about the yellowcake that got sold to Canada, so if he didn't have current, working nuclear weapons he had the starting materials.
You realize you are the least likely to be informed about the real world by listening to Fox News?
I'm curious how you rate Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann on the "real world news" scale. If you're going to skewer Fox for bias, let's not forget the other side.
Reading the actual document, it sounds like the proposal is to make all the evidence public so the public can review what data was used
Bingo. This is the SAME proposal as before, which received a lot of paranoid response in/., and the time before that... The previous discussions have been over the awful Republican legislation that would tell the EPA to do this, now the EPA is proposing the actual rule.
Yes, this is a rule that says that the EPA cannot use secret scientific data to make rules. Period. If your scientific study that shows that fidgit spinners cause cancer cannot be released to the public, then it cannot be used in making EPA rules. The data must be available so the public can review it.
Here is the summary from the linked article in the Federal Register:
This document proposes a regulation intended to strengthen the transparency of EPA regulatory science. The proposed regulation provides that when EPA develops regulations, including regulations for which the public is likely to bear the cost of compliance, with regard to those scientific studies that are pivotal to the action being taken, EPA should ensure that the data underlying those are publicly available in a manner sufficient for independent validation. In this notice, EPA solicits comment on this proposal and how it can best be promulgated and implemented in light of existing law and prior Federal policies that already require increasing public access to data and influential scientific information used to inform federal regulation.
The emphasis is mine.
Previous arguments against this kind of rule have been multi-pronged, and all incorrect.
1. It will require the release of personal data from medical studies. No, it will not. It will require release of data sufficient to allow independent validation of the results. That doesn't require personal data. Independently validating the claim that "37% of people given drug X developed side-effect Y" doesn't require names and SSNs.
2. It will require the EPA to validate the results. Again, no. All the EPA has to do is require and police the ability of people to access the data.
3. It will require EPA to operate a massive data farm to hold all this data. Again, no. It will authorize the EPA to require the SOURCE of the data to provide public access, just like a lot of NSF and other federally funded study data has to be made available. There are already data management specialists whose job is to assist researchers in meeting these requirements.
4. It will allow the EPA to collude with corporate interests and remove science from their decisions altogether. Uhhh, yeah. It doesn't say that AT ALL.
So, here we go for another round of discussion on something that should be patently obvious to any scientist and a d'oh kind of thing for the public.
So be prepared for this unacceptable and damaging intrusion. Every 3 years.
I am pretty sure you're using sarcasm here. Ok.
I'll just point out that having an emergency alert system means nothing if you've never tested it to make sure it works. It's actually worse than useless because there will be people who rely on it to get alerts and when it doesn't work they can be hurt. The last test showed that the system wasn't working, so we've had another. Which didn't get an alert to my phone, but I have no idea why not.
Second, the weekly test alerts on TV are actually a lot more damaging than the Presidential alerts. You may be in the middle of a TV show, or you may have tried timeshifting one, and your program gets shut off. A software glitch from Comcast in my area resulted in my CableCard receivers being switched to the EAS channel for the test, and then not switching back at the end. I went to sleep watching a real channel and woke up to CSPAN (the EAS channel in this system). If you can imagine how much fun it is to talk to Comcast technical support about a minor issue with your service, imagine trying to deal with them over a hidden system-based technical issue. "We can schedule a service tech to visit tomorrow..."
Really? Then why has the current disruptive obnoxious usage been used to report things like heavy rain conditions?
You've gotten Presidential IPAWS/WEA alerts for "heavy rain"? Really? Sorry, I don't believe it. Had that EVER happened, there would have been story after story in the mainstream media about the abuse of the system, just like there were stories all over the place about the Hawaii mistake for their alert system. You think there were a lot of stories about Hawaii, I can assure you the outpouring of news and opinion about a misuse of the IPAWS/WEA Presidential alert system would make the Hawaii thing look like nothing.
What you probably got are the local alerts, WHICH YOU CAN DISABLE, and which are NOT the kind of alerts I was talking about. You probably know that, however.
Wow. One website posting a link to an engadget story is now "outrage" on an epic scale. The worst thing said there was "So now Barack can track your calls and send you messages, too." (Trump is blamed for any action any executive branch agency takes today; Obama is being blamed for NSA phone activity then.) What an amazing bit of "outrage". I didn't see any mention of filing a lawsuit to stop him, did you forget to include that link?
and some of us remember the numerous birther lawsuits, the endless haranging that Obama was going to FEMA camp us into martial law,
You know, I don't remember how the "birther lawsuits" or FEMA stuff had anything to do with outrage over IPAWS or WEA. Can you elaborate a bit?
and all sorts of other nonsense which you were and are conspicuously silent about,
You don't know what I was silent about 8 years ago, and why would I rage about any of that today? Is your argument on this issue really "you guys did it a little bit to Obama, so we get to do really stupid levels of it to Trump today"? Or the third-grader "you started it, nanner nanner boo boo!"
CURRENT occupant of the White House as he shoots his mouth off.
I'm sorry, but the IPAWS/WEA test was not Trump "shooting his mouth off".
Can we stop with the "Trump Derangement Syndrome"?
I wish we could wish it away, but if wishes were horses beggars would ride.
It's propaganda intended to dismiss the legitimate opinions about an elected official.
Hardly. It's a description of a large number of ridiculous fictions. Like Trump is going to use the IPAWS and WEA system to replace Twitter when he gets banned from that, and he's going to declare national emergencies so he can force everyone in the country to see his comments.
Like so-called medical professionals who diagnose all kinds of mental conditions based on zero contact with the patient, and then claim their statements about his medical condition aren't actually diagnoses for some magical reason only they know.
Like "Orange Hair" and other personal insults as a basis for objecting to his actions.
Full-blown TDS almost always includes a rant about how HRC won some fictional "popular vote" and should be President. Those who protest with the belief that their mob rule should replace rule of law are in full onset TDS.
So, no, TDS does not refer to legitimate opinions or arguments. I am interested to see you admit that he is an elected official, by the way.
People upset about Trump's executive actions are not necessarily deranged.
Of course not, and nobody is saying that just being upset is a sign of TDS. It's what you are upset about, why, and how you express that upset that is a sign of TDS. Another example? Democratic senators who demand even more background investigation into the latest SCOTUS nominee before they'll consider voting for him, and then announce their vote decision before the investigation they demanded is finished and the reports are in. Because it's a Trump nominee.
They're responding as one should to someone who wields executive power against the principles of the office to which they've been elected.
Well, there you go. That's the kind of argument that points to TDS. You're talking about a specific person and not policies in general. You're turning your opinion of the "principles of the office" into a personal attack. Some of us had opinions on the former resident's use of the "principles of the office", like saying if the congress that is empowered to do something doesn't do what he wants, he'll do it on his own. Of course, anyone who tried turning that opinion into a personal attack usually got shouted down with cries of "racist", because of course any personal attack on a person of color is racism, even if it is because he's abusing the "principles of the office" to which he was elected. It's ok when the occupant is Trump, however, because, well, "we" just can't see our way clear to accepting that he won, and the office and the power that goes with it actually are his to use. We'll just demand that he not use any of it because, well, Trump. That's TDS in a nutshell.
Yes, I understand that the carriers can't ensure that these alerts are received at exactly the same time. Yes, I understand that there may be a legitimate need for them, and in an emergency, it can be critical. But the implementation leaves much to be desired. It doesn't need to be as disruptive as it is; it doesn't need to be as obnoxious as they are.
If you actually understood the need you'd know why they have to be as disruptive and obnoxious as they are. The system isn't designed to be delivering messages like "sorry to bother you, if you aren't busy or otherwise occupied, but here is a bit of information you might find interesting..." It's intended for a message that is critical enough that you need to stop what you are doing and listen.
We've never had one -- yet -- but when we need it it needs to be there and noticed. What would it be used for? Well, I can't predict all the messages it could convey, but one easy guess is a nuclear attack. Not a "bombs have fallen on cities", but a warning saying that warheads are on the way to conduct an EMP attack. If you know NOW that in 10 minutes there will be a series of EMP pulses, you have some ability to turn off and disconnect things to protect them. I've seen the predictions (both Russian and US) for EMP damage and a single warhead over Kansas will damage a LOT of electronic stuff, both through direct pulse and through induced power and phone line voltages. Ten minutes could mean a lot of damage prevented.
in an age where everyone has them glued to their hand, where we scarcely pass a few minutes without checking them, it is not necessary nor desirable to have a mandatory alert wailing at full volume, because people already devote a lot of attention to their phones.
You might find it interesting to know that not everyone has their phone glued to their hand with sound turned on 24/7. Some of us keep the sound off ALL THE TIME unless we're actually listening to something (podcast, etc.), and sometimes the phone will be on the other side of the house. E.g., when I get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night I never take my phone with me, and I may wind up in the kitchen getting something to drink. I have gotten texts that I don't see until the next day, and "missed call" notices the same way. I don't want to be bothered with run of the mill SMS and calls, but I would really like to know when unplugging stuff would be a really good idea.
I'm sorry you were so annoyed that it was tested once in the dozen of years it has been in place.
For one data point, I did not get any notification on my cell. T-Mobile.
And when it was signed into law under Obama, I think I remember the Republican-leaning part of the population being equally outraged at it.
Really? I don't remember any outrage about it at all. It was an extension/upgrade to the existing EAS system and back then people understood that a notification system was a Good Thing. Of course there were people who don't want to get any messages they don't want, like the presidential alert, and are unhappy that there is no way to turn them off. (I am one of those.) It's hardly "outrage" at "Obama" or "Trump" to feel that way. I feel the same way about useless Amber alerts, and even the Everbridge calls that our local Sheriff's office sometimes send out.
The only thing that's changed is who is being outraged.
No. There were no lawsuits from morons who wanted to predict all kinds of nonsense about how it would be misused when it was created. This is a lawsuit that is many years too late, because nothing has changed about the system itself. It's only who is now authorized to send the message, and that message is not coming straight from the cellphone of the President, it's coming through FEMA.
This lawsuit nonsense is a whole 'nother level of derangement. No, Trump is not going to declare a national emergency just so he can trigger a national alert. It just ain't gonna happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the automated rate: U.S. elevators make 18 billion passenger trips per year. Those trips result in about 27 deaths annually,
I have never seen, nor have I heard of, an elevator accident that happened because one elevator detected someone in the shaft that it had to avoid so it swerved into the next shaft and was hit by a passing elevator. Nor have I seen or heard of an elevator accident where one elevator slammed on the brakes to keep from hitting someone in the shaft and was run into by a following elevator.
Perhaps comparing elevator automation to automobile automation is a bit of a stretch?
Half the point of self driving cars is that they can go slower because I don't need to focus. Go 40 mph (64 kph) for all I care.
Yes, that would be remarkably safer than the current situation. Imagine a freeway where 20% of the cars are AV, and 20% of the cars are going 40MPH instead of the 65MPH speed limit.
No, I contend that half the point of AV is NOT that they can go slow because the passenger doesn't care how soon he gets to the destination. I think that's absolute nonsense.
- The emergency breaking system was deactivated at a software level,
The software saw the woman, and applied the breaks.
How does software that has been deactivated apply the brakes?
Using the logic in your comment, EVERY AV accident will be the fault of a human, so there will never be an AV accident where we can blame the AV. AV are perfect.
Well, you know, if I applied "drone" logic to these AV, I'd be gettin' my shotgun out and blastin' away at any of them durn things that gets anywhere near me or my property. Stinkin' perverts lookin' in the window of my 16 year old daughter's bedroom...
The ironic thing is, safety critical situations are generally caused by humans.
Yeah, that stupid, arrogant woman crossing the street where she shouldn't have been. It's all her fault. She was deliberately trying to ruin the perfect safety record of AV. She got what she deserved.
I would think that if the weather is too bad for autonomous vehicles, it's also too bad for human drivers...
Well, you might think that. You might be wrong. Humans have a lot of experience driving in snow and stuff. Yes, there are a lot of really funny videos of what happens on icy roads, but I don't think an AV can deal with zero traction on a hill any better than a human could.
I've lived and visited some places where many of the locals really shouldn't be licensed to drive, ever ... It would be a great place to test self-driving cars
Yeah, right, let's put automated cars on the roads where you think the people would be less able to react to them properly. NIMBY?
I like this from the summary: "or barring vehicles from traveling above safe speeds,". Sense of deja vu. Who was it that wrote "the book" on the Corvair, wasn't it? "Unsafe at any speed". Yes, I know, Google is my alleged friend, but we're currently not on speaking terms for privacy violations.
Advertisers capitalized on the media coverage of military drones by calling these toys "drones", though they can in no way fly autonomously.
With a simple app on an Android phone (Pix4D) a DJI Phantom series "drone" can fly completely autonomously, from take-off through landing.
Talking about laws for "drones" is pointless, or worse, highly misleading, unless you first define which kind of "drone" you're talking about.
Isn't it great, then, that laws dealing with "drones" don't actually call them that and do, indeed, define exactly what is covered?
Section 336 is about model aircraft,
Part 107 is more important as a sign of how the FAA treats "drone" pilots as compared to "real" pilots, and no, they do not require nearly as much training or demonstrated ability from an RPV licensee as a PP-SEL.
The right to ignore blaring crap is manifest. I thank their inventors and truly and sincerely hope they make millions for their creativity.
Thanks for the laugh. Here's something even funnier, from the Kickstarter page:
I'm already in the driver's seat to control when and how I engage. If I don't want to engage, I don't look at it, or I turn it off. Problem solved, for free. No creativity necessary.
The only place I can see these being even remotely necessary is on aircraft where the operators have put in-seat-back displays that you cannot shut off, or keep turning back on by themselves after you turn them off. The free solution to this is to rip the cover off the in-flight magazine or on-board-catalog and cover the display.
Yes and no...Light goes the same speed everywhere, it's time that changes....
So when you put on your eyeglasses, your brain runs slower?
At this point it might just be a self-driving bureaucratic mythology, since the internet makes moot any continuing practical government interest.
The internet makes government interest in the radio spectrum moot? You've got to be kidding.
I was an SWL (short wave listener) from the 1950s until about 1990 and I can't recall any "pirate" radio station that could possibly interfere with emergency services or air traffic control.
You appear to have a ham callsign as your ID. Words like "harmonic" and "spurious emission" should be familiar to you.
Most "pirate" broadcasters operated on frequencies in the domestic AM and FM broadcast bands
They had their primary emissions there. The fifth harmonic of 92 MHz is 460MHz, which is a US public safety allocation.
or in the Maritime Mobile bands.
The Maritime Mobile bands are involved in safety of marine operations, and indeed, people use those frequencies for emergency traffic.
None of the "pirate" stations wanted to interfere with anyone else
Maybe. Maybe not. But "want" is not "didn't". If wishes were horses then beggars would ride. The guy who thought it was a great idea to have a mobile cell jammer in his car to try to prevent other people from legal use of their phones in their cars "wished" he hadn't interfered with police and fire communications, I bet -- but didn't consider it until after he was caught.
because then they would suffer interference too. (Radio interference is a two-way street, you see.)
No, I don't see. If I am operating on 3.900MHz and getting splatter from the third harmonic of a pirate AM station on 1.300MHz, how is my operation interfering with him?
I think the Ofcom statement is simply a regurgitation of some self-serving bureaucratic mythology.
The fact that you don't understand the technology doesn't mean the regulators of that technology are ignorant. The fact that you understand so little about radio and yet appear to have a license to use it unsupervised does say something about Canada's licensing system.
So, they used the phrase "could interfere" with regards to emergency broadcasts. That sounds like excuse wording. At the very least it's unclear wording. Why not 'did' or 'sometimes' interfered?
In the past, some did, sometimes. For the future, you use future tense words like "could".
We're at the tail end here. DID it interfere with critical infrastructure,
No, dear, it is an ongoing problem, not the tail end.
or was that an excuse used to attack interference with purely commercial broadcasters?
You don't believe that interfering with licensed broadcasters is a bad thing?
Rep. Ro Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley
Ro Khanna is the real deal. An actual populist who refuses corporate PAC money. He doesn't fear Big Tech because he doesn't take their money.
But his job depends on Big Tech employees voting for him. Money means nothing if you don't have the votes to win. A lot of his constituents work at companies whose business model includes massive data collection, are married to people who work at those companies, or sell stuff to people who do.
If a nuke is headed my way, there's *nothing* such a message could do to help.
"A launch of high level EMP nuclear devices has been detected. ETA is ten minutes over the west coast, 20 minutes over Kansas ..." There's a lot of mitigation you can do in ten or twenty minutes to help reduce the damage to your electronic devices. Just unplugging things is going to help alot. You might even pull all the circuit breakers as an immediate first step, that's going to take what, a minute at most? Turning your cellphone off and wrapping it in Al foil will take another minute -- which means you may have a working cell phone tomorrow.
Obama's nominee was put forth OVER HALF A YEAR BEFORE THE DAMN ELECTION. There was no 'lame duck' about it.
Some people call anything after the midterms "lame duck", but during the last year certainly is "lame duck" by any definition.
fuck everyone else we won't even attempt to compromise'
You mean like the compromise to call for another background investigation to get Kavanaugh approved by the judiciary committee, which resulted in a demand for more background investigation after the compromise investigation was over? Flake was inexperienced in the process; he's learning the hard way.
and even as I said, claiming that pointing out the buffoonery of Trump is unpatriotic.
I made no such claim. Go harass someone else.
You understand that it was the conservatives that held open the Supreme court for 10 months when Obama was President right?
I remember a lame duck President hoping he'd get his nominee through the process before he left office. I do not remember that nominee facing ginned-up accusations of sexual misconduct and "drinking problems" from 36 years prior to his nomination, while he was still in high school, nor do I recall a demand for unending FBI investigations into his alleged misbehavior from 36 years ago. "Just another 20 people you should interview, what's another 20 people?" That's an actual question from an actual (I assume) news reporter at the Senate press conference this morning.
Maybe it happened and the news media of the time just ignored it?
You know what happens when a Democrat is accused of sexual misconduct? They quit because the party pressures them into it. Al Franken
You're presenting this like it is a positive quality. If Al Franken did nothing, then his party pressuring him to resign is a Bad Thing. It's pandering to baseless accusation and innuendo. It's virtue signaling. "Look at how virtuous all us Democrats are, we forced Franken to resign at the first hint of trouble." Like I said, that's not a good thing.
Kavanaugh has enough black marks against him
Unsubstantiated and unproved "black marks", to the extent that people who the accuser claimed were there and observing the activity deny being there at all. Accusations are accusations, not proof. Unfortunately for Franken, there were pictures.
Now we're defanging them and hoping what?
There is nothing in the proposed regulation that defangs the EPA. Hyperbole much? Apparently not, you're terrible at it.
Do you still believe Sadam had something to do with 9/11 and had chemical or nuclear weapons?
Don't know and don't care about his involvement in 9/11. I do remember laughing my ass off watching Wolf Blitzer live on CNN diving out of view because of incoming SCUD missiles carrying chemical weapons from Iraq (run by Saddam), so I know from reliable sources he had chemical weapons.
I also know about the yellowcake that got sold to Canada, so if he didn't have current, working nuclear weapons he had the starting materials.
You realize you are the least likely to be informed about the real world by listening to Fox News?
I'm curious how you rate Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann on the "real world news" scale. If you're going to skewer Fox for bias, let's not forget the other side.
Reading the actual document, it sounds like the proposal is to make all the evidence public so the public can review what data was used
Bingo. This is the SAME proposal as before, which received a lot of paranoid response in /., and the time before that... The previous discussions have been over the awful Republican legislation that would tell the EPA to do this, now the EPA is proposing the actual rule.
Yes, this is a rule that says that the EPA cannot use secret scientific data to make rules. Period. If your scientific study that shows that fidgit spinners cause cancer cannot be released to the public, then it cannot be used in making EPA rules. The data must be available so the public can review it.
Here is the summary from the linked article in the Federal Register:
The emphasis is mine.
Previous arguments against this kind of rule have been multi-pronged, and all incorrect.
1. It will require the release of personal data from medical studies. No, it will not. It will require release of data sufficient to allow independent validation of the results. That doesn't require personal data. Independently validating the claim that "37% of people given drug X developed side-effect Y" doesn't require names and SSNs.
2. It will require the EPA to validate the results. Again, no. All the EPA has to do is require and police the ability of people to access the data.
3. It will require EPA to operate a massive data farm to hold all this data. Again, no. It will authorize the EPA to require the SOURCE of the data to provide public access, just like a lot of NSF and other federally funded study data has to be made available. There are already data management specialists whose job is to assist researchers in meeting these requirements.
4. It will allow the EPA to collude with corporate interests and remove science from their decisions altogether. Uhhh, yeah. It doesn't say that AT ALL.
So, here we go for another round of discussion on something that should be patently obvious to any scientist and a d'oh kind of thing for the public.
So be prepared for this unacceptable and damaging intrusion. Every 3 years.
I am pretty sure you're using sarcasm here. Ok.
I'll just point out that having an emergency alert system means nothing if you've never tested it to make sure it works. It's actually worse than useless because there will be people who rely on it to get alerts and when it doesn't work they can be hurt. The last test showed that the system wasn't working, so we've had another. Which didn't get an alert to my phone, but I have no idea why not.
Second, the weekly test alerts on TV are actually a lot more damaging than the Presidential alerts. You may be in the middle of a TV show, or you may have tried timeshifting one, and your program gets shut off. A software glitch from Comcast in my area resulted in my CableCard receivers being switched to the EAS channel for the test, and then not switching back at the end. I went to sleep watching a real channel and woke up to CSPAN (the EAS channel in this system). If you can imagine how much fun it is to talk to Comcast technical support about a minor issue with your service, imagine trying to deal with them over a hidden system-based technical issue. "We can schedule a service tech to visit tomorrow ..."
Really? Then why has the current disruptive obnoxious usage been used to report things like heavy rain conditions?
You've gotten Presidential IPAWS/WEA alerts for "heavy rain"? Really? Sorry, I don't believe it. Had that EVER happened, there would have been story after story in the mainstream media about the abuse of the system, just like there were stories all over the place about the Hawaii mistake for their alert system. You think there were a lot of stories about Hawaii, I can assure you the outpouring of news and opinion about a misuse of the IPAWS/WEA Presidential alert system would make the Hawaii thing look like nothing.
What you probably got are the local alerts, WHICH YOU CAN DISABLE, and which are NOT the kind of alerts I was talking about. You probably know that, however.
Your memory isn't the only thing that matters
Wow. One website posting a link to an engadget story is now "outrage" on an epic scale. The worst thing said there was "So now Barack can track your calls and send you messages, too." (Trump is blamed for any action any executive branch agency takes today; Obama is being blamed for NSA phone activity then.) What an amazing bit of "outrage". I didn't see any mention of filing a lawsuit to stop him, did you forget to include that link?
and some of us remember the numerous birther lawsuits, the endless haranging that Obama was going to FEMA camp us into martial law,
You know, I don't remember how the "birther lawsuits" or FEMA stuff had anything to do with outrage over IPAWS or WEA. Can you elaborate a bit?
and all sorts of other nonsense which you were and are conspicuously silent about,
You don't know what I was silent about 8 years ago, and why would I rage about any of that today? Is your argument on this issue really "you guys did it a little bit to Obama, so we get to do really stupid levels of it to Trump today"? Or the third-grader "you started it, nanner nanner boo boo!"
CURRENT occupant of the White House as he shoots his mouth off.
I'm sorry, but the IPAWS/WEA test was not Trump "shooting his mouth off".
Can we stop with the "Trump Derangement Syndrome"?
I wish we could wish it away, but if wishes were horses beggars would ride.
It's propaganda intended to dismiss the legitimate opinions about an elected official.
Hardly. It's a description of a large number of ridiculous fictions. Like Trump is going to use the IPAWS and WEA system to replace Twitter when he gets banned from that, and he's going to declare national emergencies so he can force everyone in the country to see his comments.
Like so-called medical professionals who diagnose all kinds of mental conditions based on zero contact with the patient, and then claim their statements about his medical condition aren't actually diagnoses for some magical reason only they know.
Like "Orange Hair" and other personal insults as a basis for objecting to his actions.
Full-blown TDS almost always includes a rant about how HRC won some fictional "popular vote" and should be President. Those who protest with the belief that their mob rule should replace rule of law are in full onset TDS.
So, no, TDS does not refer to legitimate opinions or arguments. I am interested to see you admit that he is an elected official, by the way.
People upset about Trump's executive actions are not necessarily deranged.
Of course not, and nobody is saying that just being upset is a sign of TDS. It's what you are upset about, why, and how you express that upset that is a sign of TDS. Another example? Democratic senators who demand even more background investigation into the latest SCOTUS nominee before they'll consider voting for him, and then announce their vote decision before the investigation they demanded is finished and the reports are in. Because it's a Trump nominee.
They're responding as one should to someone who wields executive power against the principles of the office to which they've been elected.
Well, there you go. That's the kind of argument that points to TDS. You're talking about a specific person and not policies in general. You're turning your opinion of the "principles of the office" into a personal attack. Some of us had opinions on the former resident's use of the "principles of the office", like saying if the congress that is empowered to do something doesn't do what he wants, he'll do it on his own. Of course, anyone who tried turning that opinion into a personal attack usually got shouted down with cries of "racist", because of course any personal attack on a person of color is racism, even if it is because he's abusing the "principles of the office" to which he was elected. It's ok when the occupant is Trump, however, because, well, "we" just can't see our way clear to accepting that he won, and the office and the power that goes with it actually are his to use. We'll just demand that he not use any of it because, well, Trump. That's TDS in a nutshell.
Yes, I understand that the carriers can't ensure that these alerts are received at exactly the same time. Yes, I understand that there may be a legitimate need for them, and in an emergency, it can be critical. But the implementation leaves much to be desired. It doesn't need to be as disruptive as it is; it doesn't need to be as obnoxious as they are.
If you actually understood the need you'd know why they have to be as disruptive and obnoxious as they are. The system isn't designed to be delivering messages like "sorry to bother you, if you aren't busy or otherwise occupied, but here is a bit of information you might find interesting..." It's intended for a message that is critical enough that you need to stop what you are doing and listen.
We've never had one -- yet -- but when we need it it needs to be there and noticed. What would it be used for? Well, I can't predict all the messages it could convey, but one easy guess is a nuclear attack. Not a "bombs have fallen on cities", but a warning saying that warheads are on the way to conduct an EMP attack. If you know NOW that in 10 minutes there will be a series of EMP pulses, you have some ability to turn off and disconnect things to protect them. I've seen the predictions (both Russian and US) for EMP damage and a single warhead over Kansas will damage a LOT of electronic stuff, both through direct pulse and through induced power and phone line voltages. Ten minutes could mean a lot of damage prevented.
in an age where everyone has them glued to their hand, where we scarcely pass a few minutes without checking them, it is not necessary nor desirable to have a mandatory alert wailing at full volume, because people already devote a lot of attention to their phones.
You might find it interesting to know that not everyone has their phone glued to their hand with sound turned on 24/7. Some of us keep the sound off ALL THE TIME unless we're actually listening to something (podcast, etc.), and sometimes the phone will be on the other side of the house. E.g., when I get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night I never take my phone with me, and I may wind up in the kitchen getting something to drink. I have gotten texts that I don't see until the next day, and "missed call" notices the same way. I don't want to be bothered with run of the mill SMS and calls, but I would really like to know when unplugging stuff would be a really good idea.
I'm sorry you were so annoyed that it was tested once in the dozen of years it has been in place.
For one data point, I did not get any notification on my cell. T-Mobile.
And when it was signed into law under Obama, I think I remember the Republican-leaning part of the population being equally outraged at it.
Really? I don't remember any outrage about it at all. It was an extension/upgrade to the existing EAS system and back then people understood that a notification system was a Good Thing. Of course there were people who don't want to get any messages they don't want, like the presidential alert, and are unhappy that there is no way to turn them off. (I am one of those.) It's hardly "outrage" at "Obama" or "Trump" to feel that way. I feel the same way about useless Amber alerts, and even the Everbridge calls that our local Sheriff's office sometimes send out.
The only thing that's changed is who is being outraged.
No. There were no lawsuits from morons who wanted to predict all kinds of nonsense about how it would be misused when it was created. This is a lawsuit that is many years too late, because nothing has changed about the system itself. It's only who is now authorized to send the message, and that message is not coming straight from the cellphone of the President, it's coming through FEMA.
This lawsuit nonsense is a whole 'nother level of derangement. No, Trump is not going to declare a national emergency just so he can trigger a national alert. It just ain't gonna happen.