Well according to AP version of this story (from the NYTimes here), getting a court order is a piece of cake, getting Toyota to cooperate is another matter entirely.
Complaints against Toyota include "Has frequently refused to provide key information sought by crash victims and survivors." and "In some lawsuits, when pressed to provide recorder information Toyota either settled or provided printouts with the key columns blank."
So it would seem that something is going on here, possibly as simple as cost cutting, but it has nothing to do with protecting drivers' privacy.
And in an environment with little or no regulation, small business can't afford the legal department they need and taxpayers won't be able to afford to clean up the messes that WILL get left behind.
Yes, but if you do not tax corporations to pay for the government services they consume, then you artificially lower the cost of doing business and distort the market by separating the market price of a product or service from its actual cost to the people who are paying taxes. By ensuring that all of the costs of a given product are included in its price, including the cost of government services used by the company making the product, corporate taxes can result in consumers better optimizing their purchasing decisions to give themselves a maximized return on their expenditures.
Its really just the application of free and fair market principles without the anti-tax ideology or slavish devotion to corporate welfare. I'm not sure why that is so hard for people to get.
Since low cost is not a strict requirement, how about storing the data as hard-wired/burned logic gates in a read-only memory chip, like a motherboard's BIOS? I don't know what the useful life for properly stored silicon chips is exactly, but I am willing to bet it is much longer than flash memory, pressed CDs or magnetic tape. After all, an Atari 7800 stored improperly in the attic for the past fifteen years still boots, and the games still work, so there must be some hardiness to those chips.
Some here have pointed out the synergies eBay expected to get, like sellers adding Skype to their auction pages (as if non-paying bidders and people asking for international shipping on an auction that specifically says no are not annoying enough without giving them a way to call you), or how companies expand into unrelated markets all the time. But those arguments miss the real driving force in deals of this sort: brand-name CEOs, like Meg Whitman or Jack Welch, are all narcissistic empire builders(sorry its just a summary/announcement of the actual paper). It is not about the good of the company, or even the stockholders, but it is all about them.
Why else would eBay really need to own Skype? Or a manufacturer of jet engines and electric generators get into the movie/TV business? Because it puts the CEO in the news and puts the CEO's stamp on the company. And if you view deals like eBay/Skype through the prism of a CEO's ego, then the fact that 'They paid an outrageous sum, didn't get full rights, and failed to leverage that technology in any way useful to the company' becomes disturbingly understandable.
Correction: Between the effects of saltwater and very thick steel hulls, if the enemy is close enough to detect your wifi or bluetooth, they have probably ascertained your exact position via ramming.
Actually, this sounds like a wee bit of English haughtiness.
From the wiki for 'green belt (UK)' it seems that your green belts are implemented as a donut of limited development separating a city from what, are in affect, its outlying suburbs. Some 13% of England's land area is designated as such, which is impressive, though it seems that some wish to reduce this.
Urban growth boundaries are not greenbelts. Instead of reserving a ring of land and pushing further development out beyond that ring, UGBs draw a line in the sand and then make any significant development outside of that line devilishly difficult. Oregon's metro areas (Portland, Eugene, etc) exist as islands of built up areas in a sea of farms, forests, small towns and rural homes. We do not set areas aside for limited development (though we do have a number a designated wilderness areas where any development beyond the level of a hiking trail is prohibited), but instead limit development in any area not designated otherwise.
Granted this is easier to do with only 1/12 the population spread over twice the land area, though much of said land is entirely inappropriate for urban development, or desirable only to people feeling southern California.
The flight control computers are not programmed to respond to any situation beyond routing around control surfaces that fail to respond. A computer does not know how to respond to a double engine out (USAir 1549) or severe thunderstorms (Air France 447). What the computer does know is the designed aerodynamic loads an intact airframe can handle without breaking. The difference between an Airbus computer and a Boeing computer is that the Airbus system will limit control inputs that should result in airframe damage, the Boeing system will sound an alarm but allow the control input.
Also, if the issue was the American legal system, then Airbus would come up with the same solution, being as many of their customers are US airlines, or airlines that fly to and from America (if it flying to, from, over or near the US, or flown anywhere by a US carrier, or made in the US, or has US engines, etc, you can jolly well sue in US courts). Also, you could argue the manufacturer is responsible if they DON'T actively prevent the pilot from possibly damaging the aircraft. So, ultimately, the threat of lawsuits is not the reason for the differences between Airbus and Boeing control systems. Boeing and Airbus are.
And the article author and the summary are both full of it.
Perhaps not the most diplomatic response, but it is true enough.
First, there is absolutely nothing conclusive to say about Air France 447 at this point other than it did indeed crash (thus ruling out alien abduction and time travel). There are no conclusions, or even anything that could really be called a theory, just guesses and hunches ranging from informed to wild-arsed. At this point, nobody can even be certain as to whether the mismatches in indicated airspeed happened before or after the aircraft started to break up. As WAG level example, if lightning had damaged the radome at the nose of the aircraft (has been known to happen), then the three pitot probes could report different velocities not because the probes failed, but rather because to aircraft no longer conforms to the aerodynamic profile the pitot probes are calibrated for.
Also, the difference between Boeing and Airbus is not as stark as the author would like to think. On both manufacturers' most recent aircraft, in normal flight the computers will automatically do a variety of nifty things (like auto-mixing the use aileron/rudder inputs, vertical gust load alleviation, etc, to increase efficiency and comfort) in ways entirely transparent to the crew. The differences are at the extreme limits of the flight control laws. There, if the pilots pull on the controls hard enough, a Boeing plane should accept the input even when the computer thinks the input will cause permanent, or even fatal, damage to the aircraft (it will warn the crew, loudly). An Airbus plane will limit the input so as to avoid such damage (and notify the crew it is doing so). There are legitimate arguments for both configurations, and America vs Europe has nothing to do with it (old dog vs new pup might, if you could go so far as to call Airbus a new pup). At the extreme limits it is not a matter of ingenuity versus information, but more of protecting what you have left right now (an unbroken airplane in danger of crashing), or allowing risks that might let you get to a better place (a damaged, but perhaps un-crashed (for now) airplane).
In either case, by the time a flight crew encounters the philosophical differences between Boeing's and Airbus' respective control laws, they are already frakked, and in a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario.
In both cases, part of the flight computers programming is there to monitor itself, and its sensors, for failures that would compromise its function. In a situation where the airspeed indicators no longer agree with each other, the computer should automatically reduce any limiting role it has because the computers' input data is no longer reliable. And as current commercial airliners are reasonably stable in the aerodynamic sense, they can continue to fly even in the event of a total computer failure. Look carefully at cockpit pictures of the shiny new Airbus A380 and you will see a small cluster of old fashioned instruments amongst all the flat panel displays. The computer can fail, and of all the things on an airliner, the computer is the item most aware of this.
When it comes to the Supreme Court, right and wrong increasingly matter less than good policy, bad policy and political reality. A strictly legal opinion may be overturned if the result would be bad policy simply because the justices on the court are aware of the (un)likelihood that Congress would actually fix things in a reasonable ways and a reasonable amount of time. Thus, for most 5-4/6-3 decisions, it would more correct to say that the losing side was outvoted, or even just unpopular, rather than that they were genuinely wrong. Only when the Supreme Court both takes up a case, and then rules unanimously on it (or close to), have they actually made a judgment about who is right and who is wrong.
It appears (the case in question is apparently Riverkeeper, Inc. vs. EPA (2007), 475 F.3d 83, according to CNN blog post) that the disagreement was over the interpretation of the phrase 'best technology available' in the law authorizing the EPA. This phrase could be reasonably argued, and has previously been interpreted, as requiring the use of equipment that causes the least environmental impact, period, as opposed to the most cost effective. This is the sort of dispute that would be best resolved by an act of Congress, so as to allow for different standards to be applied depending on the type pollution or whatnot.
Sotomayor's ruling in this case is arguably a 'strict interpretation of the law' in that it hews strictly to the law as it was written but not necessarily as it was intended. Which is a common problem when dealing with what is actually passed as law by the US Congress. The Supreme Court, as is their discretion, seems to have chosen to read between the lines in this case (by a currently rare 6-3 margin) to create a reasonable implementation of a not so reasonably written law. The Supreme Court chose to loosely interpret the law rather then leave things in Congress' incapable hands.
It was the law that failed to account for the concept of diminishing returns, not Judge Sotomayor.
Many industrial grade AC / refrigeration / ice-making systems spray water over the the condenser coils to improve the efficiency of the system as the evaporating water absorbs much more heat than would the air itself. Especially on hot days. Combined with a large blower fan and low ambient air temperatures, this can actually result in a small snow flurry next to the condenser stack (as if Chicago winters were not already bad enough).
I wonder if this would work on LEGO bricks? Particularly the white ones that fair very poorly in the sun. That a good method for polishing out scratches would make the day of many a LEGO collector.
Honestly, I didn't need any help from the press finding the kooks, the statements the Libertarian Party candidates PAID to put in the official voter's pamphlet mailed to every Oregon voter were quite enough they were most everything but racist, and almost as far off the rails as the Constitution Party candidates (those people are scary).
They didn't spend just an hour analyzing the 747's stability, rather they spent a full hour presenting months of work to a famous pilot who had learnt most everything he knew about aircraft back when the wings had to held up with struts and wires.
Given that Polonium 210 has a half-life of 138 days and the Soviet Union collapsed about 15 years ago, there would be about 3 parts per trillion left of any Po210 produced during the last days of the Soviet Union. In fact there would be 2 parts per million (or less) left of any Po210 produced before Putin became the President of Russia. So if the Po210 used to posion Litvinenko went missing from a Russia reactor, it was the current Russian government that lost it.
As for who did it, nothing tells your critics what to go do with themselves quite like the long, painful and very public death of one of said critics. Sometimes a contract murder just doesn't get the point across.
all the cell phones on the planet could fit in 200 cubic feet of space
Assuming the average cellphone is one cubic inch in size (I would say mine is close to 3 cu in and its not that big), then you can fit 1728 junk cellphones in one cubic foot or about 350 thousand in 200 cubic feet. I am pretty sure there are more phones than that in the city of Chicago, much less the whole planet. Accounting the total quantity and historic size of cellphones, even an estimate of one million cubic feet for the phones themselves is probably a very low-ball type number. Then think of the volume of manufacturing waste, discarded packaging, accessories and obselete base station hardware. Don't underestimate the problem.
A nation does have complete control over its airspace, but by international agreement, that 'airspace' stops at 100 KM altitude. Space space is essentially uncontrolled, akin to international waters. Geosynchronous orbital slots are subject to some control and are 'owned' by different countries (I think this is the case, anyway). Multiple countries do fly photo-reconnasaince satellites over the US on a daily basis and are not bombed to bits.
However, in the years before the USSR launched Sputnik, the US was concerned about how the Russians would react to satellite passes. But since Sputnik was first and the United States specifically refused to protest overflights by it, legitimacy was established for US satellite usage.
Your rights to your property, and any information it contains, are at least severly compromised when your property becomes physically entangled with someone else's property as in an accident. It that case 'none of your business' no longer applies because your business and theirs have become one.
At present these devices are not required, and you may be able to remove the EDR BEFORE an accident if you so choose, depending on how the manufacterer integrated it into the vehicle. Removing or destroying the EDR AFTER an accident would almost certainly, and definitely should be, be treated as evidence tampering and might be admissiable as an evidence of guilt in a civil case against you. Before an accident, the EDR is just an electronic device that remembers a few seconds of information, afterwards it is evidentiary recording of the accident.
In case of an accident, yes, the police/courts certainly could demand access via subpeona as part of the trial or investigation and should receive said access. That is what due process is about. Whether access could be obtained as part of say a reckless or drunken driving case where there was no accident is less clear and is a legitimate worry. Of course a short, simple law could clear this up while preserving the use of EDRs for accident investigations. Further, as I understand it, most EDRs only retain a few seconds of information before and after airbag deployment and thus is useless outside of an accident investigation.
Finally, and this is general comment not in response to the previous post, I think too many people go too far in asserting their 'right' to drive. Operating a motor vehicle is not a right granted by the Constitution or any deity that I am aware of. It is a privilege granted by the government, and one easily given with few limits. And given the number of clearly stupid and dangerous driving behaviors I have seen, it is also a privilege that needs to be rescinded a little more frequently. Just think of what that could do for traffic congestion in Chicago alone...
I suppose it all depends on what conditions and failure modes you want the payload to be able to survive.
In the case of the rocket motor blowing up of its own accord (as opposed to destroyed by launch safety control), there wouldn't be anything you can do. The whole thing just goes BOOM! (not boom, BOOM!) with little warning. A medium sized Delta II rocket that exploded a few hundred meters above the pad in 1997 damaged the pad and destroyed some equipment on the ground. Google it, videos are spectacular.
If you have a failure or thrust loss in one of the later booster stages, the payload makes it into space but either does not achieve orbital velocity or can not make it to its final orbit. This is the most common problem for geosynchronous communications satellites, which are some of the most expensive things launched. The last booster stage is the one where using more exotic engines pays off the most, it also needs to fire multiple times and both increase failure rates. If you can not push the satellite into a useful orbit with its maneuvering fuel, you chuck it into the atmosphere in a controlled way so you no longer have to pay to watch over it. If you didn't reach orbital velocity in the first place, physics will do this for you. Either way, the weight of a heat shield, aerodynamic casing and parachutes/soft landing equipment will be very expensive. And if your boosters all work fine, then the satellite has to be able to detach from all of this stuff, which could add more failure modes late in the launch cycle.
The best case for recovery would be an in-atmosphere abort where you can wait a few seconds before triggering the range safety device. You could use the existing staging system to pop to last stage off the top of the rocket stack after shutting down the main engines. Adding a drag-chute and a couple other things so the last boost stage can be dropped from the payload (and destroyed separately) would not be hard or heavy. What would be heavy and hard to do would be adding enough parachutes, airbags and structural integrity to the payload, support truss and shrouds to survive landing with anything useful left.
Satellites are very carefully designed to withstand the stress of a sustained acceleration applied from one direction. Impacts are hard on equipment, but less so on soft, squishy things; a 20G bounce would utterly destroy a satellite (this is a GUESStimate, my degree is in aerospace engineering, but undergrad does not cover the intricacies of satellite design) but that crappy airline seat is rated for you to WALK away from 30G+ impacts. Satellites are also built, tested and moved about in full clean-room environments. So you actually need to land the satellite with an air-tight shell around it, and if the seal breaks that means every part has to be cleaned or replaced before the satellite can be used again to prevent contamination and corrosion. The Space Shuttle cargo bay is only opened in clean environments for this same reason.
While there are a number of challenges associated with an aborted launch outlined above, all can be solved with technology available right now. The Space Shuttle actually has two different launch abort modes depending on when and what goes wrong (an SRB turning into the fuel tank invalidates both). This is partly because it was already designed as reusable vehicle that lands on a runway. The replacement CEV will have also have an abort option, as cost is not much of a factor when in comes to astronaut safety and many of the parts are already there because of the need to parachute-land after re-entry. But for satellites the limiting factor is very much cost. It is cheaper to buy an insurance policy than to provide a recovery option for even the most benign failure modes. The moment this changes, Boeing, Lockheed or Ariane will immediately announce it as an option on their launchers.
PS - sorry for the length of my response, I tend to ramble, now back to thesis writing
PPS - stupid thesis
Except for the 'rocket blows up' part, it has happened. Twice.
In 1984, two communications satellites that had been left in low parking orbits after booster failures were recovered during a Space Shuttle mission (STS-51A). However, after the Challenger accident the Space Shuttle was permanently taken out of the commerical satellite launch and recovery business for fairly obvious reasons. The reason you don't hear about payloads recovered from the failure of single use launchers is that it would cost far more to install a recovery system than it does to buy insurance.
What you described is actually akin to taking a DVD and deliberately scratching out the parts you don't want binary bit by binary bit (good luck). If you did that, you would be free to re-sell your disc like any other used DVD as long you as you accurately describe its condition. The same as how you can resell highlighted textbooks and the like. What you do with your purchased copy is your concern.
The book analogy of what these companies are doing to doing to movies is the following: You take a the text of a book, delete the objectionable parts, reprint the editted book, wrap in a cover torn off of a copy printed by the original publisher, burning the old pages, and then sell it, clearly labeled perhaps, but sold as a version of the original book none the less. And what is being sold is not what was purchased from the orginial publisher. It is a copyrighted work (the cover) wrapped around an un-authorized derivative work (the editted text) that either omits, abuses or infringes upon the original copyright notice. In so doing you explicitly and willfully violate many aspects of copyright law. The original book that you purchased, and any right you had to it, was lost when you ripped the cover off and destroyed its contents. At this point you have already done what you wanted with the book you purchased: you destroyed it. Any attempt to reprint, repackage and resell that book is to manipulate somebody else's work for your own gain.
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And do you really think the PRC is interested in spreading prosperity and equality?
Well according to AP version of this story (from the NYTimes here), getting a court order is a piece of cake, getting Toyota to cooperate is another matter entirely.
Complaints against Toyota include "Has frequently refused to provide key information sought by crash victims and survivors." and "In some lawsuits, when pressed to provide recorder information Toyota either settled or provided printouts with the key columns blank."
So it would seem that something is going on here, possibly as simple as cost cutting, but it has nothing to do with protecting drivers' privacy.
And in an environment with little or no regulation, small business can't afford the legal department they need and taxpayers won't be able to afford to clean up the messes that WILL get left behind.
Yes, but if you do not tax corporations to pay for the government services they consume, then you artificially lower the cost of doing business and distort the market by separating the market price of a product or service from its actual cost to the people who are paying taxes. By ensuring that all of the costs of a given product are included in its price, including the cost of government services used by the company making the product, corporate taxes can result in consumers better optimizing their purchasing decisions to give themselves a maximized return on their expenditures.
Its really just the application of free and fair market principles without the anti-tax ideology or slavish devotion to corporate welfare. I'm not sure why that is so hard for people to get.
Since low cost is not a strict requirement, how about storing the data as hard-wired/burned logic gates in a read-only memory chip, like a motherboard's BIOS? I don't know what the useful life for properly stored silicon chips is exactly, but I am willing to bet it is much longer than flash memory, pressed CDs or magnetic tape. After all, an Atari 7800 stored improperly in the attic for the past fifteen years still boots, and the games still work, so there must be some hardiness to those chips.
Some here have pointed out the synergies eBay expected to get, like sellers adding Skype to their auction pages (as if non-paying bidders and people asking for international shipping on an auction that specifically says no are not annoying enough without giving them a way to call you), or how companies expand into unrelated markets all the time. But those arguments miss the real driving force in deals of this sort: brand-name CEOs, like Meg Whitman or Jack Welch, are all narcissistic empire builders(sorry its just a summary/announcement of the actual paper). It is not about the good of the company, or even the stockholders, but it is all about them.
Why else would eBay really need to own Skype? Or a manufacturer of jet engines and electric generators get into the movie/TV business? Because it puts the CEO in the news and puts the CEO's stamp on the company. And if you view deals like eBay/Skype through the prism of a CEO's ego, then the fact that 'They paid an outrageous sum, didn't get full rights, and failed to leverage that technology in any way useful to the company' becomes disturbingly understandable.
Correction: Between the effects of saltwater and very thick steel hulls, if the enemy is close enough to detect your wifi or bluetooth, they have probably ascertained your exact position via ramming.
Actually, this sounds like a wee bit of English haughtiness.
From the wiki for 'green belt (UK)' it seems that your green belts are implemented as a donut of limited development separating a city from what, are in affect, its outlying suburbs. Some 13% of England's land area is designated as such, which is impressive, though it seems that some wish to reduce this.
Urban growth boundaries are not greenbelts. Instead of reserving a ring of land and pushing further development out beyond that ring, UGBs draw a line in the sand and then make any significant development outside of that line devilishly difficult. Oregon's metro areas (Portland, Eugene, etc) exist as islands of built up areas in a sea of farms, forests, small towns and rural homes. We do not set areas aside for limited development (though we do have a number a designated wilderness areas where any development beyond the level of a hiking trail is prohibited), but instead limit development in any area not designated otherwise.
Granted this is easier to do with only 1/12 the population spread over twice the land area, though much of said land is entirely inappropriate for urban development, or desirable only to people feeling southern California.
The flight control computers are not programmed to respond to any situation beyond routing around control surfaces that fail to respond. A computer does not know how to respond to a double engine out (USAir 1549) or severe thunderstorms (Air France 447). What the computer does know is the designed aerodynamic loads an intact airframe can handle without breaking. The difference between an Airbus computer and a Boeing computer is that the Airbus system will limit control inputs that should result in airframe damage, the Boeing system will sound an alarm but allow the control input.
Also, if the issue was the American legal system, then Airbus would come up with the same solution, being as many of their customers are US airlines, or airlines that fly to and from America (if it flying to, from, over or near the US, or flown anywhere by a US carrier, or made in the US, or has US engines, etc, you can jolly well sue in US courts). Also, you could argue the manufacturer is responsible if they DON'T actively prevent the pilot from possibly damaging the aircraft. So, ultimately, the threat of lawsuits is not the reason for the differences between Airbus and Boeing control systems. Boeing and Airbus are.
And the article author and the summary are both full of it.
Perhaps not the most diplomatic response, but it is true enough.
First, there is absolutely nothing conclusive to say about Air France 447 at this point other than it did indeed crash (thus ruling out alien abduction and time travel). There are no conclusions, or even anything that could really be called a theory, just guesses and hunches ranging from informed to wild-arsed. At this point, nobody can even be certain as to whether the mismatches in indicated airspeed happened before or after the aircraft started to break up. As WAG level example, if lightning had damaged the radome at the nose of the aircraft (has been known to happen), then the three pitot probes could report different velocities not because the probes failed, but rather because to aircraft no longer conforms to the aerodynamic profile the pitot probes are calibrated for.
Also, the difference between Boeing and Airbus is not as stark as the author would like to think. On both manufacturers' most recent aircraft, in normal flight the computers will automatically do a variety of nifty things (like auto-mixing the use aileron/rudder inputs, vertical gust load alleviation, etc, to increase efficiency and comfort) in ways entirely transparent to the crew. The differences are at the extreme limits of the flight control laws. There, if the pilots pull on the controls hard enough, a Boeing plane should accept the input even when the computer thinks the input will cause permanent, or even fatal, damage to the aircraft (it will warn the crew, loudly). An Airbus plane will limit the input so as to avoid such damage (and notify the crew it is doing so). There are legitimate arguments for both configurations, and America vs Europe has nothing to do with it (old dog vs new pup might, if you could go so far as to call Airbus a new pup). At the extreme limits it is not a matter of ingenuity versus information, but more of protecting what you have left right now (an unbroken airplane in danger of crashing), or allowing risks that might let you get to a better place (a damaged, but perhaps un-crashed (for now) airplane).
In either case, by the time a flight crew encounters the philosophical differences between Boeing's and Airbus' respective control laws, they are already frakked, and in a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario.
In both cases, part of the flight computers programming is there to monitor itself, and its sensors, for failures that would compromise its function. In a situation where the airspeed indicators no longer agree with each other, the computer should automatically reduce any limiting role it has because the computers' input data is no longer reliable. And as current commercial airliners are reasonably stable in the aerodynamic sense, they can continue to fly even in the event of a total computer failure. Look carefully at cockpit pictures of the shiny new Airbus A380 and you will see a small cluster of old fashioned instruments amongst all the flat panel displays. The computer can fail, and of all the things on an airliner, the computer is the item most aware of this.
When it comes to the Supreme Court, right and wrong increasingly matter less than good policy, bad policy and political reality. A strictly legal opinion may be overturned if the result would be bad policy simply because the justices on the court are aware of the (un)likelihood that Congress would actually fix things in a reasonable ways and a reasonable amount of time. Thus, for most 5-4/6-3 decisions, it would more correct to say that the losing side was outvoted, or even just unpopular, rather than that they were genuinely wrong. Only when the Supreme Court both takes up a case, and then rules unanimously on it (or close to), have they actually made a judgment about who is right and who is wrong.
It appears (the case in question is apparently Riverkeeper, Inc. vs. EPA (2007), 475 F.3d 83, according to CNN blog post) that the disagreement was over the interpretation of the phrase 'best technology available' in the law authorizing the EPA. This phrase could be reasonably argued, and has previously been interpreted, as requiring the use of equipment that causes the least environmental impact, period, as opposed to the most cost effective. This is the sort of dispute that would be best resolved by an act of Congress, so as to allow for different standards to be applied depending on the type pollution or whatnot.
Sotomayor's ruling in this case is arguably a 'strict interpretation of the law' in that it hews strictly to the law as it was written but not necessarily as it was intended. Which is a common problem when dealing with what is actually passed as law by the US Congress. The Supreme Court, as is their discretion, seems to have chosen to read between the lines in this case (by a currently rare 6-3 margin) to create a reasonable implementation of a not so reasonably written law. The Supreme Court chose to loosely interpret the law rather then leave things in Congress' incapable hands.
It was the law that failed to account for the concept of diminishing returns, not Judge Sotomayor.
Many industrial grade AC / refrigeration / ice-making systems spray water over the the condenser coils to improve the efficiency of the system as the evaporating water absorbs much more heat than would the air itself. Especially on hot days. Combined with a large blower fan and low ambient air temperatures, this can actually result in a small snow flurry next to the condenser stack (as if Chicago winters were not already bad enough).
I wonder if this would work on LEGO bricks? Particularly the white ones that fair very poorly in the sun. That a good method for polishing out scratches would make the day of many a LEGO collector.
Honestly, I didn't need any help from the press finding the kooks, the statements the Libertarian Party candidates PAID to put in the official voter's pamphlet mailed to every Oregon voter were quite enough they were most everything but racist, and almost as far off the rails as the Constitution Party candidates (those people are scary).
They didn't spend just an hour analyzing the 747's stability, rather they spent a full hour presenting months of work to a famous pilot who had learnt most everything he knew about aircraft back when the wings had to held up with struts and wires.
Especially their enormous fleet.
Well, yeah. After all, Antiswitzerland would be a low-lying island.
Given that Polonium 210 has a half-life of 138 days and the Soviet Union collapsed about 15 years ago, there would be about 3 parts per trillion left of any Po210 produced during the last days of the Soviet Union. In fact there would be 2 parts per million (or less) left of any Po210 produced before Putin became the President of Russia. So if the Po210 used to posion Litvinenko went missing from a Russia reactor, it was the current Russian government that lost it.
As for who did it, nothing tells your critics what to go do with themselves quite like the long, painful and very public death of one of said critics. Sometimes a contract murder just doesn't get the point across.
And only Bill Gates could make the federal government open source.
Everyone knows the real proposal only applies to TVs 42 inches or larger.
all the cell phones on the planet could fit in 200 cubic feet of space
Assuming the average cellphone is one cubic inch in size (I would say mine is close to 3 cu in and its not that big), then you can fit 1728 junk cellphones in one cubic foot or about 350 thousand in 200 cubic feet. I am pretty sure there are more phones than that in the city of Chicago, much less the whole planet. Accounting the total quantity and historic size of cellphones, even an estimate of one million cubic feet for the phones themselves is probably a very low-ball type number. Then think of the volume of manufacturing waste, discarded packaging, accessories and obselete base station hardware. Don't underestimate the problem.
A nation does have complete control over its airspace, but by international agreement, that 'airspace' stops at 100 KM altitude. Space space is essentially uncontrolled, akin to international waters. Geosynchronous orbital slots are subject to some control and are 'owned' by different countries (I think this is the case, anyway). Multiple countries do fly photo-reconnasaince satellites over the US on a daily basis and are not bombed to bits.
However, in the years before the USSR launched Sputnik, the US was concerned about how the Russians would react to satellite passes. But since Sputnik was first and the United States specifically refused to protest overflights by it, legitimacy was established for US satellite usage.
Your rights to your property, and any information it contains, are at least severly compromised when your property becomes physically entangled with someone else's property as in an accident. It that case 'none of your business' no longer applies because your business and theirs have become one.
At present these devices are not required, and you may be able to remove the EDR BEFORE an accident if you so choose, depending on how the manufacterer integrated it into the vehicle. Removing or destroying the EDR AFTER an accident would almost certainly, and definitely should be, be treated as evidence tampering and might be admissiable as an evidence of guilt in a civil case against you. Before an accident, the EDR is just an electronic device that remembers a few seconds of information, afterwards it is evidentiary recording of the accident.
In case of an accident, yes, the police/courts certainly could demand access via subpeona as part of the trial or investigation and should receive said access. That is what due process is about. Whether access could be obtained as part of say a reckless or drunken driving case where there was no accident is less clear and is a legitimate worry. Of course a short, simple law could clear this up while preserving the use of EDRs for accident investigations. Further, as I understand it, most EDRs only retain a few seconds of information before and after airbag deployment and thus is useless outside of an accident investigation.
Finally, and this is general comment not in response to the previous post, I think too many people go too far in asserting their 'right' to drive. Operating a motor vehicle is not a right granted by the Constitution or any deity that I am aware of. It is a privilege granted by the government, and one easily given with few limits. And given the number of clearly stupid and dangerous driving behaviors I have seen, it is also a privilege that needs to be rescinded a little more frequently. Just think of what that could do for traffic congestion in Chicago alone...
I suppose it all depends on what conditions and failure modes you want the payload to be able to survive.
In the case of the rocket motor blowing up of its own accord (as opposed to destroyed by launch safety control), there wouldn't be anything you can do. The whole thing just goes BOOM! (not boom, BOOM!) with little warning. A medium sized Delta II rocket that exploded a few hundred meters above the pad in 1997 damaged the pad and destroyed some equipment on the ground. Google it, videos are spectacular.
If you have a failure or thrust loss in one of the later booster stages, the payload makes it into space but either does not achieve orbital velocity or can not make it to its final orbit. This is the most common problem for geosynchronous communications satellites, which are some of the most expensive things launched. The last booster stage is the one where using more exotic engines pays off the most, it also needs to fire multiple times and both increase failure rates. If you can not push the satellite into a useful orbit with its maneuvering fuel, you chuck it into the atmosphere in a controlled way so you no longer have to pay to watch over it. If you didn't reach orbital velocity in the first place, physics will do this for you. Either way, the weight of a heat shield, aerodynamic casing and parachutes/soft landing equipment will be very expensive. And if your boosters all work fine, then the satellite has to be able to detach from all of this stuff, which could add more failure modes late in the launch cycle.
The best case for recovery would be an in-atmosphere abort where you can wait a few seconds before triggering the range safety device. You could use the existing staging system to pop to last stage off the top of the rocket stack after shutting down the main engines. Adding a drag-chute and a couple other things so the last boost stage can be dropped from the payload (and destroyed separately) would not be hard or heavy. What would be heavy and hard to do would be adding enough parachutes, airbags and structural integrity to the payload, support truss and shrouds to survive landing with anything useful left.
Satellites are very carefully designed to withstand the stress of a sustained acceleration applied from one direction. Impacts are hard on equipment, but less so on soft, squishy things; a 20G bounce would utterly destroy a satellite (this is a GUESStimate, my degree is in aerospace engineering, but undergrad does not cover the intricacies of satellite design) but that crappy airline seat is rated for you to WALK away from 30G+ impacts. Satellites are also built, tested and moved about in full clean-room environments. So you actually need to land the satellite with an air-tight shell around it, and if the seal breaks that means every part has to be cleaned or replaced before the satellite can be used again to prevent contamination and corrosion. The Space Shuttle cargo bay is only opened in clean environments for this same reason.
While there are a number of challenges associated with an aborted launch outlined above, all can be solved with technology available right now. The Space Shuttle actually has two different launch abort modes depending on when and what goes wrong (an SRB turning into the fuel tank invalidates both). This is partly because it was already designed as reusable vehicle that lands on a runway. The replacement CEV will have also have an abort option, as cost is not much of a factor when in comes to astronaut safety and many of the parts are already there because of the need to parachute-land after re-entry. But for satellites the limiting factor is very much cost. It is cheaper to buy an insurance policy than to provide a recovery option for even the most benign failure modes. The moment this changes, Boeing, Lockheed or Ariane will immediately announce it as an option on their launchers.
PS - sorry for the length of my response, I tend to ramble, now back to thesis writing
PPS - stupid thesis
Except for the 'rocket blows up' part, it has happened. Twice.
In 1984, two communications satellites that had been left in low parking orbits after booster failures were recovered during a Space Shuttle mission (STS-51A). However, after the Challenger accident the Space Shuttle was permanently taken out of the commerical satellite launch and recovery business for fairly obvious reasons. The reason you don't hear about payloads recovered from the failure of single use launchers is that it would cost far more to install a recovery system than it does to buy insurance.
What you described is actually akin to taking a DVD and deliberately scratching out the parts you don't want binary bit by binary bit (good luck). If you did that, you would be free to re-sell your disc like any other used DVD as long you as you accurately describe its condition. The same as how you can resell highlighted textbooks and the like. What you do with your purchased copy is your concern.
The book analogy of what these companies are doing to doing to movies is the following: You take a the text of a book, delete the objectionable parts, reprint the editted book, wrap in a cover torn off of a copy printed by the original publisher, burning the old pages, and then sell it, clearly labeled perhaps, but sold as a version of the original book none the less. And what is being sold is not what was purchased from the orginial publisher. It is a copyrighted work (the cover) wrapped around an un-authorized derivative work (the editted text) that either omits, abuses or infringes upon the original copyright notice. In so doing you explicitly and willfully violate many aspects of copyright law. The original book that you purchased, and any right you had to it, was lost when you ripped the cover off and destroyed its contents. At this point you have already done what you wanted with the book you purchased: you destroyed it. Any attempt to reprint, repackage and resell that book is to manipulate somebody else's work for your own gain.