When we (academics) do experiments on people however trivial we usually have to go through ethical clearance, get informed consent etc. I think its skipping that part that people are uncomfortable about.
You do realize that you yourself conduct such "experiments" on your friends every day? While making conversation in the lunch room you ask, "Hey, anyone wanna see Planet of the Apes tonight?" That elicits a lukewarm response, so you then ask "Well what about How to Train your Dragon?" You get a lot of interest in that one, so next time you ask about watching movies you're more likely to make suggestions where they can bring along their kids.
I think the dividing line between when you need to get informed consent is when the experiment begins to make people do things they wouldn't have done anyway. Tweaking how people get paired up for dates is fine if they were looking for a date anyway. Forcing them to go on a date when they weren't planning to would require informed consent (and probably compensation).
Goes to the full August 1946 issue of Popular Science, including a first-hand account of Able - the first atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll. That glimpse into life as a tech geek in 1946 is more interesting than TFA.
Guy comes to my house and kills a member of my family. In "self defense", the next day I go and burn down his house with him and his family in it.
Rather that just reading the anti-U.S. rants about this, you should try visiting Asia and talking to the Asians who had to live under Imperial Japanese rule. Much like the Nazis, the Japanese saw themselves as a genetically superior race, and other races were nothing more than cattle to them. My grandmother was forced to watch as her sister and niece were raped and killed by Japanese soldiers, all to coerce my grandfather (a doctor) into treating one of their officers. The Imperial Japanese needed to be put down, at all costs, for the sake of civilization.
The correct analogy is guy terrorizes neighborhood killing hundreds of people. Then happens to go into your house and kill a member of your family. You fight back and eventually surround him in his home where he's instructed his entire family to die defending the house. You manage to take him and one family member out with a new weapon that vaporizes the part of the house he's in, which spares the rest of his family. The loss of the family member is regrettable, but it's a positive outcome when you consider the part you've conveniently left out of your analogy - that killing his entire family would have been an acceptable cost to free the neighborhood from his reign of terror.
I was demonstrating to a shitty software developer the other day how all his input sanitizing routines were in the javascript front end to his web application and anyone bypassing the javascript could essentially have their way with the back-end database, and he told me "Oh you're making a back-end API call, no one will ever do that!" No one except the guy who's hacking your fucking system, jackass.
That actually happened in one of the online games I used to play. The game company decided to run a promotion where you filled out a short survey on their web site, and as a reward you'd be mailed a small prize in the game. Someone sifted through the code for the website, and found it was just telling the game server's database to mail the prize's item number to the player's account. He tried changing the item number and it worked. Soon he had dozens of the rarest, most valuable item in the game in his mailbox and was selling them for the RL equivalent of thousands of dollars.
Anyhow, this is why I've always scoffed at the title "Software Engineer". Real engineers sign off on their work, and can be held personally liable if their design turns out to be flawed and leads to damage, injury, or death. In some engineering professions (e.g. civil engineering), a notable failure can lead to losing one's professional accreditation, turning that expensive engineering degree into a worthless piece of paper. The software industry needs to decide if it wants to continue down this "anyone can write a program" wild west route, or if it wants to become a real profession with real standards and real consequences for failing to adhere to those standards. Just like anyone can write code, anyone can build and wire their own house, treat themselves for an injury, or represent themselves in court. But if you want to sell your services for doing these things you have to be licensed, and you are personally liable for any harm that comes from your work not being up to professional standards.
External events are considered in US plant design already, this author seems to be a bit ignorant on how the safety case for plants is built. Who cares if we refine the probability of an event is if the plant is already designed to withstand it?
Technically, the Fukushima plant was also already designed to withstand this type of event. It had sufficient backup power systems necessary to continue operating the cooling pumps in the event of a catastrophic disaster of this type.
Where they screwed up was in the redundancy of the backups. This is unfortunately a fairly common failure mode in engineering designs. Say a single diesel generator has a 10% chance of failing to start up if you try to run it during an emergency. People then naively think that if you just put 6 diesel generators into the design, then that reduces the statistical probability of failure to 1 in a million. The chance of all six generators failing is (10%)^6 = 1 in a million.
That's the correct math for generator failures due to independent internal causes. But everything changes when you talk about external causes. Suddenly you have a cause like, oh, say, a tsunmai, which can affect all the generators simultaneously. The failure mode for each generator is no longer independent, and your redundancy does nothing to decrease the odds of a failure. All they had to avoid this effect was put the generators and diesel fuel tanks in different places. But no, the typical Japanese obsession with order and symmetry* mandated that they put all their generators in a row in the same place. And the tsunami took them out and contaminated their fuel all at once. Indeed the two newer Fukushima reactors where the generators and fuel were stored in a different location got through the earthquake and tsunami just fine.
* I rag on the Japanese, but the same thing happened with the Space Shuttle Challenger. They were having problems with poor O-ring seals in the solid rocket boosters. So to reduce the probability of a failure, they just added more O-rings. That worked to stop the independent failures (burn-through due to improper seating of an O-ring in one spot). But when an external factor popped up which caused all O-rings to fail simultaneously (cold weather), the safety of the redundant O-rings was negated.
This is kind of a double post, but it's important enough to warrant a separate post.
Unfortunately, Congress has dilly dallied on this issue for too long. We're now past the point where mandating carriers unlock phones will help. There are still phones which will work across a broad range of carriers, but they are now few and far between. Most of the newer phones are limited in their frequencies so they'll only work fully with one carrier. Take it to another carrier and you'll either suffer degraded service, or even lack certain service like LTE. So even if you can unlock your phone from the carrier, it won't do you any good because you'll lose 4g or even 3g capability if you try to use it with another carrier.
The only thing that will help now is a law mandating that carriers must provide service to any phone a customer brings with them that's capable of operating on their network. That will open up the markets so that manufacturers begin selling multi-carrier and world phones directly to customers (bypassing the carriers). You can still buy a phone from Verizon if you really want, and it'll be crippled so as not to work with any other carrier even if unlocked. But the smarter person would buy the version of the phone sold by the manufacturer at Best Buy or Amazon which supports enough frequencies that it'll work with any carrier. That's actually what Google did with the Nexus 5 - it supports enough frequencies to work on AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and a bunch of other international carriers. It's technically capable of working on Verizon (with LTE in areas where Verizon provides band 4 - New York and Los Angeles from what I hear), but Verizon blacklists it so you can't use it on their network. What we need is a law making it illegal for Verizon to do that.
The "retarded" Verizon specific phones are actually some of the most compatible phones you can buy today. Not only do they work on the Verizon CDMA and "bastardized" LTE networks, but they include full functionality for GSM and HSPA networks. I have two Verizon phones, right at this moment, that I'm using full time on other networks with full capability. My Verizon iPhone 5S is currently being used on an AT&T postpaid plan. All LTE, HSPA, and GSM functions work with 100% compatibility. My Verizon LG G2 is being used on T-Mobile with full LTE, HSPA, and GSM services. Nearly every phone worth having today is fully compatible with the GSM/WCDMA (HSPA) network technology. Phones are becoming more compatible, not less.
That's not quite true. CDMA phones with LTE have GSM SIM cards because the LTE spec requires it. Most of them also have GSM capability, while the GSM-only versions don't have CDMA capability. So that respect you're right that Verizon and Sprint phones have better global compatibility than GSM-only phones.
Unfortunately, Congress has dilly dallied on this issue for too long. We're now past the point where mandating carriers unlock phones will help. There are still phones which will work across a broad range of carriers like your G2, but they are now few and far between. Most of the newer phones are restricted in their frequencies so they'll only work fully with one carrier. Take it to another carrier and you'll either suffer degraded service, or even lack certain service (like no LTE on your Verizon G2 with Sprint). So even if you can unlock your phone from the carrier, it won't do you any good because you'll lose 4g or even 3g capability if you try to use it with another carrier.
The only thing that will help now a law mandating that carriers must provide service to any phone a customer brings with them that's capable of operating on their network. That will open up the markets so that manufacturers begin selling multi-carrier and world phones directly to customers (bypassing the carriers). You can still buy a phone from Verizon if you really want, and it'll be crippled so as not to work with any other carrier even if unlocked. But the smarter person would buy the version of the phone sold by the manufacturer at Best Buy or Amazon which supports enough frequencies that it'll work with any carrier. That's actually what Google did with the Nexus 5 - it supports enough frequencies to work on AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and a bunch of other international carriers. It's technically capable of working on Verizon, but Verizon blacklists it so you can't use it on their network at all. What we need is a law making it illegal for Verizon to do that.
Incidentally, for anyone cursing CDMA in the U.S. complicating matters, don't. CDMA won the standards war. Your GSM phone uses CDMA - most HSPA implementations are wideband CDMA. It's only because the U.S. didn't mandate GSM and allowed carriers to try out different technologies that a superior tech - CDMA - was able to prove itself in the market and was eventually incorporated into the GSM spec. If CDMA hadn't been around, we'd probably be stuck with 1 Mbps or slower data speeds today. (LTE works very similarly to CDMA, except in the frequency domain instead of the code domain. Each phone is assigned an orthogonal set of frequencies, while in CDMA they're assigned an orthogonal set of codes.)
It's expensive. Stamping or rolling a sheet of metal into a flat shape or single-curved is quick and easy. Adding lots of little dimples takes time and adds cost. While I can't say how much cost, some or most of the fuel savings may be offset by additional energy consumed during manufacturing.
The mechanism for forming the dimples may not be cost-effective. A similar idea was tried with planes - NASA drilled lots of holes in the wing and attached suction tubes to keep the boundary layer attached, leading to laminar flow over the entire wing and better wing efficiency. That's the opposite of what you're doing here (the dimples disrupt laminar flow and cause the airflow to detach and become turbulent prematurely, which actually reduces drag because the air doesn't "stick" to the car as well). But the drawback may be the same - the weight and space of carrying all that sucking equipment completely offset any fuel and cost savings.
People don't like it. Auto manufacturers would love to eliminate the cost of the shiny clearcoat layer on top of the paint. But buyers love smooth and shiny - it sells new cars. So they don't.
It'd be a lot harder to clean. Dirt and other material like dead bugs and bird droppings would tend to collect and dry in the dimples. With a smooth surface, you can scrape these off. With dimples, the crud would collect inside, and you're going to take a lot more work to clean it out. Maybe enough for an owner to say "screw this, it ain't worth an 11% fuel savings." Deformable dimples may fare better, but the dried crud may prevent the dimple from completely flattening, leaving you with a similar problem.
It causes lots of reflections. Most of your car's body is flat panels so you only see reflected sunlight at certain angles. You deal with this by temporarily covering your view of the offending car withy our hand, until you've changed angles so there is no more glare. But put a lot of small curved surfaces on a car and they will reflect sunlight into your eyes from almost any angle. Are you prepared to drive on a road where every car is covered with lots of little glare dots from the sun? It would be less of a problem if cars were painted with flat paint, but see two bullets above.
Easier/more annoying to vandalize. Antisocial kids would run around popping these with a pin while your car was parked. You wouldn't notice it until you were up to speed and the dimple suction mechanism complained of reduced vacuum pressure, so the culprits are highly unlikely to be caught.
And those are just off the top of my head. That's not to say they're legit - maybe they won't turn out to be that big a problem in practice. But if you can't think of any reason why this hasn't already been done yet other than "it's an auto industry conspiracy!", then you haven't really put a lot of thought into it.
Bq seems a fair measure to me. It's a measure of radioactivity. Would you prefer pounds (or kilograms) of X, with no measure of the rate X is releasing radiation?
It's a bad unit to use in this context because it's a measure of individual atomic decays per second. It's kinda like you asking me how far you have to walk to get to the nearest bus stop and me telling you the distance in angstroms. The scale is just completely devoid of any common reference frame for the number to be intuitively useful (not that most people have a common reference frame for radioactivity). That's why Bq is commonly used by people trying to scare the public about radioactivity - when you're talking about a lot of material like, oh, a field, it results in really, really big numbers.
Let's put it this way. A block of soil one square mile by 1 foot deep (790,000 m^3) has a natural radioactivity of 653 billion Bq. If they excavated 1.1 trillion Bq of radioactive material from Fukushima, then they removed about as much radioactive substances as is naturally contained in 1.7 square miles of soil one foot deep. Of course the piece of information that we're missing (and no it's not in TFA) is how much volume of material they removed. If we knew that, we could come up with a ratio and say "Ah hah! The stuff they removed is x times more radioactive than the natural radioactivity of dirt!"
Yes, the point is that it's like MAD and other weapons policies: you don't want to put down your gun (or shield, for that matter) while the other guy is still holding on to his.
MAD doesn't work for self-replicating things like bioweapons. If you put your gun or nuke down, and the other guy still has his and decides to shoot at you, you're screwed.
OTOH, if you destroy your smallpox virus samples, and the other guy still has his and decides to use it on you, well he's just given you a smallpox sample you can use right back on him just as if you'd never destroyed your samples.
The only bioweapon for which MAD would work would be one which kills quickly enough that the target nation is killed off before it can collect samples and send them back to the attacker. But any bioweapon that kills that quickly would be useless because it would kill the victim before he could spread the contagion to others, thus defeating the very characteristic which makes a bioweapon a weapon of mass descruction.
Yep, I think we can all agree that it's worth a few punkin' headed babies and/or a couple of deaths so the rest of us can have brighter colors and whiter whites.
That's the tradeoff we make with vaccination programs. A small percentage of kids who are vaccinated get sick, and a few of them die every year. But we still vaccinate everyone because the benefits far outweigh those costs.
The flaw in your reasoning (it's a pretty common flawed line of reasoning, not just yours, so I'm not picking on you) is that you're trying to compare against a nonexistent zero state. Radiation can cause death. If there were no radiation, there would be no deaths. Therefore we must avoid radiation. Likewise, if we didn't vaccinate, those kids who died from vaccination wouldn't die. Therefore we shouldn't vaccinate.
To do a correct comparison, you can't compare to a zero state. You must take into account opportunity costs; you have to compare with alternative equivalent states. Without vaccination, far more people would die from the diseases we're vaccinating against. Without nuclear power, the world loses 13% of its electricity. The harm from that far exceeds the few deaths from even Fukushima-level accidents. Or if you replaced that nuclear generation with the next most-viable alternative (coal/gas), the emissions from those are far more harmful than the radiation hazards from nuclear. Even if you managed to replace them with wind and solar, the number of deaths installing and maintaining all those turbines and rooftop panels (roughly 11,000 turbines for a Fukushima-level plant, or 4.8 million homes with 40 m^2 of panels installed on each of their roofs) far exceeds the number that nuclear has killed.*
* Math for the wind/solar comparison:
The Fukushima plant had 4696 MWe of nominal generating capacity.
Nuclear has a capacity factor of 0.9, so in a year it produced on average 90% of that, or 4226.4 MW.
Average wind turbine generates about 1.5 MWe peak.
Onshore wind's capacity factor is about 0.25 on the high end, so in a year that turbine produces an average 375 kW.
You'd need 11270 1.5MW turbines to equal Fukushima's output.
PV Solar using high-end 20% efficient panels generates about 150 W/m^2 peak.
Average rooftop installation is about 20 m^2, but the roof size is about 40 m^2. So 6 kW peak.
Solar's capacity factor in the U.S. is 0.145. So on average the rooftop would generate 870 Watts.
You'd need 4.86 million rooftops to equal Fukushima's output.
Working in high places is dangerous. Roofing is the 5th most dangerous job in the U.S., at 34.7 fatalities per 100,000 workers each year.
If a solar installation requires 3 roof-top workers and they can do 100 installs per year, you'd expect 51 deaths per year vs. an estimated about 30 deaths from cancer caused by Fukushima's radiation release in a once-per-25-year accident.
I can't find stats for turbine worker fatality rates, but wind already kills about 5-10 maintenance workers per year while providing less than 1/10th the world's electricity that nuclear does.
It only takes something like 1000-2000 regular donors to keep a writer in reasonable comfort
Put another way, if the median income is $45,000, then 1500 regular donors giving 1/1500th of their annual income or $30/yr each will give an author a median income. (In reality, it's less than 1/1500th because the mean income is higher than the median, so the more affluent donors will allow the author to hit the median income with less than 1/1500th of each donor's income.)
I think it's also important to keep in mind that the current book/music/movie pricing model does not scale. A DVD costs $18.95 whether they sell 10,000 copies or 10 million. In every other industry except the IP industries, price drops as sales increase. At first DVD players cost $150 and they only sold a few tens of thousands of them. As their success grew and sales reached into the tens and hundreds of millions, the price dropped to the $25 they're at now. The Patreon model brings this price scaling to the IP industry (much to the chagrin of the established players). If you're supporting an author in a niche market that you really enjoy, you'll be encouraged to donate a lot to him just to keep him writing. But if the author is enjoying J.K. Rowling-level success, you'll be less inclined to donate as much or won't donate at all, knowing that he's already getting plenty of money from other supporters.
It's good to see the EPA finally considering relaxing some of its uptight, business-hostile regulations. No wonder the US is losing ground to the developing world when for a few decades it has pushed this regulatory regime that holds industry back and has really harmed wider adoption of nuclear energy.
You're trying to be sarcastic, but your words are quite literally true. 0.25 mSv is:
12x the radiation you get from a chest x-ray
6x the radiation you get from a 5 hour airliner flight
3.5x the radiation you get from living in a stone, brick, or concrete house for a year
about half the radiation dose from a mammogram
an eighth the radiation dose from a head CT scan
1/28th the radiation dose from a chest CT scan
If the 0.25 mSv limit were applied consistently to other aspects of our lives, we'd ban mammograms and CT scans, limit people to a dozen chest x-rays in a year,
restrict pilots and stewardesses to just 30 hours of flight time per year, and severely curtail brick, stone, and concrete as building materials. If the proposal someone made below to reduce the limit to 0.025 mSv were carried out, we'd have to ban air travel and chest x-rays altogether.
That's actually why I avoid big cities in the Northeast. New York has had a quake of magnitude 5 in the recent past (1884 if I remember). While a 5 is not big, it is serious enough to do damage to unreinforced structures like brick. And the huge number of brick buildings in New York are about as unreinforced as they come. (Brick construction has no lateral strength, and topples over with just slight sideways shaking. One of the few fatalities in the 5.9 Whittier Narrows quake was a man who pulled his car off the road to ride out the quake, and the free-standing brick wall he parked next to fell on top of him.
This map just shows you the likelihood of a big quake, not the potential for damage from a quake. To get the damage potential, you need to come up with a maps of how lenient the local building codes are, then multiply the two. The areas of highest risk are actually those where big or even moderate quakes are infrequent, leading to complacency among the residents and lax building codes.
This is why a 5.7 in Morocco kills 12,000, while a 6.9 just outside San Francisco only kills a few score. Residents of the former city never thought a quake would hit there. Residents of the latter knew a big quake was coming and built appropriately. You couldn't pay me to live in St. Louis, South Carolina, east Tennessee, or New York City. All have the potential for moderate to huge quakes, but they're so rare the building codes don't take them into account.
The issue is that they don't think of a much smaller ISP like Level3 as a peer, and don't want to give them settlement-free peering - they don't peer for free with lots of other ISPs for the same reason.
Level 3 is a tier-1 network, about as big as they come. This isn't big Verizon poo-pooing some little ISP as you seem to think. This is like your local gas station Verizon trying to get Exxon to pay them for the "privilege" of shipping them product their customers have already paid for.
Seriously, is that really what matters now? What an arrogant *****. What really matters is who did it and why. What's the risk for other planes.
In the grand scheme of things, yes those are the things that matter. But unless a U.S. citizen was killed, the U.S. really has no business getting involved in this. It's the same reason the U.S. stations troops in South Korea. Their job isn't to help repel a North Korean invasion. Their job is to die so the U.S. has a reason to get involved.
The plane was a Boeing, so Boeing and possibly the NTSB will be involved in the investigation. But unless another country requests it, the U.S. cannot bring in the FBI or CIA to investigate this unless a U.S. citizen was killed. Given that Russia has already removed the black boxes and purportedly the missile truck used in the attack was secreted to Russian soil, those are the kind of intelligence assets you really want investigating this.
So yes the things you say are most important, but answering them reliably very much hinges on whether or not a U.S. citizen was among those killed.
Maybe MSFT was trying to learn from Xerox, Kodak, and other companies that pioneered technologies and then failed to follow through.
While Xerox deserves full blame for missing opportunities (the mouse, GUI, ethernet, and laser printer were all invented there), Kodak does not. They were always on the forefront of digital imaging. They built the first digital camera in the 1970s, and had a line of digital SLRs in the early 1990s. They knew exactly where the industry was heading, and in fact did most of the early R&D to get us there. The only reason they managed to hang around as long as they did was because they owned most of the patents on digital imaging and were collecting massive royalties.
What led to Kodak's downfall is obvious if you look at the pictures in that wikipedia link. Those are Nikon (and later Canon) bodies with Kodak digital sensors. Kodak was a film company, not a camera company. They weren't in the business of making cameras (aside from some cheap consumer models and disposables). When the industry shifted from film to digital, the companies which ended up on top were companies skilled at making cameras/lenses (Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Zeiss, and their arch-rival Fuji which had been busy making decent point and shoots prior to the switch to digital), and companies skilled at making electronics/silicon (Sony, Panasonic, Casio, etc). Kodak thought they could carve a piece of the digital sensor pie for themselves, but rapidly found themselves unable to keep up with companies with decades of expertise manufacturing microprocessors who simply shifted that expertise into manufacturing sensors. In other words, the best business model for making camera sensors turned out not to be knowing how to make camera sensors. It turned out to be knowing how to make microchips.
Remember when the UN complained about Guantanamo Bay? Well, this is similar.
Guantanamo Bay was (and is) a legal black hole. Past U.S. Supreme Court decisions held that not only U.S. Citizens but also foreigners on U.S. soil have Constitutional protection. So housing Taliban prisoners in U.S. prisons would've automatically granted them U.S. Constitutional rights, including the right to a speedy trial, the right to know what they're accused of, and a guarantee of legal counsel. Well guess what? Guantanamo Bay isn't on U.S. soil. It's on land leased from Cuba. Thus it falls outside the jurisdiction of that pesky SCotUS decision, and allowed the U.S. government to detain foreign nationals without following its own Constitution. That's the entire reason Bush chose it for the prison.
Most of the International and UN arguments against Guantanamo rested on International treaties concerning the treatment of prisoners of war. The problem is the preface for almost all those treaties defines combatants as people who don a uniform and wear a distinguishing emblem. The reason they make a big deal about this is to provide an incentive for soldiers to distinguish themselves from non-combatants (civilians), so as to reduce civilian casualties due to misidentification. If your soldiers want all those juicy protections for prisoners of war, they have to wear a uniform and emblems designating them as soldiers thus making it impossible for them to blend in among civilians.
Unfortunately, most if not all the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay never wore a uniform. The people drafting those treaties on the rules of war never really considered what would happen if a fighting force chose not to abide by the uniform requirement. They kinda assumed the protections were a big enough carrot that everyone would do it. This also makes it a bad idea to expand the protection for prisoners in those treaties to cover non-uniformed combatants, like many who are opposed to Guantanamo have naively advocated. If you do that then unless he's got an overdeveloped sense of honor, no soldier in his right mind would ever wear a uniform - it just makes him an easy target. And we'd devolve back to the pre-imperial chaos where wars were fought between two masses of people with no discrimination between combatants and civilians. Thus the Guantanamo prisoners fall through a crack in International law.
This isn't to say the prison at Guantanamo Bay is ok. I've never supported it and have called for it to be shut down since the beginning. I'm just saying both U.S. and International law don't quite cover the situation at Guantanamo (kinda like the guy stuck at an airport for 18 years because of the way International laws regarding entry visas and citizenship work). That makes it completely the opposite of this case, where there are laws protecting privacy in both U.S. (4th Amendment protection against warrantless searches) and UN (Article 12) that would appear to prohibit the NSA blanket surveillence.
So, forward domain_registration@sony.com to former_employee@sony.com. Let us know how that works out for you.
It works a lot better because if domain registration emails are being sent directly to former_employee@sony.com, then only he knows that domain registrations are being sent to him. There is no record at Sony saying that he was the one getting those emails.
If you instead have it sent to domain_registration@sony.com with a forwarder, when former_employee is fired, the sysadmin can look at the entire list of forwarded addresses, grep for every instance of former_employee, and re-forward them to other employees.
See the difference? With your method, only the former employee knows what emails he was getting that need to be redirected. And if he was fired, he certainly isn't going to cooperate at providing a list. With forwarded email addresses, Sony has a list of all important emails which were going to the former employee.
All this is kinda moot though. In this case with a company the size of Sony, they should've just paid the $1000 or so to register the domain for the next 100 years.
hoping users will alter their behavior doesn't work. Better technology does.
Unfortunately, no it doesn't. Energy saved from improved efficiency through technology is usually spent on additional uses, rather than reducing your overall energy use.
They do have smaller gallons though: 31 US MPG is actually 37 UK MPG, which is not too bad for a 525
The other problem is that even if the gallons were the same, MPG is the inverse of fuel efficiency. So going from 31 to 37 MPG is actually less fuel savings than going from 20 to 24 MPG, despite both being about a 20% improvement in efficiency and the former being a 6 MPG improvement vs 4 MPG for the latter. Being an inverse, the bigger the number the less it matters. This is why the push to hybridize econoboxes is a joke - you get very little fuel savings for the added complexity. The vehicles you really want to be hybridizing first to save the most fuel are trucks and SUVs.
You really want to be measuring fuel consumption in gallons or liters per 100 miles or km. That's the best way to answer the question, "I have to drive x miles; how much fuel will I use?" That's how nearly everyone drives. MPG is the best way to answer, "I have x gallons of fuel to use; how far can I go?" Only race car drivers drive that way.
However, having a fleet of heavy cars around is more dangerous for the average person, which is what the EU statistics show, and that study points it out too.
That's not how the physics works. Two heavy cars colliding is the same as two light cars colliding (provided the cars are not so light they have to compromise on length of crumple zones and rigidity of the passenger compartment). All other things being equal and assuming no objects are flying through windows (a weak spot in the protection of the passenger compartment), heavier cars are safer than lighter cars in equal-mass collisions, and collisions against stationary barricades (equivalent to an equal-mass collision).
Another reason the busy American highways are dangerous is all of the trucking used to move things around
This is what's important. Where accidents become bad are when a light car collides with a heavy car or a truck. The mass disparity results in a net energy transfer from the high mass vehicle to the low mass vehicle. In a head on collision with both vehicles traveling at the same speed, the heavier vehicle experiences a velocity change less than 100% its starting velocity (it just slows down). The lighter vehicle experiences a velocity change greater than 100% its starting velocity (it bounces backwards). The occupants of the lighter vehicle thus experience more g's of deceleration. (Put another way, the collision is symmetric in the reference frame of the center of momentum of the two vehicles, which means the reference frame is moving in the same direction as the heavier vehicle.) If you want to minimize accident injuries and deaths, you'd mandate that all cars be of the same mass, and remove trucks onto a different set of parallel roads.
Having driven on the Autobahn, I'd say another factor is the U.S. having less stringent licensing and driving requirements. In Germany, drivers are required to pull over to the slower lanes if a faster car approaches them from behind. In the U.S., people seem to take delight in cutting off faster drivers. The result is that German highway lanes are highly stratified with slower traffic always on the right, faster always on the left, thus minimizing speed differentials between adjacent lanes. While in the U.S. frequently the right or middle lanes are faster than the left lanes, resulting in more opportunity for collisions due to greater speed differentials between adjacent lanes.
If the spy budget is like the Pentagon budget, the U.S. spends more than the rest of the world combined.
U.S. spending on defense is not that far off the world average if you compare against GDP, especially if you include Japan (whom the U.S. is bound to defend under the peace treaties ending WWII). Much ballyhoo is made about how much the U.S. spends on the military in gross dollars. But that is mostly a consequence of the U.S. economy being so huge (nearly 1/4 of the world's total). If you think about it, you'll realize comparing military spending in gross dollars is pretty stupid, kinda like comparing how much food each country eats in tons instead of per capita. The U.S. accounts for 37% of the world's military spending, while the U.S. + Japan account for 30% of the world's economy. (I'm deliberately not adding European GDP to account for U.S. bases there as part of NATO, since those really should have been scaled back with the end of the Cold War.)
If you normalize for size of economy by comparing military spending vs GDP, the U.S. military ends up 15th in the world at 3.8%, notably below Russia. If you include Japan's GDP, it drops to 2.9% putting it 27th. (This excludes a few countries with historically higher military spending as percent of GDP since there is no 2013 data available for them yet. Mainly, Syria, UAE, North Korea, and Sudan.)
So getting back to your point, if countries' spending on their spy agencies is anything like their military spending, then NSA funding should actually be pretty close to what other countries' spy agencies get in proportion to their economy. BTW, spy satellites fall under NRO, not NSA.
Without getting into whether Scotland is an appropriate site for a spaceport... Orbits can be broadly divided into two categories - equatorial and polar.
Equatorial orbits are aligned close to the equator. The most useful one are geosynchronous (slight inclination so its ground track is a small figure-8 called an amalemma) or geostationary (zero inclination so they stay above the same spot on the equator). The satellites stay above the same general spot on earth, so are always "visible" to ground stations and satellite dishes. These orbits have to be about 36,000 km above the earth's surface to match the earth's daily rotation (23h 56m). Lower altitude equatorial orbits aren't as useful because their ground track is limited to a swath of latitudes centered around the equator. The primary reason they're used is because of your point (2) - they take less energy to achieve if you launch from close to the equator. If you just want to be in space and don't particularly care about where in space (e.g. the ISS), an equatorial low earth orbit is your cheapest option.
Polar orbits are aligned to pass over the poles (or close to it). These are the second-most useful orbits because they allow a satellite to observe 100% or nearly 100% of the earth's surface. Scientific data-gathering and spy satellites are put into polar orbits. (Do note that because the poles tend to be rather cold and uninhabited, and because a satellite's altitude lets it peer beyond its max orbital latitude, you can get near-100% coverage of the populated regions of the earth with a highly inclined equatorial orbit. But the more you incline the orbit, the less benefit there is from launching near the equator. For a polar orbit which passes directly over the poles, you actually have to spend energy and fuel to get rid of any sideways velocity imparted by the earth's rotation at the launch site.)
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You do realize that you yourself conduct such "experiments" on your friends every day? While making conversation in the lunch room you ask, "Hey, anyone wanna see Planet of the Apes tonight?" That elicits a lukewarm response, so you then ask "Well what about How to Train your Dragon?" You get a lot of interest in that one, so next time you ask about watching movies you're more likely to make suggestions where they can bring along their kids.
I think the dividing line between when you need to get informed consent is when the experiment begins to make people do things they wouldn't have done anyway. Tweaking how people get paired up for dates is fine if they were looking for a date anyway. Forcing them to go on a date when they weren't planning to would require informed consent (and probably compensation).
Goes to the full August 1946 issue of Popular Science, including a first-hand account of Able - the first atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll. That glimpse into life as a tech geek in 1946 is more interesting than TFA.
Rather that just reading the anti-U.S. rants about this, you should try visiting Asia and talking to the Asians who had to live under Imperial Japanese rule. Much like the Nazis, the Japanese saw themselves as a genetically superior race, and other races were nothing more than cattle to them. My grandmother was forced to watch as her sister and niece were raped and killed by Japanese soldiers, all to coerce my grandfather (a doctor) into treating one of their officers. The Imperial Japanese needed to be put down, at all costs, for the sake of civilization.
The correct analogy is guy terrorizes neighborhood killing hundreds of people. Then happens to go into your house and kill a member of your family. You fight back and eventually surround him in his home where he's instructed his entire family to die defending the house. You manage to take him and one family member out with a new weapon that vaporizes the part of the house he's in, which spares the rest of his family. The loss of the family member is regrettable, but it's a positive outcome when you consider the part you've conveniently left out of your analogy - that killing his entire family would have been an acceptable cost to free the neighborhood from his reign of terror.
That actually happened in one of the online games I used to play. The game company decided to run a promotion where you filled out a short survey on their web site, and as a reward you'd be mailed a small prize in the game. Someone sifted through the code for the website, and found it was just telling the game server's database to mail the prize's item number to the player's account. He tried changing the item number and it worked. Soon he had dozens of the rarest, most valuable item in the game in his mailbox and was selling them for the RL equivalent of thousands of dollars.
Anyhow, this is why I've always scoffed at the title "Software Engineer". Real engineers sign off on their work, and can be held personally liable if their design turns out to be flawed and leads to damage, injury, or death. In some engineering professions (e.g. civil engineering), a notable failure can lead to losing one's professional accreditation, turning that expensive engineering degree into a worthless piece of paper. The software industry needs to decide if it wants to continue down this "anyone can write a program" wild west route, or if it wants to become a real profession with real standards and real consequences for failing to adhere to those standards. Just like anyone can write code, anyone can build and wire their own house, treat themselves for an injury, or represent themselves in court. But if you want to sell your services for doing these things you have to be licensed, and you are personally liable for any harm that comes from your work not being up to professional standards.
Technically, the Fukushima plant was also already designed to withstand this type of event. It had sufficient backup power systems necessary to continue operating the cooling pumps in the event of a catastrophic disaster of this type.
Where they screwed up was in the redundancy of the backups. This is unfortunately a fairly common failure mode in engineering designs. Say a single diesel generator has a 10% chance of failing to start up if you try to run it during an emergency. People then naively think that if you just put 6 diesel generators into the design, then that reduces the statistical probability of failure to 1 in a million. The chance of all six generators failing is (10%)^6 = 1 in a million.
That's the correct math for generator failures due to independent internal causes. But everything changes when you talk about external causes. Suddenly you have a cause like, oh, say, a tsunmai, which can affect all the generators simultaneously. The failure mode for each generator is no longer independent, and your redundancy does nothing to decrease the odds of a failure. All they had to avoid this effect was put the generators and diesel fuel tanks in different places. But no, the typical Japanese obsession with order and symmetry* mandated that they put all their generators in a row in the same place. And the tsunami took them out and contaminated their fuel all at once. Indeed the two newer Fukushima reactors where the generators and fuel were stored in a different location got through the earthquake and tsunami just fine.
* I rag on the Japanese, but the same thing happened with the Space Shuttle Challenger. They were having problems with poor O-ring seals in the solid rocket boosters. So to reduce the probability of a failure, they just added more O-rings. That worked to stop the independent failures (burn-through due to improper seating of an O-ring in one spot). But when an external factor popped up which caused all O-rings to fail simultaneously (cold weather), the safety of the redundant O-rings was negated.
This is kind of a double post, but it's important enough to warrant a separate post.
Unfortunately, Congress has dilly dallied on this issue for too long. We're now past the point where mandating carriers unlock phones will help. There are still phones which will work across a broad range of carriers, but they are now few and far between. Most of the newer phones are limited in their frequencies so they'll only work fully with one carrier. Take it to another carrier and you'll either suffer degraded service, or even lack certain service like LTE. So even if you can unlock your phone from the carrier, it won't do you any good because you'll lose 4g or even 3g capability if you try to use it with another carrier.
The only thing that will help now is a law mandating that carriers must provide service to any phone a customer brings with them that's capable of operating on their network. That will open up the markets so that manufacturers begin selling multi-carrier and world phones directly to customers (bypassing the carriers). You can still buy a phone from Verizon if you really want, and it'll be crippled so as not to work with any other carrier even if unlocked. But the smarter person would buy the version of the phone sold by the manufacturer at Best Buy or Amazon which supports enough frequencies that it'll work with any carrier. That's actually what Google did with the Nexus 5 - it supports enough frequencies to work on AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and a bunch of other international carriers. It's technically capable of working on Verizon (with LTE in areas where Verizon provides band 4 - New York and Los Angeles from what I hear), but Verizon blacklists it so you can't use it on their network. What we need is a law making it illegal for Verizon to do that.
That's not quite true. CDMA phones with LTE have GSM SIM cards because the LTE spec requires it. Most of them also have GSM capability, while the GSM-only versions don't have CDMA capability. So that respect you're right that Verizon and Sprint phones have better global compatibility than GSM-only phones.
However, a lot of newer phones are limited in which frequencies they support. Your Verizon G2 for example only supports LTE at 750 and 1700 MHz. Verizon's LTE bands are at 700 and 1700 Mhz. T-Mobile's and AT&T's are at 1700 Mhz. Sprint's however are at 800, 1900, and 2500 MHz. So your phone won't get LTE with Sprint.
Unfortunately, Congress has dilly dallied on this issue for too long. We're now past the point where mandating carriers unlock phones will help. There are still phones which will work across a broad range of carriers like your G2, but they are now few and far between. Most of the newer phones are restricted in their frequencies so they'll only work fully with one carrier. Take it to another carrier and you'll either suffer degraded service, or even lack certain service (like no LTE on your Verizon G2 with Sprint). So even if you can unlock your phone from the carrier, it won't do you any good because you'll lose 4g or even 3g capability if you try to use it with another carrier.
The only thing that will help now a law mandating that carriers must provide service to any phone a customer brings with them that's capable of operating on their network. That will open up the markets so that manufacturers begin selling multi-carrier and world phones directly to customers (bypassing the carriers). You can still buy a phone from Verizon if you really want, and it'll be crippled so as not to work with any other carrier even if unlocked. But the smarter person would buy the version of the phone sold by the manufacturer at Best Buy or Amazon which supports enough frequencies that it'll work with any carrier. That's actually what Google did with the Nexus 5 - it supports enough frequencies to work on AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and a bunch of other international carriers. It's technically capable of working on Verizon, but Verizon blacklists it so you can't use it on their network at all. What we need is a law making it illegal for Verizon to do that.
Incidentally, for anyone cursing CDMA in the U.S. complicating matters, don't. CDMA won the standards war. Your GSM phone uses CDMA - most HSPA implementations are wideband CDMA. It's only because the U.S. didn't mandate GSM and allowed carriers to try out different technologies that a superior tech - CDMA - was able to prove itself in the market and was eventually incorporated into the GSM spec. If CDMA hadn't been around, we'd probably be stuck with 1 Mbps or slower data speeds today. (LTE works very similarly to CDMA, except in the frequency domain instead of the code domain. Each phone is assigned an orthogonal set of frequencies, while in CDMA they're assigned an orthogonal set of codes.)
And those are just off the top of my head. That's not to say they're legit - maybe they won't turn out to be that big a problem in practice. But if you can't think of any reason why this hasn't already been done yet other than "it's an auto industry conspiracy!", then you haven't really put a lot of thought into it.
It's a bad unit to use in this context because it's a measure of individual atomic decays per second. It's kinda like you asking me how far you have to walk to get to the nearest bus stop and me telling you the distance in angstroms. The scale is just completely devoid of any common reference frame for the number to be intuitively useful (not that most people have a common reference frame for radioactivity). That's why Bq is commonly used by people trying to scare the public about radioactivity - when you're talking about a lot of material like, oh, a field, it results in really, really big numbers.
Let's put it this way. A block of soil one square mile by 1 foot deep (790,000 m^3) has a natural radioactivity of 653 billion Bq. If they excavated 1.1 trillion Bq of radioactive material from Fukushima, then they removed about as much radioactive substances as is naturally contained in 1.7 square miles of soil one foot deep. Of course the piece of information that we're missing (and no it's not in TFA) is how much volume of material they removed. If we knew that, we could come up with a ratio and say "Ah hah! The stuff they removed is x times more radioactive than the natural radioactivity of dirt!"
MAD doesn't work for self-replicating things like bioweapons. If you put your gun or nuke down, and the other guy still has his and decides to shoot at you, you're screwed.
OTOH, if you destroy your smallpox virus samples, and the other guy still has his and decides to use it on you, well he's just given you a smallpox sample you can use right back on him just as if you'd never destroyed your samples.
The only bioweapon for which MAD would work would be one which kills quickly enough that the target nation is killed off before it can collect samples and send them back to the attacker. But any bioweapon that kills that quickly would be useless because it would kill the victim before he could spread the contagion to others, thus defeating the very characteristic which makes a bioweapon a weapon of mass descruction.
That's the tradeoff we make with vaccination programs. A small percentage of kids who are vaccinated get sick, and a few of them die every year. But we still vaccinate everyone because the benefits far outweigh those costs.
The flaw in your reasoning (it's a pretty common flawed line of reasoning, not just yours, so I'm not picking on you) is that you're trying to compare against a nonexistent zero state. Radiation can cause death. If there were no radiation, there would be no deaths. Therefore we must avoid radiation. Likewise, if we didn't vaccinate, those kids who died from vaccination wouldn't die. Therefore we shouldn't vaccinate.
To do a correct comparison, you can't compare to a zero state. You must take into account opportunity costs; you have to compare with alternative equivalent states. Without vaccination, far more people would die from the diseases we're vaccinating against. Without nuclear power, the world loses 13% of its electricity. The harm from that far exceeds the few deaths from even Fukushima-level accidents. Or if you replaced that nuclear generation with the next most-viable alternative (coal/gas), the emissions from those are far more harmful than the radiation hazards from nuclear. Even if you managed to replace them with wind and solar, the number of deaths installing and maintaining all those turbines and rooftop panels (roughly 11,000 turbines for a Fukushima-level plant, or 4.8 million homes with 40 m^2 of panels installed on each of their roofs) far exceeds the number that nuclear has killed.*
* Math for the wind/solar comparison:
Put another way, if the median income is $45,000, then 1500 regular donors giving 1/1500th of their annual income or $30/yr each will give an author a median income. (In reality, it's less than 1/1500th because the mean income is higher than the median, so the more affluent donors will allow the author to hit the median income with less than 1/1500th of each donor's income.)
I think it's also important to keep in mind that the current book/music/movie pricing model does not scale. A DVD costs $18.95 whether they sell 10,000 copies or 10 million. In every other industry except the IP industries, price drops as sales increase. At first DVD players cost $150 and they only sold a few tens of thousands of them. As their success grew and sales reached into the tens and hundreds of millions, the price dropped to the $25 they're at now. The Patreon model brings this price scaling to the IP industry (much to the chagrin of the established players). If you're supporting an author in a niche market that you really enjoy, you'll be encouraged to donate a lot to him just to keep him writing. But if the author is enjoying J.K. Rowling-level success, you'll be less inclined to donate as much or won't donate at all, knowing that he's already getting plenty of money from other supporters.
You're trying to be sarcastic, but your words are quite literally true. 0.25 mSv is:
If the 0.25 mSv limit were applied consistently to other aspects of our lives, we'd ban mammograms and CT scans, limit people to a dozen chest x-rays in a year, restrict pilots and stewardesses to just 30 hours of flight time per year, and severely curtail brick, stone, and concrete as building materials. If the proposal someone made below to reduce the limit to 0.025 mSv were carried out, we'd have to ban air travel and chest x-rays altogether.
That's actually why I avoid big cities in the Northeast. New York has had a quake of magnitude 5 in the recent past (1884 if I remember). While a 5 is not big, it is serious enough to do damage to unreinforced structures like brick. And the huge number of brick buildings in New York are about as unreinforced as they come. (Brick construction has no lateral strength, and topples over with just slight sideways shaking. One of the few fatalities in the 5.9 Whittier Narrows quake was a man who pulled his car off the road to ride out the quake, and the free-standing brick wall he parked next to fell on top of him.
This map just shows you the likelihood of a big quake, not the potential for damage from a quake. To get the damage potential, you need to come up with a maps of how lenient the local building codes are, then multiply the two. The areas of highest risk are actually those where big or even moderate quakes are infrequent, leading to complacency among the residents and lax building codes.
This is why a 5.7 in Morocco kills 12,000, while a 6.9 just outside San Francisco only kills a few score. Residents of the former city never thought a quake would hit there. Residents of the latter knew a big quake was coming and built appropriately. You couldn't pay me to live in St. Louis, South Carolina, east Tennessee, or New York City. All have the potential for moderate to huge quakes, but they're so rare the building codes don't take them into account.
Level 3 is a tier-1 network, about as big as they come. This isn't big Verizon poo-pooing some little ISP as you seem to think. This is like your local gas station Verizon trying to get Exxon to pay them for the "privilege" of shipping them product their customers have already paid for.
In the grand scheme of things, yes those are the things that matter. But unless a U.S. citizen was killed, the U.S. really has no business getting involved in this. It's the same reason the U.S. stations troops in South Korea. Their job isn't to help repel a North Korean invasion. Their job is to die so the U.S. has a reason to get involved.
The plane was a Boeing, so Boeing and possibly the NTSB will be involved in the investigation. But unless another country requests it, the U.S. cannot bring in the FBI or CIA to investigate this unless a U.S. citizen was killed. Given that Russia has already removed the black boxes and purportedly the missile truck used in the attack was secreted to Russian soil, those are the kind of intelligence assets you really want investigating this.
So yes the things you say are most important, but answering them reliably very much hinges on whether or not a U.S. citizen was among those killed.
While Xerox deserves full blame for missing opportunities (the mouse, GUI, ethernet, and laser printer were all invented there), Kodak does not. They were always on the forefront of digital imaging. They built the first digital camera in the 1970s, and had a line of digital SLRs in the early 1990s. They knew exactly where the industry was heading, and in fact did most of the early R&D to get us there. The only reason they managed to hang around as long as they did was because they owned most of the patents on digital imaging and were collecting massive royalties.
What led to Kodak's downfall is obvious if you look at the pictures in that wikipedia link. Those are Nikon (and later Canon) bodies with Kodak digital sensors. Kodak was a film company, not a camera company. They weren't in the business of making cameras (aside from some cheap consumer models and disposables). When the industry shifted from film to digital, the companies which ended up on top were companies skilled at making cameras/lenses (Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Zeiss, and their arch-rival Fuji which had been busy making decent point and shoots prior to the switch to digital), and companies skilled at making electronics/silicon (Sony, Panasonic, Casio, etc). Kodak thought they could carve a piece of the digital sensor pie for themselves, but rapidly found themselves unable to keep up with companies with decades of expertise manufacturing microprocessors who simply shifted that expertise into manufacturing sensors. In other words, the best business model for making camera sensors turned out not to be knowing how to make camera sensors. It turned out to be knowing how to make microchips.
Guantanamo Bay was (and is) a legal black hole. Past U.S. Supreme Court decisions held that not only U.S. Citizens but also foreigners on U.S. soil have Constitutional protection. So housing Taliban prisoners in U.S. prisons would've automatically granted them U.S. Constitutional rights, including the right to a speedy trial, the right to know what they're accused of, and a guarantee of legal counsel. Well guess what? Guantanamo Bay isn't on U.S. soil. It's on land leased from Cuba. Thus it falls outside the jurisdiction of that pesky SCotUS decision, and allowed the U.S. government to detain foreign nationals without following its own Constitution. That's the entire reason Bush chose it for the prison.
Most of the International and UN arguments against Guantanamo rested on International treaties concerning the treatment of prisoners of war. The problem is the preface for almost all those treaties defines combatants as people who don a uniform and wear a distinguishing emblem. The reason they make a big deal about this is to provide an incentive for soldiers to distinguish themselves from non-combatants (civilians), so as to reduce civilian casualties due to misidentification. If your soldiers want all those juicy protections for prisoners of war, they have to wear a uniform and emblems designating them as soldiers thus making it impossible for them to blend in among civilians.
Unfortunately, most if not all the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay never wore a uniform. The people drafting those treaties on the rules of war never really considered what would happen if a fighting force chose not to abide by the uniform requirement. They kinda assumed the protections were a big enough carrot that everyone would do it. This also makes it a bad idea to expand the protection for prisoners in those treaties to cover non-uniformed combatants, like many who are opposed to Guantanamo have naively advocated. If you do that then unless he's got an overdeveloped sense of honor, no soldier in his right mind would ever wear a uniform - it just makes him an easy target. And we'd devolve back to the pre-imperial chaos where wars were fought between two masses of people with no discrimination between combatants and civilians. Thus the Guantanamo prisoners fall through a crack in International law.
This isn't to say the prison at Guantanamo Bay is ok. I've never supported it and have called for it to be shut down since the beginning. I'm just saying both U.S. and International law don't quite cover the situation at Guantanamo (kinda like the guy stuck at an airport for 18 years because of the way International laws regarding entry visas and citizenship work). That makes it completely the opposite of this case, where there are laws protecting privacy in both U.S. (4th Amendment protection against warrantless searches) and UN (Article 12) that would appear to prohibit the NSA blanket surveillence.
It works a lot better because if domain registration emails are being sent directly to former_employee@sony.com, then only he knows that domain registrations are being sent to him. There is no record at Sony saying that he was the one getting those emails.
If you instead have it sent to domain_registration@sony.com with a forwarder, when former_employee is fired, the sysadmin can look at the entire list of forwarded addresses, grep for every instance of former_employee, and re-forward them to other employees.
See the difference? With your method, only the former employee knows what emails he was getting that need to be redirected. And if he was fired, he certainly isn't going to cooperate at providing a list. With forwarded email addresses, Sony has a list of all important emails which were going to the former employee.
All this is kinda moot though. In this case with a company the size of Sony, they should've just paid the $1000 or so to register the domain for the next 100 years.
That's one big-ass sandworm. (Look at the pic - it's not a crater, it's just a hole in the ground.)
Unfortunately, no it doesn't. Energy saved from improved efficiency through technology is usually spent on additional uses, rather than reducing your overall energy use.
The other problem is that even if the gallons were the same, MPG is the inverse of fuel efficiency. So going from 31 to 37 MPG is actually less fuel savings than going from 20 to 24 MPG, despite both being about a 20% improvement in efficiency and the former being a 6 MPG improvement vs 4 MPG for the latter. Being an inverse, the bigger the number the less it matters. This is why the push to hybridize econoboxes is a joke - you get very little fuel savings for the added complexity. The vehicles you really want to be hybridizing first to save the most fuel are trucks and SUVs.
You really want to be measuring fuel consumption in gallons or liters per 100 miles or km. That's the best way to answer the question, "I have to drive x miles; how much fuel will I use?" That's how nearly everyone drives. MPG is the best way to answer, "I have x gallons of fuel to use; how far can I go?" Only race car drivers drive that way.
That's not how the physics works. Two heavy cars colliding is the same as two light cars colliding (provided the cars are not so light they have to compromise on length of crumple zones and rigidity of the passenger compartment). All other things being equal and assuming no objects are flying through windows (a weak spot in the protection of the passenger compartment), heavier cars are safer than lighter cars in equal-mass collisions, and collisions against stationary barricades (equivalent to an equal-mass collision).
This is what's important. Where accidents become bad are when a light car collides with a heavy car or a truck. The mass disparity results in a net energy transfer from the high mass vehicle to the low mass vehicle. In a head on collision with both vehicles traveling at the same speed, the heavier vehicle experiences a velocity change less than 100% its starting velocity (it just slows down). The lighter vehicle experiences a velocity change greater than 100% its starting velocity (it bounces backwards). The occupants of the lighter vehicle thus experience more g's of deceleration. (Put another way, the collision is symmetric in the reference frame of the center of momentum of the two vehicles, which means the reference frame is moving in the same direction as the heavier vehicle.) If you want to minimize accident injuries and deaths, you'd mandate that all cars be of the same mass, and remove trucks onto a different set of parallel roads.
Having driven on the Autobahn, I'd say another factor is the U.S. having less stringent licensing and driving requirements. In Germany, drivers are required to pull over to the slower lanes if a faster car approaches them from behind. In the U.S., people seem to take delight in cutting off faster drivers. The result is that German highway lanes are highly stratified with slower traffic always on the right, faster always on the left, thus minimizing speed differentials between adjacent lanes. While in the U.S. frequently the right or middle lanes are faster than the left lanes, resulting in more opportunity for collisions due to greater speed differentials between adjacent lanes.
U.S. spending on defense is not that far off the world average if you compare against GDP, especially if you include Japan (whom the U.S. is bound to defend under the peace treaties ending WWII). Much ballyhoo is made about how much the U.S. spends on the military in gross dollars. But that is mostly a consequence of the U.S. economy being so huge (nearly 1/4 of the world's total). If you think about it, you'll realize comparing military spending in gross dollars is pretty stupid, kinda like comparing how much food each country eats in tons instead of per capita. The U.S. accounts for 37% of the world's military spending, while the U.S. + Japan account for 30% of the world's economy. (I'm deliberately not adding European GDP to account for U.S. bases there as part of NATO, since those really should have been scaled back with the end of the Cold War.)
If you normalize for size of economy by comparing military spending vs GDP, the U.S. military ends up 15th in the world at 3.8%, notably below Russia. If you include Japan's GDP, it drops to 2.9% putting it 27th. (This excludes a few countries with historically higher military spending as percent of GDP since there is no 2013 data available for them yet. Mainly, Syria, UAE, North Korea, and Sudan.)
So getting back to your point, if countries' spending on their spy agencies is anything like their military spending, then NSA funding should actually be pretty close to what other countries' spy agencies get in proportion to their economy. BTW, spy satellites fall under NRO, not NSA.
Without getting into whether Scotland is an appropriate site for a spaceport... Orbits can be broadly divided into two categories - equatorial and polar.
Equatorial orbits are aligned close to the equator. The most useful one are geosynchronous (slight inclination so its ground track is a small figure-8 called an amalemma) or geostationary (zero inclination so they stay above the same spot on the equator). The satellites stay above the same general spot on earth, so are always "visible" to ground stations and satellite dishes. These orbits have to be about 36,000 km above the earth's surface to match the earth's daily rotation (23h 56m). Lower altitude equatorial orbits aren't as useful because their ground track is limited to a swath of latitudes centered around the equator. The primary reason they're used is because of your point (2) - they take less energy to achieve if you launch from close to the equator. If you just want to be in space and don't particularly care about where in space (e.g. the ISS), an equatorial low earth orbit is your cheapest option.
Polar orbits are aligned to pass over the poles (or close to it). These are the second-most useful orbits because they allow a satellite to observe 100% or nearly 100% of the earth's surface. Scientific data-gathering and spy satellites are put into polar orbits. (Do note that because the poles tend to be rather cold and uninhabited, and because a satellite's altitude lets it peer beyond its max orbital latitude, you can get near-100% coverage of the populated regions of the earth with a highly inclined equatorial orbit. But the more you incline the orbit, the less benefit there is from launching near the equator. For a polar orbit which passes directly over the poles, you actually have to spend energy and fuel to get rid of any sideways velocity imparted by the earth's rotation at the launch site.)