Anyone who regularly uses Google Translate has seen the problems that come with this approach.

It "translates" analogous terms in ways that make no sense. Translate "Amsterdam" from Dutch to English and it often gives you "London". Same with kilometres / miles, and other things that significantly change the meaning of the text.

With some hand-crafted guidance, the outcome can be much less useful than the more rough-sounding word-by-word machine translations from days of yore.

surely they wouldn't mind if you sent them a .pdf

A PDF is no good for a journal; they have to rebuild the document to suit their publication process. With a PDF that's basically not possible.

What is the ten minutes for?

In New York and DC (the only places I really board trains in the USA) you have to wait in a long single queue and show your ticket to someone before you can get down to the platform. It's not like in most countries where you just walk on.

It is of course possible that people don't take potshots with RPGs because they know it will be ineffective given the motorcade.

Security is a game of closing off the easy options, so that an attacker has to use difficult, expensive, and time-consuming ones that increase the chance of getting nabbed before they pull it off.

You pay for inefficiencies in the private sector the same way you do for those in the public sector: higher costs or less value for money.

Inefficiency in the private sector is often very persistent. If everyone in the market is relaxing, then nobody has a big incentive to rock the boat. When company A cleans up their act, company B must as well, and then they're back at the same profit margins, except without the fat that was keeping them comfortable (corporate jets, etc.).

In many industries new entrants are very rare due to capitalization or infrastructure or regulatory barriers. The incumbents sit around with their thumbs up their asses and we all pay for it.

Anybody else find it odd that we put so much effort into protecting the president from outside threats (armored motorcades, well defended aircraft, bunkers, etc) when every President that met an untimely end met it at the hands of an American citizen?

I don't get your point.

Do you know of some reason that armored motorcades are particularly vulnerable to US citizens, thereby making them inappropriate for the threat model?

4 and a half months of, what, running various malware scanners?

I'm pretty sure after you've scanned everything a few times, you would move on to something more intensive. Bringing in specialists, analyzing network traffic, examining machines in depth, and so on.

The fact alone pretty much makes WHOIS useless if you need to contact someone.

I use one of those proxy services to register domains. They require a valid email address and test periodically to make sure it works. They publish an auto-generated random-looking email address for each domain, and reliably forward mail to the address I've provided. People who need to contact me are able to do so instantly.