It's more than that. By looking at users whose location corresponded to CIA HQ in Langley during the day, for example, they could determine those individuals who worked in the CIA. And by backtracking the location of those individuals to where they were early in the morning, their home address could be determined. When cross-referenced against public databases, this allowed them to determine the identities of any CIA agent working at Langley using the app, along with their home addresses and daily routine. The location of CIA HQ may be public knowledge, but the identity of their agents is not, and exposing those identities is a federal crime.

When you consider the large crowds in the public spaces where this system is likely to be deployed, a 5% false positive rate would result in unmanageable numbers to verify. -E.g. Times Square sees 300,000 people a day movement, resulting in 15,000 false positives a day. Even a 1% false positive rate would be too high, especially considering the cost in civil liberties involved to those falsely flagged.

And this seems to be the real reason for these flights. BA is moving the aircraft overnight to their hangars and service facility at Cardiff, and carrying out a positioning flight in the morning so that they are in position for the next day's timetable. Positioning flights like this are common even at airports that aren't slot restricted.

Actually Roman cities followed a strict grid pattern laid out in a N-S-E-W axis, with the streets of uniform width and the two main N-S and E-W streets (the Cardo Maximus and the Decumanus Maximus intersecting at the heart of the city. Some older Roman-descended European cities still have their main streets running along the Cardo and Decumanus Maximus - in Cologne, Germany, for example, they are the present day and Hohe Strasse and Schildergasse streets.

The organic growth came later during medieval times. For most European cities, if you were to graph them at the same elapsed time after city foundation as the American cities, I suspect you'd see very similar patterns

And this is the problem with remote working. Any job that can be done remotely at home can just as easily be done remotely anywhere. Which means the job can be easily outsourced to India or any other low cost country. A remote working job means you're competing with workers around the work, and that is never good for job security.

The problem is that even in conferences where the attendees from those banned may be a mere handful of people, it creates a dillema for the organizers in that holding it in the United States would be limiting the participation and viewpoints from people from those country. For scientific conferences in particular, which try to stay above politics and promote dialogue in their field, limiting dialogue by denying entry even to a single person would be a betrayal of their principles to promote scientific understanding.

And I think we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg. Conferences take years ahead of time to organize so the effect hasn't been fully felt yet.

Here in Canada, ambulance fees varies by province, but they are subsided to a low rate - in Ontario it's $45, and in BC $40, for example. While it's true that we are ultimately paying the true cost of the service through taxes, ultimately it saves society as a whole money, precisely because people are a lot less reluctant to call an ambulance. With a subsidized ambulance service, people are more likely to call emergency services at the first sign of a medical issue, when the patient may be stabilized, and the cost to treat the patient is lower, instead of waiting for the situation to worsen to a point where costly critical intervention is needed.

One of the main reasons we subsidize ambulance costs in Canada is because it saves money in the medical system in the long term.

The issue is hardly unique to French. Most languages have a language regulator defining official usage of the language, with English being a notable exception. Language academies worldwide have tended to try to fight back to tide of anglicism in their languages by providing similar lists of local linguistic equivalent words. I've seen similar lists for Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and even Latin.

Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and other languages also have suggested equivalent words to "smartphone" but you'd be hard pressed to find a native speaker who is aware of the equivalent and uses it in day to day conversation. And while the French Academy may try to suggest alternative words, you'll find that most people in France except for die-hard linguistic nationalists will ignore their suggestions

Lists of local language alternative to anglicisms like these are periodically produced by every language academy around the world and ignored by said speakers of those languages. This is hardly news.

At least in my experience:

1. The IT infrastructure isn't there yet. I regularly deal with large files. Transferring those from home to the work server can take an hour. At work the same file transfer is a question of minutes. And I live in a major city in north america, for those who live in rural locations with limited broadband working at home is not a feasible option.

2. Office politics. My wife tried working from home full time after her maternity leave. Then she got passed for a promotion by a coworker who was at the office and developed a better relationship with the senior managers. Personal relationships matter in the workplace, and for that you need face-to-face interaction.

3. Not all work is done on a computer screen. Most of my work is done on a computer, but as an engineer I often deal with testing of mechanical system components which need to be done on-site. And I imagine for those working in the service sector, which are the majority of jobs in North America, there is no choice. You can't be a waiter from home, for example.

Given that Jeff Bezos owns the biggest house in Washington, as well as the biggest newspaper in DC, clearly the CEO of Amazon wants to be in Washington, DC. And his personal preference may well be the most important opinion in the relocation committee.

It gets worse. From the article:

Once inside the portal, the researchers found they could view the names of more than 100 Equifax employees in Argentina, as well as their employee ID and email address. (...) However, all one needed to do in order to view said password was to right-click on the employee’s profile page and select “view source,” a function that displays the raw HTML code which makes up the Web site. Buried in that HTML code was the employee’s password in plain text.

A review of those accounts shows all employee passwords were the same as each user’s username. Worse still, each employee’s username appears to be nothing more than their last name, or a combination of their first initial and last name

But wait, it gets worse. From the main page of the Equifax.com.ar employee portal was a listing of some 715 pages worth of complaints and disputes filed by Argentinians who had at one point over the past decade contacted Equifax via fax, phone or email to dispute issues with their credit reports. The site also lists each person’s DNI — the Argentinian equivalent of the Social Security number — again, in plain text. All told, this section of the employee portal included more than 14,000 such records.

The death of radio has been predicted every decade over the last century. It was supposed to have died when the first talking pictures appeared in the 1920s, then it was the rise of television in the 1950s.. MTV and cable tv was supposed to have killed radio in the 1980s. Than it was the CDs and music sharing sites like napster in the 1990s that was to be radio's demise.

None of these new technologies have managed to disrupt radio, which has proven incredibly resilient to change. I wouldn't bet against the death of radio, given its resilience over the last century. If anything, I think radio as a medium has more to teach other mediums of communication how to survive technological disruption than the other way around.

Cubans are known for their DIY, improvised repairs that has kept together their infrastructure even during decades of economic hardship and an embargo. Could this just be a poorly done local electronic repair job on a power transformer, for example? The locals may well be suffering from the same issue health issues, but given the communist mindset, no one had the courage to complain. I'd wager more on poorly done electronic repair job than cloak and dagger spy tricks.