Indeed, the NTSB has in the past discouraged rushes to prosecution. Our standard justice system is outstanding at thoroughly punishing people anytime something goes wrong (regardless of whether they could have done much about it happening). It is less good at actually fixing problems so that they don't happen over and over again. The NTSB tends to take a longer view and they're less interested in whether one train engineer goes to jail than why we have a system where a single delinquent engineer can kill a whole bunch of people. That kind of distinction is why aircraft are so much safer than cars. With a car crash we throw the drunk in jail. With a plane crash we ask how it was that a drunk even was able to get behind the controls, and thus we don't really have drunks flying planes because there are so many places they'd get caught along the way that it just doesn't happen. The former approach leads to lots of satisfied families who can watch their loved one's killer rot in jail, while the latter approach avoids having victims in the first place.

Well, to the degree that this is the case within a particular state, they certainly are sounding like hypocrites!

Well, the legal reason is that the US government is Federal, and the state governments typically are unitary.

That is, under the US constitution, the states have a limited degree of sovereignty. However, under state constitutions the local governments typically do not have any sovereignty.

That is why states can and do charter and abolish local governments as the need arises. If your school district has an abysmal educational record, your governor can appoint somebody to come in and basically run the district. They'll listen to the locally-elected school board, but ultimately they are a dictator accountable only to the state. Your only recourse is to go to the state government for relief if you don't like it. In contrast, the President of the US cannot do the same thing with a local school district. At most he can withold Federal funding, though in reality this is a pretty big stick.

That's the reason for the situation as it stands, and it has its roots in the history at the founding of the US. Before the US Constitution there were the Articles of Confederation, and under that charter the US government was even weaker - it had no real sovereignty of its own and was a bit like the UN.

This is in contrast with how most nations function. Most governments are unitary in design. The PM of the UK can in theory fire a random teacher in a random elementary school, since ultimately the whole chain of command reports up to them. In practice they usually have local councils/etc, but typically there is no true sovereignty other than in the sense that the national government imposes rules upon itself.

Seemingly for the same reason that asian or any other immigrants get the other side of the stick. Somebody who I had nothing to do with did something good/bad to somebody else I had nothing to do with, and I feel the consequences. It really doesn't make sense, and this is just one case of it.

The next step is to realize that we should be sending a robotic mission with this stuff a few years earlier. That way whenever the first people get there, they'll find a cleared landing field and radio guidance towers, as well as a place to stay after they debark.

Of course the fly in the ointment is that you send robots and have them spend a few years building your base. Then someone else comes in before you and claims "rights of salvage" over all of that "abandoned property" they just found.

Ok, I'll clarify my statement - it is hard to manage an illicit supply chain in competition with a legitimate supply chain for the same commodity.

If I want to sell TVs stolen from trucks, I have to compete with every Walmart and Best Buy in the country.

If I want to sell cocaine, I only have to compete with somebody else who had to go through the same difficulties in getting their product onto the streets as I did.

Manufacturers are a lot more connected to their customers these days. If I buy a stolen iPhone and try to activate it, either it won't work, or I end up providing data to the manufacturer which makes it easier for them to figure out who stole it in the first place. If I buy a stolen Blu Ray player then the next time it phones home for its online features the manufacturer gets data that they can use to figure out who stole it. If I buy an expensive widget, there is a decent chance I'll end up registering it on some website for one reason or another.

I'm not saying that it is impossible to fence stolen goods - it just is a lot harder than it probably used to be. I only see that trend continuing.

Well, either he did manage to access the flight controls from the entertainment system, or he didn't.

If he didn't, I don't think the FBI has much of a case.

If he did, then the FAA should certainly be issuing an airworthiness directive banning any inflight entertainment system with a connection to the flight control systems. I don't think it is likely that they'd be satisfied with passwords. As far as the FAA is concerned video games on planes are optional, safe flight is not.

The fact that the FAA hasn't gotten involved makes me skeptical of the FBI's claims. I have a lot of issues with how the FAA does things, but they usually take any kind of potential aircraft defect seriously.

I just don't see that working in the modern world. Stick a GPS on the trailer, and now you can't just run off with it without getting caught.

Either hijacking is so rare as to not really be a problem, or it is enough to cause a dent in earnings. If the latter happens, somebody will talk to the appropriate guy in power and it will get dealt with. If the local cops are in on it, they'll get caught in a sting of some kind.

Well, if there is a driver in the cab it will be the libertarian paradise you dream of and they'll just outgun the hijackers.

There is a reason that bank robberies and such don't happen they way they used to. With the interconnectedness of today's world, it is just too hard to manage an illicit supply chain.

Uh, good luck with that.

Sure, you surround the rig with cars and hit the brakes, it will stop to avoid hitting you. Now you have a big truck stopped on the road. The truck has of course already phoned home to tell everybody what is going on, and if you manage to jam communications that will probably only draw more attention. Your faces are being streamed live to whoever owns the truck.

Since the company that runs the truck probably owns 50,000 of them, they probably have a full time person or two designed just to handle these kinds of situations. They'll have the local police/etc on the phone and if you really did do this on a "lonely stretch of road" they'll be busy setting up roadblocks miles ahead/behind you while you're standing there figuring out how to get all the stuff off the truck. There will of course not be any way to manually drive the truck. Why would you waste money on a cab for a truck that drives itself?

...and one key fob for the door locks of one car, and another fob+key for the other car. The fob+key is a real pain, because the key on the end makes it big and awkward on the ring.

Nobody is going to be able to keep people from having their own. They're just way too easy to build these days. They can't even keep people from building GPS devices that don't have the speed/altitude limits designed to prevent them from being used in ballistic missiles.

Keeping people from flying drones will be like keeping people from sharing music on the internet or from speeding.

The White House is going to have to cope with the upcoming day when anybody can stick a drone in their trunk with a 200 lbs payload. Sooner or later the day will come.

Well, except when it hasn't worked. The paper ballot system has one major flaw - it is impossible to unambiguously and objectively assess the validity or meaning of a paper ballot, at least not in a way that everybody can agree on.

What constitutes a stray mark? What constitutes a vote?

I think a good compromise is a computer-generated paper ballot which is voter-visible/verifiable, but not voter-modifiable. Let the voter pick their vote on a fancy touchscreen or whatever. Print their vote on a piece of paper behind a plexiglass screen, then have the voter hit the ok button and watch the piece of paper fall into the box. As the ballot comes out of the printer it could even run past a scanner for verification by the same algorithm that will be used for counting votes later.

This lets the machine validate the ballot while the voter is standing there and able to make corrections. There is no ambiguity around voter intent. Then the machine prints out a ballot which is completely standardized (easy to OCR accurately, unambiguous, no stray marks, etc).

There are real benefits to using computers in voting. The key is to capture those benefits, while then mitigating the risks they introduce.

I think you're misunderstanding my point.

Sure, it is easy to install Hadoop, and run it.

The hard part is figuring out WHAT to run on it.

I think a bigger problem is that most companies don't even know what big data actually is. It is a big buzzword. I hear managers talking about it all the the time. Half the time they're talking about some database table with a few hundred thousand records in it. Other times they're talking about some repository full of documents or binary files that might be terrabytes in size, but it is just random stuff. They don't actually have questions in mind that they want to answer, and ultimately that is what tools like Hadoop are about.

I've heard "big data" applied to problems that are basically just file shares or the like.

Then if a company really does have a problem where Hadoop and such is useful, they want to buy some product off the shelf that solves that particular problem, and usually they don't exist. Or they want to hire a bunch of random rent-a-coders and have them solve the problem, and they go about solving it with single-threaded solutions written in .net or whatever the commodity solution in use is at the company.

Sure, your Facebooks and Googles and Netflixs and Amazons know what they're doing. Your average GE or Exxon or Pfizer generally doesn't do that level of comp sci.

Kinda sorta. Reduced demand for tickets would indeed result in fewer movies produces, but I suspect that the ones being produced would be the highest-selling ones (blockbusters/etc). These could very well be priced higher, since they would have less competition. If they didn't think they could price it higher, they probably wouldn't produce it at all, since they would anticipate low volumes being sold.

That is my sense of it at least.

But you are correct that it isn't some kind of zero-sum game where some paying less automatically pays to others paying more. Pricing isn't directly related to cost - rather pricing is related to supply/demand, whether you make the product at all (and usually how much, but not in the case of a movie which has neglibible marginal cost) is related to cost, and the latter tends to affect the former via supply.