The problem with China is that they already have a union. They're "communist" after all. So there's a union already, and you're already a member of it and you better do as they say or else. As a matter of fact it's often touted as an advantage by Chinese manufacturers; "As the labour force is already unionised, with no competing unions, there are no risks for labour disputes aso."...

So the road for Chinese workers is longer and harder since they need functioning civil liberties first. Then they can organise proper unions.

Yepp. All research points to it being safer to much safer, to cross outside a "crosswalk". That's why (here in Sweden) we've started to remove them, and refuse to put them in in more difficult traffic situations. It has already had a measurable positive impact on pedestrian safety.

Why you'd want a jay walking law is completely beyond me...

Yepp, the disheartening lesson is that everybody is equal at the very bottom. :-)

We've had something similar in historic Sweden. One reason we never really had any feudalistic oppression in Sweden was that there wasn't room for more than the king. He didn't have to barter with feudal lords, cause there wasn't room for anyone else to grow in strength enough to get out from under the kings thumb.

That's not to say that Swedish pheasants at the time were much better off than their European brethren. No, more that everybody were equally miserable... Except for the king... :-)

Sony actually did this, remember? They were a tech company that bought a studio and we all thought "Great, now that sensible tech companies have started buying control over content we won't have to put up with this shit much longer."

Only, it turned out that the content part of Sony won and instead of tech whipping content into shape, it was the other way around.

So be careful what you wish for... Being able to control the narrative (which is what control over content allows you to do) will always have a pretty powerful allure, even if it doesn't make you nearly as much money as the boring stuff. This is incidentally why politcians flock to those with power of the daily discourse, even if they're not even close to the richest people around.

Look up the reign of Caligula (short as it was). One reason he was so popular among the common people was that he treated everybody equally (badly), and wasn't above throwing hordes of rich people to the lions. (When he ordered the first five rows of the Colosseum thrown into the arena, those were the ring side seats, filled with the rich and famous, which went down very well with the common man).

I'd like to see citations to those results actually being used. Those results weren't made public until long after the war, and since war (esp. the air war in the case of cold water immersion) made these matters pressing, the allies studied these issues as well. They got the same results through using human volounteers (cold immersion) and animal models (shooting pigs and goats), so those Nazi results weren't actually "used" other than as a comparison after the fact. (The rocket research though, there the Nazis had a real advantage, and those results were most certainly built on.)

That's not nearly an accurate description of events. The helicopter crew is clearly aware of the rules of engagement that prevents them from opening fire on the van. They comment on those rules just moments before the vans shows up. But when the van comes on the scene they really, really want to fire on it, so they flat out lie to their chain of command to receive permission to do so.

It's clear to anyone that's listened to the actual CVR...

Uhh. While it is true that radio has an edge when it comes to propagation delay compared to fibre, it's not enough to bother any but the staunchest algorithmic trader. When it comes to bandwidth it's not even close, the fibre wins by so much it's not even funny, and that's comparing to microwave, i.e. line of sight radio links, which are difficult to span large stretches of water with, being line of sight. Also since sea water is conductive you have a dickens of a time to deal with all the reflections and other potential signal degradation.

If you want to communicate via radio and it's not line of sight, then the only viable option if you're going to have any kind of bandwidth is satellite. That's both slower and suffers from a much longer delay. Any other radio is going to be much lower frequency (to follow the earth's curvature), and hence severely bandwidth limited.

P.S. Submarines will not cut cables laying on the bottom of the ocean if that's not specifically in their orders to do so. They a) don't spend much time dragging along the ocean floor, and b) have much better charts than you and I (since they also cover military cables and installations) so, that's be the very least of your worries.

As a former Ericsson telecoms engineer you don't know how right you are! It wasn't even only the truth, it was often the whole truth whether the customer wanted it or not, every time they asked! :-)

And there's such a thing as too much honesty. I remember our local CEO who used to say that "Well, you know, by listening to you lot you'd think that we couldn't find our behinds using a map and both hands, but we actually have more l a 50% market share, and providers are throwing out other manufacturers equipment for ours, so we have to be doing something right at least. It can't be all crap" :-)

P.S. Your "generations" explanation of {2,3,4}G is right on. Not that marketing crap we got today.

I'm not sure I understand your scenario, but if it's about a suspect turning a "crown witness", we don't have that either. I.e. there are no "prisoners dilemma" type situations. If you want to bear witness against your co-conspirators that probably won't hurt you when it comes to the sentencing phase, quite the contrary, but it's for the court to decide. The prosecutor can't promise to not prosecute. That promise has no legal standing. If you're stupid enough to implicate yourself on the stand, then there are no "get out of jail" cards.

Now, of course, in cases like the Aaron Schwarz case, that wasn't the issue, there were no other potential defendants, and AFAIK those situations are more uncommon in the US. Most cases involve a single defendant plea bargaining. How to address that in a situation with multiple defendants in the US if you want to keep the possibility of "crown witness" is a good question that I haven't put much thought into. If you have an adversarial process couldn't you just address that through the defence and courts i.e. "Your honor, it is quite clear to the defence that this witness is in fact guilty of taking part in this crime and he should be charged accordingly", i.e. make the promise the prosecutor makes to not prosecute null and void?Shouldn't that also make such testimony more reliable, as the potential pay off is no longer a "get out of jail free" card, but the possibility of a more modest reduction of your sentence?

You could argue that that would lead to fewer convictions, but then again, so will any change that takes power away from the prosecution and transfers it to the defendant. If we're more interested in justice than efficiency, then of course we'll successfully prosecute less people, I don't see a way around that.

But in the current US system you get confessions in about 10% of the cases where we know that people were actually innocent (the innocence project tracks this).

We don't have plea bargains in Sweden and on balance I can't say I look forward to having them. If they were ever introduced I think they should be capped at (say) max 10% or 15% or some such. I.e. none of that "I'm seeking 99 years in prison, but I'll settle for six months" as is currently not uncommon with US prosecutors. By stopping the prosecutor from lowering the sought penalty more than a reasonable percentage, you could balance the system to where it would be both worth to cooperate, but also not possible for the prosecutor to extort the defendant by skewing the risk/reward calculation to the extent that is common today.

P.S. And of course, in Sweden, if the state prosecutes you, they pay for your defence (i.e. the lawyer of your choice, reimbursed at a proper rate), and prosecutors are appointed, not elected. Last place I want a bloody politician...

Yes, I'm not saying that RAID has no place. I use software based mirroring for my "big" drive that has stuff that's annoying to lose, but not critical. And then "offsite" (well in my basement...) backup for the stuff that has to be there in addition to mirroring.

But making a list of the filenames, that's a novel idea that sounds about right. Have to do that. (And remember to include it in the offsite backup. :-) )

But it doesn't allow you to recover data in the much more common event that someone mistakenly erased it. As you'll restore about nine files due to mistakes for about every one you'll restore due to disks failing, that's what backup is supposed to protect you from.

Also, RAID ignores two other major failure modes, and that's faulty hardware/bus, and filesystem software bugs that hurts/destroys your entire filesystem. RAID won't help you from that either. In fact, since such bugs are relatively more common in professional RAID controllers, you're slightly more at risk from those when you run RAID, than without. (As any pro and they'll tell you a story about when the entire RAID-array failed horribly.)

So, no. While RAID can be an important part of any availability strategy, it's not "backup" for any useful definition of that word.

Oh, it was tried long before that. ABB tried similar technology in the 2000 time frame.

While it sounded great in theory it didn't bear out in practical tests and the technology was shelved.

P.S. No-one in a commercial setting tests developed technology for 5-10 years any more. That kind of money down the drain for no return on investment hasn't been generally available in industry for several decades (and when it was, it was mostly the defence industry that could afford such extravagances).