The ideas for changes they are describing go a long way towards making them more like eastern europe or soviet roads.
I suggest you go over to youtube and search for "russian car crash" and view a couple hours of video in the results.
Then come back and explain how fewer, and less defined rules will make things safer.
Do you get paid by the word to white-wash? Holy hell.
Google has explicitly said that they weigh search results to focus on sites that are friendly to smart phones.
http://www.pressherald.com/201...
So If I am trying to fix a an old computer I won't actually see a fix immediately because the fix might be on a snitz forums 2000 that will never ever be on a mobile phone.
... IF the user is searching with a smart phone. They don't do any of that weighing if the searcher isn't using a mobile device.
Read the fine print.
You can also click the little globe button to the right of "search tools" to get unpersonalized results.
They need to go the opposite way with this as well.
A little control panel that allows the user to select what stuff they want to see in ads, what stuff they want to see in searches ("I work in XYZ industry") or a table of sample sites of stuff I NEVER intend to be looking for.
They would get a better ad-profile (which I would block of course) but users would get better and faster searches in return.
"The Russian government is responsible for shooting down a passenger jet and murdering hundreds of people."
Not only the Russian government: "Iran Air Flight 655 was an Iran Air civilian passenger flight from Tehran to Dubai. On 3 July 1988, the aircraft operating this route was shot down by the United States Navy guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes.
Yup, and the US admitted they did it.
The soviets are still lying about their little incident.
Some artists have been helping people in areas being targeted by US drones to create large canvas images of some of the victims and lay them flat on the ground. That way as the drone flies over and targets the area the operator will see the face of a child who was previously murdered in a similar scenario. The idea came about because drone pilots describe their targets as "bug splats", and this is a way to hopefully connect them to their potential victims in the way soldiers deployed on the ground are forced to.
Maybe that and other efforts to make pilots aware of what they are doing and how it really isn't a game, that they are killing real people when they push those buttons, is having an effort. Of course they would never admit that, hence the excuse.
Yup, cuz we all know it's much preferable to see the results of what the dead guys would do to our malls, airports and schools up close in person in a few years if left alone.
Take your pacifist garbage somewhere else. You need to get used to the fact the religion of peace is coming to kill you, behead your sons, and rape your daughters. It's already happening to the soviets and various other European countries, it'll happen here. You are probably the same sort of drooler that complains about Pamela Geller exercising her free speech too aintja?
Anyway, the airfarce needs to pay more attention to the meta data of their resources and predict that a lump of guys taken on to run drones will peter out when they are up for retiring from the airfarce.
Next, they need to hire GAMERS who are used to strapping on a war face for 10 hours at a time every day. Hell, some of them would probably do that stuff for FREE. (Provided cheetos, mountain dew, and hot pockets are available in the break room.)
Just like the Army made a game to simulate being in the army, the airfarce needs a game that's all about being a drone pilot.
Then the first step is to increase the cost of water during a drought to be at least equal to what it would cost from a desalination plant.
No, the first step is to increase the cost of water so supply equals demand. Raising it to the cost of desalination would shut down every farm in California, put thousands of companies out of business, destroy millions of jobs, and devastate the California economy.
Lack of water is going to shut down "every farm in California" anyway. Your claims that the results justify a particular action are illogical. The results will exist in all cases.
This was raised before on Slashdot, and the response was that desalination would not come close to meeting the water demands of California. Do the math and come back to us - I'm curious but the devil's in the details.
Here is the thing though, desalination could at least alleviate the need for massive restrictions on what goes into municipal water supply pipes.
It isn't enough to allow for fewer restrictions on the agricultural side of course, however rejecting all fixes because they don't fix everything at once is stupid.
There are plenty of power technologies that could be deployed on the coast that could produce the energy for desalination, you know, the same ones every anonymous whanker on Slashdot trashes because they can't fit demands of the power grid. Know what doesn't need to fit the power grid demand? Desalinating and pumping water into a storage tank.
This would make a great diversionary tactic.
Take a bunch of operatives that are near retirement, non-essential and need to be re-deployed, etc.
Make them all move home, announce this. Now those countries are sitting on the REAL operatives who they were about to discover... and deciding they don't need to look as hard anymore.
A whole bunch of ops just got a lot deeper.
Nevermind what cracking the chinese or soviets were actually able to accomplish.
Likewise, this could be to throw off a new leak into thinking they are still safe... blame movements on Snowden while you close in on the new leak.
OK neanderthal, TRY and understand this. An EMP targeted attack does not have to be state-sponsored, and all of your retaliation plans go out the fucking window when that happens, since you're looking for nothing but a state-sponsored attack to be able to execute your plans against said state in retaliation.
An EMP device does not require controlled material. That is the scary part, and why the attack vector is so much larger. This problem is not black-and-white as you make it out to be, nor is the retaliation plan. Creating a nuclear wasteland should not be the automatic go-to answer here in response to an EMP attack. That level of retaliation isn't even equal, and would likely guarantee the end of our civilization instead of leaving the planet and environment intact to rebuild our electronics.
But hey, fuck that, caveman tactics FTW. We "won", that's all that matters.
How many non states do you know that can get a sophisticated, tested, and probably fifth generation or later nuclear weapon in low earth orbit at just the right height over the US while every one of their electronic devices and electronic communications are compromised or intercepted... without being noticed the entire time it's doing it?
Space aliens are the only thing I can think of... Just send a pinterest photo of your cave-painting diagram of how this will happen. We'll wait.
Even if it doesn't make things worse, the trouble with retaliation, 'second strike', MAD, 'deterrence', etc. is that it relies on attribution of warheads being relatively easy. If the adversary knows that you'll know it was him if he tries anything, your big huge second strike infrastructure is pretty scary. If you can obfuscate attribution(or, worse, successfully pin it on some innocent party) the theory of deterrence becomes effectively useless. EMPs are probably a moderately favorable case, since you need to do a reasonably visible launch to high altitude to get the best effect; but if somebody just puts a nuke in a cargo container that was supposed to contain xboxes and it levels one of the world's larger container ports, who exactly are you going to retaliate against?
Answer: all of them. Specifically, ALL of the nuclear-capable threat-states.
The ones that didn't do it, will really really want to share information about who did.
Subs can second strike anybody anywhere, and wait for a time for it to be an accurately determined enemy as they are basically impossible to kill if they are hiding.
Being able to kill off some or all other states after your state is already dead creates allies, not enemies.
The biggest problems with supersonic flight weren't emissions or the sonic boom. It was the financial viability of it, enough people simply aren't willing to pay the extra to make this viable (at least historically).
I am willing to guess, being able to go supersonic over the continental US on a regular basis would be a big deal to the military as well. Better practice and training, as well as assisting in keeping enemies alerted. "Gee, Haji, did you hear that big boom? Think the US is back operating in the area?"
increasing spending on strategic projects from 5 percent to 40 percent
Rarely does this sort of change involve spending more money in absolute terms. Most likely people doing stuff like support were retasked, outsourced, or simply cut.
Most of the stuff in the summary sounds like a good move, but I've seen companies that were fairly short-sighted in making these kinds of moves. At work we've been focusing on "strategic projects" for a long time now in belt-tightening mode and it seems like the biggest result is that every department under the sun has sprouted its own mini IT department that does all the stuff that IT stopped doing, usually less efficiently than it would be done if centralized.
When IT cuts a service that really was necessary, the result usually involves a net loss of money.
They spent 8 times more and actually started paying attention.
Stuff worked better.
Imagine that.
All this tells me is to stop wasting money giving it to the cancer society as they are prone to wasting it.
The way to do this is to separate the skills of the two components (human, robot) into different time-frames where speed doesn't matter where speed can't be achieved.
For example, the robot could be limited to detecting if an item is in a bin or not, and if it's approximately the right size and shape. It knows where the bins are, and if they have one item or not. Each bay would have a big bin of all the items, and a few out front with one of those items each.
Robots pick for orders, fast, and without many errors.
Humans take single items from the large bin, place them in the fast-pick bins and track the item (with a bar code) and the bin (with a bar code).
In the case where the flow changes and an item is ordered a lot, the number of bins can be changed. Also, robot / human meet-ups will be called for by the robots / computer system if it knows there aren't enough items or a lot are ordered. The human meets the robot there and fills bins as the robot picks.
Now the robot system can do what it does best, get the order out the door fast and accurately, without tiring and without needing a break. The human can do what it does best, getting the complex item ready for a simple robot to handle, and it's work is not very sensitive to breaks, holidays, trainees, boredom, etc.
What I'd be interested to see is if, and how aggressively, they take action against image collections that are not of any use for their desired purposes.
They obviously can't be too capricious and unpredictable, or they'll spook users; but you can't offer 'unlimited' storage without making some provision for 'that guy who hacks together a FUSE filesystem that uses images uploaded to Google Photos as a storage medium' or the 'Cool, this will make my next time-lapse video project way easier' cases.(and, of course, if you are feeling particularly uncreative,
Their track record on removing useful and loved services for little or no reason should spook users well enough without playing games with the content.
Happiness is twin floppies.
