This is a very real concern. They don't want you to know they work for the intelligence community. They work in a submarine as much as humanly possible.

But on a more important topic: I have *never* been in a Starbucks that does anything other than call out the name of the drink ordered.

This story baffles me. I'm calling B.S.

There certainly is an interlock that prevents the train from leaving the station unless all doors are closed. The automatic system takes this as a cue to release the brakes and depart the station

As built, the system was supposed to have automatic doors that would open like elevators if someone got in the way. This made operations difficult so the doors now just keep trying to close like every other system.

Completely false!! You're thinking of an Amtrak crash caused by two stoned Conrail engineers. That has nothing to do with this conversation in any way.

Washington DC has a very strong and proud tradition of African-American railway workers. From the old railways to the RF&P to the Metro and also operating the premier Acela Express maintenance facility in Ivy City, Washington DC has a very successful and proud heritage of railway workers.

No. They have operators who operate the doors and ensure the train does not leave the station with someone hanging out of a door, or other kind of emergency situation.

Are we having a serious conversation here? If not, I'll bail out now.

No. Both trains involved in the crash were in automatic mode. The only time in manual mode was when the unfortunate soul operating the striking train applied the emergency brake.

No. The old system was perfectly reliable except in certain slippery weather conditions. WMATA was in the process of replacing the old system with a new system from a different vendor. In the process they mismatched sensors with lineside equipment. The result was death and injury.

Please read the depositions. It reveals much more than most news reports say, with the possible exception of certain Washington Post articles.

Washington DC Metro and San Francisco BART are very similar systems and were designed from the outset for fully automatic operation. The platform position errors are learned by the system and corrected over time, and this calculation also measures the weight of each car.

The real challenge is that under crush loads the system tries to get a good idea how much braking force to apply with the extra weight of the passengers, but often gets the calculation wrong because even though the system "knows" how much each car weighs, people sway back and forth as the vehicles slow down and we undershoot the platform. So, what? The train pulls ahead (automatically). The operator just opens the doors.

I've never experienced a train overshoot a platform but I've had many trains undershoot. It's not a big problem, more of a curiosity.

The automatic system was fine for nearly 40 years. The upgrade process killed nine people and injured 80 and caused a safe system that ran reliably for nearly 40 years to run in "manual" mode for five years because of a maintenance error.

Several depositions from railroad workers who were tasked with upgrading Metro's nearly 40-year-old system mentioned a real problem. The signals were "bobbing." This happened because the older signal system was being replaced with a different vendor's technology in two phases with catastrophic results.

In phase one, the lineside signal cabinet equipment was replaced but the original track sensors were left. In other cases, it was reversed: the track sensors were replaced but the lineside signal cabinet equipment was original. In both cases the vendor was different and not totally compatible.

Naturally, as we would expect, the two different vendors' equipment was not interfacing perfectly. This caused signal "bobbing," where track occupancy would "bob" from red to green repeatedly. Trains would vanish from the system. Phantom trains would appear in the system.

This massive oversight reported in the depositions wasn't really taken seriously in the press nor by the accident investigation. From this point of view, the system failed due to incompatible equipment made to interface in order to save money and service disruptions. They didn't interface properly, and people died as a result. Nobody seems to care about what appears to be the real problem: incompatible vendors made to interface to save time and money.

But we now have faster trains with shorter headways that sometimes fail to stop at the correct spot in stations, so we have that going for us. At least the lineside cabinet equipment and track sensors are now from the same vendor, eliminating the problem that killed those people and put hundreds of thousands of others at risk for a couple of years until that deadly day in 2009.

It's mostly a United States problem that waste isn't reprocessed. This is now and has been done on an industrial scale in Europe and the U.K. for several decades. For some reason the United States, under the guise of non-proliferation, will not permit reprocessing of spent commercial nuclear reactor fuel.

The story in this article isn't news. Everyone knows how to reprocess spent fuel since before the 1960s. What would be actual "news" is the time at which the United States allows the well-proven, industrial-scale reprocessing to be applied to its own reactors.

Even Canada does it. The United States' nuclear energy policy is laughably stupid. It's a shame, really.

Thirty minutes is ridiculous. That is not "rapid" ANYTHING.

The only real solution is to streamline the process of swapping out battery packs, or, ideally, hydrogen fuel cells.

This is where hydrogen fuel cells really make sense. They are the ultimate battery pack. They are interchangeable modules. You stop at a filling station and replace your depleted fuel cell with a full one in fewer than five minutes.

I know Tesla has a battery pack replacement service, but it really needs to be affordable and streamlined and not require expensive robotics.

NOBODY wants to wait thirty minutes for "rapid recharge." The money spent on this infrastructure should, instead, be spent on optimizing the use of hydrogen fuel cells. They are the ultimate battery and they don't wear out.

The rule of thumb here is:
If the process you are expecting is not written into your agreement or documented as a matter of company policy, then the process is not done.

Likely you're not using a data center certified under HIPAA, PCI, SOX, SSAE/SAS-70, otherwise it would be documented and you'd already know.

The various entities circulated notices that individuals are specifically not allowed to view classified material for which they are not authorized, even if such material is on WikiLeaks. Your neighbor could read it, but you could not.

That would be a good idea if Metro Skype wasn't so utterly useless. It's almost as if they didn't even try. It is missing such basic features as marking yourself as "Busy" and is even missing the screen sharing feature.