Not everyone is losing their jobs. Technological innovation usually leads to increased employment, as lower manufacturing costs lead to increased production, and expansion of non-automated jobs. As the cost of manufactured goods fall, people will consume more of them, but also spend less on them, and spend more on services, which are much harder to automate. Currently, China has a much smaller service sector than more advanced economies. That is changing fast.

Because of the one-child policy, China's labor force is already shrinking, and a looming shortage of workers is a far more realistic scenario than "everyone loses their jobs".

I doubt if Foxconn's assembly line workers were buying many iPhones. Apple and Foxconn shareholders will have more money to spend. As profit margins go up, the incentive to design additional profitable products will increase, causing higher demand for engineers and programmers. Chinese workers will move up the value chain, just like in every other country that has industrialized.

$15/hr is the minimum wage in Seatac, Washington. There is political pressure to raise the minimum wage to $10-15 nationwide, and one likely effect of that is to increase incentives to automate those jobs out of existence.

The poverty rate is based on households, not individuals. So if you are single and making $11.50 or less, you might want to share the rent with some friends rather than getting your own place. Not every job needs to pay enough to allow a teenager to buy a house and start a family.

If you are not going to switch, why should your ISP care if you complain?

Well, "unusual punishment" is more complicated, but an unreasonable search is explicitly defined in the Fourth Amendment:

I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty clear to me: probable cause supported by oath or affirmation, and a specific description of the place to be searched, along with the person and things it applies to.

The Founders wanted to be very explicit in this case to exclude the generic "general warrants" that the British had used as tools of oppression, so they required cause and detailed instructions for the target of the warrant.

Now that you've read that, see how much "interpretation" it takes to distort that into allowing government agents to do an invasive search of every single person and every single thing that might go on a plane, with no evidence of wrong-doing or probable cause. Before 9/11, airport security got away with it because (1) it wasn't government agents, but airlines/airports doing the searching, (2) you consented to this search by a private airport security as a condition of doing business, and (3) the search was a minimal "procedural search" where you walked through a metal detector -- they'd need probable cause or sufficient suspicion to search you further or detain you. Nowadays we don't even pretend to adhere to the Constitutional text.

No, because that is nonsense. The actual* figure is 52% (not 90%) of accidents occur withing 5 miles (not five minutes). But that is not because driving within that radius is particularly dangerous, but simply because most driving occurs within that radius.

* This figure comes from a survey conducted by Progressive Insurance in 2002. Many articles attribute the study to the NHTSA, and often exaggerate the percentage, or the distance, or both.

There's a very simple explanation: there just aren't that many terrorists with both the knowledge and initiative to carry out such attacks. If your idea was feasible for terrorists, so would attacks on any number of public places with loads of people -- shopping malls, major city squares, subways, buses, etc. Places with REAL terrorist problems (e.g. some places in the Middle East) see these sorts of attacks on public places.

The fact that such attacks don't happen in the U.S. is pretty strong evidence that the terrorist threat is likely nowhere as big as the TSA (and others) would have us believe.

Yep, and that's precisely my point. This thread started about a police officer doing something illegal to justify a search. That could have happened in a parallel construction case, or it could have happened in some normal case where a cop needed more "evidence" for a search and manufactured it. My original response was to someone who claimed that it was "called parallel construction" when there was nothing in the anecdote to suggest that parallel construction was actually taking place.

And by the way, I think almost all parallel construction should also be illegal. I also know that fabricating evidence definitely is already illegal. But none of this means that a cop observed fabricating evidence for probable cause is NECESSARILY participating in a parallel construction case... so I'm still waiting to hear about how I'm "misinformed" and the original person I responded to was correct....

How so?

I know this, and I don't see how anything I said disagrees with this. The point is the construction of an alternative chain of evidence to avoid revealing a source, but the whole point is that the evidence chain needs to appear legitimate. In the case in question, an officer instead clearly fabricated evidence, instead of actually gathering an alternative set of legitimate evidence.

While this may in fact be part of a "parallel construction" case (an ILLEGAL one), GGGP's original story could just be an example of an officer fabricating evidence to, say, enhance an otherwise legit investigation without necessarily any hidden source. For example, maybe police received a tip about the location, but a judge wouldn't offer a warrant on only that evidence... so this guy goes out and gets "more evidence." That does NOT make it parallel construction -- it's just an example of fabricating evidence.

Quite difficult. C4 has a density of 1.6 gm/cc. So 500g of C4 would occupy 300cc. That is more than half the volume of my laptop, including the case. I would have to strip out the battery, and circuit board. I don't see any way to do that, and have it still work.

Great. Now sharks will want to be pilots.

I work in education largely currently, and it is similar. The teachers -- the ones producing the "product", though calling education a product kind of perturbs me -- are the ones that are paid the least. The administration and marketing (at a college it's known as "admissions", but basically the same thing) get WAY better salaries, perks, etc. Actually, the fact they have full time jobs at all is a step up, seeing as many teachers these days are adjuncts (part-time) with no benefits.

I don't want to say that the marketing isn't important -- because it is, if no one knows your school or program exists then you won't get students, I understand that -- but fundamentally, if there are no teachers, there is no school. You would think it would be even and on par. But no. The instructors are looked at more as a burden than anything else.

The spouse works in engineering, and basically same there. The salesmen look at the engineers as people that "get in the way" of making the big deal because they want to "add all this extra money to the price" (when really its adding safety clamps and shit to try to prevent it from exploding).

I honestly feel like the whole job creator debate was in a sense correct, but about the wrong class of people. The "job creators" are not the businessmen/marketing people -- it is the ENGINEERS, SCIENTISTS, PROGRAMMERS, TEACHERS that actually provide a service. And yet somehow, all of these creative professions that provide real-world value are the ones facing the most unemployment, lowest wages, longest hours, etc. It is really unfair, and we all need to unionize and get equal treatment to the executives/marketing people. I'm not saying they are unneeded -- just if they can get full time jobs with high salaries and perks, why can't we, when we actually MAKE the things they sell?

Obvious solution: Have more than one screen, so each one is not a single point of failure. But that is already part of the design, since the pilot and co-pilot each have their own screen.

Obvious solution: Route the backup power to the view screens as well.

No, what GP described is NOT the potentially legal version of "parallel construction." Parallel construction, done properly, is supposed to involve the construction of a legitimate alternative chain of evidence, where the original chain of evidence came from a questionably legal information source (e.g. NSA wiretap, improper search) or a source that can't be exposed for some reason.

The way this is supposed to work is that all the legally obtained evidence is given to a separate law enforcement person, who doesn't know the case or have the detailed evidence and who then investigates in a legal fashion. As long as there is no "fruit of the poisoned tree," the investigation can be legit. The recent controversy is often that in new cases, the NSA will convey an "anonymous tip" or something to law enforcement to search a particular place... but after that tip, the police are still expected to act legally.

In GP's case, the officer presumably received a tip that that particular house had drugs. The dog was brought past to provide probable cause (in addition to the tip) for a search. However, in this case the dog didn't sense anything, so the officer chose to commit an overt illegal act and fabricate evidence for the probable cause.

So, while "parallel construction" is on questionable legal ground in many cases, GP's description involves fabrication of evidence... which does not lead to parallel CONSTRUCTION, since no legitimate chain of evidence was legally constructed.

A friend of mine works in a lot of internet marketing and used to do things like search optimization and whatnot. Trust me, no matter what user-based system you set up, people will work day and night to subvert it to push their products. Any sort of review or rating system would be corrupted very quickly.

So the system is inherently flawed.

I can't believe there's no way to design a more robust system of review that isn't prone to corruption. Maybe the FDA is that system, but it's an expensive and inefficient way to go. Of course though, any app that interfaces with a pacemaker or diabetic medication or something ought to be vetted by them. A "health and fitness app" less so.

Employers generally don't make a specific salary offer until after an interview. So if what you said was true, we would be interviewing plenty of qualified candidates, making salary offers, and then having those offers rejected. But that is NOT what I have experienced. We are simply not finding many qualified people. When we do find someone, they almost always either accept our offer, or reject it for reasons other than the salary, such as commute distance. We pay $80k-$90k for college graduate starting salaries, and a median of $150k for developers with five or more years experience.