And yet a cheque allows an individuals to pay other individuals without any infrastructure needed apart from a pre-issued cheque book and access to a bank branch or a post box.

cheques are a painfully slow method of payment but nothing beats them for occasional payment to people who don't normally receive money, everything from individual to individual, to one off small scale charity payments. For example; I can't see the village church taking debit or credit cards for an emergency roof fixing fund but I could see donations being bigger than the amount of cash someone normally carries around with them.

Electronic payments need local readers and telecommunications which mean significant upfront investment for small scale, short term events

even if it's just the pilot, that signal will be a "new" one, which pops up in an area that is of interest, as it will have a line of sight access to the areas being protected.

Unless:

• the pilot thought to install a remote camera meaning the drone itself isn't emitting anything, just receiving while the pilot is still in WiFi range but not necessarily in an area with a line of sight.
• or connect the drone to a WiFi access point and control from somewhere more remote, making the drone more detectable (it's now transmitting) but the operator much harder to find quickly

If the drone is really a threat, as opposed to just a drone being somewhere it's not meant to be, then you have to assume the operator will take basic steps to increase the time until they are found.

True, but the question wasn't what sort of career you could choose that can't be replaced by robots. It was what sort of career you could choose that couldn't readily be replaced by a human on the other side of the planet

But what's the point of jumping to a new career to avoid potential threats to your current career if you don't consider the potential threats to the career you are jumping to

Outsourcing is a real threat to knowledge based jobs and automation is a real threat to low skilled (although the bar for skills safe from automation is constantly rising) jobs which need to be done locally. The sort of job you might switch to to avoid Outsourcing will eventually be threatened by automation.

After a number of high profile cases have been dropped due to prosecutors not being allowed to explain how the device works in court. It's become a very expensive evidence gathering tool which can't be used to collect usable evidence.

This isn't a blow against secret terms of use, it's a business decision to not buy something which can't be used for it's intended purpose.

Also, stupid unnecessary shit like tailgating 2 inches from the other guy's bumper with two open passing lanes is unfathomably popular.

Hypermiling?

All well and good, but doesn't exactly solve the problem of greenhouse gas emissions.

That depends entirely on the source of CO2

They'll spin round, walk out and go to the outfit down the street - or on the other side of the world.

...and talk to your competition who are now exposed to exactly the same risk you feared you were taking on yourself. If anything, I'd say that was a good thing, because you are able to lose a competitor.

You only need a tiny amount of moisture from the air in the box to ruin your drive by causing a short somewhere on the controller board.

That's why I'd go with optical storage in the safety deposit box, well defined standards that any optical drive in the world can read later on.

customer expectation management, that tends to be a good thing for the real techies.

Those good negotiators you are hoping will be promoted out of harms way are exactly the sort of person who tells the customer anything is possible and then leaving the small details like actually implementing the feature up to the techies.

That's not a good thing for real techies.

All Ellen Pao is doing here is guaranteeing overpayment for mediocre workers. Think about it. To get the best talent she'll have to pay top dollar. But that doesn't guarantee everyone hired is top talent.

If you read the summary carefully, they are not stating a salary value for a job in advance of making a offer to someone.

They are interviewing and then making an offer they feel is appropriate for that interviewee, that means that they can still adjust the offer based on the person in front of them (and who is to say the hiring managers don't offer less to women?). All thats changed is that the offer is set in stone, the interviewee either takes it or leaves it.

This scheme will live or die on how well they predict the job market for the roles they are hiring for but I don't see how it really addresses the stated goal of equalizing pay ranges between genders.

For eg., what was his reason for serving cold food?

Top Gear had hired most of a small hotel for a filming shoot. The shoot went on longer than expected and when they got back to the hotel they found the kitchen was closed. Not exactly unexpectedly since the kitchen open hours were stated.

So the idea that this was somehow a conspiracy by the producer to get Clarkson fired seems like a stretch unless you think he deliberately delayed the shoot so they would get back after the kitchen was closed.

literary mafia who wouldn't know a decent book if it was tattooed onto their backsides.

To be fair, assuming the decent book had to be read with a mirror, then the entire tattoo would have to be written backwards which is very error prone and curves and saggy skin will make it likely that sentences will be unreadable so identifying a decent book under those circumstances is really hard.

My understanding of those robot turrets is that they can identify human shaped targets and lock on, but they can't tell friend or foe so their default operating mode is to wait for an operator to give a fire order by feeding the video stream back to a console

They can be left in full auto mode in case of all out attack but in that mode they a just an area denial weapon, more technology than a land mine but no less indiscriminate.

So although they are a robotic weapon system with the ability to decide whether or not to fire by itself, it's not what most people think about when they talk about a fully autonomous weapon system in which a system can make strategic decisions about how to complete an arbitrary objective.