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knorby

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That's absurd and offensive on a lot of levels... The thing anyone in a protected class wants is to not be judged on that as a factor one way or the other. People working at Uber are "struggling" because their perceived ticket to the stars is looking kind of bad; they wish there were getting offers left and right for working there, because plenty of people get jobs on the basis of their last company.

You get judged in interviews, and it is a best case scenario if it is over recent stuff you had control over.

A lot of TNC drivers have cameras pointed into the car, some (but not all) with signs indicating the passenger is being filmed. It is even more standard in real taxis. The expectation of privacy is more that such footage in any of the mentioned circumstances would never be released unless it captured someone committing a crime or something similar.

This story is about extreme storms. The example storm mentioned from 2014 occurred in the worst of the drought, caused all kinds of issues, but it didn't fix anything. Both future droughts and more extreme and frequent pineapple expresses can co-exist because of climate change. MIT et al. shouldn't have to explain that in every press release made involving the climate.

Uber has the garages for both Otto and these cars on Harrison, between 3rd and 4th streets, on the side of the lanes headed to I-80W/101S. When they need to park either, particularly the semi-trucks, they get people in vests to come out, stop traffic for pretty much all lanes of traffic, and slowly park their delicate vehicles.... Glad to see this story.

The Manhattan Project had nearly unlimited resources at a time of scarcity, and it took enormous engineering risks. The risk component is something easy to overlook, but these were enormous infrastructure projects by any standard done at scale without much chance to prove them, and they were accomplished in incredibly short time-frames.

Could you imagine someone building a full-scale, power generating fusion reactor off a new and untested design in a about a year? More to the point, could you imagine someone funding that?

Ballot props are far more regular in CA than headlines suggest. The requirement for signatures keeps dropping as voter turnout drops, and it doesn't take that many resources to get something on the ballot. An appealing title and description make it fairly easy to get a lot of maybe not so great spending passed, despite reasonably good efforts to keep voters informed. I don't know that the overall function is that different from what you describe, given that there isn't really a strong opposition party in the state, but it is hard to get the majority of people to really think critically about 5 different obscure spending packages.

These are baseless associations. Perhaps Diablo Canyon and PG&E aren't flawless and honest, but you aren't establishing risk. Do you have some reason to believe there is a meltdown risk?

I don't really think a reactor being retired at 40 is the worst thing (though I'm sure it could be run longer), but have you spent as much time worrying about the oil refineries within miles of fault lines all throughout the state (think the numerous oil refinery explosions that occur regularly worldwide)? What about oil train explosions (think the other oil train explosions)?

People express serious concern for some of the most outlandish, obscure risks on any project if it somehow involves the word 'nuclear.' Every project. A lot more lives could be saved if the same effort was used to create real safety standards on oil, coal, and gas.

That there is an earthquake risk doesn't mean it isn't properly dealt with. The plant is built to withstand significant seismic risk, 10 times more than the faults around it could produce. That's right there in the wikipedia article you linked to.

The funny thing about the horrible post-dystopian future scenario is how many far greater nuclear threats could exist. Assuming the cause of said horrible future isn't caused by nuclear war already, what would happen to all the more potent nuclear material and weapons scattered about? These places are comparatively quite accessible, and the sites communicate that the objects are highly valued. You're right, focusing on the wrong things.

Nationally-funded research that's published in expensive journals is still very much available to the rest of the world. That's true with about anything that's published...

Chicago, as an example, does have cameras on streets in certain areas. Evidence gathered by these is considered admissible without a prior warrant, and no one in the state really debates that, ACLU included (http://www.aclu-il.org/chicago-sun-times-aclu-raises-red-fla...).

There are a lot of stronger counter arguments against this approach that don't have to do with warrants. Cameras don't stop crime, they can only document it and possibly alert to something happening. It is better to just make arguments about the practice of mass surveillance and police priorities than to hope court rulings will knock out cameras placed on public land as unconstitutional.

There is again absolutely no difference between phones and glass in this regard... Android phones now have trigger word detection ("OK Google") available as well, which is all that glass did. Again like a phone, the camera is only on when triggered.

The only real difference is positioning, but you can hold a phone up, and most people won't notice.

Phones continue to be a bigger or equivalent privacy threat to the individual user and others than Glass ever was. The ability to discreetly take photos and short, low-quality videos also continues to be something highly possible with phones and other consumer tech.

A great deal of the value to a manned mission to a planet, in terms of tangibles, exists in coming back. Humans can take samples easily, and a return mission would bring them back. Humans would significant contaminate any site they visit, and drones can be considerably more sterile, not to mention cheaper.

When you are talking about spending many, many billions for a single mission, arguably the success of the spacecraft is worth more than the lives of the humans. If the crew is at a significant risk of death, and it is worth noting that a lot of these risks would affect the crew mostly evenly, then the whole mission is in jeopardy.

There isn't really much to see at UofC, and you can go to a monument at the site now.

Most of the sites in the secret cities are decaying, cut off to the public or at extremely limited access, and the goal of the park is to preserve and help open them up. The graphite reactor (X-10) in Oak Ridge, for example, is a fairly tourist friendly site (one of the pics on the site), but it is right on the campus of ORNL, and it requires access to the lab or a rare tour to actually visit it. Hopefully the park can get security right and get the funds in place for frequent visits.