Leaving aside your assumption that Google can afford to do this more than Germany can (obviously both sides can, but I think Google would be the clear loser in pulling out of Germany), you're not answering the question that was asked.
The question was about Google refusing to service sites which insist that German law be enforced, implying that Google would still serve German sites that let them pass. I strongly suspect that would be illegal whether or not there's any antitrust concerns.
I strongly disagree. It might have been easier at one point, but right now? We all deal with clocks constantly; there's no end to software hiccups, and people still forget to reset their clocks and get everything wrong. Switching clocks is the greater insanity. Varied hours are something you can get used to easily. Shift workers do it.
I actually take a much more positive view of that context-free quote. The girl expressed a willingness to research issues for which she was ignorant. That's phenomenal and nearly unprecedented.
But if somebody else won with the same numbers, but you had way more tickets, you could still claim the vast majority of the prize.
Given an oracle that you are totally certain is telling the truth about the winning lottery numbers, you'd be foolish not to buy in multiple times to decrease the impact of a lucky other person dividing your earnings. Well, unless you're afraid that such a suspicious action will draw the eyes of law enforcement.
Do you actually think obese people will become *more obese* by seeing fewer skinny models? Or that average people are going to "tip over", because apparently everyone is chasing that ideal, and their success scales with the target?
Anorexics and people with other eating orders are the ones chasing that ideal. Obese people gave up on it (and they're better off than the anorexics because of it). Making the models have a more average weight on average might reduce obesity by placing the bodies within range of a reasonable diet.
(I don't agree with banning skinny models via government action, though I think consumer action to do the same would be good)
Which shrinks the usable portion of the screen. Which defeats the purpose of eliminating the bezel.
I'm not sure it does. A touchscreen is two devices: a touch input source, and a visual display. This only defeats the touch input source part of the purpose. But the visual display is still useful, and in fact we have a long history of non-touchable visual displays.
You already need space between the bezel and icons just so your visual design doesn't look like shit, so it's partly eating into already-dead space. Then you can fill the other dead space with generally non-touchable content. To give very generic examples that don't necessarily fit with any tablet that would ever be made, you could fill it with text labels, progress indicators, the date & time & battery life, transient notifications, scheduling updates, etc.. Also, it needn't be entirely non-touchable. It can still respond to gross user interactions that are unlikely to happen from just holding it (maybe that's not a good idea, just thinking out loud).
To counter everything I just said, though, I would personally be driven mad by the thought that my thumbs cover content *all the time*. Yeah, it's a quirk, but there you go. That can hold your physical buttons.
Much as I'm not a fan of this interface on the desktop, I think this *is* the way to modify windows 7 to work as desired on a tablet.
Windows 7 ran on tablets for years and it sucked because the entire interface was designed for a mouse and keyboard, with some bones thrown in for keyboard-only users. Tablets have fundamentally different constraints -- not nearly as precise as the mouse, so you need much larger hit targets and hit-testing correction; there's no "right-click" or any other button, so contextual UI has to be redesigned; can "instantly" move the pointer and even have multiple pointers simultaneously, enabling new interactions; no hardware keyboard means the UI has to dynamically account for a software keyboard; etc..
That's what the original iPhone got right: a phone is not a small desktop. People weren't asking for specifically what an iPhone was because they lacked the words to express it, like the tale of Ford and "faster horses". However, Apple seems to think that tablets are huge telephones -- and to be fair, iPad sales aren't exactly lacking, so they have a point to some extent. I think there's a different optimum to be found in that form factor, though. Microsoft seems to be betting on something that's a bit more phone-like but not really a big WinPhone, coupled with the old desktop which continues to work as crappily as ever on a tablet. From an approach perspective, I think it's interesting and promising for tablets. I think it's a mistake for any machine that doesn't primarily use touch input. I would recommend Microsoft make Metro the second-class citizen when you use mouse & keyboard, and make desktop the second-class citizen when you use a Touch device. Of course they don't want UI divergence because it would bisect their famously large 3rd party software market. But that's going to happen anyway because the compatibility is still there and the desktop is still better for mouse & keyboard. I think it's cool that you can run tablet-optimized software on a desktop and desktop-optimized software on a tablet, but I don't think that's what you should spend most of your time doing.
First, you ignored that it's a diminishing term, and therefore if they're exactly equal you're still wrong.
Second, it's not equal. They're both bad, but not all bad things are equal. Consider the following statements you could be forced to make, even if it is not considered a legally binding testimony of your true thoughts and feelings:
1. I'm sorry. 2. I murdered that man. 3. [Politician] should be elected to be [your country's chief elected official]. All hail the [political party you feel least represents you]! 4. Mom, dad, I'm gay (assuming you haven't come out to your parents, but not necessarily assuming you are actually gay). 5. I understand and accept the terms and conditions of this plea bargain.
These are different things. It's bad for courts to force them, but why would it be equally bad? Some are not clear whether one is better or worse, but that doesn't even make them equal, just different (Is Venus 'better' than Jupiter? Well, by what measure? They aren't equal).
The phone icons are quite similar. I'll grant you that.
The notebooks are quite similar, but inconclusive.
The photos apps both use yellow-leafed flowers. I'm undecided on that. I'd call it coincidence unless there's significant other evidence.
Post-its vs. paper pads aren't that similar.
The gears are clearly different. Gears are a standard icon and these look nothing alike.
The messaging apps are also completely different. I cannot imagine two recognizable "voice box" symbols that look less alike. Are you arguing that a voice box is not an obvious sigil for text messaging?
All in all, I don't see that comparison as being substantially different from this comparison: http://www.designbyinfinity.com/internet/680649f7.png. In both cases, there might be a few superficial resemblances, but they really aren't that similar.
I'd agree with science being the best attempt at an explanation of observable reality, in that it seems to work - we can predict things, make new technologies, etc..
I also agree that religion is an attempt at explaining unobserved reality. But the term "best" here doesn't have a clear definition in this case. Without a definition, it's an empty statement.
You're still conflating growth with revenue. There's no reason to believe that maximum revenue happens at a point of maximum growth. There's a differential equation here, summing more than one term.
Increasing the tax rate has an obvious effect on one of the terms which increases the revenues.
It also has a less obvious effect negative effect on economic expansion. Hence the right side of the Laffer curve.
There may be (and probably are) tertiary terms too. Eg. increased government revenue allows the government to make an investment in infrastructure that stimulates the economy again. Or, if you're so inclined, allows the government to fund an initiative that further depresses the economy. Or a little of each.
The point is, just because government revenue is not going down with increased taxation, does not mean economic expansion is still stable.
Your ideology argument kind of shines through hypocritically with the unsubstantiated claim, "I threw out 20 percent because that is actually what the theory predicts". I have yet to read anything that suggests we know where that point is. It's obviously > 0%, and my intuition strongly suspects that it's significantly less than 100%, but after that it's complicated.
I actually mostly agree with your original argument, and I will agree that Democrats have some common beliefs which are ridiculous even if I think they have fewer ridiculous beliefs than Republicans.
That's true, it isn't fair to generalize the actions of 500 years ago to all Christians at all times...just as it isn't fair to generalize the actions of some fuckers in Iran to all Muslims in all places.
The original claim was:
P1. Christianity forbids "this type of killing" P2. [implied] Islam does not forbid "this type of killing" P3. [implied] It is better to forbid "this type of killing" than not forbid it. C1. Therefore, Christianity > Islam (at least in this aspect).
P3. Is accepted by all here. The implied proof for P2 is:
P4. Finding an example of "this type of killing" done in the name of religion X implies religion X does not forbid "this type of killing". P5. We have an example of Muslims doing this type of killing. C2. Therefore, P2 is true.
The counterargument is:
P4. ibid P6. We have an example of Christians doing this type of killing. C3. Therefore, P1 is false.
We know P6 is true, so either P1 is false, or P4 is. Either way, there is a hole in the argument, and we cannot conclude that Christianity > Islam.
The reason you aren't is because you do not identify with the oppressors here. I don't actually know your religious standing, but there's billions of Christians not saying a peep. They feel it's a Muslim problem. But hey look, these religions have a lot of things in common too, including some shared source material.
They feel that they shouldn't have to answer to the crimes of these muslims because Christianity is not Islam. And that's justifiable. But you can go further. Christianity vs. Islam is a fairly arbitrary line when it comes to collective responsibility.
The government of Iran is barbaric. To generalize and say "...and the religion they espouse must also be barbaric unless huge masses of other followers specifically denounce it" -- with "huge masses" always being defined in such a way that the people already doing it aren't enough -- is fallacy. Sure, you can jump in and examine whether there are structural problems at the core of Islam that lead to these actions, but you aren't doing that and nobody on this thread is. Closest thing is the claim that the Christian religion specifically forbids this sort of thing, which is a pretty laughable "no-true-Scotsman".
I am personally an atheist, but let's set aside for the moment the question about whether religion is inherently destructive. Assume we can find at least one religion which, at its core, expresses values that are no worse than neutral. Even so, I'd expect destructive ideas to attach, remora-like, to these neutral memes and spread around certain populations. The rest of the population wouldn't even think to disavow these people because it's not part of the religion at all.
Mind you, this isn't limited to religion. Tax policy, energy policy, and even sports team and video game console fandom are subject to the same problems. True, it's not very common that somebody gets their head chopped off by Nintendo fans for playing emulated ROMs on the PC, but if it did happen, you'd not for an instant expect Nintendo fans all over the world to specifically disavow it. And the Jack Thompson crowd would blame all video gamers and point how remorseless the video game community is as a whole, and we'd all say he's ridiculous.
There's basically nobody saying the world is cooling. The whole argument is:
- WHY is it warming? - WHAT, if anything, should be done about it.
The science says it's probably due to a bunch of things humans are doing, which implies we should curtail those activities, assuming we desire to remain at the status quo temperatures (and there's good reasons to want that). There's another thread that's very small in the science world, but huge in the US political sphere that says it's not humankind's fault, and will go away on its own, so we should do nothing about it.
Other less-talked-about niche opinions are:
- It's our fault, but we shouldn't do anything about it anyway. - It's not our fault, but we should try to fix it anyway. - Regardless of whether it's our fault, it's too late to do anything about it. - etc.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 1
Your government can already say your house is "valued" at $5, purchase it from you without consent, and build an expressway. There's no need for a more convoluted route.
All systems of government revenue (including the "we shall have no revenue at all" route) are going to be problematic.
There's an unfortunately high coupling between security improvements, platform changes, and UI alterations in Chrome. The first means that the latest version is always desirable. The other two make the latest version undesirable. I can't be the only one who nearly went insane when Chrome started crashing every time you closed a youtube video a week or two back. I think they rolled out a workaround on youtube's side, and I don't know for sure that the root cause is Chrome updates vs. a latent bug that had been in Chrome for ages but was exposed by a youtube update, but it's a testament to why they're problematic. And that's between Chrome and an extremely high-traffic website owned *by the same company*. Hitting something that the Google engineers just never noticed is more likely on your own sites that you don't expect the Chrome devs are hitting up in their spare time at work.
When I was learning those topics (all the ones you listed save for laying bricks) I didn't take any notes in class. Maybe I'm just the target subject, but if I forgot something in QM then I can still remember enough to look it up in my text or even online.
Instead of QM and nuclear physics, I would have used literature analysis or the like, because there you specifically want the professor's insights rather than verifiable points of fact.
We were talking about a job you could train up to in a couple months and do from home, doesn't involve significant writing skills, and has a reasonable job market. Being a doctor or an engineer is not one of those options.
I find it funny that you think the GP is the one who is "delicate" and a "pussy" when you're the one clutching your pearls at the thought of drugs and sex and online nudity.
They don't usually have a 1:1 ratio of employees watching self-checkouts to the self-checkouts themselves, so I would say that it is eliminating jobs. Even if the customers are less efficient, with a 1:4 ratio you're getting a labour savings.
I much prefer self checkout lines and all else being equal will select a store that tends to have self-checkout lanes available. I guess we cancel each other out.
"Evolution progresses exponentially" is meaningless because evolution in general is undirected so there's nothing for it to progress against, let alone progress against "exponentially". There's another sense in which evolution progresses much more quickly in simple single-celled bacteria than in humans, simply by virtue of shorter generations, so they have a greater % change in genome per unit time. I'm not sure in what sense the selective phenomena are really more complex over time either.
I'm not sure where 200 thousand years to get modern civilization comes from, in that I'm not sure what you're taking as the start point of "now we're working toward modern civilization".
Regardless, that really has no bearing on legal matters, because we're conflating evolution of self-replicating units with random modifications and circumstantial selection, with the evolution of an otherwise-static design with only intentional modifications and only intentional selection.
Court cases address matters of already-created laws, though. There's some precedent setting in that it interprets contradictions (eg. "this is unconstitutional") or vague points in laws. You seem to be proposing a radically different government system with no legislative branch.
I think I actually agree with you in that you can't create comprehensive legal frameworks by gazing into crystal balls, but I'd go further and say you cannot create comprehensive legal frameworks by any method (not universally good ones, anyway). The court settling the edge-cases is a reasonable way to work through things.
But lots of things can be predicted in advance. There is no reason for driverless cars to be subjected to roadside alcohol tests, my crystal ball tells me so. The question of how to handle legal liabilities for an accident is important and we can think about that early. A court case can refine that to specific circumstances, but there's no reason we can't say from the start that, for instance, "car company takes responsibility, and/or owner takes responsibility; electric company does not bear responsibility; driverless cars should / should not be discriminated against when determining to which degree each party of an accident was at fault, etc.". And if it turns out wrong, we can change it, just like the night vision goggles example in your other thread.
What makes you think this will never be changed? Selecting laws here is no different from building a better telescope by trial and error. Somebody has to take the first step.
Slashdot Mirror
If everything you need is in the public domain now, then your problem is already solved.
Leaving aside your assumption that Google can afford to do this more than Germany can (obviously both sides can, but I think Google would be the clear loser in pulling out of Germany), you're not answering the question that was asked.
The question was about Google refusing to service sites which insist that German law be enforced, implying that Google would still serve German sites that let them pass. I strongly suspect that would be illegal whether or not there's any antitrust concerns.
I strongly disagree. It might have been easier at one point, but right now? We all deal with clocks constantly; there's no end to software hiccups, and people still forget to reset their clocks and get everything wrong. Switching clocks is the greater insanity. Varied hours are something you can get used to easily. Shift workers do it.
I actually take a much more positive view of that context-free quote. The girl expressed a willingness to research issues for which she was ignorant. That's phenomenal and nearly unprecedented.
But if somebody else won with the same numbers, but you had way more tickets, you could still claim the vast majority of the prize.
Given an oracle that you are totally certain is telling the truth about the winning lottery numbers, you'd be foolish not to buy in multiple times to decrease the impact of a lucky other person dividing your earnings. Well, unless you're afraid that such a suspicious action will draw the eyes of law enforcement.
Do you actually think obese people will become *more obese* by seeing fewer skinny models? Or that average people are going to "tip over", because apparently everyone is chasing that ideal, and their success scales with the target?
Anorexics and people with other eating orders are the ones chasing that ideal. Obese people gave up on it (and they're better off than the anorexics because of it). Making the models have a more average weight on average might reduce obesity by placing the bodies within range of a reasonable diet.
(I don't agree with banning skinny models via government action, though I think consumer action to do the same would be good)
Which shrinks the usable portion of the screen. Which defeats the purpose of eliminating the bezel.
I'm not sure it does. A touchscreen is two devices: a touch input source, and a visual display. This only defeats the touch input source part of the purpose. But the visual display is still useful, and in fact we have a long history of non-touchable visual displays.
You already need space between the bezel and icons just so your visual design doesn't look like shit, so it's partly eating into already-dead space. Then you can fill the other dead space with generally non-touchable content. To give very generic examples that don't necessarily fit with any tablet that would ever be made, you could fill it with text labels, progress indicators, the date & time & battery life, transient notifications, scheduling updates, etc.. Also, it needn't be entirely non-touchable. It can still respond to gross user interactions that are unlikely to happen from just holding it (maybe that's not a good idea, just thinking out loud).
To counter everything I just said, though, I would personally be driven mad by the thought that my thumbs cover content *all the time*. Yeah, it's a quirk, but there you go. That can hold your physical buttons.
Much as I'm not a fan of this interface on the desktop, I think this *is* the way to modify windows 7 to work as desired on a tablet.
Windows 7 ran on tablets for years and it sucked because the entire interface was designed for a mouse and keyboard, with some bones thrown in for keyboard-only users. Tablets have fundamentally different constraints -- not nearly as precise as the mouse, so you need much larger hit targets and hit-testing correction; there's no "right-click" or any other button, so contextual UI has to be redesigned; can "instantly" move the pointer and even have multiple pointers simultaneously, enabling new interactions; no hardware keyboard means the UI has to dynamically account for a software keyboard; etc..
That's what the original iPhone got right: a phone is not a small desktop. People weren't asking for specifically what an iPhone was because they lacked the words to express it, like the tale of Ford and "faster horses". However, Apple seems to think that tablets are huge telephones -- and to be fair, iPad sales aren't exactly lacking, so they have a point to some extent. I think there's a different optimum to be found in that form factor, though. Microsoft seems to be betting on something that's a bit more phone-like but not really a big WinPhone, coupled with the old desktop which continues to work as crappily as ever on a tablet. From an approach perspective, I think it's interesting and promising for tablets. I think it's a mistake for any machine that doesn't primarily use touch input. I would recommend Microsoft make Metro the second-class citizen when you use mouse & keyboard, and make desktop the second-class citizen when you use a Touch device. Of course they don't want UI divergence because it would bisect their famously large 3rd party software market. But that's going to happen anyway because the compatibility is still there and the desktop is still better for mouse & keyboard. I think it's cool that you can run tablet-optimized software on a desktop and desktop-optimized software on a tablet, but I don't think that's what you should spend most of your time doing.
First, you ignored that it's a diminishing term, and therefore if they're exactly equal you're still wrong.
Second, it's not equal. They're both bad, but not all bad things are equal. Consider the following statements you could be forced to make, even if it is not considered a legally binding testimony of your true thoughts and feelings:
1. I'm sorry.
2. I murdered that man.
3. [Politician] should be elected to be [your country's chief elected official]. All hail the [political party you feel least represents you]!
4. Mom, dad, I'm gay (assuming you haven't come out to your parents, but not necessarily assuming you are actually gay).
5. I understand and accept the terms and conditions of this plea bargain.
These are different things. It's bad for courts to force them, but why would it be equally bad? Some are not clear whether one is better or worse, but that doesn't even make them equal, just different (Is Venus 'better' than Jupiter? Well, by what measure? They aren't equal).
The phone icons are quite similar. I'll grant you that.
The notebooks are quite similar, but inconclusive.
The photos apps both use yellow-leafed flowers. I'm undecided on that. I'd call it coincidence unless there's significant other evidence.
Post-its vs. paper pads aren't that similar.
The gears are clearly different. Gears are a standard icon and these look nothing alike.
The messaging apps are also completely different. I cannot imagine two recognizable "voice box" symbols that look less alike. Are you arguing that a voice box is not an obvious sigil for text messaging?
All in all, I don't see that comparison as being substantially different from this comparison: http://www.designbyinfinity.com/internet/680649f7.png. In both cases, there might be a few superficial resemblances, but they really aren't that similar.
I'd agree with science being the best attempt at an explanation of observable reality, in that it seems to work - we can predict things, make new technologies, etc..
I also agree that religion is an attempt at explaining unobserved reality. But the term "best" here doesn't have a clear definition in this case. Without a definition, it's an empty statement.
You're still conflating growth with revenue. There's no reason to believe that maximum revenue happens at a point of maximum growth. There's a differential equation here, summing more than one term.
Increasing the tax rate has an obvious effect on one of the terms which increases the revenues.
It also has a less obvious effect negative effect on economic expansion. Hence the right side of the Laffer curve.
There may be (and probably are) tertiary terms too. Eg. increased government revenue allows the government to make an investment in infrastructure that stimulates the economy again. Or, if you're so inclined, allows the government to fund an initiative that further depresses the economy. Or a little of each.
The point is, just because government revenue is not going down with increased taxation, does not mean economic expansion is still stable.
Your ideology argument kind of shines through hypocritically with the unsubstantiated claim, "I threw out 20 percent because that is actually what the theory predicts". I have yet to read anything that suggests we know where that point is. It's obviously > 0%, and my intuition strongly suspects that it's significantly less than 100%, but after that it's complicated.
I actually mostly agree with your original argument, and I will agree that Democrats have some common beliefs which are ridiculous even if I think they have fewer ridiculous beliefs than Republicans.
That's true, it isn't fair to generalize the actions of 500 years ago to all Christians at all times...just as it isn't fair to generalize the actions of some fuckers in Iran to all Muslims in all places.
The original claim was:
P1. Christianity forbids "this type of killing"
P2. [implied] Islam does not forbid "this type of killing"
P3. [implied] It is better to forbid "this type of killing" than not forbid it.
C1. Therefore, Christianity > Islam (at least in this aspect).
P3. Is accepted by all here. The implied proof for P2 is:
P4. Finding an example of "this type of killing" done in the name of religion X implies religion X does not forbid "this type of killing".
P5. We have an example of Muslims doing this type of killing.
C2. Therefore, P2 is true.
The counterargument is:
P4. ibid
P6. We have an example of Christians doing this type of killing.
C3. Therefore, P1 is false.
We know P6 is true, so either P1 is false, or P4 is. Either way, there is a hole in the argument, and we cannot conclude that Christianity > Islam.
Why aren't you?
The reason you aren't is because you do not identify with the oppressors here. I don't actually know your religious standing, but there's billions of Christians not saying a peep. They feel it's a Muslim problem. But hey look, these religions have a lot of things in common too, including some shared source material.
They feel that they shouldn't have to answer to the crimes of these muslims because Christianity is not Islam. And that's justifiable. But you can go further. Christianity vs. Islam is a fairly arbitrary line when it comes to collective responsibility.
The government of Iran is barbaric. To generalize and say "...and the religion they espouse must also be barbaric unless huge masses of other followers specifically denounce it" -- with "huge masses" always being defined in such a way that the people already doing it aren't enough -- is fallacy. Sure, you can jump in and examine whether there are structural problems at the core of Islam that lead to these actions, but you aren't doing that and nobody on this thread is. Closest thing is the claim that the Christian religion specifically forbids this sort of thing, which is a pretty laughable "no-true-Scotsman".
I am personally an atheist, but let's set aside for the moment the question about whether religion is inherently destructive. Assume we can find at least one religion which, at its core, expresses values that are no worse than neutral. Even so, I'd expect destructive ideas to attach, remora-like, to these neutral memes and spread around certain populations. The rest of the population wouldn't even think to disavow these people because it's not part of the religion at all.
Mind you, this isn't limited to religion. Tax policy, energy policy, and even sports team and video game console fandom are subject to the same problems. True, it's not very common that somebody gets their head chopped off by Nintendo fans for playing emulated ROMs on the PC, but if it did happen, you'd not for an instant expect Nintendo fans all over the world to specifically disavow it. And the Jack Thompson crowd would blame all video gamers and point how remorseless the video game community is as a whole, and we'd all say he's ridiculous.
There's basically nobody saying the world is cooling. The whole argument is:
- WHY is it warming?
- WHAT, if anything, should be done about it.
The science says it's probably due to a bunch of things humans are doing, which implies we should curtail those activities, assuming we desire to remain at the status quo temperatures (and there's good reasons to want that). There's another thread that's very small in the science world, but huge in the US political sphere that says it's not humankind's fault, and will go away on its own, so we should do nothing about it.
Other less-talked-about niche opinions are:
- It's our fault, but we shouldn't do anything about it anyway.
- It's not our fault, but we should try to fix it anyway.
- Regardless of whether it's our fault, it's too late to do anything about it.
- etc.
Nobody with any sense at all claims that the world has been cooling for the past 10 years, because that's ridiculous reality-denial: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/Instrumental_Temperature_Record_(NASA).svg.
Your government can already say your house is "valued" at $5, purchase it from you without consent, and build an expressway. There's no need for a more convoluted route.
All systems of government revenue (including the "we shall have no revenue at all" route) are going to be problematic.
There's an unfortunately high coupling between security improvements, platform changes, and UI alterations in Chrome. The first means that the latest version is always desirable. The other two make the latest version undesirable. I can't be the only one who nearly went insane when Chrome started crashing every time you closed a youtube video a week or two back. I think they rolled out a workaround on youtube's side, and I don't know for sure that the root cause is Chrome updates vs. a latent bug that had been in Chrome for ages but was exposed by a youtube update, but it's a testament to why they're problematic. And that's between Chrome and an extremely high-traffic website owned *by the same company*. Hitting something that the Google engineers just never noticed is more likely on your own sites that you don't expect the Chrome devs are hitting up in their spare time at work.
When I was learning those topics (all the ones you listed save for laying bricks) I didn't take any notes in class. Maybe I'm just the target subject, but if I forgot something in QM then I can still remember enough to look it up in my text or even online.
Instead of QM and nuclear physics, I would have used literature analysis or the like, because there you specifically want the professor's insights rather than verifiable points of fact.
We were talking about a job you could train up to in a couple months and do from home, doesn't involve significant writing skills, and has a reasonable job market. Being a doctor or an engineer is not one of those options.
I find it funny that you think the GP is the one who is "delicate" and a "pussy" when you're the one clutching your pearls at the thought of drugs and sex and online nudity.
When they started detecting distance.
They don't usually have a 1:1 ratio of employees watching self-checkouts to the self-checkouts themselves, so I would say that it is eliminating jobs. Even if the customers are less efficient, with a 1:4 ratio you're getting a labour savings.
I much prefer self checkout lines and all else being equal will select a store that tends to have self-checkout lanes available. I guess we cancel each other out.
Every time I see that measured, it consistently shows the US having the least social mobility of all developed nations. For example, here: http://ftp.iza.org/dp1993.pdf and http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/81/
I do often see the claim that the US has an advantage here, but I have never, ever seen it backed up, while I have seen the counterclaim backed up.
"Evolution progresses exponentially" is meaningless because evolution in general is undirected so there's nothing for it to progress against, let alone progress against "exponentially". There's another sense in which evolution progresses much more quickly in simple single-celled bacteria than in humans, simply by virtue of shorter generations, so they have a greater % change in genome per unit time. I'm not sure in what sense the selective phenomena are really more complex over time either.
I'm not sure where 200 thousand years to get modern civilization comes from, in that I'm not sure what you're taking as the start point of "now we're working toward modern civilization".
Regardless, that really has no bearing on legal matters, because we're conflating evolution of self-replicating units with random modifications and circumstantial selection, with the evolution of an otherwise-static design with only intentional modifications and only intentional selection.
Court cases address matters of already-created laws, though. There's some precedent setting in that it interprets contradictions (eg. "this is unconstitutional") or vague points in laws. You seem to be proposing a radically different government system with no legislative branch.
I think I actually agree with you in that you can't create comprehensive legal frameworks by gazing into crystal balls, but I'd go further and say you cannot create comprehensive legal frameworks by any method (not universally good ones, anyway). The court settling the edge-cases is a reasonable way to work through things.
But lots of things can be predicted in advance. There is no reason for driverless cars to be subjected to roadside alcohol tests, my crystal ball tells me so. The question of how to handle legal liabilities for an accident is important and we can think about that early. A court case can refine that to specific circumstances, but there's no reason we can't say from the start that, for instance, "car company takes responsibility, and/or owner takes responsibility; electric company does not bear responsibility; driverless cars should / should not be discriminated against when determining to which degree each party of an accident was at fault, etc.". And if it turns out wrong, we can change it, just like the night vision goggles example in your other thread.
What makes you think this will never be changed? Selecting laws here is no different from building a better telescope by trial and error. Somebody has to take the first step.
I think you're making an artificial distinction.