And if only a small number of people take the trip, those numbers probably have a wide standard deviation, because some people drive like Mad Max and some drive like student drivers. And without enough people, you also can't tell whether the problem is a scared driver or an actual traffic backup.
Of course, a scared driver can create an actual traffic backup at any time, depending on how easy it is to pass, which compounds the problem.
This. Asking why people don't buy cell phones with removable batteries is like asking why iPhone users aren't buying phones with a headphone jack. The answer, of course, is that Apple no longer sells one.
To truly measure whether users care about a feature, you would have to have two nearly identical models whose only differences are that feature and any unavoidable side effects thereof. For example, you might have a model that has a removable battery at a slightly higher price and with a slightly thicker case. Without a proper control, you're comparing apples and oranges.
You're assuming the memory is long-term. If it is short-term, it could be that the plant, when actively dying, secreted something that stuck to the "murderer", and that the other plants could detect that scent whenever the person walked in.
When I'm moving around I prefer the convenience of Bluetooth, and when I want quality I prefer a decent DAC+amp and nice headphones with a quarter inch jack.
I don't. There's a reason that headphones with quarter-inch plugs are essentially no longer made. It turns out that it is better to put an 1/8" plug in the headphones and use an adapter. That way, when (not if) you forget that they are on your head and rip them out of the gear, you lose a $1.50 adapter instead of the input jack on your equipment.:-)
We want universal headphones that work not just with cell phones and computers, but professional audio equipment, older audio equipment...
USB-C does not prevent that. There is no reason USB-C headphones cannot be the universal interface you desire.
Actually, USB-C does prevent that. Inherently.
Every time you convert sound from the analog domain to the digital domain and vice versa, you add latency. If your professional audio hardware has an analog output and you add an ADC to then retransmit the data to a USB-based pair of headphones, you're almost guaranteed to be adding enough latency to significantly affect usability for recording purposes, where single-digit milliseconds matter.
And if your professional audio hardware somehow manages to operate in the digital domain, it is still problematic, because USB headphones have their own clock, and there's no good way to reliably synchronize the clocks of USB-based DACs with whatever ADC hardware is used inside the rest of your digital audio gear. This means that they will invariably drift, causing audio dropouts and glitches that are completely unavoidable even if you manage to keep the latency low enough to not be noticeable.
USB headphones are fine for consumer audio, because it has very, very loose synchronization requirements. The entire notion of using them for professional audio, where the synchronization requirements are much more strict, however, is pure comedy. What you're proposing is simply infeasible. The closest you could get would be doing some magic like negotiate the use of an entirely different wire protocol (e.g. S/PDIF or ADAT) across a USB-C cable similar to the way Thunderbolt 3 works, and then stream raw digital audio data to a self-synchronizing DAC setup on the other end. But that would not be USB-C in any meaningful way, any more than USB-C's "audio accessory mode" (where the digital pins become analog audio pins) is USB-C.
Neither does my bluetooth headset. Not everyone else's fault if you're stuck in the past.
Bluetooth latency is nowhere near adequate for professional audio (the context for this thread). The minimum latency of Bluetooth audio is on the order of 40 milliseconds, which is about an order of magnitude higher than acceptable for monitoring while recording. And that's on top of the conversion latency on the way in.
When recording, you have to blend in some of the sound from the mic in along with the existing tracks. High latency seriously messes with pitch perception for singers and wind instruments (among other things). As such, it is strongly recommended that engineers keep round-trip latency in the single digits. You can easily perceive 30 ms latency even when tracking things like drums — enough to through off your timing noticeably. I can't even imagine trying to track with 40 ms round trip latency or more. I've tried to track with high-latency setups like that. It did not go well.
Could USB audio replace analog audio? Ostensibly, but in practice, the synchronization requirements between the hardware used for input and output make it infeasible. USB simply has no way of carrying the timing information necessary to keep the ADC and DAC clocks in sync without drift, and drift invariably translates to blown recordings.
Analog is really the only feasible way to handle headphone monitoring, other than perhaps sending raw digital data to a self-synchronizing DAC (e.g. ADAT protocol or S/PDIF). Anybody trying to convince you otherwise is likely trying to sell you snake oil.
That's cool. My dad is proud that he never switched from cassette tapes to CD's. You two would get along.
Not moving from a flimsy, failure-prone medium with poor fidelity and linear access to a robust medium with higher fidelity and random access seems kind of silly.
But not moving from something that works reliably and has good fidelity to something that requires futzing with the phone and the device almost weekly because they aren't talking to each other and has much worse fidelity seems like a much more reasonable point of pride.
Bluetooth audio sucks, at least on iOS. And I don't just mean a little. Bluetooth works moderately well for keyboards and mice. It is absolutely the worst possible way to connect a telephone to a sound system. I've never seen anything so unreliable in my life. The sound quality is just a mild annoyance compared with having to reboot my car and my phone every couple of weeks just to get them to talk to one another again. And it isn't the car. I've had this problem with every Bluetooth system I've ever tried, from at least three or four different manufacturers (some automotive, some not).
So here we are, almost three years after Apple removed the headphone jack, and still the apologists keep telling us that Bluetooth is going to be so much better than wired headphones when they get all the bugs worked out. At the rate things are going, I fully expect Tesla to turn on their full self-driving feature long before Bluetooth audio quality and reliability matches that of wired headphones. Apple was wrong then, and there's still no sign of them becoming significantly less wrong.
But I wouldn't worry about it, it's a common practice to create news about some crazy guy's plan that will never actually occur. It isn't that California is weird this way, go to any state or country and there's always that one guy that proposes something stupid.
We said that about the plastic bag ban. Then, they passed it. Now, we have to buy trash bags for my house that use 10x as much plastic, use 10x as much fuel to deliver them to the store, and are basically worse for the environment in almost every other measurable way. And yet still, there's tons of trash blowing around our streets, because what the legislators didn't do is pass a law fining the garbage truck companies for overuse of automation in ways that result in trash littering the streets behind them.
So no, we should not assume that any idea, no matter how bonkers, is beyond the level of bats**t-craziness that the California legislature is capable of exhibiting. We should always assume that any idea proposed by a politician, no matter how absurd, is likely to pass, and use every ounce of our strength to stomp the bad ideas squarely into the ground.
It's not a terminology problem. It's a complete lack of understanding of what a Tesla can and can't do.
Yes, Tesla Autopilot can be used on city streets. But what you see here is not a street. It is a parking lot driveway. It is absolutely impossible to engage Autopilot on a road that looks like this. Autopilot requires a road to have lines (solid or dotted) on both sides of the lane, though occasionally you can get away with a sufficiently high-contrast curb.
On a road with no lines, you cannot engage any autonomy other than basic traffic-aware cruise control (with no automatic steering whatsoever). If somehow you managed to trick Autopilot into driving on this road anyway, it would have treated the driveway as a single (unusually wide) lane, so the car would have gone right down the middle of the driveway, not down one side.
So basically, unless they're claiming that Tesla brought a car with alpha firmware and ran it on a public street as a publicity stunt (which would probably be illegal unless they somehow received special approval to beta test their tech somewhere other than California), you can safely assume that a human was driving.
Also, from some angles, you can clearly see the rope.
The question is not whether this is fake; it clearly is. The question is why the heck the press were so gullible that they believed something that literally ANY Tesla driver could have told them was fake within the first three seconds without even having to slow down playback.
Ahhh. A political ignoranti who doesn't understand the Connecticut compromise.
No, we understand it quite well. The problem is that they came up with it in an era that was very different from our own. Back then:
Nobody as broadly vilified as President Trump or Hillary Clinton would ever have even made it to the ballot in enough states to win, because they didn't have giant, corporate-backed political party advertising machines pushing them.
The assumption was that electors would be highly respected people who would vote unfaithfully if an unconscionable candidate candidate somehow "won", and choose a different candidate.
They didn't have TV or airplanes, so the only way a candidate would ever pay the slightest bit of attention to minor states was if they had an exaggerated role in the election.
Accurately verifying a vote count on a national basis was challenging at best.
Slavery still existed. If voting had been one-man-one-vote, then the slave states would not have gotten the extra voting power from the three-fifths compromise when choosing a president. This was a major factor in the electoral college being supported initially.
Obviously, things are very different today.
Additionally, the disproportionate nature of the electoral college was not as extreme back then, because the population differences were not as extreme. In 1787, the two largest states (Pennsylvania and Virginia) had 10x the population of the smallest (Delaware). Pennsylvania had 3 electors, and Virginia had 12. Proportionally, this meant Delaware had about 2.4x the voting power of Pennsylvania.
Right now, the most populous state (California) is more than 68x the population (Wyoming). Because Wyoming has such a low population, the two electors resulting from Wyoming's senate seats massively skew their power relative to most of the other states, and because the number of representatives is capped too low, all of the more populous states are currently massively underrepresented in both the House and the Electoral College. As a result, one voter in Wyoming is equivalent to almost four voters in California for Electoral College purposes, and equivalent to almost 1.3 voters even in the House.
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, completely nuts. The skew has become unmanageably large because the low-population states are simply too much smaller than the high-population states. The larger that skew becomes, the less the electoral college vote resembles the popular vote, and the more disillusioned people become with the whole process.
It really is time to ditch the electoral college. It has thoroughly outlived its usefulness, and only serves to further preclude any real possibility of a third-party candidate ever winning the office. But if we're not going to do that, we should at least increase the size of the House of Representatives until we are within +/-1% of proportionate representation to at least bring that skew slightly closer to sanity.
As-is that implies you may one day press your "hefty trash bags" button and receive a set of toenail clippers or something.
Actually, that's exactly what it means. You've never seen Amazon incorrectly link two unrelated products and have them share reviews? Then you haven't been on Amazon very long.:-D
But in all seriousness, even if Amazon does this, you can always return it, and as the reason, specify that it was not the product you ordered, and they'll pay for the shipping and everything, so this is mostly a non-issue.
The longer the government shutdown lasts, the more this sounds like slavery. I mean not quite, because ostensibly air traffic controllers could quit and become baristas at Starbucks or whatever (assuming the government does not compel them to not do so), but pretty close.
Particularly appalling is the fact that during the shutdown, all vacations are cancelled, and anyone on vacation is required to immediately terminate that vacation and return to work (because after all, otherwise everyone essential would take vacations), creating pretty significant hardship, particularly given that it happened during the Christmas holiday. I'm pretty sure if I worked for the federal government, I'd have said, "Screw you. I quit," and I'm not even a millennial. I can't imagine how they didn't have an absolute exodus.
Similar problem. When my parents visit me, they use their Netflix account on my TV so that I can listen to streaming on my long drive without hitting my one-screen limit. This means at least one TV is signed in to their account. Switching accounts is a pain in the backside, so I just leave it that way. It would be far easier if a profile could be shared between their account and mine so when they choose their profile, it counts against their screen limit without spending ten minutes searching for and typing their password with a stupid on-screen keyboard every time we switch users.
Washington D.C. did it a couple of decades ago, and they haven't reversed that decision, so I guess at the very least, it wasn't enough of a disaster to bother fixing.
We already get fewer than 80k illegal immigrants successfully passing across 1,954 miles of border each year. So in each mile of border, about one person goes across every week or two. If you really call that a flood, then I think we've just found the low-information voter.
And if you think that they benefit the Democrats in any meaningful way, you're even more low-information. At that rate, illegal immigrants increase the population of our country by only about two and a half hundredths of one percent per year, and the population growth rate caused by the difference between births and deaths in the United States is about 28x that much (.7 percent), which means even if every immigrant voted Democrat, it would take hundreds (and maybe even thousands) of years for that level of immigration to make a 1% difference in the balance of votes between parties. But Hispanics tend to vote on a 60-40 split, which means it would likely take millions of years.
I think the Democrats need to cast the Republicans' motives into sharp relief.
Propose a bill that gives $50B to fully fund construction of the wall, but conditioned upon full amnesty for all immigrants currently in the country illegally, including amnesty for all crimes that either would not have been crimes or would not have been necessary had they been admitted to the country legally (lying on government forms, using someone else's SSN, etc.).
If the Republicans really are doing this because of security, then this is a no-brainer. They get what they want, and the Democrats get what they want. It's a simple trade.
If the Republicans really just want the wall because they're trying to get/keep Hispanics out, then they will get all huffy about it and call it a cheap political stunt, and then we'll all know for sure that they don't deserve our votes. Start running attack ads against every Republicans who voted against it within a week after the vote, and in the next election, run conservative Latino/Latina Democrats against each one. Then sit back and watch the party burn (metaphorically).
And they're right. To be blunt, the last thing we need is more scientists who don't understand anything but science. Science tells you how to build the bomb, but philosophy tells you whether you should. Science tells you what chemicals are needed to treat a disease, but bioethics tells you why some folks might elect to refuse treatment at some point. Science tells you how to build a car that is safe, but psychology tells you how to build a car that also feels safe. Science tells you how to build an impenetrable jail cell, but music tells you how to make prisoners less likely to cause problems while they're in there, and social justice and criminal justice tell you how to build support systems that make them less likely to come back once they are released.
We don't need a world of people who know only a single specialty. That's how we get politicians that see only their point of view and can't even comprehend the other side, much less find common ground. That's how we get technology that technically works, but in practice is hard to use. That's how we get a society of for-profit prisons instead of a society that has a low rate of incarceration. That's how we get a society where people blame immigrants for their own failings, and try to build walls instead of building up our neighbors.
This is not to say that everybody should be forced to take a course in any *particular* liberal arts subject, of course. Everyone should have the right to choose from among various approaches for broadening his or her education. Forcing everyone to take a single specific class outside their field (e.g. UCSC's mandatory "core class") is a seriously flawed approach to education that runs a high risk of becoming a mechanism of indoctrination rather than education, IMO.
But the general principle of forcing students to take a percentage of courses outside their major in key areas of study (English, math, hard science, social science, communications, music/art/dance/theater, etc.) is very valuable to society as a whole. And who knows — you just might find out that there are other things that you enjoy besides physics, and if you're really lucky, you might even find that there are subjects where both fields overlap.
For example, one of the more fascinating cross-disciplinary subjects, IMO, is the physics of music — how a closed pipe exhibits only odd harmonics while an open pipe expresses all harmonics, how standing waves affect the way a room sounds, how reflections cause hot spots where certain frequencies are amplified or attenuated, how the curve of the bell on brass instruments affects intonation (along with the shape of the backbore on the mouthpiece, IIRC), and so on.
It's almost impossible now though. A year's tuition costs more than one year's pay, even with scholarships paying 80% of the way, like I had; you're not going to be able to get a job as a high school grad that pays for University now.
There are still state universities in smaller states where you could live and work for a couple of years to get residency, then start college and (barely) scrape by. But you're right that it isn't nearly as easy as it used to be.
For example, my undergrad uni costs about $9,400 in tuition per year. That's less than a year of minimum wage even after taxes. Of course, you have to deal with books, food, and housing, so getting by on minimum wage would pretty much require finding several other people willing to split the rent on a small apartment off campus. But it should be (just barely) possible to work your way through school there without scholarships.
Slashdot Mirror
We have a similar kind of localized traffic jam in the rural south (U.S.) caused by combines.
That said, if you can't get around it, does it really matter whether the backup was caused by one vehicle or actual congestion? :-)
And if only a small number of people take the trip, those numbers probably have a wide standard deviation, because some people drive like Mad Max and some drive like student drivers. And without enough people, you also can't tell whether the problem is a scared driver or an actual traffic backup.
Of course, a scared driver can create an actual traffic backup at any time, depending on how easy it is to pass, which compounds the problem.
This. Asking why people don't buy cell phones with removable batteries is like asking why iPhone users aren't buying phones with a headphone jack. The answer, of course, is that Apple no longer sells one.
To truly measure whether users care about a feature, you would have to have two nearly identical models whose only differences are that feature and any unavoidable side effects thereof. For example, you might have a model that has a removable battery at a slightly higher price and with a slightly thicker case. Without a proper control, you're comparing apples and oranges.
That seems like quite A Modest Proposal.
You're assuming the memory is long-term. If it is short-term, it could be that the plant, when actively dying, secreted something that stuck to the "murderer", and that the other plants could detect that scent whenever the person walked in.
I don't. There's a reason that headphones with quarter-inch plugs are essentially no longer made. It turns out that it is better to put an 1/8" plug in the headphones and use an adapter. That way, when (not if) you forget that they are on your head and rip them out of the gear, you lose a $1.50 adapter instead of the input jack on your equipment. :-)
We want universal headphones that work not just with cell phones and computers, but professional audio equipment, older audio equipment...
USB-C does not prevent that. There is no reason USB-C headphones cannot be the universal interface you desire.
Actually, USB-C does prevent that. Inherently.
Every time you convert sound from the analog domain to the digital domain and vice versa, you add latency. If your professional audio hardware has an analog output and you add an ADC to then retransmit the data to a USB-based pair of headphones, you're almost guaranteed to be adding enough latency to significantly affect usability for recording purposes, where single-digit milliseconds matter.
And if your professional audio hardware somehow manages to operate in the digital domain, it is still problematic, because USB headphones have their own clock, and there's no good way to reliably synchronize the clocks of USB-based DACs with whatever ADC hardware is used inside the rest of your digital audio gear. This means that they will invariably drift, causing audio dropouts and glitches that are completely unavoidable even if you manage to keep the latency low enough to not be noticeable.
USB headphones are fine for consumer audio, because it has very, very loose synchronization requirements. The entire notion of using them for professional audio, where the synchronization requirements are much more strict, however, is pure comedy. What you're proposing is simply infeasible. The closest you could get would be doing some magic like negotiate the use of an entirely different wire protocol (e.g. S/PDIF or ADAT) across a USB-C cable similar to the way Thunderbolt 3 works, and then stream raw digital audio data to a self-synchronizing DAC setup on the other end. But that would not be USB-C in any meaningful way, any more than USB-C's "audio accessory mode" (where the digital pins become analog audio pins) is USB-C.
Bluetooth latency is nowhere near adequate for professional audio (the context for this thread). The minimum latency of Bluetooth audio is on the order of 40 milliseconds, which is about an order of magnitude higher than acceptable for monitoring while recording. And that's on top of the conversion latency on the way in.
When recording, you have to blend in some of the sound from the mic in along with the existing tracks. High latency seriously messes with pitch perception for singers and wind instruments (among other things). As such, it is strongly recommended that engineers keep round-trip latency in the single digits. You can easily perceive 30 ms latency even when tracking things like drums — enough to through off your timing noticeably. I can't even imagine trying to track with 40 ms round trip latency or more. I've tried to track with high-latency setups like that. It did not go well.
Could USB audio replace analog audio? Ostensibly, but in practice, the synchronization requirements between the hardware used for input and output make it infeasible. USB simply has no way of carrying the timing information necessary to keep the ADC and DAC clocks in sync without drift, and drift invariably translates to blown recordings.
Analog is really the only feasible way to handle headphone monitoring, other than perhaps sending raw digital data to a self-synchronizing DAC (e.g. ADAT protocol or S/PDIF). Anybody trying to convince you otherwise is likely trying to sell you snake oil.
Not moving from a flimsy, failure-prone medium with poor fidelity and linear access to a robust medium with higher fidelity and random access seems kind of silly.
But not moving from something that works reliably and has good fidelity to something that requires futzing with the phone and the device almost weekly because they aren't talking to each other and has much worse fidelity seems like a much more reasonable point of pride.
Bluetooth audio sucks, at least on iOS. And I don't just mean a little. Bluetooth works moderately well for keyboards and mice. It is absolutely the worst possible way to connect a telephone to a sound system. I've never seen anything so unreliable in my life. The sound quality is just a mild annoyance compared with having to reboot my car and my phone every couple of weeks just to get them to talk to one another again. And it isn't the car. I've had this problem with every Bluetooth system I've ever tried, from at least three or four different manufacturers (some automotive, some not).
So here we are, almost three years after Apple removed the headphone jack, and still the apologists keep telling us that Bluetooth is going to be so much better than wired headphones when they get all the bugs worked out. At the rate things are going, I fully expect Tesla to turn on their full self-driving feature long before Bluetooth audio quality and reliability matches that of wired headphones. Apple was wrong then, and there's still no sign of them becoming significantly less wrong.
Normal people don't recycle trash bags. What happens in a recycling center if someone tries to do so is moot.
We said that about the plastic bag ban. Then, they passed it. Now, we have to buy trash bags for my house that use 10x as much plastic, use 10x as much fuel to deliver them to the store, and are basically worse for the environment in almost every other measurable way. And yet still, there's tons of trash blowing around our streets, because what the legislators didn't do is pass a law fining the garbage truck companies for overuse of automation in ways that result in trash littering the streets behind them.
So no, we should not assume that any idea, no matter how bonkers, is beyond the level of bats**t-craziness that the California legislature is capable of exhibiting. We should always assume that any idea proposed by a politician, no matter how absurd, is likely to pass, and use every ounce of our strength to stomp the bad ideas squarely into the ground.
It's not a terminology problem. It's a complete lack of understanding of what a Tesla can and can't do.
Yes, Tesla Autopilot can be used on city streets. But what you see here is not a street. It is a parking lot driveway. It is absolutely impossible to engage Autopilot on a road that looks like this. Autopilot requires a road to have lines (solid or dotted) on both sides of the lane, though occasionally you can get away with a sufficiently high-contrast curb.
On a road with no lines, you cannot engage any autonomy other than basic traffic-aware cruise control (with no automatic steering whatsoever). If somehow you managed to trick Autopilot into driving on this road anyway, it would have treated the driveway as a single (unusually wide) lane, so the car would have gone right down the middle of the driveway, not down one side.
So basically, unless they're claiming that Tesla brought a car with alpha firmware and ran it on a public street as a publicity stunt (which would probably be illegal unless they somehow received special approval to beta test their tech somewhere other than California), you can safely assume that a human was driving.
Also, from some angles, you can clearly see the rope.
The question is not whether this is fake; it clearly is. The question is why the heck the press were so gullible that they believed something that literally ANY Tesla driver could have told them was fake within the first three seconds without even having to slow down playback.
This is fake news.
No, we understand it quite well. The problem is that they came up with it in an era that was very different from our own. Back then:
Obviously, things are very different today.
Additionally, the disproportionate nature of the electoral college was not as extreme back then, because the population differences were not as extreme. In 1787, the two largest states (Pennsylvania and Virginia) had 10x the population of the smallest (Delaware). Pennsylvania had 3 electors, and Virginia had 12. Proportionally, this meant Delaware had about 2.4x the voting power of Pennsylvania.
Right now, the most populous state (California) is more than 68x the population (Wyoming). Because Wyoming has such a low population, the two electors resulting from Wyoming's senate seats massively skew their power relative to most of the other states, and because the number of representatives is capped too low, all of the more populous states are currently massively underrepresented in both the House and the Electoral College. As a result, one voter in Wyoming is equivalent to almost four voters in California for Electoral College purposes, and equivalent to almost 1.3 voters even in the House.
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, completely nuts. The skew has become unmanageably large because the low-population states are simply too much smaller than the high-population states. The larger that skew becomes, the less the electoral college vote resembles the popular vote, and the more disillusioned people become with the whole process.
It really is time to ditch the electoral college. It has thoroughly outlived its usefulness, and only serves to further preclude any real possibility of a third-party candidate ever winning the office. But if we're not going to do that, we should at least increase the size of the House of Representatives until we are within +/-1% of proportionate representation to at least bring that skew slightly closer to sanity.
Actually, that's exactly what it means. You've never seen Amazon incorrectly link two unrelated products and have them share reviews? Then you haven't been on Amazon very long. :-D
But in all seriousness, even if Amazon does this, you can always return it, and as the reason, specify that it was not the product you ordered, and they'll pay for the shipping and everything, so this is mostly a non-issue.
I think that may be the best reason I've ever heard for "losing" your official cell phone.
You: Whoops. Sorry, I didn't get your voice mail. My phone went crazy in Paris.
Boss: Crazy?
You: In Seine.
The longer the government shutdown lasts, the more this sounds like slavery. I mean not quite, because ostensibly air traffic controllers could quit and become baristas at Starbucks or whatever (assuming the government does not compel them to not do so), but pretty close.
Particularly appalling is the fact that during the shutdown, all vacations are cancelled, and anyone on vacation is required to immediately terminate that vacation and return to work (because after all, otherwise everyone essential would take vacations), creating pretty significant hardship, particularly given that it happened during the Christmas holiday. I'm pretty sure if I worked for the federal government, I'd have said, "Screw you. I quit," and I'm not even a millennial. I can't imagine how they didn't have an absolute exodus.
Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. I'm pretty sure everybody understood what I meant.
Similar problem. When my parents visit me, they use their Netflix account on my TV so that I can listen to streaming on my long drive without hitting my one-screen limit. This means at least one TV is signed in to their account. Switching accounts is a pain in the backside, so I just leave it that way. It would be far easier if a profile could be shared between their account and mine so when they choose their profile, it counts against their screen limit without spending ten minutes searching for and typing their password with a stupid on-screen keyboard every time we switch users.
Washington D.C. did it a couple of decades ago, and they haven't reversed that decision, so I guess at the very least, it wasn't enough of a disaster to bother fixing.
We already get fewer than 80k illegal immigrants successfully passing across 1,954 miles of border each year. So in each mile of border, about one person goes across every week or two. If you really call that a flood, then I think we've just found the low-information voter.
And if you think that they benefit the Democrats in any meaningful way, you're even more low-information. At that rate, illegal immigrants increase the population of our country by only about two and a half hundredths of one percent per year, and the population growth rate caused by the difference between births and deaths in the United States is about 28x that much (.7 percent), which means even if every immigrant voted Democrat, it would take hundreds (and maybe even thousands) of years for that level of immigration to make a 1% difference in the balance of votes between parties. But Hispanics tend to vote on a 60-40 split, which means it would likely take millions of years.
I think the Democrats need to cast the Republicans' motives into sharp relief.
Propose a bill that gives $50B to fully fund construction of the wall, but conditioned upon full amnesty for all immigrants currently in the country illegally, including amnesty for all crimes that either would not have been crimes or would not have been necessary had they been admitted to the country legally (lying on government forms, using someone else's SSN, etc.).
If the Republicans really are doing this because of security, then this is a no-brainer. They get what they want, and the Democrats get what they want. It's a simple trade.
If the Republicans really just want the wall because they're trying to get/keep Hispanics out, then they will get all huffy about it and call it a cheap political stunt, and then we'll all know for sure that they don't deserve our votes. Start running attack ads against every Republicans who voted against it within a week after the vote, and in the next election, run conservative Latino/Latina Democrats against each one. Then sit back and watch the party burn (metaphorically).
Yeah, this sounds like a great idea. We can use it to build a wall around Washington, D.C. I'm pretty sure Mexico will gladly pay for it.
And they're right. To be blunt, the last thing we need is more scientists who don't understand anything but science. Science tells you how to build the bomb, but philosophy tells you whether you should. Science tells you what chemicals are needed to treat a disease, but bioethics tells you why some folks might elect to refuse treatment at some point. Science tells you how to build a car that is safe, but psychology tells you how to build a car that also feels safe. Science tells you how to build an impenetrable jail cell, but music tells you how to make prisoners less likely to cause problems while they're in there, and social justice and criminal justice tell you how to build support systems that make them less likely to come back once they are released.
We don't need a world of people who know only a single specialty. That's how we get politicians that see only their point of view and can't even comprehend the other side, much less find common ground. That's how we get technology that technically works, but in practice is hard to use. That's how we get a society of for-profit prisons instead of a society that has a low rate of incarceration. That's how we get a society where people blame immigrants for their own failings, and try to build walls instead of building up our neighbors.
This is not to say that everybody should be forced to take a course in any *particular* liberal arts subject, of course. Everyone should have the right to choose from among various approaches for broadening his or her education. Forcing everyone to take a single specific class outside their field (e.g. UCSC's mandatory "core class") is a seriously flawed approach to education that runs a high risk of becoming a mechanism of indoctrination rather than education, IMO.
But the general principle of forcing students to take a percentage of courses outside their major in key areas of study (English, math, hard science, social science, communications, music/art/dance/theater, etc.) is very valuable to society as a whole. And who knows — you just might find out that there are other things that you enjoy besides physics, and if you're really lucky, you might even find that there are subjects where both fields overlap.
For example, one of the more fascinating cross-disciplinary subjects, IMO, is the physics of music — how a closed pipe exhibits only odd harmonics while an open pipe expresses all harmonics, how standing waves affect the way a room sounds, how reflections cause hot spots where certain frequencies are amplified or attenuated, how the curve of the bell on brass instruments affects intonation (along with the shape of the backbore on the mouthpiece, IIRC), and so on.
You get the idea.
There are still state universities in smaller states where you could live and work for a couple of years to get residency, then start college and (barely) scrape by. But you're right that it isn't nearly as easy as it used to be.
For example, my undergrad uni costs about $9,400 in tuition per year. That's less than a year of minimum wage even after taxes. Of course, you have to deal with books, food, and housing, so getting by on minimum wage would pretty much require finding several other people willing to split the rent on a small apartment off campus. But it should be (just barely) possible to work your way through school there without scholarships.
Sporange. What kind of microbiology class did you take that didn't cover this?