I remember in the 60s and 70s when people would roll down their window while driving and throw the trash out onto the road or freeway. I'm not making that up. Not everyone did that, but plenty of people did. So I think we have made a fair amount of progress since then.
The real problem is that you can get 95% of the people (if lucky) to behave responsibly, but that still leaves a lot of people who will readily screw stuff up and not worry about it. That's why we can't have nice things anymore.
A lot of people just drive up to the visitors center, see the trashcans there, and put their trash into them. These are a lot of day trip people, they're not backpackers ready or prepared to hike out their trash. They see a trashcan and their first thought naturally is that those are places to put their trash in. And like many typical Americans (I am one, I know a lot of them and how they think) they are happy as long as they get their trash in the general vicinity of of the can.
Also remember these parks aren't all wilderness areas. The National Mall in Washington DC is a national park, as well as things like the Lincoln Memorial, and so forth.
Because back then it was clear that both sides would come to an agreement, and that any agreement would be signed by the president who didn't want to look like the bad guy. Now we've got a president that has said he's willing to keep the shutdown for years if he doesn't get his way, and a president who's very capricious and who did an about face and rejected his own party's funding plan.
The border wall is not "basic security". We have the basic security already in the form of the border partrol and the long lines of fences we already have. People are not streaming across the border with impunity, and overall illegal immigration is down and at one of the lowest points we've seen. The "caravan" is not illegal immigrants instead it is people who are coming here to find border officials in order to apply for asylum.
The wall is very much "optional security". And it's not the best security value for the dollar.
Ya, Obama should not have said anything, since it is literally impossible to legislate that every single American would keep their doctor forever. The chances of keeping your doctor are about the same before and after Obamacare.
Some conservatives you means, the ultra libertarians whose goal is to effectively dismantle all government. That's not all conservatives though, and most definitely a small minority of voters. Even if the government were to be dismantled, it would be insane to do it suddenly instead of doing this slowly with a transition. Otherwise you get tons of soldiers suddenly jobless with no civilian sector capable of taking them all in; you'd have soldiers stuck overseas as well. The federal highways would fall apart, with fights over who actually owns them since there's no government to decide this. The states would have to set up invididual trade deals with each other while at the same time there would be no federal judiciary to smooth this over (assuming states get to keep governments).
Maybe the analogy is like going without electricity. You can learn over time how to live off the grid. But if there's a sudden nationwide blackout you'd get riots in the street.
If you are going to visit the parks now be a responsible user and pack your trash out.
Oh my gosh, we're talking about Americans here! It ain't gonna happen. People see a trashcan and thank heavens they will occasionally throw the trash there instead of on the ground. But then the trashcan fills up and and they don't know what to do. These are not serious hikers or backpackers, they're weekend tourists who don't see a serious difference between Yosemite and Disneyland.
Third parties don't make headway because elections are a winner-takes-all race. The nature of that system forces things into a mostly two-party system. This is not a new phenomena either, it's been this way since the beginning. The founding fathers didn't want political parties, and possibly were naive in assuming they wouldn't come into being.
You can have many more parties in a more parliamentary system where you get proportional representation. So even if your party is only getting support from 15% of the voters you will still get some measure of representation in the legislature. But 15% of the vote in America won't win anything. Occasionally there will be a bit of a hiccup, like the Reform Party in Minnesota, but they don't last since the wins are often based on personal popularity or as a protest vote.
Our two major parties don't have solid long lasting principles. Our parties are sort of like the coalitions that you see in a parliamentary system only the coalitions are formed before the general elections. As the public changes their outlook then the parties also adapt and change so that there's a roughly even 50/50 balance. If the Republican party splits then it's guaranteed that the Democrats will get the majority in congress, and so the Republicans put up with uncomfortable alliances (social conservatives sitting at the table with fiscal conservatives). And the same happens with the Democrats, they put up with the Green Party types as well as the more left leaning socialist types, because they need to stay competitive and maintain the 50-50 split. And when the people in the moderate middle start to waffle one way or the other then the parties react to move the teeter-totter back in line.
So we do actually have shifting political alliances, only they happen within the parties and not between parties as with a parliamentary system. But to change the status quo, a constitutional change would seem to be necessary. And that's not likely to happen.
I remember when the now disgrace Randy "duke" Cunningham was bitching that the liberals were building a double fence on the border, because he insisted it needed to be a triple fence. That's when I figured out it was just a game about seeing which side was going to accuse the other side of doing things wrong. I thought it was crazy back then, but now it seems sort of sane in comparison.
The Ladykillers is a classic. Also several Hitchcock movies; he was British and began his career making British films. The modern American block buster super-budget films are a new phenomena and not really indicative of good cinema (popularity is not the same thing as quality).
If you want 100% American movies, then Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movies won't count! The best movies out there will be from a mixture of countries.
We already have a wall across most of the easily accessible areas. Most migrants not intending to apply for asylum are being funneled into dangerous areas, like cross through the desert. So even though it's not 100% coverage it means less border that needs to be actively monitored by border agents.
The snag here is that Trump wants a wall (or fence or whatever) because he made a poorly thought out campaign promise. Whereas Congress (both parties) are willing to increase budget for border security which could include things other the wall, such as increase in personnel, drones, etc (virtual wall). So the issue here is not a disagreement about border security, but a disagreement about the particular methods to be used.
The vast majority coming over now, the "caravan" are intentionally turning themselves into border patrol agents in a bid for asylum. The immigrants avoiding this and arriving illegally are balanced out by a similar number of people returning back over the border in the other direction. The wall won't make a tangible difference there.
For smuggling, including drugs, the wall won't do much either. These drugs aren't getting into the country a kilo at a time by being hidden on migrants.
Google screwed up the bus though near its headquarters. Before Google there was a private shuttle used by all companies in the region, and it ran from the Shoreline area to the Caltrain station. Then there was the Microsoft-only shuttle that appeared, and later a Google-only shuttle. So then getting to and from the train station was a problem if you weren't Google. Though maybe in a few years when Google owns all companies in the area it won't matter...
Moore's law isn't about being able to make more transistors. It's about shrinking and speeding up the transistors. So "if" Moore's law ends, you just build bigger processors that have more parallelism. Moore's law is about the physical manufacturing process of integrated circuits, nothing more.
Everything is built on top of quantum particles and effects. Electricity is a quantum effect. So technically you can throw the quantum buzzword at anything and be correct while simultaneously not saying anything of value.
Well, neural network computing does model analog processes. It's only done digitally because it's being done on a digital computer. The clock isn't there because the neural network needs it, but because the program simulating the network uses a clock in it's algorithm and it sits on top of a typical digital computer. Most programming languages are also based around sequential processing (ie, update simulated neuron 1, then update simulated neuron 2, then...).
No, they have not been able to model the human mind because it's too big, the most they've done with neural network processing is very tiny stuff. And the neurons in the brain are analog devices, not digital.
Also the articles linking of superconductivity with quantum computing is just silliness.
You can today though. Some of those industrial and embedded evaluation boards now let you debug them using the same USB you power it up with. No more buying $700 JTAG debuggers and scrounging for a $30 wall wart power adapter.
I want to just get a Cortex-M3 board, if I had the time. I want to program on the metal not just load up Linux to put some stupid scripting language on top.
Try playing around with simulators maybe - you can run a PDP-11 running a 1979 version of Unix on your PC.
Don't forget, it is very instructional to do the porting of Linux yourself. There are other boards running Linux out of the box (kinda boring though), but I'm just suggesting an alternative for people who don't mind doing hard stuff now and then and actually learning something.
I always felt that Arduino's and Raspberry Pis were dumbing down everything. They are not like the old days of home computing where you'd figure out the assembler or how the hardware worked and stuff like that, instead they main difference between those two products and the loads of other similar processor evaluation boards is that the Arduino and Pi are marketed as easy to use for non-programmers.
Now sure, you can dump the Arduino hand-holding framework and program on the bare metal, but at that point why not get a decent board instead?
Yup. The accidents are very often not the fault of the motorcycle driver. Or the bicycle rider. Things on the road that are not autos are often difficult to see for many reasons, and not just because some people are stupid. Blind spots abound in automobiles. Now going further than this and having a bike not be in an expected place like the bike line but instead cutting across multiple lanes of traffic without signaling will just compound everything (get off the damn bike, stop at the light, and put your foot on the ground instead of weaving around while you try to keep your balance).
For example, it was very common for me to experience autos passing my motorcycle within my own lane. That is, instead of getting all the way over into the lane to the left, they'd straddle the line between the lanes so that their car was just a few inches from my knee. And tailgating was so amazingly common, which is highly dangerous because the motorcycle can't safely slow down.
But my solution was to stop using a motorcycle. I didn't go and play the victim card or demand that the city institute new rules. If I ended up in a hospital bed it wouldn't matter at all if it was my fault or not.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember in the 60s and 70s when people would roll down their window while driving and throw the trash out onto the road or freeway. I'm not making that up. Not everyone did that, but plenty of people did. So I think we have made a fair amount of progress since then.
The real problem is that you can get 95% of the people (if lucky) to behave responsibly, but that still leaves a lot of people who will readily screw stuff up and not worry about it. That's why we can't have nice things anymore.
A lot of people just drive up to the visitors center, see the trashcans there, and put their trash into them. These are a lot of day trip people, they're not backpackers ready or prepared to hike out their trash. They see a trashcan and their first thought naturally is that those are places to put their trash in. And like many typical Americans (I am one, I know a lot of them and how they think) they are happy as long as they get their trash in the general vicinity of of the can.
Also remember these parks aren't all wilderness areas. The National Mall in Washington DC is a national park, as well as things like the Lincoln Memorial, and so forth.
Because back then it was clear that both sides would come to an agreement, and that any agreement would be signed by the president who didn't want to look like the bad guy. Now we've got a president that has said he's willing to keep the shutdown for years if he doesn't get his way, and a president who's very capricious and who did an about face and rejected his own party's funding plan.
The border wall is not "basic security". We have the basic security already in the form of the border partrol and the long lines of fences we already have. People are not streaming across the border with impunity, and overall illegal immigration is down and at one of the lowest points we've seen. The "caravan" is not illegal immigrants instead it is people who are coming here to find border officials in order to apply for asylum.
The wall is very much "optional security". And it's not the best security value for the dollar.
Ya, Obama should not have said anything, since it is literally impossible to legislate that every single American would keep their doctor forever. The chances of keeping your doctor are about the same before and after Obamacare.
Some conservatives you means, the ultra libertarians whose goal is to effectively dismantle all government. That's not all conservatives though, and most definitely a small minority of voters. Even if the government were to be dismantled, it would be insane to do it suddenly instead of doing this slowly with a transition. Otherwise you get tons of soldiers suddenly jobless with no civilian sector capable of taking them all in; you'd have soldiers stuck overseas as well. The federal highways would fall apart, with fights over who actually owns them since there's no government to decide this. The states would have to set up invididual trade deals with each other while at the same time there would be no federal judiciary to smooth this over (assuming states get to keep governments).
Maybe the analogy is like going without electricity. You can learn over time how to live off the grid. But if there's a sudden nationwide blackout you'd get riots in the street.
Essential government services that are still staffed: collecting taxes.
Non-essential services that are not staffed: sending refund checks.
If you are going to visit the parks now be a responsible user and pack your trash out.
Oh my gosh, we're talking about Americans here! It ain't gonna happen. People see a trashcan and thank heavens they will occasionally throw the trash there instead of on the ground. But then the trashcan fills up and and they don't know what to do. These are not serious hikers or backpackers, they're weekend tourists who don't see a serious difference between Yosemite and Disneyland.
Third parties don't make headway because elections are a winner-takes-all race. The nature of that system forces things into a mostly two-party system. This is not a new phenomena either, it's been this way since the beginning. The founding fathers didn't want political parties, and possibly were naive in assuming they wouldn't come into being.
You can have many more parties in a more parliamentary system where you get proportional representation. So even if your party is only getting support from 15% of the voters you will still get some measure of representation in the legislature. But 15% of the vote in America won't win anything. Occasionally there will be a bit of a hiccup, like the Reform Party in Minnesota, but they don't last since the wins are often based on personal popularity or as a protest vote.
Our two major parties don't have solid long lasting principles. Our parties are sort of like the coalitions that you see in a parliamentary system only the coalitions are formed before the general elections. As the public changes their outlook then the parties also adapt and change so that there's a roughly even 50/50 balance. If the Republican party splits then it's guaranteed that the Democrats will get the majority in congress, and so the Republicans put up with uncomfortable alliances (social conservatives sitting at the table with fiscal conservatives). And the same happens with the Democrats, they put up with the Green Party types as well as the more left leaning socialist types, because they need to stay competitive and maintain the 50-50 split. And when the people in the moderate middle start to waffle one way or the other then the parties react to move the teeter-totter back in line.
So we do actually have shifting political alliances, only they happen within the parties and not between parties as with a parliamentary system. But to change the status quo, a constitutional change would seem to be necessary. And that's not likely to happen.
Much as I hate Trump, this quote was never meant literally.
Are you sure? This is Trump we're talking about, so it's quite possible that he really meant and believed it.
I remember when the now disgrace Randy "duke" Cunningham was bitching that the liberals were building a double fence on the border, because he insisted it needed to be a triple fence. That's when I figured out it was just a game about seeing which side was going to accuse the other side of doing things wrong. I thought it was crazy back then, but now it seems sort of sane in comparison.
The Ladykillers is a classic. Also several Hitchcock movies; he was British and began his career making British films. The modern American block buster super-budget films are a new phenomena and not really indicative of good cinema (popularity is not the same thing as quality).
If you want 100% American movies, then Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movies won't count! The best movies out there will be from a mixture of countries.
We already have a wall across most of the easily accessible areas. Most migrants not intending to apply for asylum are being funneled into dangerous areas, like cross through the desert. So even though it's not 100% coverage it means less border that needs to be actively monitored by border agents.
The snag here is that Trump wants a wall (or fence or whatever) because he made a poorly thought out campaign promise. Whereas Congress (both parties) are willing to increase budget for border security which could include things other the wall, such as increase in personnel, drones, etc (virtual wall). So the issue here is not a disagreement about border security, but a disagreement about the particular methods to be used.
The vast majority coming over now, the "caravan" are intentionally turning themselves into border patrol agents in a bid for asylum. The immigrants avoiding this and arriving illegally are balanced out by a similar number of people returning back over the border in the other direction. The wall won't make a tangible difference there.
For smuggling, including drugs, the wall won't do much either. These drugs aren't getting into the country a kilo at a time by being hidden on migrants.
Google screwed up the bus though near its headquarters. Before Google there was a private shuttle used by all companies in the region, and it ran from the Shoreline area to the Caltrain station. Then there was the Microsoft-only shuttle that appeared, and later a Google-only shuttle. So then getting to and from the train station was a problem if you weren't Google. Though maybe in a few years when Google owns all companies in the area it won't matter...
That's the slogan used, for those who don't want to have to actually click on the story and supply advertising revenue to a clickbait site.
Moore's law isn't about being able to make more transistors. It's about shrinking and speeding up the transistors. So "if" Moore's law ends, you just build bigger processors that have more parallelism. Moore's law is about the physical manufacturing process of integrated circuits, nothing more.
Everything is built on top of quantum particles and effects. Electricity is a quantum effect. So technically you can throw the quantum buzzword at anything and be correct while simultaneously not saying anything of value.
Well, neural network computing does model analog processes. It's only done digitally because it's being done on a digital computer. The clock isn't there because the neural network needs it, but because the program simulating the network uses a clock in it's algorithm and it sits on top of a typical digital computer. Most programming languages are also based around sequential processing (ie, update simulated neuron 1, then update simulated neuron 2, then...).
No, they have not been able to model the human mind because it's too big, the most they've done with neural network processing is very tiny stuff. And the neurons in the brain are analog devices, not digital.
Also the articles linking of superconductivity with quantum computing is just silliness.
You can today though. Some of those industrial and embedded evaluation boards now let you debug them using the same USB you power it up with. No more buying $700 JTAG debuggers and scrounging for a $30 wall wart power adapter.
I want to just get a Cortex-M3 board, if I had the time. I want to program on the metal not just load up Linux to put some stupid scripting language on top.
Try playing around with simulators maybe - you can run a PDP-11 running a 1979 version of Unix on your PC.
Don't forget, it is very instructional to do the porting of Linux yourself. There are other boards running Linux out of the box (kinda boring though), but I'm just suggesting an alternative for people who don't mind doing hard stuff now and then and actually learning something.
I always felt that Arduino's and Raspberry Pis were dumbing down everything. They are not like the old days of home computing where you'd figure out the assembler or how the hardware worked and stuff like that, instead they main difference between those two products and the loads of other similar processor evaluation boards is that the Arduino and Pi are marketed as easy to use for non-programmers.
Now sure, you can dump the Arduino hand-holding framework and program on the bare metal, but at that point why not get a decent board instead?
Yup. The accidents are very often not the fault of the motorcycle driver. Or the bicycle rider. Things on the road that are not autos are often difficult to see for many reasons, and not just because some people are stupid. Blind spots abound in automobiles. Now going further than this and having a bike not be in an expected place like the bike line but instead cutting across multiple lanes of traffic without signaling will just compound everything (get off the damn bike, stop at the light, and put your foot on the ground instead of weaving around while you try to keep your balance).
For example, it was very common for me to experience autos passing my motorcycle within my own lane. That is, instead of getting all the way over into the lane to the left, they'd straddle the line between the lanes so that their car was just a few inches from my knee. And tailgating was so amazingly common, which is highly dangerous because the motorcycle can't safely slow down.
But my solution was to stop using a motorcycle. I didn't go and play the victim card or demand that the city institute new rules. If I ended up in a hospital bed it wouldn't matter at all if it was my fault or not.