"people mostly learn from their own mistakes. But they rarely learn from the mistakes of others. People collectively make the same mistakes over and over again," like, trusting AI.
When there are legitimate reasons that you shouldn't have to pay the ticket, in my experience it requires no more than a simple presentation of those reasons to city hall. where the ticket would be paid, and the penalty is always dropped entirely.
The only time I have ever seen people have to pay for parking tickets is when they actually deserved them and reasonably could have known better, but either forgetfulness or simple laziness led to the situation where they ended up getting one.
I got a parking ticket in West Palm Beach at 9:45pm on a Friday night. The parking meter was literally inside of a bush. I didn't even think to look for one because what small city makes anyone pay for parking on a Friday at that hour downtown? Could I have fought the ticket and won? Probably. But it was a $30 ticket and the cost of going out of my way (I do not live anywhere near West Palm Beach) would have far exceeded the fine. My resolution? Pay the parking ticket and never visit that piece of shit city ever again.
Not to mention the fact that the purpose of the bot is to help determine whether or not the parking ticket is valid. Have you ever parked a car in NYC? You can have three parking signs with different days and hours specified that basically make parking illegal 24/7 in that space. Why don't they just put a sign that says "No Parking at Any Time"? Because that's too straight forward and doesn't enhance parking ticket revenue. Two second on Google found this prime example
and, the defective meters; we have a lot of streets here where it's max one hour parking until 5 pm, then unlimited parking but you still have to pay. the thing is, if you arrive there at 5 or shortly thereafter, the meter doesn't always know what time it is so you feed a bunch of cash or a credit card to it, and it pops up an hour of time, though you've paid for two or three. and of course, the meters that just don't work right, so you feed them for an hour and come back 55 min later and the meter is expired and there's a ticket on your car which was written half an hour after you left it. the folks who frequent certain streets (me for instance) eventually learn what meters on the street do that kind of thing and avoid them, which means that the stranger who looks for a parking space ends up with a higher probability of getting sucked in. needless to say calling in a complaint about the meter number doesn't do anything.
What is the deal with every startup or tech company or whatever trying to take the moral high ground on whatever they happen to have found some marketable niche for? "...The most vulnerable people in society"? Give me a fucking break.
Back at you. It is as they say. Our car was towed in San Francisco a couple of years ago, and it was $500 to get it out. Did you get that? $500. Imagine someone working for $18/hour (sarcasm obvious), and needing that car to get to work. Hell, the car might not be WORTH more than $500. There was a couple crying at the pound in that exact situation. That was one of the most depressing and infuriating moments of my life.
once again decades ago, the local paper ran an expose of the local towing scheme; the city had a contract with one tow company who would haul the car to a yard way the hell out of town in a shady area, and demanded cash only to release the vehicle. no atm anywhere near, of course. naturally a couple of years later, another expose of the corrupt deals the tow company was making with a lot of cops, with kickbacks, people being towed while legally parked, etc. etc. etc.
Sorry to ruin your tirade but not all parking tickets are because somebody broke a traffic law. I've gotten one in my life. I parked in the spot where a cop normally parked when he was going to visit the woman he was having an affair with. I parked my legal vehicle on a street which street parking was permitted. My crime was I made him park across the street. It was in front of my own house for christ sake. Still had to go fight it all because I dared to slightly inconvenience a cop.
a few decades back i got a notice of unpaid parking ticket in the mail with the extra $$$ charge. not only did I not remember getting one, but at that point in my life i didn't drive much at all, biked everywhere so i was extra skeptical rather than assuming i had missed seeing it. tried to contest it, they demanded I provide them the details of the ticket which i was claiming i had never received. I went to city hall to get a copy of the missing ticket. clerk pointed to a huge literal pile of tickets in the middle of the floor and told me "it's in there, somewhere, if you want to look for it". being not as cynical then, i actually wrote to my alderman with the whole thing, and what do you know, he got them to provide me a copy of the ticket, which had my license plate number, but was at a street i had never been on, at a date and time when i knew i had been at work (to which i would have biked). replied with this info, CCing the alderman, received a reply asking if my car was a green Pontiac. Told them it wasn't, they promised to get back to me, they never did but when i inquired, the unpaid parking ticket charge (and original ticket) had been removed from my record.
and that's why i'm against the death penalty
What is the deal with this dichotomy between "the evil government" and you or me? Do you have a better method for wrangling the cats of many competing viewpoints in an ordered society? And yes, using technology to gain the upper hand in civil matters can be a bad thing. If you have traffic fines to deter people from driving in a way that is inconvenient or dangerous for others, and then a few technologically savvy people figure out how to avoid those fines, all you are going to create is a group of people who are undeterred by traffic fines and drive like maniacs. Ideally there would be a process for appealing unjustified citations (which there is), but the solution is not just to circumvent the whole system unless you think the laws are fine for everyone except you.
but but but... sometimes my side loses in an election, and this is clearly tyranny and Shall Not Stand.
Then you misread the Brexit. You should read this and the other shocking conservative counter-movements as left-leaning political organizations needing to pay more attention to the consequences of their policies. A lot of people are feeling left out and you are completely ignoring their complaints while undermining their basic humanity further with your rhetoric. Your continued head-in-the sand approach that there can be no problem for anyone through the liberal approach will only continue to give conservative politicians the opportunity to do terrible things with the dissatisfaction the center is feeling.
tell me again what part of "the left" views nationalism as the solution to anything, and sees the world in terms of "workers in my country" vs "workers in other countries", please.
He's already admitted using drugs. And I hazard to say, there are still things he hasn't admitted to: like pre-storing red blood cells; and bribery.
A cautious writer would be hesitant declaring facts in caps. It's very possible Lance failed a test but managed to get the official result of the test declared as negative.
armstrong had a small nuclear power plant replace his removed testicle.
my job sets up infrared imaging to see if you are drinking coffee, by the extra heat radiated from your abdomen, and then you are disqualified for using perforance enhancing drugs
Why not make them display what they use? That way we'd at least get to see what stuff works.
At what point would they do this, exactly? And what would keep them from swapping out the bike before/after?
I get a feeling that a lot of the people commenting on this article have never actually watched professional cycling. They all say "the bike" like there's only one bicycle in use here; in fact, multiple types of bikes are used, as well as multiple instances of each bike. Watch the support cars; you'll see spare wheels and even entire spare bikes on some of them. So playing a shell game whereby you swap an inspected bike out with one that hasn't been checked...and then, before the finish line, swap them back again...would be relatively simple.
i remember a cheating scheme that appeared in the 80s, i think; spectators would hand the competitors water bottles, as usual, and competitors would toss the bottle away when it was empty, as usual, except that at the top of a hill the spectator would hand the competitor a water bottle filled with lead which he would toss away at the bottom.....
Needless to say, all that Star Trek crap about time travel through wormholes is just that, crap.
The entire concept of wormholes comes from gut feeling that things should be symmetric together with misusing the singularity model of black holes.
By using the singularity model all the way and not just outside of the event horizon a couple of mathematicians figured that since black holes were a singularity in one direction there should also be white holes that emit matter.
The problem with white holes is that the matter had to come from somewhere and if you smoke just the right amount of pot it makes sense that the matter would come from the black holes.
Thus the wormhole theory was born.
Adding time travel to the theory doesn't really make it worse, at least not by much.
if you smoke more, you start to wonder if maybe actual worms have time travel built into their actual wormholes and we have no way of knowing. in fact, maybe there is only one worm and it just travels back and forth through time giving the illusion of many worms.
Needless to say, all that Star Trek crap about time travel through wormholes is just that, crap.
The entire concept of wormholes comes from gut feeling that things should be symmetric together with misusing the singularity model of black holes.
By using the singularity model all the way and not just outside of the event horizon a couple of mathematicians figured that since black holes were a singularity in one direction there should also be white holes that emit matter.
The problem with white holes is that the matter had to come from somewhere and if you smoke just the right amount of pot it makes sense that the matter would come from the black holes.
Thus the wormhole theory was born.
Adding time travel to the theory doesn't really make it worse, at least not by much.
black holes are the recycling bins of the universe. when matter comes out of white holes, it's all festooned with "Environmentally Green" stickers and "manufactured entirely from post-universe recycled material". (just kidding, if there's any doubt)
Somebody might be able to write an interesting sci-fi story about that. Sort of along the vein of Contact where the instructions for a ship are encoded into PI.
but Pi being infinitely long, it would contain not only an infinite number of copies of the instructions, it would contain an infinite number of copies of every wrong set of instructions of every type.
forget about expansion or relativity or anything like that
you suddenly pop into existence in the middle of a foggy field
your KNOWN universe is everything within a certain distance of you; beyond that, it's lost in the fog, and wherever the boundaries of the field may be, if there are any at all, they're lost in the distant fog.
the part of the field that you know of, that you have any experience of, appears to be centered on you, because the ability to know and experience it is a function of its distance from you.
if the TOTAL universe is finite, we don't know it, and we have no idea where its boundaries are. but the KNOWN universe, the boundaries of everything we have any information about, are a function of the distance of things from us, and consequently we find ourselves always at the center of that.
That's not true at all. If it were, travel through space would be impossible. You can't postulate that the universe started at a single point in space (or single point of space) and then wave your hands about and say "expansion" to come to the conclusion that all reference frames place the observer at the center of space.
Spacetime is a physical construct and if it's infinite there is no big bang, no expansion, etc., and it can't be generated as we traverse it.
If it's finite, it can be bounded. If it's generated as we traverse it, then at any given point in time it is finite and it can be defined and bounded. It will not change faster than we can traverse it (or walking down to the store would be impossible).
It is absolutely possible for an observer to take a step back and see a bigger picture, though not the complete picture, and approximate a center based on mass distribution or something similar. Of course everything will be bound by our light cone. But an observer being at the center of their own reference frame does not prevent the observer from analyzing other reference frames.
it can be finite but unbounded. imagine a 2D universe on the outside of a sphere, for instance. and the center of that universe, is actually outside the universe.
The second law of thermodynamics forbids travelling backwards in time, as this would decrease the entropy of the universe the traveller observes.
If someone can circumvent the first or second law of thermodynamics, they can call themselves a deity for all intents and purposes.
but of course you can decrease entropy locally if you increase it elsewhere more to compensate; this is the principle behind life, for instance. so we just need a big entropy dump.
Is it that ALL the nuclei in the universe point in the same direction, and never move? I don't think so, so why should they identify a privileged time direction?
no, the deal is that each nucleus points in a specific direction, and that's new and interesting. up till now the theory holds that nuclei are symmetrical. they shouldn't have a pointy end and a blunt end.
A few years from now someone will "discover" something that disproves the limitaion of the pear shaped nuclei. The one thing about science, it's never certain, and what we thing is fact today, becomes fiction tomorrow. " Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow. " K, Men in Black.
and some pundit on Fox News will interview Bill Nye and ask him doesn't this pear shaped nucleus thing disprove AGW.
Time only "goes from" the past to the future because we define those terms by the way that time "goes", and time "goes" the way it does, from less-entropic to more-entropic states, because the process of memory formation, like all processes, necessitates an increase in entropy. Time isn't actually "going" anywhere, there are just different possible states of the universe, and the ones we we remember (or are otherwise recorded for us to gather information from) are necessarily more entropic, and we call the states we already remember (or otherwise has record of) "past" and the opposite direction in the configuration space "future".
What the hell could pear-shaped nuclei possible have to do with any of that?
yes and no; given that we don't believe in the deterministic newtonian billiard ball universe any more, there is a random component from our POV in the future that is not in the past. i don''t think we know at this point whether that is real or just our future-blindness.
of course, this could all be a reflection of the many worlds type of theories, in that all those random possibilities all do exist in the future and all the random possibilities also exist in the past, and the only variable is which path our consciousness travels along them...
Slashdot Mirror
"people mostly learn from their own mistakes. But they rarely learn from the mistakes of others. People collectively make the same mistakes over and over again,"
like, trusting AI.
When there are legitimate reasons that you shouldn't have to pay the ticket, in my experience it requires no more than a simple presentation of those reasons to city hall. where the ticket would be paid, and the penalty is always dropped entirely.
The only time I have ever seen people have to pay for parking tickets is when they actually deserved them and reasonably could have known better, but either forgetfulness or simple laziness led to the situation where they ended up getting one.
I got a parking ticket in West Palm Beach at 9:45pm on a Friday night. The parking meter was literally inside of a bush. I didn't even think to look for one because what small city makes anyone pay for parking on a Friday at that hour downtown? Could I have fought the ticket and won? Probably. But it was a $30 ticket and the cost of going out of my way (I do not live anywhere near West Palm Beach) would have far exceeded the fine. My resolution? Pay the parking ticket and never visit that piece of shit city ever again.
Not to mention the fact that the purpose of the bot is to help determine whether or not the parking ticket is valid. Have you ever parked a car in NYC? You can have three parking signs with different days and hours specified that basically make parking illegal 24/7 in that space. Why don't they just put a sign that says "No Parking at Any Time"? Because that's too straight forward and doesn't enhance parking ticket revenue. Two second on Google found this prime example
and, the defective meters; we have a lot of streets here where it's max one hour parking until 5 pm, then unlimited parking but you still have to pay. the thing is, if you arrive there at 5 or shortly thereafter, the meter doesn't always know what time it is so you feed a bunch of cash or a credit card to it, and it pops up an hour of time, though you've paid for two or three.
and of course, the meters that just don't work right, so you feed them for an hour and come back 55 min later and the meter is expired and there's a ticket on your car which was written half an hour after you left it.
the folks who frequent certain streets (me for instance) eventually learn what meters on the street do that kind of thing and avoid them, which means that the stranger who looks for a parking space ends up with a higher probability of getting sucked in.
needless to say calling in a complaint about the meter number doesn't do anything.
What is the deal with every startup or tech company or whatever trying to take the moral high ground on whatever they happen to have found some marketable niche for? "...The most vulnerable people in society"? Give me a fucking break.
Back at you. It is as they say. Our car was towed in San Francisco a couple of years ago, and it was $500 to get it out. Did you get that? $500. Imagine someone working for $18/hour (sarcasm obvious), and needing that car to get to work. Hell, the car might not be WORTH more than $500. There was a couple crying at the pound in that exact situation. That was one of the most depressing and infuriating moments of my life.
once again decades ago, the local paper ran an expose of the local towing scheme; the city had a contract with one tow company who would haul the car to a yard way the hell out of town in a shady area, and demanded cash only to release the vehicle. no atm anywhere near, of course.
naturally a couple of years later, another expose of the corrupt deals the tow company was making with a lot of cops, with kickbacks, people being towed while legally parked, etc. etc. etc.
What a disgusting city. Great reasons to never want to ever visit nor do business with or in that multi-storey rancid, corrupt dumpster.
percentage-wise, it's probably better than most smaller places. it's just the totality that gets a person down.
The woman across the road was his mother.
the cop was his mother.
Sorry to ruin your tirade but not all parking tickets are because somebody broke a traffic law. I've gotten one in my life. I parked in the spot where a cop normally parked when he was going to visit the woman he was having an affair with. I parked my legal vehicle on a street which street parking was permitted. My crime was I made him park across the street. It was in front of my own house for christ sake. Still had to go fight it all because I dared to slightly inconvenience a cop.
a few decades back i got a notice of unpaid parking ticket in the mail with the extra $$$ charge. not only did I not remember getting one, but at that point in my life i didn't drive much at all, biked everywhere so i was extra skeptical rather than assuming i had missed seeing it.
tried to contest it, they demanded I provide them the details of the ticket which i was claiming i had never received.
I went to city hall to get a copy of the missing ticket. clerk pointed to a huge literal pile of tickets in the middle of the floor and told me "it's in there, somewhere, if you want to look for it".
being not as cynical then, i actually wrote to my alderman with the whole thing, and what do you know, he got them to provide me a copy of the ticket, which had my license plate number, but was at a street i had never been on, at a date and time when i knew i had been at work (to which i would have biked).
replied with this info, CCing the alderman, received a reply asking if my car was a green Pontiac. Told them it wasn't, they promised to get back to me, they never did but when i inquired, the unpaid parking ticket charge (and original ticket) had been removed from my record.
and that's why i'm against the death penalty
What is the deal with this dichotomy between "the evil government" and you or me? Do you have a better method for wrangling the cats of many competing viewpoints in an ordered society? And yes, using technology to gain the upper hand in civil matters can be a bad thing. If you have traffic fines to deter people from driving in a way that is inconvenient or dangerous for others, and then a few technologically savvy people figure out how to avoid those fines, all you are going to create is a group of people who are undeterred by traffic fines and drive like maniacs. Ideally there would be a process for appealing unjustified citations (which there is), but the solution is not just to circumvent the whole system unless you think the laws are fine for everyone except you.
but but but... sometimes my side loses in an election, and this is clearly tyranny and Shall Not Stand.
Then you misread the Brexit. You should read this and the other shocking conservative counter-movements as left-leaning political organizations needing to pay more attention to the consequences of their policies. A lot of people are feeling left out and you are completely ignoring their complaints while undermining their basic humanity further with your rhetoric. Your continued head-in-the sand approach that there can be no problem for anyone through the liberal approach will only continue to give conservative politicians the opportunity to do terrible things with the dissatisfaction the center is feeling.
tell me again what part of "the left" views nationalism as the solution to anything, and sees the world in terms of "workers in my country" vs "workers in other countries", please.
Lance Armstrong has never failed a drug test.
That is a FACT.
He's already admitted using drugs. And I hazard to say, there are still things he hasn't admitted to: like pre-storing red blood cells; and bribery.
A cautious writer would be hesitant declaring facts in caps. It's very possible Lance failed a test but managed to get the official result of the test declared as negative.
armstrong had a small nuclear power plant replace his removed testicle.
How much would you do to get ahead in your job?
my job sets up infrared imaging to see if you are drinking coffee, by the extra heat radiated from your abdomen, and then you are disqualified for using perforance enhancing drugs
this is doping in the same sense that calling an uber to carry you and your bike to the finish line is doping.
Why not make them display what they use? That way we'd at least get to see what stuff works.
At what point would they do this, exactly? And what would keep them from swapping out the bike before/after?
I get a feeling that a lot of the people commenting on this article have never actually watched professional cycling. They all say "the bike" like there's only one bicycle in use here; in fact, multiple types of bikes are used, as well as multiple instances of each bike. Watch the support cars; you'll see spare wheels and even entire spare bikes on some of them. So playing a shell game whereby you swap an inspected bike out with one that hasn't been checked...and then, before the finish line, swap them back again...would be relatively simple.
i remember a cheating scheme that appeared in the 80s, i think; spectators would hand the competitors water bottles, as usual, and competitors would toss the bottle away when it was empty, as usual, except that at the top of a hill the spectator would hand the competitor a water bottle filled with lead which he would toss away at the bottom.....
Needless to say, all that Star Trek crap about time travel through wormholes is just that, crap.
The entire concept of wormholes comes from gut feeling that things should be symmetric together with misusing the singularity model of black holes. By using the singularity model all the way and not just outside of the event horizon a couple of mathematicians figured that since black holes were a singularity in one direction there should also be white holes that emit matter. The problem with white holes is that the matter had to come from somewhere and if you smoke just the right amount of pot it makes sense that the matter would come from the black holes. Thus the wormhole theory was born.
Adding time travel to the theory doesn't really make it worse, at least not by much.
if you smoke more, you start to wonder if maybe actual worms have time travel built into their actual wormholes and we have no way of knowing. in fact, maybe there is only one worm and it just travels back and forth through time giving the illusion of many worms.
Needless to say, all that Star Trek crap about time travel through wormholes is just that, crap.
The entire concept of wormholes comes from gut feeling that things should be symmetric together with misusing the singularity model of black holes. By using the singularity model all the way and not just outside of the event horizon a couple of mathematicians figured that since black holes were a singularity in one direction there should also be white holes that emit matter. The problem with white holes is that the matter had to come from somewhere and if you smoke just the right amount of pot it makes sense that the matter would come from the black holes. Thus the wormhole theory was born.
Adding time travel to the theory doesn't really make it worse, at least not by much.
black holes are the recycling bins of the universe. when matter comes out of white holes, it's all festooned with "Environmentally Green" stickers and "manufactured entirely from post-universe recycled material". (just kidding, if there's any doubt)
Somebody might be able to write an interesting sci-fi story about that. Sort of along the vein of Contact where the instructions for a ship are encoded into PI.
but Pi being infinitely long, it would contain not only an infinite number of copies of the instructions, it would contain an infinite number of copies of every wrong set of instructions of every type.
forget about expansion or relativity or anything like that
you suddenly pop into existence in the middle of a foggy field
your KNOWN universe is everything within a certain distance of you; beyond that, it's lost in the fog, and wherever the boundaries of the field may be, if there are any at all, they're lost in the distant fog.
the part of the field that you know of, that you have any experience of, appears to be centered on you, because the ability to know and experience it is a function of its distance from you.
if the TOTAL universe is finite, we don't know it, and we have no idea where its boundaries are. but the KNOWN universe, the boundaries of everything we have any information about, are a function of the distance of things from us, and consequently we find ourselves always at the center of that.
that happens to you too, eh? damn Jagermeister.
That's not true at all. If it were, travel through space would be impossible. You can't postulate that the universe started at a single point in space (or single point of space) and then wave your hands about and say "expansion" to come to the conclusion that all reference frames place the observer at the center of space.
Spacetime is a physical construct and if it's infinite there is no big bang, no expansion, etc., and it can't be generated as we traverse it. If it's finite, it can be bounded. If it's generated as we traverse it, then at any given point in time it is finite and it can be defined and bounded. It will not change faster than we can traverse it (or walking down to the store would be impossible).
It is absolutely possible for an observer to take a step back and see a bigger picture, though not the complete picture, and approximate a center based on mass distribution or something similar. Of course everything will be bound by our light cone. But an observer being at the center of their own reference frame does not prevent the observer from analyzing other reference frames.
it can be finite but unbounded. imagine a 2D universe on the outside of a sphere, for instance. and the center of that universe, is actually outside the universe.
'Cause that would be weird. Cool, but weird.
then there's this one drunk one pointing the wrong direction at 3 am sunday morning, smashing into all the other ones.
"And that, my lord, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped."
"people all around the globe know that the earth is really flat"
The second law of thermodynamics forbids travelling backwards in time, as this would decrease the entropy of the universe the traveller observes.
If someone can circumvent the first or second law of thermodynamics, they can call themselves a deity for all intents and purposes.
but of course you can decrease entropy locally if you increase it elsewhere more to compensate; this is the principle behind life, for instance. so we just need a big entropy dump.
Is it that ALL the nuclei in the universe point in the same direction, and never move? I don't think so, so why should they identify a privileged time direction?
no, the deal is that each nucleus points in a specific direction, and that's new and interesting. up till now the theory holds that nuclei are symmetrical. they shouldn't have a pointy end and a blunt end.
A few years from now someone will "discover" something that disproves the limitaion of the pear shaped nuclei. The one thing about science, it's never certain, and what we thing is fact today, becomes fiction tomorrow. " Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow. " K, Men in Black.
and some pundit on Fox News will interview Bill Nye and ask him doesn't this pear shaped nucleus thing disprove AGW.
Backward time travel is impossible because it is inevitable that eventually it is used to prevent the discovery of backward time travel.
mod up
Farmers around Chernobyl discover nuclear pears all the time.
Time only "goes from" the past to the future because we define those terms by the way that time "goes", and time "goes" the way it does, from less-entropic to more-entropic states, because the process of memory formation, like all processes, necessitates an increase in entropy. Time isn't actually "going" anywhere, there are just different possible states of the universe, and the ones we we remember (or are otherwise recorded for us to gather information from) are necessarily more entropic, and we call the states we already remember (or otherwise has record of) "past" and the opposite direction in the configuration space "future".
What the hell could pear-shaped nuclei possible have to do with any of that?
yes and no; given that we don't believe in the deterministic newtonian billiard ball universe any more, there is a random component from our POV in the future that is not in the past. i don''t think we know at this point whether that is real or just our future-blindness. of course, this could all be a reflection of the many worlds type of theories, in that all those random possibilities all do exist in the future and all the random possibilities also exist in the past, and the only variable is which path our consciousness travels along them...