I was very intrigued by reading your response. My 4 year old son is on the spectrum, and we still don't have a great understanding of "how he works". I was always confused about his intense empathy for others, which appeared to go against what I considered to be typical autism. Much of your post mirrored behavior I see in my son. Though I have never been considered autistic (just ADHD), I had often encountered intense panic/stress as a child when being forced to introduce myself to new people my own age. To this day, I still get stressed out and "snappy" if plans change and I thrive on daily routines. My son and I both love "novel situations". I feel like I learned something new today about this complex condition, and will do some more research. Many thanks for your post!
For my son, I think he's just like everyone else, he's trying to make sense of the world. So novel situations are fine because there are no expectations and it allows him to broaden his horizon and learn more about how the world works but changes are bad because once he decides that the world works a certain way, it's very upsetting if they don't work that way. When my son is having an "anxiety attack", the phrase he tends to repeat over and over is "I don't understand, I don't understand" which I believe is exactly how he feels. Somewhat related, autistic kids tend to be obsessed with one thing whether it is a spinning wheel or star wars. Many parents try to suppress those "obsessions" but I've read a few places that many times once they "master" that obsession that that obsession will go away and they will move on to the next obsession to "master". My son (and many geeks) are like this.
Actually I'm a bit surprised that such coops aren't more common on the Internet, like instead of dealing with commercial companies like Google (YouTube) and Spotify you could upload your music/videos to a website that'd offer it to the public with transparent terms and open books. You'd think for the people who actually want to make money and not just get a free service that'd be a better deal, but I guess it's hard to get the momentum going.
Companies like facebook and twitter have the incentive to spend lots of money to get the momentum going as they can profit from all the free content afterwards. Look at the money google has spent on googleplus. I think part of the problem is that the way the internet currently works, facebook, twitter, etc... hold the world hostage once they have the critical mass. This critical mass acts as a moat that prevents people from leaving. Email providers have the same. They give you a "free" email address but you don't actually own it. It is on their domain and they control what you can and cannot do with it. What we really need is a way for people to get email addresses, facebook pages, etc... outside of walled gardens where if I wanted to transfer my social profile from facebook to googleplus that I can transfer it without giving up all my friends and contacts that I have amassed. This is similar to how phone numbers used to work where everytime you switched from one provider to another you lost your phone number. We now have number portability where we can take our number with us. It would be nice if we could somehow take our email address or our friends list with us when we changed providers.
Autistic people are under constant stress. Every single new situation in life is stress. And we're not talking about something the average normal person would consider new, like, say, a new job or having to meet someone important for the first time. ANYTHING that does not fit the ordinary is a moment of stress. Add on top of that any situation you cannot plan for fully in advance. If you want to put an autistic person into full stress mode tell him to "just wing it".
Although I mostly agree, my son and I have inherited a slight variant of autism. My son gets very upset when plans change but at the same time, he's perfectly fine in novel situations. So if there is music instead of PE at school this is very upsetting to him but going on a field trip to a new place he's never been and he absorbs it like a sponge. My son also exhibits extreme empathy and concern for others and is very concerned with things being fair and not hurting people's feelings. Being autistic he doesn't always pick up the social cues to know when he's hurting someone else's feelings but when he notices, it very much bothers him. Same with animals, he might not realize that he's hurting the cat by the way he's holding it but if he realizes someone is hurting an animal (like when I clean fish), it upsets him greatly. I think part of the problem with the autistic umbrella is that many people treat it as a single set of symptoms (afraid of novel situations, no empathy) but from all the autistic people I know, it's very nuanced and can vary greatly from person to person. I think part of this is probably the body and brain taking different routes to compensate for what is missing whether it is unconscious rewiring of the brain or more conscious coping mechanisms.
and as an added benefit everyone will confuse it with rj11
And why does this matter? RJ11 is basically dead. My brother recently didn't even bother to install phone jacks in his new house. Using RJ11 or something that looks similar is fine. RJ45 is still probably better for the data center but having something smaller like RJ11 for the home market in the few cases where wireless is not good enough is probably fine. Personally, I expect wired ethernet to die and be replace with either wireless or ethernet over usb. I have a box full of hubs, switches, and ethernet cables that I don't use anymore. Even my desktop connects via wireless.
One of the biggest advantage of the rj-45 port is the relative ease of making a connection. Having smaller ports means we will need factory built connectors. And need all wires to be presized for all jobs. Making wiring much more difficult.
Besides most small tech that cannot handle the RJ-45 sized ports are built fore wireless networking. Which for most used is fast enough.
I agree that most applications where RJ45 is too big, they just use wireless but you could still have field serviceable wired connections from a smaller connection. As 10 and 100 meg ethernet only use 4 wires, RJ11 (phone) would work just fine. Many RJ45 crimpers also have RJ11 already there and creating a RJ11 to RJ45 adapter would be trivial. In general, creating an adapter/dongle for any port would be trivial. Just like most devices come with a mini to full size usb adapter, it makes sense for something like the raspberry pi to come with a mini-rj45 to rj45 adapter (at least for the near future).
Then why charge for the service at all? If you make the service free, LOTS more people will use it.
You have any proof of this? The price has never even factored into my decision at all and I've never once met a person that didn't ride the bus because of cost. In most places it's already basically free compared to the cost of owning a vehicle. I have several friends that don't own cars and ride their bikes everywhere and even for them, it's not the cost that keeps them off the bus. Likewise for all my friends who own cars. It's primarily convenience and timing that factor into whether someone takes the bus.
Now a taxi is another story. If I could take a taxi everywhere and it was price competitive then I would sell my car tomorrow. Buses are price competitive but unless you live in a place that has buses every 15 minutes they are nowhere near as convenient as owning a car or calling a taxi.
the machine played zillion times and millions of games some of them from skilled humans - I see some disparity here.
Yes, but a machine never forgets and can easily be replicated once it learns a task.
Another question is - all these hundreds of cores needed to best one of best humans at the game.
And the first computer took an entire room and could be beat by a guy with an abacus. Look where it is now.
The end result is as with anything else - we produce a tool to replace our weaknesses - it was a shaped stone back in the cave, it is a 1.5k silicon cores now.
If the machines ever get really intelligent the way we are - will they be modern slaves or will they succeed in freeing themselves.
Luckily current computers are nowhere close to conscience which probably makes them better. Better to keep them as tools than a conscience entity that you have to worry about rights.
From this perspective this result is irrelevant even if it were significant and it is less significant than people think it is.
Not irrelevant at all. There are plenty of tasks that it would be nice to automate. Even something as simple as folding someone's laundry or organizing someone's photo albums is a useful thing that has lots of value to lots of people and more and more of these things become possible with more intelligent AI.
Except Mass Transit is never going to be a money-maker. It may be touted as such, but mass transit is always there as a service to the people. The importance of transporting population, including those in a wheelchair, takes precedence over pure revenue intake.
There is no reason mass transportation can't be a money maker. It will always be cheaper to transport a dozen people on one vehicle than maintaining a dozen different vehicles. Now if you want to run mass transportation as a charity then that's fine but don't expect everyone to take it. On the other hand, if you make the bus system convenient enough that the regular person starts taking it and you charge this regular person 3-4 times what you are currently charging then you have the money to possibly offer special services for the handicap and/or discount fares to the ones that really need it. Basically, stop making buses that cater to the lowest common denominator and instead look at how you can attract the middle class and upper middle class to the bus system. The lower class with no other options are going to take the bus regardless but to get everyone moved over you need to attract the people who currently are driving and to do that it's less about cost and more about convenience and speed.
Many cities already have services like these, which are pricey and inefficient because of the lack of scale. When you're moving only dozens of people every day, instead of thousands, it's not going to be a very useful alternative.
But the handicap service doesn't need to be more expensive. In fact it shouldn't be. It should be subsidized by the regular bus fares. As I said before, it's not the cost that prevents most people from riding public transportation. Most people would gladly pay double or triple the regular bus fare if it was just as fast and convenient as driving. Public transportation needs to stop trying to make buses cheap and instead try to make them convenient first.
It's discrimination no matter how you cut it. You cannot tell a person in a wheelchair that "Sorry, you have to wait 20 minutes for the next bus," while everyone else at the stop can hop on. And all for your convenience. This is classic discrimination.
There are plenty of buildings that have "handicap entrances" and plenty of buildings where the masses can take the fast escalator while handicap and people with strollers have to wait for the much slower elevator which many times has a line. The handicap bus also doesn't necessarily need to be slower. As there are fewer handicap, it could possibly be an on-call system where it comes directly to you and takes you directly to your destination. The point is that if you only build bus routes for the lowest common denominator then it will be much much harder to get widespread adoption. If you eliminate all the stopping and all the zigzagging so that buses are the same speed as cars then alot more people would likely take the bus.
You don't know what to do, really? Are you willing to pay more, to be inconvinced less? It is called discrimination. You discriminate against the handicapped individual, because you can. And, was it their fault they delayed you? Or the mode of transportation that they can afford to use? That delayed you?
It's not discrimination if it's done right. An easy solution is to have a bus for slow passengers whether it is someone in a wheelchair or someone in a stroller. One simple solution which wouldn't technically discriminate and would be in line with what this article is talking about would be for the "fast" bus to not stop. You make it like some trolleys where it slows down at a stop and you need to hop on/off while it's still moving. One of the major deterrents to mass transportation is that it is considerably slower than other forms of transportation. The goal should be to figure out how to get the majority of people from point A to point B in times similar to a car. This might require making it slightly less safe by not stopping at bus stops, providing a separate service for the disabled, collecting fares while the bus is moving, having express routes, allowing buses to have their own express lanes, having smaller buses more frequently or other ideas that speed up transit. Cost isn't really a factor for most people for mass transit, it's the long travel time and inconvenience so making it faster and more convenient should be the primary goal.
Kinda misses the whole point of a motorcycle, at least for a lot of people.
What next? Surferless boards?
The autonomous is for the return trip which would work great for a surf board too. You take your board out surfing and if/when you fall off, it returns to the shore so you can pick it up again. Another advantage of only using it for the return trip for something like a surfboard or a bike is that the return trip would require significantly less energy without the need to haul around a 200 pound passenger. It would also make collisions less of a problem because a lightweight bike without a passenger travelling at slow speeds is not likely to hurt someone even if it hits them.
the government should take steps to prevent other companies from doing short term dumping in an attempt to run them out of business.
Yes.... IMO the government should impose capital costs on these businesses.
I would suggest a tax paid upfront based on the number of unique vehicles used.
Example: $315 per Month per unique vehicle used with the service during that month.
It would probably be most useful if the registration and administration for this can only be done by the driver; go to the local DMV: Cashiers check only. Then you get your sticker; Which the laws should be set up so the "Ride sharing company" must then verify, scan, and track the status of.
Unless they paid $4000 for the whole year, with an extra $210 convenience fee, then next month, they must repeat the same manual steps.
Essentially, a disincentive to bringing on contractors who will only make a part-time commitment. Since they no longer get to enlist vehicles nearly for free and only pay driving labor.
The tax proceeds should be reserved for the purposes of covering damage claims: in case the company becomes insolvent, and the taxing authority would also have the option later to use proceeds to rebuild the local market, or to help provide new job-reeducation assistance for former commercial drivers displaced from their jobs.
Is this sarcasm? I can't tell. Anyways, although preventing dumping is the responsibility of the government, I'm not sure what you're trying to solve with charging the driver for taking on part-time work. I have no problem with part-time workers. I actually think ride sharing apps would work better if they would have stayed ride sharing and people only picked up fare when they were going that direction anyways.
It's an old market manipulation technique: give your product away to increase market share, and then cash in when you drive as many competitors as possible out of the market. It takes time to smelt metals, build assembly lines and crank up production.
But this doesn't work so well with services, especially those with little capital investment. A ridesharing service doesn't even have to build fast food stands.
No, a ridesharing app doesn't have capital but most of it's competitors do. If it runs all the taxis, buses, etc... out of business then jacks up it's rates, it takes time to assemble a new fleet of buses, routes, etc... at which time it could again lower its rates. A virtual company that can fade away and come back can cause havoc when competing against another industry that has significant startup cost. And this doesn't mean that the virtual company is better. There are many businesses with significant startup costs that are cheaper and better for consumers once they are up and running and the government should take steps to prevent other companies from doing short term dumping in an attempt to run them out of business.
I don't think there is anything to be concerned about. They didn't engineer this bacterium, they discovered it.
That's not good news, that's BAD news... Nature is getting better at destroying the things we use because we thought they were effectively indestructible.
The lead in Flint Michigan's water will look like a quaint inconvenience when bacteria figure out how to feed on the innumerable PVC and ABS pipes municipal utilities have directly buried, to distribute water to homes and businesses.
Do we really need pipes that last hundreds of years? Civilization will be just fine if we have to replace our pipes every couple decades. We did just fine before the invention of plastic with iron pipes that eventually rusted. Things rot, we replace them. As another poster pointed out, we still make plenty of stuff out of wood and there are lots of things that can eat wood.
BSD license = you are free to do with the software what you want. GPL license = we are going to dictate what you may do and what you may not, which products it is acceptable to build, etc.
Sounds like one of those is much freer than the other...
BSD is freer in the first generation sense but when someone takes BSD and expands on it (for example MacOS), other people are then cut off from those added improvement. It would be like a free public library where no one was required to return the books. Yes, the books are more free for the first person that checks them out but if the first person puts them on their shelf at home, those books are now a lot less free for future users. In this case, they are obviously worried that as machine learning becomes more and more important they don't want the market cornered by a handful of commercial companies negating the last 20 years of their progress. If instead of paying a "microsoft tax" to use windows everyone has to start paying a "google tax" for the machine learning to make their computer usable then we are back where we have started from.
This is deliberate so that businesses will pay business rates. If you want fast upload, you have to buy a business package.
Maybe so but I live in a residential neighborhood and have tried to get a business connection and I still can't and even if I could, this doesn't help the average internet user. There are probably quite a few new or potential technologies that are being hampered by this, not to mention would-be entrepreneurs. I think upload speeds should be part of net neutrality as limiting upload speeds stifles innovation. We would also all be better off if there were more creators instead of the average internet user being restricted to being only a consumer of bits.
Hydroelectric is a fixed resource that is pretty much already maxed out. Even if we weren't dealing with droughts in some areas, you have to have a large river with unused land upstream that doesn't mind being flooded and this river needs to really be something that you don't need for navigation. There are just not that many suitable places to build large dams.
Right, because our collective mothers and grandmothers are are thinking of, not to speak of capable of, doing anything other than what's already built in.
I think there are plenty of apps that are user friendly enough for semi-literate computer years (grandmothers or otherwise). The big problem I see holding back offsite backups is the stingy upload speeds. The FASTED upload speed I can currently get is 512k and it takes multiple calls to tech support to even find out what your upload speed it. The upload speed also barely changes, if at all, whether you go with the 1M package or the 10M package. Even if they just opened up the upload speed at night, this would help the average user have access to better online backups.
Except that here we're not talking about future scenarios, but actual present (and past) data that confirm that nuclear generation has been decreasing for several years. Enjoy oblivion.
You can't look at declining data and say it will continue to decline without looking at what is causing the decline. If the fish population is declining in a lake because of overfishing and people stop fishing in that lake then the fish population will likely not continue to decline. Likewise with nuclear. Nuclear is in decline because of a variety of issues of which only some are related to the technology itself. If we start to get serious about carbon dioxide emissions then nuclear could quickly turn the other direction as it's the only major non-carbon baseload we currently have.
Just because a group supports you doesn't mean that you support that group.
Maybe not, but it definitely demonstrates one of the properties of your appeal.
If all the neo-Nazis and KKK groups support you, then it might be time to do a little self-examination, no? Maybe just ask yourself, "Why are these people all coming to my side?"
But the appeal of a party to a group still doesn't say anything about that party. For instance, people who want to blow up whaling ships are most likely democrats. But it's a one way arrow: wants to blow up whaling ships->cares about environment->votes democrat It says nothing about whether democrats in general want to blow up whaling ships.
What China is pursuing is the same thing the USA has pursued since 9/11 which is looking at where people travel, who they hang out with, and what they say to try to stop mass casualty events^W^W^W^W changes to the political, financial, and societal status quo before they happen.
FTFY
Strat
You say that like it's a bad thing. The primary goal of the government is to create a safe, stable environment. Maintaining the status quo is its job. It only becomes a problem when it interferes with progress or unfairly favors one group over another.
For pre-crime, the real problem with pre-crime in the US is that you will never be able to convict someone "beyond a reasonable doubt" unless you have absolutely ironclad scientific proof that the events would have happened the exactly same way as in the prediction, no matter what, every time with perfect accuracy. And then, you will need to explain why you are convicting someone for a crime you could have prevented by simply calling up the victim and telling them to go to a safe location at such and such a time.
They specifically mention terrorism. I don't think either of your points are valid. You can't call up a stadium and evacuate it to prevent victims as the terrorist will just choose a different target and even if they don't the stadium itself even without anyone in it is a target. Likewise, even in the USA, if you find someone with an apartment full of explosions, a jury would easily convict them. Yes, single victim precrimes like robbery and rape would be difficult but that's not likely something that anyone in China or anywhere else is currently pursuing. What China is pursuing is the same thing the USA has pursued since 9/11 which is looking at where people travel, who they hang out with, and what they say to try to stop mass casualty events before they happen.
I know plenty of good, honest, moral, non-racist people on both the democrat side and the republican side.
Can you cite any neo-Nazi or KKK groups that are supporting the Democrats in 2016?
Nah, didn't think so.
Just because a group supports you doesn't mean that you support that group. Every racist, pedophile, etc.. out there that votes has to pick a side. The racists tend to vote for republicans while the pedophiles tend to support democrats. There might be some subtle reasons for this but that doesn't make the republican candidates racist any more than it makes the democrat candidates pedophiles. That's like saying airline pilots support clinton so that makes clinton an airline pilot. See how absurd that sounds?
They were able to track the former by the swastika wallpaper on their smartphones.
I know plenty of good, honest, moral, non-racist people on both the democrat side and the republican side. Many of them are more similar that they are willing to admit. I think the people in congress know this and it's all a game to them. If they keep both sides fighting over trivial things and demonizing each other then they can run the country however they want.
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I was very intrigued by reading your response. My 4 year old son is on the spectrum, and we still don't have a great understanding of "how he works". I was always confused about his intense empathy for others, which appeared to go against what I considered to be typical autism. Much of your post mirrored behavior I see in my son. Though I have never been considered autistic (just ADHD), I had often encountered intense panic/stress as a child when being forced to introduce myself to new people my own age. To this day, I still get stressed out and "snappy" if plans change and I thrive on daily routines. My son and I both love "novel situations". I feel like I learned something new today about this complex condition, and will do some more research. Many thanks for your post!
For my son, I think he's just like everyone else, he's trying to make sense of the world. So novel situations are fine because there are no expectations and it allows him to broaden his horizon and learn more about how the world works but changes are bad because once he decides that the world works a certain way, it's very upsetting if they don't work that way. When my son is having an "anxiety attack", the phrase he tends to repeat over and over is "I don't understand, I don't understand" which I believe is exactly how he feels. Somewhat related, autistic kids tend to be obsessed with one thing whether it is a spinning wheel or star wars. Many parents try to suppress those "obsessions" but I've read a few places that many times once they "master" that obsession that that obsession will go away and they will move on to the next obsession to "master". My son (and many geeks) are like this.
Actually I'm a bit surprised that such coops aren't more common on the Internet, like instead of dealing with commercial companies like Google (YouTube) and Spotify you could upload your music/videos to a website that'd offer it to the public with transparent terms and open books. You'd think for the people who actually want to make money and not just get a free service that'd be a better deal, but I guess it's hard to get the momentum going.
Companies like facebook and twitter have the incentive to spend lots of money to get the momentum going as they can profit from all the free content afterwards. Look at the money google has spent on googleplus. I think part of the problem is that the way the internet currently works, facebook, twitter, etc... hold the world hostage once they have the critical mass. This critical mass acts as a moat that prevents people from leaving. Email providers have the same. They give you a "free" email address but you don't actually own it. It is on their domain and they control what you can and cannot do with it. What we really need is a way for people to get email addresses, facebook pages, etc... outside of walled gardens where if I wanted to transfer my social profile from facebook to googleplus that I can transfer it without giving up all my friends and contacts that I have amassed. This is similar to how phone numbers used to work where everytime you switched from one provider to another you lost your phone number. We now have number portability where we can take our number with us. It would be nice if we could somehow take our email address or our friends list with us when we changed providers.
This. Someone hand that person a mod.
Autistic people are under constant stress. Every single new situation in life is stress. And we're not talking about something the average normal person would consider new, like, say, a new job or having to meet someone important for the first time. ANYTHING that does not fit the ordinary is a moment of stress. Add on top of that any situation you cannot plan for fully in advance. If you want to put an autistic person into full stress mode tell him to "just wing it".
Although I mostly agree, my son and I have inherited a slight variant of autism. My son gets very upset when plans change but at the same time, he's perfectly fine in novel situations. So if there is music instead of PE at school this is very upsetting to him but going on a field trip to a new place he's never been and he absorbs it like a sponge. My son also exhibits extreme empathy and concern for others and is very concerned with things being fair and not hurting people's feelings. Being autistic he doesn't always pick up the social cues to know when he's hurting someone else's feelings but when he notices, it very much bothers him. Same with animals, he might not realize that he's hurting the cat by the way he's holding it but if he realizes someone is hurting an animal (like when I clean fish), it upsets him greatly. I think part of the problem with the autistic umbrella is that many people treat it as a single set of symptoms (afraid of novel situations, no empathy) but from all the autistic people I know, it's very nuanced and can vary greatly from person to person. I think part of this is probably the body and brain taking different routes to compensate for what is missing whether it is unconscious rewiring of the brain or more conscious coping mechanisms.
and as an added benefit everyone will confuse it with rj11
And why does this matter? RJ11 is basically dead. My brother recently didn't even bother to install phone jacks in his new house. Using RJ11 or something that looks similar is fine. RJ45 is still probably better for the data center but having something smaller like RJ11 for the home market in the few cases where wireless is not good enough is probably fine. Personally, I expect wired ethernet to die and be replace with either wireless or ethernet over usb. I have a box full of hubs, switches, and ethernet cables that I don't use anymore. Even my desktop connects via wireless.
One of the biggest advantage of the rj-45 port is the relative ease of making a connection. Having smaller ports means we will need factory built connectors. And need all wires to be presized for all jobs. Making wiring much more difficult.
Besides most small tech that cannot handle the RJ-45 sized ports are built fore wireless networking. Which for most used is fast enough.
I agree that most applications where RJ45 is too big, they just use wireless but you could still have field serviceable wired connections from a smaller connection. As 10 and 100 meg ethernet only use 4 wires, RJ11 (phone) would work just fine. Many RJ45 crimpers also have RJ11 already there and creating a RJ11 to RJ45 adapter would be trivial. In general, creating an adapter/dongle for any port would be trivial. Just like most devices come with a mini to full size usb adapter, it makes sense for something like the raspberry pi to come with a mini-rj45 to rj45 adapter (at least for the near future).
Then why charge for the service at all? If you make the service free, LOTS more people will use it.
You have any proof of this? The price has never even factored into my decision at all and I've never once met a person that didn't ride the bus because of cost. In most places it's already basically free compared to the cost of owning a vehicle. I have several friends that don't own cars and ride their bikes everywhere and even for them, it's not the cost that keeps them off the bus. Likewise for all my friends who own cars. It's primarily convenience and timing that factor into whether someone takes the bus.
Now a taxi is another story. If I could take a taxi everywhere and it was price competitive then I would sell my car tomorrow. Buses are price competitive but unless you live in a place that has buses every 15 minutes they are nowhere near as convenient as owning a car or calling a taxi.
the machine played zillion times and millions of games some of them from skilled humans - I see some disparity here.
Yes, but a machine never forgets and can easily be replicated once it learns a task.
Another question is - all these hundreds of cores needed to best one of best humans at the game.
And the first computer took an entire room and could be beat by a guy with an abacus. Look where it is now.
The end result is as with anything else - we produce a tool to replace our weaknesses - it was a shaped stone back in the cave, it is a 1.5k silicon cores now.
If the machines ever get really intelligent the way we are - will they be modern slaves or will they succeed in freeing themselves.
Luckily current computers are nowhere close to conscience which probably makes them better. Better to keep them as tools than a conscience entity that you have to worry about rights.
From this perspective this result is irrelevant even if it were significant and it is less significant than people think it is.
Not irrelevant at all. There are plenty of tasks that it would be nice to automate. Even something as simple as folding someone's laundry or organizing someone's photo albums is a useful thing that has lots of value to lots of people and more and more of these things become possible with more intelligent AI.
Except Mass Transit is never going to be a money-maker. It may be touted as such, but mass transit is always there as a service to the people. The importance of transporting population, including those in a wheelchair, takes precedence over pure revenue intake.
There is no reason mass transportation can't be a money maker. It will always be cheaper to transport a dozen people on one vehicle than maintaining a dozen different vehicles. Now if you want to run mass transportation as a charity then that's fine but don't expect everyone to take it. On the other hand, if you make the bus system convenient enough that the regular person starts taking it and you charge this regular person 3-4 times what you are currently charging then you have the money to possibly offer special services for the handicap and/or discount fares to the ones that really need it. Basically, stop making buses that cater to the lowest common denominator and instead look at how you can attract the middle class and upper middle class to the bus system. The lower class with no other options are going to take the bus regardless but to get everyone moved over you need to attract the people who currently are driving and to do that it's less about cost and more about convenience and speed.
Many cities already have services like these, which are pricey and inefficient because of the lack of scale. When you're moving only dozens of people every day, instead of thousands, it's not going to be a very useful alternative.
But the handicap service doesn't need to be more expensive. In fact it shouldn't be. It should be subsidized by the regular bus fares. As I said before, it's not the cost that prevents most people from riding public transportation. Most people would gladly pay double or triple the regular bus fare if it was just as fast and convenient as driving. Public transportation needs to stop trying to make buses cheap and instead try to make them convenient first.
It's discrimination no matter how you cut it. You cannot tell a person in a wheelchair that "Sorry, you have to wait 20 minutes for the next bus," while everyone else at the stop can hop on. And all for your convenience. This is classic discrimination.
There are plenty of buildings that have "handicap entrances" and plenty of buildings where the masses can take the fast escalator while handicap and people with strollers have to wait for the much slower elevator which many times has a line. The handicap bus also doesn't necessarily need to be slower. As there are fewer handicap, it could possibly be an on-call system where it comes directly to you and takes you directly to your destination. The point is that if you only build bus routes for the lowest common denominator then it will be much much harder to get widespread adoption. If you eliminate all the stopping and all the zigzagging so that buses are the same speed as cars then alot more people would likely take the bus.
You don't know what to do, really? Are you willing to pay more, to be inconvinced less? It is called discrimination. You discriminate against the handicapped individual, because you can. And, was it their fault they delayed you? Or the mode of transportation that they can afford to use? That delayed you?
It's not discrimination if it's done right. An easy solution is to have a bus for slow passengers whether it is someone in a wheelchair or someone in a stroller. One simple solution which wouldn't technically discriminate and would be in line with what this article is talking about would be for the "fast" bus to not stop. You make it like some trolleys where it slows down at a stop and you need to hop on/off while it's still moving. One of the major deterrents to mass transportation is that it is considerably slower than other forms of transportation. The goal should be to figure out how to get the majority of people from point A to point B in times similar to a car. This might require making it slightly less safe by not stopping at bus stops, providing a separate service for the disabled, collecting fares while the bus is moving, having express routes, allowing buses to have their own express lanes, having smaller buses more frequently or other ideas that speed up transit. Cost isn't really a factor for most people for mass transit, it's the long travel time and inconvenience so making it faster and more convenient should be the primary goal.
Kinda misses the whole point of a motorcycle, at least for a lot of people.
What next? Surferless boards?
The autonomous is for the return trip which would work great for a surf board too. You take your board out surfing and if/when you fall off, it returns to the shore so you can pick it up again. Another advantage of only using it for the return trip for something like a surfboard or a bike is that the return trip would require significantly less energy without the need to haul around a 200 pound passenger. It would also make collisions less of a problem because a lightweight bike without a passenger travelling at slow speeds is not likely to hurt someone even if it hits them.
the government should take steps to prevent other companies from doing short term dumping in an attempt to run them out of business.
Yes.... IMO the government should impose capital costs on these businesses.
I would suggest a tax paid upfront based on the number of unique vehicles used.
Example: $315 per Month per unique vehicle used with the service during that month.
It would probably be most useful if the registration and administration for this can only be done by the driver;
go to the local DMV: Cashiers check only. Then you get your sticker; Which the laws should be set up so the
"Ride sharing company" must then verify, scan, and track the status of.
Unless they paid $4000 for the whole year, with an extra $210 convenience fee, then next month, they must repeat
the same manual steps.
Essentially, a disincentive to bringing on contractors who will only make a part-time commitment.
Since they no longer get to enlist vehicles nearly for free and only pay driving labor.
The tax proceeds should be reserved for the purposes of covering damage claims: in case the
company becomes insolvent, and the taxing authority would also have the option later to use
proceeds to rebuild the local market, or to help provide new job-reeducation assistance for former commercial drivers
displaced from their jobs.
Is this sarcasm? I can't tell. Anyways, although preventing dumping is the responsibility of the government, I'm not sure what you're trying to solve with charging the driver for taking on part-time work. I have no problem with part-time workers. I actually think ride sharing apps would work better if they would have stayed ride sharing and people only picked up fare when they were going that direction anyways.
It's an old market manipulation technique: give your product away to increase market share, and then cash in when you drive as many competitors as possible out of the market. It takes time to smelt metals, build assembly lines and crank up production.
But this doesn't work so well with services, especially those with little capital investment. A ridesharing service doesn't even have to build fast food stands.
No, a ridesharing app doesn't have capital but most of it's competitors do. If it runs all the taxis, buses, etc... out of business then jacks up it's rates, it takes time to assemble a new fleet of buses, routes, etc... at which time it could again lower its rates. A virtual company that can fade away and come back can cause havoc when competing against another industry that has significant startup cost. And this doesn't mean that the virtual company is better. There are many businesses with significant startup costs that are cheaper and better for consumers once they are up and running and the government should take steps to prevent other companies from doing short term dumping in an attempt to run them out of business.
That's not good news, that's BAD news... Nature is getting better at destroying the things we use because we thought they were effectively indestructible.
The lead in Flint Michigan's water will look like a quaint inconvenience when bacteria figure out how to feed on the innumerable PVC and ABS pipes municipal utilities have directly buried, to distribute water to homes and businesses.
Do we really need pipes that last hundreds of years? Civilization will be just fine if we have to replace our pipes every couple decades. We did just fine before the invention of plastic with iron pipes that eventually rusted. Things rot, we replace them. As another poster pointed out, we still make plenty of stuff out of wood and there are lots of things that can eat wood.
So paraphrasing:
BSD license = you are free to do with the software what you want.
GPL license = we are going to dictate what you may do and what you may not, which products it is acceptable to build, etc.
Sounds like one of those is much freer than the other...
BSD is freer in the first generation sense but when someone takes BSD and expands on it (for example MacOS), other people are then cut off from those added improvement. It would be like a free public library where no one was required to return the books. Yes, the books are more free for the first person that checks them out but if the first person puts them on their shelf at home, those books are now a lot less free for future users. In this case, they are obviously worried that as machine learning becomes more and more important they don't want the market cornered by a handful of commercial companies negating the last 20 years of their progress. If instead of paying a "microsoft tax" to use windows everyone has to start paying a "google tax" for the machine learning to make their computer usable then we are back where we have started from.
This is deliberate so that businesses will pay business rates. If you want fast upload, you have to buy a business package.
Maybe so but I live in a residential neighborhood and have tried to get a business connection and I still can't and even if I could, this doesn't help the average internet user. There are probably quite a few new or potential technologies that are being hampered by this, not to mention would-be entrepreneurs. I think upload speeds should be part of net neutrality as limiting upload speeds stifles innovation. We would also all be better off if there were more creators instead of the average internet user being restricted to being only a consumer of bits.
step back both of you: hydroelectricity!
Hydroelectric is a fixed resource that is pretty much already maxed out. Even if we weren't dealing with droughts in some areas, you have to have a large river with unused land upstream that doesn't mind being flooded and this river needs to really be something that you don't need for navigation. There are just not that many suitable places to build large dams.
Right, because our collective mothers and grandmothers are are thinking of, not to speak of capable of, doing anything other than what's already built in.
I think there are plenty of apps that are user friendly enough for semi-literate computer years (grandmothers or otherwise). The big problem I see holding back offsite backups is the stingy upload speeds. The FASTED upload speed I can currently get is 512k and it takes multiple calls to tech support to even find out what your upload speed it. The upload speed also barely changes, if at all, whether you go with the 1M package or the 10M package. Even if they just opened up the upload speed at night, this would help the average user have access to better online backups.
Except that here we're not talking about future scenarios, but actual present (and past) data that confirm that nuclear generation has been decreasing for several years. Enjoy oblivion.
You can't look at declining data and say it will continue to decline without looking at what is causing the decline. If the fish population is declining in a lake because of overfishing and people stop fishing in that lake then the fish population will likely not continue to decline. Likewise with nuclear. Nuclear is in decline because of a variety of issues of which only some are related to the technology itself. If we start to get serious about carbon dioxide emissions then nuclear could quickly turn the other direction as it's the only major non-carbon baseload we currently have.
Maybe not, but it definitely demonstrates one of the properties of your appeal.
If all the neo-Nazis and KKK groups support you, then it might be time to do a little self-examination, no? Maybe just ask yourself, "Why are these people all coming to my side?"
But the appeal of a party to a group still doesn't say anything about that party.
For instance, people who want to blow up whaling ships are most likely democrats.
But it's a one way arrow: wants to blow up whaling ships->cares about environment->votes democrat
It says nothing about whether democrats in general want to blow up whaling ships.
What China is pursuing is the same thing the USA has pursued since 9/11 which is looking at where people travel, who they hang out with, and what they say to try to stop mass casualty events^W^W^W^W changes to the political, financial, and societal status quo before they happen.
FTFY
Strat
You say that like it's a bad thing. The primary goal of the government is to create a safe, stable environment. Maintaining the status quo is its job. It only becomes a problem when it interferes with progress or unfairly favors one group over another.
For pre-crime, the real problem with pre-crime in the US is that you will never be able to convict someone "beyond a reasonable doubt" unless you have absolutely ironclad scientific proof that the events would have happened the exactly same way as in the prediction, no matter what, every time with perfect accuracy. And then, you will need to explain why you are convicting someone for a crime you could have prevented by simply calling up the victim and telling them to go to a safe location at such and such a time.
They specifically mention terrorism. I don't think either of your points are valid. You can't call up a stadium and evacuate it to prevent victims as the terrorist will just choose a different target and even if they don't the stadium itself even without anyone in it is a target. Likewise, even in the USA, if you find someone with an apartment full of explosions, a jury would easily convict them.
Yes, single victim precrimes like robbery and rape would be difficult but that's not likely something that anyone in China or anywhere else is currently pursuing. What China is pursuing is the same thing the USA has pursued since 9/11 which is looking at where people travel, who they hang out with, and what they say to try to stop mass casualty events before they happen.
Can you cite any neo-Nazi or KKK groups that are supporting the Democrats in 2016?
Nah, didn't think so.
Just because a group supports you doesn't mean that you support that group. Every racist, pedophile, etc.. out there that votes has to pick a side. The racists tend to vote for republicans while the pedophiles tend to support democrats. There might be some subtle reasons for this but that doesn't make the republican candidates racist any more than it makes the democrat candidates pedophiles. That's like saying airline pilots support clinton so that makes clinton an airline pilot. See how absurd that sounds?
They were able to track the former by the swastika wallpaper on their smartphones.
I know plenty of good, honest, moral, non-racist people on both the democrat side and the republican side. Many of them are more similar that they are willing to admit. I think the people in congress know this and it's all a game to them. If they keep both sides fighting over trivial things and demonizing each other then they can run the country however they want.