Volvo consider's Tesla's system a Level 3 system, which they consider dangerous.... Volvo's system coming out this year is what they call a Level 4. What this means is that the car does not require the driver to be in control at any time, even during extreme conditions.
Volvo considers Tesla a Level 3 corporation, naively manufacturing all its cars in America, which they consider dangerous to profits. Volvo is what they call a Level 4 corporation. What this means is that the system can automatically detect that profits are in danger and shift manufacturing to China. This ensures safety of profits at any time, even during extreme economic conditions. (As a bonus, the sophisticated Volvo system automatically makes public claims that there will be no reduction in quality or safety as a result.)
It's working right now for Tesla's 13,000 or so full-time employees. Rich people buying bling is the most straightforward form of redistribution of wealth.
TrueCrypt has this - the "hidden partition" feature. Of course, that just means that with any encrypted file they can jail you until you produce the password that shows what the state wants you to show.
So where did I say I believed that first-trimester abortion was murder? Certainly not in the post you responded to, where I said I believed it probably wasn't, was OK with it, but how can anyone be sure? You're quick to show your tribal identity, but you're off-topic with it.
No, the 5th amendment was explicitly about preventing the state from torturing confessions out of suspects. A practice that had recently been in fashion in the 1700s, and which seems to be coming back into fashion again. Won't confess? To jail with you until you do!
If this guy is innocent then he can work with them to show he is innocent. Let the Project see the evidence.
Yes, yes, "guilty until proven innocent" is so much easier for the state. A liquor store was robbed? Just arrest the nearest black person - he probably can't afford a lawyer, so the charges will stick. Kiddie porn downloaded? Arrest the first person you find with encrypted files - if they provide a password, demand they produce the other password, for the hidden partition.
You cannot be compelled to assist in producing/inventing evidence against yourself. Perhaps you read about the inquisition in history class? It was a bad thing. As soon as you go down the road of allowing the state to torture suspects until they confess, all hope is lost, and throwing someone in jail until they confess is more than one step down that road.
Sound like you believe the police. Never do that. If they had found evidence that would convince a jury, they wouldn't bother with his hard drive, they'd just go to court. Clearly the evidence thus far isn't very compelling.
Small companies mostly hope to be bought by large companies once the drug gets past the right trail stage - just like other tech startups, it's the big company acquisition budget (not the R&D budget) that drives progress.
As for the military. Don't fool yourselves that 70 years without a world war was an accident. It was the result of deterrence. As America's power wanes, we'll see how it plays out. Nuclear proliferation is on the rise, Russia is territorially ambitious, Europe is economically unstable, and I'm quite glad I'm too old for the draft. It is not a victory for the human race that ISIS was allowed to grow and conquer so much territory - it looks like it's reached its peak, but with so much suffering and misery along the way.
You seem awfully sure of that. I mean, I'm an atheist, but I realize there's no way to be sure about "soul"-related questions. Post-Singularity, or given a Star Trek transporter to experiment with, then maybe I could be sure.
I'm certainly not sure when or how much to call a fetus a person. First trimester? The odds sure seem low to me that it's murder, low enough that I'm OK with it, but even second trimester seems quite risky. It's illegal to fire a bullet in the air in the city, after all, and the odds there are pretty low.
They don't contain marketable securities, in the fact that they're special treasury bills- but they are valuable securities, regardless.
My point was just that SS claims can now only be paid from new taxation, whereas they used to be able to be paid by the fund selling securities. The government funded other operations by selling off those securities, just because they could get away with it.
All spending by Social Security must come from taxation. I don't think we agree. FICA taxation.
I'm not distinguishing by the label on the tax. Just the all outflows now require new inflows. If you check the usdebtclock.org page, you can see the totals, and the division between income tax, payroll tax, and corporate tax, but ultimately, congress can just change the law and spend the payroll tax on gold-plating the capitol if they want to.
he majority of your income taxes go to the military, flatly, period
Now that's just not true. Military spending is about 1/3 of income tax, and the government spends more than it makes.
today, we (well, this is subjective, I admit) get a lot more money out of those relatively small taxes per percentage of marginal rate than we do from income taxes, and a lot more value per dollar.
I'm not sure what your saying here, unless it's just to comment on your favorite flavor of government spending. Everyone has one, which is why cuts are so hard.
Personally I'm appalled at Social Security: so many people have no easy means of survival except at the pleasure of the government. I don't like that power balance at all. Some sort of government-regulated 401k-style thing, where the money is yours the whole time, would change the balance of power favorably for us all, while still providing a safety net. It would also mean the workers would, to some extent, directly own the means of production, which I'm a great fan of if it's not proxied through some government.
You do realize that an underdog wanting freedom for himself against an oppressive regime is the fundamental belief of the Right,right? Complaining about government overreach? Arguing for smaller government? Warning of the dangers of too much government power?
The movies are telling stories published decades ago (remember how a liberal becomes a conservative). They're successful because they don't twist the fun story just to insert political footballs. (Well, OK, the entire original point of Tony Stark was to add a hero who was fundamentally a successful CEO, an arms dealer no less, just to mess with lefties at the time, but he was the exception.)
I'm not sure why Disney is seen as a hated agent of the left by the crazy end of the right, but it's not about the Marvel movies.
What a simplistic view you have. A book about X must either be an endorsement, condemnation, or satire of X? Do you only read children's stories?
Starship Troopers was a book about how people living in a fascist society would view living in that society. The book made it plenty clear that they were brainwashed throughout schooling, so of course the characters accepted the society as normal, even admirable.
There no preaching either way about fascism in Starship Troopers, as it wasn't a bedtime story. It was an insightful exploration of why a fascist society holds together despite being so evil as seen from the reader's perspective. The book was published just 14 years after WWII - everyone in his target market hated the fascists, preaching about that would have been very shallow and trite (not that Heinlein was above shallow and trite for a buck, but that was Number of the Beast, not Starship Troopers).
Only if you believe the character's voice is the author's voice, which is frankly a childish view. Do you imagine Heinlein was endorsing the fascist society in Starship Troopers merely because the characters inhabiting the world accepted it? Was he then also endorsing the libertarian society in Moon is a Harsh Mistress? And where does Stranger in a Strange Land fit in?
Man, I'm tired of people trying to convince me Heinlein was fascist libertarian hippie. He wrote about the good and bad aspects of a society taken to the extreme in some direction. Sorry, no child-safe black-and-white there, just an attempt at an honest examination of how these societies would look from the inside, leaving up to you how to view them from the outside.
By design the Hugos are a popularity contest. The Nebulas are chosen by critics, the Hugos by fans. There's no "stacking the vote" in any way, just voting (it's not like this is an internet poll or something silly like that).
While the only important popularity contest is book sales, the Hugos do sometimes help less-known authors get discovered. Even then it's about the books you like, not the books you're supposed to like - the latter was always the Nebulas.
The sorry arse losers who only want gay and lesbian sci-fi characters?:(
I've read exactly one good SF book with a central gay or lesbian SF (not skiffy) character was Lois McMaster Bujold's Ethan of Athos, written 30 years ago long before it was a political football. The central character "just happened to be gay", rather than that being important to the plot, though because he came from a colony of only gay men there were some "fish out of water" moments (a classic SF angle to comment on society - introduce a true outsider), and some humor at the expense of people who thought only in stereotypes.
Importantly, the character was utterly confident in his sexuality, and this was a novel about being gay or any nonsense like that. Instead it was a SF novel.
Plenty of swashbuckling fun in Heinlein, at least in the 90% of his work that was somewhat schlocky (mostly metaphorical swashbuckling, but some actual swashes were buckled along the way).
That is very disingenuous, when you consider That of that 68%, more than half is money that people either earned by way of a pension, or already paid in in the form of social security. You have no right to "stop the handouts" when those moneys are in fact owed every bit as much as (if not more) than our vast public debt.
What can't be paid won't be paid. The public debt must be paid unless we amend or ignore the constitution, those "promises", not so much (per the SCOTUS). Local governments are already dealing with this, here and there, pre-saging the larger issue. They declare bankruptcy, and the smaller pension payouts come out of the settlement. We can't do that at the federal level - we'll either change the programs once there's a crisis (goodness knows we lack the courage to enable a soft landing by acting before a crisis), or inflate our way out, but either way the purchasing power won't be there. That's inevitable. The question is one of priorities - do we value mailing checks over roads? Education? A military? Enforcing important safety regulations? Something will have to give.
cut the military spending back to a sane level
15% of the budget isn't crazy. The military is already collapsing, and their current primary concern (and for the past decade or so) is how to manage the reduction in staff an equipment. Our post-WWII desire to be able to fight "2 and a half wars" is long one. It's already questionable whether we could fight one against a real opponent. You're focused on asymmetric threats, but the only reason we've had those and not world wars for 70 years is the deterrent effect of such a large military, an effect that is gone now.
The FICA trusts were all emptied by Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush. They no longer contain marketable securities, and instead contain IOUs with no economic value. Much as if you loaned yourself all the money in your 401k - the 401k still has an asset, worth the same as before, but it's useless to your retirement plans.
All spending by Social Security must come from taxation. Pre-Reagan, the SSA could actually sell the securities it held on the market, as they were normal federal bonds. That's no longer the case. The sad thing is, almost no one noticed. There was some complaining when the looting started, but we moved on the the next political scandal and ignored it for 20 years.
Unless you're proposing spending FICA withheld taxes on infrastructure?
Money is always fungible. Doesn't matter what the tax is called, the government will spent it where it wants.
BTW, FICA won't even cover the outlays it's intended for, going forward (the combined unfunded liabilities of SS and Medi* are $860k per taxpayer - never gonna happen). Breaking our promise there is only a matter of time (or we'll inflate our way out, but the promise isn't a dollar amount, it the ability to subsist on the money). And of course we lack the political courage to do this gracefully, 20 years ahead of a crisis.
Well, we have to be careful with the English terminology. There are two effects here. One is, in a very intuitive way, when we measure something we affect it because of how we do the measurement. Find the position of an electron by slamming a photon into it, and obviously you've changed the system, wave function and all. This is not a fundamental limitation of physics, as it turns out, just a very difficult experimental problem.
Separately, when we measure the position/momentum of an electron (or any other paired values), we can dial in some proportion of uncertainty for both, depending on how we measure. Whatever range of uncertainly is left isn't merely unmeasured but actually indeterminate. The difference is subtle, but in this sense the measurement doesn't change the wave function, it's just inherent in the mapping between the wave function and what we measure. The wave function has variables with the same degrees of freedom as position x momentum, but they each represent a composite of both.
Are you kidding? Federal government spending is 25% of GDP, total government spending is nearly 40% of GDP; these numbers have been going up for many decades. At what point do you consider government spending to be "enough"?
To be fair, current federal spending is: * 68% mailing checks to the old and the poor * 15% military * 6% interest * 11% everything else
We can reduce spending greatly while doubling spending on infrastructure, education, NASA, even enforcing regulations. We'd just have to be willing to mail less money to people. Sadly, those people are now a majority of voters, so it won't happen. (State and local spending is even more dominated by pension plans and related check-mailing.)
will work with lawmakers, regulators and the public to realize the safety and societal benefits of self-driving vehicles." David Strickland, a former top official of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, is coalition's counsel and spokesman.
In other words, these major corporations have formed a special interest (super?) PAC to lobby congress and the regulators, led by a former regulator from one of the groups they'll be lobbying.
Slashdot Mirror
Volvo consider's Tesla's system a Level 3 system, which they consider dangerous. ... Volvo's system coming out this year is what they call a Level 4. What this means is that the car does not require the driver to be in control at any time, even during extreme conditions.
Volvo considers Tesla a Level 3 corporation, naively manufacturing all its cars in America, which they consider dangerous to profits. Volvo is what they call a Level 4 corporation. What this means is that the system can automatically detect that profits are in danger and shift manufacturing to China. This ensures safety of profits at any time, even during extreme economic conditions. (As a bonus, the sophisticated Volvo system automatically makes public claims that there will be no reduction in quality or safety as a result.)
Especially since they're Swedish.
Volvos are made in China now. Or was that the joke?
Finally, the trickle down economy will work.
It's working right now for Tesla's 13,000 or so full-time employees. Rich people buying bling is the most straightforward form of redistribution of wealth.
TrueCrypt has this - the "hidden partition" feature. Of course, that just means that with any encrypted file they can jail you until you produce the password that shows what the state wants you to show.
So where did I say I believed that first-trimester abortion was murder? Certainly not in the post you responded to, where I said I believed it probably wasn't, was OK with it, but how can anyone be sure? You're quick to show your tribal identity, but you're off-topic with it.
No, the 5th amendment was explicitly about preventing the state from torturing confessions out of suspects. A practice that had recently been in fashion in the 1700s, and which seems to be coming back into fashion again. Won't confess? To jail with you until you do!
If this guy is innocent then he can work with them to show he is innocent. Let the Project see the evidence.
Yes, yes, "guilty until proven innocent" is so much easier for the state. A liquor store was robbed? Just arrest the nearest black person - he probably can't afford a lawyer, so the charges will stick. Kiddie porn downloaded? Arrest the first person you find with encrypted files - if they provide a password, demand they produce the other password, for the hidden partition.
You cannot be compelled to assist in producing/inventing evidence against yourself. Perhaps you read about the inquisition in history class? It was a bad thing. As soon as you go down the road of allowing the state to torture suspects until they confess, all hope is lost, and throwing someone in jail until they confess is more than one step down that road.
Sound like you believe the police. Never do that. If they had found evidence that would convince a jury, they wouldn't bother with his hard drive, they'd just go to court. Clearly the evidence thus far isn't very compelling.
Did you read the post you responded to?
Small companies mostly hope to be bought by large companies once the drug gets past the right trail stage - just like other tech startups, it's the big company acquisition budget (not the R&D budget) that drives progress.
As for the military. Don't fool yourselves that 70 years without a world war was an accident. It was the result of deterrence. As America's power wanes, we'll see how it plays out. Nuclear proliferation is on the rise, Russia is territorially ambitious, Europe is economically unstable, and I'm quite glad I'm too old for the draft. It is not a victory for the human race that ISIS was allowed to grow and conquer so much territory - it looks like it's reached its peak, but with so much suffering and misery along the way.
You seem awfully sure of that. I mean, I'm an atheist, but I realize there's no way to be sure about "soul"-related questions. Post-Singularity, or given a Star Trek transporter to experiment with, then maybe I could be sure.
I'm certainly not sure when or how much to call a fetus a person. First trimester? The odds sure seem low to me that it's murder, low enough that I'm OK with it, but even second trimester seems quite risky. It's illegal to fire a bullet in the air in the city, after all, and the odds there are pretty low.
They don't contain marketable securities, in the fact that they're special treasury bills- but they are valuable securities, regardless.
My point was just that SS claims can now only be paid from new taxation, whereas they used to be able to be paid by the fund selling securities. The government funded other operations by selling off those securities, just because they could get away with it.
All spending by Social Security must come from taxation. I don't think we agree. FICA taxation.
I'm not distinguishing by the label on the tax. Just the all outflows now require new inflows. If you check the usdebtclock.org page, you can see the totals, and the division between income tax, payroll tax, and corporate tax, but ultimately, congress can just change the law and spend the payroll tax on gold-plating the capitol if they want to.
he majority of your income taxes go to the military, flatly, period
Now that's just not true. Military spending is about 1/3 of income tax, and the government spends more than it makes.
today, we (well, this is subjective, I admit) get a lot more money out of those relatively small taxes per percentage of marginal rate than we do from income taxes, and a lot more value per dollar.
I'm not sure what your saying here, unless it's just to comment on your favorite flavor of government spending. Everyone has one, which is why cuts are so hard.
Personally I'm appalled at Social Security: so many people have no easy means of survival except at the pleasure of the government. I don't like that power balance at all. Some sort of government-regulated 401k-style thing, where the money is yours the whole time, would change the balance of power favorably for us all, while still providing a safety net. It would also mean the workers would, to some extent, directly own the means of production, which I'm a great fan of if it's not proxied through some government.
You do realize that an underdog wanting freedom for himself against an oppressive regime is the fundamental belief of the Right,right? Complaining about government overreach? Arguing for smaller government? Warning of the dangers of too much government power?
The movies are telling stories published decades ago (remember how a liberal becomes a conservative). They're successful because they don't twist the fun story just to insert political footballs. (Well, OK, the entire original point of Tony Stark was to add a hero who was fundamentally a successful CEO, an arms dealer no less, just to mess with lefties at the time, but he was the exception.)
I'm not sure why Disney is seen as a hated agent of the left by the crazy end of the right, but it's not about the Marvel movies.
What a simplistic view you have. A book about X must either be an endorsement, condemnation, or satire of X? Do you only read children's stories?
Starship Troopers was a book about how people living in a fascist society would view living in that society. The book made it plenty clear that they were brainwashed throughout schooling, so of course the characters accepted the society as normal, even admirable.
There no preaching either way about fascism in Starship Troopers, as it wasn't a bedtime story. It was an insightful exploration of why a fascist society holds together despite being so evil as seen from the reader's perspective. The book was published just 14 years after WWII - everyone in his target market hated the fascists, preaching about that would have been very shallow and trite (not that Heinlein was above shallow and trite for a buck, but that was Number of the Beast, not Starship Troopers).
Starship Troopers (the novel): right wing.
Only if you believe the character's voice is the author's voice, which is frankly a childish view. Do you imagine Heinlein was endorsing the fascist society in Starship Troopers merely because the characters inhabiting the world accepted it? Was he then also endorsing the libertarian society in Moon is a Harsh Mistress? And where does Stranger in a Strange Land fit in?
Man, I'm tired of people trying to convince me Heinlein was fascist libertarian hippie. He wrote about the good and bad aspects of a society taken to the extreme in some direction. Sorry, no child-safe black-and-white there, just an attempt at an honest examination of how these societies would look from the inside, leaving up to you how to view them from the outside.
By design the Hugos are a popularity contest. The Nebulas are chosen by critics, the Hugos by fans. There's no "stacking the vote" in any way, just voting (it's not like this is an internet poll or something silly like that).
While the only important popularity contest is book sales, the Hugos do sometimes help less-known authors get discovered. Even then it's about the books you like, not the books you're supposed to like - the latter was always the Nebulas.
The sorry arse losers who only want gay and lesbian sci-fi characters? :(
I've read exactly one good SF book with a central gay or lesbian SF (not skiffy) character was Lois McMaster Bujold's Ethan of Athos, written 30 years ago long before it was a political football. The central character "just happened to be gay", rather than that being important to the plot, though because he came from a colony of only gay men there were some "fish out of water" moments (a classic SF angle to comment on society - introduce a true outsider), and some humor at the expense of people who thought only in stereotypes.
Importantly, the character was utterly confident in his sexuality, and this was a novel about being gay or any nonsense like that. Instead it was a SF novel.
Plenty of swashbuckling fun in Heinlein, at least in the 90% of his work that was somewhat schlocky (mostly metaphorical swashbuckling, but some actual swashes were buckled along the way).
That is very disingenuous, when you consider That of that 68%, more than half is money that people either earned by way of a pension, or already paid in in the form of social security. You have no right to "stop the handouts" when those moneys are in fact owed every bit as much as (if not more) than our vast public debt.
What can't be paid won't be paid. The public debt must be paid unless we amend or ignore the constitution, those "promises", not so much (per the SCOTUS). Local governments are already dealing with this, here and there, pre-saging the larger issue. They declare bankruptcy, and the smaller pension payouts come out of the settlement. We can't do that at the federal level - we'll either change the programs once there's a crisis (goodness knows we lack the courage to enable a soft landing by acting before a crisis), or inflate our way out, but either way the purchasing power won't be there. That's inevitable. The question is one of priorities - do we value mailing checks over roads? Education? A military? Enforcing important safety regulations? Something will have to give.
cut the military spending back to a sane level
15% of the budget isn't crazy. The military is already collapsing, and their current primary concern (and for the past decade or so) is how to manage the reduction in staff an equipment. Our post-WWII desire to be able to fight "2 and a half wars" is long one. It's already questionable whether we could fight one against a real opponent. You're focused on asymmetric threats, but the only reason we've had those and not world wars for 70 years is the deterrent effect of such a large military, an effect that is gone now.
The FICA trusts were all emptied by Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush. They no longer contain marketable securities, and instead contain IOUs with no economic value. Much as if you loaned yourself all the money in your 401k - the 401k still has an asset, worth the same as before, but it's useless to your retirement plans.
All spending by Social Security must come from taxation. Pre-Reagan, the SSA could actually sell the securities it held on the market, as they were normal federal bonds. That's no longer the case. The sad thing is, almost no one noticed. There was some complaining when the looting started, but we moved on the the next political scandal and ignored it for 20 years.
Unless you're proposing spending FICA withheld taxes on infrastructure?
Money is always fungible. Doesn't matter what the tax is called, the government will spent it where it wants.
BTW, FICA won't even cover the outlays it's intended for, going forward (the combined unfunded liabilities of SS and Medi* are $860k per taxpayer - never gonna happen). Breaking our promise there is only a matter of time (or we'll inflate our way out, but the promise isn't a dollar amount, it the ability to subsist on the money). And of course we lack the political courage to do this gracefully, 20 years ahead of a crisis.
Well, we have to be careful with the English terminology. There are two effects here. One is, in a very intuitive way, when we measure something we affect it because of how we do the measurement. Find the position of an electron by slamming a photon into it, and obviously you've changed the system, wave function and all. This is not a fundamental limitation of physics, as it turns out, just a very difficult experimental problem.
Separately, when we measure the position/momentum of an electron (or any other paired values), we can dial in some proportion of uncertainty for both, depending on how we measure. Whatever range of uncertainly is left isn't merely unmeasured but actually indeterminate. The difference is subtle, but in this sense the measurement doesn't change the wave function, it's just inherent in the mapping between the wave function and what we measure. The wave function has variables with the same degrees of freedom as position x momentum, but they each represent a composite of both.
Are you kidding? Federal government spending is 25% of GDP, total government spending is nearly 40% of GDP; these numbers have been going up for many decades. At what point do you consider government spending to be "enough"?
To be fair, current federal spending is:
* 68% mailing checks to the old and the poor
* 15% military
* 6% interest
* 11% everything else
We can reduce spending greatly while doubling spending on infrastructure, education, NASA, even enforcing regulations. We'd just have to be willing to mail less money to people. Sadly, those people are now a majority of voters, so it won't happen. (State and local spending is even more dominated by pension plans and related check-mailing.)
will work with lawmakers, regulators and the public to realize the safety and societal benefits of self-driving vehicles." David Strickland, a former top official of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, is coalition's counsel and spokesman.
In other words, these major corporations have formed a special interest (super?) PAC to lobby congress and the regulators, led by a former regulator from one of the groups they'll be lobbying.
Yay?