This "build shit, destroy shit" cycle we humans seem stuck in is going do do us in some day. At least when we blow shit up on Earth it lands somewhere to be slowly buried over by soil. All that orbital debris is going to form a freaking shrapnel belt at some point and it'll be Russian roulette every time we launch and sipping tea in front of a Gatling gun to stay in orbit. Life is hard by its nature, but we seem hell bent on making it as hard as possible. Then again, maybe they used those old Lenovo ThinkPad batteries in the thing and no weaponry was involved...
I wonder if it would help to have a device placed between the ends of the severed spinal cords such that they're perfectly flush against it. The device would read/write impulses from/to both sides and work like a router in that it would enumerate each connection and be able to map one to another. A skin-tight suit of electrodes could be fitted on the person to assist with the mapping process. Initially the heart and lungs would need to be manually operated until the correct nerves could be mapped. The output nerves from the brain could be identified based on the patterns detected by the intermediary device. The heart and diaphragm could be manually stimulated with electrical impulses to determine the input nerves. Once the basic functions were mapped (with manual backups still in place) the patient would be told to repeatedly flex muscles or move limbs in specific ways, allowing the device to detect and test possible mappings. The electrodes in the body suit would record the mapping attempt results which combined with visual observation would help determine if the correct muscle was being stimulated. Even if this worked, there's the problem of the intermediary device being a permanent addition to their body and that the spinal cord ends couldn't be shifted on its surface without disrupting the mappings. The device would almost have to be organic, or somehow allow its logical mappings to become physical and permanent. They'd also probably just have the major mappings correct and require extensive rehabilitation to function normally and may have side effects that are never corrected such as at itch coming from the "wrong place".
Targeting a mall for a mass shooting or bombing would cause a big reaction, but if a video surfaces of soccer mom kidnapped and beheaded inside the United States all hell will break loose. 9/11, bombings, mass shootings...those are all terrible but they're a little more abstract psychologically because they affect a group of random people. The idea that a van could pull up next to you while walking the dog on the other hand is something that you might find difficult to stop thinking about. They've tried this in other countries (Australia, I think?), so unless there's some radical shift in sentiment (or existence) among terrorist groups it's only a matter of time.
No it means that you believed, what media and government was showing to you. When they talked about "enemys ower seas", "bloodi muslims etc", you believed them, becouse you can not believe, that the culprit was your own government.
You should be angry, becouse you do not have critical thinking.
You're right. I should have immediately driven up to New York and starting digging through the rubble looking for evidence with my CSI Miami forensic kit. Or perhaps watched the conspiracy videos on YouTube; those are fine examples of critical thinking. I'm sure your critical thinking skills are so finely honed you quickly figured out exactly what happened and why, perhaps in part due to the aluminum shielding your brain from the media/illuminati's mind control waves. In any case, you're missing my point, which was to provide an example of how aggression/anger/rage alters one's reasoning. PSA: Keep posting as Anonymous Coward, as they have eyes on you.
Stephen Hawking needs to stick to cosmology...he doesn't know *shit* about computing and human behavior.
"aggression" is such a ridiculously ill-defined term, it means virtually nothing scientifically
Without writing a book about it, simply defining aggression as "How easily a person get pissed off" is an easily-understood and practical definition. Some examples of the fruit of high aggression we could do without would include spousal abuse, road rage and war-mongering/retaliation. A specific example of that last one would be how I felt after 9/11 (which I no longer feel), which was basically, "Oh you fucked up now. We're going to bomb the shit out of every last one of you. Die, motherfuckers, etc." There's a significant and dangerous disconnect between how a calm person and an enraged person reasons and acts.
Thanks for the info. You can probably tell I'm not a network engineer. Gotta admit though, it sounded pretty clever until that damned reality bumped into it.:)
It wouldn't surprise me if when detecting bittorrent traffic AT&T disallowed connecting to any peers or seeds with an AT&T IP address. The downloader would still max out their up/downstream bandwidth, but it would be a single-edged sword as all their connected peers and seeds would be non-AT&T customers. AT&T would then have more available bandwidth (at the expense of the other ISPs) and could argue they were enhancing their customers' experience. A brilliant plan until other ISPs find out and do the same. Perhaps then AT&T could start their own VPN service marketed to their own customers under a different brand, touting unrestricted bittorrent connectivity as a selling point.
This is a strategy for demonstrating the absurdity of the current patent regime, right?
Unintentionally, no doubt. On the bright side the more absurdly and widely abused the system is the more ammunition for reforming it. I hope they cause a real mess spamming the USPTO with every possible patentable combination of words. Maybe they'll replace the USPTO staff with an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters to process them.
Judgement is also a driving skill and probably the most important one. Knowing the rules is irrelevant if your poor judgement causes you to ignore them. Alcohol only impairs judgement if you let it (up to a point, obviously). It's not as if you're possessed by a demon and literally no longer have control over your thoughts and actions. If you remain mindful that you're intoxicated the impulse to do something potentially unwise is immediately followed by the question "Is this wise" and you can decide to crush the impulse and not perform the action. The problem, other than people who just can't drive worth a damn in any case, is people who have too many drinks and remain in denial of their altered state. If you have a broken leg you can walk just fine with a crutch and a little care. Most drunk drivers throw away the crutch, pretend their leg is just fine, and sprint with obviously disastrous results.
They did that on Mythbusters, but it was between alcohol intoxication and sleep deprivation. Interestingly they found sleep deprivation to be equally (if not more) debilitating than alcohol intoxication.
I like the idea for your study, but it would be fun if they also had a test requiring the participants to send a text message or repeatedly answer the phone or set up their GPS while driving.
Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad
Face it, it explains everything.
This would be a useful equation if it weren't for the fact that the person in question was a fuckwad long before the anonymity or audience came. The idea that a thoughtful, virtuous person somehow becomes a troll because of anonymity and an audience is bullshit. The only thing anonymity does is melt away the facade of civility a fuckwad has carefully crafted for themselves.
It's the geek's time-honored right to rant and whine that Big Media produces nothing but remakes and sequels. But when given the chance to show what he can do, it always Star Trek: Back To The Future.
It is ironic, though it may be because the Big Media remakes and sequels are often so shitty that we geeks spend the remainder of our lives trying desperately to scrub their memories from our minds. For example, if Alien 3 and 4 had been as good as the first two I would be cool with a new one every few years until the end of time. Another issue is that people tend to think sequels and remakes come at the cost of the exclusion of new/original works. As if making Star Wars XIV somehow prevents someone else from making a Heinlein film.
How did they secure the rights to make these episodes? You'd think that would be the most expensive and most restrictive part.
They didn't. CBS or Paramount or whoever generally turns a blind eye to projects like these as long as they don't make any money. Other than the recent films (which arguably are only Star Trek in name), the franchise is dead. It's possible even that they're keeping an eye on how the public receives it in consideration of creating a new official television series. I think if there is to be a new series they should put it on HBO and go for broke. Good actors, good writers, the occasional full-frontal and beheading/gibbing will make for some unforgettable Trek, if nothing else.
There simply have been too many advances in the last 40 years. The cheap sets, cheesey special effects and bad acting just aren't tolerable any more.
Either they're still tolerable or you haven't been watching much television lately. There are a lot of good shows, but holy shit, the majority are pretty awful. I think of ToS more as on-screen theater than some gritty, brutally-realistic drama. It's like Shakespeare. You gotta watch it with a certain perspective and malleability in order to enjoy it.
The problem is that Star Trek isn't a very good science fiction premise.
Premise is largely irrelevant; it's more about the execution with special attention to commanding performances and excellent writing. The problem with Star Trek (and I've seen every episode of every incarnation and all the films) is that it's hit and miss with the acting and writing. I kinda like the premise, as most sci-fi is about "us" versus "them". The concept of exploration, the search for knowledge and the betterment of the human race and the galaxy as one large community is something everyone on this planet could take some lessons from. Star Trek is an allegory about our own struggles here on Earth.
That being said, I'd love to see more quality science fiction on television and film drawn from the works of our greatest authors.
I wish your post could be modded to +infinity, or perhaps there should be a "Holy fucking shit, chisel those words in stone in a national park somewhere" mod. Nicely said.
Banning things that people want leads to an increase in crime, and while you may say the only crime will be selling tobacco, for some reason criminals with no recourse for being wronged (since it's illegal) will take reprisal into their own hands. Prohibition created the mob. Making marijuana illegal created countless videos of narcos cutting necks and chainsawing people on meat hooks. Yes, lets make more shit people want illegal and see if it works.
Incorrect. Buying a *single* ticket is worth it, since it puts you on the playing field at least. It's buying 2+ tickets that aren't worth the money, Every ticket after the first raises your chances by such an incredibly small amount that it's not worth it. The first ticket raising your chances above a flat zero is worth it though.
Interesting point, although the debate regarding the difference between zero and 1/150,000,000 seems pointless when you begin to consider the odds of getting killed on any given day just walking outside your front door.
I think the lottery is a win in general. Yes, you have people who become addicted or can't afford to spend the money, but that's life. On the plus side a lot of people sincerely enjoy playing and much of the cash goes to public works and schools and such. It's practically an optional tax, and the idea of taxes being optional I find fantastic.
No, there's a new paper and THAT'S THE LAST WORD. Everyone update their recommendations and reprint their pamphlets, immediately! I think this is what Scott Adams was ranting about a few weeks ago. You're right, though, and one other thing that alcohol does even if drinking alone is to relax you, lift your spirits and get your mind off whatever stressful events actually are draining your life force. I appreciate people doing all this research, but they need to show a little humility. Hard work doesn't mean you're right.
So the obvious question is, what kind of drugs are these people taking? Is no one at a Fortune 500 company capable of thinking anything through these days? Do the programmers who think these features are "cool": and "awesome" not have managers with a three-digit IQ?
In recent years I've been noticing this in a growing number of products. I'm not an engineer or QA person though as a programmer I may have better insight into design than most, but it seems everything from cars to coffee makers have one or more obvious, critical design flaws that somehow make it through every check at well-known companies and all the way to retail.
My only theories are that 1) People are getting more stupid generally, 2) QA departments are incompetent, 3) designers and engineers are incompetent, and 4) consumers are either apathetic or incapable of recognizing [in]effective design.
In any case, anyone else have any recent experiences with products making it to retail that anyone with basic AutoCAD experience and more than two brain cells should have caught prior to production? Perhaps there should be a wiki of really stupid shit designers/engineers should avoid when creating a product to save us all the pain.
In probably less than 50 years first-world countries and their poorer allies will have tools far more precise and forgiving than bombs for eliminating undesirables. Imagine land-based humanoid drones that from a distance or at night look and move convincingly as people whose mission is to apprehend enemies and only maim or kill as a last resort. Imagine air-based drones the size of an eagle firing small, guided rockets with a payload only large enough to kill their target but leave anyone standing next to them unscathed. Combine the current technique of dividing drone functionality between members of small teams (target acquisition, movement, etc.), the exponential increase in intelligence-gathering current trends indicate the future holds and the rapid development of smaller, nimbler robots with semi-autonomous systems and you have the perfect recipe for the precision engagement of distant enemies. The future will bring a redefinition of the word "drone" to include nearly everything a soldier or humanitarian worker could ever be asked to do and more.
So yes, the usual human issues will still exist (territorial disputes, religious differences sparking violence, dictators and warlords seeking power, illegal trafficking of whatever, etc.), but the ability of governments to shape and/or resolve them through force will be unrecognizable with respect to the casualties received and inflicted. For example, you can't execute a robot. Even if you do it in the most horrendous way possible, film it and post it on Twitter people will just laugh their asses off. Any weapon (such as a bomb) with a blast radius of more than a few feet is going to cause collateral damage. If a drone of a foreign power killed my dad because he just happened to be in the same area as a known terrorist I would be understandably upset. I probably wouldn't start burning people alive or anything batshit crazy like that, but I empathize with the anger some of these people feel. Granted, that is but one component of the extreme violence being committed by radical groups such as ISIS, but nevertheless human nature and the desire for retribution can't be erased by statements of how precise bombs are or that infants blasted apart in their homes are unfortunate accidents. I don't know if bombs kill more terrorists than they create, but there will be a better way to deal with them and with a little time many of us will see it in stunning 8K on the news channel of our choice.
To answer TFA's question, technically "Yes" in that it informs the public of a newsworthy event, though it's trash journalism in that it emotionalizes the issue through a depiction of violence atypical of what Fox News viewers are accustomed to witnessing on the channel. I think they did it for the lulz and ratings. I don't think it was wrong or un-newsworthy, just tasteless. Things like that shouldn't be shown on a channel not widely known for showing such things due to the static nature of television. You could have had your child in the room and flipped to the channel 1 second after the video started, for god's sake. Real asshole move, Fox (disclaimer, my HTPC serves all my needs; I have no cable/satellite).
About ten years ago I started getting into cooking and cuisine have enjoyed and benefited from it since. What I began to realize on this journey based on observations of my own changing tastes as well as the unchanging tastes of everyone around me is that most people (at least in the U.S.) actually have no idea what good food is. Apparently having a lot of fat, salt and sugar constitutes a good meal and the rest isn't important. Frozen dinners? Delicious! McDonalds burgers? More please! It is an education problem, because it takes a little work before your palate can tell the difference between something that's been frozen more than once and something that is fresh. Knowing what's in your food and how it's made is also pretty enlightening, as you'll be far more hesitant to put much of it in your mouth.
Considering the state of general health these days, I'm surprised the government hasn't forced culinary and food education classes on our kids yet. As much as I hate the government forcing anything on anyone, this would be an exception.
matter how much you talk about the different ways the body metabolizes food, or all the different ways different peoples' bodies work, you can't change the fact that to lose weight you personally must eat fewer calories than you personally burn. If you eat fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight. It's a fact.
Were that somehow not a fact, we could hook obese people up to mile-high cylinders and we'd have a perpetual source of energy by harvesting the difference in energy between what they eat and what materializes out of thin air. Science has failed by not testing this, for certain.
If a doctor can find no medical reason why a person can't be vaccinated and they still choose not to be vaccinated then deport them. The creepiness of the government strapping you down screaming while they put needles in your arm (excluding executions) will be avoided, as will a bunch of diseased idiots walking around infecting the population like a pack of starving zombies. And you'll still have a choice.
Slashdot Mirror
This "build shit, destroy shit" cycle we humans seem stuck in is going do do us in some day. At least when we blow shit up on Earth it lands somewhere to be slowly buried over by soil. All that orbital debris is going to form a freaking shrapnel belt at some point and it'll be Russian roulette every time we launch and sipping tea in front of a Gatling gun to stay in orbit. Life is hard by its nature, but we seem hell bent on making it as hard as possible. Then again, maybe they used those old Lenovo ThinkPad batteries in the thing and no weaponry was involved...
I wonder if it would help to have a device placed between the ends of the severed spinal cords such that they're perfectly flush against it. The device would read/write impulses from/to both sides and work like a router in that it would enumerate each connection and be able to map one to another. A skin-tight suit of electrodes could be fitted on the person to assist with the mapping process. Initially the heart and lungs would need to be manually operated until the correct nerves could be mapped. The output nerves from the brain could be identified based on the patterns detected by the intermediary device. The heart and diaphragm could be manually stimulated with electrical impulses to determine the input nerves. Once the basic functions were mapped (with manual backups still in place) the patient would be told to repeatedly flex muscles or move limbs in specific ways, allowing the device to detect and test possible mappings. The electrodes in the body suit would record the mapping attempt results which combined with visual observation would help determine if the correct muscle was being stimulated. Even if this worked, there's the problem of the intermediary device being a permanent addition to their body and that the spinal cord ends couldn't be shifted on its surface without disrupting the mappings. The device would almost have to be organic, or somehow allow its logical mappings to become physical and permanent. They'd also probably just have the major mappings correct and require extensive rehabilitation to function normally and may have side effects that are never corrected such as at itch coming from the "wrong place".
This is only news to those who have had their head in the ground, listening to fox news and government shills.
Before clicking the article the words "head up their ass" were already on my fingertips. Nicely done.
Targeting a mall for a mass shooting or bombing would cause a big reaction, but if a video surfaces of soccer mom kidnapped and beheaded inside the United States all hell will break loose. 9/11, bombings, mass shootings...those are all terrible but they're a little more abstract psychologically because they affect a group of random people. The idea that a van could pull up next to you while walking the dog on the other hand is something that you might find difficult to stop thinking about. They've tried this in other countries (Australia, I think?), so unless there's some radical shift in sentiment (or existence) among terrorist groups it's only a matter of time.
No it means that you believed, what media and government was showing to you. When they talked about "enemys ower seas", "bloodi muslims etc", you believed them, becouse you can not believe, that the culprit was your own government.
You should be angry, becouse you do not have critical thinking.
You're right. I should have immediately driven up to New York and starting digging through the rubble looking for evidence with my CSI Miami forensic kit. Or perhaps watched the conspiracy videos on YouTube; those are fine examples of critical thinking. I'm sure your critical thinking skills are so finely honed you quickly figured out exactly what happened and why, perhaps in part due to the aluminum shielding your brain from the media/illuminati's mind control waves. In any case, you're missing my point, which was to provide an example of how aggression/anger/rage alters one's reasoning. PSA: Keep posting as Anonymous Coward, as they have eyes on you.
Stephen Hawking needs to stick to cosmology...he doesn't know *shit* about computing and human behavior.
"aggression" is such a ridiculously ill-defined term, it means virtually nothing scientifically
Without writing a book about it, simply defining aggression as "How easily a person get pissed off" is an easily-understood and practical definition. Some examples of the fruit of high aggression we could do without would include spousal abuse, road rage and war-mongering/retaliation. A specific example of that last one would be how I felt after 9/11 (which I no longer feel), which was basically, "Oh you fucked up now. We're going to bomb the shit out of every last one of you. Die, motherfuckers, etc." There's a significant and dangerous disconnect between how a calm person and an enraged person reasons and acts.
Thanks for the info. You can probably tell I'm not a network engineer. Gotta admit though, it sounded pretty clever until that damned reality bumped into it. :)
It wouldn't surprise me if when detecting bittorrent traffic AT&T disallowed connecting to any peers or seeds with an AT&T IP address. The downloader would still max out their up/downstream bandwidth, but it would be a single-edged sword as all their connected peers and seeds would be non-AT&T customers. AT&T would then have more available bandwidth (at the expense of the other ISPs) and could argue they were enhancing their customers' experience. A brilliant plan until other ISPs find out and do the same. Perhaps then AT&T could start their own VPN service marketed to their own customers under a different brand, touting unrestricted bittorrent connectivity as a selling point.
This is a strategy for demonstrating the absurdity of the current patent regime, right?
Unintentionally, no doubt. On the bright side the more absurdly and widely abused the system is the more ammunition for reforming it. I hope they cause a real mess spamming the USPTO with every possible patentable combination of words. Maybe they'll replace the USPTO staff with an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters to process them.
Judgement is also a driving skill and probably the most important one. Knowing the rules is irrelevant if your poor judgement causes you to ignore them. Alcohol only impairs judgement if you let it (up to a point, obviously). It's not as if you're possessed by a demon and literally no longer have control over your thoughts and actions. If you remain mindful that you're intoxicated the impulse to do something potentially unwise is immediately followed by the question "Is this wise" and you can decide to crush the impulse and not perform the action. The problem, other than people who just can't drive worth a damn in any case, is people who have too many drinks and remain in denial of their altered state. If you have a broken leg you can walk just fine with a crutch and a little care. Most drunk drivers throw away the crutch, pretend their leg is just fine, and sprint with obviously disastrous results.
They did that on Mythbusters, but it was between alcohol intoxication and sleep deprivation. Interestingly they found sleep deprivation to be equally (if not more) debilitating than alcohol intoxication.
I like the idea for your study, but it would be fun if they also had a test requiring the participants to send a text message or repeatedly answer the phone or set up their GPS while driving.
Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad
Face it, it explains everything.
This would be a useful equation if it weren't for the fact that the person in question was a fuckwad long before the anonymity or audience came. The idea that a thoughtful, virtuous person somehow becomes a troll because of anonymity and an audience is bullshit. The only thing anonymity does is melt away the facade of civility a fuckwad has carefully crafted for themselves.
It's the geek's time-honored right to rant and whine that Big Media produces nothing but remakes and sequels. But when given the chance to show what he can do, it always Star Trek: Back To The Future.
It is ironic, though it may be because the Big Media remakes and sequels are often so shitty that we geeks spend the remainder of our lives trying desperately to scrub their memories from our minds. For example, if Alien 3 and 4 had been as good as the first two I would be cool with a new one every few years until the end of time. Another issue is that people tend to think sequels and remakes come at the cost of the exclusion of new/original works. As if making Star Wars XIV somehow prevents someone else from making a Heinlein film.
How did they secure the rights to make these episodes? You'd think that would be the most expensive and most restrictive part.
They didn't. CBS or Paramount or whoever generally turns a blind eye to projects like these as long as they don't make any money. Other than the recent films (which arguably are only Star Trek in name), the franchise is dead. It's possible even that they're keeping an eye on how the public receives it in consideration of creating a new official television series. I think if there is to be a new series they should put it on HBO and go for broke. Good actors, good writers, the occasional full-frontal and beheading/gibbing will make for some unforgettable Trek, if nothing else.
There simply have been too many advances in the last 40 years. The cheap sets, cheesey special effects and bad acting just aren't tolerable any more.
Either they're still tolerable or you haven't been watching much television lately. There are a lot of good shows, but holy shit, the majority are pretty awful. I think of ToS more as on-screen theater than some gritty, brutally-realistic drama. It's like Shakespeare. You gotta watch it with a certain perspective and malleability in order to enjoy it.
The problem is that Star Trek isn't a very good science fiction premise.
Premise is largely irrelevant; it's more about the execution with special attention to commanding performances and excellent writing. The problem with Star Trek (and I've seen every episode of every incarnation and all the films) is that it's hit and miss with the acting and writing. I kinda like the premise, as most sci-fi is about "us" versus "them". The concept of exploration, the search for knowledge and the betterment of the human race and the galaxy as one large community is something everyone on this planet could take some lessons from. Star Trek is an allegory about our own struggles here on Earth.
That being said, I'd love to see more quality science fiction on television and film drawn from the works of our greatest authors.
I wish your post could be modded to +infinity, or perhaps there should be a "Holy fucking shit, chisel those words in stone in a national park somewhere" mod. Nicely said.
Banning things that people want leads to an increase in crime, and while you may say the only crime will be selling tobacco, for some reason criminals with no recourse for being wronged (since it's illegal) will take reprisal into their own hands. Prohibition created the mob. Making marijuana illegal created countless videos of narcos cutting necks and chainsawing people on meat hooks. Yes, lets make more shit people want illegal and see if it works.
Incorrect. Buying a *single* ticket is worth it, since it puts you on the playing field at least. It's buying 2+ tickets that aren't worth the money, Every ticket after the first raises your chances by such an incredibly small amount that it's not worth it. The first ticket raising your chances above a flat zero is worth it though.
Interesting point, although the debate regarding the difference between zero and 1/150,000,000 seems pointless when you begin to consider the odds of getting killed on any given day just walking outside your front door.
I think the lottery is a win in general. Yes, you have people who become addicted or can't afford to spend the money, but that's life. On the plus side a lot of people sincerely enjoy playing and much of the cash goes to public works and schools and such. It's practically an optional tax, and the idea of taxes being optional I find fantastic.
No, there's a new paper and THAT'S THE LAST WORD. Everyone update their recommendations and reprint their pamphlets, immediately! I think this is what Scott Adams was ranting about a few weeks ago. You're right, though, and one other thing that alcohol does even if drinking alone is to relax you, lift your spirits and get your mind off whatever stressful events actually are draining your life force. I appreciate people doing all this research, but they need to show a little humility. Hard work doesn't mean you're right.
So the obvious question is, what kind of drugs are these people taking? Is no one at a Fortune 500 company capable of thinking anything through these days? Do the programmers who think these features are "cool": and "awesome" not have managers with a three-digit IQ?
In recent years I've been noticing this in a growing number of products. I'm not an engineer or QA person though as a programmer I may have better insight into design than most, but it seems everything from cars to coffee makers have one or more obvious, critical design flaws that somehow make it through every check at well-known companies and all the way to retail.
My only theories are that 1) People are getting more stupid generally, 2) QA departments are incompetent, 3) designers and engineers are incompetent, and 4) consumers are either apathetic or incapable of recognizing [in]effective design.
In any case, anyone else have any recent experiences with products making it to retail that anyone with basic AutoCAD experience and more than two brain cells should have caught prior to production? Perhaps there should be a wiki of really stupid shit designers/engineers should avoid when creating a product to save us all the pain.
In probably less than 50 years first-world countries and their poorer allies will have tools far more precise and forgiving than bombs for eliminating undesirables. Imagine land-based humanoid drones that from a distance or at night look and move convincingly as people whose mission is to apprehend enemies and only maim or kill as a last resort. Imagine air-based drones the size of an eagle firing small, guided rockets with a payload only large enough to kill their target but leave anyone standing next to them unscathed. Combine the current technique of dividing drone functionality between members of small teams (target acquisition, movement, etc.), the exponential increase in intelligence-gathering current trends indicate the future holds and the rapid development of smaller, nimbler robots with semi-autonomous systems and you have the perfect recipe for the precision engagement of distant enemies. The future will bring a redefinition of the word "drone" to include nearly everything a soldier or humanitarian worker could ever be asked to do and more.
So yes, the usual human issues will still exist (territorial disputes, religious differences sparking violence, dictators and warlords seeking power, illegal trafficking of whatever, etc.), but the ability of governments to shape and/or resolve them through force will be unrecognizable with respect to the casualties received and inflicted. For example, you can't execute a robot. Even if you do it in the most horrendous way possible, film it and post it on Twitter people will just laugh their asses off. Any weapon (such as a bomb) with a blast radius of more than a few feet is going to cause collateral damage. If a drone of a foreign power killed my dad because he just happened to be in the same area as a known terrorist I would be understandably upset. I probably wouldn't start burning people alive or anything batshit crazy like that, but I empathize with the anger some of these people feel. Granted, that is but one component of the extreme violence being committed by radical groups such as ISIS, but nevertheless human nature and the desire for retribution can't be erased by statements of how precise bombs are or that infants blasted apart in their homes are unfortunate accidents. I don't know if bombs kill more terrorists than they create, but there will be a better way to deal with them and with a little time many of us will see it in stunning 8K on the news channel of our choice.
To answer TFA's question, technically "Yes" in that it informs the public of a newsworthy event, though it's trash journalism in that it emotionalizes the issue through a depiction of violence atypical of what Fox News viewers are accustomed to witnessing on the channel. I think they did it for the lulz and ratings. I don't think it was wrong or un-newsworthy, just tasteless. Things like that shouldn't be shown on a channel not widely known for showing such things due to the static nature of television. You could have had your child in the room and flipped to the channel 1 second after the video started, for god's sake. Real asshole move, Fox (disclaimer, my HTPC serves all my needs; I have no cable/satellite).
About ten years ago I started getting into cooking and cuisine have enjoyed and benefited from it since. What I began to realize on this journey based on observations of my own changing tastes as well as the unchanging tastes of everyone around me is that most people (at least in the U.S.) actually have no idea what good food is. Apparently having a lot of fat, salt and sugar constitutes a good meal and the rest isn't important. Frozen dinners? Delicious! McDonalds burgers? More please! It is an education problem, because it takes a little work before your palate can tell the difference between something that's been frozen more than once and something that is fresh. Knowing what's in your food and how it's made is also pretty enlightening, as you'll be far more hesitant to put much of it in your mouth.
Considering the state of general health these days, I'm surprised the government hasn't forced culinary and food education classes on our kids yet. As much as I hate the government forcing anything on anyone, this would be an exception.
matter how much you talk about the different ways the body metabolizes food, or all the different ways different peoples' bodies work, you can't change the fact that to lose weight you personally must eat fewer calories than you personally burn. If you eat fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight. It's a fact.
Were that somehow not a fact, we could hook obese people up to mile-high cylinders and we'd have a perpetual source of energy by harvesting the difference in energy between what they eat and what materializes out of thin air. Science has failed by not testing this, for certain.
If a doctor can find no medical reason why a person can't be vaccinated and they still choose not to be vaccinated then deport them. The creepiness of the government strapping you down screaming while they put needles in your arm (excluding executions) will be avoided, as will a bunch of diseased idiots walking around infecting the population like a pack of starving zombies. And you'll still have a choice.