(1) I rarely use my hazard lights in any of these ways, so I'm not going to try to justify their detailed use. I was just trying to point out that some of your claims about illegality and inapplicability were false. (2) Why not use them in rush hour traffic? Because they are used to signal an UNEXPECTED speed differential. If you are approaching a car in rush hour traffic with good visibility, you'll see a mass of cars ahead which you're obviously approaching fast and have a clue to slow down. In poor visibility, you often can't see that context and also may not be able to judge approach speed as well. Also, if visibility is very poor and you can't we far ahead, you need as much warning as possible to slow down. If just spotting a car through the fog/rain/snow, the flashing lights say immediately that you need to slow down... And perhaps even be prepared to stop.
Exactly. Why don't people discuss the millions of small decisions
Agreed. This situation is rare enough for discussion to be useless at this stage of AI in cars.
"how quickly shall I go through this stop sign?", "should I signal this turn or is it too much hassle?". Those are where the existing human software is causing bad consequences on a daily basis.
Huh? You don't go through a "stop" sign -- you, er, STOP.
You ALWAYS use turn signals.
I'm pretty sure your examples are of the non-negotiable kind that AI cars can be easily programmed to obey in all cases.
Turning on your hazard lights while driving is illegal in most states, and for good reason.
False. Hazard light use is regulated while in motion in many states, but it's only completely banned in rouighly 10 states. (And even in many of them, funeral processions are an exception.)
Some states don't put any regulations on hazard light use (about 1/3), and most of the rest require an "emergency" situation or a "traffic hazard."
Did you know that many makes and models use the exact same lights for your hazard lights as the turn and/or brake lights? And guess which behavior wins out? The hazard lights, of course.
Brake lights on many cars do in fact override the hazard lights.
Do you know when the hazard lights are supposed to be used? When you're stuck on the side of the road or stalled in traffic. Not for "Oh no it's raining hard I want to make sure the people behind me notice the bad weather" or "hey it's really foggy and no one can see me" or even "Hey I know I should be trying to stop right now but I am going to fumble for the hazard lights while I hit the brakes." So please don't teach driverless cars to do the unsafe things that you do.
I agree that those are all bad reasons to use hazard lights. However, most truckers (and a lot of other people) use hazard lights on highways to indicate something different: low speed (often below the posted minimum), which would count as a "traffic hazard" in most states.
I think you may be misunderstanding many people's use of hazard lights in bad weather. You should NOT turn on your hazard lights because you're afraid other cars can't see you. (If that's the case, conditions are bad enough that you probably should pull off the road.) But when weather conditions get bad, often it's unsafe to drive above the minimum posted speed on a highway -- in most states, it's acceptable to use hazards to warn other drivers around you that you are traveling slowly. (Truckers do this all the time when ascending hills and going slow.) If you don't warn other drivers who may be traveling at full highway speed -- even though such a speed is totally unsafe for conditions -- they may not realize how slow you are going until they are too close to brake.
Some states explicitly specify that hazard lights are to be used when traveling at unexpected low speeds. And the Uniform Vehicle Code states clearly:
The driver of any vehicle equipped with vehicular hazard warning lights may activate such lights whenever necessary to warn the operators of following vehicles of the presence of a traffic hazard ahead of the signaling vehicle, or to warn the operators of other vehicles that the signaling vehicle may itself constitute a traffic hazard.
Anyhow, the quoted section of the Uniform Vehicle Code could be interpreted in such a way as to allow behavior in the form GP suggested, i.e., to warn others that a vehicle is coming abruptly to a stop. That will frequently constitute a traffic hazard.
If it's not entertaining at normal speed, it's not entertaining at any speed.
Agreed. This seems like someone listening to pop music on fast forward. Why? Just choose a better song you actually like better.
Just like music, film and TV has a "rhythm" and a temporal "feel." If you speed it up, you mess with that rhythm, which the director (and editor, etc.) worked so hard to create. Unless the TV show or film is already bad, it probably won't be improved by tampering with its fundamental design.
I was re-watching one of my favorite silent films, Buster Keaton's "The General" on DVD and I found out that PowerDVD (this was at around 2003) could play back 25% faster with sound, which made the film even funnier!
That's also because The General is frankly one of the best movies of all time. It's fantastic. (Seriously, AFI listed it as #18 on its list of the best films of all time.) There are very few silent films on that list, and certainly none rival The General (except perhaps Chaplin's The Gold Rush).
The real test would be to see whether speeding up would make Griffith's Intolerance seem less intolerably long....
But Washington directs and influences too much of the economy, e.g., the military-industrial complex is a massive jobs and pork project for literally millions of people. The federal executive branch has so grossly overstepped its constitutional functions that it's horrifying and disgusting. Trump and Clinton would be far less dangerous to the republic if the office was considerably more modest and Americans didn't treat the President as some messianic figure who will deliver them jobs and other goodies!
Just wanted to note, since you mentioned the fall of the Roman Republic, that this sort of thing is precisely the flaw that arguably brought down the Roman Republic. The "root password" to any political system's governing structure is always appeasement of the masses. Montesquieu skips over the early elements of this story in Rome, but one of the harbingers of doom for the Roman Republic happened with the Gracchi brothers, who were some of the earliest Romans to seek radical populist reform. Concern about the rural poor and the plight of military veterans led to their attempts to circumvent many of the traditional Roman principles... including ignoring previous checks on power and re-election in their offices (Tribune of the Plebs). The Roman senators had the good sense to club Tiberius Gracchus to death.
The parallels to the Great Depression, Dust Bowl (affecting rural poor), marches of WWI veterans on Washington, and FDR's shocking election to 4 consecutive terms are just too numerous to go into a detailed comparison. After FDR's "New Deal" was repeatedly thrown out by the Supreme Court as being unconstitutional, finally the switch in time that saved nine overrode federalist principles in the Constitution that had functioned since 1789.
Now, of course the U.S. has gone on a different course than Rome did (with the upheavals under Sulla, Marius, etc.). But it's a little scary to me that the Roman Republic essentially lasted only 84 years after Tiberius Gracchus set it on the path toward ruin in 133 BC. Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC, and was effectively declared dictator for life (after a series of consecutively consulships), effectively moving the Republic into an imperialist empire.
I'll just note that FDR was elected in 1932 with populist rhetoric to overturn the old Constitutional constraints on government power. It's now 2016, 84 years later, and we have the threat of a Trump presidency, a guy who seems to view his position in the world as dictatorial to say the least.
I'm not some crazy numerologist -- just noting that the timeline between when the Constitutional breakdown started to occur and where we are now is a shocking coincidence. It's sad that the generation around the 1930s was when Latin study and Roman study of the classics really started to be expunged from school curricula. For the past several decades we've been starting out on a track toward dissolution of a Republic and toward an Empire -- something the Founders, who were very aware of Roman precedent when they designed the government, hoped to prevent. But few people know about such history anymore, so they don't see the danger.
For all you guys who like to make fun of liberal arts majors... here's why history is important to know something about: to avoid making the same mistakes others have in the past.
This is a common misconception, but the first Chromebooks were released in 2011, whereas Peppermint released in 2010 and was in development before that.. so if anyone copied anyone.....
Interesting! Thanks for the correction. Yeah, reading about it now, it appears that Peppermint was originally inspired by a desire to integrate social media and various cloud elements directly into the desktop. You're right that it predated Chromebooks... I didn't remember the timeline correctly.
Does Peppermint provide some value to somebody that you can't get from, say, Xubuntu? What's this distro's raison d'etre?
I haven't tried it, but my sense is that it was originally created as an answer to Chromebooks, i.e., a distro that focused heavily on integrating web applications into the desktop with SSBs, etc. Like Chromebooks, the system requirements were lower because of the reliance on web-based apps. Also, like Linux Mint (its namesake), Peppermint has made certain choices about user interface, settings, etc. that many seem to prefer to the Canonical Ubuntu variants.
Now more distros can do these things more easily, so Peppermint is less distinctive, other than still being a slimmed down version of a standard distro, requiring less RAM and HD space.
You have conveniently ignored at least one item from GP posting. Specifically, that claim:
the definition of 'alcohol related accident' meaning ANY person involved having a measurable amount of alcohol (including passengers and pedestrians) leads to the inflating of numbers and 'proof' that we need even stupider laws.
(If true) that alone seems like a problem negating ANY meaningful statistics on a number of "alcohol-related" accidents.
I ignored it because it's irrelevant to everything I posted. The statistics I was quoting were from studies based on drunk DRIVERS, not on "alcohol-related accidents" or whatever. There tend to be pretty good and reliable records of drunk DRIVERS because most states tend to put such people in jail for at least a few days when they happen. (Also, something I wasn't clear on -- the numbers I gave were lowball estimates from studies for the most part. I didn't want to be accused of exaggerating anything.)
Yes, it's true that "alcohol-related accident" numbers are sometimes inflated by MADD and related groups. It happens with any interest group like that. And, frankly, they may sometimes have a point -- driver distraction is a huge issue, regardless of the cause. As someone who has (in my younger days) driven a car full of puking screaming drunk people around, I can assure you that I -- even though sober -- was not driving at my best due to distractions. If I ended up in a car accident on such an occasion, I think (depending on the exact circumstances) there might be pretty good justification for classifying it as "alcohol-related."
But inflating the number of "alcohol-related accidents" has no impact on studies looking at actual drunk DRIVERS and how many time a drunk DRIVER is charged in an accident, which is what my post was about... as was the supposed "FACT" cited by the parent.
If a large enough fraction of any electorate wants a do-over on a referendum, then why not? Why does this have to be a winner-take-all scenario?
1. What would that fraction be?
A number of voters greater than the margin of the vote, in this case a bit less than 1.3 million. Theoretically, a number that large could all consist of people who want to switch sides (though unlikely in this case), but a re-vote could be triggered.
If you think this is unjust, then let the other side start a petition to NOT allow more revotes. If they can get a greater number of verified voters to agree NOT to allow a revote, fine. But I sort of doubt that.
About 48% of Americans didn't vote for Obama in 2008, perhaps we should have had a do-over in that?
Poor comparison. The U.S. nominally operates under a Constitution, which specifies the process by which voting for presidents happens. There's nothing in the Constitution that requires a do-over when the voting margin is small (as we painfully discovered in 2000).
IF the referendum which was already voted on had specified "this matter shall be considered as settled for the next four years and no further votes may take place until then," then maybe you'd have a case, similar to the election of a president. But that's not the case here -- and in a democratic system, the people should have the right to reconsider past actions unless they have legislated against such reconsideration. (That's why, for example, many constitutions have amendment clauses specifying supermajorities for amendments: they want to ensure that once something is adopted into the constitution, it "sticks" unless a LARGE number of people want it changed.)
Also, if you want to be technical, Obama received roughly 69.5 million votes in 2008. The US population in 2008 was about 304 million, so technically 77% of Americans didn't vote for Obama in 2008. Or, well, to be fair, only adults can vote, so it isn't really fair to include children. So, since there were roughly 230 million adults in the US in 2008, that means roughly 70% of Americans didn't vote for Obama.
(Note: I'm not just being a jerk here. The point is that a large number of people don't participate in elections. And unless there is something barring reconsideration of the UK referendum here, I think it's perfectly reasonable for the millions of people who didn't vote because they didn't realize how important this was to have a chance to voice their opinion.)
It's it's completely anti-democratic unless your petition has the support of more people than voted to stay, and all the people signing the petition were verified as being eligible to vote.
Huh? How precisely is asking the public to vote on an issue "anti-democratic"?? It's clear that a large section of the populace either didn't participate or cast their vote without realizing the dire implications of their choice. Whether or not that segment of the population is a majority, from the reports of yesterday, it seems pretty likely that the number of voters who want clarification may be greater than margin of the vote (less than 1.3 million difference between the two sides).
At a minimum, I think it's perfectly reasonable for a revote to be requested if a number of voters greater than the margin of the difference requests it.
It's the equivalent of losing a contest and then continually shouting "I want a do over!" or "No fair, I wasn't ready!" or "Best N out of 2N-1!!" until you get the outcome you want. It's pathetic, grade school, childish shit.
You know what's "childish"? Acting like a huge decision that could impact an entire country's future for decades to come shouldn't be debated again because "We called it the first time! Too bad, you lose!"
If the margin was 90-10 with 90% of the population voting, or if this was the fourth request for a revote, I would agree that you have a point.
But democracy is determined by voting. If a large segment of the population in concerned about an issue, there should be a vote. Denying a vote based on a childish notion of "We're already done, suckers! You losers!" is actually the anti-democratic notion here, no matter which side of the issue you favor.
"Remember, Uber and Lyft were not forced out of Austin. They simply left because they didn't want to play by the rules."
To be fair, they left because Austin changed the rules.
To be fair, they left because Austin changed the rules to require background checks like all other professional drivers (taxi drivers, limo drivers, bus drivers, etc.) operating in the city.
Or, as GP said, "they simply left because they didn't want to play by the rules" (which everybody else does).
Fact: accident and injuries caused by driver impairment happen at levels around.15 and that number has not changed no matter what they've done with the laws. The people you need to be worried about are habitual drunks who have no regard for anything, and that's another thing that laws and checkpoints and other modern bullshit does not change.
Uh, NO.
There's no "magic switch" that happens after your blood alcohol level goes above 0.15. It's a gradual ramp upward of increased risk of accident, beginning somewhere around 0.05, based on a number of studies.
By the time you reach 0.08 (the threshold of many municipalities), you're at somewhere between twice the risk and 7 times the risk of a sober person of causing an accident. (Different studies come up with different figures, but there's a clear and significant relationship.) By the time you get up to your proposed limit of 0.15, you're up to about 25 times greater chance of causing an accident than a sober person.
It *is* true that the *majority* of drunk-driving accidents are caused by people who are significantly impaired, something like 75% of them by people with 0.15 and up. But that still leaves a significant number of people below your threshold who cause accidents.
So I at least won't joke about actual DUI but I will joke about the laws, and I will insult at every opportunity the profiteering and ruining of countless lives for no reason by our 'justice' system.
There are obviously screwed up aspects of drunk-driving laws, as there are with most things. But your assumptions ("FACT") are NOT true. Even a couple of drinks is often enough to begin to impact your driving abilities, and if you're driving over the limit (whether 0.08 or 0.1 or whatever), you ARE at significantly greater risk of causing an accident than a sober person.
Be responsible. Stop kidding yourself and saying, "Yeah I'm okay to drive" when you've had 5 or 6 beers (which is what it takes for a typical adult male of average weight to get to around 0.15). I can't believe any mods have modded this up as "informative."
Eh, pizza ovens usually get set around 550 degrees.
That depends on the style of pizza. If you're baking traditional Neapolitan style pizza (i.e., the kind they make in Naples, Italy, the place where pizza is kinda from), the official regulations say you need a minimum cooking surface temperature of about 900F, and a minimum oven dome temperature of about 800F. Cooking time should be no longer than 90 seconds.
Even at 500 degrees you have to put the pizza on a screen or it will burn on contact with the oven.
I bake pizza all the time at home at the maximum my oven will do (550F). A little while back, I actually invested in a thick steel plate to get more heat into my pizza dough faster, compared to a traditional baking stone (which really can't make great pizza at only 550F in a home oven).
Somehow I bake pizzas all the time pumping the heat in as fast as my oven can at over 500F, and my pizzas don't burn.
Again, it depends on the type of dough. Neapolitan dough is intended for 800-900F ovens, traditional "New York style" dough is often baked lower, usually somewhere in the 500-600F range or a bit higher. Chicago deep dish is baked even lower than that.
I wonder how the representative was able to say, "...For your situation, you would have to dispute the payment with your bank." without either falling over laughing, or suffering a crippling attack of guilt. Or both.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a Comcast supervisor who called me one Sunday over a decade ago.
The background to this call is that I had moved between states and had Comcast (then the only option) in both states. Comcast managed to screw up just about everything possible in billing me for closing my account in one state and then opening the new one. Long story short: I ended up with roughly $500 in illegitimate charges and fees, which required the intervention of the Better Business Bureau and two state agencies to force Comcast to resolve.
Anyhow, my favorite conversation occurred this particular Sunday with a supervisor. I had previously attempted to resolve my problems by calling Comcast, who told me that I needed to go to the local Comcast office in person -- but the local office proceeded to tell me that they couldn't do anything and I needed to call. The next call I insisted that I speak with someone who could resolve my bill immediately and when I was told that was impossible, I asked to talk to a supervisor.
I was informed that I could not talk to a supervisor ("Our system doesn't work that way!") but they would put in a request for a supervisor to call me back within 72 hours.
A couple days pass, and a cheery-voiced supervisor indeed calls me on Sunday afternoon. I swear I am not making this up, but this is roughly how the conversation went:
[Comcast]: Hi, I'm a supervisor.
[me]: Hi. [I explain situation.] I need you to just fix this billing error right now.
[Comcast]: I'm sorry, but those rates are set by your local market, so you'll need to talk to your local office.
[me]: I tried that. They told me they can't do it, and I need to talk to you. Please just fix this.
[Comcast]: Well, I'm sorry but those rates are set by your local market, and I don't have access to that information.
[me]: Where are you?
[Comcast]: I'm in [state on other side of the U.S. from me].
[me]: Well, could you maybe connect me with a supervisor from my local market to resolve this??
[Comcast]: Well, obviously I can't do that now. [Laughs.] I mean, it's Sunday afternoon! Nobody's working.
[me]: Huh? Well, why are you calling me?... Oh... forget it -- okay [I think I see a solution] -- so I'm told your system allows you to put in requests to talk to supervisors. Could you put in a request in the system to have a supervisor from my local market to call me back... you know, one who could actually resolve my problem?
[Comcast]: I'm sorry sir, but our system doesn't work that way.
[me, exasperated]: Then WHY DID YOU CALL ME?!? You took time on your Sunday afternoon when no one else is apparently working to call me and tell me... that you can do nothing to help me?!?
[Comcast, sounding cheery]: Well, sir, we are committed to returning calls within 72 hours, so I wanted to get back to you.
[me]: [grumble, grumble, feeling like I'm trapped in a Kafka novel]
[Comcast, after a short pause, sounding even more chipper]: Well, sir, is there anything else I can help you with today?
[me]: Huh? You did NOTHING to help me! This call makes no sense. I really don't understand what just happened. I don't understand what this call is. I'm sorry, I'm just going to have to sit down and try to process the insanity of this situation. Goodbye.
Since that phone call, I've never talked to another Comcast representative when an error occurs. This was just the most insane encounter with Comcast customer "service" I had, out of maybe a dozen or more in attempts to resolve the billing issues that happened during one move. After that, I went straight to government regulatory agencies when I experienced any problems... which thankfully I had few of. And even more thankfully, I've
this thing isn't doing anything that your $2000 486 couldn't do in 16MB
I hate to be "that guy," but this set of specs sounds a bit off. In the heyday of 486's, if I remember correctly (and this was a long time ago), 4 MB or less was standard. 8 MB was quite big. 16 MB was almost unheard of until 486's were on their way out in favor of Pentiums. And when 486's were most popular, RAM was nearly $100/MB, so your 16 MB rig would've cost a LOT more than $2000. (Just from a quick search -- Dell's top-of-the-line rig in 1993 was a 486, 8 MB of RAM, and 320 MB hard drive for $4,400.)
I agree that the word "sharing" needs to be banned from this stuff, but you're blaming it on the wrong people. It isn't "hipsters" or even "word erosion" -- this is a term deliberately used by companies like Uber and Airbnb to try to avoid legal consequences and regulation. If you say I'm not running a taxi service but merely "ride-sharing" I don't need to obey regulations for taxis, get it? A hotel might need to collect taxes and have pesky things like extra insurance and posted exit plans in case of emergency, but if I'm "sharing" my vacant apartment with you for a few nights, I'm magically not operating a hotel and don't have to pay attention to those rules. The term isn't a case of "eroding" language: it's deliberately employed by these companies to give a misleading impression through obfuscating terminology.
Courts are a PITA. I don't mind at all having arbitration clauses.
There are various problems with arbitration clauses in cases like this, but the biggest one is that most arbitrations are not public record. That's a BIG problem for combating systemic abuses, since future plaintiffs won't be able to determine what wrongdoing may have come up in previous actions.
There are problems with courts and class action suits, too, of course. (And in many settlements for court cases, some details are private too -- though at least a record of an action will often exist in public documents.) But forcing people to settle claims "behind closed doors" is just a recipe for abuse of power in companies. It completely blows up the basic standards for legal accountability.
Whether you agree with drug testing for welfare or not, there is a bid difference between testing for handouts, and testing for tax penalty avoidance. A complete lack of comprehension of said difference is the most disappointing thing about such a proposal.
While I think such a proposal will never be implemented, what is most disappointing to ME about this discussion is the lack of comprehension of justice and fairness in economic systems. Instead, everyone seems to be acting like there's some sort of strict demarcation between "my money" and "the rest of society," when in reality society is necessary for you to make your money, to profit from your skills, and to spend your money on goods that make you happy.
Your perspective fails the basic "Justice as Fairness" doctrine espoused in one of the greatest works of political philosophy and ethics from the 20th century, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice.
Rawls begins with the idea that we should design a moral economic and political system behind a "veil of ignorance," i.e., not knowing what value our personal skills and abilities may have to society. After all, you may have been born with innate skills that make you rich in one society, but in another you might be the stupidest or least talented person alive. It's only by imagining what's fair to that latter person that we should make decisions about how to structure things.
Rawls ultimately comes up with what to me seems to be a pretty darn insightful idea about fairness -- which is that obviously inequality benefits us all in a society. Smart people may get rich by inventing cool stuff, and by doing so, they bring up the standard of living of all of us. Thus, a just society needs to allow them an incentive (e.g., more money) to promote our collective well-being.
But, Rawls says, the point at which we stop that inequality is when the extra money for the rich stops benefitting the society as a whole. At some point rich people just get more and more wealth, but it doesn't actually help the poorest to improve their quality of life (and often begins to make the poorest WORSE off). And again going back to the veil of ignorance, if you didn't know what your talent would be before entering in a society (and you might have ended up on the bottom), you probably would say that's not fair for all. Collectively, we need to design the rules to benefit us all, because rich people don't exist in a vacuum.
So -- going to the present proposal, the question becomes: We've apparently decided that we want to drug-test the poor to ensure that society's resources will be used well. If we agree to that, why not tax the rich before giving them a tax break?
Rawls would say that the question should be rephrased in terms of social benefit -- no one has a "right" to be taxed according to a difference scheme. There's no "inalienable right" to have capital gains taxed at a lower rate than other income. So, we have to ask -- by allowing rich people to buy drugs with the money from their tax break, do we actually benefit society as a whole? If you woke up in a society and just happened to be the stupidest and most untalented person, would you think that was a fair thing to grant rich people to improve society as a whole? Or would it be wasting resources on a rich-people tax break that could be used to actually benefit other people?
Again, I don't think this is a practical proposal. But in terms of justice and fairness, I think you're asking the wrong questions. "My money" does not exist in a vacuum. You get to live your life through the benefits of the rest of society. You have no inalienable rights to whatever complex set of tax deductions you'd like.
It's not fiction. It's a future documentary from an alternate universe. The Time Macheen depicted in the movie is real. The only thing is it malfunctions and each time it's run (that is, each time the heroes realize it doesn't exist) it bumps that universe over one and closer to ours.
Absolutely. I have to admit that I love the Time Masheen as is:
... We are going to take you back... First to the year 1939 when Charlie Chaplin and his evil Nazi regime enslaved Europe and tried to take over the world. But then an even greater force emerged: The 'UN'. And the 'UN' un-Nazied the world... forever!"
I've never even heard of the association between Citigroup and "thank you", and I'm willing to bet plenty of English-speaking humans on this planet also don't subscribe or recognize this marketing gimmick. I also have a really hard time believing this causes you confusion.
Wow... I gotta wind up for this one. It's a really doozy. Woo... wait for it... WOO... here it comes... WOOOOO... OKAY, EVERYBODY TOGETHER NOW!!!!....
WHOOOOOOOOOOOSH!!!!!!
P.S. Why both this post AND the parent are both modded "Insightful" is incredibly bizarre to me. Are the mods on crack this morning??
CO2 Levels Likely to Stay Above 400PPM for the Rest of Our Lives
Umm, but Ray Kurzweil told me if I take 200 pills per day and survive to the Singularity (which, apparently, is coming soon to a neocortex near you), then I'll live forever. And so will you.
Does that mean CO2 levels will stay that high forever? Just wonderin'...
Coursera appropriated that content and is denying access to it
Hogwash. Coursera didn't "appropriate" anything. They just made it available, for free. Then they stopped.
Agreed. No company or internet service who hosted something for FREE has an obligation to keep hosting said content for FREE forever. They're not "denying access" to content; they're just not going to host it anymore.
If the original creator failed to keep a backup, that is not Coursera's fault.
It surprises me that people haven't figured this out about the internet yet. I realized it 20 years ago.
Two rules that constitute the grand oxymoron of internet content durability:
(1) Once you put something on the internet, it may be on the internet FOREVER. (Corollary: Be careful what you post; it could follow you for the rest of your life.)
(2) Anything that's on the internet could disappear FOREVER at any time. (Corollary: If you actually want to preserve something, you need to download it and be responsible for preserving it yourself.)
Unfortunately, many people haven't caught on to this. A century from now historians will be looking back in puzzlement at the "Dark Decades" between the end of paper records and the beginning of more permanent digital archives, where huge amounts of electronic content was created but then lost forever. Meanwhile, I'm sure most of the meaningless Tweets and Facebook posts of drunken party photos will still be around for historians to assess....
If you're reading text instead of watching someone talking, you're in mortal danger of paying attention to someone who isn't attractive . The horror.
This is true. But it's not just attractiveness. It's body language. It's the whole framing and presentation of the thing.
It's not by coincidence that when the ancient Roman Cicero, one of the greatest orators of all time, was killed by political enemies, they cut off his hands and nailed them to the place he gave his speeches. While some have interpreted this to be a way of punishing the "hands that wrote his speeches," it's likely that at least one reason (if not the primary one) was because of the role of gestures in the delivery of orations at the time. Without microphones in ancient Rome, speakers who wanted "those in the back" to understand them necessarily made use of formalized gesture to emphasize points and to enhance argument. (You see the same thing in stage actors when they use enhanced gestures without microphones today.) Ancient treatises on persuasive speaking repeatedly mention the importance of body language and gestures. As Quintilian wrote: "As for the hands, without which all action would be crippled and enfeebled, it is scarcely possible to describe the variety of their motions, since they are almost as expressive as words. For other portions of the body may help the speaker, whereas the hands may almost be said to speak."
Anyhow, this could all lead up to a silly joke about Italians who 'talk with their hands." But even if most modern methods of expression don't use these stylized body motions, good persuasive speakers are very familiar with how one's body language and movements can impact the reception of an argument.
And whether you're dealing with audio or video, the SOUND of a speaker is critical in conveying meaning and tone (as we all know from that time we sent an email which was grossly misinterpreted).
TL;DR -- Video (or real-life speaking, for that matter) has the potential for MUCH greater manipulation of viewers than text. Politicians have known this and have exploited it for millennia. Even an ancient Roman could have told you that text was useful for serious study and critique, whereas oratory was all about manipulation of your audience.
Slashdot Mirror
(1) I rarely use my hazard lights in any of these ways, so I'm not going to try to justify their detailed use. I was just trying to point out that some of your claims about illegality and inapplicability were false. (2) Why not use them in rush hour traffic? Because they are used to signal an UNEXPECTED speed differential. If you are approaching a car in rush hour traffic with good visibility, you'll see a mass of cars ahead which you're obviously approaching fast and have a clue to slow down. In poor visibility, you often can't see that context and also may not be able to judge approach speed as well. Also, if visibility is very poor and you can't we far ahead, you need as much warning as possible to slow down. If just spotting a car through the fog/rain/snow, the flashing lights say immediately that you need to slow down... And perhaps even be prepared to stop.
Exactly. Why don't people discuss the millions of small decisions
Agreed. This situation is rare enough for discussion to be useless at this stage of AI in cars.
"how quickly shall I go through this stop sign?", "should I signal this turn or is it too much hassle?". Those are where the existing human software is causing bad consequences on a daily basis.
Huh? You don't go through a "stop" sign -- you, er, STOP.
You ALWAYS use turn signals.
I'm pretty sure your examples are of the non-negotiable kind that AI cars can be easily programmed to obey in all cases.
Turning on your hazard lights while driving is illegal in most states, and for good reason.
False. Hazard light use is regulated while in motion in many states, but it's only completely banned in rouighly 10 states. (And even in many of them, funeral processions are an exception.)
Some states don't put any regulations on hazard light use (about 1/3), and most of the rest require an "emergency" situation or a "traffic hazard."
Did you know that many makes and models use the exact same lights for your hazard lights as the turn and/or brake lights? And guess which behavior wins out? The hazard lights, of course.
Brake lights on many cars do in fact override the hazard lights.
Do you know when the hazard lights are supposed to be used? When you're stuck on the side of the road or stalled in traffic. Not for "Oh no it's raining hard I want to make sure the people behind me notice the bad weather" or "hey it's really foggy and no one can see me" or even "Hey I know I should be trying to stop right now but I am going to fumble for the hazard lights while I hit the brakes." So please don't teach driverless cars to do the unsafe things that you do.
I agree that those are all bad reasons to use hazard lights. However, most truckers (and a lot of other people) use hazard lights on highways to indicate something different: low speed (often below the posted minimum), which would count as a "traffic hazard" in most states.
I think you may be misunderstanding many people's use of hazard lights in bad weather. You should NOT turn on your hazard lights because you're afraid other cars can't see you. (If that's the case, conditions are bad enough that you probably should pull off the road.) But when weather conditions get bad, often it's unsafe to drive above the minimum posted speed on a highway -- in most states, it's acceptable to use hazards to warn other drivers around you that you are traveling slowly. (Truckers do this all the time when ascending hills and going slow.) If you don't warn other drivers who may be traveling at full highway speed -- even though such a speed is totally unsafe for conditions -- they may not realize how slow you are going until they are too close to brake.
Some states explicitly specify that hazard lights are to be used when traveling at unexpected low speeds. And the Uniform Vehicle Code states clearly:
The driver of any vehicle equipped with vehicular hazard warning lights may activate such lights whenever necessary to warn the operators of following vehicles of the presence of a traffic hazard ahead of the signaling vehicle, or to warn the operators of other vehicles that the signaling vehicle may itself constitute a traffic hazard.
Anyhow, the quoted section of the Uniform Vehicle Code could be interpreted in such a way as to allow behavior in the form GP suggested, i.e., to warn others that a vehicle is coming abruptly to a stop. That will frequently constitute a traffic hazard.
If it's not entertaining at normal speed, it's not entertaining at any speed.
Agreed. This seems like someone listening to pop music on fast forward. Why? Just choose a better song you actually like better.
Just like music, film and TV has a "rhythm" and a temporal "feel." If you speed it up, you mess with that rhythm, which the director (and editor, etc.) worked so hard to create. Unless the TV show or film is already bad, it probably won't be improved by tampering with its fundamental design.
I was re-watching one of my favorite silent films, Buster Keaton's "The General" on DVD and I found out that PowerDVD (this was at around 2003) could play back 25% faster with sound, which made the film even funnier!
That's also because The General is frankly one of the best movies of all time. It's fantastic. (Seriously, AFI listed it as #18 on its list of the best films of all time.) There are very few silent films on that list, and certainly none rival The General (except perhaps Chaplin's The Gold Rush).
The real test would be to see whether speeding up would make Griffith's Intolerance seem less intolerably long....
But Washington directs and influences too much of the economy, e.g., the military-industrial complex is a massive jobs and pork project for literally millions of people. The federal executive branch has so grossly overstepped its constitutional functions that it's horrifying and disgusting. Trump and Clinton would be far less dangerous to the republic if the office was considerably more modest and Americans didn't treat the President as some messianic figure who will deliver them jobs and other goodies!
Just wanted to note, since you mentioned the fall of the Roman Republic, that this sort of thing is precisely the flaw that arguably brought down the Roman Republic. The "root password" to any political system's governing structure is always appeasement of the masses. Montesquieu skips over the early elements of this story in Rome, but one of the harbingers of doom for the Roman Republic happened with the Gracchi brothers, who were some of the earliest Romans to seek radical populist reform. Concern about the rural poor and the plight of military veterans led to their attempts to circumvent many of the traditional Roman principles... including ignoring previous checks on power and re-election in their offices (Tribune of the Plebs). The Roman senators had the good sense to club Tiberius Gracchus to death.
The parallels to the Great Depression, Dust Bowl (affecting rural poor), marches of WWI veterans on Washington, and FDR's shocking election to 4 consecutive terms are just too numerous to go into a detailed comparison. After FDR's "New Deal" was repeatedly thrown out by the Supreme Court as being unconstitutional, finally the switch in time that saved nine overrode federalist principles in the Constitution that had functioned since 1789.
Now, of course the U.S. has gone on a different course than Rome did (with the upheavals under Sulla, Marius, etc.). But it's a little scary to me that the Roman Republic essentially lasted only 84 years after Tiberius Gracchus set it on the path toward ruin in 133 BC. Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC, and was effectively declared dictator for life (after a series of consecutively consulships), effectively moving the Republic into an imperialist empire.
I'll just note that FDR was elected in 1932 with populist rhetoric to overturn the old Constitutional constraints on government power. It's now 2016, 84 years later, and we have the threat of a Trump presidency, a guy who seems to view his position in the world as dictatorial to say the least.
I'm not some crazy numerologist -- just noting that the timeline between when the Constitutional breakdown started to occur and where we are now is a shocking coincidence. It's sad that the generation around the 1930s was when Latin study and Roman study of the classics really started to be expunged from school curricula. For the past several decades we've been starting out on a track toward dissolution of a Republic and toward an Empire -- something the Founders, who were very aware of Roman precedent when they designed the government, hoped to prevent. But few people know about such history anymore, so they don't see the danger.
For all you guys who like to make fun of liberal arts majors... here's why history is important to know something about: to avoid making the same mistakes others have in the past.
This is a common misconception, but the first Chromebooks were released in 2011, whereas Peppermint released in 2010 and was in development before that .. so if anyone copied anyone.....
Interesting! Thanks for the correction. Yeah, reading about it now, it appears that Peppermint was originally inspired by a desire to integrate social media and various cloud elements directly into the desktop. You're right that it predated Chromebooks... I didn't remember the timeline correctly.
Does Peppermint provide some value to somebody that you can't get from, say, Xubuntu? What's this distro's raison d'etre?
I haven't tried it, but my sense is that it was originally created as an answer to Chromebooks, i.e., a distro that focused heavily on integrating web applications into the desktop with SSBs, etc. Like Chromebooks, the system requirements were lower because of the reliance on web-based apps. Also, like Linux Mint (its namesake), Peppermint has made certain choices about user interface, settings, etc. that many seem to prefer to the Canonical Ubuntu variants.
Now more distros can do these things more easily, so Peppermint is less distinctive, other than still being a slimmed down version of a standard distro, requiring less RAM and HD space.
You have conveniently ignored at least one item from GP posting. Specifically, that claim:
the definition of 'alcohol related accident' meaning ANY person involved having a measurable amount of alcohol (including passengers and pedestrians) leads to the inflating of numbers and 'proof' that we need even stupider laws.
(If true) that alone seems like a problem negating ANY meaningful statistics on a number of "alcohol-related" accidents.
I ignored it because it's irrelevant to everything I posted. The statistics I was quoting were from studies based on drunk DRIVERS, not on "alcohol-related accidents" or whatever. There tend to be pretty good and reliable records of drunk DRIVERS because most states tend to put such people in jail for at least a few days when they happen. (Also, something I wasn't clear on -- the numbers I gave were lowball estimates from studies for the most part. I didn't want to be accused of exaggerating anything.)
Yes, it's true that "alcohol-related accident" numbers are sometimes inflated by MADD and related groups. It happens with any interest group like that. And, frankly, they may sometimes have a point -- driver distraction is a huge issue, regardless of the cause. As someone who has (in my younger days) driven a car full of puking screaming drunk people around, I can assure you that I -- even though sober -- was not driving at my best due to distractions. If I ended up in a car accident on such an occasion, I think (depending on the exact circumstances) there might be pretty good justification for classifying it as "alcohol-related."
But inflating the number of "alcohol-related accidents" has no impact on studies looking at actual drunk DRIVERS and how many time a drunk DRIVER is charged in an accident, which is what my post was about... as was the supposed "FACT" cited by the parent.
If a large enough fraction of any electorate wants a do-over on a referendum, then why not? Why does this have to be a winner-take-all scenario?
1. What would that fraction be?
A number of voters greater than the margin of the vote, in this case a bit less than 1.3 million. Theoretically, a number that large could all consist of people who want to switch sides (though unlikely in this case), but a re-vote could be triggered.
If you think this is unjust, then let the other side start a petition to NOT allow more revotes. If they can get a greater number of verified voters to agree NOT to allow a revote, fine. But I sort of doubt that.
About 48% of Americans didn't vote for Obama in 2008, perhaps we should have had a do-over in that?
Poor comparison. The U.S. nominally operates under a Constitution, which specifies the process by which voting for presidents happens. There's nothing in the Constitution that requires a do-over when the voting margin is small (as we painfully discovered in 2000).
IF the referendum which was already voted on had specified "this matter shall be considered as settled for the next four years and no further votes may take place until then," then maybe you'd have a case, similar to the election of a president. But that's not the case here -- and in a democratic system, the people should have the right to reconsider past actions unless they have legislated against such reconsideration. (That's why, for example, many constitutions have amendment clauses specifying supermajorities for amendments: they want to ensure that once something is adopted into the constitution, it "sticks" unless a LARGE number of people want it changed.)
Also, if you want to be technical, Obama received roughly 69.5 million votes in 2008. The US population in 2008 was about 304 million, so technically 77% of Americans didn't vote for Obama in 2008. Or, well, to be fair, only adults can vote, so it isn't really fair to include children. So, since there were roughly 230 million adults in the US in 2008, that means roughly 70% of Americans didn't vote for Obama.
(Note: I'm not just being a jerk here. The point is that a large number of people don't participate in elections. And unless there is something barring reconsideration of the UK referendum here, I think it's perfectly reasonable for the millions of people who didn't vote because they didn't realize how important this was to have a chance to voice their opinion.)
It's it's completely anti-democratic unless your petition has the support of more people than voted to stay, and all the people signing the petition were verified as being eligible to vote.
Huh? How precisely is asking the public to vote on an issue "anti-democratic"?? It's clear that a large section of the populace either didn't participate or cast their vote without realizing the dire implications of their choice. Whether or not that segment of the population is a majority, from the reports of yesterday, it seems pretty likely that the number of voters who want clarification may be greater than margin of the vote (less than 1.3 million difference between the two sides).
At a minimum, I think it's perfectly reasonable for a revote to be requested if a number of voters greater than the margin of the difference requests it.
It's the equivalent of losing a contest and then continually shouting "I want a do over!" or "No fair, I wasn't ready!" or "Best N out of 2N-1!!" until you get the outcome you want. It's pathetic, grade school, childish shit.
You know what's "childish"? Acting like a huge decision that could impact an entire country's future for decades to come shouldn't be debated again because "We called it the first time! Too bad, you lose!"
If the margin was 90-10 with 90% of the population voting, or if this was the fourth request for a revote, I would agree that you have a point.
But democracy is determined by voting. If a large segment of the population in concerned about an issue, there should be a vote. Denying a vote based on a childish notion of "We're already done, suckers! You losers!" is actually the anti-democratic notion here, no matter which side of the issue you favor.
"Remember, Uber and Lyft were not forced out of Austin. They simply left because they didn't want to play by the rules."
To be fair, they left because Austin changed the rules.
To be fair, they left because Austin changed the rules to require background checks like all other professional drivers (taxi drivers, limo drivers, bus drivers, etc.) operating in the city.
Or, as GP said, "they simply left because they didn't want to play by the rules" (which everybody else does).
Fact: accident and injuries caused by driver impairment happen at levels around .15 and that number has not changed no matter what they've done with the laws. The people you need to be worried about are habitual drunks who have no regard for anything, and that's another thing that laws and checkpoints and other modern bullshit does not change.
Uh, NO.
There's no "magic switch" that happens after your blood alcohol level goes above 0.15. It's a gradual ramp upward of increased risk of accident, beginning somewhere around 0.05, based on a number of studies.
By the time you reach 0.08 (the threshold of many municipalities), you're at somewhere between twice the risk and 7 times the risk of a sober person of causing an accident. (Different studies come up with different figures, but there's a clear and significant relationship.) By the time you get up to your proposed limit of 0.15, you're up to about 25 times greater chance of causing an accident than a sober person.
It *is* true that the *majority* of drunk-driving accidents are caused by people who are significantly impaired, something like 75% of them by people with 0.15 and up. But that still leaves a significant number of people below your threshold who cause accidents.
So I at least won't joke about actual DUI but I will joke about the laws, and I will insult at every opportunity the profiteering and ruining of countless lives for no reason by our 'justice' system.
There are obviously screwed up aspects of drunk-driving laws, as there are with most things. But your assumptions ("FACT") are NOT true. Even a couple of drinks is often enough to begin to impact your driving abilities, and if you're driving over the limit (whether 0.08 or 0.1 or whatever), you ARE at significantly greater risk of causing an accident than a sober person.
Be responsible. Stop kidding yourself and saying, "Yeah I'm okay to drive" when you've had 5 or 6 beers (which is what it takes for a typical adult male of average weight to get to around 0.15). I can't believe any mods have modded this up as "informative."
Eh, pizza ovens usually get set around 550 degrees.
That depends on the style of pizza. If you're baking traditional Neapolitan style pizza (i.e., the kind they make in Naples, Italy, the place where pizza is kinda from), the official regulations say you need a minimum cooking surface temperature of about 900F, and a minimum oven dome temperature of about 800F. Cooking time should be no longer than 90 seconds.
Even at 500 degrees you have to put the pizza on a screen or it will burn on contact with the oven.
I bake pizza all the time at home at the maximum my oven will do (550F). A little while back, I actually invested in a thick steel plate to get more heat into my pizza dough faster, compared to a traditional baking stone (which really can't make great pizza at only 550F in a home oven).
Somehow I bake pizzas all the time pumping the heat in as fast as my oven can at over 500F, and my pizzas don't burn.
Again, it depends on the type of dough. Neapolitan dough is intended for 800-900F ovens, traditional "New York style" dough is often baked lower, usually somewhere in the 500-600F range or a bit higher. Chicago deep dish is baked even lower than that.
I wonder how the representative was able to say, "...For your situation, you would have to dispute the payment with your bank." without either falling over laughing, or suffering a crippling attack of guilt. Or both.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a Comcast supervisor who called me one Sunday over a decade ago.
The background to this call is that I had moved between states and had Comcast (then the only option) in both states. Comcast managed to screw up just about everything possible in billing me for closing my account in one state and then opening the new one. Long story short: I ended up with roughly $500 in illegitimate charges and fees, which required the intervention of the Better Business Bureau and two state agencies to force Comcast to resolve.
Anyhow, my favorite conversation occurred this particular Sunday with a supervisor. I had previously attempted to resolve my problems by calling Comcast, who told me that I needed to go to the local Comcast office in person -- but the local office proceeded to tell me that they couldn't do anything and I needed to call. The next call I insisted that I speak with someone who could resolve my bill immediately and when I was told that was impossible, I asked to talk to a supervisor.
I was informed that I could not talk to a supervisor ("Our system doesn't work that way!") but they would put in a request for a supervisor to call me back within 72 hours.
A couple days pass, and a cheery-voiced supervisor indeed calls me on Sunday afternoon. I swear I am not making this up, but this is roughly how the conversation went:
[Comcast]: Hi, I'm a supervisor.
[me]: Hi. [I explain situation.] I need you to just fix this billing error right now.
[Comcast]: I'm sorry, but those rates are set by your local market, so you'll need to talk to your local office.
[me]: I tried that. They told me they can't do it, and I need to talk to you. Please just fix this.
[Comcast]: Well, I'm sorry but those rates are set by your local market, and I don't have access to that information.
[me]: Where are you?
[Comcast]: I'm in [state on other side of the U.S. from me].
[me]: Well, could you maybe connect me with a supervisor from my local market to resolve this??
[Comcast]: Well, obviously I can't do that now. [Laughs.] I mean, it's Sunday afternoon! Nobody's working.
[me]: Huh? Well, why are you calling me?... Oh... forget it -- okay [I think I see a solution] -- so I'm told your system allows you to put in requests to talk to supervisors. Could you put in a request in the system to have a supervisor from my local market to call me back... you know, one who could actually resolve my problem?
[Comcast]: I'm sorry sir, but our system doesn't work that way.
[me, exasperated]: Then WHY DID YOU CALL ME?!? You took time on your Sunday afternoon when no one else is apparently working to call me and tell me... that you can do nothing to help me?!?
[Comcast, sounding cheery]: Well, sir, we are committed to returning calls within 72 hours, so I wanted to get back to you.
[me]: [grumble, grumble, feeling like I'm trapped in a Kafka novel]
[Comcast, after a short pause, sounding even more chipper]: Well, sir, is there anything else I can help you with today?
[me]: Huh? You did NOTHING to help me! This call makes no sense. I really don't understand what just happened. I don't understand what this call is. I'm sorry, I'm just going to have to sit down and try to process the insanity of this situation. Goodbye.
Since that phone call, I've never talked to another Comcast representative when an error occurs. This was just the most insane encounter with Comcast customer "service" I had, out of maybe a dozen or more in attempts to resolve the billing issues that happened during one move. After that, I went straight to government regulatory agencies when I experienced any problems... which thankfully I had few of. And even more thankfully, I've
this thing isn't doing anything that your $2000 486 couldn't do in 16MB
I hate to be "that guy," but this set of specs sounds a bit off. In the heyday of 486's, if I remember correctly (and this was a long time ago), 4 MB or less was standard. 8 MB was quite big. 16 MB was almost unheard of until 486's were on their way out in favor of Pentiums. And when 486's were most popular, RAM was nearly $100/MB, so your 16 MB rig would've cost a LOT more than $2000. (Just from a quick search -- Dell's top-of-the-line rig in 1993 was a 486, 8 MB of RAM, and 320 MB hard drive for $4,400.)
I agree that the word "sharing" needs to be banned from this stuff, but you're blaming it on the wrong people. It isn't "hipsters" or even "word erosion" -- this is a term deliberately used by companies like Uber and Airbnb to try to avoid legal consequences and regulation. If you say I'm not running a taxi service but merely "ride-sharing" I don't need to obey regulations for taxis, get it? A hotel might need to collect taxes and have pesky things like extra insurance and posted exit plans in case of emergency, but if I'm "sharing" my vacant apartment with you for a few nights, I'm magically not operating a hotel and don't have to pay attention to those rules. The term isn't a case of "eroding" language: it's deliberately employed by these companies to give a misleading impression through obfuscating terminology.
Courts are a PITA. I don't mind at all having arbitration clauses.
There are various problems with arbitration clauses in cases like this, but the biggest one is that most arbitrations are not public record. That's a BIG problem for combating systemic abuses, since future plaintiffs won't be able to determine what wrongdoing may have come up in previous actions.
There are problems with courts and class action suits, too, of course. (And in many settlements for court cases, some details are private too -- though at least a record of an action will often exist in public documents.) But forcing people to settle claims "behind closed doors" is just a recipe for abuse of power in companies. It completely blows up the basic standards for legal accountability.
Whether you agree with drug testing for welfare or not, there is a bid difference between testing for handouts, and testing for tax penalty avoidance. A complete lack of comprehension of said difference is the most disappointing thing about such a proposal.
While I think such a proposal will never be implemented, what is most disappointing to ME about this discussion is the lack of comprehension of justice and fairness in economic systems. Instead, everyone seems to be acting like there's some sort of strict demarcation between "my money" and "the rest of society," when in reality society is necessary for you to make your money, to profit from your skills, and to spend your money on goods that make you happy.
Your perspective fails the basic "Justice as Fairness" doctrine espoused in one of the greatest works of political philosophy and ethics from the 20th century, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice.
Rawls begins with the idea that we should design a moral economic and political system behind a "veil of ignorance," i.e., not knowing what value our personal skills and abilities may have to society. After all, you may have been born with innate skills that make you rich in one society, but in another you might be the stupidest or least talented person alive. It's only by imagining what's fair to that latter person that we should make decisions about how to structure things.
Rawls ultimately comes up with what to me seems to be a pretty darn insightful idea about fairness -- which is that obviously inequality benefits us all in a society. Smart people may get rich by inventing cool stuff, and by doing so, they bring up the standard of living of all of us. Thus, a just society needs to allow them an incentive (e.g., more money) to promote our collective well-being.
But, Rawls says, the point at which we stop that inequality is when the extra money for the rich stops benefitting the society as a whole. At some point rich people just get more and more wealth, but it doesn't actually help the poorest to improve their quality of life (and often begins to make the poorest WORSE off). And again going back to the veil of ignorance, if you didn't know what your talent would be before entering in a society (and you might have ended up on the bottom), you probably would say that's not fair for all. Collectively, we need to design the rules to benefit us all, because rich people don't exist in a vacuum.
So -- going to the present proposal, the question becomes: We've apparently decided that we want to drug-test the poor to ensure that society's resources will be used well. If we agree to that, why not tax the rich before giving them a tax break?
Rawls would say that the question should be rephrased in terms of social benefit -- no one has a "right" to be taxed according to a difference scheme. There's no "inalienable right" to have capital gains taxed at a lower rate than other income. So, we have to ask -- by allowing rich people to buy drugs with the money from their tax break, do we actually benefit society as a whole? If you woke up in a society and just happened to be the stupidest and most untalented person, would you think that was a fair thing to grant rich people to improve society as a whole? Or would it be wasting resources on a rich-people tax break that could be used to actually benefit other people?
Again, I don't think this is a practical proposal. But in terms of justice and fairness, I think you're asking the wrong questions. "My money" does not exist in a vacuum. You get to live your life through the benefits of the rest of society. You have no inalienable rights to whatever complex set of tax deductions you'd like.
Yes, them along with Carl's Jr.
It's not fiction. It's a future documentary from an alternate universe. The Time Macheen depicted in the movie is real. The only thing is it malfunctions and each time it's run (that is, each time the heroes realize it doesn't exist) it bumps that universe over one and closer to ours.
Absolutely. I have to admit that I love the Time Masheen as is:
The dinosaurs really make it.
I've never even heard of the association between Citigroup and "thank you", and I'm willing to bet plenty of English-speaking humans on this planet also don't subscribe or recognize this marketing gimmick. I also have a really hard time believing this causes you confusion.
Wow... I gotta wind up for this one. It's a really doozy. Woo... wait for it... WOO... here it comes... WOOOOO... OKAY, EVERYBODY TOGETHER NOW!!!!....
WHOOOOOOOOOOOSH!!!!!!
P.S. Why both this post AND the parent are both modded "Insightful" is incredibly bizarre to me. Are the mods on crack this morning??
CO2 Levels Likely to Stay Above 400PPM for the Rest of Our Lives
Umm, but Ray Kurzweil told me if I take 200 pills per day and survive to the Singularity (which, apparently, is coming soon to a neocortex near you), then I'll live forever. And so will you.
Does that mean CO2 levels will stay that high forever? Just wonderin'...
Coursera appropriated that content and is denying access to it
Hogwash. Coursera didn't "appropriate" anything. They just made it available, for free. Then they stopped.
Agreed. No company or internet service who hosted something for FREE has an obligation to keep hosting said content for FREE forever. They're not "denying access" to content; they're just not going to host it anymore.
If the original creator failed to keep a backup, that is not Coursera's fault.
It surprises me that people haven't figured this out about the internet yet. I realized it 20 years ago.
Two rules that constitute the grand oxymoron of internet content durability:
(1) Once you put something on the internet, it may be on the internet FOREVER. (Corollary: Be careful what you post; it could follow you for the rest of your life.)
(2) Anything that's on the internet could disappear FOREVER at any time. (Corollary: If you actually want to preserve something, you need to download it and be responsible for preserving it yourself.)
Unfortunately, many people haven't caught on to this. A century from now historians will be looking back in puzzlement at the "Dark Decades" between the end of paper records and the beginning of more permanent digital archives, where huge amounts of electronic content was created but then lost forever. Meanwhile, I'm sure most of the meaningless Tweets and Facebook posts of drunken party photos will still be around for historians to assess....
If you're reading text instead of watching someone talking, you're in mortal danger of paying attention to someone who isn't attractive . The horror.
This is true. But it's not just attractiveness. It's body language. It's the whole framing and presentation of the thing.
It's not by coincidence that when the ancient Roman Cicero, one of the greatest orators of all time, was killed by political enemies, they cut off his hands and nailed them to the place he gave his speeches. While some have interpreted this to be a way of punishing the "hands that wrote his speeches," it's likely that at least one reason (if not the primary one) was because of the role of gestures in the delivery of orations at the time. Without microphones in ancient Rome, speakers who wanted "those in the back" to understand them necessarily made use of formalized gesture to emphasize points and to enhance argument. (You see the same thing in stage actors when they use enhanced gestures without microphones today.) Ancient treatises on persuasive speaking repeatedly mention the importance of body language and gestures. As Quintilian wrote: "As for the hands, without which all action would be crippled and enfeebled, it is scarcely possible to describe the variety of their motions, since they are almost as expressive as words. For other portions of the body may help the speaker, whereas the hands may almost be said to speak."
Anyhow, this could all lead up to a silly joke about Italians who 'talk with their hands." But even if most modern methods of expression don't use these stylized body motions, good persuasive speakers are very familiar with how one's body language and movements can impact the reception of an argument.
And whether you're dealing with audio or video, the SOUND of a speaker is critical in conveying meaning and tone (as we all know from that time we sent an email which was grossly misinterpreted).
TL;DR -- Video (or real-life speaking, for that matter) has the potential for MUCH greater manipulation of viewers than text. Politicians have known this and have exploited it for millennia. Even an ancient Roman could have told you that text was useful for serious study and critique, whereas oratory was all about manipulation of your audience.