Any more? Ask a 70 year old that didn't have an engineering or science career to calculate exponents of decimal places. They will look at you like you are crazy.
That may be true. But my experience with quite a few older folks is that they tend to understand estimation for basic arithmetic rather well. If they have any mental math skills (and many of them do, even if it's mostly basic arithmetic), they can often estimate things to get at least the order of magnitude and the first digit about right.
That's much more than I've seen for most people under the age of 40, who seem lost without some device to calculate for them -- and who will happily believe that device when it spits out a random number off by a number of orders of magnitude (usually due to an entry error) followed by 10 or more completely insignificant digits.
I don't know why any of these "numbers of digits" things are surprising to anyone.
When you calculate a circumference, for example, you're just multiplying pi by some other number. You're not going to need more precision in pi than you have in the number of orders of magnitude of precision in the other number.
So, all of these discussions about "how many digits of pi" actually just are asking "how many order of magnitude" of length or whatever are in various sizes/comparisons within the universe.
It's really not necessary to bring pi into this discussion at all. It's just talking about precision of measurement and orders of magnitude in general.
It seems to me that these answer would only be interesting/surprising to those who have no understanding of "significant figures" in calculations. (Unfortunately, that seems to apply to most people and students, who will assume that however many digits their calculator or whatever spits out are meaningful.)
The other thing about the quoted policy is that "$1 per week" seems not only arbitrary but quite excessive for many users. I probably read a Wired article once per month at most (well, at least until their recent policy went into effect). They certainly aren't making $4 in ad revenue off of me from the one article I view each month.
In fact, except for very heavy users of Wired, I can't imagine that they're making anywhere close to $1/week in ad revenue. Perhaps if they're also tracking you and selling your data, they'll make a little more -- but if so, this whole complaining about "ad blocking" is a bit dishonest: they really want to track you.
In general, I'm fine with sites that want to switch to some sort of paywalled model. But this cost isn't worthwhile to me given how much I visit that site. So I just don't visit Wired anymore.
The funny thing, of course, is that these anti-ad blocker campaigns seem to be targeting the people who are least likely to be responsive to ads. So, sites are complaining that that they "can't keep the lights on" without charging ad producers money for people who are least likely to actually use the ads.
In effect, they want to cheat ad producers out of their money by inflating their "impressions" numbers by serving up ads to people who don't care. I realize companies are struggling to survive, but this doesn't strike me as the most moral (or sustainable) practice either.
Now, if Wired wanted to charge me a "cost-per-viewed-article" fee of a few cents, that would probably be more than they'd make off of my ad views. And maybe I'd consider it. But there's no easy method to set up such a practical payment structure yet. Maybe something like that could ultimately be sustainable for online content producers; I don't know.
But if they want to charge me $4/month to view on average one article... no thanks. Bye, bye, Wired.
Well your link claims he deems the law unconstitutional and will therefore will not claim it is constitutional before court. That kind of sounds like doing his job.
Actually, "doing his job" would be to appoint a special counsel to defend the law on behalf of the government. The Executive Branch is part of the government, and the Justice Department is generally duty-bound to defend the law as passed by Congress. If the Executive Branch does not want to support the law, it is still bound to choose someone to defend the law on behalf of the government as a whole.
I'm NOT defending DOMA, which was a stupid law for a number of reasons. But the way the Obama administration handled this whole thing was a legal farce, as was the way the courts "overturned" it repeatedly. In the normal world of law, you require an actual "case or controversy" for a court to intervene. But with DOMA, you had parties "appealing" to higher courts and then refusing to defend the law in question. It was a mockery of the judicial method. If the administration felt it could not in good conscience defend the law, it still needed to appoint someone to defend it if it actually wanted to appeal the case.
It would be kinda like if your neighbor sued you over $10, and you said, "Yeah, you're right, I owe you $10," but then you refuse to pay it and take it to court. And the then judge says, "Yes, sir, you need to pay him $10." And you said, "I *KNOW*! Obviously!! Isn't it crazy how I should pay him $10!! Of course I should! But let's appeal it to a higher court anyway, just for fun!"
If the Obama administration REALLY believed it was in the right, why wouldn't it pay out the money that it was supposed to do to the gay partner in the judgment of the lower courts in the DOMA case? Oh wait, that would actually be acknowledging the law WAS unconstitutional, instead of pretending to claim that by not defending it while still basically enforcing it.
I hate this. Not least of which is the lack of scalability. If one's are dots, tens are boxes, and hundreds are cubes, what are thousands? Ten thousands? Millions? When an elementary school kid needs to draw a seven-dimension-hyper-cube to solve his homework, it's a sign that we've needlessly over-complicated things.
Use straw-men much? I'm not going to argue for or against the "Common Core" (which isn't really what you think it means), but this is one the most ridiculous arguments I've heard against it.
I've personally seen 3 and 4 and 5 year olds in a Montessori school understand "place value" concepts much quicker and easier than most kids get them (1st or 2nd grade) through visual aids like strips and squares and cubes. Also, it leads to an intuitive understanding of, well... "squaring" and "cubing" numbers at an early age. (I think you're off by an order of magnitude, by the way -- cubes should generally represent a thousand at a minimum, i.e., 10 "cubed".)
Nobody's arguing for using a 7-dimensional object to represent 10^7. It's a useful (visual, tactile) analogy for teaching simple place value for SMALL numbers, it gives kids a sense of relative magnitude (otherwise they don't realize how volume can scale quickly when a small surface grows), and it produces an intuitive sense about what more advanced math concepts like exponents will mean down the road. Are you against using the terms "squaring" and "cubing" for exponents 2 and 3 as well?!
My third grader has nightly crying sessions over his math homework. He struggles with basic concepts like multiplication and division. My seventh grader, though, got his beginning math done before Common Core took over and loves math.
Just to be clear, Common Core standards do NOT generally specify that these very specific pedagogical tools must be used. What you're talking about is probably individual decisions by states and perhaps local school districts about how to implement Common Core standards.
My wife and I are very active opposing Common Core and high stakes testing.
I'm with you in opposing the ridiculous amounts of standardized testing imposed on students in most states today. And I think there's potentially a lot wrong with some ways that Common Core standards have been IMPLEMENTED. I'm not quite sure the underlying ideas are as bad as some people would have us believe, however.
While I think one can go overboard with animal rights, I think there is actually a difference between raising a captive (and domesticated) animal for slaughter and deliberately keeping a wild animal in a small "pen" for amusement.
In a similar fashion, I deplore murderers. But perhaps there should be a special punishment reserved for someone who would hold a person captive and torture them intermittently for an entire lifetime. Killing is one act that often happens quickly; it can thus be the result of an accident or a single bad choice in the "heat of a moment." But years and years of deprivation to a human (or animal) requires someone to condone systemic abuse again and again.
(I know lots of people will find various faults with this analogy. Whatever. You get the general point.)
Some animals are much smarter than others, much cuter than others, much more dangerous to human than others, much more useful to humans than others, etc.
You hit it on the head with the "cuteness" idea. The rest are merely excuses. Decades ago orcas were just another sea creature (with a nasty name like "killer whale"). But Seaworld did itself in when it starts showing how "cute" they are and selling stuffed animals, etc.
When you see a lot of kids playing with stuffed animals of slugs, a few years later there will suddenly be a much greater objection to pesticides against them.
It would be an atrociously stupid idea anyway. That's why the founding fathers rejected it for the federal courts. Several states do have judges chosen with elections - and it's a disaster across the board.
Well, like it or not, the nomination process for SCOTUS is now highly politicized. It may not be an actual popular vote yet, but it gets closer and closer.
First we have the 17th amendment, which puts senators in more direct contact with a state's constituents. Thus, they no longer represent a state legislature's interest, but rather the "people" more directly.
Then we have the televising of nomination hearings, which have now become about senators pandering to the television audience, rather than vetting nominees with legitimate legal questions. It's more important to "score points" with a "soundbite" for the evening news than actually to determine whether the nominee is qualified.
And finally we have the gradual shift away from fixed Constitutional law and long-term stare decisis, which has expanded the powers of the federal government (since FDR), thus giving judges who decide federal law more power. But it also has politicized the positions more, as more novel Constitutional interpretations are found by justices. Rather than a fixed body of law, you get a "moving target," and thus politicized issues depend less on legal scholarship than the political leanings of who is appointed. (To some extent this was always true. And I'm NOT arguing this is a bad trend overall -- obviously it was necessary to further the Civil Rights cause, etc. But it is a shift from jurisprudence for the first 150 years or so of the US.) So, now nominations tend to be focused on the 20% or so of SCOTUS cases that tend to be decided with close 5-4 "political" rulings, rather than the other 80% of the business that the court deals with in technical legal minutiae.
All of these things together mean that nominations become a politicized media circus, rather than a debate about qualifications. It used to be that even strongly opinionated justices were easily confirmed -- as long as they were seen to be brilliant legal scholars. Scalia was probably the last of these, since he was confirmed with a 98-0 vote in the Senate.
There's no way that a justice like Scalia (or an equivalently "liberal" justice) could get a vote like that today, no matter how brilliant they are.
Should have said " The senate would reign in legislation"
Either way, I'd avoid the ironic reference to hereditary monarchy. People don't "reign" things in -- kings and queens have "reigns." People "rein" things in, like horses.
Ironically, even the much heralded founding fathers were reluctant to include everyone in the selection process of our nation's leaders.
Of course they did -- their models were the Roman Republic and Athenian Democracy. Both theoretically had a "body of all citizens" which had a voice in government, but the definition of "citizen" was strict enough that it tended to exclude the majority of people.
I believe you have to let everyone vote for one simple reason: where would you draw the line?
I'm not going to put forth an opinion about "drawing the line" somewhere else, but we clearly do "draw the line" for example at 18-year-olds.
But back to the "roots," it's important to recall the word "democracy" comes from the Greek "demos," which was a small subdivision around ancient Athens. There was never an idea that ALL people should vote, but rather "citizens" were sent from each demos.
Many were disqualified from "citizenship" -- women, slaves, former slaves, children and adolescents, those who hadn't completed military training, foreigners who were residents in Athens, and those whose voting rights had been suspended (in some cases, these suspensions of voting rights extended for generations within a family). Also, the granting of citizenship was not automatic -- in the case of new people, even those who had lived in the area for a couple generations, they generally had to be granted it by vote of the assembly (and citizenship would then generally be passed down to descendants).
Basically, the original definition of democracy perhaps allowed 10% of the population a voice in voting. And it was deliberately restricted to those who would have a strong investment and a personal stake in the community of Athens -- adults who were generally born there, were generally landowners (or part of landowning families) and had trained for military service to protect the community.
The "Founding Fathers" of the US didn't include the military training and didn't like the idea of inherited rights (or inherited exclusions from rights), but otherwise they followed many of the same principles. And thus voting was generally restricted to free male landowners in most states in the early US.
I'm NOT arguing we should go back to such a definition, just noting that the Founders were following traditional "democratic" principles by restricting voting rights.
"We" is a first-person pronoun. It's just plural. GP didn't say "all people..." or "all people except me..." (though I suspect the meaning intended was more like "most people, but not those smart people who realize how the system works, like me..." ).
None of that is universal.
No, but GP has a valid observation about how our economic system is set up. If our society allowed workers to drop weekly hours a bit as productivity increased significantly (aa it has for basically the past century), then we could all be working a lot less while making a living wage. There were experiments back in the 1930s by some big companies to reduce the standard workweek for wage employees, and it had a number of positive benefits for everyone. Some European countries have done the same, especially in encouraging long vacation time.
But in the US, this trend stopped and is much less strong, while income disparities in classes has gone way up. Draw your own conclusions about the motivations.
I suggest you go back and re-read my original post in this thread. You seem to want to argue about things I didn't even talk about instead of what I actually said.
The original post in this thread (which I replied to) made two main arguments: (1) a dirty bomb would be stupid and a detonation of one would have no major effect, (2) the US is sufficiently secure against entrance of a nuclear device.
Neither of these is true. You do not dispute these. So it seems we are in agreement about my actual points.
Instead, you seem to want to debate other nuances. Please note I NEVER said that I thought such an event was likely, nor did I argue that this is something that the US should spend a lot of time worrying about. On the list of stuff I think the US government should be spending money on, preventing random nuclear attacks seems unlikely enough that I don't think it should be high on the list. I was just pointing out that the original post's logic was horribly flawed.
Indeed. I think GP was just a troll here. I can't figure out how all of this wacko uninformed nonsense otherwise comes together in a single post. Just goes to show that low ID number still gets treated differently, though.
Nice job nitpicking without actually addressing my major points. My point about the nuns wasn't that they could have easily gotten away with something themselves, but a well-armed and trained team could get disturbingly close to weapons grade uranium without anyone really paying much attention... but that's all beside the point. You offered nothing to critique my primary point about GP, which is that we don't have adequate security to prevent entrance of a dirty bomb or even a small better nuclear device. The kiloton backpack was based on a nuclear expert quote in a news story I read some time ago... after researching after your post, I agree that sounds inaccurate. But you could certainly put a kiloton weapon in a space roughly the size of a backpack or a little larger, and it would only weigh a few hundred pounds, so it could easily be transported into the US without notice in a car or shipping container as I discussed. And a backpack bomb with even a 15-ton yield would probably result in a significant death toll in an urban center... but again the point is the perception and fear that will ensue, not whether 100 or 1000 or 10000 or 100000 are killed.
Sorry -- small correction: of course, I meant weapons-grade uranium storage in facilities when talking about the nuns. And at least two of the people in the group were in their 80s, not just their 70s....
A dirty bomb? Those have bugger all effectiveness, except against the emotions of the weak. The amount of radioactive material required to build a dirty bomb that actually did something would exceed the amount needed to build a real bomb. It would be utterly stupid.
It depends on what your goals are. The goal of a dirty bomb denotation is not likely large-scale destruction -- it would be terror. Detonate even a small one in Times Square and watch how much disruption it will cause. Actual number of casualties are almost irrelevant. Look at how much the deaths of 3000 people on 9/11 did -- it's not the body count that terrorists are often after, but the repercussions that follow the feeling of insecurity.
The US is reasonably well guarded. Certainly, it's enough to stop any serious physical weapon from getting through.
I cannot fathom how a post with this in it got modded "+5 Insightful." A kiloton weapon could be smuggled into the U.S. in a heavy backpack. You could move that in through a port. ABC News moved depleted uranium in back in 2002 and 2003. Congress passed laws requiring 100% scanning by 2012, then 2014... it's not here, and it's doubtful it would happen anytime soon.
Or you could drive it across the border from Canada. Cars are rarely inspected in detail. Hell, if you're a random septuagenarian nun, you could even wander into a U.S. nuclear weapons or depleted uranium facility restricted area in this country itself without a huge amount of trouble. Our own security within the U.S. to protect nuclear material is pretty abysmal -- and our ability to screen for a smallish nuclear weapon entering the U.S. by land or sea is nearly non-existent.
I have no clue how you equate this with a statement like "The US is reasonably well guarded" against nuclear devices. Could you easily smuggle in an ICBM? No. Duh. But you could easily smuggle in something that would incinerate many blocks of a major city. And again, terrorism isn't about the magnitude of the event, but the feeling of insecurity it creates.
They "missed" it, huh? Why is cooking discussed in detail in TFA and even mentioned twice in the abstract then?
Cooking has a large known effect on consumption and abduction of food. Especially meat. Resulting in needing to eat less quantity and being easier to chew..
Yes. No one disputes it. It's mentioned in the article. Problem is: best evidence now is that cooking only started in a controlled way a few hundred thousand years ago, maybe 500,000 at the most. Meanwhile, the changes actually mentioned in TFA began perhaps as early as 2 million years ago. Stone tools were around then (and had been used perhaps as much as 3 million years ago).
No.. That couldn't be a factor.. Must have been those thin slices. Sigh.
Uh, or TFA could explicitly acknowledge multiple times that cooking was a major evolutionary factor, but they're perhaps hypothesizing about a different earlier stage?
Sounds a lot like someone flash of the moment idea that they rushed to publish rather than something with much backing
Rather ironic to read this coming from someone who didn't even take the time to find out what the article was about before posting in ignorance. Is TFA conclusive evidence of anything? Absolutely not -- it's just throwing out a possible idea for a stage of evolution where jaw size and strength decreases, etc. before we have any solid evidence of cooking.
Jeez - read the linked abstract in TFS. It talks about cooking and fires. Problem is our first clear evidence of controlled fires for human ancestor use was somewhere around 250,000-300,000 years ago, maybe 500,000 at the most. On the other hand, TFA points out that Homo erectus was already showing smaller jaws, reduced bite force, and smaller gut over a million years earlier. So, how did this evolution happen unless Homo erectus was somehow able to extract more calories more efficiently? Well, the first stone tools start appearing almost 3 million years ago, long before Homo erectus was around. So, perhaps stone tools could have aided chewing and digestion... cooking obviously did even more, but we have no evidence of that until long after these evolutionary changes clearly began. Is this theory the correct explanation? I don't know -- but it's at least possible, whereas your fire theory requires us to believe controlled fire usage by human ancestors was going on much earlier than we currently have evidence for.
I actually agree with you. I think true self-driving cars are farther off in the future than most people think, precisely because of the reasons I articulated. Until cars can be THAT autonomous, they won't be safe.
I think you've perfectly articulated why this kind of design -- allowing the "driver" to essentially lay back, pop open a newspaper and ignore the road -- is a Really Bad Idea.
And that's precisely why I've been arguing here for years that AI cars a lot far off than many people think. Because until we get to a situation where the kind of design under discussion is safe and practical, true "self-driving cars" won't be feasible.
Airplanes are even more autonomous -- the vast majority of any commercial flight you take these days is controlled by autopilot, yet there are humans -- plural -- sitting at attention for the inevitable moment when something goes wrong. And that's up in the big, largely empty sky. Why in the world would we want it to be any different for millions of cars tearing around in close proximity?
The problem with this analogy is that airline pilots are paid to ensure the safety of hundreds of people on their aircraft. Their reason for being there is to ensure that the autopilot works and if it doesn't to take control.
The reason most people get into a car is because it takes them somewhere -- not because they are paid to drive or care deeply about being a safe driver.
And already we're seeing how distracted people are willing to be WITHOUT "self-driving" cars. People text, people talk on phones... people eat, shave, apply makeup, whatever. They do this knowing full well that they are supposed to be controlling their vehicle too.
And somehow people imagine that after we create a "self-driving" car where 97% of the time they DON'T need to pay attention, that drivers will still be like attentive airline pilots, ready to take over at a moment's notice?
Sorry, that's just not going to work in the real world. Whether or not you want it to happen, the vast majority of people are going to be reading the newspaper or their tablet while eating breakfast when they are supposed to be "driving" a self-driving car.
That's what will happen. And thus the only mainstream AI cars which should be put on the market are those which cannot depend on the driver taking control suddenly as a normal "failure mode."
To listen to the proponents of autonomous cars speak, people get in a fatal accident every time they get behind the wheel, and we're all dead now.
Just to be clear, I am most definitely NOT a "proponent of autonomous cars." If they ever get up to the standards I'm proposing, I'd consider them -- but I think such AI is still quite a ways off.
Also, according to the CDC, approximately 1 out of every 100 people in the US will visit a hospital due to a motor vehicle accident in a given year. Approximately 1 in 10,000 people will die in such an accident. They are a leading cause of serious injury and death among accidental causes.
So, no -- we're not all dead. But car accidents happen... a LOT. Self-driving cars need to be programmed to deal with scenarios that are likely to cause them, not flash a warning and hand off control at high speed to an unprepared distracted human.
Right it's entirely unreasonable to believe that unforeseen failures can occur those things never happen.
Of course failures can happen. What I'm saying is putting a so-called "self-driving" car on the road which can fail in such a way as to require a person to take over SUDDENLY is a major safety hazard, both for the "driver"/passengers and for those cars around it.
It's not like people, birds, and other wild life have ever ran out in front of cars without warning
If an AI can't respond to such things, it should NOT be allowed on the road. Period.
And if the "failure mode" in these scenarios is to suggest that the distracted businessman reading the newspaper while eating his breakfast is supposed to suddenly take the wheel... well, that's just not reasonable. And you can say, "Oh, but these 'drivers' should be alert," but that's just not how people are going to use a "self-driving" car in the real world.
If the distracted guy on his commute who takes 3 seconds to take the wheel is going to do better than the AI in avoiding "people, birds, and other wildlife," then I definitely would not buy such a car, and I would propose that such an AI is a TERRIBLE driver and should be banned from the roads.
and I have never seen a new car broken down on the side of the road.
Different scenario. Re-read my post. If a major failure happens, there needs to be a backup system that can get the car to the side of the road and to a stop safely. Clearly, in your scenario, the human driver was able to do that. Why precisely should we demand less of an AI "driver"?
I didn't say that mechanical failures would be impossible on future cars -- but the AI should be designed in such a way (with various backup systems) that it's basically the LAST thing that will fail... and if it does so, such a failure should never be sudden and in the middle of a highway.
In all but the most catastrophic of failures, the human should NEVER have to suddenly take control. It's dangerous, and it's a stupid idea.
My first reaction to the seats turning to face each other was "so if the driver has to take control.... huge delay."
This is one of those things that everyone thinks, but seems completely unreasonable if you think about it a little more deeply. I know that self-driving cars right now require the operators to be attentive and take over when necessary -- because they are still being "trained" in their early phase.
However, this is simply not a reasonable thing to expect the general public to do with a self-driving car. The first mass-market car that truly claims to be "self-driving" should NEVER require human intervention to "take control" suddenly. The car needs to be able to handle all situations adequately, and if it can't (e.g., case of impending major mechanical failure), it should have a backup system that will at least exit the current traffic pattern to the side of the road and come to a halt safely.
Anything less is a huge safety problem.
The idea that a human driver will just "take over" control in an emergency is incredibly stupid and naive. Think about how many accidents are caused by drunk drivers. And most of them are caused because drunk drivers have impaired reaction ability -- and a few tenths of a second is an issue.
Now imagine some rich guy who buys a BMW to drive him to work every day. He'll bit sitting there drinking coffee and reading a newspaper, and you somehow expect him to suddenly "take the wheel" when the AI can't cope? Forget about seats turned sideways or whatever -- you're talking a couple seconds minimum before (1) he realizes there is a problem, (2) manages to get rid of his newspaper, coffee, and breakfast sandwich before he can, (3) hit the button to take control, and (4) actually adjust his body to the controls. And with that amount of delay and breakfast bits flying around the car, there's no guarantee that a human driver would even be able to respond well and make safe maneuvers for a few seconds even after he takes control.
Three seconds at 65 mph is almost the length of a football field. Once we get to the point that drivers expect a car to drive itself MOST of the time, we simply cannot rely on the idea that drivers will be alert and ready to take over at a moment's notice. Moreover, I think it will be actually MORE dangerous to have a human driver take over in most such scenarios when unprepared and emerging from distraction.
So, actually, some ideas about the BMW design are better -- assuming that the AI actually functions flawlessly (which I think we're still a long way from). But once we get that level of AI, it's probably better to encourage people to act like they're not really a "driver" anymore.
My second reaction was "...and if you hit something, you'll be oriented sideways, which seems like a really bad idea."
We already have plenty of buses, shuttles, long limos, etc. which have some sideways oriented seating. I realize those seats aren't generally at the front of the vehicle, but still -- if AI is not demonstrably better than most bus or limo drivers in completely autonomous driving, then it shouldn't be allowed on the roads.
If you accurately represented his opinion, it would indeed be shocking.
Since you didn't, it is called a "straw man."
Actually, while GP is being a bit hyperbolic, I think the argument would more accurately be called a "slippery slope" type, rather than a straw man. GP may overestimate how far Breyer is willing to go, but your post underestimates the radical shift in judicial philosophy that is occurring.
There is nothing at all fringe about the idea that European law is connected to American law; indeed, English Common Law was adopted from the start. The earliest legal document that gets cited in US law is the Magna Carta; look it up if you think that was an American document.;)
And it is you who seemingly misunderstands the issue here. Yes, English Common Law was adopted because it was already in practice. The very definition of Common Law is that matters beyond the written Constitution are frequently resolved by citing relevant court precedent (which is often important, since the law never covers all cases explicitly).
The early US really had no choice here if they wanted to retain a Common Law system. Previously, the Colonies had been governed by English Common Law, and lawyers here had been trained in that system and would cite those cases as precedent (which were themselves often built on English cases). To simply erase all of that history after the US declared independence would be to put a huge amount of cases in legal "limbo" where judges could effectively rule whatever they wanted to with no governing precedent.
So, the citation of earlier English law was required to maintain continuity in the early US. And the very concept of Common Law allows citation of predecessors, whether native law or not. Thus, the Magna Carta may be one of the earliest legal documents that gets cited (and not as often as most legislators seem to think -- there are only one or two concepts there that still have direct import on modern law, and contrary to what you imply, that document is NOT directly binding on US law; it's mostly relevant in the precedents it has created). But English law derived some concepts in turn from medieval French law. And medieval French law in turn inherited concepts from ancient Roman law.
And there are still legal concepts dating back to Roman law which get cited in cases, if not actual documents.
The point is that these are all HISTORICAL citations from systems that are the DIRECT ANCESTORS of our own legal system. That's basically how Common Law works in finding previous precedent and concepts codified in previous rulings.
The reality is that the Constitution bans "cruel and unusual" punishment, which is and always was based on the current culture.
Yes, and the notion is traditionally based on COMMUNITY standards. This goes for a number of legal issues, such as the idea of pornography/obscenity, where we think of Justice Potter Stewart's classic line, "I know it when I see it."
In the case of pornography and "cruel punishment," standards do change, but in previous law the idea was to look at COMMUNITY standards, whether local or for the nation as a whole. Citation of other countries' ideas would generally be confined to historical precedents.
It is perfectly reasonable to look to what is considered "cruel" and "unusual" by our formal allies, especially those ones who share certain parts of common law with us.
I agree it's "perfectly reasonable." But it isn't standard practice in US law (or rather, it hasn't generally been, until it started in recent years). The much more common citation of Common Law in other countries would be to look at historical cases dating before the US. The other time courts would occasionally look to other nations would be to resolve a NOVEL issue for which precedent did not exist yet in the US.
all parties must agree, unless you have a warrant, or special circumstances apply. They don't on a public bus.
Sure they apply -- the "special circumstances" are that public buses are disproportionately filled with poor people. That's likely why this legislation to restrict recording never went beyond committee even though it's been introduced four times in the past. Poor people have fewer lobbyists, so why should legislators care?
The article also addresses precisely why the circumstances have changed -- the recent riots in Baltimore led to a number of specific complaints, apparently including complaints about this surveillance.
Poor people can usually be safely ignored by legislators. Rioting poor people might harm rich people or drag down the image of a city (which indirectly harms rich people by keeping tourists and investors away). Hence, the legislators now must pay attention.
Or, at least that's a cynical perspective on how politics typically works.
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Any more? Ask a 70 year old that didn't have an engineering or science career to calculate exponents of decimal places. They will look at you like you are crazy.
That may be true. But my experience with quite a few older folks is that they tend to understand estimation for basic arithmetic rather well. If they have any mental math skills (and many of them do, even if it's mostly basic arithmetic), they can often estimate things to get at least the order of magnitude and the first digit about right.
That's much more than I've seen for most people under the age of 40, who seem lost without some device to calculate for them -- and who will happily believe that device when it spits out a random number off by a number of orders of magnitude (usually due to an entry error) followed by 10 or more completely insignificant digits.
I don't know why any of these "numbers of digits" things are surprising to anyone.
When you calculate a circumference, for example, you're just multiplying pi by some other number. You're not going to need more precision in pi than you have in the number of orders of magnitude of precision in the other number.
So, all of these discussions about "how many digits of pi" actually just are asking "how many order of magnitude" of length or whatever are in various sizes/comparisons within the universe.
It's really not necessary to bring pi into this discussion at all. It's just talking about precision of measurement and orders of magnitude in general.
It seems to me that these answer would only be interesting/surprising to those who have no understanding of "significant figures" in calculations. (Unfortunately, that seems to apply to most people and students, who will assume that however many digits their calculator or whatever spits out are meaningful.)
The other thing about the quoted policy is that "$1 per week" seems not only arbitrary but quite excessive for many users. I probably read a Wired article once per month at most (well, at least until their recent policy went into effect). They certainly aren't making $4 in ad revenue off of me from the one article I view each month.
In fact, except for very heavy users of Wired, I can't imagine that they're making anywhere close to $1/week in ad revenue. Perhaps if they're also tracking you and selling your data, they'll make a little more -- but if so, this whole complaining about "ad blocking" is a bit dishonest: they really want to track you.
In general, I'm fine with sites that want to switch to some sort of paywalled model. But this cost isn't worthwhile to me given how much I visit that site. So I just don't visit Wired anymore.
The funny thing, of course, is that these anti-ad blocker campaigns seem to be targeting the people who are least likely to be responsive to ads. So, sites are complaining that that they "can't keep the lights on" without charging ad producers money for people who are least likely to actually use the ads.
In effect, they want to cheat ad producers out of their money by inflating their "impressions" numbers by serving up ads to people who don't care. I realize companies are struggling to survive, but this doesn't strike me as the most moral (or sustainable) practice either.
Now, if Wired wanted to charge me a "cost-per-viewed-article" fee of a few cents, that would probably be more than they'd make off of my ad views. And maybe I'd consider it. But there's no easy method to set up such a practical payment structure yet. Maybe something like that could ultimately be sustainable for online content producers; I don't know.
But if they want to charge me $4/month to view on average one article... no thanks. Bye, bye, Wired.
Well your link claims he deems the law unconstitutional and will therefore will not claim it is constitutional before court. That kind of sounds like doing his job.
Actually, "doing his job" would be to appoint a special counsel to defend the law on behalf of the government. The Executive Branch is part of the government, and the Justice Department is generally duty-bound to defend the law as passed by Congress. If the Executive Branch does not want to support the law, it is still bound to choose someone to defend the law on behalf of the government as a whole.
I'm NOT defending DOMA, which was a stupid law for a number of reasons. But the way the Obama administration handled this whole thing was a legal farce, as was the way the courts "overturned" it repeatedly. In the normal world of law, you require an actual "case or controversy" for a court to intervene. But with DOMA, you had parties "appealing" to higher courts and then refusing to defend the law in question. It was a mockery of the judicial method. If the administration felt it could not in good conscience defend the law, it still needed to appoint someone to defend it if it actually wanted to appeal the case.
It would be kinda like if your neighbor sued you over $10, and you said, "Yeah, you're right, I owe you $10," but then you refuse to pay it and take it to court. And the then judge says, "Yes, sir, you need to pay him $10." And you said, "I *KNOW*! Obviously!! Isn't it crazy how I should pay him $10!! Of course I should! But let's appeal it to a higher court anyway, just for fun!"
If the Obama administration REALLY believed it was in the right, why wouldn't it pay out the money that it was supposed to do to the gay partner in the judgment of the lower courts in the DOMA case? Oh wait, that would actually be acknowledging the law WAS unconstitutional, instead of pretending to claim that by not defending it while still basically enforcing it.
I hate this. Not least of which is the lack of scalability. If one's are dots, tens are boxes, and hundreds are cubes, what are thousands? Ten thousands? Millions? When an elementary school kid needs to draw a seven-dimension-hyper-cube to solve his homework, it's a sign that we've needlessly over-complicated things.
Use straw-men much? I'm not going to argue for or against the "Common Core" (which isn't really what you think it means), but this is one the most ridiculous arguments I've heard against it.
I've personally seen 3 and 4 and 5 year olds in a Montessori school understand "place value" concepts much quicker and easier than most kids get them (1st or 2nd grade) through visual aids like strips and squares and cubes. Also, it leads to an intuitive understanding of, well... "squaring" and "cubing" numbers at an early age. (I think you're off by an order of magnitude, by the way -- cubes should generally represent a thousand at a minimum, i.e., 10 "cubed".)
Nobody's arguing for using a 7-dimensional object to represent 10^7. It's a useful (visual, tactile) analogy for teaching simple place value for SMALL numbers, it gives kids a sense of relative magnitude (otherwise they don't realize how volume can scale quickly when a small surface grows), and it produces an intuitive sense about what more advanced math concepts like exponents will mean down the road. Are you against using the terms "squaring" and "cubing" for exponents 2 and 3 as well?!
My third grader has nightly crying sessions over his math homework. He struggles with basic concepts like multiplication and division. My seventh grader, though, got his beginning math done before Common Core took over and loves math.
Just to be clear, Common Core standards do NOT generally specify that these very specific pedagogical tools must be used. What you're talking about is probably individual decisions by states and perhaps local school districts about how to implement Common Core standards.
My wife and I are very active opposing Common Core and high stakes testing.
I'm with you in opposing the ridiculous amounts of standardized testing imposed on students in most states today. And I think there's potentially a lot wrong with some ways that Common Core standards have been IMPLEMENTED. I'm not quite sure the underlying ideas are as bad as some people would have us believe, however.
While I think one can go overboard with animal rights, I think there is actually a difference between raising a captive (and domesticated) animal for slaughter and deliberately keeping a wild animal in a small "pen" for amusement.
In a similar fashion, I deplore murderers. But perhaps there should be a special punishment reserved for someone who would hold a person captive and torture them intermittently for an entire lifetime. Killing is one act that often happens quickly; it can thus be the result of an accident or a single bad choice in the "heat of a moment." But years and years of deprivation to a human (or animal) requires someone to condone systemic abuse again and again.
(I know lots of people will find various faults with this analogy. Whatever. You get the general point.)
Some animals are much smarter than others, much cuter than others, much more dangerous to human than others, much more useful to humans than others, etc.
You hit it on the head with the "cuteness" idea. The rest are merely excuses. Decades ago orcas were just another sea creature (with a nasty name like "killer whale"). But Seaworld did itself in when it starts showing how "cute" they are and selling stuffed animals, etc.
When you see a lot of kids playing with stuffed animals of slugs, a few years later there will suddenly be a much greater objection to pesticides against them.
It would be an atrociously stupid idea anyway. That's why the founding fathers rejected it for the federal courts. Several states do have judges chosen with elections - and it's a disaster across the board.
Well, like it or not, the nomination process for SCOTUS is now highly politicized. It may not be an actual popular vote yet, but it gets closer and closer.
First we have the 17th amendment, which puts senators in more direct contact with a state's constituents. Thus, they no longer represent a state legislature's interest, but rather the "people" more directly.
Then we have the televising of nomination hearings, which have now become about senators pandering to the television audience, rather than vetting nominees with legitimate legal questions. It's more important to "score points" with a "soundbite" for the evening news than actually to determine whether the nominee is qualified.
And finally we have the gradual shift away from fixed Constitutional law and long-term stare decisis, which has expanded the powers of the federal government (since FDR), thus giving judges who decide federal law more power. But it also has politicized the positions more, as more novel Constitutional interpretations are found by justices. Rather than a fixed body of law, you get a "moving target," and thus politicized issues depend less on legal scholarship than the political leanings of who is appointed. (To some extent this was always true. And I'm NOT arguing this is a bad trend overall -- obviously it was necessary to further the Civil Rights cause, etc. But it is a shift from jurisprudence for the first 150 years or so of the US.) So, now nominations tend to be focused on the 20% or so of SCOTUS cases that tend to be decided with close 5-4 "political" rulings, rather than the other 80% of the business that the court deals with in technical legal minutiae.
All of these things together mean that nominations become a politicized media circus, rather than a debate about qualifications. It used to be that even strongly opinionated justices were easily confirmed -- as long as they were seen to be brilliant legal scholars. Scalia was probably the last of these, since he was confirmed with a 98-0 vote in the Senate.
There's no way that a justice like Scalia (or an equivalently "liberal" justice) could get a vote like that today, no matter how brilliant they are.
Should have said " The senate would reign in legislation"
Either way, I'd avoid the ironic reference to hereditary monarchy. People don't "reign" things in -- kings and queens have "reigns." People "rein" things in, like horses.
Ironically, even the much heralded founding fathers were reluctant to include everyone in the selection process of our nation's leaders.
Of course they did -- their models were the Roman Republic and Athenian Democracy. Both theoretically had a "body of all citizens" which had a voice in government, but the definition of "citizen" was strict enough that it tended to exclude the majority of people.
I believe you have to let everyone vote for one simple reason: where would you draw the line?
I'm not going to put forth an opinion about "drawing the line" somewhere else, but we clearly do "draw the line" for example at 18-year-olds.
But back to the "roots," it's important to recall the word "democracy" comes from the Greek "demos," which was a small subdivision around ancient Athens. There was never an idea that ALL people should vote, but rather "citizens" were sent from each demos.
Many were disqualified from "citizenship" -- women, slaves, former slaves, children and adolescents, those who hadn't completed military training, foreigners who were residents in Athens, and those whose voting rights had been suspended (in some cases, these suspensions of voting rights extended for generations within a family). Also, the granting of citizenship was not automatic -- in the case of new people, even those who had lived in the area for a couple generations, they generally had to be granted it by vote of the assembly (and citizenship would then generally be passed down to descendants).
Basically, the original definition of democracy perhaps allowed 10% of the population a voice in voting. And it was deliberately restricted to those who would have a strong investment and a personal stake in the community of Athens -- adults who were generally born there, were generally landowners (or part of landowning families) and had trained for military service to protect the community.
The "Founding Fathers" of the US didn't include the military training and didn't like the idea of inherited rights (or inherited exclusions from rights), but otherwise they followed many of the same principles. And thus voting was generally restricted to free male landowners in most states in the early US.
I'm NOT arguing we should go back to such a definition, just noting that the Founders were following traditional "democratic" principles by restricting voting rights.
And own your statements. Use first-person.
"We" is a first-person pronoun. It's just plural. GP didn't say "all people..." or "all people except me..." (though I suspect the meaning intended was more like "most people, but not those smart people who realize how the system works, like me..." ).
None of that is universal.
No, but GP has a valid observation about how our economic system is set up. If our society allowed workers to drop weekly hours a bit as productivity increased significantly (aa it has for basically the past century), then we could all be working a lot less while making a living wage. There were experiments back in the 1930s by some big companies to reduce the standard workweek for wage employees, and it had a number of positive benefits for everyone. Some European countries have done the same, especially in encouraging long vacation time.
But in the US, this trend stopped and is much less strong, while income disparities in classes has gone way up. Draw your own conclusions about the motivations.
I suggest you go back and re-read my original post in this thread. You seem to want to argue about things I didn't even talk about instead of what I actually said.
The original post in this thread (which I replied to) made two main arguments: (1) a dirty bomb would be stupid and a detonation of one would have no major effect, (2) the US is sufficiently secure against entrance of a nuclear device.
Neither of these is true. You do not dispute these. So it seems we are in agreement about my actual points.
Instead, you seem to want to debate other nuances. Please note I NEVER said that I thought such an event was likely, nor did I argue that this is something that the US should spend a lot of time worrying about. On the list of stuff I think the US government should be spending money on, preventing random nuclear attacks seems unlikely enough that I don't think it should be high on the list. I was just pointing out that the original post's logic was horribly flawed.
Indeed. I think GP was just a troll here. I can't figure out how all of this wacko uninformed nonsense otherwise comes together in a single post. Just goes to show that low ID number still gets treated differently, though.
Nice job nitpicking without actually addressing my major points. My point about the nuns wasn't that they could have easily gotten away with something themselves, but a well-armed and trained team could get disturbingly close to weapons grade uranium without anyone really paying much attention... but that's all beside the point. You offered nothing to critique my primary point about GP, which is that we don't have adequate security to prevent entrance of a dirty bomb or even a small better nuclear device. The kiloton backpack was based on a nuclear expert quote in a news story I read some time ago... after researching after your post, I agree that sounds inaccurate. But you could certainly put a kiloton weapon in a space roughly the size of a backpack or a little larger, and it would only weigh a few hundred pounds, so it could easily be transported into the US without notice in a car or shipping container as I discussed. And a backpack bomb with even a 15-ton yield would probably result in a significant death toll in an urban center... but again the point is the perception and fear that will ensue, not whether 100 or 1000 or 10000 or 100000 are killed.
Sorry -- small correction: of course, I meant weapons-grade uranium storage in facilities when talking about the nuns. And at least two of the people in the group were in their 80s, not just their 70s....
A dirty bomb? Those have bugger all effectiveness, except against the emotions of the weak. The amount of radioactive material required to build a dirty bomb that actually did something would exceed the amount needed to build a real bomb. It would be utterly stupid.
It depends on what your goals are. The goal of a dirty bomb denotation is not likely large-scale destruction -- it would be terror. Detonate even a small one in Times Square and watch how much disruption it will cause. Actual number of casualties are almost irrelevant. Look at how much the deaths of 3000 people on 9/11 did -- it's not the body count that terrorists are often after, but the repercussions that follow the feeling of insecurity.
The US is reasonably well guarded. Certainly, it's enough to stop any serious physical weapon from getting through.
I cannot fathom how a post with this in it got modded "+5 Insightful." A kiloton weapon could be smuggled into the U.S. in a heavy backpack. You could move that in through a port. ABC News moved depleted uranium in back in 2002 and 2003. Congress passed laws requiring 100% scanning by 2012, then 2014... it's not here, and it's doubtful it would happen anytime soon.
Or you could drive it across the border from Canada. Cars are rarely inspected in detail. Hell, if you're a random septuagenarian nun, you could even wander into a U.S. nuclear weapons or depleted uranium facility restricted area in this country itself without a huge amount of trouble. Our own security within the U.S. to protect nuclear material is pretty abysmal -- and our ability to screen for a smallish nuclear weapon entering the U.S. by land or sea is nearly non-existent.
I have no clue how you equate this with a statement like "The US is reasonably well guarded" against nuclear devices. Could you easily smuggle in an ICBM? No. Duh. But you could easily smuggle in something that would incinerate many blocks of a major city. And again, terrorism isn't about the magnitude of the event, but the feeling of insecurity it creates.
And the other small factor they missed.. Cooking!
They "missed" it, huh? Why is cooking discussed in detail in TFA and even mentioned twice in the abstract then?
Cooking has a large known effect on consumption and abduction of food. Especially meat. Resulting in needing to eat less quantity and being easier to chew..
Yes. No one disputes it. It's mentioned in the article. Problem is: best evidence now is that cooking only started in a controlled way a few hundred thousand years ago, maybe 500,000 at the most. Meanwhile, the changes actually mentioned in TFA began perhaps as early as 2 million years ago. Stone tools were around then (and had been used perhaps as much as 3 million years ago).
No.. That couldn't be a factor.. Must have been those thin slices. Sigh.
Uh, or TFA could explicitly acknowledge multiple times that cooking was a major evolutionary factor, but they're perhaps hypothesizing about a different earlier stage?
Sounds a lot like someone flash of the moment idea that they rushed to publish rather than something with much backing
Rather ironic to read this coming from someone who didn't even take the time to find out what the article was about before posting in ignorance. Is TFA conclusive evidence of anything? Absolutely not -- it's just throwing out a possible idea for a stage of evolution where jaw size and strength decreases, etc. before we have any solid evidence of cooking.
What's your theory?? What's the backing for it?
Jeez - read the linked abstract in TFS. It talks about cooking and fires. Problem is our first clear evidence of controlled fires for human ancestor use was somewhere around 250,000-300,000 years ago, maybe 500,000 at the most. On the other hand, TFA points out that Homo erectus was already showing smaller jaws, reduced bite force, and smaller gut over a million years earlier. So, how did this evolution happen unless Homo erectus was somehow able to extract more calories more efficiently? Well, the first stone tools start appearing almost 3 million years ago, long before Homo erectus was around. So, perhaps stone tools could have aided chewing and digestion... cooking obviously did even more, but we have no evidence of that until long after these evolutionary changes clearly began. Is this theory the correct explanation? I don't know -- but it's at least possible, whereas your fire theory requires us to believe controlled fire usage by human ancestors was going on much earlier than we currently have evidence for.
I actually agree with you. I think true self-driving cars are farther off in the future than most people think, precisely because of the reasons I articulated. Until cars can be THAT autonomous, they won't be safe.
I think you've perfectly articulated why this kind of design -- allowing the "driver" to essentially lay back, pop open a newspaper and ignore the road -- is a Really Bad Idea.
And that's precisely why I've been arguing here for years that AI cars a lot far off than many people think. Because until we get to a situation where the kind of design under discussion is safe and practical, true "self-driving cars" won't be feasible.
Airplanes are even more autonomous -- the vast majority of any commercial flight you take these days is controlled by autopilot, yet there are humans -- plural -- sitting at attention for the inevitable moment when something goes wrong. And that's up in the big, largely empty sky. Why in the world would we want it to be any different for millions of cars tearing around in close proximity?
The problem with this analogy is that airline pilots are paid to ensure the safety of hundreds of people on their aircraft. Their reason for being there is to ensure that the autopilot works and if it doesn't to take control.
The reason most people get into a car is because it takes them somewhere -- not because they are paid to drive or care deeply about being a safe driver.
And already we're seeing how distracted people are willing to be WITHOUT "self-driving" cars. People text, people talk on phones... people eat, shave, apply makeup, whatever. They do this knowing full well that they are supposed to be controlling their vehicle too.
And somehow people imagine that after we create a "self-driving" car where 97% of the time they DON'T need to pay attention, that drivers will still be like attentive airline pilots, ready to take over at a moment's notice?
Sorry, that's just not going to work in the real world. Whether or not you want it to happen, the vast majority of people are going to be reading the newspaper or their tablet while eating breakfast when they are supposed to be "driving" a self-driving car.
That's what will happen. And thus the only mainstream AI cars which should be put on the market are those which cannot depend on the driver taking control suddenly as a normal "failure mode."
To listen to the proponents of autonomous cars speak, people get in a fatal accident every time they get behind the wheel, and we're all dead now.
Just to be clear, I am most definitely NOT a "proponent of autonomous cars." If they ever get up to the standards I'm proposing, I'd consider them -- but I think such AI is still quite a ways off.
Also, according to the CDC, approximately 1 out of every 100 people in the US will visit a hospital due to a motor vehicle accident in a given year. Approximately 1 in 10,000 people will die in such an accident. They are a leading cause of serious injury and death among accidental causes.
So, no -- we're not all dead. But car accidents happen... a LOT. Self-driving cars need to be programmed to deal with scenarios that are likely to cause them, not flash a warning and hand off control at high speed to an unprepared distracted human.
Right it's entirely unreasonable to believe that unforeseen failures can occur those things never happen.
Of course failures can happen. What I'm saying is putting a so-called "self-driving" car on the road which can fail in such a way as to require a person to take over SUDDENLY is a major safety hazard, both for the "driver"/passengers and for those cars around it.
It's not like people, birds, and other wild life have ever ran out in front of cars without warning
If an AI can't respond to such things, it should NOT be allowed on the road. Period.
And if the "failure mode" in these scenarios is to suggest that the distracted businessman reading the newspaper while eating his breakfast is supposed to suddenly take the wheel... well, that's just not reasonable. And you can say, "Oh, but these 'drivers' should be alert," but that's just not how people are going to use a "self-driving" car in the real world.
If the distracted guy on his commute who takes 3 seconds to take the wheel is going to do better than the AI in avoiding "people, birds, and other wildlife," then I definitely would not buy such a car, and I would propose that such an AI is a TERRIBLE driver and should be banned from the roads.
and I have never seen a new car broken down on the side of the road.
Different scenario. Re-read my post. If a major failure happens, there needs to be a backup system that can get the car to the side of the road and to a stop safely. Clearly, in your scenario, the human driver was able to do that. Why precisely should we demand less of an AI "driver"?
I didn't say that mechanical failures would be impossible on future cars -- but the AI should be designed in such a way (with various backup systems) that it's basically the LAST thing that will fail... and if it does so, such a failure should never be sudden and in the middle of a highway.
In all but the most catastrophic of failures, the human should NEVER have to suddenly take control. It's dangerous, and it's a stupid idea.
My first reaction to the seats turning to face each other was "so if the driver has to take control.... huge delay."
This is one of those things that everyone thinks, but seems completely unreasonable if you think about it a little more deeply. I know that self-driving cars right now require the operators to be attentive and take over when necessary -- because they are still being "trained" in their early phase.
However, this is simply not a reasonable thing to expect the general public to do with a self-driving car. The first mass-market car that truly claims to be "self-driving" should NEVER require human intervention to "take control" suddenly. The car needs to be able to handle all situations adequately, and if it can't (e.g., case of impending major mechanical failure), it should have a backup system that will at least exit the current traffic pattern to the side of the road and come to a halt safely.
Anything less is a huge safety problem.
The idea that a human driver will just "take over" control in an emergency is incredibly stupid and naive. Think about how many accidents are caused by drunk drivers. And most of them are caused because drunk drivers have impaired reaction ability -- and a few tenths of a second is an issue.
Now imagine some rich guy who buys a BMW to drive him to work every day. He'll bit sitting there drinking coffee and reading a newspaper, and you somehow expect him to suddenly "take the wheel" when the AI can't cope? Forget about seats turned sideways or whatever -- you're talking a couple seconds minimum before (1) he realizes there is a problem, (2) manages to get rid of his newspaper, coffee, and breakfast sandwich before he can, (3) hit the button to take control, and (4) actually adjust his body to the controls. And with that amount of delay and breakfast bits flying around the car, there's no guarantee that a human driver would even be able to respond well and make safe maneuvers for a few seconds even after he takes control.
Three seconds at 65 mph is almost the length of a football field. Once we get to the point that drivers expect a car to drive itself MOST of the time, we simply cannot rely on the idea that drivers will be alert and ready to take over at a moment's notice. Moreover, I think it will be actually MORE dangerous to have a human driver take over in most such scenarios when unprepared and emerging from distraction.
So, actually, some ideas about the BMW design are better -- assuming that the AI actually functions flawlessly (which I think we're still a long way from). But once we get that level of AI, it's probably better to encourage people to act like they're not really a "driver" anymore.
My second reaction was "...and if you hit something, you'll be oriented sideways, which seems like a really bad idea."
We already have plenty of buses, shuttles, long limos, etc. which have some sideways oriented seating. I realize those seats aren't generally at the front of the vehicle, but still -- if AI is not demonstrably better than most bus or limo drivers in completely autonomous driving, then it shouldn't be allowed on the roads.
If you accurately represented his opinion, it would indeed be shocking.
Since you didn't, it is called a "straw man."
Actually, while GP is being a bit hyperbolic, I think the argument would more accurately be called a "slippery slope" type, rather than a straw man. GP may overestimate how far Breyer is willing to go, but your post underestimates the radical shift in judicial philosophy that is occurring.
There is nothing at all fringe about the idea that European law is connected to American law; indeed, English Common Law was adopted from the start. The earliest legal document that gets cited in US law is the Magna Carta; look it up if you think that was an American document. ;)
And it is you who seemingly misunderstands the issue here. Yes, English Common Law was adopted because it was already in practice. The very definition of Common Law is that matters beyond the written Constitution are frequently resolved by citing relevant court precedent (which is often important, since the law never covers all cases explicitly).
The early US really had no choice here if they wanted to retain a Common Law system. Previously, the Colonies had been governed by English Common Law, and lawyers here had been trained in that system and would cite those cases as precedent (which were themselves often built on English cases). To simply erase all of that history after the US declared independence would be to put a huge amount of cases in legal "limbo" where judges could effectively rule whatever they wanted to with no governing precedent.
So, the citation of earlier English law was required to maintain continuity in the early US. And the very concept of Common Law allows citation of predecessors, whether native law or not. Thus, the Magna Carta may be one of the earliest legal documents that gets cited (and not as often as most legislators seem to think -- there are only one or two concepts there that still have direct import on modern law, and contrary to what you imply, that document is NOT directly binding on US law; it's mostly relevant in the precedents it has created). But English law derived some concepts in turn from medieval French law. And medieval French law in turn inherited concepts from ancient Roman law.
And there are still legal concepts dating back to Roman law which get cited in cases, if not actual documents.
The point is that these are all HISTORICAL citations from systems that are the DIRECT ANCESTORS of our own legal system. That's basically how Common Law works in finding previous precedent and concepts codified in previous rulings.
The reality is that the Constitution bans "cruel and unusual" punishment, which is and always was based on the current culture.
Yes, and the notion is traditionally based on COMMUNITY standards. This goes for a number of legal issues, such as the idea of pornography/obscenity, where we think of Justice Potter Stewart's classic line, "I know it when I see it."
In the case of pornography and "cruel punishment," standards do change, but in previous law the idea was to look at COMMUNITY standards, whether local or for the nation as a whole. Citation of other countries' ideas would generally be confined to historical precedents.
It is perfectly reasonable to look to what is considered "cruel" and "unusual" by our formal allies, especially those ones who share certain parts of common law with us.
I agree it's "perfectly reasonable." But it isn't standard practice in US law (or rather, it hasn't generally been, until it started in recent years). The much more common citation of Common Law in other countries would be to look at historical cases dating before the US. The other time courts would occasionally look to other nations would be to resolve a NOVEL issue for which precedent did not exist yet in the US.
That's an entirely different
all parties must agree, unless you have a warrant, or special circumstances apply. They don't on a public bus.
Sure they apply -- the "special circumstances" are that public buses are disproportionately filled with poor people. That's likely why this legislation to restrict recording never went beyond committee even though it's been introduced four times in the past. Poor people have fewer lobbyists, so why should legislators care?
The article also addresses precisely why the circumstances have changed -- the recent riots in Baltimore led to a number of specific complaints, apparently including complaints about this surveillance.
Poor people can usually be safely ignored by legislators. Rioting poor people might harm rich people or drag down the image of a city (which indirectly harms rich people by keeping tourists and investors away). Hence, the legislators now must pay attention.
Or, at least that's a cynical perspective on how politics typically works.