No offense to Forrest Mins -- I know who he is and I admire him -- but selling 7.5 million copies total of 60 titles (average of 125,000 copies per book) is hardly major bestseller status. I just checked Wikipedia's list of books which have sold over 10 MILLION copies, including authors who have multiple popular books, and there are a number of authors on there whose names I wouldn't recognize.
Basically, if you're into hobbyist electronics or at least read some about it, you may have heard of him. But GP is right -- if you aren't within that small group (probably MUCH less than 1% of the population), you likely won't know his name or what he's known for.
What I don't want is a world where I have to make a micro payment to every bloody page I visit.
You're likely already doing that, albeit indirectly. Who pays for the ads? You think businesses just grow their money on trees to pay out that money to website owners for serving ads?
No -- those ads are paid for by businesses, who must extract more profits from customers to pay for those ads. With the increase in "targeted advertising" where you tend to see advertisements for products you've been shopping for recently -- you're already making a "micropayment" for that business serving up that ad for that product you're interested in, which adds some small amount onto the cost of that product.
If you want to support that system, that's your choice. Personally, I'd rather see the ad-supported web die completely. I was around before it existed. It was fine. There are only a handful of sites I actually find valuable on a regular basis, and I'd gladly pay to support them if I had to. (And I actually have already subscribed and/or made donations to some of them.)
What do you mean? Their odds of winning were identical. Their expected payback, however, would be lower since it would be split with cheaters. So non-cheating winners might have a gripe.
Well, TFA implies that this guy may have changed the algorithm so he could predict the numbers, and it puts "random" in quotation marks. So it depends on exactly what he did, but if the numbers could be predicted in advance, it's possible he did something that might also alter the odds, which would potentially violate the published odds.
If certain patterns of numbers had a better or worse chance than the published odds due to his tinkering, I'd imagine there might be grounds for a case... but it'd likely be an uphill battle.
Every paper who printed the headline "everything is just fine" has gone out of business.
And that's the larger point here: the news distorts EVERTHING, not just science.
Newspapers sell by sensationalizing everything. It's why public fears are so out of whack with reality -- you read the paper today, and there's a plane crash, a drive-by shooting in another city, and a terrorist attack in another country. Thus the public worries about these things when they could prevent orders of magnitude more deaths by encouraging public officials to target actual everyday common issues that kill lots of people, like car crashes for example. A car crash that kills someone barely makes the back part of the local section, but something rare and weird ("shark bites swimmer!!!") gets the front page.
The news distorts everything and causes us to take disproportionate notice of rare and misleading stuff. Its distortion of science is no different, so I think it's a bit weird to single out science here. Reporters commonly don't do research, emphasize the rare or weird, and make common errors while burying nuance that would make the story less interesting. It doesn't matter whether the topic is science or crime or accidents or political issues or whatever... the mundane stuff that actually is the most relevant to our lives often isn't newsworthy.
You're just mentally devaluing it to say it wasn't good enough to be worth paying for, thus they didn't lose anything when you took it for free. It's a perfect rationalization of ad blocking and piracy for cheapskates and the poor, because you wouldn't/couldn't pay for anything it's okay if you download everything.
Actually, I think you're skipping a few ste" -- in particular, a site should agree to pay me damages if I get malware from one of theirps here. Ad blocking is actually slightly different from piracy.
I'm not applying for sainthood either, but if we want to have an intellectual discussion let's at least be honest about it.
Okay, let's be honest about it. There's a difference between selling a product like a movie or music or whatever and asking people to pay for it vs. putting something up on a publicly accessible website and demanding people also download annoying time-wasting ads from third-party sites that eat your bandwidth and your processor time.
Putting something on a publicly accessible internet page is like putting something on a public bulletin board in the middle of Times Square. If you want to claim "ownership" over it and don't want people to read it, don't post it in a publicly viewable space. There are plenty of sites that recognize common ad blockers and either display a message like "Please view our ads" or even refuse to show content unilaterally. I have no problem with that. I have no problem with paywalls, either, and I do subscribe to a few online services whose content I actually find valuable enough to pay for.
The problem with most sites and ads is that by viewing a site, I'm required to submit to a crapload of 3rd-party scripts and cookies loading on my machine. Many websites don't do their due diligence in checking out this stuff, so you're asking me to potentially infect my computer with malware in order to view the content? Sorry -- that price is too high.
If you had a site that guaranteed no 3rd-party trackers and only served ads from its own server that it had done due diligence in checking for malware, etc., THEN I might consider viewing the ads. But 99.9% of sites don't do anything like that, and thus I can't take the risk.
You can't run your business another way? That's not my problem. You don't want people to "take your stuff for free"? Put it behind a paywall, or at least set up a rudimentary screening thing for people browsing with common ad blockers that says, "We see you're using an ad blocker. You need to accept ads to view the rest of our site. Sorry." And then I'll make a decision about whether it's worth it to view your site.
But if you deliberately post your content on a publicly viewable website, I have no moral obligation to pay to download, render, and then waste my time sitting through your potentially malware-ridden ads from 3rd parties. Those are my "terms and conditions of use" for my computer. You don't like it? Don't put publicly viewable stuff on your website.
All of this is VERY different from piracy, which involves taking something which is generally sold for a price and sharing/downloading for free against the creator's wishes. The creator on a public website is implicitly allowing me to download content AND use an ad blocker, unless they tell not to.
If you go down the road to your logic, the next thing you'll be telling me is that it's immoral to get up and make a sandwich which muting my TV during a commercial. No, sorry -- that's not stealing content, and nor is viewing content on a public website.
(And by the way, I'm fully behind AdBlock trying to make standards for more reasonable ad practices, but it would have to go a lot further for me to find them "acceptable.")
Arguably one of the more important historical archives in the world and your support comes down to if you like the personalities?
Absolutely, when it's relevant. GP mentioned Wikipedia -- the personalities of the people running and managing Wikipedia are shaping the format of the project. Personally, I think that has caused the project to have fundamental flaws and should either die or morph into something better. Until that culture of personalities is changed, there's no way I will support Wikipedia, and in fact I'll argue with anyone I can that they should not only NOT support it but should actively work against it... I think the future of knowledge and the fundamental nature of epistemology is at stake.
With the Internet Archive, I've heard the values of the project and the people running it. Unlike Wikipedia, I think those values of those people are worth supporting, because they are likely to lead to a long-term sustainable archive.
It's not so much the personalities themselves, as much as how those personalities are reflected in the values and priorities of the project. And yes, those are important, because an archive done poorly with poor decisions made because of bad values is potentially worse... because such a bad archive will suck money and resources away from the building of a better alternative, as Wikipedia has done.
That's not quite accurate. Paul Ryan presented the whole budget omibus bill after long negotiations that would ensure enough votes for passage. Lots of passages were likely added to the 2000-page omnibus bill at the request of various people to secure their votes. Who exactly wanted the CISA thing added is unclear, but clearly Paul Ryan was okay with it ending up in the final version.
But saying he was primarily responsible to requesting it to be put in there on the first place? We don't really know that, and because negotiations before the final draft went on "behind closed doors," it's not likely we could know for sure who wanted it.
People actually trying to build AI ARE trying to prove it, by making one. You're sitting in your armchair saying "it's impossible because magic!"
To be fair to him, he's a little more sophisticated than your average religious nut who believes that people have "souls" or something and computers can't. Instead, he has a somewhat complex metaphysical argument about the nature of reality, and he ultimately is happy to deny the existence of the material world. (Why he would bother arguing so long with people hear about such issues then, is beyond me -- from his perspective, we're all lunatics who have been taken in by some illusion.)
From my perspective, the philosophical argument is a bit muddled. But it's not like he's sitting in his armchair saying "it's impossible because magic!" -- rather, he isn't even sure his armchair or anything else exists -- except perhaps some version of disembodied "experience," which he somehow has "100% certain" knowledge exists not just for himself but for "everyone else." So it's not "impossible because magic!" but rather "it's impossible because the material world, including all robots, is basically ontologically inferior to 'experience' and since robots might all be an illusion anyway, there's no way they could have true 'experience' or 'intelligence' or 'consciousness' or whatever."
It's wacky, but I give him slightly more credit for claiming more than "It's magic!" as a religious wacko might. He's vaguely trying to make a rational argument, even if it seems pretty kooky.
No I only affirm what I know with certainty- that there IS experience. You know there is also, and so does everyone else.
Yes, but how do you make the epistemological leap from the fact that "there is experience" (i.e., whatever you experience) to the reality that I am having "experience" and that "everyone else" has experience?
How could you possibly know "with certainty" that I or "everyone else" exist and have experience without accepting that there is some reality to the world as generated by your senses? Even if the only thing you believe about the reality in the world is that other consciousnesses exist, the only way you have evidence of them is through the medium of your sensory experience.
It's a huge logical leap to go from "I exist" and "I experience" to the "certainty" that "we all have experience" without making an assertion to the validity of SOME of your sensory experiences, i.e., those about the existence of others and their behavior.
Now that we know with 100% absolute certainty that experience exists and no skeptic can meaningfully deny it, let's take a good look at material substance. We have chased that stuff for thousands of years and each time we have been certain we have gotten to the irreducible and final form it, except for currently.
And I would counter that I am NOT "certain' that we have reached any irreducible or final understanding of the material world. Any decent scientist who has any basic understanding of epistemology should also agree with that. But just because we haven't made some sort of final determination about the properties of something doesn't mean that it's ontologically defective. There are LOTS of things we don't understand about the nature of experience -- I've spent a lot of time reading literature about phenomenology and the philosophy of perception. We hardly have complete and final understanding of how that works either. Yet you're convinced that that truly has real existence, while you're iffy about the material world because you don't think you have complete knowledge of it. That's a weird argument.
On this point, you can take a lesson from Marvin Minsky, who admits that if very complex systems give rise to consciousness because of "ether", er, I mean "emergent properties" then it must admit of degrees. So it follows that, and he says this explicitly, simple feedback loops like oh, your house's thermostat, actually possess a rudimentary form of consciousness.
You seem to find this disturbing, as if somehow admitting "consciousness" to a thermostat creates some fundamental problem in your universe or ideology.
I don't freakin' care. "Consciousness" to me is just a name for an emergent behavior. Perhaps it has degrees. Perhaps a dog is "conscious." Perhaps not. Does it matter? Apparently a great deal to you. But to me, not so much. To me, it's all about some sort of arbitrary definition of an emergent behavior. To you, it seems to be endowed with a fundamental ontological distinction. How you come to that distinction is still a mystery to me. And I have no idea why you think it MUST exist. How do you KNOW for certain that your thermostat isn't "conscious"? Why? Is a dog "conscious"? How do you know? Are you certain? How about a "brain-dead" person? Are they "conscious"? How do you know? What if their body still responds to certain stimuli, apparently a byproduct of reflexes and certain nerve pathways? Where do you the draw the line? More importantly -- how are you SO CERTAIN where you can draw the line about who or what has this special kind of "experience" you seem to think the universe is made of?
Once you open the door to the "emergent properties of complex systems" you're going to find yourself working overtime gerrymandering the legal boundaries of *which* complex systems should qualify for "consciousness" and the more things you find you have to gerrymander, th
Anyways...the larger point is, that there is no reason to believe that consciousness or experience falls out of machines, no matter how wet or complex they are.
Sure there is, if you actually believe in the empirical world. And that's all you're "evidence" is that you're discussing -- the physical stuff you see and can measure and dissect. There's no way currently to "prove" that consciousness emerges from the physical stuff of the brain, but the burden of proof is on your side to prove that there's "something else" there, because the rest of physical reality as we sense it seems logically consistent with materialism.
Consider that anything which can be modeled with a computer can be modeled with something much more primitive, albeit in a cumbersome way, for example, a Turing tape or a even a very fancy abacus made of wood, wires, beads. Yes you definitely want to keep that fact in mind before you pin that Strong AI Booster pin on your lapel.
What kind of crappy philosophical argument is this? Just because you can model the physical atoms of the brain with a sufficiently large "abacus," materialism must be false? Have you ever heard of "emergent" behavior? Have you ever seen apparent complexity emerging from apparently simple systems? People have been convinced that ELIZA was a conscious person. Now you have the brain with many orders of magnitude more complexity than the simple ELIZA algorithm, and you're telling me that you couldn't possibly be fooled by emergent behavior in such a complex mechanical system into thinking there was consciousness there -- or even strongly believing that beings with such mechanisms (like other humans) might possess consciousness... even if it's based only on a hugely complex material basis??
If we want to get down to brass tacks and go really hardcore the one thing we have absolute irrefutable evidence for is just experience itself. Everything else is possibly a chimera based on a re-construction of experience-as-thought; material substance is real the same way a false belief or an illusion is real.
Sure, but this is the path to solipsism. If you can't prove the material world exists, you can't even prove that other people or other minds exist. So, actually, it's inaccurate to say that the "one thing we have irrefutable evidence for is just experience itself." Rather, you should have said, "the one thing *I* have irrefutable evidence for is just my own experience -- I don't know that anything outside of my own thoughts exists, and I could be participating in a pseudo-masturbatory exercise of pretending that there is an external world and other people out there and this imaginary place called Slashdot where I pretend to communicate with these figments of my imagination."
That's where your argument leads ultimately. If you accept the material world exists, and you accept that there is actually a "we" in a meaningful sense of other people who might also be conscious, then you need to explain how they might be conscious in the way that you are. And short of some other explanatory method, materialism seems a pretty good explanatory tool for most progress in understanding and making consistent sense out of our perceptions of this apparent sensory world.
If anything, consciousness gives rise to matter (as an illusion or particular way of thinking) and also all the laws of physics and everything that flows therefrom. Given the absolute non-reputability of the existence of experience it's more likely that consciousness is the "fundamental" stuff of the universe than matter or that consciousness arises from sufficiently complex arrangements of non-conscience matter.
On what basis could you possibly judge what is "more likely" in this argument?? Is this possible? Sure. It's also possible that we're all brains floating in vats, or that we're in the Matrix, or whatever. But you have no empirical (or even a pr
A project can only be considered "open source" if anyone can push changes to its code repo without any oversight at all.
What the heck are you talking about? You want the Wikipedia version of "open source," the source that anyone can edit? No thanks -- that's asking for trouble. I'll be stuck getting "patches" by random vandals.
The correct term in that case is "source-available", not "open source".
Most of what are typically called "open source" software projects aren't open at all.
No, the well-established definition of "open source" (as even Wikipedia can tell you) is that the source or design for something is publicly available and can be edited/modified freely by end users.
It simply means the source is "open" (i.e., available to see and edit), as opposed to "closed" (i.e., unavailable and buried in a proprietary binary or something).
There is typically a small group of maintainers who control all changes, even if anyone can see the source and submit patches.
And I'm generally grateful for that. Those maintainers serve to check the changes and ensure they might actually improve the product, rather than being detrimental to it.
I, and most others, can't commit directly to the Thunderbird source repo
You got a problem with that? You don't think the direction of the project is going in the right way? That's fine -- FORK. That's what open source allows.
I'll be the first one to admit that there are plenty of projects where I've heard of overbearing or wacko maintainers who have weird ideas about what the project should or shouldn't do. Those people can be a problem, and they can hold things back.
But if that's so much of a problem as to significantly degrade the quality, then you shouldn't be the only one complaining -- so team up and fork. If people like what you're doing better, they'll go with you.
Maintainers with too much power can definitely be a problem. And, from what I hear, there can be a lot of dysfunction in the open-source community at times. Maybe widening the pool of active participants and decentralizing power could be useful in many projects. But I *really* don't think the solution is to allow *anyone* to make changes without *any* oversight. That sounds like a recipe for disaster.
You just identified the real issue "following too closely behind the vehicle in front of you" perhaps if there was a legislative/punitive or technological solution to this, issues relating to "traffic waves" would be solved.
Well, we could just start giving out more tickets for tailgating. They're pretty rare these days except in particularly egregious cases, but tailgating (i.e., "not maintaining a reasonable and safe following distance) is illegal in a lot of places and already can incur a fine.
We have the technology -- police cars tend to have cameras mounted in them and if they are looking for speeding cars, they also can record the speed. Since "safe following distance" is usually related to speed, the speed + the camera can verify that the driving was unsafe.
The problem is that a "safe following distance" which would prevent traffic waves is a LOT bigger than most drivers seem to think, particularly when they're driving on highways at rush hour. If we just started ticketed everyone who didn't allow that distance, there would likely be huge public outcry.
Better tech solution -- with all of the car cameras and sensors these days, install a meter or dial which displays distance to the car in front divided by current speed, along with the speedometer or tachometer. The units could just be "seconds" to cover that distance. Then states can very clearly just say, "you need to allow an X number of seconds 'cushion' in front of you on highways at all times." And you can read that off the meter.
Then police would be completely justified in ticketing you if you had the meter available and chose to violate the law.
Good luck arguing for this, though. I think we'll be more likely to have roads full of autonomous cars before this would become common.
Oh there is a reason, it just has nothing to do with safety.
Or there is a reason, it has to do with safety, or with optimising throughput, or some other valid concern, but that reason is not obvious to every dummy driver on the street.
The throughput argument bears repeating. Many drivers don't understand this, but sometimes you can get more people through a bottleneck (AND have fewer accidents) if everyone drives more slower at a constant speed than if everyone is trying to drive faster at the same traffic density. This is particularly true when you have a high variability of vehicle speeds, like in a mountainous area where trucks are forced to go slower or in an urban area where frequent incoming and outgoing traffic at exits often travel at different speeds from the rest of the highway.
For example, if you're driving on a highway through an urban area and they lower the rush hour speed limit to 45 mph (some areas now are adopting such dynamic speed limit signs), the idea is that if cars actually go 40-45 mph, the road will actually be able to handle the amount of traffic while also allowing all the people merging on, getting off at exits, changing lanes, etc. at a safe speed.
If, instead, everyone tries to drive 65-70 in the same area, what can happen is that the merging or changing lanes will eventually cause someone to cut someone else off, which causes sudden braking, which then causes some tailgaters behind them to brake suddenly, others follow and overcompensate because they were going too fast and suddenly see much slower cars, and within a few minutes you have a "traffic wave" of stop-and-go traffic backed up for a few miles which might take a half-hour to resolve, where throughput is dramatically reduced. (How many times have you gotten to the end after sitting through 10 minutes of such stop-and-go traffic waves, and there's nothing there -- no accident, no merge, etc.? This is often the kind of thing that happened.)
At a slower speed, the slower car may not have been forced to "cut someone off" in the first place, or if he does, the impact of a bit of braking may not cause such massive changes and overcompensation. Traffic thus recovers faster and throughput is maximized.
They specifically talk about merging into traffic.
I think you're replying to the wrong post. There was no discussion of merging in the post I was replying to. The only vaguely related idea was the possibility of needing to "swerve into the left lane." While doing so may require you to speed up slightly if the left lane is going faster, (1) it's certainly not going to require you to go "several times the maximum suggested speed" and max out your speedometer, and (2) you'd usually be much better off braking and staying in your own lane rather than swerving suddenly into another lane and speeding up. The main reason you'd NEED to swerve into another lane in the first place (rather than braking) would be if you were following too close, i.e., already committing a traffic violation.
I am not sure why you brought road rage into this discussion, unless you consider routine traffic violations an example of road rage.
As the previous post said, I think honking and using middle fingers (some of your examples of efficient communication) are generally indications of aggressive driving behavior, commonly known as "road rage."
Strictly adhering to a speed limit doesn't make you a safe driver. Driving according to road conditions, your alertness level, and your car's ability does. For example, by backing up traffic by strictly following 60 mph speed limit on a sunny clear day on a straight road you probably killed 0.001 humans. If you do this regularly, then over years you can rake up higher death toll than a drunk driver.
I think you need a lesson in causality and culpability. Generally speaking, the driver who is going 60mph in a scenario where the law compels him to is not creating this "death toll." It is the people who drive more unsafely around him (tailgating, swerving to pass, etc.) because they aren't patient enough to drive safely within the posted limit. It's perfectly legal and in fact legally encouraged to drive at or below the speed limit, particularly if in the right lane (or one of the right lanes on a multilane highway). I do agree with you that it is unsafe for someone to drive the speed limit in some cases in the left lane, and there are generally laws prohibiting that. But if the slow driver is not in the left lane, and if common practice among most of the cars on that road is to drive faster and the authorities have not raised the speed limit, then the culpability may be jointly shared by those who posted the limit and the people who drove in crazy ways to be able to go faster.
I will freely admit that I frequently go over the speed limit, particularly when the general flow of traffic around me is going faster. But I have no illusions that if I end up in a serious crash by speeding that somehow a slower driver was magically the cause of it. When I do encounter a slower driver, I either drive a safe distance behind him or pass when it is safe and traffic is clear. That's what a "safe driver" actually does when encountering a car driving the speed limit -- and if you do otherwise and have an accident, it's YOUR fault.
If, as sometimes happens, I see a hoard of jerks driving bumper-to-bumper, tailgating, and weaving while trying to pass a slower car, I generally back WAY OFF behind them, because they are the ones causing the hazard, and I've actually witnessed accidents happen in those scenarios, so I want to be as far behind them as possible.
Not only is it not an infraction to drive in such a way as to save lives and prevent accidents, when you can save a life or prevent an accident, but it requires you to go against the suggested speed, or swerve into the left lane (even when the divider is solid) you are actually required to do so.
WHAT?!?
In >99% of such situations, the correct decision is to hit the brake, NOT the accelerator. Unless you're participating in a car chase and fleeing from terrorists as in some action movie, there is almost never a situation where slamming down the accelerator is the correct choice to prevent an accident.
In general, you are much more likely to cause a serious accident by doing this (since the combination of swerving and accelerating is much more likely to cause you to lose control and even roll or flip), not to mention running into other cars. By braking, the worst that can usually happen is you get a much less-serious crash into your rear from a car behind you that was following too close to isn't paying attention.
That is the entire point of cars having a maximum speed of several times the maximum suggested speed is because you are supposed to speed in many situations to save lives.
Good to know. I was wondering why my speedometer goes up to 140 mph or whatever. So, next time something weird happens in front of me while I'm going at 65mph on the highway, I'll slam on the accelerator, swerve left into oncoming traffic, and go 140mph to avoid the accident.
Are you freakin' kidding me? And this was modded up??
Once we apply control system concepts to this, it becomes immediately obvious that any system of rigid adherence to traffic laws is a lot less efficient than more flexible system based on human-to-human interactions and learning.
[Citation needed]
Your primary argument is that the benefit comes from "dynamic" systems that "are capable of adjusting to a wide range of situations." Except with more predictable adherence to traffic laws, you'd have a smaller range of situations occurring.
Also, in terms of "efficiency," it's pretty well demonstrated in traffic theory that traffic has "transition thresholds" kind of like fluid dynamic transitions between laminar and turbulent flow. When you have conditions like people trying to drive too fast and tailgating in high-density traffic, there's a greater chance of someone needing to brake suddenly, which often causes a chain reaction, and can generate a "traffic wave" that snarls traffic for 15 minutes in stop-and-go waves for miles behind. Similarly, in a merge scenario, often an efficient "zipper merge" might be able to happen at speed X if everyone were driving at a constant rate and merging at the appropriate moment. But if everyone instead is trying to drive at speed X+10 and tailgating to "not let the jerks in," it actually creates a bottleneck which results in the effective flow-rate through the merge to be at speed X-10, i.e., lower (and less efficient) than if everyone drove slowly and allowed adequate merging room.
In sum, there are a lot of common traffic situations where irrational human behavior is the primary cause of traffic snarls in high-density traffic. There are traffic flow studies that show even a small quantity (like 10-20%) of drivers driving more rationally (leaving gaps in front, avoiding crazing acceleration and braking, etc.) can actually "seed" a traffic snarl and cause it to break up and increase throughput. That, for example, is why have a large number of trucks on a highway during a traffic jam can often cause it to clear more quickly -- the trucks tend to avoid a lot of stop-and-go, and they need to allow adequate braking distance, so they effectively can help to clear a jam.
Anyhow, I don't buy the idea that the dynamic irrationality of human systems are actually more efficient, since the vast majority of traffic problems where you end up sitting in stop-and-go traffic for 30 minutes are caused by human error and accidents, usually introduced by violation of various traffic laws.
All of this is true, yet accident rate of these idiotic humans is half of what rigidly-abiding robots are. Perhaps, driving like an idiot in all sorts of unpredictable ways is the right approach to reducing accidents in a system that presently dominated by idiots driving in all sorts of unpredictable ways?
Maybe, maybe not. It depends on how you count accidents. Do you want to reduce accidents in general, or do you want to reduce serious accidents that cause serious or fatal injuries?
It's unclear from the limited data what effect the robotic rules are having. If "driving like an idiot in all sorts of unpredictable ways" causes 50 accidents with 25 serious ones and 10 fatalities, but driving in a more rigid rule-based way results in 100 fender-benders but no serious accidents and no fatalities, I think most people would tend to agree that the greater accident rate may be a significant improvement in highway safety.
But as I said, I don't know whether this will actually happen. It seems likely that the robot cars will tend to be involved in more fender-benders by driving more safely. But what effect do these "rigid rule-based" cars have on those around them? If it causes other people to have road rage and drive in even worse ways, that's likely to result in even more accidents AROUND the robot cars. Just looking at the stats for the robot cars themselves isn't enough to judge their effect on safety overall.
I'm sure there will be AI defenders who will question the assertion about a crash rate "double" that of average humans. But it doesn't matter. The point is that human drivers are idiots and drive in all sorts of unpredictable ways. They also tend to hate other drivers who operate in demonstrably safer ways (e.g., allowing plenty of space in front of them, not accelerating wildly just to stop 100 feet ahead in stop-and-go traffic, not zooming past a slower lane in a merge situation, but instead attempting a "zipper merge" at the same speed as the slower lane, etc). Of course, a lot of the less safe human behaviors also tend to be the reason for traffic snarls in the first place, but you'll have a hard time convincing most drivers of that, since they want to drive as if they are on a racetrack and somehow think that weaving back and forth to get into that tiny gap you've left in front for safety is going to allow them to get home so much faster (even if it's only 2 seconds earlier).
I imagine the biggest problem with having AI cars obey traffic laws strictly is not the accidents -- rather that it's going to lead to human road rage, which often leads humans to be even more irrational and drive in even less safe ways. Thus, while AI cars are still a minority on the roads, I'm not sure it will lead to a net improvement in accident statistics -- just as a "slow driver" on a highway can block up traffic, cause other drivers to drive unsafely around them, and ultimately lead to the potential for more accidents, even if that slow driver thinks they are being "safe" by driving the speed limit or a little below.
Oh, and by the way, yeah -- I know there were a few minor typos in that post. I was typing fast. I saw them before I hit "submit," but, ya know what?
I really actually do even care less about those minor typos than the whole debate about the phrase anyway. So, I was right when I said before about the usage debate -- I COULD care less. And now I do!
Maybe next time use the normal phrase instead of some screwed up version you misheard, mmh sunshine?
Actually, the phrase "could care less" dates back roughly 60 years in English, and the phrase "couldn't care less" is perhaps only 10 years older.
So, they basically emerged around the same time and always mean the same thing, i.e., "I don't care." As that link discusses, there are plenty of other English idioms that have similarly irrational constructions. Grammatical logic does not trump idiomatic usage.
And as for your contention that it's a "screwed up version," you might have a look at this article, which include statistics showing that even in the New York Times (usually somewhat conservative in usage matters), the two phrases have become almost equally common since 2000. And recent databases of spoken rather than written English show that (the supposedly "screwed up") "could care less" is roughly five times more common than (your supposedly "correct") "couldn't care less." Whether you like it or not, the usage you claim is "wrong" has become quite standard.
Regardless, this whole "grammar police" discussion is pointless. As usual with these sort of things, language marches on, and the grammar wackos are the ones who make trouble for everyone. Without you folks, we'd likely transition to "could care less" completely in a few decades, and "couldn't care less" would mostly die out. But no -- you'll keep it alive, because you think it's "more logical," and in 30 years nobody educated will be able to use either phrase, because "couldn't" will have become so rare as to sound weird, and "could" will be branded as "wrong" by the few wackos still holding the line.
Whatever. I could care less... or, actually, ya know, I really couldn't....
I really hate it, when politicians pop up, write a "Hello World!" one liner, and then claim that they can code.
Who has claimed that? Obama certainly didn't claim that -- the press release said he was "the first president to write a line of code." There's no claim that he became an expert or fluent -- he just participated in doing something that many people of his generation have never done. Because he thinks it's important, as he said:
Part of what we're realizing is that we're starting too late when it comes to making sure that our young people are familiar with not just how to play a video game, but how to create a video game.
And it wasn't David Cameron claiming he "learned to code" -- if anything it's the Microsoft press release that used that phrase. If you read the details, they say just that these politicians "had their first experience" of coding, not that they had somehow become an expert in an hour. If anything, the emphasis with Cameron was how much he learned from OTHER KIDS who had clearly invested more time in this stuff.
They don't understand what programming is all about, and want to dismiss it as a simple skill that anyone (H1Bs) can do. Just because you can speak a few words of English as a foreign language, that doesn't mean that you can write works of Shakespearean quality.
That, is what politicians don't get about programming. They don't understand it, so they want to dismiss it as something trivial.
Actually, it is the exact opposite. If you actually read what they're saying, they are trying to emphasize how important these sorts of skills are, and they are doing these "stunts" NOT to demonstrate that "I too can learn to code in an hour," but rather something like, "Hey -- parents and grandparents out there who may never have done anything like this -- look, it's important, and it's a good idea to expose your kids to it early. I'm taking time to show how important skills like this are by trying a little myself, even though I haven't done it before."
Now -- you can criticize various aspects of what they're doing. You could say that this is an ineffective way of getting their message across or that we don't need more kids familiar with coding (probably not true) or that there's a better way to demonstrate their commitment to this.
But the whole point of these things is politicians trying to emphasize the IMPORTANCE of coding to our society today -- even if older generations don't "get it." They're not "dismiss[ing] it as something trivial" -- they're trying to encourage kids and parents to take the time to try it. As the Microsoft story about Cameron ends:
the hope is that the Minecraft Hour of Code tutorial will have sparked an interest that lasts a lifetime.
It probably won't for the vast majority of kids, but it might create an interest in some. Maybe you have some better ideas about how to encourage this. But I don't think you can accuse the politicians here of claiming either (1) that they became experts in an hour or (2) that they are trying to dismiss these skills as overly simple. If anything, they are trying to point out how we need to get kids interested early because it is a HARD and IMPORTANT skill that can take a long time to learn.
Yes, and contra the summary, it hasn't even passed the House yet. They just announced that a deal has been struck and released the text. But it's doubtful they'd make the announcement if they weren't certain they has the House votes. Then it will go back to the Senate. But note that CISA was already passed in a separate provision in the Senate, so it's doubtful this would be a reason to deny passage of the whole thing in the Senate.
Slashdot Mirror
Darns autocorrect... Mims is what I meant, obviously, but to be fair, TFS also got his name wrong.
No offense to Forrest Mins -- I know who he is and I admire him -- but selling 7.5 million copies total of 60 titles (average of 125,000 copies per book) is hardly major bestseller status. I just checked Wikipedia's list of books which have sold over 10 MILLION copies, including authors who have multiple popular books, and there are a number of authors on there whose names I wouldn't recognize.
Basically, if you're into hobbyist electronics or at least read some about it, you may have heard of him. But GP is right -- if you aren't within that small group (probably MUCH less than 1% of the population), you likely won't know his name or what he's known for.
What I don't want is a world where I have to make a micro payment to every bloody page I visit.
You're likely already doing that, albeit indirectly. Who pays for the ads? You think businesses just grow their money on trees to pay out that money to website owners for serving ads?
No -- those ads are paid for by businesses, who must extract more profits from customers to pay for those ads. With the increase in "targeted advertising" where you tend to see advertisements for products you've been shopping for recently -- you're already making a "micropayment" for that business serving up that ad for that product you're interested in, which adds some small amount onto the cost of that product.
If you want to support that system, that's your choice. Personally, I'd rather see the ad-supported web die completely. I was around before it existed. It was fine. There are only a handful of sites I actually find valuable on a regular basis, and I'd gladly pay to support them if I had to. (And I actually have already subscribed and/or made donations to some of them.)
What do you mean? Their odds of winning were identical. Their expected payback, however, would be lower since it would be split with cheaters. So non-cheating winners might have a gripe.
Well, TFA implies that this guy may have changed the algorithm so he could predict the numbers, and it puts "random" in quotation marks. So it depends on exactly what he did, but if the numbers could be predicted in advance, it's possible he did something that might also alter the odds, which would potentially violate the published odds.
If certain patterns of numbers had a better or worse chance than the published odds due to his tinkering, I'd imagine there might be grounds for a case... but it'd likely be an uphill battle.
Every paper who printed the headline "everything is just fine" has gone out of business.
And that's the larger point here: the news distorts EVERTHING, not just science.
Newspapers sell by sensationalizing everything. It's why public fears are so out of whack with reality -- you read the paper today, and there's a plane crash, a drive-by shooting in another city, and a terrorist attack in another country. Thus the public worries about these things when they could prevent orders of magnitude more deaths by encouraging public officials to target actual everyday common issues that kill lots of people, like car crashes for example. A car crash that kills someone barely makes the back part of the local section, but something rare and weird ("shark bites swimmer!!!") gets the front page.
The news distorts everything and causes us to take disproportionate notice of rare and misleading stuff. Its distortion of science is no different, so I think it's a bit weird to single out science here. Reporters commonly don't do research, emphasize the rare or weird, and make common errors while burying nuance that would make the story less interesting. It doesn't matter whether the topic is science or crime or accidents or political issues or whatever... the mundane stuff that actually is the most relevant to our lives often isn't newsworthy.
You're just mentally devaluing it to say it wasn't good enough to be worth paying for, thus they didn't lose anything when you took it for free. It's a perfect rationalization of ad blocking and piracy for cheapskates and the poor, because you wouldn't/couldn't pay for anything it's okay if you download everything.
Actually, I think you're skipping a few ste" -- in particular, a site should agree to pay me damages if I get malware from one of theirps here. Ad blocking is actually slightly different from piracy.
I'm not applying for sainthood either, but if we want to have an intellectual discussion let's at least be honest about it.
Okay, let's be honest about it. There's a difference between selling a product like a movie or music or whatever and asking people to pay for it vs. putting something up on a publicly accessible website and demanding people also download annoying time-wasting ads from third-party sites that eat your bandwidth and your processor time.
Putting something on a publicly accessible internet page is like putting something on a public bulletin board in the middle of Times Square. If you want to claim "ownership" over it and don't want people to read it, don't post it in a publicly viewable space. There are plenty of sites that recognize common ad blockers and either display a message like "Please view our ads" or even refuse to show content unilaterally. I have no problem with that. I have no problem with paywalls, either, and I do subscribe to a few online services whose content I actually find valuable enough to pay for.
The problem with most sites and ads is that by viewing a site, I'm required to submit to a crapload of 3rd-party scripts and cookies loading on my machine. Many websites don't do their due diligence in checking out this stuff, so you're asking me to potentially infect my computer with malware in order to view the content? Sorry -- that price is too high.
If you had a site that guaranteed no 3rd-party trackers and only served ads from its own server that it had done due diligence in checking for malware, etc., THEN I might consider viewing the ads. But 99.9% of sites don't do anything like that, and thus I can't take the risk.
You can't run your business another way? That's not my problem. You don't want people to "take your stuff for free"? Put it behind a paywall, or at least set up a rudimentary screening thing for people browsing with common ad blockers that says, "We see you're using an ad blocker. You need to accept ads to view the rest of our site. Sorry." And then I'll make a decision about whether it's worth it to view your site.
But if you deliberately post your content on a publicly viewable website, I have no moral obligation to pay to download, render, and then waste my time sitting through your potentially malware-ridden ads from 3rd parties. Those are my "terms and conditions of use" for my computer. You don't like it? Don't put publicly viewable stuff on your website.
All of this is VERY different from piracy, which involves taking something which is generally sold for a price and sharing/downloading for free against the creator's wishes. The creator on a public website is implicitly allowing me to download content AND use an ad blocker, unless they tell not to.
If you go down the road to your logic, the next thing you'll be telling me is that it's immoral to get up and make a sandwich which muting my TV during a commercial. No, sorry -- that's not stealing content, and nor is viewing content on a public website.
(And by the way, I'm fully behind AdBlock trying to make standards for more reasonable ad practices, but it would have to go a lot further for me to find them "acceptable.")
Arguably one of the more important historical archives in the world and your support comes down to if you like the personalities?
Absolutely, when it's relevant. GP mentioned Wikipedia -- the personalities of the people running and managing Wikipedia are shaping the format of the project. Personally, I think that has caused the project to have fundamental flaws and should either die or morph into something better. Until that culture of personalities is changed, there's no way I will support Wikipedia, and in fact I'll argue with anyone I can that they should not only NOT support it but should actively work against it... I think the future of knowledge and the fundamental nature of epistemology is at stake.
With the Internet Archive, I've heard the values of the project and the people running it. Unlike Wikipedia, I think those values of those people are worth supporting, because they are likely to lead to a long-term sustainable archive.
It's not so much the personalities themselves, as much as how those personalities are reflected in the values and priorities of the project. And yes, those are important, because an archive done poorly with poor decisions made because of bad values is potentially worse... because such a bad archive will suck money and resources away from the building of a better alternative, as Wikipedia has done.
That's not quite accurate. Paul Ryan presented the whole budget omibus bill after long negotiations that would ensure enough votes for passage. Lots of passages were likely added to the 2000-page omnibus bill at the request of various people to secure their votes. Who exactly wanted the CISA thing added is unclear, but clearly Paul Ryan was okay with it ending up in the final version.
But saying he was primarily responsible to requesting it to be put in there on the first place? We don't really know that, and because negotiations before the final draft went on "behind closed doors," it's not likely we could know for sure who wanted it.
People actually trying to build AI ARE trying to prove it, by making one. You're sitting in your armchair saying "it's impossible because magic!"
To be fair to him, he's a little more sophisticated than your average religious nut who believes that people have "souls" or something and computers can't. Instead, he has a somewhat complex metaphysical argument about the nature of reality, and he ultimately is happy to deny the existence of the material world. (Why he would bother arguing so long with people hear about such issues then, is beyond me -- from his perspective, we're all lunatics who have been taken in by some illusion.)
From my perspective, the philosophical argument is a bit muddled. But it's not like he's sitting in his armchair saying "it's impossible because magic!" -- rather, he isn't even sure his armchair or anything else exists -- except perhaps some version of disembodied "experience," which he somehow has "100% certain" knowledge exists not just for himself but for "everyone else." So it's not "impossible because magic!" but rather "it's impossible because the material world, including all robots, is basically ontologically inferior to 'experience' and since robots might all be an illusion anyway, there's no way they could have true 'experience' or 'intelligence' or 'consciousness' or whatever."
It's wacky, but I give him slightly more credit for claiming more than "It's magic!" as a religious wacko might. He's vaguely trying to make a rational argument, even if it seems pretty kooky.
Man, that's harsh. Very cold. I wish I had thought of something that pithy instead of trying to argue. :)
No I only affirm what I know with certainty- that there IS experience. You know there is also, and so does everyone else.
Yes, but how do you make the epistemological leap from the fact that "there is experience" (i.e., whatever you experience) to the reality that I am having "experience" and that "everyone else" has experience?
How could you possibly know "with certainty" that I or "everyone else" exist and have experience without accepting that there is some reality to the world as generated by your senses? Even if the only thing you believe about the reality in the world is that other consciousnesses exist, the only way you have evidence of them is through the medium of your sensory experience.
It's a huge logical leap to go from "I exist" and "I experience" to the "certainty" that "we all have experience" without making an assertion to the validity of SOME of your sensory experiences, i.e., those about the existence of others and their behavior.
Now that we know with 100% absolute certainty that experience exists and no skeptic can meaningfully deny it, let's take a good look at material substance. We have chased that stuff for thousands of years and each time we have been certain we have gotten to the irreducible and final form it, except for currently.
And I would counter that I am NOT "certain' that we have reached any irreducible or final understanding of the material world. Any decent scientist who has any basic understanding of epistemology should also agree with that. But just because we haven't made some sort of final determination about the properties of something doesn't mean that it's ontologically defective. There are LOTS of things we don't understand about the nature of experience -- I've spent a lot of time reading literature about phenomenology and the philosophy of perception. We hardly have complete and final understanding of how that works either. Yet you're convinced that that truly has real existence, while you're iffy about the material world because you don't think you have complete knowledge of it. That's a weird argument.
On this point, you can take a lesson from Marvin Minsky, who admits that if very complex systems give rise to consciousness because of "ether", er, I mean "emergent properties" then it must admit of degrees. So it follows that, and he says this explicitly, simple feedback loops like oh, your house's thermostat, actually possess a rudimentary form of consciousness.
You seem to find this disturbing, as if somehow admitting "consciousness" to a thermostat creates some fundamental problem in your universe or ideology.
I don't freakin' care. "Consciousness" to me is just a name for an emergent behavior. Perhaps it has degrees. Perhaps a dog is "conscious." Perhaps not. Does it matter? Apparently a great deal to you. But to me, not so much. To me, it's all about some sort of arbitrary definition of an emergent behavior. To you, it seems to be endowed with a fundamental ontological distinction. How you come to that distinction is still a mystery to me. And I have no idea why you think it MUST exist. How do you KNOW for certain that your thermostat isn't "conscious"? Why? Is a dog "conscious"? How do you know? Are you certain? How about a "brain-dead" person? Are they "conscious"? How do you know? What if their body still responds to certain stimuli, apparently a byproduct of reflexes and certain nerve pathways? Where do you the draw the line? More importantly -- how are you SO CERTAIN where you can draw the line about who or what has this special kind of "experience" you seem to think the universe is made of?
Once you open the door to the "emergent properties of complex systems" you're going to find yourself working overtime gerrymandering the legal boundaries of *which* complex systems should qualify for "consciousness" and the more things you find you have to gerrymander, th
Anyways...the larger point is, that there is no reason to believe that consciousness or experience falls out of machines, no matter how wet or complex they are.
Sure there is, if you actually believe in the empirical world. And that's all you're "evidence" is that you're discussing -- the physical stuff you see and can measure and dissect. There's no way currently to "prove" that consciousness emerges from the physical stuff of the brain, but the burden of proof is on your side to prove that there's "something else" there, because the rest of physical reality as we sense it seems logically consistent with materialism.
Consider that anything which can be modeled with a computer can be modeled with something much more primitive, albeit in a cumbersome way, for example, a Turing tape or a even a very fancy abacus made of wood, wires, beads. Yes you definitely want to keep that fact in mind before you pin that Strong AI Booster pin on your lapel.
What kind of crappy philosophical argument is this? Just because you can model the physical atoms of the brain with a sufficiently large "abacus," materialism must be false? Have you ever heard of "emergent" behavior? Have you ever seen apparent complexity emerging from apparently simple systems? People have been convinced that ELIZA was a conscious person. Now you have the brain with many orders of magnitude more complexity than the simple ELIZA algorithm, and you're telling me that you couldn't possibly be fooled by emergent behavior in such a complex mechanical system into thinking there was consciousness there -- or even strongly believing that beings with such mechanisms (like other humans) might possess consciousness... even if it's based only on a hugely complex material basis??
If we want to get down to brass tacks and go really hardcore the one thing we have absolute irrefutable evidence for is just experience itself. Everything else is possibly a chimera based on a re-construction of experience-as-thought; material substance is real the same way a false belief or an illusion is real.
Sure, but this is the path to solipsism. If you can't prove the material world exists, you can't even prove that other people or other minds exist. So, actually, it's inaccurate to say that the "one thing we have irrefutable evidence for is just experience itself." Rather, you should have said, "the one thing *I* have irrefutable evidence for is just my own experience -- I don't know that anything outside of my own thoughts exists, and I could be participating in a pseudo-masturbatory exercise of pretending that there is an external world and other people out there and this imaginary place called Slashdot where I pretend to communicate with these figments of my imagination."
That's where your argument leads ultimately. If you accept the material world exists, and you accept that there is actually a "we" in a meaningful sense of other people who might also be conscious, then you need to explain how they might be conscious in the way that you are. And short of some other explanatory method, materialism seems a pretty good explanatory tool for most progress in understanding and making consistent sense out of our perceptions of this apparent sensory world.
If anything, consciousness gives rise to matter (as an illusion or particular way of thinking) and also all the laws of physics and everything that flows therefrom. Given the absolute non-reputability of the existence of experience it's more likely that consciousness is the "fundamental" stuff of the universe than matter or that consciousness arises from sufficiently complex arrangements of non-conscience matter.
On what basis could you possibly judge what is "more likely" in this argument?? Is this possible? Sure. It's also possible that we're all brains floating in vats, or that we're in the Matrix, or whatever. But you have no empirical (or even a pr
A project can only be considered "open source" if anyone can push changes to its code repo without any oversight at all.
What the heck are you talking about? You want the Wikipedia version of "open source," the source that anyone can edit? No thanks -- that's asking for trouble. I'll be stuck getting "patches" by random vandals.
The correct term in that case is "source-available", not "open source".
Most of what are typically called "open source" software projects aren't open at all.
No, the well-established definition of "open source" (as even Wikipedia can tell you) is that the source or design for something is publicly available and can be edited/modified freely by end users.
It simply means the source is "open" (i.e., available to see and edit), as opposed to "closed" (i.e., unavailable and buried in a proprietary binary or something).
There is typically a small group of maintainers who control all changes, even if anyone can see the source and submit patches.
And I'm generally grateful for that. Those maintainers serve to check the changes and ensure they might actually improve the product, rather than being detrimental to it.
I, and most others, can't commit directly to the Thunderbird source repo
You got a problem with that? You don't think the direction of the project is going in the right way? That's fine -- FORK. That's what open source allows.
I'll be the first one to admit that there are plenty of projects where I've heard of overbearing or wacko maintainers who have weird ideas about what the project should or shouldn't do. Those people can be a problem, and they can hold things back.
But if that's so much of a problem as to significantly degrade the quality, then you shouldn't be the only one complaining -- so team up and fork. If people like what you're doing better, they'll go with you.
Maintainers with too much power can definitely be a problem. And, from what I hear, there can be a lot of dysfunction in the open-source community at times. Maybe widening the pool of active participants and decentralizing power could be useful in many projects. But I *really* don't think the solution is to allow *anyone* to make changes without *any* oversight. That sounds like a recipe for disaster.
You just identified the real issue "following too closely behind the vehicle in front of you" perhaps if there was a legislative/punitive or technological solution to this, issues relating to "traffic waves" would be solved.
Well, we could just start giving out more tickets for tailgating. They're pretty rare these days except in particularly egregious cases, but tailgating (i.e., "not maintaining a reasonable and safe following distance) is illegal in a lot of places and already can incur a fine.
We have the technology -- police cars tend to have cameras mounted in them and if they are looking for speeding cars, they also can record the speed. Since "safe following distance" is usually related to speed, the speed + the camera can verify that the driving was unsafe.
The problem is that a "safe following distance" which would prevent traffic waves is a LOT bigger than most drivers seem to think, particularly when they're driving on highways at rush hour. If we just started ticketed everyone who didn't allow that distance, there would likely be huge public outcry.
Better tech solution -- with all of the car cameras and sensors these days, install a meter or dial which displays distance to the car in front divided by current speed, along with the speedometer or tachometer. The units could just be "seconds" to cover that distance. Then states can very clearly just say, "you need to allow an X number of seconds 'cushion' in front of you on highways at all times." And you can read that off the meter.
Then police would be completely justified in ticketing you if you had the meter available and chose to violate the law.
Good luck arguing for this, though. I think we'll be more likely to have roads full of autonomous cars before this would become common.
Oh there is a reason, it just has nothing to do with safety.
Or there is a reason, it has to do with safety, or with optimising throughput, or some other valid concern, but that reason is not obvious to every dummy driver on the street.
The throughput argument bears repeating. Many drivers don't understand this, but sometimes you can get more people through a bottleneck (AND have fewer accidents) if everyone drives more slower at a constant speed than if everyone is trying to drive faster at the same traffic density. This is particularly true when you have a high variability of vehicle speeds, like in a mountainous area where trucks are forced to go slower or in an urban area where frequent incoming and outgoing traffic at exits often travel at different speeds from the rest of the highway.
For example, if you're driving on a highway through an urban area and they lower the rush hour speed limit to 45 mph (some areas now are adopting such dynamic speed limit signs), the idea is that if cars actually go 40-45 mph, the road will actually be able to handle the amount of traffic while also allowing all the people merging on, getting off at exits, changing lanes, etc. at a safe speed.
If, instead, everyone tries to drive 65-70 in the same area, what can happen is that the merging or changing lanes will eventually cause someone to cut someone else off, which causes sudden braking, which then causes some tailgaters behind them to brake suddenly, others follow and overcompensate because they were going too fast and suddenly see much slower cars, and within a few minutes you have a "traffic wave" of stop-and-go traffic backed up for a few miles which might take a half-hour to resolve, where throughput is dramatically reduced. (How many times have you gotten to the end after sitting through 10 minutes of such stop-and-go traffic waves, and there's nothing there -- no accident, no merge, etc.? This is often the kind of thing that happened.)
At a slower speed, the slower car may not have been forced to "cut someone off" in the first place, or if he does, the impact of a bit of braking may not cause such massive changes and overcompensation. Traffic thus recovers faster and throughput is maximized.
They specifically talk about merging into traffic.
I think you're replying to the wrong post. There was no discussion of merging in the post I was replying to. The only vaguely related idea was the possibility of needing to "swerve into the left lane." While doing so may require you to speed up slightly if the left lane is going faster, (1) it's certainly not going to require you to go "several times the maximum suggested speed" and max out your speedometer, and (2) you'd usually be much better off braking and staying in your own lane rather than swerving suddenly into another lane and speeding up. The main reason you'd NEED to swerve into another lane in the first place (rather than braking) would be if you were following too close, i.e., already committing a traffic violation.
I am not sure why you brought road rage into this discussion, unless you consider routine traffic violations an example of road rage.
As the previous post said, I think honking and using middle fingers (some of your examples of efficient communication) are generally indications of aggressive driving behavior, commonly known as "road rage."
Strictly adhering to a speed limit doesn't make you a safe driver. Driving according to road conditions, your alertness level, and your car's ability does. For example, by backing up traffic by strictly following 60 mph speed limit on a sunny clear day on a straight road you probably killed 0.001 humans. If you do this regularly, then over years you can rake up higher death toll than a drunk driver.
I think you need a lesson in causality and culpability. Generally speaking, the driver who is going 60mph in a scenario where the law compels him to is not creating this "death toll." It is the people who drive more unsafely around him (tailgating, swerving to pass, etc.) because they aren't patient enough to drive safely within the posted limit. It's perfectly legal and in fact legally encouraged to drive at or below the speed limit, particularly if in the right lane (or one of the right lanes on a multilane highway). I do agree with you that it is unsafe for someone to drive the speed limit in some cases in the left lane, and there are generally laws prohibiting that. But if the slow driver is not in the left lane, and if common practice among most of the cars on that road is to drive faster and the authorities have not raised the speed limit, then the culpability may be jointly shared by those who posted the limit and the people who drove in crazy ways to be able to go faster.
I will freely admit that I frequently go over the speed limit, particularly when the general flow of traffic around me is going faster. But I have no illusions that if I end up in a serious crash by speeding that somehow a slower driver was magically the cause of it. When I do encounter a slower driver, I either drive a safe distance behind him or pass when it is safe and traffic is clear. That's what a "safe driver" actually does when encountering a car driving the speed limit -- and if you do otherwise and have an accident, it's YOUR fault.
If, as sometimes happens, I see a hoard of jerks driving bumper-to-bumper, tailgating, and weaving while trying to pass a slower car, I generally back WAY OFF behind them, because they are the ones causing the hazard, and I've actually witnessed accidents happen in those scenarios, so I want to be as far behind them as possible.
Not only is it not an infraction to drive in such a way as to save lives and prevent accidents, when you can save a life or prevent an accident, but it requires you to go against the suggested speed, or swerve into the left lane (even when the divider is solid) you are actually required to do so.
WHAT?!?
In >99% of such situations, the correct decision is to hit the brake, NOT the accelerator. Unless you're participating in a car chase and fleeing from terrorists as in some action movie, there is almost never a situation where slamming down the accelerator is the correct choice to prevent an accident.
In general, you are much more likely to cause a serious accident by doing this (since the combination of swerving and accelerating is much more likely to cause you to lose control and even roll or flip), not to mention running into other cars. By braking, the worst that can usually happen is you get a much less-serious crash into your rear from a car behind you that was following too close to isn't paying attention.
That is the entire point of cars having a maximum speed of several times the maximum suggested speed is because you are supposed to speed in many situations to save lives.
Good to know. I was wondering why my speedometer goes up to 140 mph or whatever. So, next time something weird happens in front of me while I'm going at 65mph on the highway, I'll slam on the accelerator, swerve left into oncoming traffic, and go 140mph to avoid the accident.
Are you freakin' kidding me? And this was modded up??
Once we apply control system concepts to this, it becomes immediately obvious that any system of rigid adherence to traffic laws is a lot less efficient than more flexible system based on human-to-human interactions and learning.
[Citation needed]
Your primary argument is that the benefit comes from "dynamic" systems that "are capable of adjusting to a wide range of situations." Except with more predictable adherence to traffic laws, you'd have a smaller range of situations occurring.
Also, in terms of "efficiency," it's pretty well demonstrated in traffic theory that traffic has "transition thresholds" kind of like fluid dynamic transitions between laminar and turbulent flow. When you have conditions like people trying to drive too fast and tailgating in high-density traffic, there's a greater chance of someone needing to brake suddenly, which often causes a chain reaction, and can generate a "traffic wave" that snarls traffic for 15 minutes in stop-and-go waves for miles behind. Similarly, in a merge scenario, often an efficient "zipper merge" might be able to happen at speed X if everyone were driving at a constant rate and merging at the appropriate moment. But if everyone instead is trying to drive at speed X+10 and tailgating to "not let the jerks in," it actually creates a bottleneck which results in the effective flow-rate through the merge to be at speed X-10, i.e., lower (and less efficient) than if everyone drove slowly and allowed adequate merging room.
In sum, there are a lot of common traffic situations where irrational human behavior is the primary cause of traffic snarls in high-density traffic. There are traffic flow studies that show even a small quantity (like 10-20%) of drivers driving more rationally (leaving gaps in front, avoiding crazing acceleration and braking, etc.) can actually "seed" a traffic snarl and cause it to break up and increase throughput. That, for example, is why have a large number of trucks on a highway during a traffic jam can often cause it to clear more quickly -- the trucks tend to avoid a lot of stop-and-go, and they need to allow adequate braking distance, so they effectively can help to clear a jam.
Anyhow, I don't buy the idea that the dynamic irrationality of human systems are actually more efficient, since the vast majority of traffic problems where you end up sitting in stop-and-go traffic for 30 minutes are caused by human error and accidents, usually introduced by violation of various traffic laws.
All of this is true, yet accident rate of these idiotic humans is half of what rigidly-abiding robots are. Perhaps, driving like an idiot in all sorts of unpredictable ways is the right approach to reducing accidents in a system that presently dominated by idiots driving in all sorts of unpredictable ways?
Maybe, maybe not. It depends on how you count accidents. Do you want to reduce accidents in general, or do you want to reduce serious accidents that cause serious or fatal injuries?
It's unclear from the limited data what effect the robotic rules are having. If "driving like an idiot in all sorts of unpredictable ways" causes 50 accidents with 25 serious ones and 10 fatalities, but driving in a more rigid rule-based way results in 100 fender-benders but no serious accidents and no fatalities, I think most people would tend to agree that the greater accident rate may be a significant improvement in highway safety.
But as I said, I don't know whether this will actually happen. It seems likely that the robot cars will tend to be involved in more fender-benders by driving more safely. But what effect do these "rigid rule-based" cars have on those around them? If it causes other people to have road rage and drive in even worse ways, that's likely to result in even more accidents AROUND the robot cars. Just looking at the stats for the robot cars themselves isn't enough to judge their effect on safety overall.
I'm sure there will be AI defenders who will question the assertion about a crash rate "double" that of average humans. But it doesn't matter. The point is that human drivers are idiots and drive in all sorts of unpredictable ways. They also tend to hate other drivers who operate in demonstrably safer ways (e.g., allowing plenty of space in front of them, not accelerating wildly just to stop 100 feet ahead in stop-and-go traffic, not zooming past a slower lane in a merge situation, but instead attempting a "zipper merge" at the same speed as the slower lane, etc). Of course, a lot of the less safe human behaviors also tend to be the reason for traffic snarls in the first place, but you'll have a hard time convincing most drivers of that, since they want to drive as if they are on a racetrack and somehow think that weaving back and forth to get into that tiny gap you've left in front for safety is going to allow them to get home so much faster (even if it's only 2 seconds earlier).
I imagine the biggest problem with having AI cars obey traffic laws strictly is not the accidents -- rather that it's going to lead to human road rage, which often leads humans to be even more irrational and drive in even less safe ways. Thus, while AI cars are still a minority on the roads, I'm not sure it will lead to a net improvement in accident statistics -- just as a "slow driver" on a highway can block up traffic, cause other drivers to drive unsafely around them, and ultimately lead to the potential for more accidents, even if that slow driver thinks they are being "safe" by driving the speed limit or a little below.
Oh, and by the way, yeah -- I know there were a few minor typos in that post. I was typing fast. I saw them before I hit "submit," but, ya know what?
I really actually do even care less about those minor typos than the whole debate about the phrase anyway. So, I was right when I said before about the usage debate -- I COULD care less. And now I do!
Maybe next time use the normal phrase instead of some screwed up version you misheard, mmh sunshine?
Actually, the phrase "could care less" dates back roughly 60 years in English, and the phrase "couldn't care less" is perhaps only 10 years older.
So, they basically emerged around the same time and always mean the same thing, i.e., "I don't care." As that link discusses, there are plenty of other English idioms that have similarly irrational constructions. Grammatical logic does not trump idiomatic usage.
And as for your contention that it's a "screwed up version," you might have a look at this article, which include statistics showing that even in the New York Times (usually somewhat conservative in usage matters), the two phrases have become almost equally common since 2000. And recent databases of spoken rather than written English show that (the supposedly "screwed up") "could care less" is roughly five times more common than (your supposedly "correct") "couldn't care less." Whether you like it or not, the usage you claim is "wrong" has become quite standard.
Regardless, this whole "grammar police" discussion is pointless. As usual with these sort of things, language marches on, and the grammar wackos are the ones who make trouble for everyone. Without you folks, we'd likely transition to "could care less" completely in a few decades, and "couldn't care less" would mostly die out. But no -- you'll keep it alive, because you think it's "more logical," and in 30 years nobody educated will be able to use either phrase, because "couldn't" will have become so rare as to sound weird, and "could" will be branded as "wrong" by the few wackos still holding the line.
Whatever. I could care less... or, actually, ya know, I really couldn't....
I really hate it, when politicians pop up, write a "Hello World!" one liner, and then claim that they can code.
Who has claimed that? Obama certainly didn't claim that -- the press release said he was "the first president to write a line of code." There's no claim that he became an expert or fluent -- he just participated in doing something that many people of his generation have never done. Because he thinks it's important, as he said:
Part of what we're realizing is that we're starting too late when it comes to making sure that our young people are familiar with not just how to play a video game, but how to create a video game.
And it wasn't David Cameron claiming he "learned to code" -- if anything it's the Microsoft press release that used that phrase. If you read the details, they say just that these politicians "had their first experience" of coding, not that they had somehow become an expert in an hour. If anything, the emphasis with Cameron was how much he learned from OTHER KIDS who had clearly invested more time in this stuff.
They don't understand what programming is all about, and want to dismiss it as a simple skill that anyone (H1Bs) can do. Just because you can speak a few words of English as a foreign language, that doesn't mean that you can write works of Shakespearean quality.
That, is what politicians don't get about programming. They don't understand it, so they want to dismiss it as something trivial.
Actually, it is the exact opposite. If you actually read what they're saying, they are trying to emphasize how important these sorts of skills are, and they are doing these "stunts" NOT to demonstrate that "I too can learn to code in an hour," but rather something like, "Hey -- parents and grandparents out there who may never have done anything like this -- look, it's important, and it's a good idea to expose your kids to it early. I'm taking time to show how important skills like this are by trying a little myself, even though I haven't done it before."
Now -- you can criticize various aspects of what they're doing. You could say that this is an ineffective way of getting their message across or that we don't need more kids familiar with coding (probably not true) or that there's a better way to demonstrate their commitment to this.
But the whole point of these things is politicians trying to emphasize the IMPORTANCE of coding to our society today -- even if older generations don't "get it." They're not "dismiss[ing] it as something trivial" -- they're trying to encourage kids and parents to take the time to try it. As the Microsoft story about Cameron ends:
the hope is that the Minecraft Hour of Code tutorial will have sparked an interest that lasts a lifetime.
It probably won't for the vast majority of kids, but it might create an interest in some. Maybe you have some better ideas about how to encourage this. But I don't think you can accuse the politicians here of claiming either (1) that they became experts in an hour or (2) that they are trying to dismiss these skills as overly simple. If anything, they are trying to point out how we need to get kids interested early because it is a HARD and IMPORTANT skill that can take a long time to learn.
Yes, and contra the summary, it hasn't even passed the House yet. They just announced that a deal has been struck and released the text. But it's doubtful they'd make the announcement if they weren't certain they has the House votes. Then it will go back to the Senate. But note that CISA was already passed in a separate provision in the Senate, so it's doubtful this would be a reason to deny passage of the whole thing in the Senate.