However, none of that was related to ShanghaiBill's query, which was whether the change in the yellow-timing coincided with the study. Something that neither the summary nor the Tribune article make clear (although the way the article is written suggests to me the reversion pre-dates the study.) Nor did anything you linked to.
You failed to read ShanghaiBill's comment properly, then went on a rant about him failing to read the summary. Just accept that you were wrong, apologise to ShanghaiBill, and move on. Being wrong doesn't make you a bad person. Trying to twist out of it to save face does.
The key part of ShanghaiBill's query was "in the intersections studied".
In the Tribune article, as in the summary, the comment about the change in the yellow-timing was a completely separate part of the article from that discussing the findings of their commissioned study. From the article I get the impression that the Tribune investigation which led to the reversal of the city's policy pre-dated the newspaper commissioning the study and therefore wasn't a confounding factor, however there's nothing in the summary that makes that clear. (And even in the article, I'm only interpreting the language, it isn't specifically stated.)
Surprisingly, much of the casting works really well.
(Exceptions are that Bones seems miscast and Grant just sucks as Sulu. Grant isn't just hammy overacting, but doing an exaggerated comedic impersonation of hammy-overacting. I guess the producers get cheap props that way, so... the needs of the many...)
as he has managed to pick some some pretty good movies to be involved with.
He's also picked some absolute shockers. And the ratio of gems to shit seems to fall over time. Most of his recent work, even in otherwise good films, seems phoned in.
Do you realise how many layers you're adding just to preserve a theory that both the author of the original story and writer of the damn screenplay said wasn't valid? Just give it up.
The analogy drawn between Deckard and the replicants was meant to show the dehumanisation of his job, his life, that he needed Rachel in order to become "human" again, not that he was a super-secret special replicant allowed to roam freely in violation of the very law enforced by the agency that is employing him.
While I see your point, all of those certification schemes you see on products (whether "dolphin safe" or "heartsmart" or "sustainable forests"), those companies had to pay to join. The money is, generally, used to verify that the company is compliant with the scheme's goals.
This is no different. It's an attempt by Eyeo to find a balance between dangerous/intrusive ads and allowing content providers to earn a living. But doing so has costs, so if your company wants Eyeo to grant you an exception because you are a responsible advertiser, you need to pay for that extra service.
You don't want to receive something for nothing, do you? Surely the irony would kill you.
A compromise would be to let customers indicate whether they want or need to use anonymiser services (wither TOR or conventional proxies). Much like customers who do/don't use their credit cards overseas. Very very few customers would choose this (or even understand the option), so it wouldn't reduce the protective effect compared to a blanket ban on TOR.
This seems very common in the US. The weird, almost religious belief in the "efficiency of business/inefficiency of government" that legislators choose the worst possible combination of business and government. All the loss of control of out-sourcing a monopoly, while retaining all the stupidity and corruption of bureaucracy.
The weirdest thing is that this hatred of "government" seems to come, without a trace of irony, from politicians.
Problem is what if there is a reason where solar generation is interrupted for a period that is longer than the battery storage such as a week long winter storm? Or perhaps a hurricane that damages the solar panels? In a black swan event, are the solarists(?) going to be content with decision to be disconnected to the grid and powerless for what could be a prolong period OR would they be setting themselves up for a "humanitarian crisis"?
How is that different from the "white swans" that we see all the time? Week long winter storms that take out power lines with ice build-up (while preventing repair crews from getting out), or hurricanes that take down power lines across an entire region, or even pull major power stations offline.
it seems unreasonable to assume that a highly advanced civilization intent in colonization would invest the economic resources and risk the political or social resources to do so very distant to their own world when much closer, viable options are a possibility.
However, after those first nearby colonies have developed, some of their population will have an economic, political, religious/etc interest in setting up their own colonies slightly further out. And some of those colonies will spawn others yet further out...
Exactly as humans spread around the world by foot and canoe.
And with FTL it would only take a few tens of thousands of years to expand through the entire galaxy, even if colonies developed fairly slowly (by human standards.) Without FTL it would only take a few tens of millions of years.
[And realistically it would happen faster. Colonies which develop quickest are those more culturally likely to seed further colonies. And the fastest developing of those would be the first to seed the next round. The process would be self reinforcing. The culture of colonising would be amplified each round.]
This galaxy is frippin' BIG. Even with practical FTL, it could take a long time for an intelligent species to spread through the galaxy
Time is also big.
If it takes 1000 years on average to colonise and develop a new planetary system to the point where it's willing and able to spin off its own colonies, and each successful colony produces just one child colony every thousand years (allowing for failed colonies, colonies that don't further colonisation, etc), it would take just 38 thousand years to colonise all 200 billion stars in this galaxy.
Even allowing for a practical limit of 1% of the speed of light, if it is even possible to reach another star system, you can colonise the entire galaxy in just a few million years.
If just one civilisation in the last few billion years had a culture of colonisation even a fraction as much as humans do, the entire galaxy would have been colonised, even without FTL. And colonised repeatedly, in thousands of waves, exploiting every niche. We simply wouldn't have had a chance to exist.
and it's plausible that such an advanced civilization wouldn't really be interested in what happened on planets.
All of them?
Not a single faction from a single alien civilisation is interested in other early intelligences? We study dolphins and chimps. We study parrots and ravens. Hell, there are researchers who study ants, lichen, plankton...
Even leaving aside the major question of quite how intelligent life actually is (spend an hour or 24 watching "fail" vids on Youtube),
- Advanced tool use, up to and including electronics and networking, - Cooperation/communication, allowing a global information network and the standards required for web/video. - Symbolic logic, to use the OS/browser/smartphone/tablet... even amongst the simplest users. - Advanced socialisation, not only establishing in-group/out-group, but abstracting that to online entities. - Humour, which requires strong social awareness, and, in the case of "fail" videos, dissociative empathy.
It all suggests a reasonably intelligent species, with at least pockets of high intelligence.
Hell, even Youtube trolls require high level social skills for the recursive opponent modelling (just not quite high enough.)
the aliens went away to wait for us to evolve into something interesting.
All of them?
Every faction from every alien civilisation in the entire galaxy all unanimously decided to go away for thousands of years, even though their own rules (according to your scenario) allow them to interfere.
There are 200 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. If intelligent life can appear on just 1 in a million, that's still 200,000 civilisations right now. And that doesn't include the civilisations that rose and fell over the last 8-10 billion years since metallicity became high enough in the galaxy to support planets.
If even a single alien civilisation enjoys/wants/requires colonisation, and interstellar travel is as easy as you believe, then our whole solar system would have been colonised billions of years ago; and more likely colonised again and again and again, hundreds of times, every few million years as new civilisations rise and fall.
[People just don't comprehend how big these numbers are. Star Trek has a lot to answer for.]
Assuming that a basic English vocabulary has 30,000 words, four-word passphrases allows just 30k^4 combinations. That's the equivalent of a system that requires a 5 letter lower-case non-dictionary password. You get more combinations from just two random upper/lower/numbers/punctuation characters.
It's probably worth pointing out that these are not "given" to police. They are "loaned".
Therefore police depts that accept this gear are required to pay for maintenance (which on some of the vehicles can be more than the value of the vehicle) and are forbidden from selling them if they become surplus to requirements.
If they got the accounts system, (which seems likely, given that Sony seems to have put every subsystem on the same network, employee medical records on the same network as raw film files) then any electronic receipt for purchase of items for office lunch rooms could include the model numbers for the sinks.
Not in most jurisdictions, including the UK. Malicious release of information can be libellous even if the information is truthful. (And on the flip side, falsehoods aren't necessarily slander.) I think there's also a "public interest" requirement under EU privacy rules which the UK complies with.
However, in this case, the police will have an exclusion somewhere in the law because they will be allowed to create a "public record", such as the old police blotter. Which gives them a giant loophole to selectively and maliciously target what and how they report in order to turn it into an extra-judicial punishment (as in this case).
For starters, it's a record of the police's activity.
No, it's a selective record of what they want to release. There's no uniform reporting requirements, it's not an official record, it's solely at the discretion of the Met's own PR gimps.
They are not going to tweet anything that embarrasses the Met, nor anyone who is protected, no insiders will be shamed. For DUI'd politicians, influential businessmen and off-duty cops, whether they end up on the name'n'shame roster will be purely a political decision - whether they are considered "friend" or "foe". Similarly, if some researcher or NGO uses the Twitter feed to show, for example, a statistical bias in arrests, then from then on the PR gimps compiling the Twitter feed will simply filter the cases to fit whatever "balance" is deemed acceptable to their higher-ups (note: doing nothing to change the actual target rates).
You either make it an official record of every qualifying incident, at a central.gov.uk site (not using a social "play" site like Twitter or Facebook), where reporting conforms to uniform requirements and there are set legal and civil penalties for misuse of the register, or you do none of it.
Generally this is a bad idea, since it will take you from "maybe get out of this with a warning" into "they will throw everything they can at you even if they can't get you for speeding".
"Tearing" isn't something you get from lag between PC and monitor. So that suggests he was using bad cables, or bad connectors, or bad cards, something that caused a signal drop-out. Meaning his problem would be solved by simply improving the cabling.
[That said, his wife doesn't like fan noise in the living room, but he wants to go to a projector?]
Slashdot Mirror
Nice attempt to move the goalposts.
However, none of that was related to ShanghaiBill's query, which was whether the change in the yellow-timing coincided with the study. Something that neither the summary nor the Tribune article make clear (although the way the article is written suggests to me the reversion pre-dates the study.) Nor did anything you linked to.
You failed to read ShanghaiBill's comment properly, then went on a rant about him failing to read the summary. Just accept that you were wrong, apologise to ShanghaiBill, and move on. Being wrong doesn't make you a bad person. Trying to twist out of it to save face does.
People have been trying to make driving safer.
Driving is now safer.
Laws to make driving safer were therefore hysterical and stupid.
The key part of ShanghaiBill's query was "in the intersections studied".
In the Tribune article, as in the summary, the comment about the change in the yellow-timing was a completely separate part of the article from that discussing the findings of their commissioned study. From the article I get the impression that the Tribune investigation which led to the reversal of the city's policy pre-dated the newspaper commissioning the study and therefore wasn't a confounding factor, however there's nothing in the summary that makes that clear. (And even in the article, I'm only interpreting the language, it isn't specifically stated.)
Surprisingly, much of the casting works really well.
(Exceptions are that Bones seems miscast and Grant just sucks as Sulu. Grant isn't just hammy overacting, but doing an exaggerated comedic impersonation of hammy-overacting. I guess the producers get cheap props that way, so... the needs of the many...)
Ridley Scott is one of my favourite directors and aliens is one of the best movies ever made
Ridley Scott directed Alien. James Cameron wrote and directed Aliens.
as he has managed to pick some some pretty good movies to be involved with.
He's also picked some absolute shockers. And the ratio of gems to shit seems to fall over time. Most of his recent work, even in otherwise good films, seems phoned in.
Do you realise how many layers you're adding just to preserve a theory that both the author of the original story and writer of the damn screenplay said wasn't valid? Just give it up.
The analogy drawn between Deckard and the replicants was meant to show the dehumanisation of his job, his life, that he needed Rachel in order to become "human" again, not that he was a super-secret special replicant allowed to roam freely in violation of the very law enforced by the agency that is employing him.
can we PLEASE have the word replicant added to slashdot's dictionary?
Errr, slashdot doesn't have a dictionary. Your browser does. Right-click the highlighted word, "add to dictionary". Bam! Done.
While I see your point, all of those certification schemes you see on products (whether "dolphin safe" or "heartsmart" or "sustainable forests"), those companies had to pay to join. The money is, generally, used to verify that the company is compliant with the scheme's goals.
This is no different. It's an attempt by Eyeo to find a balance between dangerous/intrusive ads and allowing content providers to earn a living. But doing so has costs, so if your company wants Eyeo to grant you an exception because you are a responsible advertiser, you need to pay for that extra service.
You don't want to receive something for nothing, do you? Surely the irony would kill you.
Meanwhile, Patreon, Kickstarter, Indiegogo...
A compromise would be to let customers indicate whether they want or need to use anonymiser services (wither TOR or conventional proxies). Much like customers who do/don't use their credit cards overseas. Very very few customers would choose this (or even understand the option), so it wouldn't reduce the protective effect compared to a blanket ban on TOR.
This seems very common in the US. The weird, almost religious belief in the "efficiency of business/inefficiency of government" that legislators choose the worst possible combination of business and government. All the loss of control of out-sourcing a monopoly, while retaining all the stupidity and corruption of bureaucracy.
The weirdest thing is that this hatred of "government" seems to come, without a trace of irony, from politicians.
Problem is what if there is a reason where solar generation is interrupted for a period that is longer than the battery storage such as a week long winter storm? Or perhaps a hurricane that damages the solar panels? In a black swan event, are the solarists(?) going to be content with decision to be disconnected to the grid and powerless for what could be a prolong period OR would they be setting themselves up for a "humanitarian crisis"?
How is that different from the "white swans" that we see all the time? Week long winter storms that take out power lines with ice build-up (while preventing repair crews from getting out), or hurricanes that take down power lines across an entire region, or even pull major power stations offline.
it seems unreasonable to assume that a highly advanced civilization intent in colonization would invest the economic resources and risk the political or social resources to do so very distant to their own world when much closer, viable options are a possibility.
However, after those first nearby colonies have developed, some of their population will have an economic, political, religious/etc interest in setting up their own colonies slightly further out. And some of those colonies will spawn others yet further out...
Exactly as humans spread around the world by foot and canoe.
And with FTL it would only take a few tens of thousands of years to expand through the entire galaxy, even if colonies developed fairly slowly (by human standards.) Without FTL it would only take a few tens of millions of years.
[And realistically it would happen faster. Colonies which develop quickest are those more culturally likely to seed further colonies. And the fastest developing of those would be the first to seed the next round. The process would be self reinforcing. The culture of colonising would be amplified each round.]
This galaxy is frippin' BIG. Even with practical FTL, it could take a long time for an intelligent species to spread through the galaxy
Time is also big.
If it takes 1000 years on average to colonise and develop a new planetary system to the point where it's willing and able to spin off its own colonies, and each successful colony produces just one child colony every thousand years (allowing for failed colonies, colonies that don't further colonisation, etc), it would take just 38 thousand years to colonise all 200 billion stars in this galaxy.
Even allowing for a practical limit of 1% of the speed of light, if it is even possible to reach another star system, you can colonise the entire galaxy in just a few million years.
If just one civilisation in the last few billion years had a culture of colonisation even a fraction as much as humans do, the entire galaxy would have been colonised, even without FTL. And colonised repeatedly, in thousands of waves, exploiting every niche. We simply wouldn't have had a chance to exist.
and it's plausible that such an advanced civilization wouldn't really be interested in what happened on planets.
All of them?
Not a single faction from a single alien civilisation is interested in other early intelligences? We study dolphins and chimps. We study parrots and ravens. Hell, there are researchers who study ants, lichen, plankton...
Even leaving aside the major question of quite how intelligent life actually is (spend an hour or 24 watching "fail" vids on Youtube),
- Advanced tool use, up to and including electronics and networking,
- Cooperation/communication, allowing a global information network and the standards required for web/video.
- Symbolic logic, to use the OS/browser/smartphone/tablet... even amongst the simplest users.
- Advanced socialisation, not only establishing in-group/out-group, but abstracting that to online entities.
- Humour, which requires strong social awareness, and, in the case of "fail" videos, dissociative empathy.
It all suggests a reasonably intelligent species, with at least pockets of high intelligence.
Hell, even Youtube trolls require high level social skills for the recursive opponent modelling (just not quite high enough.)
the aliens went away to wait for us to evolve into something interesting.
All of them?
Every faction from every alien civilisation in the entire galaxy all unanimously decided to go away for thousands of years, even though their own rules (according to your scenario) allow them to interfere.
There are 200 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. If intelligent life can appear on just 1 in a million, that's still 200,000 civilisations right now. And that doesn't include the civilisations that rose and fell over the last 8-10 billion years since metallicity became high enough in the galaxy to support planets.
If even a single alien civilisation enjoys/wants/requires colonisation, and interstellar travel is as easy as you believe, then our whole solar system would have been colonised billions of years ago; and more likely colonised again and again and again, hundreds of times, every few million years as new civilisations rise and fall.
[People just don't comprehend how big these numbers are. Star Trek has a lot to answer for.]
Assuming that a basic English vocabulary has 30,000 words, four-word passphrases allows just 30k^4 combinations. That's the equivalent of a system that requires a 5 letter lower-case non-dictionary password. You get more combinations from just two random upper/lower/numbers/punctuation characters.
So, why are they only giving these to police?
It's probably worth pointing out that these are not "given" to police. They are "loaned".
Therefore police depts that accept this gear are required to pay for maintenance (which on some of the vehicles can be more than the value of the vehicle) and are forbidden from selling them if they become surplus to requirements.
If they got the accounts system, (which seems likely, given that Sony seems to have put every subsystem on the same network, employee medical records on the same network as raw film files) then any electronic receipt for purchase of items for office lunch rooms could include the model numbers for the sinks.
slander needs to be false
Not in most jurisdictions, including the UK. Malicious release of information can be libellous even if the information is truthful. (And on the flip side, falsehoods aren't necessarily slander.) I think there's also a "public interest" requirement under EU privacy rules which the UK complies with.
However, in this case, the police will have an exclusion somewhere in the law because they will be allowed to create a "public record", such as the old police blotter. Which gives them a giant loophole to selectively and maliciously target what and how they report in order to turn it into an extra-judicial punishment (as in this case).
For starters, it's a record of the police's activity.
No, it's a selective record of what they want to release. There's no uniform reporting requirements, it's not an official record, it's solely at the discretion of the Met's own PR gimps.
They are not going to tweet anything that embarrasses the Met, nor anyone who is protected, no insiders will be shamed. For DUI'd politicians, influential businessmen and off-duty cops, whether they end up on the name'n'shame roster will be purely a political decision - whether they are considered "friend" or "foe". Similarly, if some researcher or NGO uses the Twitter feed to show, for example, a statistical bias in arrests, then from then on the PR gimps compiling the Twitter feed will simply filter the cases to fit whatever "balance" is deemed acceptable to their higher-ups (note: doing nothing to change the actual target rates).
You either make it an official record of every qualifying incident, at a central .gov.uk site (not using a social "play" site like Twitter or Facebook), where reporting conforms to uniform requirements and there are set legal and civil penalties for misuse of the register, or you do none of it.
Selective reporting is inherently unsound.
Generally this is a bad idea, since it will take you from "maybe get out of this with a warning" into "they will throw everything they can at you even if they can't get you for speeding".
Holy shit, your country sucks.
Texting here means writing text to paper
Ah, yes. We call that "printing", which is clearly much less confusing.
"Tearing" isn't something you get from lag between PC and monitor. So that suggests he was using bad cables, or bad connectors, or bad cards, something that caused a signal drop-out. Meaning his problem would be solved by simply improving the cabling.
[That said, his wife doesn't like fan noise in the living room, but he wants to go to a projector?]