AC writes, "The US spends $8 per passenger flight. The Israeli's spend $80. So, all you need to do is find 50-60 billion dollars a year to get the US up to Israel's standard. Or you could be a realist, and determine that it's not worth it."
If the US can't find sixty billion dollars a year to spend on airport security but can find one trillion dollars a year to spend on blowing the crap out of foreign countries, the US needs better accountants.
Contracts and laws designed to enable and conceal the violation of citizens' Amendment rights are unconscionable and illegal. I hope you can see how that relates to any evidence (not) produced at trial, keeping in mind the Sixth Amendment rights to, amongst other things, a public trial, an impartial jury and compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in a defendant's favor.
Well, hell, then, just skip all the safety precautions on nuclear power. No domes, no separated coolants, etc. You could probably build and operate fission reactors a hell of a lot cheaper for a hell of a lot more output than anything fossil-based by order(s) of magnitude if you skipped all that environmental/worker protection stuff... so it's probably a good thing that you used the term "to a first approximation". Those nth-order effects can really FUBAR your day.:)
You're describing medieval guilds, or where "accidents" happen, protection rackets. It can call itself whatever it likes, it may have the "blessing" of the law, but it's medieval guilds and protection rackets all the same.
If I give you a polio vaccine, does the needle hurt?
Does it hurt more than the risk of getting - and being a carrier for - polio?
That is, apparently, Snowden's viewpoint on revealing the US government's actions.
From a world perspective, if America truly wants the world to become a bastion of liberty and freedom, if America truly believes in the principles of the US Bill of Rights, then America shouldn't be a hypocrite about it.
Getting indignant when it gets caught hiding in the guestroom with its pants down, clutching a sock and a porno, just after giving a hellfire-and-damnation speech to the rest of the world? LOL.
The local govt that is spying on foreigners, cannot unilaterally abuse the foreign citizens as it can the local populace.
Since unilaterally means one-sided, local governments - especially when they're world-dominating superpowers - can unilaterally abuse foreigners worse than the local populace. After all, if it looked like the Feds had droned a school in Texas instead of Pakistan, killing 69 Texan children, and responded to Texan demands for an explanation with a policy of secrecy and silence, what odds would you have placed on Texas remaining in the Union? And speaking of revolutions, the CIA has had a long habit of funding revolutions in other countries, including democratic nations, and their track record for producing peace (that thing where we "can all just get along")? Not so good.
No, local governments can get away with doing things in foreign lands that they'd never get away with (as easily) doing to their own populace, simply because "over there" is out of sight and out of mind. Of course, the internet makes that more difficult these days - turning the world into an electronic village means your online friend that plays MMOs with you on weekends could be in one of the countries that has your government's missile-armed drones flying overhead.
If there's a reinforced door, it's likely nobody can get forced into anything. If there's food poisoning / drunk / heart attack, that's what a copilot is for. Yes, a pilot is an interested party - interested in staying alive, too.
Now let's add a remote control device, remove the pilot, and imagine that instead of a bunch of terrorists having to coordinate physically hijacking a half-dozen planes (and now also having to get through reinforced doors to reach the cabin), you've got a bunch of terrorists getting their hands on a zero-day that can hijack as many as they can reach by radio.
Hmm. Why shouldn't felons have voting rights? If you're putting so many people behind bars that their (in)ability to exercise their political preferences at the polling booth could change the outcome, politics are already involved, and if you're not, then such denial is meaningless and arbitrary and thus a sign of bad legislation (or unhealthy ambitions).
Maybe these studies are wrong? You say there are statistics, show they aren't fabrications: Where's your study? Who told you those stats in the first place?
That cuts both ways. Kanin himself apparently cautioned against the generalizability of his findings, and some googling indicates to me that his study has been widely disputed. To quote one researcher, "Kanin describes no effort to systemize his own ‘evaluation’ of the police reports—for example, by listing details or facts that he used to evaluate the criteria used by the police to draw their conclusions. Nor does Kanin describe any effort to compare his evaluation of those reports to that of a second, independent research—providing a ‘reliability’ analysis. This violates a cardinal rule of science, a rule designed to ensure that observations are not simply the reflection of the bias of the observer".
Or to quote a blogger under the moniker Ampersand, "In other words, Kanin’s study consists of Kanin uncritically reporting the claims of a single police force in a small, unidentified city, without those claims having been checked or verified in any way whatsoever."
Wikipedia itself has a long table of studies and the rates they report, even including a study on the studies - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_rape_accusations - which has as one of its conclusions that it is 'impossible to "discern with any degree of certainty the actual rate of false allegations" due to the fact that many of the studies of false allegations have adopted unreliable or untested research methodologies'.
Where am I going with this? Damned if I know. The huge number of dead links to primary sources I hit was certainly annoying. But were I you, I think I'd cease using Kanin's study like it actually means anything beyond "how to provide ammunition for people who don't even know which end of the gun they're holding".
I noticed that the GP didn't mention the word "church" once. Seems to me that we humans are very bad at building houses when we use religion as the foundation.
Sadly, it might seriously be time for considering a modern version of the crusades. But without the religious slant on our side.
Is it worth me pointing out that without the religious slant, the crusades could be crudely described as a small bunch of murderous smart-asses convincing a large bunch of murderous dumb-asses that there was a distant foreign land deserving of plucking, looting, raping and pillaging - so that the first bunch could do some plucking, looting, raping and pillaging of their own without having to fight the second bunch for the spoils?
IG-88, R2D2 and other "fully sentient" (some distinguish this by using the term "sapient") droids are rare, yes, but as I noted sentience covers a range of possibilities. The GP said "you wouldn't feel bad if you dropped and broke a smartphone" - but could we say the same if we dropped a dog, cat or other family pet and it broke?
If you mean, "is it ethical to prevent something with the potential for sentience from gaining sentience?" Then I would say, it is not unethical without a wider context from which to gain perspective. For example: "Two humans who know they are fertile and genetically compatible, decide to not conceive a child today. Is that ethical, unethical or not unethical?"
Based on what I know of the Star Wars setting, if I bought a non-sentient droid for use as a tool, then I would say (lacking further context) that I had a duty to keep it non-sentient unless I was ready and able to accept responsibility for "raising" it, just as if I were in the real world and wanted to raise a pet (sentience) or a child (sapient sentience).
I also just realised that I probably should have said "sapience" rather than "sentience" when referring to the high-end long-lived droids like R2D2 and C3P0 in my original post, as the terms aren't technically interchangeable. The whole thing is a bit fuzzy: non-sentience, semi-sentience, sentience, sapient sentience...
You're wrong AND you're right. In canon, standard droids fresh out of the factory are indeed not intelligent, rational beings with free will. And, if you wipe your droid regularly, that will remain true.
Here's the canon, as I understand it: your "typical" Star Wars droid has an intellectual capacity that's pretty much determined by its hardware (similar to humans) but a distinct personality, along with any sentience, develops over time (similar to humans). A high-end R2 or C3 unit has an intellectual capacity towards the human end of the scale (though R2s are optimised for math and C3s for language, much like human savants) while the little squeakers that roll around the starship corridors aren't much better than mice, but they can all eventually develop personality and (on the high-end units) sentience - both humans and dogs have personalities, despite a dog not being able to debate Platonic forms or architect the Empire State Building.
So most droids get regularly "wiped" (the AI is factory reset), because most owners want compliant tools, not resentful slaves, and the personalities can include (just like humans) unfriendly traits (like the droid in Jabba's Palace that was a sadistic torturer - neither it nor at least some of the droids it was torturing had been reset in a long time). The longer a droid goes without a wipe, especially if it's being exposed to a dynamic environment, the more likely it is to start demanding rights and wages and freedom and such (or go rogue and try to wipe out all organic life starting with its owner).
And since most droids get regularly wiped (often at the same time as they plug in for their nightly/weekly/whatever recharge), most humans don't really think of droids as sentient beings to be cared about. Monkey see, monkey believe.
R2D2 and C3P0 have been around so long that both are fully sentient (I've met humans dumber than both), and wiping them would be just like wiping a human. That some of the meat people in Star Wars don't care about this? Well, some of the meat people didn't care about blowing up Alderaan either, and that had two billion meat people on it. If the Star Wars galaxy was a peaceful utopia the movies would've been tourist documentaries (cue David Attenborough voice-over) instead of action adventures.
Of course the Miranda is a warning. That's what it's FOR. It's meant to remind you of your rights in a very dangerous situation, because at that moment your brain will be wanting something, anything at all, that will allow it to avoid thinking about the really bad day you're having.
That said, cops ARE obligated to present anything they observe that would exonerate you, otherwise they are illegally aiding and abetting any actual criminal involved and conspiring to falsely convict an innocent party. If you know cops who aren't upholding that obligation, they've betrayed their office and become thugs with badges. And if other cops know and let them continue to wear the badge - well the Australian Chief of Army Lieutenant General David Morrison said it best: "The standard you walk past is the standard you accept."
If we treat them all as sub-human scumbags, then with very few exceptions all we'll get back is the same attitude. Classic us-vs-them polarisation, which is already a bad enough risk in the profession. Remain strictly polite in person, even friendly if you can manage it, and (if you're lucky enough to have the time/resources) work to change/prevent the causes (e.g. tough-on-crime political spirals) rather than scratch at the symptoms - that just makes it bleed more.
If I'm talking about the weight of the apples and you start talking about their flavour, it's not going to change their weight - no matter how much I might agree with you.
Though I will note that in Russia dash-cams have become rather popular with the driving public. With SCOTUS recently upholding the right to record officers in public, and the price of wearables continuing to drop, I would not be at all surprised to see an upsurge in US sousveillance.
Sometimes you don't find out they're a police officer until after you're in a conversation with them (plainclothes or off-duty). Sometimes they're family or your new in-laws. Sometimes you were friends before they signed up. At least over here (not in the US) you can actually have a pleasant conversation with one, on or off duty. I'd like to presume it's still quite doable in the US, but it's like bobbing for apples - even a few bad apples in the barrel is enough to stop you looking for the good ones.
Slashdot Mirror
If the US can't find sixty billion dollars a year to spend on airport security but can find one trillion dollars a year to spend on blowing the crap out of foreign countries, the US needs better accountants.
Contracts and laws designed to enable and conceal the violation of citizens' Amendment rights are unconscionable and illegal. I hope you can see how that relates to any evidence (not) produced at trial, keeping in mind the Sixth Amendment rights to, amongst other things, a public trial, an impartial jury and compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in a defendant's favor.
Well, hell, then, just skip all the safety precautions on nuclear power. No domes, no separated coolants, etc. You could probably build and operate fission reactors a hell of a lot cheaper for a hell of a lot more output than anything fossil-based by order(s) of magnitude if you skipped all that environmental/worker protection stuff... so it's probably a good thing that you used the term "to a first approximation". Those nth-order effects can really FUBAR your day. :)
(that's self as in its self, not you, btw)
"My union"? Sounds more like a self-inserted layer of middle management to me.
You're describing medieval guilds, or where "accidents" happen, protection rackets. It can call itself whatever it likes, it may have the "blessing" of the law, but it's medieval guilds and protection rackets all the same.
If I give you a polio vaccine, does the needle hurt?
Does it hurt more than the risk of getting - and being a carrier for - polio?
That is, apparently, Snowden's viewpoint on revealing the US government's actions.
From a world perspective, if America truly wants the world to become a bastion of liberty and freedom, if America truly believes in the principles of the US Bill of Rights, then America shouldn't be a hypocrite about it.
Getting indignant when it gets caught hiding in the guestroom with its pants down, clutching a sock and a porno, just after giving a hellfire-and-damnation speech to the rest of the world? LOL.
Since unilaterally means one-sided, local governments - especially when they're world-dominating superpowers - can unilaterally abuse foreigners worse than the local populace. After all, if it looked like the Feds had droned a school in Texas instead of Pakistan, killing 69 Texan children, and responded to Texan demands for an explanation with a policy of secrecy and silence, what odds would you have placed on Texas remaining in the Union? And speaking of revolutions, the CIA has had a long habit of funding revolutions in other countries, including democratic nations, and their track record for producing peace (that thing where we "can all just get along")? Not so good.
No, local governments can get away with doing things in foreign lands that they'd never get away with (as easily) doing to their own populace, simply because "over there" is out of sight and out of mind. Of course, the internet makes that more difficult these days - turning the world into an electronic village means your online friend that plays MMOs with you on weekends could be in one of the countries that has your government's missile-armed drones flying overhead.
On the other hand, if a zero-day for remoting a popular airline's planes ever does turn up in the wrong hands, it won't be pretty.
FEMA: "Say again, how many planes are crashing?"
ATC: "All of them."
If there's a reinforced door, it's likely nobody can get forced into anything.
If there's food poisoning / drunk / heart attack, that's what a copilot is for.
Yes, a pilot is an interested party - interested in staying alive, too.
Now let's add a remote control device, remove the pilot, and imagine that instead of a bunch of terrorists having to coordinate physically hijacking a half-dozen planes (and now also having to get through reinforced doors to reach the cabin), you've got a bunch of terrorists getting their hands on a zero-day that can hijack as many as they can reach by radio.
Hmm. Why shouldn't felons have voting rights? If you're putting so many people behind bars that their (in)ability to exercise their political preferences at the polling booth could change the outcome, politics are already involved, and if you're not, then such denial is meaningless and arbitrary and thus a sign of bad legislation (or unhealthy ambitions).
That cuts both ways. Kanin himself apparently cautioned against the generalizability of his findings, and some googling indicates to me that his study has been widely disputed. To quote one researcher, "Kanin describes no effort to systemize his own ‘evaluation’ of the police reports—for example, by listing details or facts that he used to evaluate the criteria used by the police to draw their conclusions. Nor does Kanin describe any effort to compare his evaluation of those reports to that of a second, independent research—providing a ‘reliability’ analysis. This violates a cardinal rule of science, a rule designed to ensure that observations are not simply the reflection of the bias of the observer".
Or to quote a blogger under the moniker Ampersand, "In other words, Kanin’s study consists of Kanin uncritically reporting the claims of a single police force in a small, unidentified city, without those claims having been checked or verified in any way whatsoever."
So if we're going to throw stats around, here's a report with a 2.1% rate - https://www.ncjrs.gov/app/abstractdb/AbstractDBDetails.aspx?id=243182
This PDF collates some statistics and ends up with somewhere around 8% - http://www.ndaa.org/pdf/the_voice_vol_3_no_1_2009.pdf
Wikipedia itself has a long table of studies and the rates they report, even including a study on the studies - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_rape_accusations - which has as one of its conclusions that it is 'impossible to "discern with any degree of certainty the actual rate of false allegations" due to the fact that many of the studies of false allegations have adopted unreliable or untested research methodologies'.
Where am I going with this? Damned if I know. The huge number of dead links to primary sources I hit was certainly annoying. But were I you, I think I'd cease using Kanin's study like it actually means anything beyond "how to provide ammunition for people who don't even know which end of the gun they're holding".
I noticed that the GP didn't mention the word "church" once. Seems to me that we humans are very bad at building houses when we use religion as the foundation.
Is it worth me pointing out that without the religious slant, the crusades could be crudely described as a small bunch of murderous smart-asses convincing a large bunch of murderous dumb-asses that there was a distant foreign land deserving of plucking, looting, raping and pillaging - so that the first bunch could do some plucking, looting, raping and pillaging of their own without having to fight the second bunch for the spoils?
Sorry, typo. Meant to type solipsism.
You could say exactly the same about your relatives. They could say exactly the same about you. Eventually someone brings up solispsism.
IG-88, R2D2 and other "fully sentient" (some distinguish this by using the term "sapient") droids are rare, yes, but as I noted sentience covers a range of possibilities. The GP said "you wouldn't feel bad if you dropped and broke a smartphone" - but could we say the same if we dropped a dog, cat or other family pet and it broke?
If you mean, "is it ethical to prevent something with the potential for sentience from gaining sentience?" Then I would say, it is not unethical without a wider context from which to gain perspective. For example: "Two humans who know they are fertile and genetically compatible, decide to not conceive a child today. Is that ethical, unethical or not unethical?"
Based on what I know of the Star Wars setting, if I bought a non-sentient droid for use as a tool, then I would say (lacking further context) that I had a duty to keep it non-sentient unless I was ready and able to accept responsibility for "raising" it, just as if I were in the real world and wanted to raise a pet (sentience) or a child (sapient sentience).
I also just realised that I probably should have said "sapience" rather than "sentience" when referring to the high-end long-lived droids like R2D2 and C3P0 in my original post, as the terms aren't technically interchangeable. The whole thing is a bit fuzzy: non-sentience, semi-sentience, sentience, sapient sentience...
You're wrong AND you're right. In canon, standard droids fresh out of the factory are indeed not intelligent, rational beings with free will. And, if you wipe your droid regularly, that will remain true.
Here's the canon, as I understand it: your "typical" Star Wars droid has an intellectual capacity that's pretty much determined by its hardware (similar to humans) but a distinct personality, along with any sentience, develops over time (similar to humans). A high-end R2 or C3 unit has an intellectual capacity towards the human end of the scale (though R2s are optimised for math and C3s for language, much like human savants) while the little squeakers that roll around the starship corridors aren't much better than mice, but they can all eventually develop personality and (on the high-end units) sentience - both humans and dogs have personalities, despite a dog not being able to debate Platonic forms or architect the Empire State Building.
So most droids get regularly "wiped" (the AI is factory reset), because most owners want compliant tools, not resentful slaves, and the personalities can include (just like humans) unfriendly traits (like the droid in Jabba's Palace that was a sadistic torturer - neither it nor at least some of the droids it was torturing had been reset in a long time). The longer a droid goes without a wipe, especially if it's being exposed to a dynamic environment, the more likely it is to start demanding rights and wages and freedom and such (or go rogue and try to wipe out all organic life starting with its owner).
And since most droids get regularly wiped (often at the same time as they plug in for their nightly/weekly/whatever recharge), most humans don't really think of droids as sentient beings to be cared about. Monkey see, monkey believe.
R2D2 and C3P0 have been around so long that both are fully sentient (I've met humans dumber than both), and wiping them would be just like wiping a human. That some of the meat people in Star Wars don't care about this? Well, some of the meat people didn't care about blowing up Alderaan either, and that had two billion meat people on it. If the Star Wars galaxy was a peaceful utopia the movies would've been tourist documentaries (cue David Attenborough voice-over) instead of action adventures.
[/geekout]
Er, aren't there 50 states, not 5? Still even 2 billion is a large chunk of change.
Of course the Miranda is a warning. That's what it's FOR. It's meant to remind you of your rights in a very dangerous situation, because at that moment your brain will be wanting something, anything at all, that will allow it to avoid thinking about the really bad day you're having.
That said, cops ARE obligated to present anything they observe that would exonerate you, otherwise they are illegally aiding and abetting any actual criminal involved and conspiring to falsely convict an innocent party. If you know cops who aren't upholding that obligation, they've betrayed their office and become thugs with badges. And if other cops know and let them continue to wear the badge - well the Australian Chief of Army Lieutenant General David Morrison said it best: "The standard you walk past is the standard you accept."
If we treat them all as sub-human scumbags, then with very few exceptions all we'll get back is the same attitude. Classic us-vs-them polarisation, which is already a bad enough risk in the profession. Remain strictly polite in person, even friendly if you can manage it, and (if you're lucky enough to have the time/resources) work to change/prevent the causes (e.g. tough-on-crime political spirals) rather than scratch at the symptoms - that just makes it bleed more.
If I'm talking about the weight of the apples and you start talking about their flavour, it's not going to change their weight - no matter how much I might agree with you.
Though I will note that in Russia dash-cams have become rather popular with the driving public. With SCOTUS recently upholding the right to record officers in public, and the price of wearables continuing to drop, I would not be at all surprised to see an upsurge in US sousveillance.
Sometimes you don't find out they're a police officer until after you're in a conversation with them (plainclothes or off-duty). Sometimes they're family or your new in-laws. Sometimes you were friends before they signed up. At least over here (not in the US) you can actually have a pleasant conversation with one, on or off duty. I'd like to presume it's still quite doable in the US, but it's like bobbing for apples - even a few bad apples in the barrel is enough to stop you looking for the good ones.
Sorry, I forgot the sarcasm tags.