And then people have the audacity to be surprised when teenagers "rebel" and go off the deep end by resorting to drugs, petty crime, and general disobedience. Here you have a human being whose brain is telling them "you are grown up; time to start doing shit on your own, so you're not a burden to the tribe; your mom has about 8 kids younger than you to feed and look after", but everything around them is designed to deprive them of responsibility and autonomy. School is run by fascists armed with zero tolerance policies, parents are no better because cable news has convinced them that giving a teenager an inch of freedom will result in them doing vodka enemas, and popular culture feeds them the image of the typical teen as an infantile, bumbling idiot, whose greatest possible accomplishment is successfully sneaking out of the house to go to a pool party where they can drink to the point of throwing up and touch a few genitals.
The poorly dressed/shirtless analogy doesn't really work. Businesses that enforce a dress code do so for practical reasons. Legally speaking, it's only discrimination if [you can convince a judge that] the criteria used by the business to refuse service have no direct relevance to their interests as a business.
Unless their actions have a direct negative impact on your business.
That leaves the door wide open for a lot of arguments. "If I let a black person join my club, all the white people will leave" wouldn't be a very outlandish statement, especially not 50 years ago. Today, same goes for "if I allow a gay marriage to be performed in my establishment, I'll lose a lot of straight couples" in a lot of places.
We're talking about the TSA, not the NSA. Do try to keep up.
The TSA is (typically) not the one putting people on no-fly lists or "requires additional probing" lists, that's the intelligence agencies. Keep up yourself.
Here's a clue: we Americans hate the federal government, too. If you set your prejudices aside you might just find friendly, like-minded people.
A lot of good it does him when he ends up with all his possessions confiscated, sitting in some detention area for days praying that they'll let him go back home soon. If you weren't so hyper-sensitive (the reasons for which I can only speculate on), you may have noticed OP wasn't saying anything about Americans, only your government.
reduced income from places that run 'wishing wells' which tend to be another dumping ground for pennies
Eh, I highly doubt there would be a significant decrease in charitable giving if the penny was murdered (as it no doubt should be). In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there was an increase -- psychologically, people might be more willing to give up nickels, dimes, and quarters if the penny no longer the smallest denomination.
For what it's worth, there were aspects to beta that I really liked upon briefly looking at it, like a cleaner interface and more obvious "submission" link. If you reduce the whitespace and make commenting more robust, I'd be glad to switch. Also for what it's worth, I hope you guys aren't letting all the venomous hatred get to you. With the recent "Flappy Bird" mess, I've come to appreciate how much devs can be affected by unabashed user rage.
Yeah, tell me about it. When my sister, who lives in Sweden, whipped out her chip and pin card system while visiting me, I must have looked like a caveman seeing a ferrari.
In the past, courts have outlawed gangs and ordered gang members to not associate with each other. Are these restrictions, restrictions which are constitutionally iffy,...
AFAIK these only ever apply to parolees, which I don't see a constitutional problem with in principle.
I don't think having sociopaths in power is really by itself such a bad thing, in fact IIRC there's a strong hypothesis that the reason for the existence of sociopaths is that society (well, tribes) need them to fulfill the role of leaders, because sometimes a leader needs the ability to go against the rules that make most people good "citizens". The problem is, if you're going to have sociopaths in power, you had better make sure their incentives line up with the good of the population, because they will optimize selfishly without much regard for the good of others (by definition), and they'll do a really good job at it.
Oh my god, nothing has ever been more wrong than what you just said. It might be true in some tiny field I've never heard of, but in my areas many of the biggest names have books to their name. For someone who knows their shit to write a book is a great service to the community, because it consolidates knowledge and facilitates its use and transmission (be it for teaching or research).
pointless busywork designed to justify a flow of money
Ding ding ding! There is no reason to expect the organizational structure and goals of the NSA to be any different from middle management at Microsoft, except unlike Microsoft, the NSA doesn't have a finite money supply dictated by the market and a CEO that would be willing to draw the line somewhere if enough money was squandered. I don't know what performance metrics they use at the NSA (doubt it's stack ranking), but at the end of the day it's going to be about helping your boss convince his boss that you should be awarded a bigger budget because what you're working on is really cool and will impress the guys upstairs.
Spoken like a true biologist -- "Based on 7 samples of 10000 dimensional microarray data, I have concluded that this gene causes all cancer in everyone!"
I agree, I personally wouldn't take this kind of chance. However, I think it's a really interesting legal question, so I'd kind of like to see someone attempt something like this. Might go all the way up to the SCOTUS (though it might be kept secret, too).
Because sometimes government is scarier than profit-driven private entities. Typically the worst thing that can happen to me from businesses having my private info is advertising inundation; inability to qualify for loans; getting ripped off because the entity selling me a product or service knows I can afford it; etc. The worst thing that the government can do, however, includes diminished ability to travel (no-fly lists and such), forced cooperation (warrants, secret or otherwise; forced questioning regarding one's associations -- yes I've seen it happen), incarceration, and other wonderful things. Corporations want your money and labor, government can want everything else.
I've heard similar proposals before, and it seems very murky from a legal standpoint. With a highly automated system like this meta tag, I think most judges wouldn't have a problem deciding that you violated the terms of a secret warrant by not updating it. The proposal I heard was to try to circumvent this by making the "canary" something more complicated -- imagine that, every day that you didn't receive a secret warrant, you went to some location in your city, took a photo, and posted it on your webpage. Could a judge then force you to keep doing so? Or even more extreme -- every day that you don't receive a warrant, you run a 10K. Could a judge force you to keep running? Or keep going to work? Or keep self-mutilating in some way? At what point are a person's basic liberties more important than the secrecy of the warrant?
My guess would be that in any of these instances, no judge would rule that you must keep updating the canary. However, I'd imagine that they might rule that you broke the law by setting up the canary in the first place. Of course, there's an obvious problem with that -- as long as you never get a secret warrant, you clearly couldn't be prosecuted for violating one. So it's a weird situation where an action that is otherwise legal, becomes retroactively illegal upon receiving a secret warrant. It's a bit of a mindfuck.
But you could say that about everything. Smoking 2 packs a day causes lung cancer, and yet "lung cancer is caused by genetics and lifestyle factors". There are people who smoke 2 packs a day and never get lung cancer, probably in no small part due to genetics. At some point it's a numbers' game -- when behavior A combined with genotype B causes disease D, if genotype B is sufficiently common (and behavior A is sufficiently uncommon -- i.e. A shouldn't be "drinking water") it's reasonable to say that A causes D. Where exactly you draw the line is unclear, but when behavior A is something that deviates as strongly from the historical norm as taking in a thousand calories' worth of sugar a day, it might not be so misleading to call it the cause.
Do you want an internal combustion engine in your smartphone? Speaking of which, electric motors are more efficient than internal combustion, I believe. There's also the issue of rising food prices. And the fact that better battery tech is pretty important for wider adoption of variable energy sources like solar and wind. Plus burning gasoline or vegetable-derived fuels releases more than just CO2. Even if you end up burning crops for energy, you might be better off doing that in a centralized fashion and getting the energy to cars through batteries.
I seem to recall some old English dude saying stuff about supply and demand... But sarcasm aside, isn't it about time we had some tangible breakthroughs in battery tech?
There's a fundamental difference between the kind of safety features you list, and the kind proposed in the article, which is essentially whether the car will "do its best" to obey the driver or not. Take anti-lock brakes, for instance -- you could say that they are "a technology to prevent stupid", but when a driver presses the brake pedal, anti-lock brakes still brake, they just do it more effectively than a human driver could. There's a significant difference between that, and telling the driver to go fuck himself when he tries to do something that the whims of legislators have decreed illegal. Safety features like the ones you list are a good idea, because they enhance a driver's ability to operate and control their car. The one in the article is an entirely different animal.
Slashdot Mirror
And then people have the audacity to be surprised when teenagers "rebel" and go off the deep end by resorting to drugs, petty crime, and general disobedience. Here you have a human being whose brain is telling them "you are grown up; time to start doing shit on your own, so you're not a burden to the tribe; your mom has about 8 kids younger than you to feed and look after", but everything around them is designed to deprive them of responsibility and autonomy. School is run by fascists armed with zero tolerance policies, parents are no better because cable news has convinced them that giving a teenager an inch of freedom will result in them doing vodka enemas, and popular culture feeds them the image of the typical teen as an infantile, bumbling idiot, whose greatest possible accomplishment is successfully sneaking out of the house to go to a pool party where they can drink to the point of throwing up and touch a few genitals.
The poorly dressed/shirtless analogy doesn't really work. Businesses that enforce a dress code do so for practical reasons. Legally speaking, it's only discrimination if [you can convince a judge that] the criteria used by the business to refuse service have no direct relevance to their interests as a business.
Unless their actions have a direct negative impact on your business.
That leaves the door wide open for a lot of arguments. "If I let a black person join my club, all the white people will leave" wouldn't be a very outlandish statement, especially not 50 years ago. Today, same goes for "if I allow a gay marriage to be performed in my establishment, I'll lose a lot of straight couples" in a lot of places.
We're talking about the TSA, not the NSA. Do try to keep up.
The TSA is (typically) not the one putting people on no-fly lists or "requires additional probing" lists, that's the intelligence agencies. Keep up yourself.
Here's a clue: we Americans hate the federal government, too. If you set your prejudices aside you might just find friendly, like-minded people.
A lot of good it does him when he ends up with all his possessions confiscated, sitting in some detention area for days praying that they'll let him go back home soon. If you weren't so hyper-sensitive (the reasons for which I can only speculate on), you may have noticed OP wasn't saying anything about Americans, only your government.
reduced income from places that run 'wishing wells' which tend to be another dumping ground for pennies
Eh, I highly doubt there would be a significant decrease in charitable giving if the penny was murdered (as it no doubt should be). In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there was an increase -- psychologically, people might be more willing to give up nickels, dimes, and quarters if the penny no longer the smallest denomination.
For what it's worth, there were aspects to beta that I really liked upon briefly looking at it, like a cleaner interface and more obvious "submission" link. If you reduce the whitespace and make commenting more robust, I'd be glad to switch. Also for what it's worth, I hope you guys aren't letting all the venomous hatred get to you. With the recent "Flappy Bird" mess, I've come to appreciate how much devs can be affected by unabashed user rage.
Yeah, tell me about it. When my sister, who lives in Sweden, whipped out her chip and pin card system while visiting me, I must have looked like a caveman seeing a ferrari.
Holy shit, that was an amazing read. Thanks!
In the past, courts have outlawed gangs and ordered gang members to not associate with each other. Are these restrictions, restrictions which are constitutionally iffy, ...
AFAIK these only ever apply to parolees, which I don't see a constitutional problem with in principle.
I don't think having sociopaths in power is really by itself such a bad thing, in fact IIRC there's a strong hypothesis that the reason for the existence of sociopaths is that society (well, tribes) need them to fulfill the role of leaders, because sometimes a leader needs the ability to go against the rules that make most people good "citizens". The problem is, if you're going to have sociopaths in power, you had better make sure their incentives line up with the good of the population, because they will optimize selfishly without much regard for the good of others (by definition), and they'll do a really good job at it.
Oh my god, nothing has ever been more wrong than what you just said. It might be true in some tiny field I've never heard of, but in my areas many of the biggest names have books to their name. For someone who knows their shit to write a book is a great service to the community, because it consolidates knowledge and facilitates its use and transmission (be it for teaching or research).
pointless busywork designed to justify a flow of money
Ding ding ding! There is no reason to expect the organizational structure and goals of the NSA to be any different from middle management at Microsoft, except unlike Microsoft, the NSA doesn't have a finite money supply dictated by the market and a CEO that would be willing to draw the line somewhere if enough money was squandered. I don't know what performance metrics they use at the NSA (doubt it's stack ranking), but at the end of the day it's going to be about helping your boss convince his boss that you should be awarded a bigger budget because what you're working on is really cool and will impress the guys upstairs.
Carlin, is that you?
Plus, bugs don't live very long. If you only need your ship to work for a couple of weeks, there's a lot you can get away with too.
Spoken like a true biologist -- "Based on 7 samples of 10000 dimensional microarray data, I have concluded that this gene causes all cancer in everyone!"
I agree, I personally wouldn't take this kind of chance. However, I think it's a really interesting legal question, so I'd kind of like to see someone attempt something like this. Might go all the way up to the SCOTUS (though it might be kept secret, too).
Because sometimes government is scarier than profit-driven private entities. Typically the worst thing that can happen to me from businesses having my private info is advertising inundation; inability to qualify for loans; getting ripped off because the entity selling me a product or service knows I can afford it; etc. The worst thing that the government can do, however, includes diminished ability to travel (no-fly lists and such), forced cooperation (warrants, secret or otherwise; forced questioning regarding one's associations -- yes I've seen it happen), incarceration, and other wonderful things. Corporations want your money and labor, government can want everything else.
I've heard similar proposals before, and it seems very murky from a legal standpoint. With a highly automated system like this meta tag, I think most judges wouldn't have a problem deciding that you violated the terms of a secret warrant by not updating it. The proposal I heard was to try to circumvent this by making the "canary" something more complicated -- imagine that, every day that you didn't receive a secret warrant, you went to some location in your city, took a photo, and posted it on your webpage. Could a judge then force you to keep doing so? Or even more extreme -- every day that you don't receive a warrant, you run a 10K. Could a judge force you to keep running? Or keep going to work? Or keep self-mutilating in some way? At what point are a person's basic liberties more important than the secrecy of the warrant?
My guess would be that in any of these instances, no judge would rule that you must keep updating the canary. However, I'd imagine that they might rule that you broke the law by setting up the canary in the first place. Of course, there's an obvious problem with that -- as long as you never get a secret warrant, you clearly couldn't be prosecuted for violating one. So it's a weird situation where an action that is otherwise legal, becomes retroactively illegal upon receiving a secret warrant. It's a bit of a mindfuck.
Just OP being pretentious. Reminds me of Louis C.K.'s "people from phoenix are Phoenicians" bit.
But you could say that about everything. Smoking 2 packs a day causes lung cancer, and yet "lung cancer is caused by genetics and lifestyle factors". There are people who smoke 2 packs a day and never get lung cancer, probably in no small part due to genetics. At some point it's a numbers' game -- when behavior A combined with genotype B causes disease D, if genotype B is sufficiently common (and behavior A is sufficiently uncommon -- i.e. A shouldn't be "drinking water") it's reasonable to say that A causes D. Where exactly you draw the line is unclear, but when behavior A is something that deviates as strongly from the historical norm as taking in a thousand calories' worth of sugar a day, it might not be so misleading to call it the cause.
Are we? I was talking about batteries.
Do you want an internal combustion engine in your smartphone? Speaking of which, electric motors are more efficient than internal combustion, I believe. There's also the issue of rising food prices. And the fact that better battery tech is pretty important for wider adoption of variable energy sources like solar and wind. Plus burning gasoline or vegetable-derived fuels releases more than just CO2. Even if you end up burning crops for energy, you might be better off doing that in a centralized fashion and getting the energy to cars through batteries.
Yet another reason to wish electric vehicles widespread adoption. It's about time we escaped the paleolithic era of energy storage.
I seem to recall some old English dude saying stuff about supply and demand... But sarcasm aside, isn't it about time we had some tangible breakthroughs in battery tech?
There's a fundamental difference between the kind of safety features you list, and the kind proposed in the article, which is essentially whether the car will "do its best" to obey the driver or not. Take anti-lock brakes, for instance -- you could say that they are "a technology to prevent stupid", but when a driver presses the brake pedal, anti-lock brakes still brake, they just do it more effectively than a human driver could. There's a significant difference between that, and telling the driver to go fuck himself when he tries to do something that the whims of legislators have decreed illegal. Safety features like the ones you list are a good idea, because they enhance a driver's ability to operate and control their car. The one in the article is an entirely different animal.