I know that faster alternatives exist in some parts of USA. I still believe 2-4mbps is "typical" though, and that's what I said. Actually I'm certain there's a lot more people on speeds UNDER 2mbps than there are on speeds ABOVE 4mbps.
There's 100mbps symetrical available in parts of Norway (from BKK), but it's not typical, first its only available in a small fraction of the country, and secondly, even where it's available a small portion of the population care to pay for it. My ISP for example has 6, 25 and 50mbps available, and say outrigth that the only reason they offer nothing higher is "no demand", even at the current speeds 75% of the customers go for the slowest alternative. 6mbps is sufficient for most internet-use afterall.
The physical infrastructure is single-mode fibre-to-the-basement of every house, and GB ethernet internally in the houses. The physical fibre can handle multiple GB (if not TB), so that's certianly not the issue. (they do use some of it for offering around 100 channels TV over the same fibre though)
If a worm is more damaging, it will, as you say, prompt users to take it more seriously.
But this will also tend to limit the spread of the worm. (even though getting dangerous ssslllloooooooooowwwwwllly as you suggest seems to work fairly well for HIV)
The "it's too large" argument won't hold anyway, if indeed it holds today.
Used to be, industry considered the ridicolous size of CDs protection enough -- 700MB or thereabout would take forever to download, and be completely cost-prohibitive to store on a hard-disc anyway.
Then lossy compression came, and gave results that are acceptable to 99% of the listeners for 1/8th the size or thereabouts, which means we're at less than 100MB for a CD.
Then bandwith grew -- 28.8 gave way to 56.6 gave way to 128kbps and then on to broadband -- initially 700kbps or thereabouts, today typically 2-4Mbps in the USA, 5 - 25 mbps in Norway.
Even at the lowest speed offered by my ISP (6 Mbps symetrical), downloading a 100MB album takes less than a minute and a half, which is trivial.
Then movies. DVDs -- it was argued, hold 5-10GB of data, so are completely impractical to pirate. The same story repeated. Compression came. You can download a 1-2GB version of a 10GB DVD with a quality good enough for 99% of the viewers -- there's much better codecs out there than the ones used on DVD.
1GB of data is like 15 minutes at full throttle even today (still with the LOWEST speed available from Lyse), even the full uncompressed DVD at 10GB or so would be downloaded in about 2 hours, which is still practical.
Now it's argued that whatever NextGen disc at 50GB or thereabouts will not be pirated because the size makes it impractical.
Give me a break. 99% of the people who listen to music find well-encoded 192kbps mp3 to be "good enough", the same people will very likely find a 1-5GB recompressed version of a blueray original "good enough" too. And they'll be able to download and store the original trivially a few years in the future anyway.
I support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The thought of an innocent person being mistreated or detained without legal recourse is horrifying to me. But I balance these believes against the stark reality that there are people out there who couldn't care less about these international standards and couldn't care less about human rights, and whose sole goal it is to kill innocent people like you and me because we don't subscribe to their radical ideology.
But what distinguishes us from them, the good guys from the bad guys is, among other things, that we treat *even* those people fairly who wouldn't do the same to us.
Even a person with no respect for the law whatsoever has his rigths respected by the law. Our doctors try their very best to save the lifes of wounded people -- even those that got those wounds in an attempt to kill innocent people.
The universal declaration of human rights is called universal for a reason -- it's supposed to apply to *every* human. Even those that "don't deserve it" for whatever reason.
Besides -- there aren't all that many people out there whose "sole goal" it is to "kill innocent people". There's plenty of people set on expanding their particular religious nonsense. Even some who are willing to kill to achieve this goal. But very very few for which the killing in itself is the goal.
Tat bill is funny. It illustrates the problem very nicely. It attempts to define "unlawful enemy combatant" thus:
The term `unlawful enemy combatant' means--
(i) a person who has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its co-belligerents who is not a lawful enemy combatant (including a person who is part of the Taliban, al Qaeda, or associated forces); or
`(ii) a person who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense.
Funny one, no ? Yes it goes on to define "unlawful". One'd think it'd have something to do with breaking laws, no ? It doesn't. A lawful combatant is defined as one that basically, represents a state.
Furthermore, putting it in writing doesn't make it better. It's unsurprising that the US government is of the opinion that the US government can legally do what they do. (and that its wise!)
If you are in a war. And the enemy (the one you are figthing against) takes you prisoner, you're a prisoner of war. It's not a very complicated concept.
If you're *not* in war -- then it follows that whomever takes you prisoner is some sort of police-authority where you're taken prisoner. So you're a criminal -- after proven guilty in a court of law offcourse.
None of this really fits for people kidnapped in Italy by US personell though. The US is neither figthing a war there, nor are any of your personell legitimate police-forces in the area.
I think it's easy to demonstrate the mission-creep. Hell, its pretty much inherent in the statement itself.
For example, how do you make a defendible hard line for how mentally disabled someone must be to lose human rights ? How do you objectively measure disabledness anyway ? and why just children ? Until what point is someone a child ?
Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person. The people in Gitmo doesn't enjoy much of what the rest of us would call liberty.
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
Also doesn't appear to be fully the case in Gitmo (and elsewhere)
It's stupid. Braindead stupid. It makes America lose the only really strong card you have in this conflict. It makes you lose the advantage of being universally seen as "the good guys".
Look, it's really simple. Everyone in prison is *eiher* a criminal, and should be charged for a normal court with having broken a law, or a prisoner of war, and should be treated in accordance with relevant rules.
There IS no third category "illegal combatant" is bull. Furthermore -- even if it wasn't -- you'd need an actual court for determining if some random person picked up in some random country actually does fit the definition for "illegal combatant". (which has the problem that the US has refused to even define the term. In effect saying, these people are "X", but we don't say what we mean by X.)
Yeah, it's stupid, but common. Human rights are named like they are for a reason. Intelligence or for that matter consciousness is just traits shared by many humans, but in no way qualifiers for human rights.
Now, it may very well be that we'll meet species, which it'd make sense to treat differently than animals, and if so, we should do so. That *still* wouldn't make them human though. Even a species *smarter* than humans, still wouldn't be human.
Chimps don't recognize (and by all accounts aren't capable of recognizing) rigth and wrong. Nor do they extend any courtesy to human beings. I don't see how they then qualify as anything more than animals. All animals should be well-treated, and needless suffering should be minimized, but that goes for all animals and ain't specific for chimps.
True. So people who feel very particularily nitpicky can point out that in actual fact, only 99.9% of the electricity that goes into a computer comes back out in the form of useful heat. (in a cold climate)
What you say is more or less true. But cost-of-purchase ain't the only part counting. Total cost is what counts.
So, a more expensive solution that uses less power, and thus ends up costing less in total, over the lifetime of the PC, will likely also be more environmentally friendly. It'd be better for your electricity-bill too.
At $0.15/kwh, saving 50W (say going from 100W average to 50W average) is worth $65/year in a always-on device. So, if such an always-on home-server is used for 3-4 years, that saving in power-consumption would be worth paying something like $200 more for initially.
In other words, if you can save 50W by spending $200 more, it's probably worth it, if you save less than that though, it's probably a waste no matter how you turn it.
True. But non-scientific is not a synonym for religious. You don't actually *believe* Bach music is beautiful, you *KNOW* that it pleases you. (but you also know that it can fail to please some other person, with none of you being "wrong", i.e. it's a subjective judgement)
And that's where it diverges from religion. If I'm religious and believe in Jesus, and you don't. Then I have to believe you're *wrong*. "Jesus is the son of God" is a statement of (claimed) fact. "I like Bach" is just a personal preference, which ain't the same thing at all.
Re:Perceived Intelligence - Simple is better?
on
Most Impressive Game AI?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
That's typical of the AI possible today: It can't actually perform better than a stupid program following simple rules.
Had a similar depressing experience in my class on AI. The task was to build a neural network that could guesstimate the sex of a first-name. A quite complex neural net, trained on 300 random male and female names could thereafter guess the correct sex of a name about 65% of the time.
Which seemed impressive until someone pointed out that a trivial table-lookup of the most common 100 female and male names, and random guesses for everything else is enough to reach about 70-80% (depending on the country the names are from, some countries have more variation than others) and even something as simple as "if ends in a, guess female, otherwise guess male" is enough to reach similar "accuracy" as the neural net.
Currently, you're no doubt correct. Thing is though, performance of computers move up a lot faster than performance of display-equipment. Performance of eyes don't change at all.
Several years ago, I bougth a 19" CRT, it did 1600x1200 at 70hz. Today, more than half a decade later we've got flat-panel screens, but their performance is actually no better than the CRT was way-back-when. Infact most 19" LCDs do only 1280x1024, which is the same my 17" CRT did more than a DECADE ago.
Meanwhile, performance of CPU and the graphics integrated on mainboards have increased by something like a factor of 100.
My point ?
If this different rate of progress keeps up, driving a screen will become a more and more trivial task. So, less and less people will have need for a dedicated GPU-card. Which pretty much means Nvidias core market will simply disappear. Even today basically only a small group of impatient young men buy the stuff.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say with your math and your examples. My entire point was that with an engine that has a 1:2 relation between highest and lowest working-rpm, you can make do with a gearbox where every gear is half the gearing of the previous one. It is true that in practice there tends to be significant overlap, but that doesn't change the fundamental idea at all.
You make several mistakes, but it don't matter much to the overall point. gearboxes for trains are impractical. But you would not, infact, require one with 1000 different gears in it. A dozen or so would do. Also, 200-wagon trains do not, infact, have similar performance in acceleration or hill-climbing to highway-trucks. The performance is atleast an order of magnitude poorer. Also, 4600:1 gear-ratios are not typically made by having a gargantuan wheel with 4600 teeth for every one on another, instead it is done by a cascade of smaller gearings.
You'd not need to have the clutch handle anything other than startup and minor synch, it'd be easy to control the engine so as to do:
Put in 1st (1:10000) and have the clutch handle synching. (this brings you to 1mph at 1000rpm)
Accelerate using the engine to 2mph (at 2000rpm)
Disengage, change to 2nd (at 1:5000)
Rev the engine down to 1000rpm.
Have the clutch re-engage (should be only minor synching at this point since 1000rpm at 1:5000 gives precisely the same rotational speed as 2000rpm at 1:10000
So no. It's not true that ratios must be close, or clutch-plates must be enormous. Aslong as the ratios are atleast as close as the area the engine works well under, only minor clutch-action is nessecary when changing gears.
But yes, gears for handling thousands or tens of thousands of KW at anything between zero and 200mph or so woul be prohibitve. I never stated otherwise. I'm just saying, there's no reason you'd need 1:10000 1:9999 1:9998 and so on. It's bad -- but it's not THAT bad.
And that estimate is very generous indeed, the estimates for total famine-deaths in the 20th century are in the 50 - 120 million range. This is a lot of people -- but it is 1300 to 3300 pro day, not 35000 pro day.
Infact, generous is the wrong word. The "estimate" is deliberately misleading crap.
You're rigth that gears for a train would be prohibitive, but your math is off.
If you've exhausted 1st gear (at 1:10000) with a diesel that operates in 1000-2000rpm, you don't need to change to have a second gear that is 1:9999, your diesel can handle a factor of 2 by itself.
So, the actual gearing could be 1st 1:10000 2nd 1:5000 3rd 1:2500 4th 1:1250 and so on. If first gear gets you up to 1mph, you'd need a 8-gear gearbox for a topspeed of 128mph.
With the forces involved, it'd be a monster. but it *wouldn't* need to have thousands of gears.
Uhm, no. In general any creative work is copyrigthed by the person who created it. Unless some agreement is in effect to change this.
So, the school would own the coprigths only if they had prior agreements with all students to this effect. Personally I'd consider that completely batshit insane, seeing as schools don't generally pay students, but I realize parts of the US school-system is somewhat different.
Yeah. I agree. But in practice, such things aren't taught in areas which are pancake-shaped (i.e. flat), regardless of the type of transmission that is common.
My wife is from Cottbus, somewhat south of Berlin. Everyone drives a manual there, just as in Norway, but the area is literally pancake-flat. I'd say the highest and lowest points in town are within 10 meters of heigth of oneanother, and you'd have to really search to find a spot to park with even 1% inclination.
Sure, in *principle* they should. In practice, nobody does. Took my wife a few weeks to get used to the fact that whenever I've been using the car, it *will* be parked in first, with the handbrake on.
Normally the handbrake works, when its reasonably flat it certainly works. It's just that there are zero drawbacks to using the gears too, plus it's a habit that can and will save your ass the day your handbrake goes, or you go vitis your relatives in Norway.
Actully, you do both. Apply the handbrake *and* leave the car in gear (preferably gear 1 or reverse). Some manual cars are even made so that it is physically impossible to remove the key from the ignition unless the car is in reverse. (SAAB comes to mind)
Handbrakes fail. Plus, on most cars the handbrake works on the rear wheels while leaving the car in gear will block the *front* wheels on a front-drive car. (which is 80-90% or so of european/japanese cars these days)
Offcourse people that don't a) live somewhere hilly and b) where manual is the norm, wouldn't know this.
This is a very good point, and one I see all too many parents completely fail to grasp.
He/she ain't mature/adult enough to handle that completely perfectly by him/herself so lets shield him/her from it.
How the hell are you going to learn how to constructively deal with something that you are not, in actual fact, allowed to deal with ?
I was very frustrated by this as a scout-leader. Several parents where simply *unable* to actually let their (8-12 year old) kids pack for themselves. Despite explitily being informed by us that this is part of the learning. Despite having received information that in actual fact, we have backups for *everything* so there is *nothing* the kid could forget that'd actually be dangerous.
Still, about a quarter of the parents where unable to let the kids handle it.
Kids learn fast.
Give a 10-year old the responsibility to buy food for a weekend of camping for his tentfull (5) of people, for a maximum of X dollars. Bring a backup just in case. Bring something ligthweigth and simple. (we usually brought a kilo or two of oatmeal)
The kid may actually show up with no food whatsoever. Or with 2 bags of chips and a coke. (I've had both happen), but I can assure you that this will only happen once. Furthermore, all the others in that tent, and others that observe their misfortune) will have learnt the lesson. No harsh words are nessecary. Just let the kids carry the results of their own actions. Eating cold oatmeal when the kids in the tent next-door are barbequing gets the point across just fine.
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There's 100mbps symetrical available in parts of Norway (from BKK), but it's not typical, first its only available in a small fraction of the country, and secondly, even where it's available a small portion of the population care to pay for it. My ISP for example has 6, 25 and 50mbps available, and say outrigth that the only reason they offer nothing higher is "no demand", even at the current speeds 75% of the customers go for the slowest alternative. 6mbps is sufficient for most internet-use afterall.
The physical infrastructure is single-mode fibre-to-the-basement of every house, and GB ethernet internally in the houses. The physical fibre can handle multiple GB (if not TB), so that's certianly not the issue. (they do use some of it for offering around 100 channels TV over the same fibre though)
If a worm is more damaging, it will, as you say, prompt users to take it more seriously.
But this will also tend to limit the spread of the worm. (even though getting dangerous ssslllloooooooooowwwwwllly as you suggest seems to work fairly well for HIV)
Used to be, industry considered the ridicolous size of CDs protection enough -- 700MB or thereabout would take forever to download, and be completely cost-prohibitive to store on a hard-disc anyway.
Then lossy compression came, and gave results that are acceptable to 99% of the listeners for 1/8th the size or thereabouts, which means we're at less than 100MB for a CD.
Then bandwith grew -- 28.8 gave way to 56.6 gave way to 128kbps and then on to broadband -- initially 700kbps or thereabouts, today typically 2-4Mbps in the USA, 5 - 25 mbps in Norway.
Even at the lowest speed offered by my ISP (6 Mbps symetrical), downloading a 100MB album takes less than a minute and a half, which is trivial.
Then movies. DVDs -- it was argued, hold 5-10GB of data, so are completely impractical to pirate. The same story repeated. Compression came. You can download a 1-2GB version of a 10GB DVD with a quality good enough for 99% of the viewers -- there's much better codecs out there than the ones used on DVD.
1GB of data is like 15 minutes at full throttle even today (still with the LOWEST speed available from Lyse), even the full uncompressed DVD at 10GB or so would be downloaded in about 2 hours, which is still practical.
Now it's argued that whatever NextGen disc at 50GB or thereabouts will not be pirated because the size makes it impractical.
Give me a break. 99% of the people who listen to music find well-encoded 192kbps mp3 to be "good enough", the same people will very likely find a 1-5GB recompressed version of a blueray original "good enough" too. And they'll be able to download and store the original trivially a few years in the future anyway.
You should look at ads because they'd like you to ?
Migth as well argue they should drop ads because readers would like them to. Especially anoying ones.
But what distinguishes us from them, the good guys from the bad guys is, among other things, that we treat *even* those people fairly who wouldn't do the same to us.
Even a person with no respect for the law whatsoever has his rigths respected by the law. Our doctors try their very best to save the lifes of wounded people -- even those that got those wounds in an attempt to kill innocent people.
The universal declaration of human rights is called universal for a reason -- it's supposed to apply to *every* human. Even those that "don't deserve it" for whatever reason.
Besides -- there aren't all that many people out there whose "sole goal" it is to "kill innocent people". There's plenty of people set on expanding their particular religious nonsense. Even some who are willing to kill to achieve this goal. But very very few for which the killing in itself is the goal.
(i) a person who has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its co-belligerents who is not a lawful enemy combatant (including a person who is part of the Taliban, al Qaeda, or associated forces); or
`(ii) a person who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense.
Funny one, no ? Yes it goes on to define "unlawful". One'd think it'd have something to do with breaking laws, no ? It doesn't. A lawful combatant is defined as one that basically, represents a state.
Furthermore, putting it in writing doesn't make it better. It's unsurprising that the US government is of the opinion that the US government can legally do what they do. (and that its wise!)
If you are in a war. And the enemy (the one you are figthing against) takes you prisoner, you're a prisoner of war. It's not a very complicated concept.
If you're *not* in war -- then it follows that whomever takes you prisoner is some sort of police-authority where you're taken prisoner. So you're a criminal -- after proven guilty in a court of law offcourse.
None of this really fits for people kidnapped in Italy by US personell though. The US is neither figthing a war there, nor are any of your personell legitimate police-forces in the area.
For example, how do you make a defendible hard line for how mentally disabled someone must be to lose human rights ? How do you objectively measure disabledness anyway ? and why just children ? Until what point is someone a child ?
Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person. The people in Gitmo doesn't enjoy much of what the rest of us would call liberty.
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
Also doesn't appear to be fully the case in Gitmo (and elsewhere)
It's stupid. Braindead stupid. It makes America lose the only really strong card you have in this conflict. It makes you lose the advantage of being universally seen as "the good guys".
Look, it's really simple. Everyone in prison is *eiher* a criminal, and should be charged for a normal court with having broken a law, or a prisoner of war, and should be treated in accordance with relevant rules.
There IS no third category "illegal combatant" is bull. Furthermore -- even if it wasn't -- you'd need an actual court for determining if some random person picked up in some random country actually does fit the definition for "illegal combatant". (which has the problem that the US has refused to even define the term. In effect saying, these people are "X", but we don't say what we mean by X.)
Now, it may very well be that we'll meet species, which it'd make sense to treat differently than animals, and if so, we should do so. That *still* wouldn't make them human though. Even a species *smarter* than humans, still wouldn't be human.
Chimps don't recognize (and by all accounts aren't capable of recognizing) rigth and wrong. Nor do they extend any courtesy to human beings. I don't see how they then qualify as anything more than animals. All animals should be well-treated, and needless suffering should be minimized, but that goes for all animals and ain't specific for chimps.
True. So people who feel very particularily nitpicky can point out that in actual fact, only 99.9% of the electricity that goes into a computer comes back out in the form of useful heat. (in a cold climate)
Actually, no. It does not matter where the power is being used. All of it turns into heat regardless.
So, a more expensive solution that uses less power, and thus ends up costing less in total, over the lifetime of the PC, will likely also be more environmentally friendly. It'd be better for your electricity-bill too.
At $0.15/kwh, saving 50W (say going from 100W average to 50W average) is worth $65/year in a always-on device. So, if such an always-on home-server is used for 3-4 years, that saving in power-consumption would be worth paying something like $200 more for initially.
In other words, if you can save 50W by spending $200 more, it's probably worth it, if you save less than that though, it's probably a waste no matter how you turn it.
And that's where it diverges from religion. If I'm religious and believe in Jesus, and you don't. Then I have to believe you're *wrong*. "Jesus is the son of God" is a statement of (claimed) fact. "I like Bach" is just a personal preference, which ain't the same thing at all.
Had a similar depressing experience in my class on AI. The task was to build a neural network that could guesstimate the sex of a first-name. A quite complex neural net, trained on 300 random male and female names could thereafter guess the correct sex of a name about 65% of the time.
Which seemed impressive until someone pointed out that a trivial table-lookup of the most common 100 female and male names, and random guesses for everything else is enough to reach about 70-80% (depending on the country the names are from, some countries have more variation than others) and even something as simple as "if ends in a, guess female, otherwise guess male" is enough to reach similar "accuracy" as the neural net.
Several years ago, I bougth a 19" CRT, it did 1600x1200 at 70hz. Today, more than half a decade later we've got flat-panel screens, but their performance is actually no better than the CRT was way-back-when. Infact most 19" LCDs do only 1280x1024, which is the same my 17" CRT did more than a DECADE ago.
Meanwhile, performance of CPU and the graphics integrated on mainboards have increased by something like a factor of 100.
My point ?
If this different rate of progress keeps up, driving a screen will become a more and more trivial task. So, less and less people will have need for a dedicated GPU-card. Which pretty much means Nvidias core market will simply disappear. Even today basically only a small group of impatient young men buy the stuff.
You make several mistakes, but it don't matter much to the overall point. gearboxes for trains are impractical. But you would not, infact, require one with 1000 different gears in it. A dozen or so would do. Also, 200-wagon trains do not, infact, have similar performance in acceleration or hill-climbing to highway-trucks. The performance is atleast an order of magnitude poorer. Also, 4600:1 gear-ratios are not typically made by having a gargantuan wheel with 4600 teeth for every one on another, instead it is done by a cascade of smaller gearings.
- Put in 1st (1:10000) and have the clutch handle synching. (this brings you to 1mph at 1000rpm)
- Accelerate using the engine to 2mph (at 2000rpm)
- Disengage, change to 2nd (at 1:5000)
- Rev the engine down to 1000rpm.
- Have the clutch re-engage (should be only minor synching at this point since 1000rpm at 1:5000 gives precisely the same rotational speed as 2000rpm at 1:10000
So no. It's not true that ratios must be close, or clutch-plates must be enormous. Aslong as the ratios are atleast as close as the area the engine works well under, only minor clutch-action is nessecary when changing gears.But yes, gears for handling thousands or tens of thousands of KW at anything between zero and 200mph or so woul be prohibitve. I never stated otherwise. I'm just saying, there's no reason you'd need 1:10000 1:9999 1:9998 and so on. It's bad -- but it's not THAT bad.
Infact, generous is the wrong word. The "estimate" is deliberately misleading crap.
If you've exhausted 1st gear (at 1:10000) with a diesel that operates in 1000-2000rpm, you don't need to change to have a second gear that is 1:9999, your diesel can handle a factor of 2 by itself.
So, the actual gearing could be 1st 1:10000 2nd 1:5000 3rd 1:2500 4th 1:1250 and so on. If first gear gets you up to 1mph, you'd need a 8-gear gearbox for a topspeed of 128mph.
With the forces involved, it'd be a monster. but it *wouldn't* need to have thousands of gears.
For most people (as in everyone other than hardcore 3d-gamers) add-on graphics-cards are completely unnessecary even today.
So, the school would own the coprigths only if they had prior agreements with all students to this effect. Personally I'd consider that completely batshit insane, seeing as schools don't generally pay students, but I realize parts of the US school-system is somewhat different.
My wife is from Cottbus, somewhat south of Berlin. Everyone drives a manual there, just as in Norway, but the area is literally pancake-flat. I'd say the highest and lowest points in town are within 10 meters of heigth of oneanother, and you'd have to really search to find a spot to park with even 1% inclination.
Sure, in *principle* they should. In practice, nobody does. Took my wife a few weeks to get used to the fact that whenever I've been using the car, it *will* be parked in first, with the handbrake on.
Normally the handbrake works, when its reasonably flat it certainly works. It's just that there are zero drawbacks to using the gears too, plus it's a habit that can and will save your ass the day your handbrake goes, or you go vitis your relatives in Norway.
Handbrakes fail. Plus, on most cars the handbrake works on the rear wheels while leaving the car in gear will block the *front* wheels on a front-drive car. (which is 80-90% or so of european/japanese cars these days) Offcourse people that don't a) live somewhere hilly and b) where manual is the norm, wouldn't know this.
He/she ain't mature/adult enough to handle that completely perfectly by him/herself so lets shield him/her from it.
How the hell are you going to learn how to constructively deal with something that you are not, in actual fact, allowed to deal with ?
I was very frustrated by this as a scout-leader. Several parents where simply *unable* to actually let their (8-12 year old) kids pack for themselves. Despite explitily being informed by us that this is part of the learning. Despite having received information that in actual fact, we have backups for *everything* so there is *nothing* the kid could forget that'd actually be dangerous.
Still, about a quarter of the parents where unable to let the kids handle it.
Kids learn fast.
Give a 10-year old the responsibility to buy food for a weekend of camping for his tentfull (5) of people, for a maximum of X dollars. Bring a backup just in case. Bring something ligthweigth and simple. (we usually brought a kilo or two of oatmeal)
The kid may actually show up with no food whatsoever. Or with 2 bags of chips and a coke. (I've had both happen), but I can assure you that this will only happen once. Furthermore, all the others in that tent, and others that observe their misfortune) will have learnt the lesson. No harsh words are nessecary. Just let the kids carry the results of their own actions. Eating cold oatmeal when the kids in the tent next-door are barbequing gets the point across just fine.
Professors of law aren't generally stupid about law.