There are simply too many conditions in which a self-driving car could occasionally need a human pilot, and the vast majority of those are when a quick decision that is not safety related is required, and the rest are when the vehicle is operating on something other than conventional roads.
For example, if I'm going to an event in a rural area I'm probably going to have to park in an improvised parking area on an unimproved or only marginally improved surface. I may have to drive down a trail that itself is unimproved or only marginally improved, either following the directions of humans waving at me or else following something like the occasional orange cone or even the tracks of previous vehicles. A self-driving car is probably not going to interpret the directions of a teenager with a yellow safety vest and will instead see the person merely as an object to avoid colliding with. It will not see bits of orange tape on the ground or ruts as a path. It probably won't handle being told to enqueue to park in rows, peeling off after the next vehicle to park per human-guided hand signals.
In this kind of scenario, which is common to outdoor concerts, festivals, campgrounds, renaissance festivals, theme-parks, lodges, and many other situations, a car that cannot be directly driven by a human being would not be able to function. The vehicle may well drive the vast majority of the time on its own, but it still needs to be capable of being occasionally human-operated or at least very directly human-instructed. Entirely eliminating the conventional driver controls makes that difficult.
Furthemore, having owned many vehicles in various states of repair and condition for around twenty years now, I do not want a vehicle to be stranded when its autonomous systems have malfuctioned. Flat out that's a non-starter. Vehicles break. This is a fact of life. I don't want a vehicle with no issues with the powertrain to strand me because the controller can't figure out how to drive on the road. If nothing else, in general emergencies it may be necessary for me to make decisions that the vehicle is not capable of making itself, like in having to drive in the aftermath of a hurricane or tornado when the roads are messed up with debris.
Don't get me wrong, the idea of a vehicle functioning as a hackney carriage, getting in and telling it where to go and it does that, has appeal, but I don't want it to only function that way.
What you describe are the risks you are willing to take as an owner of a car.
The use cases of a fully autonomous car without allowing human control are equivalent of a taxi service where the passenger doesn't own or control the vehicle. As a business, as soon as you give over control over the vehicle to a passenger, then you are operating the equivalent of a rental service. So that would mean making sure that the person has a license and is insured and making sure there are rules of usage that are followed.
There are many many scenarios where you wouldn't want to provide the option of manual override to a passenger. At least not without popping the hood and flipping a switch or something... What if the only passenger doesn't have a license to drive? What if they are elderly and physically incapable of driving? What about a child that is old enough to be a passenger, say 14 years old, but not old enough to drive? What if the passenger is drunk?
Having an easily accessible manual override in many scenarios would open a taxi service up to liability and endanger the passengers, pedestrians, other vehicles and property.
I don't object to having a steering wheel and other manual controls in every car, but manual override shouldn't always be as easy as pressing a button on the dash and taking over control of the vehicle. The use case for autonomous cars as a service is that the passengers should not be expected to ever be in a position to take over manual control.
But it's simply not. Tout all the vaporware you can buzzword - breeder reactors, thorium reactors, etc etc - it's still going to be more expensive than wind and solar. Build nukes as safe as you want, they're still going to be more of a risk, and still be more expensive to decomission.
Doesn't matter if solar and wind are cheaper than nuclear if solar and wind can't do the job of powering our civilization without coal/natural gas/oil or nuclear.
How do you price all the wars that are going to be fought because solar and wind are simply not sufficient for powering our civilization? Or coal.
So choose. Either we choose to proceed with Global Climate change and on our death beds feel good about having "tried" to prevent it with solar and wind power... or we actually engineer a way to avoid the worst of climate change by expanding nuclear power capacity and investing as a society in new more efficient and better nuclear power designs.
'Cause right now, in the US, it looks like we have two very messed up perspectives. Half the US is going to invest in Solar and Wind and feel a false sense of entitlement to keep living unsustainable lifestyles (because despite their low carbon emissions in their homes and vehicles they are relying on the industrial output of the other half of society which is burning coal/oil/natural gas)
And the other half is going to deny it all to make themselves feel better and burn whatever they can (including coal) to produce cheaper electricity and power industrial manufacturing.
And then both sides will continue to call the other side a bunch of idiots and they will be half right and half wrong.
Bury your heads in the sands and repeat. The two major factions appear to be seeking blissful denial rather than real solutions.
And to achieve this goal, they buy electricity from France. A smart move, after all: you get the praise for how clean your energy production is, and you let the others deal with the dangers associated with its production.
let the others deal with the [fear mongering] associated with its production.
One of the most important aspects of our voting process is preventing coercion. This is done by making your vote as anonymous as possible. Imagine your boss comes up to you and demands that you vote a certain way or you will lose your job, and tells you to take a ballot selfie to prove it. If a ballot selfie is illegal, then no one can force you to vote that way. While I respect the first amendment argument, protecting voting rights is the more important concern here.
How does the law in any way prevent what you describe? It doesn't. The coercion is already illegal, so why wouldn't it already prevent what you describe... secrecy. Ballot picture laws don't actually physically stop people from taking pictures of ballots and secretly sharing those with a single person, they just make it illegal to do so. Given a ballot booth, sometimes with a curtain, and a small camera such as those on every cell phone then there is very little likelihood of getting caught taking a picture unless you willingly share that picture with multiple people or make no attempt to conceal the taking of the picture. What the law punishes is legitimate exercise of constitutional rights and does nothing practical to address the issue of voter coercion because there is no practical means to prevent people from secretly taking pictures of ballots.
The only thing ballot picture laws prevents are 1) People choosing to share their votes with others which is protected speech and 2) Recording their votes so they can be used collectively to verify election results haven't been tampered with at the polls. Both are important parts of ensuring the integrity of elections and override the spurious concerns over voter intimidation, coercion and vote buying.
The First Circuit has already correctly ruled that New Hampshire's prohibition on ballot pictures was an unconstitutional violation of first amendment rights.
If it is legally permissible to prove, through photographic evidence, who exactly they supported, then it is entirely possible for people to intimidate someone else into providing such proof, because you have absolutely zero proof that they are taking that photo entirely of their own volition, and with no influence from anyone who wants to know how that person voted.
So you are saying because it is against the law it can be stopped? The law isn't preventing the scenario you describe in any meaningful and practical way. People can secretly take pictures of their ballots and present those pictures secretly to a third party without much fear of getting caught. Most voting booths are design to conceal a persons choices which would also conceal whether they take a picture of the ballot or not. So the only thing the law is really preventing is the voluntary public disclosure of a person's ballot.
That law stinks of an attempt to give cover of law to election fraud, not an honest attempt to prevent voter coercion.
If we allow this, we open things up so that people can be pressured to vote one way or another. People's votes are their own, they shouldn't have to answer to their bosses or anyone else about who they vote for.
And if we prohibit people from recording their own votes by their own choice then we are preventing people the one means at their disposal to prevent wholesale election fraud. Forget the 'hey I want to show my support' aspect. We have a system that totally relies on trusting a small number of people to not conspire to change the voting results as they see fit. If trust breaks down, as it has broken down today and will break down from time to time, then we need to give people the option of recording a copy of their own vote in order to provide some means of independently verifying the result after the fact. It is that simple. Secrecy of the ballot is of a secondary concern compared with verifiable trust that our election results are true.
What I was trying to get across is that the environmentalists that are anti-nuclear are every bit as ignorant of reality as those denying the measurable effects of climate change. It is equivalent to deny that we should do anything about CO2 emissions to say no to nuclear.
That'd take nuclear - something that intelligent people understand and support, but unfortunately that's a tiny fraction of the voting population.
Anti-nuclear power = Climate Change Denier. Or might as well be. We simply do not have the technology to stop or even reduce CO2 emissions in the necessary time frame at the necessary scale without a massive investment in new nuclear power generating capacity. Really there isn't a meaningful benefit in investing in expensive solar and wind alternatives unless there is also a large scale investment in nuclear power right now.
Well there is a benefit to solar and wind power, but it is mostly so rich limousine liberals can delude themselves into feeling good about their role as they change the planet and cause regional wars and famine and are really just as responsible for all that death and destruction like everyone else is.
Or about 5 cents per liter -- not too far off from the 2 cents needed
Thanks for doing some quick math, but "not far" is not how I would describe the challenge... It is not an order of magnitude (10x) of improvement, but even taking your numbers that still means the new device has to be over twice as efficient in a humid area and probably closer to 4 times as efficient in a much less humid area.
Not supporting nuclear power to a greater extent than we have today is going to ensure that we exceed Global Climate change targets which are meant to keep climate change largely within acceptable limits.
Maybe Global Climate change is unavoidable at this point, but just trudging forward with solar and wind without seeing their real limits doesn't do anyone any favors, except dragging things out for the fossil fuel industry until they hit their production limits. The future is at least 60% nuclear or else it is going to get a lot warmer for our kids and grand kids than civilization can really withstand.
With that kind of environmental damage we can expect some serious regional or world wars with food production and water resources as underlying causes and the mass migrations we see because of that. Already we can view the war in Syria as not just a factional struggle, but as a result of too many people struggling to control too few resources and then dividing along sectarian and ethnic lines when resources become too scarce.
Did someone say Radioactive Frogs? Get the pitch forks towns folk! We need to prevent these evil radioactive frogs from destroying our civilization with their electrifications!
Well, you either accept the leak and reported stories as fact... which means anyone at Yahoo that knows about it really can't legally say anything about it publicly without going to jail or you don't accept the facts as they have been reported and it may not even have ever happened.
I choose to believe the facts that were reported and that Yahoo did likely cooperate with the government under a secret order which means exactly what I said. Yahoo isn't saying they don't have information they are saying they can't reveal that information and are asking the only authority they can ask to declassify the information so they can talk about it publicly.
Personally, I am not pulling any punches... if the story is true and Yahoo didn't legally object in court to the sort of untargeted keyword searches being alleged, then Yahoo was complicit in a criminal conspiracy to violate the constitutional rights of millions of Americans.
And by untargeted I mean they used keywords instead of having a constitutionally valid warrant for all the emails to or from specific individuals.
So Yahoo, a company that made its name as a search engine, can't search through its own corporate records.
"we find ourselves unable to respond in detail" doesn't necessarily mean they don't have any records about this, it most likely means they legally can't respond because it is either classified and only cleared individuals given access to the information have it or they are simply under threat of felony prosecution not to divulge that they were under orders. Also, it is very likely they would not have been given any copies of those orders. It would be sufficient to show them the orders without giving them a copy.
Bingo! You nailed it. The Federal government can always "borrow" the money from the Federal Reserve and as long as it always borrows more than it has to pay back then it isn't a drain on taxpayers.
Really the net government borrowing is the only way to increase the money supply over the medium to long term, since money borrowed by banks does eventually need to be paid back to the Fed.
So lower rates are a temporary monetary stimulus followed by a contraction of the money supply when rates go up.
Give the money to the people. No way there is a level playing field without a base income at least. It used to be that land was so cheap it was the equivalent of a basic income since you could always go out and subsistence farm. That level of equality was what enabled Liberty to thrive for a time in America.
What's happening here is fraud and perjury and its organized, making it organized racketeering. This is for the FBI to investigate.
And it really undermines the rule of law to have some lawyers conspiring to fundamentally defraud the courts in a systematic way. They are harming third parties right to free speech, probably without those individuals even being aware.
You could have *probably* named 5 or 6 different major state and non-state players in the cyber espionage/hacking business that are of equal or greater concern, but Russia is the convenient target these days.
Seems the cold war is back on, but to me it would be far better to maintain somewhat better relations with Russia as a hedge of China and Saudi(Sunni Islamist) influence in world affairs. Even the EU and India should be considered as a potential competitors that should be worked with as friends, while understanding that we may have divergent global interests in the future.
Pushing Russia further towards China, Iran and others does nothing other than set up stronger anti-American alliances just as our technological military edge further erodes and we face larger militaries with increasingly sophisticated weapons and communications and backed by large industrial capacity.
We are so interconnected and with larger and larger populations we are more vulnerable to major disruptions that nobody should be looking to pick a fight amongst the larger countries. Of course nobody should be looking to pick a fight at all between countries, but especially strong is the responsibility to avoid further acrimony among the major and even the regional powers.
Why wouldn't Alphabet spin off a new company that they have a 40% stake in and let it fly?
It wouldn't be part of Alphabet, so the rules wouldn't apply.
If it fails, they can handle a little loss.
If it is a hit, they can make money from it without holding back on good ideas the world might be able to use.
That is why I clicked on this thread. There should be room in the Alphabet ecosystem to spin off R&D like this into a standalone business or to sell to other companies for further development if there is a viable business plan and a sizable enough market.
Otherwise they will get stuck in the mindset that befell Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center when it was at the forefront of computing R&D and ended up with other companies actually developing their concepts because the concepts for computing didn't appear to support their core business model. Xerox could have been a major player in the emerging PC market if they had seen their concepts as much more than niche products.
I agree that it doesn't sound like this particular R&D fit the core Google business model, but if there was an opportunity to advance some area of technology with some promising new approaches and there was a market for the products then why not spin it off or seek outside capital if Alphabet itself didn't want to invest. I understand that even for Google/Alphabet there is a finite amount of capital. And of course they would want to retain key people and key patents so maybe it wouldn't have worked out as a spin off or new venture.
But if we as a society, as Google customers, are going to put so much capital into Google/Alphabet and put so much hope in their R&D then they really need to be going the extra mile to make sure all their promising tech gets out the door whenever possible and not just what is going to end up selling to a mass market.
One US swimmer trashed a gas station and said he was robbed at gunpoint. Does that mean everyone in America is a lying scumbag vandal?
That's ridiculous, just like it's ridiculous to claim BLM is a hate group just because there are a few members in the organization that are.
I didn't say it was right, just that it was equal treatment. And it isn't without some merit that a group is attacked for the actions of a few. The saying goes that a few bad apples spoil the bunch... as in if you don't exclude the bad apples, take them out, that they will spoil the rest. That goes for the police and BLM.
The point of BLM is equality, not racism. You can't piss on the whole movement because of a few asshats who align themselves with it.
It is not accurate to compare a white supremacy to blm.
Equality means people can indeed piss on the whole movement because of a few asshats who align themselves with it.
That is what mainstream politics and the press do to these sorts of political movements. That's what they did to the Tea Party, Occupy Movement, and now Black Lives Matter. Guilt by association is a pretty transparent tactic by parties aligned with various factions to undermine competing factions. And guilt by association in particular is the inherent weakness of populist movements because populist movements by their nature are going to include many many more people with a wider range of backgrounds including racists, criminals, gang members etc etc. There is simply no way to defend the integrity of a populist movement based on the integrity of all of its members.
It is also the weakness of BLM in particular because the movement has no simply stated achievable goals and relies on a shared sense of oppression and persecution for an ongoing sense of purpose. And there has been, a now exposed, cynical conspiracy by the democratic party elite to co-opt black lives matter into a vehicle to drive turnout on election day without actually delivering any achievable policy... Keep it supportive yet vague was the directive.
Again the cynical democratic party elite has tried to make sure BLM has no clear achievable agenda other than being a vehicle for discontent. The implication being that any actual policy agenda will either be too divisive within the democratic party or will be agreeable to all sides and won't allow for a contrast between parties that would help drive turnout.
It simply doesn't serve the party to achieve anything before election day other than black voter turnout. And then the next election is just two years away... It is up to BLM leaders to get some agenda on the table that most people can agree to and to stop being used for petty partisan politics. BLM itself needs to keep the focus on the things that can actually work to make things better.
One of the challenges VR will have over the next year or so is the proliferation of terrible pseudo-VR experiences.
I don't think that is necessarily a problem. Plenty of cheap laggy poor quality smartphones out there and I don't think it is a problem for the "market" as a hole. It gives people options. The important thing is that there are quality options at a price point that people can reach.
Even the low powered mobile/embedded computers we had from ten years ago were not really fast enough to incorporate a lot of sensor data and perform extensive autonomous functions. We aren't talking about the small rack of computers you could put on a jumbo jet, or even in a car, or the small embedded computers you would put on a missile that could incorporate one sensor or two with simple instructions. What we have now is a capability to have small embedded or low power computers that can have millions of lines of code and do much more of the real time sensor processing needed to keep a small uav or small VTOL stable during dynamic near ground and cross wind conditions. And we also have an open source software community around autonomous drones and robotics that could be leveraged for control systems for small VTOL.
Just as soon as the Moller Skycar is ready. It'll be real soon now, right? He's only been working on it for about 50 years.
Moller ran up against the problem of not wanting to get test pilots killed, and the FAA not wanting to get test pilots killed... but strap in a lightweight laptop that can autonomously stabilize the vehicle during testing while you have a pilot on the ground directing it where to go and you should be able to make faster progress than Moller ever could with periodic tethered flights from a crane and a human test pilot.
The biggest mistake people make, is thinking, if technology X was tested and it failed. that in 50 years with new technology and materials it will still fail.
The problem with making a flying car isn't really the technology. We've known how to make a VTOL aircraft for a long time now. The showstopper is the economics of it.
Yes, it is the technology... new technology is what makes the economics work or not work. Successful new technology has always been about making the economics work. Lighter stronger materials..... lighter more powerful engines and motors, denser energy storage in batteries, along with lighter more powerful and more energy efficient computers necessary for controlling all those systems in a more dynamic vertical take off flight mode. I am not saying the economics will work, or that it could be made affordable for large numbers of people, but it is certainly a lot closer to working than it was ten or twenty years ago.
And even if the economics only work for the wealthy, then that still could mean a better overall transportation system with less pressure on existing infrastructure if we take some people off the roads.
Certainly worth some speculative R&D and it is worth support from NASA and regulatory support from the FAA.
If terrorists hack emails of White House Office staff and get such sensitive information we will see the fall of our country."
Yeah, I totally believe you're an American. Totally. Look, this is my not-being-sarcastic face.
Regardless, our national security is built on the stronger foundation of common purpose of Liberty and democracy and not merely the ability of our government officials to keep secrets from us and our enemies.
Sure there are some things that should be secret to keep people safer and which allows our government and military to operate without adversaries knowing their every move. But our national security must be stronger than secrets.
Slashdot Mirror
There are simply too many conditions in which a self-driving car could occasionally need a human pilot, and the vast majority of those are when a quick decision that is not safety related is required, and the rest are when the vehicle is operating on something other than conventional roads.
For example, if I'm going to an event in a rural area I'm probably going to have to park in an improvised parking area on an unimproved or only marginally improved surface. I may have to drive down a trail that itself is unimproved or only marginally improved, either following the directions of humans waving at me or else following something like the occasional orange cone or even the tracks of previous vehicles. A self-driving car is probably not going to interpret the directions of a teenager with a yellow safety vest and will instead see the person merely as an object to avoid colliding with. It will not see bits of orange tape on the ground or ruts as a path. It probably won't handle being told to enqueue to park in rows, peeling off after the next vehicle to park per human-guided hand signals.
In this kind of scenario, which is common to outdoor concerts, festivals, campgrounds, renaissance festivals, theme-parks, lodges, and many other situations, a car that cannot be directly driven by a human being would not be able to function. The vehicle may well drive the vast majority of the time on its own, but it still needs to be capable of being occasionally human-operated or at least very directly human-instructed. Entirely eliminating the conventional driver controls makes that difficult.
Furthemore, having owned many vehicles in various states of repair and condition for around twenty years now, I do not want a vehicle to be stranded when its autonomous systems have malfuctioned. Flat out that's a non-starter. Vehicles break. This is a fact of life. I don't want a vehicle with no issues with the powertrain to strand me because the controller can't figure out how to drive on the road. If nothing else, in general emergencies it may be necessary for me to make decisions that the vehicle is not capable of making itself, like in having to drive in the aftermath of a hurricane or tornado when the roads are messed up with debris.
Don't get me wrong, the idea of a vehicle functioning as a hackney carriage, getting in and telling it where to go and it does that, has appeal, but I don't want it to only function that way.
What you describe are the risks you are willing to take as an owner of a car.
The use cases of a fully autonomous car without allowing human control are equivalent of a taxi service where the passenger doesn't own or control the vehicle. As a business, as soon as you give over control over the vehicle to a passenger, then you are operating the equivalent of a rental service. So that would mean making sure that the person has a license and is insured and making sure there are rules of usage that are followed.
There are many many scenarios where you wouldn't want to provide the option of manual override to a passenger. At least not without popping the hood and flipping a switch or something... What if the only passenger doesn't have a license to drive? What if they are elderly and physically incapable of driving? What about a child that is old enough to be a passenger, say 14 years old, but not old enough to drive? What if the passenger is drunk?
Having an easily accessible manual override in many scenarios would open a taxi service up to liability and endanger the passengers, pedestrians, other vehicles and property.
I don't object to having a steering wheel and other manual controls in every car, but manual override shouldn't always be as easy as pressing a button on the dash and taking over control of the vehicle. The use case for autonomous cars as a service is that the passengers should not be expected to ever be in a position to take over manual control.
If that means the vehicle won't go off-r
But it's simply not. Tout all the vaporware you can buzzword - breeder reactors, thorium reactors, etc etc - it's still going to be more expensive than wind and solar. Build nukes as safe as you want, they're still going to be more of a risk, and still be more expensive to decomission.
Doesn't matter if solar and wind are cheaper than nuclear if solar and wind can't do the job of powering our civilization without coal/natural gas/oil or nuclear.
How do you price all the wars that are going to be fought because solar and wind are simply not sufficient for powering our civilization? Or coal.
So choose. Either we choose to proceed with Global Climate change and on our death beds feel good about having "tried" to prevent it with solar and wind power... or we actually engineer a way to avoid the worst of climate change by expanding nuclear power capacity and investing as a society in new more efficient and better nuclear power designs.
'Cause right now, in the US, it looks like we have two very messed up perspectives. Half the US is going to invest in Solar and Wind and feel a false sense of entitlement to keep living unsustainable lifestyles (because despite their low carbon emissions in their homes and vehicles they are relying on the industrial output of the other half of society which is burning coal/oil/natural gas)
And the other half is going to deny it all to make themselves feel better and burn whatever they can (including coal) to produce cheaper electricity and power industrial manufacturing.
And then both sides will continue to call the other side a bunch of idiots and they will be half right and half wrong.
Bury your heads in the sands and repeat. The two major factions appear to be seeking blissful denial rather than real solutions.
And to achieve this goal, they buy electricity from France. A smart move, after all: you get the praise for how clean your energy production is, and you let the others deal with the dangers associated with its production.
let the others deal with the [fear mongering] associated with its production.
There I fixed it for you.
One of the most important aspects of our voting process is preventing coercion. This is done by making your vote as anonymous as possible. Imagine your boss comes up to you and demands that you vote a certain way or you will lose your job, and tells you to take a ballot selfie to prove it. If a ballot selfie is illegal, then no one can force you to vote that way. While I respect the first amendment argument, protecting voting rights is the more important concern here.
How does the law in any way prevent what you describe? It doesn't. The coercion is already illegal, so why wouldn't it already prevent what you describe... secrecy. Ballot picture laws don't actually physically stop people from taking pictures of ballots and secretly sharing those with a single person, they just make it illegal to do so. Given a ballot booth, sometimes with a curtain, and a small camera such as those on every cell phone then there is very little likelihood of getting caught taking a picture unless you willingly share that picture with multiple people or make no attempt to conceal the taking of the picture. What the law punishes is legitimate exercise of constitutional rights and does nothing practical to address the issue of voter coercion because there is no practical means to prevent people from secretly taking pictures of ballots.
The only thing ballot picture laws prevents are 1) People choosing to share their votes with others which is protected speech and 2) Recording their votes so they can be used collectively to verify election results haven't been tampered with at the polls. Both are important parts of ensuring the integrity of elections and override the spurious concerns over voter intimidation, coercion and vote buying.
The First Circuit has already correctly ruled that New Hampshire's prohibition on ballot pictures was an unconstitutional violation of first amendment rights.
If it is legally permissible to prove, through photographic evidence, who exactly they supported, then it is entirely possible for people to intimidate someone else into providing such proof, because you have absolutely zero proof that they are taking that photo entirely of their own volition, and with no influence from anyone who wants to know how that person voted.
So you are saying because it is against the law it can be stopped? The law isn't preventing the scenario you describe in any meaningful and practical way. People can secretly take pictures of their ballots and present those pictures secretly to a third party without much fear of getting caught. Most voting booths are design to conceal a persons choices which would also conceal whether they take a picture of the ballot or not. So the only thing the law is really preventing is the voluntary public disclosure of a person's ballot.
That law stinks of an attempt to give cover of law to election fraud, not an honest attempt to prevent voter coercion.
If we allow this, we open things up so that people can be pressured to vote one way or another. People's votes are their own, they shouldn't have to answer to their bosses or anyone else about who they vote for.
And if we prohibit people from recording their own votes by their own choice then we are preventing people the one means at their disposal to prevent wholesale election fraud. Forget the 'hey I want to show my support' aspect. We have a system that totally relies on trusting a small number of people to not conspire to change the voting results as they see fit. If trust breaks down, as it has broken down today and will break down from time to time, then we need to give people the option of recording a copy of their own vote in order to provide some means of independently verifying the result after the fact. It is that simple. Secrecy of the ballot is of a secondary concern compared with verifiable trust that our election results are true.
What I was trying to get across is that the environmentalists that are anti-nuclear are every bit as ignorant of reality as those denying the measurable effects of climate change. It is equivalent to deny that we should do anything about CO2 emissions to say no to nuclear.
That'd take nuclear - something that intelligent people understand and support, but unfortunately that's a tiny fraction of the voting population.
Anti-nuclear power = Climate Change Denier. Or might as well be. We simply do not have the technology to stop or even reduce CO2 emissions in the necessary time frame at the necessary scale without a massive investment in new nuclear power generating capacity. Really there isn't a meaningful benefit in investing in expensive solar and wind alternatives unless there is also a large scale investment in nuclear power right now.
Well there is a benefit to solar and wind power, but it is mostly so rich limousine liberals can delude themselves into feeling good about their role as they change the planet and cause regional wars and famine and are really just as responsible for all that death and destruction like everyone else is.
Or about 5 cents per liter -- not too far off from the 2 cents needed
Thanks for doing some quick math, but "not far" is not how I would describe the challenge... It is not an order of magnitude (10x) of improvement, but even taking your numbers that still means the new device has to be over twice as efficient in a humid area and probably closer to 4 times as efficient in a much less humid area.
To be fair, TVA has patched the design to mitigate some of the more serious risks based on lessons learned in Fukushima
If a tsunami hits Tennessee then a nuclear accident is the least of our concerns.
Not supporting nuclear power to a greater extent than we have today is going to ensure that we exceed Global Climate change targets which are meant to keep climate change largely within acceptable limits.
Maybe Global Climate change is unavoidable at this point, but just trudging forward with solar and wind without seeing their real limits doesn't do anyone any favors, except dragging things out for the fossil fuel industry until they hit their production limits. The future is at least 60% nuclear or else it is going to get a lot warmer for our kids and grand kids than civilization can really withstand.
With that kind of environmental damage we can expect some serious regional or world wars with food production and water resources as underlying causes and the mass migrations we see because of that. Already we can view the war in Syria as not just a factional struggle, but as a result of too many people struggling to control too few resources and then dividing along sectarian and ethnic lines when resources become too scarce.
> or Eeeevil Radioactive Fog.
Did someone say Radioactive Frogs? Get the pitch forks towns folk! We need to prevent these evil radioactive frogs from destroying our civilization with their electrifications!
Another Yahoo Apologist AI chat bot?
Well, you either accept the leak and reported stories as fact... which means anyone at Yahoo that knows about it really can't legally say anything about it publicly without going to jail or you don't accept the facts as they have been reported and it may not even have ever happened.
I choose to believe the facts that were reported and that Yahoo did likely cooperate with the government under a secret order which means exactly what I said. Yahoo isn't saying they don't have information they are saying they can't reveal that information and are asking the only authority they can ask to declassify the information so they can talk about it publicly.
Personally, I am not pulling any punches... if the story is true and Yahoo didn't legally object in court to the sort of untargeted keyword searches being alleged, then Yahoo was complicit in a criminal conspiracy to violate the constitutional rights of millions of Americans.
And by untargeted I mean they used keywords instead of having a constitutionally valid warrant for all the emails to or from specific individuals.
So Yahoo, a company that made its name as a search engine, can't search through its own corporate records.
"we find ourselves unable to respond in detail" doesn't necessarily mean they don't have any records about this, it most likely means they legally can't respond because it is either classified and only cleared individuals given access to the information have it or they are simply under threat of felony prosecution not to divulge that they were under orders. Also, it is very likely they would not have been given any copies of those orders. It would be sufficient to show them the orders without giving them a copy.
Bingo! You nailed it. The Federal government can always "borrow" the money from the Federal Reserve and as long as it always borrows more than it has to pay back then it isn't a drain on taxpayers.
Really the net government borrowing is the only way to increase the money supply over the medium to long term, since money borrowed by banks does eventually need to be paid back to the Fed.
So lower rates are a temporary monetary stimulus followed by a contraction of the money supply when rates go up.
Give the money to the people. No way there is a level playing field without a base income at least. It used to be that land was so cheap it was the equivalent of a basic income since you could always go out and subsistence farm. That level of equality was what enabled Liberty to thrive for a time in America.
What's happening here is fraud and perjury and its organized, making it organized racketeering. This is for the FBI to investigate.
And it really undermines the rule of law to have some lawyers conspiring to fundamentally defraud the courts in a systematic way. They are harming third parties right to free speech, probably without those individuals even being aware.
You could have *probably* named 5 or 6 different major state and non-state players in the cyber espionage/hacking business that are of equal or greater concern, but Russia is the convenient target these days.
Seems the cold war is back on, but to me it would be far better to maintain somewhat better relations with Russia as a hedge of China and Saudi(Sunni Islamist) influence in world affairs. Even the EU and India should be considered as a potential competitors that should be worked with as friends, while understanding that we may have divergent global interests in the future.
Pushing Russia further towards China, Iran and others does nothing other than set up stronger anti-American alliances just as our technological military edge further erodes and we face larger militaries with increasingly sophisticated weapons and communications and backed by large industrial capacity.
We are so interconnected and with larger and larger populations we are more vulnerable to major disruptions that nobody should be looking to pick a fight amongst the larger countries. Of course nobody should be looking to pick a fight at all between countries, but especially strong is the responsibility to avoid further acrimony among the major and even the regional powers.
Why wouldn't Alphabet spin off a new company that they have a 40% stake in and let it fly?
It wouldn't be part of Alphabet, so the rules wouldn't apply.
If it fails, they can handle a little loss.
If it is a hit, they can make money from it without holding back on good ideas the world might be able to use.
That is why I clicked on this thread. There should be room in the Alphabet ecosystem to spin off R&D like this into a standalone business or to sell to other companies for further development if there is a viable business plan and a sizable enough market.
Otherwise they will get stuck in the mindset that befell Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center when it was at the forefront of computing R&D and ended up with other companies actually developing their concepts because the concepts for computing didn't appear to support their core business model. Xerox could have been a major player in the emerging PC market if they had seen their concepts as much more than niche products.
I agree that it doesn't sound like this particular R&D fit the core Google business model, but if there was an opportunity to advance some area of technology with some promising new approaches and there was a market for the products then why not spin it off or seek outside capital if Alphabet itself didn't want to invest. I understand that even for Google/Alphabet there is a finite amount of capital. And of course they would want to retain key people and key patents so maybe it wouldn't have worked out as a spin off or new venture.
But if we as a society, as Google customers, are going to put so much capital into Google/Alphabet and put so much hope in their R&D then they really need to be going the extra mile to make sure all their promising tech gets out the door whenever possible and not just what is going to end up selling to a mass market.
So by your logic:
One US swimmer trashed a gas station and said he was robbed at gunpoint.
Does that mean everyone in America is a lying scumbag vandal?
That's ridiculous, just like it's ridiculous to claim BLM is a hate group just because there are a few members in the organization that are.
I didn't say it was right, just that it was equal treatment. And it isn't without some merit that a group is attacked for the actions of a few. The saying goes that a few bad apples spoil the bunch... as in if you don't exclude the bad apples, take them out, that they will spoil the rest. That goes for the police and BLM.
The point of BLM is equality, not racism. You can't piss on the whole movement because of a few asshats who align themselves with it.
It is not accurate to compare a white supremacy to blm.
Equality means people can indeed piss on the whole movement because of a few asshats who align themselves with it.
That is what mainstream politics and the press do to these sorts of political movements. That's what they did to the Tea Party, Occupy Movement, and now Black Lives Matter. Guilt by association is a pretty transparent tactic by parties aligned with various factions to undermine competing factions. And guilt by association in particular is the inherent weakness of populist movements because populist movements by their nature are going to include many many more people with a wider range of backgrounds including racists, criminals, gang members etc etc. There is simply no way to defend the integrity of a populist movement based on the integrity of all of its members.
It is also the weakness of BLM in particular because the movement has no simply stated achievable goals and relies on a shared sense of oppression and persecution for an ongoing sense of purpose. And there has been, a now exposed, cynical conspiracy by the democratic party elite to co-opt black lives matter into a vehicle to drive turnout on election day without actually delivering any achievable policy... Keep it supportive yet vague was the directive.
Again the cynical democratic party elite has tried to make sure BLM has no clear achievable agenda other than being a vehicle for discontent. The implication being that any actual policy agenda will either be too divisive within the democratic party or will be agreeable to all sides and won't allow for a contrast between parties that would help drive turnout.
It simply doesn't serve the party to achieve anything before election day other than black voter turnout. And then the next election is just two years away... It is up to BLM leaders to get some agenda on the table that most people can agree to and to stop being used for petty partisan politics. BLM itself needs to keep the focus on the things that can actually work to make things better.
One of the challenges VR will have over the next year or so is the proliferation of terrible pseudo-VR experiences.
I don't think that is necessarily a problem. Plenty of cheap laggy poor quality smartphones out there and I don't think it is a problem for the "market" as a hole. It gives people options. The important thing is that there are quality options at a price point that people can reach.
Muller has had computers he could fly since 1980.
Even the low powered mobile/embedded computers we had from ten years ago were not really fast enough to incorporate a lot of sensor data and perform extensive autonomous functions. We aren't talking about the small rack of computers you could put on a jumbo jet, or even in a car, or the small embedded computers you would put on a missile that could incorporate one sensor or two with simple instructions. What we have now is a capability to have small embedded or low power computers that can have millions of lines of code and do much more of the real time sensor processing needed to keep a small uav or small VTOL stable during dynamic near ground and cross wind conditions. And we also have an open source software community around autonomous drones and robotics that could be leveraged for control systems for small VTOL.
Just as soon as the Moller Skycar is ready. It'll be real soon now, right? He's only been working on it for about 50 years.
Moller ran up against the problem of not wanting to get test pilots killed, and the FAA not wanting to get test pilots killed... but strap in a lightweight laptop that can autonomously stabilize the vehicle during testing while you have a pilot on the ground directing it where to go and you should be able to make faster progress than Moller ever could with periodic tethered flights from a crane and a human test pilot.
The biggest mistake people make, is thinking, if technology X was tested and it failed. that in 50 years with new technology and materials it will still fail.
The problem with making a flying car isn't really the technology. We've known how to make a VTOL aircraft for a long time now. The showstopper is the economics of it.
Yes, it is the technology... new technology is what makes the economics work or not work. Successful new technology has always been about making the economics work. Lighter stronger materials..... lighter more powerful engines and motors, denser energy storage in batteries, along with lighter more powerful and more energy efficient computers necessary for controlling all those systems in a more dynamic vertical take off flight mode. I am not saying the economics will work, or that it could be made affordable for large numbers of people, but it is certainly a lot closer to working than it was ten or twenty years ago.
And even if the economics only work for the wealthy, then that still could mean a better overall transportation system with less pressure on existing infrastructure if we take some people off the roads.
Certainly worth some speculative R&D and it is worth support from NASA and regulatory support from the FAA.
Yeah, I totally believe you're an American. Totally. Look, this is my not-being-sarcastic face.
Regardless, our national security is built on the stronger foundation of common purpose of Liberty and democracy and not merely the ability of our government officials to keep secrets from us and our enemies.
Sure there are some things that should be secret to keep people safer and which allows our government and military to operate without adversaries knowing their every move. But our national security must be stronger than secrets.