If you fire you would be classified as hostile and the minimum force to stop you should be used. Robots are more precise that humans they can shoot to incapacitate.
We have a military that is under civilian control. Since we know the military has a pretty good history of giving and obeying illegal orders we should just build the robots not to obey illegal orders as much as possible.
That way an officer can give an illegal order (like killing a bunch of civilians) and the robots will just refuse to do it just like humans are REQUIRED to do so by law but they keep doing it anyways.
That is the way that humans controlling the robots are doing the classifying right now. Clearly that is WRONG as hell. A robot programmed to follow things like the geneva conventions would not fire until actual evidence of someone being a combatant. (ie they actually pulled out a gun and fired at the robot or at something the robot is supposed to protect)
And yes those humans do violate the various rules that cover war and do shoot into crowds of civilians. I would say so far that approach is not working very well.
Give the robot reflexes fast enough that you don't calculate it. You just scan for it and shoot back.
Time is not the same for computers as it is for us. What is an instance for a human is a very very long time for a computer. We have computers that can visually pick out a bad product from a free fall of products and use a small puff of air to move just that one bad product out of the way. To a human the whole thing looks like a solid fall of stuff.
Things like that are used for french fries for instance.
The point is the world is very slow for a computer. Since we don't' care if the robot is shot let it take the first shot and then shoot back. We could also program it with various parameters to protect things classified as nonhostile.
I would trust the robot more. You could program it to not take things like emotions into account. You can have it judge if someone is hostile or a combatant and only exercise the force required. Humans are far more likely to overreact.
This kind of thing is why I want to transition to a fully online learning system. I am not saying that online learning is some huge advancement just that the traditional methods are pretty lousy.
Until we get strong AI you won't have any computers going on a personal vendetta against you.;)
Overall though this really is a problem. In fields like engineering you can't get a job as an engineer without that piece of paper and some of the professors are truly evil. However you have no choice, you have to play their game if you want to actually do anything. I am hopeful that we can get these nasty places shut down and replaced with online systems.
What is sad is that professors can easily beat any online system I have seen. The problem is that not only do they choose not to they manage to be orders of magnitude worse. I am surprised at how much people actually manage to learn on leaving university. It is especially sad that so few engineers know how to use computers to solve problems. They have learned various methods that are used on tests to solve simplified problems but can't solve real problems in real situations.
I did not say we should just stop cold but if you never make attempts to change at all you won't get anywhere and the problem just keeps getting worse.
One way or another we have to make these changes since oil can't keep up with the ever increasing demands for energy. We also can't keep up wasting so much energy from things like poor insulation.
We need to work on making changes. Better insulation would be a very good start since that helps regardless of the source of energy. In areas where it makes sense we can deploy new solar and wind technology plants. We can work on building newer and safer nuclear reactors. We can refit existing fossil fuel sources to make them cleaner.
So I suppose we have to just keep spending even increasing amounts on war spending? Just a never ending spiral of costs that don't really help our economy in the end?
We can cut back a lot and still not be weak. We can invest in infrastructure, education, high tech manufacturing that has a better payback. Even the military has proposed budget cuts for itself that would leave it more combat effective than it is now. Most of the money is just wasted on defense contractors.
This is also not based on votes. In the end ideology loses to reality and the longer you take to make those changes the more it costs and the more damage it does. We need to make the decisions purely based on data, as data changes so does the decision.
Those should be factored into the costs as well. We need to base decisions on the best data we have available and change whenever new information is available.
What I find strange is that germans are not known for ignoring practicality. We also know what a paragon of sunshine germany is.;)
My point is that we have areas in the USA that get vastly more sunshine than germany does and yet they can use solar and wind power at a profit while we are told here it can't work.
Overall I think there is a lot of lieing going on from many sources. I also think our biggest energy problem is not generation but waste. The insulation on our homes and businesses is just amazingly poor and that has a very high energy cost. No matter how good your energy generation is if you throw nearly half of it away from poor insulation you will be in trouble no matter how you get it.
It means building twice as many wind and solar options as we would otherwise have to do. It means extracting far more coal, oil, natural gas etc than otherwise. It means more nuclear reactors to deal with the additional power requirements.
We need to insulate, increase efficiency, switch to various renewable types based on local climate, build more nuclear reactors, phase out fossil fuels and invest in better technology for power generation and more efficient usage.
Does that mean you are okay with no help for solar, wind, coal. oil etc?
That means no military involvement for fossil fuel reasons. That means no money from the state department to help with negotiations to get better deals. That mean no money from the EPA to help any of them with damage they cause. If they do the damage they clean up 100% of the damage. If they cause more damage than their company is worth the company is liquidated and that is the end of them.
What I have seen is many people have said we need to get rid of government in energy and let the market decide but that will only work if the full costs are born by those that do the damage.
That also means that if we can prove that x technology caused y damage then the company pays for that period. So if coal power plants cause cancer they pay for all of that instead of handing that off as someones else problem and that gets factored into the costs of coal. The same for any toxic chemicals used to make solar panels. wind turbines etc.
It should also mean that if your have a foreseeable potential for causing harm that is in excess of the value of the company you should have to carry insurance on that since society should not be picking up the tab if you screw it. To allow companies to risk in excess of what they are worth is just externalizing the cost to the society which market forces don't work with.
How much does it cost to clean up all the damage caused by those spills? How much money is made on the oil involved. As far as I can see it costs of cleaning up all the damage is higher than the oil is worth.
You might want to look at test results on contaminants in many of the seafood taken from the gulf. The damage is not gone it is just not easily visible to you anymore. There is still damage and it is being paid for in hospital bills all over the country, lower productivity, direct environmental damage in the gulf area etc.
We need to do a total cost of energy which has the FULL environmental cost of the damage involved and decide on the best source of energy. Right now we have not done that work and our energy policies are reckless.
I am sorry that those jobs have been destroyed however they should probably never come back and people retrained for other jobs. Fossil fuels cost far too much and just punting the problem down the road for someone else to pay for is wrong.
And who is going to pay the costs of not getting off the stuff? All this environmental damage is not free and it has a real cost in terms of our health (and the money it takes to fix it) and also in terms of damage done directly to us in the form of stronger storms.
Saying that fossil fuels are cheaper is just a way of externalizing the costs. It is letting large businesses make a fortune while our tax dollars go to clean up the damage and the money spent to repair the damage dwarfs the money made from the fuels.
Also we can eliminate fossil fuels for most uses already right now and we are doing very little of that. About half the energy used in a house is just wasted due to poor insulation. No matter what kind of fuel source you have if you throw away a significant fraction of your power you are going to have problems.
We have also developed better battery technology, building technology for cars to make them lighter and stronger and companies like BP keep buying up the patents on them like on lithium polymer batteries.
Sure we can't go 100% off fossil fuels but there is no 100% solution. We can still use a lot more wind, solar, nuclear and combine that with better insulation, EVs for most normal commuter driving and still get at least 80% or more of the way to not using fossil fuels anymore.
This attitude seems pretty defeatist. Since we can't do 100% we might as well do nothing. The problem is the costs of doing nothing are enormous. Even if all we did was spend the kind of money we do on various wars on insulating houses in America it would still make a huge impact in our emissions and reduce our need for fossil fuels by a lot. That even has a better payback for the society that then wars do.
That is why I like more advanced engineering classes. Any calculator. Open notes, books, homework, previous exams etc.
The tests are not based on memorization at all. They are based on real problems with real solutions. Most of my books have 50+ pages of tables at the back on various properties and you are expected to know how to use those tables. On exams you have to figure out what you are trying to solve for, what assumptions you should make, what you should look up etc. The exams are very hard but also much more real world.
In the real world nobody cares if you memorize various equations of state, VLE equations, etc. They care if given pretty much any resource you need you can solve the problem accurately and on time.
The point is that you have to design special case problems so you can do them with a normal calculator. You also have to use simpler math that gives terrible approximations in order to make them solveable on an exam with a simple calculator.
That is why I like classes that try to be more realistic. My professors encourage you to program your calculator to solve more advanced problems in them. Coding in things like the peng-robinson equation of state for thermodynamics is a very good idea.
Too many people just learn and are tested on ideal situations with simplified functions that give answers that are not even close to right. This is grossly negligent when we know methods that will get you within a few percent of the needed answer. What we need are better test circumstances where you can use real methods to solve real problems. It is absolutely pathetic that the certification exams for engineers (FE exams) are still to methods that are more than a decade old and will get you FIRED if you use them.
FE exam should probably take place on a real computer with excel/matlab and some other software based on what is being done. You should be solving real problems with real solutions.
I just finished an assignment where my partner and I solved the problem using iterative calculation and not assuming that things like density, viscosity etc where constant. We ended up with a much much better answer that those students that decided to do the problem by hand and in order to make it hand solvable they had to assume constant properties. There is no place for those methods anymore and the sooner we kick them to the curb on classes, exams and certifications the better since they have long since been kicked to the curb in the real world.
I know it is handy as hell for my chemical engineering classes. Our professors believe we should be solving more realistic problems on exams so the exams are open books, notes, previous exams, homework, calculators etc just not anything that is wifi/cellular.
In my last heat exam one of the problem ended up with about 10 simultaneous non-linear equations and one of them was a second order ODE. Once you solve the problem to the point where you have equations, knowns and unknowns without independent equations to cover the unknowns that problem is mostly considered solved. That gives about 80-95% of the credit but if you have a more advanced calculator you can more easily do the last bit and get another few points.
Exam averages tend to be around 50%-60% or so before any curves so the exams are extremely hard. I know for many degrees things like these are not needed or even should be used. It is pretty much only when you have moved beyond all the basic math stuff and you are at the point where you are using the math as a tool to solve some other type of problem entirely that you want a calculator that can handle this stuff. More and more of the students in my classes are picking up the Nspire CX CAS just for that reason. It even handles some things that are a pain to do in matlab or excel.
I have really loved the nspire CX CAS for my engineering classes. It looks like this new ti-84 is just going to use the same screen which the nspire CX uses which is just a cellphone screen.
It can solve simultaneous non-linear system of equations along with ODEs, integrals, differentials etc. The most I have given it so far is a set of about 40 equations and it still handles it just fine.
Our professors have started giving us more realistic problems and they are expecting more realistic solutions and things like this calculator have really helped. What I like is that it means I just concentrate on setting up all my equations and boundary conditions. Once I have more independent equations than I do unknowns the problem is a plug and chug problem and there is no reason to do that by hand when a calculator will do it more accurately and without errors.
For classes like heat transfer, fluid mechanics and thermo dynamics these higher calculators really help. The people with ti-84s are having a much harder time.
My view is we have too many humans on this planet already. I don't really care if Iran nukes Israel or Israel nukes Iran. My view is that we should just stay out of and stop destabilizing that region of the world. Israel can deal with its own problems, especially since they do so much to cause those problems.
This country is basically bankrupt. Being the policemen of the world is just too dang expensive. If Israel wants to pay the USA that would be a different issue but we already pay them.
If we actually care about human suffering there are a lot of things we could do right here in the USA to deal with that. We have massive numbers of homeless people and people suffering without medical care in the tens of millions range. Helping those will also cost less and help us more than interfering between Iran and Israel.
We could also help countries that actually want help and really need it. How about making malaria medication cheaper? How about getting the funding to finish wiping out polio? All of those kill more people than a fight between Israel and Iran do. Sure the fight between Israel and Iran will have a lot of loud bangs but overall it is a minor issue and we should focus on more important issues.
My assumed goal is that regardless of them liking the person in charge or not they will work together and do the best they can for the country over the time they have. They will show, via actions, they are a party that cares about all of us and will work to make this country better no matter what hand they have been dealt. As a result they will do better in the next election cycle since they will be able to point to a lot of positive changes they have made and how that have made deals to turn policies that would have been bad into ones that are actually pretty good for the people they represent.
That is what they are PAID to do, that is their job and if they can't do that they need to be replaced. I know this if pretty far from the currently nut-job reality we have but that is absolutely what I expect from them. If they can't do that then I hope that eventually we can replace our republic with a computer system that runs the whole thing.
Because it had higher storm surge than most category 5 hurricanes do. It also covered a much wider area than any normal hurricane does. The problem was that it was really 3 storms and some very strange weather conditions including the placement of the jet stream and some cold air moving into the area.
You can't rate this just on a simple hurricane scale just like not all magnitude X earthquakes do the same damage. You could have a 6 that does almost no damage and a x that does staggering damage just based on the type of quake and duration the result is the same for storms.
In my engineering classes they are pretty much allowing us to use books, notes, homework, previous exams, and pretty advanced calculators like the nspire but the also give FAR more realistic problems.
The exams tend to be very difficult and sometimes have unrealistic time constraints (ie nobody in a class of 100 people or so finish the exam). Pretty much the only thing we can't use is a laptop/cellphone etc or anything with an internet connection.
It would certainly be nice if I could use matlab, python or excel on exams.
I doubt these cars will be required but I will definitely get one. I hate driving and consider it an option of last resort when buses, bikes and walking are not available.
With malpractice one problem is that many doctors are inept. They prescribe drugs based on handouts from drug companies and act like authorities when they have little understanding of the system.
I don't think they are purposefully inept I think we are just at the point where we have more medical knowledge then any human can learn. As we learn more we have drugs designed for specific conditions and if you assign it to a similar but different problem a lot of damage can be caused.
We need to accept that humans can no longer be doctors effectively and that they need to be backed up by a computer. We need computers to make the diagnosis and humans to carry it out until we can have computers to those parts also.
One thing I have even learned from classes is many of the doctors really don't care very much about learning at all. They just wanted to learn/cheat enough to graduate and after that their learning is done. Sure not all doctors are that way but enough are that we definitely need malpractice.
Slashdot Mirror
If you fire you would be classified as hostile and the minimum force to stop you should be used. Robots are more precise that humans they can shoot to incapacitate.
We have a military that is under civilian control. Since we know the military has a pretty good history of giving and obeying illegal orders we should just build the robots not to obey illegal orders as much as possible.
That way an officer can give an illegal order (like killing a bunch of civilians) and the robots will just refuse to do it just like humans are REQUIRED to do so by law but they keep doing it anyways.
They absolutely should be programmed to refuse orders like that. However, I don't expect that to happen which is very very sad.
That is the way that humans controlling the robots are doing the classifying right now. Clearly that is WRONG as hell. A robot programmed to follow things like the geneva conventions would not fire until actual evidence of someone being a combatant. (ie they actually pulled out a gun and fired at the robot or at something the robot is supposed to protect)
And yes those humans do violate the various rules that cover war and do shoot into crowds of civilians. I would say so far that approach is not working very well.
Give the robot reflexes fast enough that you don't calculate it. You just scan for it and shoot back.
Time is not the same for computers as it is for us. What is an instance for a human is a very very long time for a computer. We have computers that can visually pick out a bad product from a free fall of products and use a small puff of air to move just that one bad product out of the way. To a human the whole thing looks like a solid fall of stuff.
Things like that are used for french fries for instance.
The point is the world is very slow for a computer. Since we don't' care if the robot is shot let it take the first shot and then shoot back. We could also program it with various parameters to protect things classified as nonhostile.
I would trust the robot more. You could program it to not take things like emotions into account. You can have it judge if someone is hostile or a combatant and only exercise the force required. Humans are far more likely to overreact.
This kind of thing is why I want to transition to a fully online learning system. I am not saying that online learning is some huge advancement just that the traditional methods are pretty lousy.
Until we get strong AI you won't have any computers going on a personal vendetta against you. ;)
Overall though this really is a problem. In fields like engineering you can't get a job as an engineer without that piece of paper and some of the professors are truly evil. However you have no choice, you have to play their game if you want to actually do anything. I am hopeful that we can get these nasty places shut down and replaced with online systems.
What is sad is that professors can easily beat any online system I have seen. The problem is that not only do they choose not to they manage to be orders of magnitude worse. I am surprised at how much people actually manage to learn on leaving university. It is especially sad that so few engineers know how to use computers to solve problems. They have learned various methods that are used on tests to solve simplified problems but can't solve real problems in real situations.
I did not say we should just stop cold but if you never make attempts to change at all you won't get anywhere and the problem just keeps getting worse.
One way or another we have to make these changes since oil can't keep up with the ever increasing demands for energy. We also can't keep up wasting so much energy from things like poor insulation.
We need to work on making changes. Better insulation would be a very good start since that helps regardless of the source of energy. In areas where it makes sense we can deploy new solar and wind technology plants. We can work on building newer and safer nuclear reactors. We can refit existing fossil fuel sources to make them cleaner.
There is no one solution to fix everything.
So I suppose we have to just keep spending even increasing amounts on war spending? Just a never ending spiral of costs that don't really help our economy in the end?
We can cut back a lot and still not be weak. We can invest in infrastructure, education, high tech manufacturing that has a better payback. Even the military has proposed budget cuts for itself that would leave it more combat effective than it is now. Most of the money is just wasted on defense contractors.
This is also not based on votes. In the end ideology loses to reality and the longer you take to make those changes the more it costs and the more damage it does. We need to make the decisions purely based on data, as data changes so does the decision.
Those should be factored into the costs as well. We need to base decisions on the best data we have available and change whenever new information is available.
What I find strange is that germans are not known for ignoring practicality. We also know what a paragon of sunshine germany is. ;)
My point is that we have areas in the USA that get vastly more sunshine than germany does and yet they can use solar and wind power at a profit while we are told here it can't work.
Overall I think there is a lot of lieing going on from many sources. I also think our biggest energy problem is not generation but waste. The insulation on our homes and businesses is just amazingly poor and that has a very high energy cost. No matter how good your energy generation is if you throw nearly half of it away from poor insulation you will be in trouble no matter how you get it.
It means building twice as many wind and solar options as we would otherwise have to do. It means extracting far more coal, oil, natural gas etc than otherwise. It means more nuclear reactors to deal with the additional power requirements.
We need to insulate, increase efficiency, switch to various renewable types based on local climate, build more nuclear reactors, phase out fossil fuels and invest in better technology for power generation and more efficient usage.
Does that mean you are okay with no help for solar, wind, coal. oil etc?
That means no military involvement for fossil fuel reasons. That means no money from the state department to help with negotiations to get better deals. That mean no money from the EPA to help any of them with damage they cause. If they do the damage they clean up 100% of the damage. If they cause more damage than their company is worth the company is liquidated and that is the end of them.
What I have seen is many people have said we need to get rid of government in energy and let the market decide but that will only work if the full costs are born by those that do the damage.
That also means that if we can prove that x technology caused y damage then the company pays for that period. So if coal power plants cause cancer they pay for all of that instead of handing that off as someones else problem and that gets factored into the costs of coal. The same for any toxic chemicals used to make solar panels. wind turbines etc.
It should also mean that if your have a foreseeable potential for causing harm that is in excess of the value of the company you should have to carry insurance on that since society should not be picking up the tab if you screw it. To allow companies to risk in excess of what they are worth is just externalizing the cost to the society which market forces don't work with.
How much does it cost to clean up all the damage caused by those spills? How much money is made on the oil involved. As far as I can see it costs of cleaning up all the damage is higher than the oil is worth.
You might want to look at test results on contaminants in many of the seafood taken from the gulf. The damage is not gone it is just not easily visible to you anymore. There is still damage and it is being paid for in hospital bills all over the country, lower productivity, direct environmental damage in the gulf area etc.
We need to do a total cost of energy which has the FULL environmental cost of the damage involved and decide on the best source of energy. Right now we have not done that work and our energy policies are reckless.
I am sorry that those jobs have been destroyed however they should probably never come back and people retrained for other jobs. Fossil fuels cost far too much and just punting the problem down the road for someone else to pay for is wrong.
And who is going to pay the costs of not getting off the stuff? All this environmental damage is not free and it has a real cost in terms of our health (and the money it takes to fix it) and also in terms of damage done directly to us in the form of stronger storms.
Saying that fossil fuels are cheaper is just a way of externalizing the costs. It is letting large businesses make a fortune while our tax dollars go to clean up the damage and the money spent to repair the damage dwarfs the money made from the fuels.
Also we can eliminate fossil fuels for most uses already right now and we are doing very little of that. About half the energy used in a house is just wasted due to poor insulation. No matter what kind of fuel source you have if you throw away a significant fraction of your power you are going to have problems.
We have also developed better battery technology, building technology for cars to make them lighter and stronger and companies like BP keep buying up the patents on them like on lithium polymer batteries.
Sure we can't go 100% off fossil fuels but there is no 100% solution. We can still use a lot more wind, solar, nuclear and combine that with better insulation, EVs for most normal commuter driving and still get at least 80% or more of the way to not using fossil fuels anymore.
This attitude seems pretty defeatist. Since we can't do 100% we might as well do nothing. The problem is the costs of doing nothing are enormous. Even if all we did was spend the kind of money we do on various wars on insulating houses in America it would still make a huge impact in our emissions and reduce our need for fossil fuels by a lot. That even has a better payback for the society that then wars do.
That is why I like more advanced engineering classes. Any calculator. Open notes, books, homework, previous exams etc.
The tests are not based on memorization at all. They are based on real problems with real solutions. Most of my books have 50+ pages of tables at the back on various properties and you are expected to know how to use those tables. On exams you have to figure out what you are trying to solve for, what assumptions you should make, what you should look up etc. The exams are very hard but also much more real world.
In the real world nobody cares if you memorize various equations of state, VLE equations, etc. They care if given pretty much any resource you need you can solve the problem accurately and on time.
The point is that you have to design special case problems so you can do them with a normal calculator. You also have to use simpler math that gives terrible approximations in order to make them solveable on an exam with a simple calculator.
That is why I like classes that try to be more realistic. My professors encourage you to program your calculator to solve more advanced problems in them. Coding in things like the peng-robinson equation of state for thermodynamics is a very good idea.
Too many people just learn and are tested on ideal situations with simplified functions that give answers that are not even close to right. This is grossly negligent when we know methods that will get you within a few percent of the needed answer. What we need are better test circumstances where you can use real methods to solve real problems. It is absolutely pathetic that the certification exams for engineers (FE exams) are still to methods that are more than a decade old and will get you FIRED if you use them.
FE exam should probably take place on a real computer with excel/matlab and some other software based on what is being done. You should be solving real problems with real solutions.
I just finished an assignment where my partner and I solved the problem using iterative calculation and not assuming that things like density, viscosity etc where constant. We ended up with a much much better answer that those students that decided to do the problem by hand and in order to make it hand solvable they had to assume constant properties. There is no place for those methods anymore and the sooner we kick them to the curb on classes, exams and certifications the better since they have long since been kicked to the curb in the real world.
I know it is handy as hell for my chemical engineering classes. Our professors believe we should be solving more realistic problems on exams so the exams are open books, notes, previous exams, homework, calculators etc just not anything that is wifi/cellular.
In my last heat exam one of the problem ended up with about 10 simultaneous non-linear equations and one of them was a second order ODE. Once you solve the problem to the point where you have equations, knowns and unknowns without independent equations to cover the unknowns that problem is mostly considered solved. That gives about 80-95% of the credit but if you have a more advanced calculator you can more easily do the last bit and get another few points.
Exam averages tend to be around 50%-60% or so before any curves so the exams are extremely hard. I know for many degrees things like these are not needed or even should be used. It is pretty much only when you have moved beyond all the basic math stuff and you are at the point where you are using the math as a tool to solve some other type of problem entirely that you want a calculator that can handle this stuff. More and more of the students in my classes are picking up the Nspire CX CAS just for that reason. It even handles some things that are a pain to do in matlab or excel.
I have really loved the nspire CX CAS for my engineering classes. It looks like this new ti-84 is just going to use the same screen which the nspire CX uses which is just a cellphone screen.
It can solve simultaneous non-linear system of equations along with ODEs, integrals, differentials etc. The most I have given it so far is a set of about 40 equations and it still handles it just fine.
Our professors have started giving us more realistic problems and they are expecting more realistic solutions and things like this calculator have really helped. What I like is that it means I just concentrate on setting up all my equations and boundary conditions. Once I have more independent equations than I do unknowns the problem is a plug and chug problem and there is no reason to do that by hand when a calculator will do it more accurately and without errors.
For classes like heat transfer, fluid mechanics and thermo dynamics these higher calculators really help. The people with ti-84s are having a much harder time.
My view is we have too many humans on this planet already. I don't really care if Iran nukes Israel or Israel nukes Iran. My view is that we should just stay out of and stop destabilizing that region of the world. Israel can deal with its own problems, especially since they do so much to cause those problems.
This country is basically bankrupt. Being the policemen of the world is just too dang expensive. If Israel wants to pay the USA that would be a different issue but we already pay them.
If we actually care about human suffering there are a lot of things we could do right here in the USA to deal with that. We have massive numbers of homeless people and people suffering without medical care in the tens of millions range. Helping those will also cost less and help us more than interfering between Iran and Israel.
We could also help countries that actually want help and really need it. How about making malaria medication cheaper? How about getting the funding to finish wiping out polio? All of those kill more people than a fight between Israel and Iran do. Sure the fight between Israel and Iran will have a lot of loud bangs but overall it is a minor issue and we should focus on more important issues.
My assumed goal is that regardless of them liking the person in charge or not they will work together and do the best they can for the country over the time they have. They will show, via actions, they are a party that cares about all of us and will work to make this country better no matter what hand they have been dealt. As a result they will do better in the next election cycle since they will be able to point to a lot of positive changes they have made and how that have made deals to turn policies that would have been bad into ones that are actually pretty good for the people they represent.
That is what they are PAID to do, that is their job and if they can't do that they need to be replaced. I know this if pretty far from the currently nut-job reality we have but that is absolutely what I expect from them. If they can't do that then I hope that eventually we can replace our republic with a computer system that runs the whole thing.
Because it had higher storm surge than most category 5 hurricanes do. It also covered a much wider area than any normal hurricane does. The problem was that it was really 3 storms and some very strange weather conditions including the placement of the jet stream and some cold air moving into the area.
You can't rate this just on a simple hurricane scale just like not all magnitude X earthquakes do the same damage. You could have a 6 that does almost no damage and a x that does staggering damage just based on the type of quake and duration the result is the same for storms.
In my engineering classes they are pretty much allowing us to use books, notes, homework, previous exams, and pretty advanced calculators like the nspire but the also give FAR more realistic problems.
The exams tend to be very difficult and sometimes have unrealistic time constraints (ie nobody in a class of 100 people or so finish the exam).
Pretty much the only thing we can't use is a laptop/cellphone etc or anything with an internet connection.
It would certainly be nice if I could use matlab, python or excel on exams.
I doubt these cars will be required but I will definitely get one. I hate driving and consider it an option of last resort when buses, bikes and walking are not available.
With malpractice one problem is that many doctors are inept. They prescribe drugs based on handouts from drug companies and act like authorities when they have little understanding of the system.
I don't think they are purposefully inept I think we are just at the point where we have more medical knowledge then any human can learn. As we learn more we have drugs designed for specific conditions and if you assign it to a similar but different problem a lot of damage can be caused.
We need to accept that humans can no longer be doctors effectively and that they need to be backed up by a computer. We need computers to make the diagnosis and humans to carry it out until we can have computers to those parts also.
One thing I have even learned from classes is many of the doctors really don't care very much about learning at all. They just wanted to learn/cheat enough to graduate and after that their learning is done. Sure not all doctors are that way but enough are that we definitely need malpractice.