Until we send a space craft outside the solar system to another one and return, we actually can't even prove that anything outside the solar system is real. Wouldn't it be funny to hit the edge of the heliosphere and the spacecraft hits it like a bug on a windshield?
An interstellar spacecraft won't prove anything. It'd be simple for the simulation to keep everything outside the solar system as a "low-poly background" as you say, but then when we send a ship to Alpha Centauri, switch the detail of that star system up to high. I'm sure we already do this kind of thing with our current game simulators: there's no reason to have high-detail simulations of a part of the game map until a player actually goes there.
Exactly. And if want to have a little fun with the simulation, you can have some of the non-scientist people encounter weird phenomena (ghosts, UFOs, etc.), especially when they're alone, but then when more people, particularly scientists, attempt to investigate, just reset the local parameters of the simulation to "only normal physics".
It's not necessarily "crazy" (not like infowars.com garbage), but it absolutely is religious in nature. Something about "God's goal" is not "news", it's religious claptrap, even if in the end they are agreeing with my personal opinion on homosexuality. It's nice to see the Christians (or some of them) turning against prosperity gospel, but again, that's religious stuff, not general "news".
Personally, I think it'd be perfectly fine to put that kind of thing into a news aggregator as something that users can choose to see in their feeds. But don't make it part of the default.
It's not just the lack of training, there's also a lack of sleep, which can probably be chalked up to being understaffed.
What are they teaching these crews,--anything at all?
They're teaching the crews with a self-taught course on CD-ROM, which they have to do at sea, but they don't because they only sleep 3 hours a night.
Really, how much could real training cost? Certainly less than a couple of cruise missiles.
Training costs too much. The cost of missiles is irrelevant, because that comes from a different pot of money. Those missiles are specifically budgeted for and approved by Congress, not the Navy. Similarly, the budget for training has to be budgeted for and approved, specifically, by Congress; the Navy doesn't get the latitude to make such spending decisions. After all, if the military could make its own decisions about how to spend money, it'd be "wasted", so it "needs" Congressional "oversight". That's the root of the problem.
I don't; it offloads something that used to be a pain in the ass, and adds clairvoyance too.
I remember driving without GPS very well; I've spent more years without it than with it, after all. Driving any place that I wasn't familiar with was a PITA: you had to get verbal directions from people, which were completely unreliable, only worked from one direction, etc. Or you had to study maps and try to figure out exactly where "123 Main St" is on a road that runs for miles, and frequently has the same street number used in different places (e.g., "123 Main St NW" vs "123 Main St SE", and the idiot who gave you the address didn't bother giving you either NW or SE). Good luck even finding a street number on many maps, and when you did get nearby, good luck actually seeing the street numbers on any of the buildings in the vicinity to help you find it.
Now, it's easy: fire up Google Maps, type in the *name* of where you want to go, it shows it to you on the map, select it to verify that's where you want to go (there might be multiple places with that name, as with chain stores), the hit "navigate" and it'll tell you how to get there, turn-by-turn.
Even better, it can tell you if there's any traffic jams along the way, and route you around them if feasible. Before GPS, that required you to have ESP, which obviously isn't real, or maybe listening to some radio station and hoping to hear a useful traffic report in time, between all the ads and crappy music. Now it's routine. (Also, those traffic reports weren't that useful; they only reported on really big jams on main highways in large metro areas, not smaller jams elsewhere.)
Yep, you just convinced me. I looked up the Wikipedia page for tap code, spend about 30 seconds looking at it, and now I can say I know how to use tap code, because the table is so simple (the only "hard" thing to memorize is that K shares C's space). By contrast, I don't know Morse Code, even though I had a little interest in it when I was young. All I remember now is how to signal SOS.
Definitely a good example of simplicity and ease-of-learning trumping efficiency.
This is dumb. American drivers are already too lazy and stupid to drive properly and attentively, and as a result, we have tens of thousands dead every year on the road (about 30k, last I checked). The number has gone down, though (used to be 50k/year), thanks to safer vehicles (airbags, better crashworthiness, etc.).
Autodriving can only make things better. Sure, it'll fail sometimes and people will die, but it'll be an order of magnitude fewer than now.
If you want *real* safety, we need to 1) legislatively *require* auto-driving software to be developed to avionics standards, not developed the way most software is these days, and 2) we need to fund and build SkyTran to get most people (esp. commuters) out of personally-owned vehicles, and to get them to their destinations much more quickly than the 2-dimensional road system allows.
has no bearing on knowing the rules of the road, being able to shift gears in a standard, hill start, etc.
This is very tangential, but might be slightly relevant: in cars, a lot of those skills are largely obsolete. For instance, not many cars in the US come with a manual transmission any more: they're much harder to resell (unless it's a sports car), and automatics now have significantly better fuel economy than sticks (largely due to differences in gearing: automatics have taller gears at the top end, so the city economy is about the same but highway is worse).
Also, starting on hills isn't a necessary skill any more much of the time: many cars have some kind of "hill-holder" mechanism. Subarus had a form of this way back in the late 80s I think, but modern cars have it as standard, provided by the ABS system (just hold the rear brake pressure on a hill until the car starts moving). Consequently, people learning to drive won' have to deal with these things, unless they get stuck in an older car unexpectedly.
There may be a component of this to the Navy's problems: they have lots of high-tech systems, but they don't seem to teach any of the fundamentals any more, so sailors are dependent on the systems, but also don't understand how they really work and when not to trust them. (So, for instance, an older driver with a new car doesn't *need* to cover the brake when starting on a hill, but if there's someone right behind him, he might do so anyway out of precaution, in case the hill-holder system happens to fail at that moment, unlikely as that may be. The young driver won't, and will roll back into the other car.)
Please explain why US Navy warhsips have crews who "lack basic seamanship certification".
I read an article, I think on gcaptain.com, about this not long ago. Basically, it said that they just don't bother training them any more, because of cost-cutting measures in the late 2000s. They used to have some school they'd send them to to learn basic seamanship, but because of Congress's cost-cutting (Congress wants to spend lots of $$$ on weapons systems and shipbuilding, but they don't want to allow the Navy to spend any money on training), they closed the school and replaced it with a self-taught course on a bunch of CD-ROMs that sailors were expected to do on their own, *at sea*, while already way too busy with all their regular shipboard duties.
Ultimately, I think the blame probably lies with Congress. The military really isn't able to run itself that much and make its own decisions for how to do things and fund things; it's highly micro-managed by Congress.
I constantly see (signed out; I never sign into Google News or other services at work), including in today's feed along side the usuals (BBC, NYT, WaPo, CNN, Reuters, etc.):
Fox News ChristianityToday.com The Narrative Times RT
I frequently also see Breitbart and Washington Times, though not today.
And, while it's not directly related to gun control, improvements in the mental health system in our country would go a long way as well, as most mass shooters in the US tend to have psychological issues that have been unaddressed, or at least inadequately addressed.
Honestly, I'm not sure how that would help any. At least half the US population believes the government staged the 9/11 attacks, after all. This population is under nothing less than a mass delusion. I can't imagine how you'd fix that with some counselors; it's self-reinforcing.
You shouldn't speak about things you're clueless about. Machine guns are not illegal in the slightest, they're just expensive and hard to get because they're in limited supply (they can't sell new ones to civilians, so you're limited to ones manufactured before sometime in the 80s, so you have to convince someone to sell one of theirs to you, and you have to pay the ATF $200 for a tax stamp and they'll do some kind of background check on you).
In addition to that, it's not *that* hard to make your own using a readily-available assault rifle (usually an AR-15). It's illegal, of course, but information isn't and the information is available on the internet somewhere. You're probably right that this guy doesn't obey gun laws (it's much more likely he illegally converted an AR-15 or AK47 to full-auto than he bought a legal one), but having easily-converted rifles so readily available to civilians makes it easy for nutjobs like this to do these kinds of things. It's not so easy to convert a wooden-stock single-shot bolt-action hunting rifle to full-auto, for instance. "Practical" gun control is always about making it more difficult for people to get guns (esp. mentally unstable people), and part of that is about making it more difficult to get guns that make it easy to be more destructive. So, if for instance, AR-15s and other magazine-fed rifles were banned, but magazine-fed.22LR handguns were still readily available, we wouldn't be seeing massacres like this.
They just have to report is stolen and they are free of any guilt, even though it was stolen due to their own negligence. In the event they did have it locked up and secured, then yes, they were responsible and the thief was determined, so they are no longer liable, but most stolen weapons are ones that were secured poorly or not at all. Time to start holding those people responsible.
Maybe I'm wrong here, but while reporting the gun stolen may absolve someone of *criminal* liability, I don't think it prevents them from being sued by victims or the victims' families.
Of course, in the case of Sandy Hook, the idiot mother was killed by her son so she wasn't alive to sue afterwards. Plus, the type of people who own guns usually don't have that much in the way of assets to be sued for: taking the negligent gun owner's trailer home and 1980s-era pickup truck isn't going to even pay for their legal fees, and I'm not sure they'd even be able to collect that much (IANAL, but I don't think you can make someone homeless with a court judgment, even if you wanted to for revenge).
It doesn't help that Google News is constantly pushing far right-wing and Christian "news" sites. At least, that's what it constantly shows me unless I log in.
and there are no affordable second hand ones on the market yet.
You can get a Nissan Leaf for well under $10k now, maybe even close to $5k.
Thatâ(TM)s more about pollutants. And if you really want to make a dent in those, ban coal fired BBQs and wood burning fireplaces. Where I live those are by far the biggest contributors to particulate emissions.
Different pollutants. 2-strokes aren't bad for particulates, but are bad for a bunch of other things like unburned gasoline. For particulates, in urban areas, you need to ban diesel buses and trains and replace them with electric (or hybrid for buses).
I don't know about you, but my house isn't owned by a "company", it's owned by me, an individual. I suspect most people who have lawns to cut are the same.
And I can mow my own damn yard. I've hired lawn services in the past, and the guy with the weedwacker always destroys the irrigation.
The people at Apple have already proven themselves to be asses, so why should he bother?
I'm not a fan of this Pai guy at all so far, but I'd become his biggest fan if he made a ruling that all smartphones needed to have FM radio capability, even if that means bringing back the headphone jack. Even better if he made it retroactive, and Apple was forced to recall and replace all their shitty jack-less phones. (And another bonus if, as the other poster said, they forced them to change iOS to change the shitty flat UI.)
Slashdot Mirror
Until we send a space craft outside the solar system to another one and return, we actually can't even prove that anything outside the solar system is real. Wouldn't it be funny to hit the edge of the heliosphere and the spacecraft hits it like a bug on a windshield?
An interstellar spacecraft won't prove anything. It'd be simple for the simulation to keep everything outside the solar system as a "low-poly background" as you say, but then when we send a ship to Alpha Centauri, switch the detail of that star system up to high. I'm sure we already do this kind of thing with our current game simulators: there's no reason to have high-detail simulations of a part of the game map until a player actually goes there.
Exactly. And if want to have a little fun with the simulation, you can have some of the non-scientist people encounter weird phenomena (ghosts, UFOs, etc.), especially when they're alone, but then when more people, particularly scientists, attempt to investigate, just reset the local parameters of the simulation to "only normal physics".
He's not talking about planing wood, silly. He's obviously talking about hydroplaning. They're going to replace all their destroyers with these...
Watch for them to be defunded soon.
It's not necessarily "crazy" (not like infowars.com garbage), but it absolutely is religious in nature. Something about "God's goal" is not "news", it's religious claptrap, even if in the end they are agreeing with my personal opinion on homosexuality. It's nice to see the Christians (or some of them) turning against prosperity gospel, but again, that's religious stuff, not general "news".
Personally, I think it'd be perfectly fine to put that kind of thing into a news aggregator as something that users can choose to see in their feeds. But don't make it part of the default.
It's not just the lack of training, there's also a lack of sleep, which can probably be chalked up to being understaffed.
What are they teaching these crews,--anything at all?
They're teaching the crews with a self-taught course on CD-ROM, which they have to do at sea, but they don't because they only sleep 3 hours a night.
Really, how much could real training cost? Certainly less than a couple of cruise missiles.
Training costs too much. The cost of missiles is irrelevant, because that comes from a different pot of money. Those missiles are specifically budgeted for and approved by Congress, not the Navy. Similarly, the budget for training has to be budgeted for and approved, specifically, by Congress; the Navy doesn't get the latitude to make such spending decisions. After all, if the military could make its own decisions about how to spend money, it'd be "wasted", so it "needs" Congressional "oversight". That's the root of the problem.
What in the fuck are you blabbering about? These ships crashed because of human error, you idiot, not GPS hacking.
I don't; it offloads something that used to be a pain in the ass, and adds clairvoyance too.
I remember driving without GPS very well; I've spent more years without it than with it, after all. Driving any place that I wasn't familiar with was a PITA: you had to get verbal directions from people, which were completely unreliable, only worked from one direction, etc. Or you had to study maps and try to figure out exactly where "123 Main St" is on a road that runs for miles, and frequently has the same street number used in different places (e.g., "123 Main St NW" vs "123 Main St SE", and the idiot who gave you the address didn't bother giving you either NW or SE). Good luck even finding a street number on many maps, and when you did get nearby, good luck actually seeing the street numbers on any of the buildings in the vicinity to help you find it.
Now, it's easy: fire up Google Maps, type in the *name* of where you want to go, it shows it to you on the map, select it to verify that's where you want to go (there might be multiple places with that name, as with chain stores), the hit "navigate" and it'll tell you how to get there, turn-by-turn.
Even better, it can tell you if there's any traffic jams along the way, and route you around them if feasible. Before GPS, that required you to have ESP, which obviously isn't real, or maybe listening to some radio station and hoping to hear a useful traffic report in time, between all the ads and crappy music. Now it's routine. (Also, those traffic reports weren't that useful; they only reported on really big jams on main highways in large metro areas, not smaller jams elsewhere.)
Yep, you just convinced me. I looked up the Wikipedia page for tap code, spend about 30 seconds looking at it, and now I can say I know how to use tap code, because the table is so simple (the only "hard" thing to memorize is that K shares C's space). By contrast, I don't know Morse Code, even though I had a little interest in it when I was young. All I remember now is how to signal SOS.
Definitely a good example of simplicity and ease-of-learning trumping efficiency.
This is dumb. American drivers are already too lazy and stupid to drive properly and attentively, and as a result, we have tens of thousands dead every year on the road (about 30k, last I checked). The number has gone down, though (used to be 50k/year), thanks to safer vehicles (airbags, better crashworthiness, etc.).
Autodriving can only make things better. Sure, it'll fail sometimes and people will die, but it'll be an order of magnitude fewer than now.
If you want *real* safety, we need to 1) legislatively *require* auto-driving software to be developed to avionics standards, not developed the way most software is these days, and 2) we need to fund and build SkyTran to get most people (esp. commuters) out of personally-owned vehicles, and to get them to their destinations much more quickly than the 2-dimensional road system allows.
has no bearing on knowing the rules of the road, being able to shift gears in a standard, hill start, etc.
This is very tangential, but might be slightly relevant: in cars, a lot of those skills are largely obsolete. For instance, not many cars in the US come with a manual transmission any more: they're much harder to resell (unless it's a sports car), and automatics now have significantly better fuel economy than sticks (largely due to differences in gearing: automatics have taller gears at the top end, so the city economy is about the same but highway is worse).
Also, starting on hills isn't a necessary skill any more much of the time: many cars have some kind of "hill-holder" mechanism. Subarus had a form of this way back in the late 80s I think, but modern cars have it as standard, provided by the ABS system (just hold the rear brake pressure on a hill until the car starts moving). Consequently, people learning to drive won' have to deal with these things, unless they get stuck in an older car unexpectedly.
There may be a component of this to the Navy's problems: they have lots of high-tech systems, but they don't seem to teach any of the fundamentals any more, so sailors are dependent on the systems, but also don't understand how they really work and when not to trust them. (So, for instance, an older driver with a new car doesn't *need* to cover the brake when starting on a hill, but if there's someone right behind him, he might do so anyway out of precaution, in case the hill-holder system happens to fail at that moment, unlikely as that may be. The young driver won't, and will roll back into the other car.)
Please explain why US Navy warhsips have crews who "lack basic seamanship certification".
I read an article, I think on gcaptain.com, about this not long ago. Basically, it said that they just don't bother training them any more, because of cost-cutting measures in the late 2000s. They used to have some school they'd send them to to learn basic seamanship, but because of Congress's cost-cutting (Congress wants to spend lots of $$$ on weapons systems and shipbuilding, but they don't want to allow the Navy to spend any money on training), they closed the school and replaced it with a self-taught course on a bunch of CD-ROMs that sailors were expected to do on their own, *at sea*, while already way too busy with all their regular shipboard duties.
Ultimately, I think the blame probably lies with Congress. The military really isn't able to run itself that much and make its own decisions for how to do things and fund things; it's highly micro-managed by Congress.
I constantly see (signed out; I never sign into Google News or other services at work), including in today's feed along side the usuals (BBC, NYT, WaPo, CNN, Reuters, etc.):
Fox News
ChristianityToday.com
The Narrative Times
RT
I frequently also see Breitbart and Washington Times, though not today.
And, while it's not directly related to gun control, improvements in the mental health system in our country would go a long way as well, as most mass shooters in the US tend to have psychological issues that have been unaddressed, or at least inadequately addressed.
Honestly, I'm not sure how that would help any. At least half the US population believes the government staged the 9/11 attacks, after all. This population is under nothing less than a mass delusion. I can't imagine how you'd fix that with some counselors; it's self-reinforcing.
You shouldn't speak about things you're clueless about. Machine guns are not illegal in the slightest, they're just expensive and hard to get because they're in limited supply (they can't sell new ones to civilians, so you're limited to ones manufactured before sometime in the 80s, so you have to convince someone to sell one of theirs to you, and you have to pay the ATF $200 for a tax stamp and they'll do some kind of background check on you).
In addition to that, it's not *that* hard to make your own using a readily-available assault rifle (usually an AR-15). It's illegal, of course, but information isn't and the information is available on the internet somewhere. You're probably right that this guy doesn't obey gun laws (it's much more likely he illegally converted an AR-15 or AK47 to full-auto than he bought a legal one), but having easily-converted rifles so readily available to civilians makes it easy for nutjobs like this to do these kinds of things. It's not so easy to convert a wooden-stock single-shot bolt-action hunting rifle to full-auto, for instance. "Practical" gun control is always about making it more difficult for people to get guns (esp. mentally unstable people), and part of that is about making it more difficult to get guns that make it easy to be more destructive. So, if for instance, AR-15s and other magazine-fed rifles were banned, but magazine-fed .22LR handguns were still readily available, we wouldn't be seeing massacres like this.
They just have to report is stolen and they are free of any guilt, even though it was stolen due to their own negligence. In the event they did have it locked up and secured, then yes, they were responsible and the thief was determined, so they are no longer liable, but most stolen weapons are ones that were secured poorly or not at all. Time to start holding those people responsible.
Maybe I'm wrong here, but while reporting the gun stolen may absolve someone of *criminal* liability, I don't think it prevents them from being sued by victims or the victims' families.
Of course, in the case of Sandy Hook, the idiot mother was killed by her son so she wasn't alive to sue afterwards. Plus, the type of people who own guns usually don't have that much in the way of assets to be sued for: taking the negligent gun owner's trailer home and 1980s-era pickup truck isn't going to even pay for their legal fees, and I'm not sure they'd even be able to collect that much (IANAL, but I don't think you can make someone homeless with a court judgment, even if you wanted to for revenge).
I'd much rather we get something closer to the BBC, more than the circus-for-money we currently have in American media.
The problem with that is that it'd be government-owned, and most Americans wouldn't trust it at all.
Remember, at least half of Americans believe that 9/11 was staged by the government.
It doesn't help that Google News is constantly pushing far right-wing and Christian "news" sites. At least, that's what it constantly shows me unless I log in.
Also hopefully Trump will trip and fall into a fucking cuisinart,
This is a horribly thing to wish for.
If it happened, we'd have Pence as our president, which would be even worse.
Netflix doesn't have to do a good job of it. They can do a half-ass job to show "we're trying!", but they're not.
and there are no affordable second hand ones on the market yet.
You can get a Nissan Leaf for well under $10k now, maybe even close to $5k.
Thatâ(TM)s more about pollutants. And if you really want to make a dent in those, ban coal fired BBQs and wood burning fireplaces. Where I live those are by far the biggest contributors to particulate emissions.
Different pollutants. 2-strokes aren't bad for particulates, but are bad for a bunch of other things like unburned gasoline. For particulates, in urban areas, you need to ban diesel buses and trains and replace them with electric (or hybrid for buses).
As soon as you can figure out how to keep your fucking car from polluting MY air, we'll do that. Until then, fuck you.
Are you stupid? Where in there did I propose banning existing (already sold) lawn equipment?
I don't know about you, but my house isn't owned by a "company", it's owned by me, an individual. I suspect most people who have lawns to cut are the same.
And I can mow my own damn yard. I've hired lawn services in the past, and the guy with the weedwacker always destroys the irrigation.
The people at Apple have already proven themselves to be asses, so why should he bother?
I'm not a fan of this Pai guy at all so far, but I'd become his biggest fan if he made a ruling that all smartphones needed to have FM radio capability, even if that means bringing back the headphone jack. Even better if he made it retroactive, and Apple was forced to recall and replace all their shitty jack-less phones. (And another bonus if, as the other poster said, they forced them to change iOS to change the shitty flat UI.)