If the NY Times author wants to criticize the time lines that's perfectly fine and dandy... and very much so accurate. However with the Slashdot OP suggesting removing it from our list of goals altogether, that's a far worse joke than the joke "Mars One" and "Inspiration One" are making. Out of the bunch, (Elon Musk) SpaceX, is the only one that can be taken seriously. NASA however is the most honest about it, they have it slated for 2035 at this present time which we can already suspect will slide backwards. I'm fine with the general mania though. It's a similar kind of mania that got us to the Moon. The timeline by which the US (and almost Soviets) achieved that goal with the technology they had was pretty ridiculous. All problems can be solved with the correct dosage of time and money. Nearly all the time, lots of both of those resources are needed.
This is an age old argument, likely without a real single answer but a lot of controversy. While I don't have all the same data and theories to back up my opinions like you do, I do have some anecdotal observations I think we can all agree on. In my humble opinion, human beings certainly have an instinctual nature that is likely baggage from everything we've evolved from both in our hominid line and everything prior to it. I think that would be impossibly difficult to deny. All of which includes the deep desire for the propagation of our species, with multiple mates, with all of the evolutionary advantages it brings to the table. However one of the critical traits of our homo sapiens nature that make us stand far out from any other species is the fact it is in our very nature to override our nature. Based on all of the cultural variety we see out there today, there really are not limits to our social behaviors and constructs but there are definitely many commonalities. We create things like honor, laws, bravery, religion, stoicism, politics, morality, matrimony, and on and on and on... The inner strength and power we have to command and control our desires and behaviors and direct them in many different shapes and forms is really quite fantastic.
We can easily find a surprising amount of intelligence in many other species on our little planet but none of them exhibit the nature-over-nature trait as strongly as we do. Truly, I believe that is what makes us human. So my personal counter to the age old question "Isn't that a natural and physical need?" would be, "yes it certainly is, but I and many others would consider it a weakness in your humanity."
I want a robot to do household cleaning chores. Clean the bathroom, or at least the flat surfaces. Mop the tiled floors. Vacuum the carpets. Clean the windows. Possibly clean the patio and the sidewalks. Possibly deal with some of the kitchen cleaning. If the robot did this kind of cleaning daily then it never would be all that bad and consequently the robot wouldn't have to work very hard on any given day so long as it started out relatively clean.
HEY - robots exist for at least a few of the items you listed here. You really need to buy one if you haven't already! They're certainly not perfect but the vacuum and mopping robots I have work good enough for me. They keep the floors clean for me during the day, I just have to empty their canisters and throw the mop cloths in the laundry. I wish they'd make robots that can dust and vacuum stairs though:\
Colleges are being run like businesses, not education centers. That in of itself is not a problem. However couple that with the multiple other factors: they can milk state and local governments for gobs of money via "financial aid", they can charge their financially incompetent students (customers) a ridiculous amount of tuition and they rarely say no because they can just borrow it and pay later, and they themselves are often rated on how much they cost. Colleges and universities are not even expected to prove their "value". They just make some BS marketing and some numbers out of thin air or bending existing ones and then get in trouble for it by some government watchdog a half decade later. I mean, how can this freaking NOT end up as a disaster?
For Pete's sake, even the "non profit" "Catholic" college I went to, established in 1870, originally run by humble Jesuits, no longer has any Jesuits running the place. In fact 3-4 years after I graduated the replaced the damn Jesuit president with guess who? Mr. MBA man who has a background of being CEO of profitable businesses, a proven track record of raising tons of money, and making sound financial decisions and investments. I gave them a piece of my mind next time they called me and asked for donations, which I halted immediately. Their tuition has more more than doubled in a span of 10 years. When I went it was a tall $17K/yr... it's now a ludicrous $35K/yr. From what I've read, all of that money is not being spent on students nor faculty. No it's going to their precious endowment fund.
I know the government has done minor things like require colleges to post Net Price Calculators but that's almost pointless. You could have researched that information prior to that law being passed if you were determined enough to do it. IMHO, what they should really do is require them to create a ranking and scoring system they all have to abide by. Post entry-graduation rates, by year, by field/career, indicating how many attained jobs in each respective field or whether they had to leave their field, and how long it took. I'm sure prospective students would love that, especially if they could also see what graduates are getting paid as their salaries though that's a slightly too invasive. At least with this they could compare colleges apples to apples, on equal footing. Students could truly shop around and see what their dollar could get them.
So basically you want a label to indicate whether a GMO was produced via vertical gene transfer vs. horizontal gene transfer. I think it's a noble thought but I'm not sure that difference is really that critical if the final result is the same. I'm ignoring the fact that horizontal gene transfer has been documented to also naturally occur among eukaryotes as well, because that's besides the point.
Instead of confounding the argument with frivolous logical debate, "you said this, this implies this, therefore this etc" why not present actual studies showing how horizontal gene transfer is innately harmful vs. vertical gene transfer? This would actually do a much better job at persuasion than proving some abstract logical superiority. This isn't a battle of verbal logic, prove your argument with facts, studies, and post some links. Then I can read them and change my mind.
I have the right to know if what I'm buying with my money is the result of a combination of genes that have undergone thousands of years of 'safety testing' known as evolution, or something concocted in a lab by people who don't even understand fully the basics of what they're doing, but whose employers are in a rush to make a quick buck while they have the patent; something, which is only 'tested' against the interpretation of the safety rules of the said employers for a year or two.
I also used to be a huge proponent of GMO labeling before listening to Bill Nye explain why it's both redundant and pointless and should be embraced instead. Every-thing we eat is literally some variant of GMO, we've been making GMO foods since we've been cultivating crops and domesticating animals. Nothing we eat today is not GMO unless we go berry picking deep in the forest. I know it's simpler to think many of the foods we eat today were cultivated/domesticated 10,000's of years ago, and it's true. However we've been continually modifying everything we eat, every year, non stop, since then. The corn we eat today is nothing like the native plant we first cultivated, and also different than the corn we ate 100 years ago. So the idea of the food we eat having been safety tested for "thousands of years" doesn't really strictly hold up.
Also finding out how freaking awesome their genetics lab work was amazingly impressive. They can test and sequence genomes for plants in hours with specialized machinery instead of weeks like it used to take. Transcend 100s of generations of a plant in a matter of weeks, selecting from among the throng the best candidates for perpetuation. When they're happy with the genetic results they then cultivate them to ensure expectations meet reality. 100's of geneticists do this for 3-4 years before handing it over to the FDA which reviews it for another 3 years. There is no going "back to the old ways" on this where you sprinkle pollen on the stamen by hand and wait for it to grow before selecting. We're waaaay past that. We can improve the new GMO process but there's ZERO chance we're going back to the old ways.
If anything it's scary-amazing to know how effective it is and where this will take our world in the next 100 years. We're now able to do in weeks what takes mother nature centuries. We can make plants resistant to bugs, pests, reduce the water they intake, make them more nutritious, give them a longer shelf life, reduce or eliminate natural toxins that many plants have, grow faster. This is really literally super food. Being anti GMO is nearly as bad as being anti-vaccination.
Sadly, your reference points out Generation IV reactors will not be ready for prime time until 2030. "The Technology Roadmap Update for Generation IV Nuclear Energy Systems was published in January 2014 which details R&D objectives for the next decade." Yes, that was just the roadmap. We may as well assume to add at least another 10 years to their 2030 target date on top of that too.
This is probably a terrible and grossly oversimplified analogy but I'm going to use it anyway. Our world is like a house. When you first begin building a new house, you can pick whatever you want and it's easy to implement and because it's very efficient and the ROI is phenomenal. After all, you're putting something there where there was nothing before so you get the full benefit of putting in something new. Today, now we have an old house. Replacing things that already "work" even if they don't work well is much more difficult to justify than the former. Not only does it cost more to build something better, you also have to add in the costs of decommissioning whatever you're replacing, and then combine all of that with but a mere incremental increase on ROI. This is why the world is languishing in old infrastructure and old resources, even though it might be slowly killing us. It's just *soooo* much cheaper. I fear the old will most likely have to collapse before being fully addressed and rectified.
For all the people comparing Russian corruption to other countries, particularly the US... We all have to realize it's present everywhere but there's also full spectrum of colors and subcolors that could describe types and severities. Certain types of corruption are far more rampant in some countries while negligible in another, and vice versa. Anyone who thinks there's a country that does not have any corruption is a devoted blind fool. Overall however, I would definitely put most "developing" countries (like Russia) on the upper echelons of said spectrum. I do always find it somewhat odd that Russia is considered a developing country by many economists though.
Source with nice graphs [guttmacher.org]. At least half of American women will experience an unintended pregnancy by age 45, and at 2008 abortion rates, one in 10 women will have an abortion by age 20, one in four by age 30 and three in 10 by age 45.
I just want to point out the data source from the link indicates it's counting pregnancy-occurrences not people. So saying something like "three in 10 by age 45" is not just misleading but outright false. The same is also often true for the infamous reported divorce rates. It's far more challenging to track individuals than it is to track events. For example when I was much younger I worked with a woman who had 11 abortions by the time she was 19. Yes, it was a fast foot restaurant. If you've ever worked at one, you already know you meet very interesting people. Now I'm sure she's an outlier but she'd clearly be skewing the numbers. All that being said, it's really not hard to avoid pregnancy folks! You have 2 people that can control and prevent the natural result that happens there. It's sad to see people using abortion as a contraceptive.
If you think about it, the abortion debate really boils down to one questions. Do you consider the baby inside a woman to be a "person". If you say "yes" it becomes awfully difficult to rationalize. If you say "no" it becomes extraordinarily easy to rationalize. Both sides of the debate are well meaning people but they happen to believe something different on that single point which makes all the difference.
I'd be curious to see if the population of disillusioned independents is growing faster as well. I'd speculate most of them would be categorized as "moderates" which is a species rapidly disappearing, sadly from both political factions. I for one count myself among them, both parties have developed fundamental show stoppers that make it impossible for me to vote for either candidate in presidential elections. I don't at all consider my vote "thrown away". A vote for a 3rd party is a vote against both, it still counts and enough of them should garner attention for more moderates eventually.
Sort of ironic the current botters were only banned for 6 months, I was perma banned for botting in WoW circa 2006. I didn't do it for gold, in fact I probably had more gold than 99% of the players on that server at the time from cornering the AH market on many items better than most could on my server. I was quite upset at the time since I had been hoping to sell my account as a just-graduated-student at some point for $3-4K... which was an enormous amount of dough for me at the time. My account was worth a lot not just for the characters I had, but the crafting skills and rare recipes I had collected. Foolish thing about it all was I only botted because I wanted a 5th and 6th lvl 60 and no longer had time to play as much as I wanted to spend more time with my then-gf-now-wife. In hindsight, getting banned was probably the best thing that could have happened to me! Minus the loss of money of course lol
Just got back from a trip to downtown Philadelphia. I ahd to get around parts of a wrecked car, a stalled truck, and then run a light that was on permanent red - after waiting for the other 20 people ahead of me to realize it was never going to change and do likewise. So how is Mr RoboCar going to do THAT? How long would it wait for a green light? Would it crash into a fender in the road or stop for a McDs bag?
Really? I fully admit computers can be dumb but for this to work they're not going to be that dumb. If self driving cars are to ever become mainstream everything will have to be integrated. In other words, on a highway of 1000's of vehicles, each vehicle will know the status, location, and conditions of the other vehicles present. Information could be relayed regarding any accidents or problems and traffic, communications to all other vehicles and likely will be instantly sent out in real time. Possibly even notifying service vehicles for clean up and municipal authorities to the problem to alter traffic light patterns to accommodate the situation. Yeah, that's right, we're talking about Borg collective sh**. This kind of tech may already exist in some theoretical shape or form today but it's not implemented anywhere in the real world today. Doing that part is a lot harder and expensive than anyone can imagine.
That being all said, we're still very far away from this today... but that's where we are headed. Maybe 25+ years.
we may someday just pass signs requiring drivers to activate auto-drive functionality for certain particularly treacherous stretches of roadway.
So on the sections of road I'm going to be most terrified to navigate I should secede control to the computer? In principal, this makes sense, but in reality this is a pee-your-pants moment that even adrenaline junkies will probably say no thanks to.
A day is coming where people will trust autonomous driving ability more than human but that's not anywhere near close to being a reality today. More likely 30+ years from now. I imagine one day there will tracks of road that doesn't support self driving and instead those will become pee-your-pants moments for regular folks. Adrenaline junkies will still be doing their off road tracks for their kicks just like they do today!
You sound like a terrible, terrible driver. Why don't you take your toys to the track?
Actually, my driving record of MANY decades would beg to differ with your conclusion. I don't generally bother to look at posted speed limits, no..unless the cops are around or the radar detector goes off. That being said, I drive for what is safe in the current driving conditions. If it is raining, I slow down. If it is a nice road, especially one I'm familiar with, and there is very little to no traffic around me I go as fast as is possibly safe for what my car can handle. I drive based on the conditions around me at that moment in time. I don't care what the posted sign says, I go slower when warranted and go as fast as is safe for me when conditions are right.
If everyone did this 24/7 the only accidents would be occurring because of mechanical failures and we wouldn't even be having a discussion about this post lol.
When SDC can scrape their own sensors free of ice (or even be able to function in snow/icy/wet conditions) I'll be impressed! In all seriousness though the worst human drivers are here to stay - if you thought gun nuts rage when goverment tries to restrict them just wait untill the government tries to say people "dont have the right to drive anymore".
Well the ice would only be a problem for optical sensors right? Not radar or GPS. Definitely need a solution for ice, water, and frost covering optic sensors unless they can find an alternative. The latter might be better. But I'm not sure it would ever become government restricted though. It's possible but I highly doubt it would ever come to something that extreme. I don't think it would need to be? I think the more likely set of possibilities may be something like:
A) Pay significantly more premium on a standard automobile policy, maybe by several orders of magnitude, of course after it's proven via underwriting they're significantly safer
B) Harsher penalties for causing accidents caused by non-self-driving vehicles
C) All vehicles must have the feature equipped but can be turned off, with exceptions
D) Densely populated cities banning non-self-driving cars within city limits where you'll then be guided to park in a designated area and then ride in on public transportation if your car does not have the feature available
The first, the driver did not scrape his windows from ice and could not see any of the drivers around him
I see this being a huge problem in nordic countries when it comes to self driving cars as well. Perhaps the self driving car will refuse to operate if the sensors are covered in ice. This would be safer, but would lead to dissatisfaction from a lot of owners as they would have to carefully remove ice from the sensors hoping not to damage them in the process. Then you'd be driving down the road and get covered in spray (salt, dirt, water) from other vehicles and the sensors would become inoperational again. The driver would either have to take over, making the expensive self driving car useless, or pull over to the side of the road and clean the sensor before going on their way. I'd like to see how self driving cars handle snow, salty/dirty/muddy roads, and even a heavy rain. Could the sensors still actually discern what's going on, or do they require hot, dry, sunny, California type weather.
Yep, I think they still have quite a few hurdles to overcome. Last I've heard I don't think they've even mastered "driving in the rain" much less snow and icy road conditions! All of these conditions have to be mastered far in advance and allowed to mature before self driving cars ever hope to become widely adopted. For some folks oo say it's never going to happen though is a little backwards though.
" The second, another driver decided to use the right lane as a passing lane in a 4 lane road, driving 55 while everyone else is going 35, denying anyone in the left lanes the ability to change lanes and make a right turn. Let me repeat, that was just today."
You call that risky behaviour? Go drive in Paris, Rome, Manilla or Shanghai and then we'll talk again.
Sure, of course, they're on an entirely new level of terrible driving. I've been to all of those places minus Shanghai, I've never been to Asia. The denser the city, the worse it gets. That's usually how it rolls. Hopefully you understood my point because what you said seemingly reinforces my point however your tone implies that you did not.
For what, +1 Irrational Fear? Seems like that should be -1 to me. You won't see ubiquitous self-driving cars until the system is better than meat-popsicle cars. Once that happens, the rational argument flips: "do you want some incompetent person driving a hunk of steel on a road near where your child plays? *shudder* Think of what would happen if that human had to react to something!"
Sure, you could say you don't think self-driving cars will ever be safer than meat-popsicle cars, but that's like saying "640 kB ought to be enough for anybody". Technology is advancing at a staggering pace, and these systems are only getting better and more reliable.
Amen, as long as avoiding risking behavior is a mandatory feature in autonomous driving software. I'd speculate a majority of accidents and road fatalities are nearly all avoidable, brought on by either poor choices, risky behavior, or bad driving habits. Case in point just today on my way to work I narrowly avoided two accidents. The first, the driver did not scrape his windows from ice and could not see any of the drivers around him - nearly plowing into me and others around him as he was changing lanes. The second, another driver decided to use the right lane as a passing lane in a 4 lane road, driving 55 while everyone else is going 35, denying anyone in the left lanes the ability to change lanes and make a right turn. Let me repeat, that was just today. Stuff like this happens everyday to millions of people. For myself, getting tail gated while I'm already going 10 above the limit is a regular *daily* occurrence. I'm barely even going to bring up the young, inexperienced, risk-loving drivers because all of the problems there should be understood without even saying.
I for one am eagerly looking forward to autonomous cars purely because of the minor few that make the roads dangerous for everyone else. But like the poster above, it's probably going to be awhile before they're reliable enough for use. But it will happen because technology will be improved over time. Changing, people's attitudes and driving habits? Yeah, far more difficult and expensive than technology with diminishing returns. Good luck on that!
Isn't that like saying modern car manufacturers don't have to thank Henry Ford for paving the way? Little bit of an understatement. I'm not even going to dive into the details in differences in resources between those groups, a small team vs. 1000's of code breakers. Anyway, they all relied on mistakes made by German operators, even the British bombe. They were just different in nature and complexity.
Even once we had airplanes, you have only a lifetime from 1903 to 1969, yet people in 1903 couldn't have dreamed of what the Saturn V would look like or how it would work.
There were rockets in 1903. They weren't as powerful, but the physics of rocket flight was pretty well known at the time.
The only difference between fireworks and the Saturn V is scale...more powerful fuel, stronger materials, etc.
Hell yeah, and the only difference between modern computers and the cryptological bombas used during WW2 is just electronics miniaturization! Stupid elementary stuff my friends! Yeah, it's not so simple my friend. There's a reason it takes *decades* and thousands of brilliant minds to advance technology step by step. The Saturn V is not simply a bigger, better version of "fireworks". You've been playing too much Kerbal space program.
Yeah I lol'd too. "Oh look, we had a team of developers accidentally build out a fully functioning module into the TV's OS, tested it, worked out the bugs, published it, and it also just so happens to make our company more money. This is an outrage, how could this have possibly happened?".
Watch out everyone, software is now evolving on its own! It's beginning, machines are rising! Where is Sarah Connor!?!?
The Sarbanes-Oxley act has been on the books since 2002. Dodd-Frank bill since 2010. So are they working to keep companies in check and increase transparency? Or just costing both the government and the companies it affects a bunch of time and money? On one side you can say this activity was finally caught. On the other hand you have to ask when large banks are subject to regular audits how do they get away with it from year to year?
From my own limited personal experience, the only thing I can say for sure is that those audits are usually pretty terrible. In theory they're looking for the right stuff, but the auditors themselves are usually green accountants who often lack the hybrid blend of accounting, technical, and IT skills needed to any proper analysis. They don't understand what they're looking at and don't know what to ask for. They usually just follow a sheet of instructions line by line and check those boxes to indicate their work is done. I don't think that quite captures the spirit of those laws.
They're not fragile at all. If you perturb them, it just re-stabilizes at a new equilibrium point. e.g. If you tilt the bowl in the wiki picture, the ball doesn't fall off the top of the bowl like in the first picture or roll away like in the third picture.. It just settles in at a different spot on the bottom of the bowl in the second picture, now-tilted slightly.
This made me chuckle, I think your own argument flew right over your own head. As you've clearly pointed out, disrupting an the original equilibrium creates a new and different equilibrium. Yes, you sir are absolutely correct.
So let's use an extreme example. Let's destroy photosynthesis driven life on this planet somehow. What happens then? Hey the ecosystem now will search our its new equilibrium which now only includes life that survive by feeding off the energy from geothermic vents! What's wrong? We've found our new equilibrium, clearly there's no fragility here. Everyone can keep calm and carry on:)
IMHO the primary ingredient is diligence, just like everything else. Everything else is secondary. I think the idea that only certain people can be programmers is as silly as saying only certain people can be physically fit. Yes, some people will naturally be better at it than others, just like when it comes to physical fitness. The notion however that only a select few may enter is both ignorant and also party responsible for so few people entering the field. There are brilliant mechanics and terrible mechanics, brilliant doctors and terrible doctors, this is more a function of people and their level of effort and less a function of difficulty of material.
I was a teacher assistant while studying CS and from my experience laziness was the #1 killer of students, both "smart" and "dumb". I always thought there was something tragic and beautiful to see someone naturally "ungifted" in intelligence whomp someone who was naturally gifted with intelligence just because they tried harder.
I've been watching Blackberry for over a year and these buyout rumors always, always, always get started when Blackberry's stock is at its worst and falling rapidly. This is one of the most consistently-wildly-volatile stocks I've ever watched. The short interest on this is ridiculous while at the same time you have zealous firm believers who are awaiting the messiah's return. Then you have a CEO with a good record of turnarounds but who is so adamant about no buyouts. Then you have their GAAP vs. non-GAAP results. It's just an incredible perfect storm of what-ifs and maybes. It's also quite a dangerous stock to follow where anyone can easily be crushed by a bad wave. But if you're the one peddling these rumors and controlling the timing, well by golly Baal-Hamon be praised, there's money to be made and that special someone is making an absolute killing...
Slashdot Mirror
If the NY Times author wants to criticize the time lines that's perfectly fine and dandy... and very much so accurate. However with the Slashdot OP suggesting removing it from our list of goals altogether, that's a far worse joke than the joke "Mars One" and "Inspiration One" are making. Out of the bunch, (Elon Musk) SpaceX, is the only one that can be taken seriously. NASA however is the most honest about it, they have it slated for 2035 at this present time which we can already suspect will slide backwards. I'm fine with the general mania though. It's a similar kind of mania that got us to the Moon. The timeline by which the US (and almost Soviets) achieved that goal with the technology they had was pretty ridiculous. All problems can be solved with the correct dosage of time and money. Nearly all the time, lots of both of those resources are needed.
This is an age old argument, likely without a real single answer but a lot of controversy. While I don't have all the same data and theories to back up my opinions like you do, I do have some anecdotal observations I think we can all agree on. In my humble opinion, human beings certainly have an instinctual nature that is likely baggage from everything we've evolved from both in our hominid line and everything prior to it. I think that would be impossibly difficult to deny. All of which includes the deep desire for the propagation of our species, with multiple mates, with all of the evolutionary advantages it brings to the table. However one of the critical traits of our homo sapiens nature that make us stand far out from any other species is the fact it is in our very nature to override our nature. Based on all of the cultural variety we see out there today, there really are not limits to our social behaviors and constructs but there are definitely many commonalities. We create things like honor, laws, bravery, religion, stoicism, politics, morality, matrimony, and on and on and on... The inner strength and power we have to command and control our desires and behaviors and direct them in many different shapes and forms is really quite fantastic.
We can easily find a surprising amount of intelligence in many other species on our little planet but none of them exhibit the nature-over-nature trait as strongly as we do. Truly, I believe that is what makes us human. So my personal counter to the age old question "Isn't that a natural and physical need?" would be, "yes it certainly is, but I and many others would consider it a weakness in your humanity."
I want a robot to do household cleaning chores. Clean the bathroom, or at least the flat surfaces. Mop the tiled floors. Vacuum the carpets. Clean the windows. Possibly clean the patio and the sidewalks. Possibly deal with some of the kitchen cleaning. If the robot did this kind of cleaning daily then it never would be all that bad and consequently the robot wouldn't have to work very hard on any given day so long as it started out relatively clean.
HEY - robots exist for at least a few of the items you listed here. You really need to buy one if you haven't already! They're certainly not perfect but the vacuum and mopping robots I have work good enough for me. They keep the floors clean for me during the day, I just have to empty their canisters and throw the mop cloths in the laundry. I wish they'd make robots that can dust and vacuum stairs though :\
Colleges are being run like businesses, not education centers. That in of itself is not a problem. However couple that with the multiple other factors: they can milk state and local governments for gobs of money via "financial aid", they can charge their financially incompetent students (customers) a ridiculous amount of tuition and they rarely say no because they can just borrow it and pay later, and they themselves are often rated on how much they cost. Colleges and universities are not even expected to prove their "value". They just make some BS marketing and some numbers out of thin air or bending existing ones and then get in trouble for it by some government watchdog a half decade later. I mean, how can this freaking NOT end up as a disaster?
For Pete's sake, even the "non profit" "Catholic" college I went to, established in 1870, originally run by humble Jesuits, no longer has any Jesuits running the place. In fact 3-4 years after I graduated the replaced the damn Jesuit president with guess who? Mr. MBA man who has a background of being CEO of profitable businesses, a proven track record of raising tons of money, and making sound financial decisions and investments. I gave them a piece of my mind next time they called me and asked for donations, which I halted immediately. Their tuition has more more than doubled in a span of 10 years. When I went it was a tall $17K/yr... it's now a ludicrous $35K/yr. From what I've read, all of that money is not being spent on students nor faculty. No it's going to their precious endowment fund.
I know the government has done minor things like require colleges to post Net Price Calculators but that's almost pointless. You could have researched that information prior to that law being passed if you were determined enough to do it. IMHO, what they should really do is require them to create a ranking and scoring system they all have to abide by. Post entry-graduation rates, by year, by field/career, indicating how many attained jobs in each respective field or whether they had to leave their field, and how long it took. I'm sure prospective students would love that, especially if they could also see what graduates are getting paid as their salaries though that's a slightly too invasive. At least with this they could compare colleges apples to apples, on equal footing. Students could truly shop around and see what their dollar could get them.
So basically you want a label to indicate whether a GMO was produced via vertical gene transfer vs. horizontal gene transfer. I think it's a noble thought but I'm not sure that difference is really that critical if the final result is the same. I'm ignoring the fact that horizontal gene transfer has been documented to also naturally occur among eukaryotes as well, because that's besides the point.
Instead of confounding the argument with frivolous logical debate, "you said this, this implies this, therefore this etc" why not present actual studies showing how horizontal gene transfer is innately harmful vs. vertical gene transfer? This would actually do a much better job at persuasion than proving some abstract logical superiority. This isn't a battle of verbal logic, prove your argument with facts, studies, and post some links. Then I can read them and change my mind.
Nope. The labels are about informed choice.
I have the right to know if what I'm buying with my money is the result of a combination of genes that have undergone thousands of years of 'safety testing' known as evolution, or something concocted in a lab by people who don't even understand fully the basics of what they're doing, but whose employers are in a rush to make a quick buck while they have the patent; something, which is only 'tested' against the interpretation of the safety rules of the said employers for a year or two.
I also used to be a huge proponent of GMO labeling before listening to Bill Nye explain why it's both redundant and pointless and should be embraced instead. Every-thing we eat is literally some variant of GMO, we've been making GMO foods since we've been cultivating crops and domesticating animals. Nothing we eat today is not GMO unless we go berry picking deep in the forest. I know it's simpler to think many of the foods we eat today were cultivated/domesticated 10,000's of years ago, and it's true. However we've been continually modifying everything we eat, every year, non stop, since then. The corn we eat today is nothing like the native plant we first cultivated, and also different than the corn we ate 100 years ago. So the idea of the food we eat having been safety tested for "thousands of years" doesn't really strictly hold up.
Also finding out how freaking awesome their genetics lab work was amazingly impressive. They can test and sequence genomes for plants in hours with specialized machinery instead of weeks like it used to take. Transcend 100s of generations of a plant in a matter of weeks, selecting from among the throng the best candidates for perpetuation. When they're happy with the genetic results they then cultivate them to ensure expectations meet reality. 100's of geneticists do this for 3-4 years before handing it over to the FDA which reviews it for another 3 years. There is no going "back to the old ways" on this where you sprinkle pollen on the stamen by hand and wait for it to grow before selecting. We're waaaay past that. We can improve the new GMO process but there's ZERO chance we're going back to the old ways.
If anything it's scary-amazing to know how effective it is and where this will take our world in the next 100 years. We're now able to do in weeks what takes mother nature centuries. We can make plants resistant to bugs, pests, reduce the water they intake, make them more nutritious, give them a longer shelf life, reduce or eliminate natural toxins that many plants have, grow faster. This is really literally super food. Being anti GMO is nearly as bad as being anti-vaccination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
Sadly, your reference points out Generation IV reactors will not be ready for prime time until 2030. "The Technology Roadmap Update for Generation IV Nuclear Energy Systems was published in January 2014 which details R&D objectives for the next decade." Yes, that was just the roadmap. We may as well assume to add at least another 10 years to their 2030 target date on top of that too.
This is probably a terrible and grossly oversimplified analogy but I'm going to use it anyway. Our world is like a house. When you first begin building a new house, you can pick whatever you want and it's easy to implement and because it's very efficient and the ROI is phenomenal. After all, you're putting something there where there was nothing before so you get the full benefit of putting in something new. Today, now we have an old house. Replacing things that already "work" even if they don't work well is much more difficult to justify than the former. Not only does it cost more to build something better, you also have to add in the costs of decommissioning whatever you're replacing, and then combine all of that with but a mere incremental increase on ROI. This is why the world is languishing in old infrastructure and old resources, even though it might be slowly killing us. It's just *soooo* much cheaper. I fear the old will most likely have to collapse before being fully addressed and rectified.
For all the people comparing Russian corruption to other countries, particularly the US... We all have to realize it's present everywhere but there's also full spectrum of colors and subcolors that could describe types and severities. Certain types of corruption are far more rampant in some countries while negligible in another, and vice versa. Anyone who thinks there's a country that does not have any corruption is a devoted blind fool. Overall however, I would definitely put most "developing" countries (like Russia) on the upper echelons of said spectrum. I do always find it somewhat odd that Russia is considered a developing country by many economists though.
Source with nice graphs [guttmacher.org]. At least half of American women will experience an unintended pregnancy by age 45, and at 2008 abortion rates, one in 10 women will have an abortion by age 20, one in four by age 30 and three in 10 by age 45.
I just want to point out the data source from the link indicates it's counting pregnancy-occurrences not people. So saying something like "three in 10 by age 45" is not just misleading but outright false. The same is also often true for the infamous reported divorce rates. It's far more challenging to track individuals than it is to track events. For example when I was much younger I worked with a woman who had 11 abortions by the time she was 19. Yes, it was a fast foot restaurant. If you've ever worked at one, you already know you meet very interesting people. Now I'm sure she's an outlier but she'd clearly be skewing the numbers. All that being said, it's really not hard to avoid pregnancy folks! You have 2 people that can control and prevent the natural result that happens there. It's sad to see people using abortion as a contraceptive.
If you think about it, the abortion debate really boils down to one questions. Do you consider the baby inside a woman to be a "person". If you say "yes" it becomes awfully difficult to rationalize. If you say "no" it becomes extraordinarily easy to rationalize. Both sides of the debate are well meaning people but they happen to believe something different on that single point which makes all the difference.
I'd be curious to see if the population of disillusioned independents is growing faster as well. I'd speculate most of them would be categorized as "moderates" which is a species rapidly disappearing, sadly from both political factions. I for one count myself among them, both parties have developed fundamental show stoppers that make it impossible for me to vote for either candidate in presidential elections. I don't at all consider my vote "thrown away". A vote for a 3rd party is a vote against both, it still counts and enough of them should garner attention for more moderates eventually.
Sort of ironic the current botters were only banned for 6 months, I was perma banned for botting in WoW circa 2006. I didn't do it for gold, in fact I probably had more gold than 99% of the players on that server at the time from cornering the AH market on many items better than most could on my server. I was quite upset at the time since I had been hoping to sell my account as a just-graduated-student at some point for $3-4K... which was an enormous amount of dough for me at the time. My account was worth a lot not just for the characters I had, but the crafting skills and rare recipes I had collected. Foolish thing about it all was I only botted because I wanted a 5th and 6th lvl 60 and no longer had time to play as much as I wanted to spend more time with my then-gf-now-wife. In hindsight, getting banned was probably the best thing that could have happened to me! Minus the loss of money of course lol
Just got back from a trip to downtown Philadelphia. I ahd to get around parts of a wrecked car, a stalled truck, and then run a light that was on permanent red - after waiting for the other 20 people ahead of me to realize it was never going to change and do likewise. So how is Mr RoboCar going to do THAT? How long would it wait for a green light? Would it crash into a fender in the road or stop for a McDs bag?
Really? I fully admit computers can be dumb but for this to work they're not going to be that dumb. If self driving cars are to ever become mainstream everything will have to be integrated. In other words, on a highway of 1000's of vehicles, each vehicle will know the status, location, and conditions of the other vehicles present. Information could be relayed regarding any accidents or problems and traffic, communications to all other vehicles and likely will be instantly sent out in real time. Possibly even notifying service vehicles for clean up and municipal authorities to the problem to alter traffic light patterns to accommodate the situation. Yeah, that's right, we're talking about Borg collective sh**. This kind of tech may already exist in some theoretical shape or form today but it's not implemented anywhere in the real world today. Doing that part is a lot harder and expensive than anyone can imagine.
That being all said, we're still very far away from this today... but that's where we are headed. Maybe 25+ years.
we may someday just pass signs requiring drivers to activate auto-drive functionality for certain particularly treacherous stretches of roadway. So on the sections of road I'm going to be most terrified to navigate I should secede control to the computer? In principal, this makes sense, but in reality this is a pee-your-pants moment that even adrenaline junkies will probably say no thanks to.
A day is coming where people will trust autonomous driving ability more than human but that's not anywhere near close to being a reality today. More likely 30+ years from now. I imagine one day there will tracks of road that doesn't support self driving and instead those will become pee-your-pants moments for regular folks. Adrenaline junkies will still be doing their off road tracks for their kicks just like they do today!
Actually, my driving record of MANY decades would beg to differ with your conclusion. I don't generally bother to look at posted speed limits, no..unless the cops are around or the radar detector goes off. That being said, I drive for what is safe in the current driving conditions. If it is raining, I slow down. If it is a nice road, especially one I'm familiar with, and there is very little to no traffic around me I go as fast as is possibly safe for what my car can handle. I drive based on the conditions around me at that moment in time. I don't care what the posted sign says, I go slower when warranted and go as fast as is safe for me when conditions are right.
If everyone did this 24/7 the only accidents would be occurring because of mechanical failures and we wouldn't even be having a discussion about this post lol.
When SDC can scrape their own sensors free of ice (or even be able to function in snow/icy/wet conditions) I'll be impressed! In all seriousness though the worst human drivers are here to stay - if you thought gun nuts rage when goverment tries to restrict them just wait untill the government tries to say people "dont have the right to drive anymore".
Well the ice would only be a problem for optical sensors right? Not radar or GPS. Definitely need a solution for ice, water, and frost covering optic sensors unless they can find an alternative. The latter might be better. But I'm not sure it would ever become government restricted though. It's possible but I highly doubt it would ever come to something that extreme. I don't think it would need to be? I think the more likely set of possibilities may be something like:
I'm sure many others...
I see this being a huge problem in nordic countries when it comes to self driving cars as well. Perhaps the self driving car will refuse to operate if the sensors are covered in ice. This would be safer, but would lead to dissatisfaction from a lot of owners as they would have to carefully remove ice from the sensors hoping not to damage them in the process. Then you'd be driving down the road and get covered in spray (salt, dirt, water) from other vehicles and the sensors would become inoperational again. The driver would either have to take over, making the expensive self driving car useless, or pull over to the side of the road and clean the sensor before going on their way. I'd like to see how self driving cars handle snow, salty/dirty/muddy roads, and even a heavy rain. Could the sensors still actually discern what's going on, or do they require hot, dry, sunny, California type weather.
Yep, I think they still have quite a few hurdles to overcome. Last I've heard I don't think they've even mastered "driving in the rain" much less snow and icy road conditions! All of these conditions have to be mastered far in advance and allowed to mature before self driving cars ever hope to become widely adopted. For some folks oo say it's never going to happen though is a little backwards though.
" The second, another driver decided to use the right lane as a passing lane in a 4 lane road, driving 55 while everyone else is going 35, denying anyone in the left lanes the ability to change lanes and make a right turn. Let me repeat, that was just today."
You call that risky behaviour? Go drive in Paris, Rome, Manilla or Shanghai and then we'll talk again.
Sure, of course, they're on an entirely new level of terrible driving. I've been to all of those places minus Shanghai, I've never been to Asia. The denser the city, the worse it gets. That's usually how it rolls. Hopefully you understood my point because what you said seemingly reinforces my point however your tone implies that you did not.
For what, +1 Irrational Fear? Seems like that should be -1 to me. You won't see ubiquitous self-driving cars until the system is better than meat-popsicle cars. Once that happens, the rational argument flips: "do you want some incompetent person driving a hunk of steel on a road near where your child plays? *shudder* Think of what would happen if that human had to react to something!"
Sure, you could say you don't think self-driving cars will ever be safer than meat-popsicle cars, but that's like saying "640 kB ought to be enough for anybody". Technology is advancing at a staggering pace, and these systems are only getting better and more reliable.
Amen, as long as avoiding risking behavior is a mandatory feature in autonomous driving software. I'd speculate a majority of accidents and road fatalities are nearly all avoidable, brought on by either poor choices, risky behavior, or bad driving habits. Case in point just today on my way to work I narrowly avoided two accidents. The first, the driver did not scrape his windows from ice and could not see any of the drivers around him - nearly plowing into me and others around him as he was changing lanes. The second, another driver decided to use the right lane as a passing lane in a 4 lane road, driving 55 while everyone else is going 35, denying anyone in the left lanes the ability to change lanes and make a right turn. Let me repeat, that was just today. Stuff like this happens everyday to millions of people. For myself, getting tail gated while I'm already going 10 above the limit is a regular *daily* occurrence. I'm barely even going to bring up the young, inexperienced, risk-loving drivers because all of the problems there should be understood without even saying.
I for one am eagerly looking forward to autonomous cars purely because of the minor few that make the roads dangerous for everyone else. But like the poster above, it's probably going to be awhile before they're reliable enough for use. But it will happen because technology will be improved over time. Changing, people's attitudes and driving habits? Yeah, far more difficult and expensive than technology with diminishing returns. Good luck on that!
Isn't that like saying modern car manufacturers don't have to thank Henry Ford for paving the way? Little bit of an understatement. I'm not even going to dive into the details in differences in resources between those groups, a small team vs. 1000's of code breakers. Anyway, they all relied on mistakes made by German operators, even the British bombe. They were just different in nature and complexity.
Even once we had airplanes, you have only a lifetime from 1903 to 1969, yet people in 1903 couldn't have dreamed of what the Saturn V would look like or how it would work.
There were rockets in 1903. They weren't as powerful, but the physics of rocket flight was pretty well known at the time.
The only difference between fireworks and the Saturn V is scale...more powerful fuel, stronger materials, etc.
Hell yeah, and the only difference between modern computers and the cryptological bombas used during WW2 is just electronics miniaturization! Stupid elementary stuff my friends! Yeah, it's not so simple my friend. There's a reason it takes *decades* and thousands of brilliant minds to advance technology step by step. The Saturn V is not simply a bigger, better version of "fireworks". You've been playing too much Kerbal space program.
Yeah I lol'd too. "Oh look, we had a team of developers accidentally build out a fully functioning module into the TV's OS, tested it, worked out the bugs, published it, and it also just so happens to make our company more money. This is an outrage, how could this have possibly happened?".
Watch out everyone, software is now evolving on its own! It's beginning, machines are rising! Where is Sarah Connor!?!?
The Sarbanes-Oxley act has been on the books since 2002. Dodd-Frank bill since 2010. So are they working to keep companies in check and increase transparency? Or just costing both the government and the companies it affects a bunch of time and money? On one side you can say this activity was finally caught. On the other hand you have to ask when large banks are subject to regular audits how do they get away with it from year to year?
From my own limited personal experience, the only thing I can say for sure is that those audits are usually pretty terrible. In theory they're looking for the right stuff, but the auditors themselves are usually green accountants who often lack the hybrid blend of accounting, technical, and IT skills needed to any proper analysis. They don't understand what they're looking at and don't know what to ask for. They usually just follow a sheet of instructions line by line and check those boxes to indicate their work is done. I don't think that quite captures the spirit of those laws.
This made me chuckle, I think your own argument flew right over your own head. As you've clearly pointed out, disrupting an the original equilibrium creates a new and different equilibrium. Yes, you sir are absolutely correct.
So let's use an extreme example. Let's destroy photosynthesis driven life on this planet somehow. What happens then? Hey the ecosystem now will search our its new equilibrium which now only includes life that survive by feeding off the energy from geothermic vents! What's wrong? We've found our new equilibrium, clearly there's no fragility here. Everyone can keep calm and carry on :)
IMHO the primary ingredient is diligence, just like everything else. Everything else is secondary. I think the idea that only certain people can be programmers is as silly as saying only certain people can be physically fit. Yes, some people will naturally be better at it than others, just like when it comes to physical fitness. The notion however that only a select few may enter is both ignorant and also party responsible for so few people entering the field. There are brilliant mechanics and terrible mechanics, brilliant doctors and terrible doctors, this is more a function of people and their level of effort and less a function of difficulty of material. I was a teacher assistant while studying CS and from my experience laziness was the #1 killer of students, both "smart" and "dumb". I always thought there was something tragic and beautiful to see someone naturally "ungifted" in intelligence whomp someone who was naturally gifted with intelligence just because they tried harder.
I've been watching Blackberry for over a year and these buyout rumors always, always, always get started when Blackberry's stock is at its worst and falling rapidly. This is one of the most consistently-wildly-volatile stocks I've ever watched. The short interest on this is ridiculous while at the same time you have zealous firm believers who are awaiting the messiah's return. Then you have a CEO with a good record of turnarounds but who is so adamant about no buyouts. Then you have their GAAP vs. non-GAAP results. It's just an incredible perfect storm of what-ifs and maybes. It's also quite a dangerous stock to follow where anyone can easily be crushed by a bad wave. But if you're the one peddling these rumors and controlling the timing, well by golly Baal-Hamon be praised, there's money to be made and that special someone is making an absolute killing...