No, you used the term "slippery slope" correctly. The very premise of your slope is flawed. As a society, we've had mind altering drugs that directly stimulate our reward centers for as long as we've been a society. Nearly everyone takes some kind, but we still have an incredibly small percentage of people looking to use the harder stuff (antidepressants, ADHD drugs, street drugs). Given this history, it seems highly unlikely that we're heading toward a future of "mechanized work/play" any time soon.
FWIW, historically, Opium dens and crack houses did not consume much more than a small percentage of actual people, but it was significant enough to cause wide-spread effect on the population as a whole. Just because we aren't headed toward a future of "mechanized work/play", doesn't mean that the slope isn't slippery, it's just that you aren't likely to slip too far, but even then some might not like the consequences of slipping a small amount (depending on your definition of "small")...
Although you might disparage so called anti-ADHD people as being as a group ignorant, likewise some ADHD proponents exhibit a lack of knowledge of analogous medical anomalies like antibiotic abuse, or even somatic and conversion disorders (including, Münchausen syndrome or Münchausen syndrome by proxy)...
FWIW, it appears (to me anyhow) the current diagnostic of ADHD is problematic in that it is really an attempt to categorize a vague set of symptoms (effectively a syndrome) and associate this with a generic treatment plan. This is not unlike having a fever, stomach aches, etc and looking for some sort of pre-emptive and/or palliative cure in antihistamines and antibiotics (instead of perhaps waiting for a bacterial culture to verify the diagnosis before taking antibiotics). Sure some of those with symptoms might have TB or Salmonella poisoning, or have cold that results in secondary bacterial infection like pneumonia, so you can't rule that out, that possibility doesn't make it an inevitable (although personally, that's happened many times to me).
Studies like this ADHD study can really help to improve the situation greatly and hopefully result in a diagnostic tool that has much higher predictive powers for designing treatments rather than broad-spectrum palliative medications that can be over-prescribed and potentially have a net-negative outcome.
With more discrimination, sometimes newer treatment will emerge (like Neuraminidase inhibitors like Tamiflu did for actual viral influenza) that actually start to clinically improve outcomes (rather than just vaguely mask symptoms). In the meantime, palliatives are generally tradeoffs and if Ritalin actually helps a patient's situation relative to the side-effects, it is certainly useful, but as we can see with the anti-biotic over-use fiasco, the patents (or even the doctors) aren't necessarily always capable of making good tradeoffs in many cases, which leads me to be skeptical generally of ADHD being as wide spread as it is diagnosed (and similarly treated)...
My wife is a doctor and I know from her there is still strong bias and pressure to preemptively prescribe anti-biotics in the medical community (both from patents and over-worked doctors) even with all we know now... The main reason given... Just in case, side-effects are usually minimal, cannot treat the underlying virus anyhow and want to do something...
I suspect many feel the same is true with ADHD. It isn't that a brain/body disorder analogous to ADHD doesn't exist, it's just that we must be careful what we are trying to treat and why since we do not yet have the best diagnostic tools available to distinguish this disorder from other disorders for which we do not know the cause only symptoms, nor do we have a great understanding of the treatment outcomes relative to a specific underlying cause.
Her resignation does not beg questions; it prompts or raises them.
To beg the question is to assume a particular answer in the reasoning used to arrive at that answer.
It perhaps raises the question if she was the right person to lead the program... But it might beg the question that the huge cost of sending her into space was a waste of taxpayer's money (assuming that was the goal of spending the money)...
Yes, it's like a bath where the taps are on and providing X litres/s while Y litres/s are going down the plughole. X only needs to be a little bit bigger than Y for the water level to rise.
Of course, which is why I also said this...
...but even if somehow we could collectively reduce our carbon footprint to zero (likely impossible), it's likely that some warming is already inevitably started and the only long term solution would be to adapt our planet to sink the additional carbon output we will be producing...
Indeed. Under communism, comrade, all pigs will be equal. It's just the pigs at the top will have instant access to executive jets, Zil limos and dashas in the country, while the pigs at the bottom will wait twenty years for a Trabant.
That would simply be the fact that some pigs are more equal, right?
Build more bus stops or something. Would you prefer that there were ~40 times as many passenger vehicles on the road as busses? 101 is bad enough with the buses... Much like the "housing crisis" caused by "not allowing sufficient new housing to be built", the silicon valley cities are basically causing their own problems by completely ignoring demand.
Not to mention that the Muni/VTA theoretically uses the $2 fee to operate the buses while that cost is directly paid by the tech companies.
I think if Google and crew ponied up for their own private bus stops, the argument about stopping at existing stops is moot, right?
I don't think that SV cities not building enough houses is causing people to want to commute from SF. Certain people want to live in SF and having a job in SV is enabling more of them to compete for SF housing... Before these busses, I know many folks that live in SF and used public transportation (e.g., Caltrain) to get to work in SV. Also, there are plenty of housing in Tracy and Morgan Hill about the same distance from SV cities if it were simply about housing costs and availability...
Google and crew are simply catering to a the segment of their highly skilled 20-something workforce desires to live in SF and enabling them with attractive commute options (which is in line with other perks you offer the employees you want to recruit/retain). Sadly this seems to impact disproportionality a segment of the population of SF that doesn't benefit from this. OTOH, I'm sure the property owners near these transportation corridors are really-really happy about Gbus and the like driving up their rents and property values...
Oh yeah, that $2 doesn't pay for squat. SF-Muni has a 22% fare-box recovery ratio, and given the number of fare crashers in a typical SF-Muni bus, it's likely irrelevant to the people these shuttle busses are affecting. In contrast, BART has about a 60% fare-box recovery ratio which is more typical of public transit...
If CO2 were a leading cause of warming, why would the temperatures not be spiking along with CO2 levels?
If you notice closely, they attempted to pose a slightly different question...
carbon dioxide (CO2) — the leading human-produced greenhouse gas and the principal human-produced driver of climate change.
If you ask the question like this, it's true. However, leading causes of warming is the sun and the other main gas driving global climate change is methane, neither of which is technically human produced.
If you want to get technical, if factor in our desires for growing plants, industrialization, keeping warm and eating beef, then both CO2 and methane are somewhat similar in that regard. There's about 200x the CO2 than methane in the atmosphere, but methane is about 86x better at trapping atmospheric heat.
It's easy to forget humans are likely responsible for only 25Gtons of the CO2 released, where the natural carbon cycle is about 750Gtons (+- a extra volcano eruptions which are about 40Gtons)... Human contribution is non-negligible, for sure, but natural variations are of the same scale. Certainly there is case to be made that doing something is better than nothing, but even if somehow we could collectively reduce our carbon footprint to zero (likely impossible), it's likely that some warming is already inevitably started and the only long term solution would be to adapt our planet to sink the additional carbon output we will be producing...
Truth be told, all the CO2 we humans are likely to responsible for is dwarfed by the Methane Clathrate Ice timebomb at the bottom of our oceans. All that stuff was there long before humans and has been theorized to be the source of historical global run-away climate events. It's probably already too late for this, so it's likely that adaptation for a higher climate variation is something we just have to adapt for...
Except it is paid for. The buses pay the city to use the infrastructure. What is this infrastructure you ask? It's a space on a street. When it is vacated, the city bus, on the rare occasions it's right behind a google bus, will move in and "use the infrastructure." More often than not it's the other way around because city buses are slow, ponderous, and take a long time to get people on them.
Clearly you have not actually experienced this first hand.
First, there's the google bus, then the yahoo bus, then the apple bus, then the facebook bus and then the ea bus, and then the ebay bus, and during rush how it's a mess (according to a friend of mine who used to live near Van Ness and worked near the Financial district and used to take Muni)
In the southbay, in Sunnyvale near me, a particular Gbus is parking in a VTA bus stop and waiting for a Caltrain connection nearly every day. Sometimes they get their early and wait jamming up traffic while they wait for googlers to try to get off Caltrain and attempt to make a timed transfer** I've seen VTA busses stuck in the long line of traffic behind me and I wonder if every time they did this they might cause a VTA passenger to miss their Caltrain connections. I guess it's tough shit for the VTA bus rider in this situation, because they Gbus schedules aren't public knowledge...
AFAIK, SF is currently charging $1/day for a stop. If you happen to be an uber or a tour bus operator, you would have to pay a $279 dollar ticket for doing something like this. To scale this, it's $2/person to ride muni, but only a $100 fine if you are caught by one of the 2 fare inspectors checking 1000 busses (okay, that's an exaggeration). Not that $4/stop would break their bank, but to say they these busses paying their fair share is a bit farcical, they are getting a golden deal that most uber and tour bus operators could only dream about...
The VTA (in the south bay) hasn't started charging google yet. Probably because google bribed Mountain View with some free shuttle busses (however, they only agreed to pay for the shuttle busses for 2 years). I imagine that will turn out to be even net worse because now people will get used to the shuttle, and demand that it not be terminated after the 2 years is up leaving MV footing the bill. Meanwhile, google is probably banking that all the furor of the busses will die off by then...
FWIW, here's a purported map of the problem areas on the SF side...
***note VTA doesn't have timed transfers, so if Caltrain is late, you miss the bus and have to wait for the next one. Likewize if you bus is late...
Before the US picked up the abandoned French effort for the Panama canal, the US was seriously considering building the Nicaragua canal*.
The Nicaraguan government was historically worried about British colonial aspirations in the area and basically invited the US in as a preemptive action to deter the British from action. By 1884 a treaty was negotiated to build the Nicaraguan canal and a US based canal company established to build it, but the company didn't accomplish too much before going bankrupt. The US was going to restart work on Nicaraguan canal, but whole Panama thing changed the US direction. It was only after the US financed the Panamanian revolution and the newly formed country of Panama decided to accept the terms of the previously negotiated Hay–Herrán Treaty (not actually ratified by Colombia) which discounted the French bankruptcy sale price from $100M to $40 to take over the French project.
Interest revived in in 1914 with the Bryan–Chamorro Treaty, but that never panned out either...
the vast majority of people find staples like food, clothing, etc to be very expensive
That's an unfortunate reality of their economic power of the people, not the currency they use for transactions...
Of course if they returned to their own currency, they could devalue it to temporarily improve the lot of their poor (if you don't save money and don't have any capital and live day-to-day, devaluation doesn't hurt you as much), but ultimately that is another level of hell that they just got out of...
Local currency manipulation might be able to smooth over the rough patches, but improving the economic power of the population relative to the rest of the world is really the only way out.
I suspect the benefit of a digital currency is mostly to improve local liquidity of money given the country's current crushing sovereign debt load and critical need to preserved hard cash to finance it (as they've defaulted on bonds). A parallel virtual currency is much cheaper to deploy on short notics than a parallel physical currency.
This vaguely reminds me back in the 80's when I went to china, with their two-currency system (RMB vs FEC or foreign exchangeable currency). Nominally they were the "same" value, but of course their value in real life was quite different. I suspect the same will be true here...
a human operator won't even be required for safe operation; only to provide instructions about where to go.
I dunno, but letting humans decide where an autonomous vehicle should go, might still be a recipe for unsafe operation...
* Teenagers * Elderly people with dementia * Naïve people unfamiliar with local gang activity patterns * Suicidal depressives * etc...
We should always be concerned when you have human decision in the loop of a potentially dangerous machine (car, airplane, nuclear power plant, etc). It doesn't mean autonomous operation isn't valuable assistance (ABS, ATC, etc), it just means it isn't a total panacea for the safe operation...
Actually I would say that they should take one class on the principles of security...
Most of the problems with web security are not really novel to web program, but are systematic security issues that permeate all levels of software. For example, execution privilege (e.g., cross site), parameter checking (e.g, including buffer overruns and sql injection) aren't really novel to web application security.
Most folks seem to think that security is some sort of discipline or retro-fit on existing code, but it's really more similar to a style of programming (like an orthogonal axis to procedural vs object oriented vs functional programming), because most of the difficulty behind security relate to auditing/testing code and behavior.
Sadly and predictably, when you start talking about programming styles, you come up with all sorts of resistance from inflexible programmers and heaps of legacy code so security things generally things get avoided/overlooked/dismissed, and well, the predictable happens.
Odds are the so-called "secret-serum" is called ZMapp manufactured by a small biotech company called Mapp Biopharmaceutical...
Odds are this treatment is an optimized cocktail combining the best components of MB-003 and ZMAb (both appear to be three-mouse monoclonal antibody produced by exposing mice to fragments of the Ebola virus and extracting antibodies from their blood)...
Odds are these particular antibodies are actually manufactured in a plants, specifically Nicotiana, not extracted from animal blood.
Odds are you could find this information on this internet in less than 1 minute w/o suggesting or consulting a poorly researched, highly politicized book written in alarmist form.
Unfortunately, odds are many people are unable to use the internet effectively...
One advantage of vote-by-mail is that any large-scale fraud (enough to tip an election) takes quite a bit resources and people One advantage of on-line voting is that minimal resource and people (e.g., as small as one person) can likely perpetrate such an action.
Two people can keep a secret (if one of them is dead). This is the difference.
This will probably go poorly; but it might actually go poorly in a visible enough way that they have to fix it or risk embarassment/lawsuits, rather than just having it go poorly more or less forever.
I vote for the go-poorly-more-or-less-forever...
The current state-of-the-art hotel security fail has pretty much flew under the public radar after a brief buzz, and apparently was so forgettable that it was even forgotten by many of the readers of slashdot...
Okay, what is 'inadequate' (other than full disclosure)? What is 'irrelevant' about most of the information that is requested to be removed? Is information actually ever 'excessive' (e.g., TMI)? 'Inaccuracy' of course can be determined in a court (don't need DCMA-like takedowns requests for that)...
Seems like much of the information requested to be removed would be quite relevant to certain people in certain situation (although perhaps not most people in most situations)... So exactly how would such a person go about finding information relevant to them, if it was removed from view the general masses? It's quite a slippery slope there, right?
The name 'Gigafactory' is a shortcut for a battery factory capable of over a gigawatt-hour of annual production capacity.
In the case of Musk's proposed factory, it's projected to be capable of producing enough battery cells to store 35GWh of energy in a year. Since Tesla's Model S have 85kWh batteries, if you want to make a new line of car that sells more than 10,000 cars/year you can probably use a factory with the capacity of a Gigafactory (or multiple production lines of a smaller factory).
Some folks estimate Panasonic's current battery factory production capacities (multiple lines in multiple cities for multiple car companies) as being only able to support slightly north of 28K cars/month where the proposed single Gigafactory should be able to supply batteries at the rate at a similar rate to all existing capacity. Presumably there is some economy in scale (Tesla is estimating ~30%) which is what they are counting on...
if we can't trust society to act fairly under full disclosure, then selective disclosure is the only alternative to protect the disadvantaged.
Who exactly is disadvantaged? The person that may or may not act for their own personal self interest w/o full disclosure about another person or the person that conceals some information about themselves to prevent other people from acting in their own personal self interests?
Of course the 64-thousand dollar question is who exactly has the right to decide what information is personal enough to withhold? Certainly not the person (because they would withhold all negative information about themselves). Some faceless entity? We can see how that works out on things like internet dating sites (I'm thinking about the recent OkCupid fiasco)...
We can throw out examples ad-nauseum. What about hiring a caregiver for a child that unbeknownst to you is a binge drinker and tends to break speed limits? Is being a binge drinker or a speeder a matter of privacy (it probably isn't a legal issue)? What if the child was your kid and you needed your caregiver for transport between school and home? Maybe that person shouldn't be a caregiver anyhow? How about those folks that have AIDS and are deliberately reckless about spreading it around? How about that privacy in that case?
You can always find specific examples for both side of this argument, but what is the principles to decide? It's arbitrary and capricious to anyone stuck on the wrong side of the line, but clearly the only "pure" strategy is full disclosure, and exceptions should only be made to that on a case-by-case basis (if at all).
Take the first person that filed the lawsuit in Spain against Google linking to an article about being evicted from his home. I'm sure a future landlord of his might have found this relevant information even though he found it embarrassing... It's only the fact of some arbitrary determination that this information was no longer relevant to any future landlords that it was required to be removed. That's a real scalable principle... NOT!
In Central Beijing (a very large city), most people live in large apartment buildings which have central heating. Although historically coal was used for these central boilers, most have been transitioned to coal gas. In smaller buildings, coal burning ovens have been transitioned to electric heat (where the coal is merely burned somewhere else)...
However, the biggest change is that has been made recently was to require new homes to be metered. Historically, residents simply paid heating bills relative to the size of their apartments (~20rmb/m^2) which gave little incentive for any efficiency (power company losses were generally subsidized by the government), but with metering and improved insulation upgrades, coupled with the natural gas and electric conversions, things in Beijing are looking up...
In the suburbs and surrounding cities... well, let's just say air pollution is usually not a local thing and the average pollution level hasn't seemed to have changed too much...
On the other hand, you can't really dismiss the whole idea of centralization being a potential solution to part of this problem. The infrastructure in China (esp Beijing) is quite centralized and the Chinese are generally quite good at getting things done when they have an incentive to do so...
There are no easy answers to any of these issues, but one thing is all but certain: throwing out everything our societies have learned over centuries about defending private lives and allowing people to move on from mistakes, just because a few Internet companies who have made staggering amounts of money might lose some of it if their business models were modestly inconvenienced, is not the only possible or potentially desirable way forward.
There are never any easy answers, but one thing is certain, this issue is not constrained to a few internet companies.
* Credit Reporting Bureaus (Callcredit, Equifax, Experian, CEG, Shufa) * Educational institutions (and other information held by other Credential verification organizations) * Background checks for Employment (including criminal and citizenship checks in the USA)
It's not clear that privacy principles are generally respected or even tolerated in these areas and mistakes you may have made often carry on for a very long time in many areas. One thing that society has learned over centuries is that when it comes to people, history is often a leading indicator of future behavior.
Depending on the current regimes influencing your life, you may or may not have a *right* to limit access to your history, but that does not reduce the value of that history to people that you interact with. Because of this inherent conflict of interest, there will likely never be a correct answer to this, only what we collectively agree (or disagree) about.
People have studied this type of thing in game theory (e.g., the Tit-for-tat). Many experiments and models suggest that the better outcomes happen if we forgive, but do not forget. In my opinion mostly these laws simply attempt to coerce forgiving behavior on the unwilling people by forcing them to forget. I'm not sure this is the best reductive way get the desired result.
And yet strangely the two largest language groups are Mandarin and Spanish, the two least successful millitaries of the 20th century.
However, in 200BC, the Qin (aka Chin) dynasty had quite the army, and in the 16th and early 17th century, Spain had quite the military/navy.
FWIW, much of the geopolitical world as we know it wasn't formed in the 20th century. Much of the current geo-political alignments of the world were formed as a result of the Holy roman empire in the 800's, the exploits of Genghis Khan in the 12th century, and early Spanish explorers (and conquistadors) in the Americas. Of course the weapons they manufactured back then were primitive by modern standards, they managed to shape the world as we know it.
Seriously, can we get a can analogy (yeah, I know, imagine a perfectly spherical car, bastards!;-)
Neutron star: imagine what happens when you trade in your Ford Aerostar under the Cash-for-Clunkers program... Such a car is not massive enough to become a black hole consuming all your gas money, but bigger than a Crown-V (aka Chandrasekhar limit) which is the largest car that ends it's life as a white dud (aka dwarf).
Slashdot Mirror
No, you used the term "slippery slope" correctly. The very premise of your slope is flawed. As a society, we've had mind altering drugs that directly stimulate our reward centers for as long as we've been a society. Nearly everyone takes some kind, but we still have an incredibly small percentage of people looking to use the harder stuff (antidepressants, ADHD drugs, street drugs). Given this history, it seems highly unlikely that we're heading toward a future of "mechanized work/play" any time soon.
FWIW, historically, Opium dens and crack houses did not consume much more than a small percentage of actual people, but it was significant enough to cause wide-spread effect on the population as a whole. Just because we aren't headed toward a future of "mechanized work/play", doesn't mean that the slope isn't slippery, it's just that you aren't likely to slip too far, but even then some might not like the consequences of slipping a small amount (depending on your definition of "small")...
Although you might disparage so called anti-ADHD people as being as a group ignorant, likewise some ADHD proponents exhibit a lack of knowledge of analogous medical anomalies like antibiotic abuse, or even somatic and conversion disorders (including, Münchausen syndrome or Münchausen syndrome by proxy)...
FWIW, it appears (to me anyhow) the current diagnostic of ADHD is problematic in that it is really an attempt to categorize a vague set of symptoms (effectively a syndrome) and associate this with a generic treatment plan. This is not unlike having a fever, stomach aches, etc and looking for some sort of pre-emptive and/or palliative cure in antihistamines and antibiotics (instead of perhaps waiting for a bacterial culture to verify the diagnosis before taking antibiotics). Sure some of those with symptoms might have TB or Salmonella poisoning, or have cold that results in secondary bacterial infection like pneumonia, so you can't rule that out, that possibility doesn't make it an inevitable (although personally, that's happened many times to me).
Studies like this ADHD study can really help to improve the situation greatly and hopefully result in a diagnostic tool that has much higher predictive powers for designing treatments rather than broad-spectrum palliative medications that can be over-prescribed and potentially have a net-negative outcome.
With more discrimination, sometimes newer treatment will emerge (like Neuraminidase inhibitors like Tamiflu did for actual viral influenza) that actually start to clinically improve outcomes (rather than just vaguely mask symptoms). In the meantime, palliatives are generally tradeoffs and if Ritalin actually helps a patient's situation relative to the side-effects, it is certainly useful, but as we can see with the anti-biotic over-use fiasco, the patents (or even the doctors) aren't necessarily always capable of making good tradeoffs in many cases, which leads me to be skeptical generally of ADHD being as wide spread as it is diagnosed (and similarly treated)...
My wife is a doctor and I know from her there is still strong bias and pressure to preemptively prescribe anti-biotics in the medical community (both from patents and over-worked doctors) even with all we know now... The main reason given... Just in case, side-effects are usually minimal, cannot treat the underlying virus anyhow and want to do something...
I suspect many feel the same is true with ADHD. It isn't that a brain/body disorder analogous to ADHD doesn't exist, it's just that we must be careful what we are trying to treat and why since we do not yet have the best diagnostic tools available to distinguish this disorder from other disorders for which we do not know the cause only symptoms, nor do we have a great understanding of the treatment outcomes relative to a specific underlying cause.
Her resignation does not beg questions; it prompts or raises them.
To beg the question is to assume a particular answer in the reasoning used to arrive at that answer.
It perhaps raises the question if she was the right person to lead the program...
But it might beg the question that the huge cost of sending her into space was a waste of taxpayer's money (assuming that was the goal of spending the money)...
Yes, it's like a bath where the taps are on and providing X litres/s while Y litres/s are going down the plughole. X only needs to be a little bit bigger than Y for the water level to rise.
Of course, which is why I also said this...
...but even if somehow we could collectively reduce our carbon footprint to zero (likely impossible), it's likely that some warming is already inevitably started and the only long term solution would be to adapt our planet to sink the additional carbon output we will be producing...
Indeed. Under communism, comrade, all pigs will be equal. It's just the pigs at the top will have instant access to executive jets, Zil limos and dashas in the country, while the pigs at the bottom will wait twenty years for a Trabant.
That would simply be the fact that some pigs are more equal, right?
Build more bus stops or something. Would you prefer that there were ~40 times as many passenger vehicles on the road as busses? 101 is bad enough with the buses... Much like the "housing crisis" caused by "not allowing sufficient new housing to be built", the silicon valley cities are basically causing their own problems by completely ignoring demand.
Not to mention that the Muni/VTA theoretically uses the $2 fee to operate the buses while that cost is directly paid by the tech companies.
I think if Google and crew ponied up for their own private bus stops, the argument about stopping at existing stops is moot, right?
I don't think that SV cities not building enough houses is causing people to want to commute from SF. Certain people want to live in SF and having a job in SV is enabling more of them to compete for SF housing... Before these busses, I know many folks that live in SF and used public transportation (e.g., Caltrain) to get to work in SV. Also, there are plenty of housing in Tracy and Morgan Hill about the same distance from SV cities if it were simply about housing costs and availability...
Google and crew are simply catering to a the segment of their highly skilled 20-something workforce desires to live in SF and enabling them with attractive commute options (which is in line with other perks you offer the employees you want to recruit/retain). Sadly this seems to impact disproportionality a segment of the population of SF that doesn't benefit from this. OTOH, I'm sure the property owners near these transportation corridors are really-really happy about Gbus and the like driving up their rents and property values...
Oh yeah, that $2 doesn't pay for squat. SF-Muni has a 22% fare-box recovery ratio, and given the number of fare crashers in a typical SF-Muni bus, it's likely irrelevant to the people these shuttle busses are affecting. In contrast, BART has about a 60% fare-box recovery ratio which is more typical of public transit...
Try again...
If CO2 were a leading cause of warming, why would the temperatures not be spiking along with CO2 levels?
If you notice closely, they attempted to pose a slightly different question...
carbon dioxide (CO2) — the leading human-produced greenhouse gas and the principal human-produced driver of climate change.
If you ask the question like this, it's true. However, leading causes of warming is the sun and the other main gas driving global climate change is methane, neither of which is technically human produced.
If you want to get technical, if factor in our desires for growing plants, industrialization, keeping warm and eating beef, then both CO2 and methane are somewhat similar in that regard. There's about 200x the CO2 than methane in the atmosphere, but methane is about 86x better at trapping atmospheric heat.
It's easy to forget humans are likely responsible for only 25Gtons of the CO2 released, where the natural carbon cycle is about 750Gtons (+- a extra volcano eruptions which are about 40Gtons)... Human contribution is non-negligible, for sure, but natural variations are of the same scale. Certainly there is case to be made that doing something is better than nothing, but even if somehow we could collectively reduce our carbon footprint to zero (likely impossible), it's likely that some warming is already inevitably started and the only long term solution would be to adapt our planet to sink the additional carbon output we will be producing...
Truth be told, all the CO2 we humans are likely to responsible for is dwarfed by the Methane Clathrate Ice timebomb at the bottom of our oceans. All that stuff was there long before humans and has been theorized to be the source of historical global run-away climate events. It's probably already too late for this, so it's likely that adaptation for a higher climate variation is something we just have to adapt for...
Except it is paid for. The buses pay the city to use the infrastructure. What is this infrastructure you ask? It's a space on a street. When it is vacated, the city bus, on the rare occasions it's right behind a google bus, will move in and "use the infrastructure." More often than not it's the other way around because city buses are slow, ponderous, and take a long time to get people on them.
Clearly you have not actually experienced this first hand.
First, there's the google bus, then the yahoo bus, then the apple bus, then the facebook bus and then the ea bus, and then the ebay bus, and during rush how it's a mess (according to a friend of mine who used to live near Van Ness and worked near the Financial district and used to take Muni)
In the southbay, in Sunnyvale near me, a particular Gbus is parking in a VTA bus stop and waiting for a Caltrain connection nearly every day. Sometimes they get their early and wait jamming up traffic while they wait for googlers to try to get off Caltrain and attempt to make a timed transfer** I've seen VTA busses stuck in the long line of traffic behind me and I wonder if every time they did this they might cause a VTA passenger to miss their Caltrain connections. I guess it's tough shit for the VTA bus rider in this situation, because they Gbus schedules aren't public knowledge...
AFAIK, SF is currently charging $1/day for a stop. If you happen to be an uber or a tour bus operator, you would have to pay a $279 dollar ticket for doing something like this. To scale this, it's $2/person to ride muni, but only a $100 fine if you are caught by one of the 2 fare inspectors checking 1000 busses (okay, that's an exaggeration). Not that $4/stop would break their bank, but to say they these busses paying their fair share is a bit farcical, they are getting a golden deal that most uber and tour bus operators could only dream about...
The VTA (in the south bay) hasn't started charging google yet. Probably because google bribed Mountain View with some free shuttle busses (however, they only agreed to pay for the shuttle busses for 2 years). I imagine that will turn out to be even net worse because now people will get used to the shuttle, and demand that it not be terminated after the 2 years is up leaving MV footing the bill. Meanwhile, google is probably banking that all the furor of the busses will die off by then...
FWIW, here's a purported map of the problem areas on the SF side...
***note VTA doesn't have timed transfers, so if Caltrain is late, you miss the bus and have to wait for the next one. Likewize if you bus is late...
Before the US picked up the abandoned French effort for the Panama canal, the US was seriously considering building the Nicaragua canal*.
The Nicaraguan government was historically worried about British colonial aspirations in the area and basically invited the US in as a preemptive action to deter the British from action. By 1884 a treaty was negotiated to build the Nicaraguan canal and a US based canal company established to build it, but the company didn't accomplish too much before going bankrupt. The US was going to restart work on Nicaraguan canal, but whole Panama thing changed the US direction. It was only after the US financed the Panamanian revolution and the newly formed country of Panama decided to accept the terms of the previously negotiated Hay–Herrán Treaty (not actually ratified by Colombia) which discounted the French bankruptcy sale price from $100M to $40 to take over the French project.
Interest revived in in 1914 with the Bryan–Chamorro Treaty, but that never panned out either...
* see Sánchez-Merry Treaty and read this book...
the vast majority of people find staples like food, clothing, etc to be very expensive
That's an unfortunate reality of their economic power of the people, not the currency they use for transactions...
Of course if they returned to their own currency, they could devalue it to temporarily improve the lot of their poor (if you don't save money and don't have any capital and live day-to-day, devaluation doesn't hurt you as much), but ultimately that is another level of hell that they just got out of...
Local currency manipulation might be able to smooth over the rough patches, but improving the economic power of the population relative to the rest of the world is really the only way out.
I suspect the benefit of a digital currency is mostly to improve local liquidity of money given the country's current crushing sovereign debt load and critical need to preserved hard cash to finance it (as they've defaulted on bonds). A parallel virtual currency is much cheaper to deploy on short notics than a parallel physical currency.
This vaguely reminds me back in the 80's when I went to china, with their two-currency system (RMB vs FEC or foreign exchangeable currency). Nominally they were the "same" value, but of course their value in real life was quite different. I suspect the same will be true here...
a human operator won't even be required for safe operation; only to provide instructions about where to go.
I dunno, but letting humans decide where an autonomous vehicle should go, might still be a recipe for unsafe operation...
* Teenagers
* Elderly people with dementia
* Naïve people unfamiliar with local gang activity patterns
* Suicidal depressives
* etc...
We should always be concerned when you have human decision in the loop of a potentially dangerous machine (car, airplane, nuclear power plant, etc). It doesn't mean autonomous operation isn't valuable assistance (ABS, ATC, etc), it just means it isn't a total panacea for the safe operation...
Actually I would say that they should take one class on the principles of security...
Most of the problems with web security are not really novel to web program, but are systematic security issues that permeate all levels of software. For example, execution privilege (e.g., cross site), parameter checking (e.g, including buffer overruns and sql injection) aren't really novel to web application security.
Most folks seem to think that security is some sort of discipline or retro-fit on existing code, but it's really more similar to a style of programming (like an orthogonal axis to procedural vs object oriented vs functional programming), because most of the difficulty behind security relate to auditing/testing code and behavior.
Sadly and predictably, when you start talking about programming styles, you come up with all sorts of resistance from inflexible programmers and heaps of legacy code so security things generally things get avoided/overlooked/dismissed, and well, the predictable happens.
Odds are the so-called "secret-serum" is called ZMapp manufactured by a small biotech company called Mapp Biopharmaceutical...
Odds are this treatment is an optimized cocktail combining the best components of MB-003 and ZMAb (both appear to be three-mouse monoclonal antibody produced by exposing mice to fragments of the Ebola virus and extracting antibodies from their blood)...
Odds are these particular antibodies are actually manufactured in a plants, specifically Nicotiana, not extracted from animal blood.
Odds are you could find this information on this internet in less than 1 minute w/o suggesting or consulting a poorly researched, highly politicized book written in alarmist form.
Unfortunately, odds are many people are unable to use the internet effectively...
One advantage of vote-by-mail is that any large-scale fraud (enough to tip an election) takes quite a bit resources and people
One advantage of on-line voting is that minimal resource and people (e.g., as small as one person) can likely perpetrate such an action.
Two people can keep a secret (if one of them is dead). This is the difference.
This will probably go poorly; but it might actually go poorly in a visible enough way that they have to fix it or risk embarassment/lawsuits, rather than just having it go poorly more or less forever.
I vote for the go-poorly-more-or-less-forever...
The current state-of-the-art hotel security fail has pretty much flew under the public radar after a brief buzz, and apparently was so forgettable that it was even forgotten by many of the readers of slashdot...
I suspect they won't be getting an endorsement from Erin Edwards...
I suspect you mean Erin Andrews...
Okay, what is 'inadequate' (other than full disclosure)? What is 'irrelevant' about most of the information that is requested to be removed? Is information actually ever 'excessive' (e.g., TMI)? 'Inaccuracy' of course can be determined in a court (don't need DCMA-like takedowns requests for that)...
Seems like much of the information requested to be removed would be quite relevant to certain people in certain situation (although perhaps not most people in most situations)... So exactly how would such a person go about finding information relevant to them, if it was removed from view the general masses? It's quite a slippery slope there, right?
The name 'Gigafactory' is a shortcut for a battery factory capable of over a gigawatt-hour of annual production capacity.
In the case of Musk's proposed factory, it's projected to be capable of producing enough battery cells to store 35GWh of energy in a year. Since Tesla's Model S have 85kWh batteries, if you want to make a new line of car that sells more than 10,000 cars/year you can probably use a factory with the capacity of a Gigafactory (or multiple production lines of a smaller factory).
Some folks estimate Panasonic's current battery factory production capacities (multiple lines in multiple cities for multiple car companies) as being only able to support slightly north of 28K cars/month where the proposed single Gigafactory should be able to supply batteries at the rate at a similar rate to all existing capacity. Presumably there is some economy in scale (Tesla is estimating ~30%) which is what they are counting on...
if we can't trust society to act fairly under full disclosure, then selective disclosure is the only alternative to protect the disadvantaged.
Who exactly is disadvantaged? The person that may or may not act for their own personal self interest w/o full disclosure about another person or the person that conceals some information about themselves to prevent other people from acting in their own personal self interests?
Of course the 64-thousand dollar question is who exactly has the right to decide what information is personal enough to withhold? Certainly not the person (because they would withhold all negative information about themselves). Some faceless entity? We can see how that works out on things like internet dating sites (I'm thinking about the recent OkCupid fiasco)...
We can throw out examples ad-nauseum. What about hiring a caregiver for a child that unbeknownst to you is a binge drinker and tends to break speed limits? Is being a binge drinker or a speeder a matter of privacy (it probably isn't a legal issue)? What if the child was your kid and you needed your caregiver for transport between school and home? Maybe that person shouldn't be a caregiver anyhow? How about those folks that have AIDS and are deliberately reckless about spreading it around? How about that privacy in that case?
You can always find specific examples for both side of this argument, but what is the principles to decide? It's arbitrary and capricious to anyone stuck on the wrong side of the line, but clearly the only "pure" strategy is full disclosure, and exceptions should only be made to that on a case-by-case basis (if at all).
Take the first person that filed the lawsuit in Spain against Google linking to an article about being evicted from his home. I'm sure a future landlord of his might have found this relevant information even though he found it embarrassing... It's only the fact of some arbitrary determination that this information was no longer relevant to any future landlords that it was required to be removed. That's a real scalable principle... NOT!
Complete records must be kept indefinitely and will be audited against upstream connection logs.
So much for the right to be forgotten...
In Central Beijing (a very large city), most people live in large apartment buildings which have central heating. Although historically coal was used for these central boilers, most have been transitioned to coal gas. In smaller buildings, coal burning ovens have been transitioned to electric heat (where the coal is merely burned somewhere else)...
However, the biggest change is that has been made recently was to require new homes to be metered. Historically, residents simply paid heating bills relative to the size of their apartments (~20rmb/m^2) which gave little incentive for any efficiency (power company losses were generally subsidized by the government), but with metering and improved insulation upgrades, coupled with the natural gas and electric conversions, things in Beijing are looking up...
In the suburbs and surrounding cities... well, let's just say air pollution is usually not a local thing and the average pollution level hasn't seemed to have changed too much...
On the other hand, you can't really dismiss the whole idea of centralization being a potential solution to part of this problem. The infrastructure in China (esp Beijing) is quite centralized and the Chinese are generally quite good at getting things done when they have an incentive to do so...
There are no easy answers to any of these issues, but one thing is all but certain: throwing out everything our societies have learned over centuries about defending private lives and allowing people to move on from mistakes, just because a few Internet companies who have made staggering amounts of money might lose some of it if their business models were modestly inconvenienced, is not the only possible or potentially desirable way forward.
There are never any easy answers, but one thing is certain, this issue is not constrained to a few internet companies.
* Credit Reporting Bureaus (Callcredit, Equifax, Experian, CEG, Shufa)
* Educational institutions (and other information held by other Credential verification organizations)
* Background checks for Employment (including criminal and citizenship checks in the USA)
It's not clear that privacy principles are generally respected or even tolerated in these areas and mistakes you may have made often carry on for a very long time in many areas. One thing that society has learned over centuries is that when it comes to people, history is often a leading indicator of future behavior.
Depending on the current regimes influencing your life, you may or may not have a *right* to limit access to your history, but that does not reduce the value of that history to people that you interact with. Because of this inherent conflict of interest, there will likely never be a correct answer to this, only what we collectively agree (or disagree) about.
People have studied this type of thing in game theory (e.g., the Tit-for-tat). Many experiments and models suggest that the better outcomes happen if we forgive, but do not forget. In my opinion mostly these laws simply attempt to coerce forgiving behavior on the unwilling people by forcing them to forget. I'm not sure this is the best reductive way get the desired result.
Which is why I explicitly said 20th century.
...Because the language people speak in various lands around the world was decided by military actions in the 20th century?
Thanks for the irrelevant 400-year history lesson, though.
No, no, thank you for confirming what I was thinking...
And yet strangely the two largest language groups are Mandarin and Spanish, the two least successful millitaries of the 20th century.
However, in 200BC, the Qin (aka Chin) dynasty had quite the army, and in the 16th and early 17th century, Spain had quite the military/navy.
FWIW, much of the geopolitical world as we know it wasn't formed in the 20th century. Much of the current geo-political alignments of the world were formed as a result of the Holy roman empire in the 800's, the exploits of Genghis Khan in the 12th century, and early Spanish explorers (and conquistadors) in the Americas. Of course the weapons they manufactured back then were primitive by modern standards, they managed to shape the world as we know it.
Of course no dynasty lasts forever...
Seriously, can we get a can analogy (yeah, I know, imagine a perfectly spherical car, bastards! ;-)
Neutron star: imagine what happens when you trade in your Ford Aerostar under the Cash-for-Clunkers program...
Such a car is not massive enough to become a black hole consuming all your gas money, but bigger than a Crown-V (aka Chandrasekhar limit) which is the largest car that ends it's life as a white dud (aka dwarf).