Of course it goes both ways. The various government agencies have been vastly overrstepping their bounds in pursuit of achieving their legal mandate, and the Russians have been actively tampering with our election. The problem is not that the NSA is doing their job, it is the actual job they have been mandated to perform is unconscionable.
In response to his "they are heros" statement, I say no, they are no better than the German soldiers who performed the Nazis work. Those soldiers were also given a legal mandate to perform their jobs, and they performed their jobs well. Very few of them ever stood up and said that the job itself was evil. The few US government agency employees who have stood up and said this is wrong have been persecuted by the government instead of being hailed as heros. The very fact this guy can't tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys is a very ominous sign for our country and indeed the world at large.
Compared to many countries, the United States has an educated and enthusiastic workforce.Productive workers offset some amount of taxation.
Bwahahahaha,
Haven't spent much time working outside the states have you?
Our work ethic and quality is actually pretty typical. What has always made the US an economic powerhouse is technological superiority. As that edge is slowly eroded, other nations have surpassed us in productivity, and the US will only slide further down that list as other nations advance. Trump is right in that we should do something to "make America great again". The only trouble is he doesn't have the foggiest clue how to actually do it.
Make repatriating money easier and cheaper and two things will happen:
1) money will come back into the US and help our economy
2) whoever does it will be crucified for being easy on big business income taxes.
Yeah, I think we've had enough of the carrot in American business.
How about this for a plan: Change the tax code to tax them at 35% whether they bring the money back to the US or not. If they have been holding out like apple, add a special provision that its 45% just because fuck em.
If trump were to actually grow a set and use the stick instead of the carrot, he might actually get re-elected in four years (Assuming they don't figure out how to impeach him first, and even then he STILL might get re-elected).
I guess that's why they don't use tanks and use fuel cells instead then.
Just in case you actually don't know what a fuel cell is: Its an electricity generator, not a fuel storage device. You still have to have something to store the fuel in (a tank). The fuel is then transfered into the Fuel cell slowly where it is converted into electricity and waste products (water in the case of hydrogen fuel cells).
Are you telling me they can't put it in a tank designed to store liquid hydrogen?
A tank designed to contain liquid hydrogen has to be kept *cold*, *very cold*. Failure to do so causes the tank to rupture, and you will get a massive conflagration if not outright explosion.
Cryogenics plants are not small, or light. If you change that from liquid hydrogen to compressed hydrogen gas, that is now a factor of 40, not 4.
Compressed hydrogen gas actually makes lithium ion look safe by comparison. Liquid Hydrocarbon fuels are not explosive under vary many scenarios, usually requiring a heated pressurized environment. Many types of hydrocarbon fuels wont even burn under normal STP. Hydrogen gas by contrast loves to burn, and is a mess to contain (leaking hydrogen has no smell, and it is perfectly possible for a container to leak hydrogen but be "air tight" to everything else).
1 Average of annual losses in 2005 through 2014. Estimated losses in 2014 for the entire United States were about 5%.
I was intentionally using worst case numbers for everything. My point was to illustrate that even when comparing best case gasoline numbers against worst case electric numbers, the balance is still wildly in favor of electrics...
The best of the lot: Flyweheels are fundamentally limited by how much mechanical energy can be stored safely in a flywheel. A flywheel significant enough to store the energy of a 2 ton motor vehicle moving at 75 MPH is going to require so much mass that it will actually impair the maneuverability of the vehicle (unless it is fully gimbaled, in which case, it is going to weigh a lot more, and will require a hugely complex slip-ring arrangement, which will take up a huge amount of space).
One of the most powerful flywheel systems ever built was a 133kwH pack for railway use. It occupied the better part of a locomotive, weighed 25 tons, and could accelerate the locomotive to cruising speed (although not much more). Compare that to Tesla's 80kwH pack that fits handily inside a passenger vehicles with room to spare for other amenities such as passengers. Flywheels have had 100+ years of research and that is the best it gets. Batteries on the other hand have had around 20 years of real research, and there is still a lot of room for them to continue improving.
I'm sorry to have to tell you that if you got a mechanical engineering degree hoping to design vehicles, you wasted your time. The future of transportation is electric, and not even a trillion dollar automotive industry could prevent it forever.
Gasoline on the road versus coal/natural gas/etc... in a power plant, then transferred at a slight loss through the electric grid, transferred at a loss to charge batteries, then transferred at a loss again into mechanical energy. That is ignoring the additional problems with the complex chemistry, manufacture, and eventual disposal of batteries versus steel and aluminum engines.
Almost certainly not better when everything is accounted for.
Ok; lets pick that apart, only this time with actual knowledge instead of your "intuition".
First, Gasoline engines are around 20% efficient. That means you burn 5 gallons of gas and get 1 gallon of gas worth of actual travel. Plus, Gasoline cars do not have regenerative breaking (we'll get to that later).
Second, Electricity production using Natural Gas has 35% efficiency. So for that equivalent 5 gallons of gas, you get 1.666 gallons of gas worth of travel, but you have to add charging efficiency, battery to wheel efficiency and of course transmission line efficiency. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to look those up, but For rough numbers, the battery to road efficiency is about 87%, the transmission line efficiency is about 50%, and the charging efficiency is about 85%. There are some other minor factors, but the big ones above are the main items. So, you take and multiply all of the efficiencies number to get the final efficiency. With electric vehicles, that efficiency is about 13% all told.
So! now we know that gas engines really are more efficient! Not so fast, heres where that regenerative breaking I mentioned above comes into play. There is no known way to convert mechanical energy back into gasoline, but with an electric vehicle, the circuits to take mechanical energy and put it back into the battery when breaking are very trivial to make. That means that the amount of energy it takes to make an electric car with regen breaking go 1 mile is far far less than it is to make a gasoline car go the same distance when all other factors are included. This number is typically 1/4 of the energy on average. That means that of that original 5 gallons of gas worth of energy, the electric car only got.64 gallons, but that will take the car 2.58 gallons of gas worth of distance while the gasoline car only got a gallon of gas worth of distance. Regen breaking is the key folks, always has been. With electric vehicles, regen is almost automatically included. With all other types of propulsion, it is a nasty and complex problem that is usually solved by ---- you guessed it---- adding a battery and electric motor...
Wow, I think we might be seeing an actual difference. There was never any difference between Democrats and Republicans
But there might be some difference between Trump and Democrats/Republicans. Most of it could be bad, but still...
A very large segment of the population no logner cares if trump is good or bad, they are just sick of getting screwed by the politicians, and if trump ends up screwing them just like every other president in recent history, at least some of the elites are likely to take it in the shorts as well. Its the scorched earth mentality, and it is the logical result of 30+ years of policy that favors the wealthy at everyone elses expense. Anyone who thinks that this is a strictly the republicans doing, needs to take a close look a the Clinton economic policy (both of them) to realize that the democrats were just as complicit. These asshole politicians made their own bed over the last three decades and are either so insulated from their actual constituency, or so corrupt they don't care how bad they are screwing the majority of the people. I for one loathe Both trump and Clinton, but at least with Trump there is a chance that those with the power and the money will get the hint and in 4 years will put some policies on the table that actually benefit society instead of the new feudal lords. Policies like single payer health care, and free education are not just nice sounding ideas, they are all that stands between the trump hordes and open revolution. Trump was just a warning shot, the next round will be played with live ammo.
Easily the most annoying problem in programming I face is functional requirements not being fully specced out before the project begins
This is one of the most fundamentally misunderstood problems in software design. Probably because it is not really a software problem at all, but a business problem, and the solutions require intelligent business decisions which seem to be beyond everyone.
The solution to the specification problem is not more detailed design specs. The reason is simple. The people writing the detailed spec are not the people using the software, and they are not the people writing the software, so they are in no way competent at providing communications between the two. All of the successful software designs that I have seen are the result of competent programmers becoming involved in the completion of a task that software automation would apply very well to. Those people then subsequently write the software applying their first-hand knowledge of how the software will be used, and what the users needs are.
If you want your software to be very well designed, sit the programmers down to perform the job of the people who will use the software. They need to become proficient at this job, so a 1 week training course aint going to cut it. You need them to spend at least a month doing the job.
If you have the software developers do this, you will get exceptional results without the need for any kind of specification, or other real involvement, because the programmers are naturally very good at optimizing processes, otherwise they wouldn't be good at programming at all. The client gets the features they need, want, and didn't even know they could have. The software design itself is cleaner and faster because the developers have a fully fleshed out idea of what the software needs to do, and can design to meet the need instead of designing to meet a spec that may or may not remotely resemble what is feasible , practical, or correct.
Every major company out there breaks visa laws is huge ways, and that the government is complicit in it.
That doesn't make it acceptable behavior for a presidential candidate. As many as 1 in three women are sexually assaulted, 1 in 10 men. Does that mean that it is acceptable for a rapist to be president, because he/she know how rapists think and promises to end sexual assault?
Trump knows this, he knows that companies are forced to break laws to compete. And his turning this around will benefit everyone, on every level of society.
The man has absolutely no incentive to change any of that, and all of the incentive in the world to leave it as it is. When/if he gets out of office, he will go back to his business, where he will have to work within whatever he sets up. He has no reason in the world to fix anything while he is in office, and there is plenty of reason to believe he will not do anything he has promised. The man is a pathological liar. His track record of contradicting himself, and provable significant lies is so long and distinguished that there is practically no way of knowing what he will actually do, other than based on his recorded actions, which I am afraid are indicative of a person who will do whatever he pleases and damn the consequences to anyone else.
There was and is only one candidate in this election with the integrity and consistent history of actions that indicates they would do good by people. Unfortunately he is not on the ballot in my state, nor any other that I am aware of.
Sanders for president. We don't need the delusional crazy asshole for president, and we don't need the reckless more-of-the-same candidate for president. We've had 30 years of the more-of-the-same presidents and it has gotten us massively into debt, ruined our economy through two major recessions, put an entire race of people behind bars for no good reason and created record income inequality in our country. Both major parties have been complicit in fucking over the masses for the benefit of the privileged few. Now the chickens have come home to roost with Trump, but don't for one second think to come to my door complaining about how things turn out when it comes back to bite all of you in the ass, because I will be defending whats mine with the fury of a thousands suns because I wont let the idiots of this world use democracy to screw over me and mine.
Trump followed the law, but wants change trade law and work visa laws to stop that sort of thing in the future.
No, Trump broke the law, and he got away with it because of his ability to bribe his way out. He is and always has been the worst kind of filth this country can produce. He continues to thrive because so many Americans are so clueless as to the ways the world really works, that they will let him say and do anything he wants without consequences. Trumps remarkable success this election season is proof positive that Democracy is a failure. Sooner or later, the ignorant masses will do something monumentally self-destructive, and Democracy gives them the power to do so.
Please note that when I say ignorant masses, I mean people who do not have a clear understanding of the consequences of their own actions. People who believe that Trump is somehow going to change course after 50 years of screwing everyone around him to make a buck, and is somehow going to work for the benefit of the American people. People who believe that after 3 marriages and god-knows how many affairs that somehow Trump is past all that, and is now a moral man.
People (and by people here, I mean almost every human on the planet) are particularly bad at seeing beyond their own prejudices. Americans see politicians how they want to see them: As good guys or bad guys, and they are not about to let reality impede on those opinions. Its times like these that have convinced me the human race is doomed, and that we deserve the fate were building for ourselves.
These actually appear to be some of the most reasonable "boondoggles" ever to have been co-financed by US taxes. Certainly it appears better to fund technological R&D than to finance useless wars or $5000 off-the-shelf hammers or ridiculous finance flows in healthcare and others.
Lets not forget those endless tax breaks for the wealthiest 1%, and enough loopholes in the tax code so they can enjoy not paying taxes at all...
US manned spaceflight has been littered with cutting corners for fifty years. So was Russian manned spaceflight, for that matter.
The Russians were epically careless, and life in Russia is cheap. They would have crammed a lit stick of dynamite down a cosmonauts throat if they thought any part of him might make it into space that way...
The average school budget in the US is between $10000 and $20000 per student-year. An adequate computer shouldn't cost over $500 and most of the software needed is available in "close-enough" form as freeware. Your claim is off by a factor of 20 to 40.
Adding an extra $500 per student is kiss of death to these kinds of things. Your lack of understanding as to where that money goes is disheartening. Education is resource intensive like no other industry because of several factors. First, unlike retail, wholesale, and services, your budget per customer has to accoodate their prolonged daily use of the product of every single customer. This means your infrastructure costs are going to be massively higher than any other industry. Add on top of that, your labor costs are far more complicated, in that it takes far more labor resources to provide teaching than most people realize. Its not just the lone teacher at the front of the class, but the small army of maintenance, janotorial and other staff that are needed to make a school run.
Now on top of all that, lets go to middle America. A place where the median household income is around $40k. You want the typical 2 child family to shell out how much per year for education? $10k per student? thats a $20k per year burden, or half of that families income. Or lets say you want to spread that cost to the entire community, but that includes asking the childless and elderly to pay a very large portion of their income for a service they will never get any direct benefit from. The problem you will quickly run into is that those folks vote too, and you have to tread a fine line with your school budget or they will vote your budget down in a hurry.
All of that adds up to a very precarious balance in the school budget that often has a hard time coming up with the $150 per student to buy used text books, can barely pay their teachers a wage that will keep them from having to have 2 jobs just to eat and still has a hard time getting passed when the town / village gets to vote on it. Thats the budget you want to add $500 to? I'm afraid you hadn't thought that through very clearly.
As an exercise, I would recommend picking any middle class neighborhood in the country and go door to door campaigning for a $45 per month increase in their taxes per child in their household to pay for those laptops and see how long you can keep your limbs attached to your body.
Municipalities are incorporated for the benefit of the people that live in them, not to make a profit. They are not businesses.
Any profit that municipalities make is that much less in taxes they have to levy on their citizens. Even a moron can see the benefit to a municipality's citizens when they provide a profitable service to their neighbors...
The only loosers here are the hypothetical company that wants those 200 customers in the future.
The ISPs/telcos are not fighting this because they think those particular 200 people will ever be customers of theirs (they have no plans to *ever* provide service in those locations). They are threatened by the precedent this sets, and the they worry about the day when all citizens realize they should ask their local government to do exactly this same thing, and provide local utility services directly and use the profits to offset taxes. A few rural towns and counties do it, no big deal. Pittsburg does it and all of a sudden the established players are no longer profitable at all, and all of the profit they used to get goes to the local governments instead. Ultimately, it seems like a fitting punishment for the way the huge telcos/isps have been taking public money to provide infrastructure and have instead been dragging their feet and screwing the people. To all those who believe that government should be prevented from engaging in profitable business, I have just one observation. The only thing less effective at providing services efficiently than government agencies is government subsidized private industry providing those same services.
Even better idea, Put a 3 year moratorium on municipalities entering any market segment they are not already in. If the ISPs want those customers, they have three years to get there first. After that, its fair game for any local government...
Amazon's just going to slowly grab more and more of your wallet
As long as their competition continues to not "get it" Amazon is going to continue to grow. I go to amazon because I can buy absolutely anything there, and it will be cheaper there than anywhere else. Amazons third party sales thing is absolutely brilliant as it brings more products to amazon, and brings more customers to the site.
If the automated driver system in Tesla cars has caused more than 1.13 deaths per 100 million miles driven, he would seem to have it backward.
No, he has it perfectly right. To illustrate, lets use something I like to call "math"
As of the closest thing we have to actual data, fatalities in autonomous vehicles right now are approximately 4.5 deaths per 100 million miles. As you can see, the current fatality rate for autonomous vehicles is about 4 times the human rate. It seems like they are killing more people than saving so what gives? The secret is in the rate of improvement. Human drivers have shown an approximately 25% reduction in deaths per mile every decade. That means it took 40 years to go from 4.5 deaths per 100mmi to 1.13 deaths per 100mmi. As of 2014, Google has estimated that if its vehicles were allowed to operate at full speed the fatality rate would have been around 50-100 per 100mmi, which is a whopping 91% reduction in 2 years. assuming they maintain that rate of improvement for 5 more years, the human fatality rate will be about 0.988 fatalities per 100mmi while the autonomous vehicle fatality rate will be approximately 0.02 fatalities per 100mmi.
Assuming a linear relationship rather than geometric (to make the math a lot simpler without affecting the answer much), and we will get and average fatality rate for humans of 1.059 fatalities per 100mmi, whole autonomous vehicles would average 2.26 fatalities per 100mmi. Sounds bad, but what about the 5 years after that? humans: 0.8645 fatalities per 100 mmi. Autonomous vehicles: 0.01 fatalities per 100 mmi. Given an annual death toll of 35k, that amounts to an excess of 34,500 deaths per year for every year after 5 years from now. If we delay that progress for 5 years, then in the mean time an excess of 34,500 people will die for every year that autonomous vehicles are delayed.
Those number are far more pessimistic in that they assume that we are talking about a 100% conversion to autonomous vehicles right now. Since we are in fact talking about a vanishingly small percentage of actual vehicles initially, the cost in lives for the development of autonomous vehicles is practically non-existant, while the end state savings are phenomenal. Ultimately, Automakers should be given a 5 year moratorium on liability so long as they can demonstrate sufficient continued improvement in performance (say 33% annual reduction in fatalities per mile.). After 3 years it will be safer to be in an autonomous vehicle. After 10 years driving a car manually would be tantamount to drunk driving.
The question of how safe autonomous vehicles are is a stupid question, as it is obvious to nearly everyone who knows which end of an equation is which that we *will* reach a point where autonomous vehicles are safer, and the sooner we get there the less lives will be lost before we get to have the benefits.
The surest way to halt that progress is through liability stemming from the over application of our American legal framework. Our legal system almost entirely fails to consider the larger implications of any given law, in favor of the application of precedents and procedures. You could make a very real argument that a single liability lawsuit, at this stage in the game could delay the deployment of autonomous vehicles by a decade or more, which would effectively condemn over 300,000 people to die needlessly
The automakers need to be given a temporary liability shield, in exchange for which they must demonstrate continued improvement in autonomous safety performance, and after 5 years they must release *all* hardware designs including source code to the public domain so that the other automakers can implement these life saving systems properly. After 10 years it should become illegal to sell any new vehicle that does not have full autonomous capability, and after 15 years, it should be illegal to operate a vehicle manually on public roads.
Actually I got my degree in engineering, nice try moron. By the way that's what AI prioritization decisions are, engineering. You wouldn't understand that, obviously.
Three things:
First, if you had truly understood the engineering you were learning in school, then it would have gotten through to you pretty quick that from an engineering standpoint, one human is as good as another, and you solve the problem in front of you, not worry about a problem that can't easily be translated into the engineering domain and has very little value there anyways. Engineering is about affecting maximum results for minimum cost. The task of trying to decide which particular set of humans to save in a catastrophic event is something straight out of sci-fi and fantasy, and has no bearing on the real world. The task of framing such a decision into a structure that would even allow for a computational model to make such a decision is monumental. Those resources could be far better spent elsewhere. Engineering is all about the bottom line. They don't save people, they make things statistically safer. If you can't understand the difference, you have no business as an engineer.
Second: You will find it near impossible to convince anyone of anything when you repeatedly use personal attacks and insults where they are neither warranted nor useful. Any time spent at all in any liberal arts should teach you that you don't influence people by being an ass.
Third, if you want to be taken seriously in any adult conversation, put you name to what you say. I fully support a persons right to anonymity, but I have found that people who know their name wont be on something put very little effort into adding quality to their work, and people who see a statement made anonymously will discount it as worthless garbage (and rightly so in most cases).
The question of what AI prioritizes as it becomes ubiquitous technology is a matter of life and death for some people in the future.
There are far more important things to worry about, and Mercedes is correct in their assessment that the value added work to be performed is in avoiding these situations altogether. The percentage of actual auto accidents in which there is some moral conundrum that requires a decision as to which person or persons is going to die are vanishingly small. There is almost never a situation in which the only path to safety is through the crowd...
GP is right. Philosophy is for those who can't actually *DO*. Philosophers try to make up for that lacking by trying to tell others what they "should" do.
To all those liberal arts majors out there, progress is made by the scientists and engineers who roll up their sleeves and do the work, not that wank all idiots who sit and talk about it all day. If you want some say in what gets done, then be one of the people who does the work, otherwise shut up sit down and enjoy the ride because you're going to be a passenger in your own life.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't have it both ways.
Of course it goes both ways. The various government agencies have been vastly overrstepping their bounds in pursuit of achieving their legal mandate, and the Russians have been actively tampering with our election. The problem is not that the NSA is doing their job, it is the actual job they have been mandated to perform is unconscionable.
In response to his "they are heros" statement, I say no, they are no better than the German soldiers who performed the Nazis work. Those soldiers were also given a legal mandate to perform their jobs, and they performed their jobs well. Very few of them ever stood up and said that the job itself was evil. The few US government agency employees who have stood up and said this is wrong have been persecuted by the government instead of being hailed as heros. The very fact this guy can't tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys is a very ominous sign for our country and indeed the world at large.
Compared to many countries, the United States has an educated and enthusiastic workforce.Productive workers offset some amount of taxation.
Bwahahahaha,
Haven't spent much time working outside the states have you?
Our work ethic and quality is actually pretty typical. What has always made the US an economic powerhouse is technological superiority. As that edge is slowly eroded, other nations have surpassed us in productivity, and the US will only slide further down that list as other nations advance. Trump is right in that we should do something to "make America great again". The only trouble is he doesn't have the foggiest clue how to actually do it.
Make repatriating money easier and cheaper and two things will happen: 1) money will come back into the US and help our economy 2) whoever does it will be crucified for being easy on big business income taxes.
Yeah, I think we've had enough of the carrot in American business.
How about this for a plan: Change the tax code to tax them at 35% whether they bring the money back to the US or not. If they have been holding out like apple, add a special provision that its 45% just because fuck em.
If trump were to actually grow a set and use the stick instead of the carrot, he might actually get re-elected in four years (Assuming they don't figure out how to impeach him first, and even then he STILL might get re-elected).
I guess that's why they don't use tanks and use fuel cells instead then.
Just in case you actually don't know what a fuel cell is: Its an electricity generator, not a fuel storage device. You still have to have something to store the fuel in (a tank). The fuel is then transfered into the Fuel cell slowly where it is converted into electricity and waste products (water in the case of hydrogen fuel cells).
Are you telling me they can't put it in a tank designed to store liquid hydrogen?
A tank designed to contain liquid hydrogen has to be kept *cold*, *very cold*. Failure to do so causes the tank to rupture, and you will get a massive conflagration if not outright explosion.
Cryogenics plants are not small, or light. If you change that from liquid hydrogen to compressed hydrogen gas, that is now a factor of 40, not 4.
Compressed hydrogen gas actually makes lithium ion look safe by comparison. Liquid Hydrocarbon fuels are not explosive under vary many scenarios, usually requiring a heated pressurized environment. Many types of hydrocarbon fuels wont even burn under normal STP. Hydrogen gas by contrast loves to burn, and is a mess to contain (leaking hydrogen has no smell, and it is perfectly possible for a container to leak hydrogen but be "air tight" to everything else).
1 Average of annual losses in 2005 through 2014. Estimated losses in 2014 for the entire United States were about 5%.
I was intentionally using worst case numbers for everything. My point was to illustrate that even when comparing best case gasoline numbers against worst case electric numbers, the balance is still wildly in favor of electrics...
You would get even bigger savings.
Ummm, No.
The best of the lot: Flyweheels are fundamentally limited by how much mechanical energy can be stored safely in a flywheel. A flywheel significant enough to store the energy of a 2 ton motor vehicle moving at 75 MPH is going to require so much mass that it will actually impair the maneuverability of the vehicle (unless it is fully gimbaled, in which case, it is going to weigh a lot more, and will require a hugely complex slip-ring arrangement, which will take up a huge amount of space).
One of the most powerful flywheel systems ever built was a 133kwH pack for railway use. It occupied the better part of a locomotive, weighed 25 tons, and could accelerate the locomotive to cruising speed (although not much more). Compare that to Tesla's 80kwH pack that fits handily inside a passenger vehicles with room to spare for other amenities such as passengers. Flywheels have had 100+ years of research and that is the best it gets. Batteries on the other hand have had around 20 years of real research, and there is still a lot of room for them to continue improving.
I'm sorry to have to tell you that if you got a mechanical engineering degree hoping to design vehicles, you wasted your time. The future of transportation is electric, and not even a trillion dollar automotive industry could prevent it forever.
Coal fired plants have higher efficiency, around 45%to 50%
Nuclear is around 26%-28%, but carries a whole other bag of problems.
Solar is by far and gone the best option, as it can dramatically reduce the transmission losses (Solar is generally a distributed power source).
Gasoline on the road versus coal/natural gas/etc... in a power plant, then transferred at a slight loss through the electric grid, transferred at a loss to charge batteries, then transferred at a loss again into mechanical energy. That is ignoring the additional problems with the complex chemistry, manufacture, and eventual disposal of batteries versus steel and aluminum engines. Almost certainly not better when everything is accounted for.
Ok; lets pick that apart, only this time with actual knowledge instead of your "intuition".
First, Gasoline engines are around 20% efficient. That means you burn 5 gallons of gas and get 1 gallon of gas worth of actual travel. Plus, Gasoline cars do not have regenerative breaking (we'll get to that later).
Second, Electricity production using Natural Gas has 35% efficiency. So for that equivalent 5 gallons of gas, you get 1.666 gallons of gas worth of travel, but you have to add charging efficiency, battery to wheel efficiency and of course transmission line efficiency. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to look those up, but For rough numbers, the battery to road efficiency is about 87%, the transmission line efficiency is about 50%, and the charging efficiency is about 85%. There are some other minor factors, but the big ones above are the main items. So, you take and multiply all of the efficiencies number to get the final efficiency. With electric vehicles, that efficiency is about 13% all told.
So! now we know that gas engines really are more efficient! Not so fast, heres where that regenerative breaking I mentioned above comes into play. There is no known way to convert mechanical energy back into gasoline, but with an electric vehicle, the circuits to take mechanical energy and put it back into the battery when breaking are very trivial to make. That means that the amount of energy it takes to make an electric car with regen breaking go 1 mile is far far less than it is to make a gasoline car go the same distance when all other factors are included. This number is typically 1/4 of the energy on average. That means that of that original 5 gallons of gas worth of energy, the electric car only got .64 gallons, but that will take the car 2.58 gallons of gas worth of distance while the gasoline car only got a gallon of gas worth of distance. Regen breaking is the key folks, always has been. With electric vehicles, regen is almost automatically included. With all other types of propulsion, it is a nasty and complex problem that is usually solved by ---- you guessed it---- adding a battery and electric motor...
Wow, I think we might be seeing an actual difference. There was never any difference between Democrats and Republicans But there might be some difference between Trump and Democrats/Republicans. Most of it could be bad, but still...
A very large segment of the population no logner cares if trump is good or bad, they are just sick of getting screwed by the politicians, and if trump ends up screwing them just like every other president in recent history, at least some of the elites are likely to take it in the shorts as well. Its the scorched earth mentality, and it is the logical result of 30+ years of policy that favors the wealthy at everyone elses expense. Anyone who thinks that this is a strictly the republicans doing, needs to take a close look a the Clinton economic policy (both of them) to realize that the democrats were just as complicit. These asshole politicians made their own bed over the last three decades and are either so insulated from their actual constituency, or so corrupt they don't care how bad they are screwing the majority of the people. I for one loathe Both trump and Clinton, but at least with Trump there is a chance that those with the power and the money will get the hint and in 4 years will put some policies on the table that actually benefit society instead of the new feudal lords. Policies like single payer health care, and free education are not just nice sounding ideas, they are all that stands between the trump hordes and open revolution. Trump was just a warning shot, the next round will be played with live ammo.
Easily the most annoying problem in programming I face is functional requirements not being fully specced out before the project begins
This is one of the most fundamentally misunderstood problems in software design. Probably because it is not really a software problem at all, but a business problem, and the solutions require intelligent business decisions which seem to be beyond everyone.
The solution to the specification problem is not more detailed design specs. The reason is simple. The people writing the detailed spec are not the people using the software, and they are not the people writing the software, so they are in no way competent at providing communications between the two. All of the successful software designs that I have seen are the result of competent programmers becoming involved in the completion of a task that software automation would apply very well to. Those people then subsequently write the software applying their first-hand knowledge of how the software will be used, and what the users needs are.
If you want your software to be very well designed, sit the programmers down to perform the job of the people who will use the software. They need to become proficient at this job, so a 1 week training course aint going to cut it. You need them to spend at least a month doing the job.
If you have the software developers do this, you will get exceptional results without the need for any kind of specification, or other real involvement, because the programmers are naturally very good at optimizing processes, otherwise they wouldn't be good at programming at all. The client gets the features they need, want, and didn't even know they could have. The software design itself is cleaner and faster because the developers have a fully fleshed out idea of what the software needs to do, and can design to meet the need instead of designing to meet a spec that may or may not remotely resemble what is feasible , practical, or correct.
Every major company out there breaks visa laws is huge ways, and that the government is complicit in it.
That doesn't make it acceptable behavior for a presidential candidate. As many as 1 in three women are sexually assaulted, 1 in 10 men. Does that mean that it is acceptable for a rapist to be president, because he/she know how rapists think and promises to end sexual assault?
Trump knows this, he knows that companies are forced to break laws to compete. And his turning this around will benefit everyone, on every level of society.
The man has absolutely no incentive to change any of that, and all of the incentive in the world to leave it as it is. When/if he gets out of office, he will go back to his business, where he will have to work within whatever he sets up. He has no reason in the world to fix anything while he is in office, and there is plenty of reason to believe he will not do anything he has promised. The man is a pathological liar. His track record of contradicting himself, and provable significant lies is so long and distinguished that there is practically no way of knowing what he will actually do, other than based on his recorded actions, which I am afraid are indicative of a person who will do whatever he pleases and damn the consequences to anyone else.
There was and is only one candidate in this election with the integrity and consistent history of actions that indicates they would do good by people. Unfortunately he is not on the ballot in my state, nor any other that I am aware of.
Sanders for president. We don't need the delusional crazy asshole for president, and we don't need the reckless more-of-the-same candidate for president. We've had 30 years of the more-of-the-same presidents and it has gotten us massively into debt, ruined our economy through two major recessions, put an entire race of people behind bars for no good reason and created record income inequality in our country. Both major parties have been complicit in fucking over the masses for the benefit of the privileged few. Now the chickens have come home to roost with Trump, but don't for one second think to come to my door complaining about how things turn out when it comes back to bite all of you in the ass, because I will be defending whats mine with the fury of a thousands suns because I wont let the idiots of this world use democracy to screw over me and mine.
Trump followed the law, but wants change trade law and work visa laws to stop that sort of thing in the future.
No, Trump broke the law, and he got away with it because of his ability to bribe his way out. He is and always has been the worst kind of filth this country can produce. He continues to thrive because so many Americans are so clueless as to the ways the world really works, that they will let him say and do anything he wants without consequences. Trumps remarkable success this election season is proof positive that Democracy is a failure. Sooner or later, the ignorant masses will do something monumentally self-destructive, and Democracy gives them the power to do so.
Please note that when I say ignorant masses, I mean people who do not have a clear understanding of the consequences of their own actions. People who believe that Trump is somehow going to change course after 50 years of screwing everyone around him to make a buck, and is somehow going to work for the benefit of the American people. People who believe that after 3 marriages and god-knows how many affairs that somehow Trump is past all that, and is now a moral man.
People (and by people here, I mean almost every human on the planet) are particularly bad at seeing beyond their own prejudices. Americans see politicians how they want to see them: As good guys or bad guys, and they are not about to let reality impede on those opinions. Its times like these that have convinced me the human race is doomed, and that we deserve the fate were building for ourselves.
These actually appear to be some of the most reasonable "boondoggles" ever to have been co-financed by US taxes. Certainly it appears better to fund technological R&D than to finance useless wars or $5000 off-the-shelf hammers or ridiculous finance flows in healthcare and others.
Lets not forget those endless tax breaks for the wealthiest 1%, and enough loopholes in the tax code so they can enjoy not paying taxes at all...
US manned spaceflight has been littered with cutting corners for fifty years. So was Russian manned spaceflight, for that matter.
The Russians were epically careless, and life in Russia is cheap. They would have crammed a lit stick of dynamite down a cosmonauts throat if they thought any part of him might make it into space that way...
where 90% of the children are raised by single parents.
Did you correlate the incidence of single motherhood against the rates of incarceration of fathers for drug offenses? No?
Try it some time, the statistical evidence is highly suggestive...
The average school budget in the US is between $10000 and $20000 per student-year. An adequate computer shouldn't cost over $500 and most of the software needed is available in "close-enough" form as freeware. Your claim is off by a factor of 20 to 40.
Adding an extra $500 per student is kiss of death to these kinds of things. Your lack of understanding as to where that money goes is disheartening. Education is resource intensive like no other industry because of several factors. First, unlike retail, wholesale, and services, your budget per customer has to accoodate their prolonged daily use of the product of every single customer. This means your infrastructure costs are going to be massively higher than any other industry. Add on top of that, your labor costs are far more complicated, in that it takes far more labor resources to provide teaching than most people realize. Its not just the lone teacher at the front of the class, but the small army of maintenance, janotorial and other staff that are needed to make a school run.
Now on top of all that, lets go to middle America. A place where the median household income is around $40k. You want the typical 2 child family to shell out how much per year for education? $10k per student? thats a $20k per year burden, or half of that families income. Or lets say you want to spread that cost to the entire community, but that includes asking the childless and elderly to pay a very large portion of their income for a service they will never get any direct benefit from. The problem you will quickly run into is that those folks vote too, and you have to tread a fine line with your school budget or they will vote your budget down in a hurry.
All of that adds up to a very precarious balance in the school budget that often has a hard time coming up with the $150 per student to buy used text books, can barely pay their teachers a wage that will keep them from having to have 2 jobs just to eat and still has a hard time getting passed when the town / village gets to vote on it. Thats the budget you want to add $500 to? I'm afraid you hadn't thought that through very clearly.
As an exercise, I would recommend picking any middle class neighborhood in the country and go door to door campaigning for a $45 per month increase in their taxes per child in their household to pay for those laptops and see how long you can keep your limbs attached to your body.
Municipalities are incorporated for the benefit of the people that live in them, not to make a profit. They are not businesses.
Any profit that municipalities make is that much less in taxes they have to levy on their citizens. Even a moron can see the benefit to a municipality's citizens when they provide a profitable service to their neighbors...
The only loosers here are the hypothetical company that wants those 200 customers in the future.
The ISPs/telcos are not fighting this because they think those particular 200 people will ever be customers of theirs (they have no plans to *ever* provide service in those locations). They are threatened by the precedent this sets, and the they worry about the day when all citizens realize they should ask their local government to do exactly this same thing, and provide local utility services directly and use the profits to offset taxes. A few rural towns and counties do it, no big deal. Pittsburg does it and all of a sudden the established players are no longer profitable at all, and all of the profit they used to get goes to the local governments instead. Ultimately, it seems like a fitting punishment for the way the huge telcos/isps have been taking public money to provide infrastructure and have instead been dragging their feet and screwing the people. To all those who believe that government should be prevented from engaging in profitable business, I have just one observation. The only thing less effective at providing services efficiently than government agencies is government subsidized private industry providing those same services.
Even better idea, Put a 3 year moratorium on municipalities entering any market segment they are not already in. If the ISPs want those customers, they have three years to get there first. After that, its fair game for any local government...
Amazon's just going to slowly grab more and more of your wallet
As long as their competition continues to not "get it" Amazon is going to continue to grow. I go to amazon because I can buy absolutely anything there, and it will be cheaper there than anywhere else. Amazons third party sales thing is absolutely brilliant as it brings more products to amazon, and brings more customers to the site.
Our formula irreversibly ruins the clothes worn by the thief or any of the protection they may be wearing
What about the bike? Doesn't this ruin the bike?
You're free to conduct business but not free to push costs on other people. If you got Airbnb in apartment next door maybe you'd understand.
I have not had that problem, so you'll have to explain it the old fashioned way. Whats your beef?
If the automated driver system in Tesla cars has caused more than 1.13 deaths per 100 million miles driven, he would seem to have it backward.
No, he has it perfectly right. To illustrate, lets use something I like to call "math"
As of the closest thing we have to actual data, fatalities in autonomous vehicles right now are approximately 4.5 deaths per 100 million miles. As you can see, the current fatality rate for autonomous vehicles is about 4 times the human rate. It seems like they are killing more people than saving so what gives? The secret is in the rate of improvement. Human drivers have shown an approximately 25% reduction in deaths per mile every decade. That means it took 40 years to go from 4.5 deaths per 100mmi to 1.13 deaths per 100mmi. As of 2014, Google has estimated that if its vehicles were allowed to operate at full speed the fatality rate would have been around 50-100 per 100mmi, which is a whopping 91% reduction in 2 years. assuming they maintain that rate of improvement for 5 more years, the human fatality rate will be about 0.988 fatalities per 100mmi while the autonomous vehicle fatality rate will be approximately 0.02 fatalities per 100mmi.
Assuming a linear relationship rather than geometric (to make the math a lot simpler without affecting the answer much), and we will get and average fatality rate for humans of 1.059 fatalities per 100mmi, whole autonomous vehicles would average 2.26 fatalities per 100mmi. Sounds bad, but what about the 5 years after that? humans: 0.8645 fatalities per 100 mmi. Autonomous vehicles: 0.01 fatalities per 100 mmi. Given an annual death toll of 35k, that amounts to an excess of 34,500 deaths per year for every year after 5 years from now. If we delay that progress for 5 years, then in the mean time an excess of 34,500 people will die for every year that autonomous vehicles are delayed.
Those number are far more pessimistic in that they assume that we are talking about a 100% conversion to autonomous vehicles right now. Since we are in fact talking about a vanishingly small percentage of actual vehicles initially, the cost in lives for the development of autonomous vehicles is practically non-existant, while the end state savings are phenomenal. Ultimately, Automakers should be given a 5 year moratorium on liability so long as they can demonstrate sufficient continued improvement in performance (say 33% annual reduction in fatalities per mile.). After 3 years it will be safer to be in an autonomous vehicle. After 10 years driving a car manually would be tantamount to drunk driving.
The question of how safe autonomous vehicles are is a stupid question, as it is obvious to nearly everyone who knows which end of an equation is which that we *will* reach a point where autonomous vehicles are safer, and the sooner we get there the less lives will be lost before we get to have the benefits.
The surest way to halt that progress is through liability stemming from the over application of our American legal framework. Our legal system almost entirely fails to consider the larger implications of any given law, in favor of the application of precedents and procedures. You could make a very real argument that a single liability lawsuit, at this stage in the game could delay the deployment of autonomous vehicles by a decade or more, which would effectively condemn over 300,000 people to die needlessly
The automakers need to be given a temporary liability shield, in exchange for which they must demonstrate continued improvement in autonomous safety performance, and after 5 years they must release *all* hardware designs including source code to the public domain so that the other automakers can implement these life saving systems properly. After 10 years it should become illegal to sell any new vehicle that does not have full autonomous capability, and after 15 years, it should be illegal to operate a vehicle manually on public roads.
You still think of computers as magic boxes don't you?
Actually I got my degree in engineering, nice try moron. By the way that's what AI prioritization decisions are, engineering. You wouldn't understand that, obviously.
Three things:
First, if you had truly understood the engineering you were learning in school, then it would have gotten through to you pretty quick that from an engineering standpoint, one human is as good as another, and you solve the problem in front of you, not worry about a problem that can't easily be translated into the engineering domain and has very little value there anyways. Engineering is about affecting maximum results for minimum cost. The task of trying to decide which particular set of humans to save in a catastrophic event is something straight out of sci-fi and fantasy, and has no bearing on the real world. The task of framing such a decision into a structure that would even allow for a computational model to make such a decision is monumental. Those resources could be far better spent elsewhere. Engineering is all about the bottom line. They don't save people, they make things statistically safer. If you can't understand the difference, you have no business as an engineer.
Second: You will find it near impossible to convince anyone of anything when you repeatedly use personal attacks and insults where they are neither warranted nor useful. Any time spent at all in any liberal arts should teach you that you don't influence people by being an ass.
Third, if you want to be taken seriously in any adult conversation, put you name to what you say. I fully support a persons right to anonymity, but I have found that people who know their name wont be on something put very little effort into adding quality to their work, and people who see a statement made anonymously will discount it as worthless garbage (and rightly so in most cases).
The question of what AI prioritizes as it becomes ubiquitous technology is a matter of life and death for some people in the future.
There are far more important things to worry about, and Mercedes is correct in their assessment that the value added work to be performed is in avoiding these situations altogether. The percentage of actual auto accidents in which there is some moral conundrum that requires a decision as to which person or persons is going to die are vanishingly small. There is almost never a situation in which the only path to safety is through the crowd...
GP is right. Philosophy is for those who can't actually *DO*. Philosophers try to make up for that lacking by trying to tell others what they "should" do.
To all those liberal arts majors out there, progress is made by the scientists and engineers who roll up their sleeves and do the work, not that wank all idiots who sit and talk about it all day. If you want some say in what gets done, then be one of the people who does the work, otherwise shut up sit down and enjoy the ride because you're going to be a passenger in your own life.