The show terrified some viewers who apparently didn't realise that their TV screen was powered by the grid."
And... these people vote.... usually for whomever tells the sweetest lies.
Kind of like the one listed above. The two comments that the article painted as this were of people who thought it was a documentary (because of the use of documentary-style filming techniques and their own biases). No one he quoted said anything about believing it was live television, but hey if it feels good to feel smug and superior to stupid people, then it feels even better if they're even stupider, right? Pretty sweet lie to pander to that.
A great idea might be to corrupt save games after some point. Let them get halfway into it then corrupt all save games. Make sure your support team knows you are doing this and corrupt all the files in some very obvious way like changing them text files about the harm piracy does to gaming.
Oh, you mean like EarthBound did? It did all that and so much more: Nag screens, unbearable enemy encounter levels, and after slogging through the whole game it freezes at the final boss and deletes your save too. Epic spite.
Telling people how to "crack" your software and add malware is a great idea for poisoning the well on cracked copies and a wonderfully spiteful bit of snark, but he takes it a bit too far by telling people how to give themselves a free license with simple tools using clean version from his own site, at which point they are totally free to stop. (Oh, it's a violation of your license, he points out, but what pirate cares?)
I mean, if this involved something that could more properly be termed an exploit than a simple config file change, that would raise the bar to something that only scary "hackers" can do, leaving you at their unethical mercies if you get a cracked version, but this is kind of shooting himself in the foot.
Wow, what an amazingly useless statement. Hey, scientists! SlithyMagister has declared that there is no point in describing genomics at a more fine-grained level than the species level. Field's closed -- everyone out!
Of course, the issue is the matter of degree of similarity. They found that friends were more similar than strangers, to the point that they were as similar as fourth cousins. That would be fascinating on its own, but they also found that friends were specifically more similar in two ways -- sense of smell and linoleic acid metabolism -- and specifically different in immune system function.
Most of what people focus on in defining the "races" is superficial traits mostly distinguished by appearance. Beneath the surface, there's a lot more commonality, and there's a lot less variation in areas further removed from Africa.
All that said, the genetic sample base they used was the Framingham Heart Study, which overwhelmingly dealt with white, European-descended people from the same city. This has potential biases to the sample set, which they acknowledge and address where possible.
I've lived around the world and have a variety of friends.
Well neat. You alone must be a representative sample set of humanity that dwarfs this mere 1932 person sample group for statistical relevance. Thank goodness you know more about statistics than people doing a population study!
I'm assuming these 2000 individuals for the study were in environments that just happened to have similar genes around them.
Actually, if you read the study (OMG! I must be new here!), then you'll see that they address this point:
"There are (at least) four possible reasons that friends may exhibit homophily in their genotypes. First, correlation in genotypes may be a trivial by-product of the tendency of people to make friends with geographically proximate or ethnoracially similar individuals who also tend to share the same ancestry. Thus, it is important to use strict controls for population stratification in tests of genetic correlation (below, we rely on the widely used principal components method to control for ancestry). [...] Third, people may actively choose particular environments, and, in those environments, they may be more likely to encounter people with similar phenotypes influenced by specific genotypes. If people then choose friends from within these environments (even at random), it would tend to generate correlated genotypes." [...] "To eliminate the possibility that the results are influenced by people tending to make friends with distant relatives, we use only the 907 friend pairs where kinship â 0 (recall that kinship can be less than zero when unrelated individuals tend to have negatively correlated genotypes)." (ed: They do the same with 907 stranger pairs.)
In the end, they find that people prefer friends that share genes for the same sense of smell and the same linoleic acid metabolism. We also strongly prefer people with different genotypes for immune system function. While there are hundreds more homophilic and heterophilic gene correlations, those were the three that were most over-represented between people. There are many other genes that friends share, but most of those vary from pair to pair of people and are either idiosyncratic preferences or possibly just coincidences. Those three genes are not.
It's pretty well known that human select their lovers in part by smell. It's interesting that we pick our friends too that way. The paper gives a few good theories for why that's true (based on older research) and also does so for the immune system. The linoleic acid thing seems to have baffled them a bit, though they make a stab at explaining it as possibly being related to food safety and keeping the community on the same page about what's good to eat.
Where do your numbers come from? Who is making the judgment on whether the acts were legal or not? (i.e. Is following a very questionable interpretation of a law that is itself possibly unconstitutional still counted as legal?) Could the answer to both questions be the very agency whose conduct is being called into question?
And if the NSA's portrayal of themselves as ultimately noble and only breaking the law because of training failures and low-level misconduct here and there is accurate, how long can you say that that will remain true? I'm guessing you'd probably just ask the NSA on that one too.
I said a long time ago that the militarization of the internet would cause a lot of problems... and that we had no business developing an offensive cyber-military because it would just encourage others to begin an arms race that would lead to major economic and communications instabilities worldwide. It hasn't gotten that far yet, but it's building to that. Our own aggressive stance has created yet another fucking cold war.
The nitpicker in me wants to say "remilitarization," since the Internet started as a military resource, but that's not what's important.
What's important is that this was inevitable. From the very dawn of the public gaining access to the internet, there were already viruses and worms. Decades before there ever even was an internet, our SF writers were telling tales of computer intrusion and privatized cyber-warfare. The internet provides access to infrastructure and documents that previously required physical breaking and entering to get access to at high-risk to the parties doing the espionage, theft, sabotage, etc. Hackers can strike from the other side of the world without even leaving their homes. Not only was it utterly inevitable that private actors and corporate actors would exploit this, but it was also inevitable that state actors would to.
Yeah, it's perhaps a little sad, but that how politics / war / diplomacy are.
We have enough studies telling you not to do this particular thing where you feel like complete and utter crap if you do.
Well, cool. You must feel pretty proud about learning absolutely nothing from this study except how your preconceived notions (aka "common sense") were correct to brag about it here and bash the authors for their useless work, but personally, I was fascinated by the info about sleep mediating gene activation and its effects on myelin growth.
Providing a mechanism to explain why you feel like utter crap is important -- especially for people who just like to soldier through chronic sleep deprivation and say they can handle it. Turns out, no, you can't -- you're literally killing your brain slowly, and that candle you're burning will run out much quicker. I've been trying to get myself into bed earlier each night, and I've heard studies that tell me that I'm shortening my life by not getting enough sleep, but now I know how and why and that I may be doing long-term brain damage by not fixing that problem, and that provides extra impetus to stop coasting and solve it right now.
This article, in the long run, may save my life (or at least greatly extend it) by giving the final kick in the pants to do something solid about it. (Especially since I'm half-dead today from lack of sleep.)
IP means "intellectual property," as you well know, which is a broad term for the only semi-related torts and laws governing the use and reproduction of ideas: copyright, patents, trademarks & trade dress, publicity, and trade secrets. Copyright is one of the three main pillars of IP law.
If you want to bitch about how useless "intellectual property" is as a term when it covers such disparate and unrelated laws & torts, then you're several centuries too late. All of property law has long been described as "a bundle of sticks," because there's almost no relation between trespass & nuisance, wills & trusts and other estate law, landlord-tenant law, easements, covenants, water rights, subsurface rights, bailment, all the dozens of other semi-random "involves a thing or place" legal concepts you have learn in Property class. But without the full set, the concept of property falls apart.
Same goes for intellectual property, right or wrong.
Nuclear accidents have not been proven to have killed a single person.
Not a single person. Not a one? I mean, if you had led with "the numbers are vastly inflated," and then provided a supporting link debunking the inflated estimated cancer statistics, you would have sounded reasonable -- though a bit biased in being willing to accept similar loose causation for deaths from coal. Instead, you have revealed yourself as someone who is willing to disregard facts that are inconvenient to your worldview, regardless of how ridiculous the end result may seem.
At least 40 staff members and rescue workers dieddirectly as a result of Chernobyl. 4 died in a tragic helicopter crash attempting to extinguish the fire, but the vast majority died with in a few days or months from acute radiation poisoning. That's just the people on site during the disaster and its aftermath. It doesn't count the 9 children who died of thyroid cancer or the IAEA's estimate of 4000 additional cancer deaths out of 600,000 exposed.
That also doesn't count the Soviet K-431, K-27, and K-19 nuclear submarine reactor incidents (28 acute radiation fatalities and many more radiation injuries between them) or the two radiation deaths in Tokimura in 1999. It also doesn't count non-radiation deaths like the Mihama steam pipe explosion that kill 4 workers in 2004 or the 3 killed by the SL-1 reactor explosion. It doesn't count cancer deaths from those and more incidents such as the Windscale fire or those caused by the Rocky Flats Plant (which, admittedly, was used to create bomb materials and not simply civilian power generation).
One can argue about whether coal is more dangerous in the long-run than nuclear (which I think is true), but one shouldn't do so by making up nonsense about nuclear accidents never once causing harm.
Have you actually considered directly responding to the people who responded to you in separate messages so that they would actually see your response in their own comments page?
Just a tip for the future. Breaking the flow in a forum-type discussion like that is considered a bit boorish.
I mean, sure, there's a quite a bit longer time to failure once the power is lost compared to the reactor cooling system (i.e. the time it would take for underground super-chilled ice to melt), but seriously what is it with Tepco and safety systems that rely on the thing they're protecting working right?
Instead of pie-in-the-sky ideas like Hyperloop, Elon should invest his billions into coming out with a new generation of batteries that:
a) don't rob the world of a specific limited resource to produce, need to make it from carbon, period, we have more than enough, use up what we have dumped into the atmosphere as a start. b) has a much higher energy density than found in today's batteries, extends range and delivery of power comparable to combustion engines. c) are quicker to charge, ideally 5 minutes for a long enough charge that matters d) are significantly cheaper to produce, we don't want $20k batteries that have a limited lifetime.
You call Hyperloop "pie-in-the-sky," and then you demand all this from batteries? What do you expect him to be, a wizard? Do you think throwing money at the problem will just magically make all this happen?
The way capitalism works is demand first, then supply shows up. It can't even be done the other way around.
Sure it can. Inventing demand for a waste product is a great way to create new markets. Examples include whey protein as a byproduct of cheese production, biodiesel from waste fryer oil, the huge demand for a process to turn cellulose into ethanol, the invention of silage for animal feed in the 19th century, scrap metal reselling, gasoline and petroleum jelly as byproducts of refining oil into kerosene, etc. These are all examples where supply came first and demand came later.
Also, marketing can be a huge creator of demand for products people didn't even know they wanted. For a humorous, non-scholarly article on that, check out 5 Basic Facts of Life (Were Made Up By Marketing Campaigns). While it doesn't focus on the creation of markets as much as their radical expansion, The 7 Sneakiest Ways Corporations Manipulated Human Behavior is also good for a read on the subject. (Take with a grain of salt; both articles are from a comedy site that doesn't exactly cite its references.)
What fun is a normal car? I mean, I can't think of any activity that involves nearly as much banal, repetitive tedium combined with the need to be vigilant against life-threatening danger that doesn't involve enlisting in the military.
I hate driving. You can't do anything really exciting with a car 95% of the time, because there are (necessary) safety laws preventing it, and the road is full of drivers worse than you (or at least worse then you think you are). I waste about 5% of my life every day on driving the same route back and forth from home to work, and I would trade a fair amount of money to be able to put my attention elsewhere for it. Sure, that won't happen for at least a few decades after driverless cars initially hit the market, but if I still have to drive myself when I'm old and infirm, it will be a huge disappointment.
Fuck! Whatever happened to decent educational programming and real news. I mean real quality content! But whatever; conservatives such as myself are old and obsolete. I should just go away.
Conservatives killed it by getting rid of the fairness doctrine and fueling the growth of entertainment-focused news organizations via talk radio and cable news. Programs that cater to the information-seeking crowd are usually panned as "liberal" and "biased."
Okay, maybe that's a smidge unfair, because the partisan divide is a bit less important than the educational interest divide in the country. (Though one might argue that killing news with a neutral POV policy may have contributed to that shift.)
Conservatives tend to love competitive reality television. Liberals tend to love observational reality television. But both love reality TV, because both sides are filled with idiots. "Low information voters" are actually the majority; we just focused in the last election on the ones who didn't have strong enough opinions to hide their lack of care about getting informed on issues of substance.
Yes, but it's a separate (but related) issue. Flip back a page and you'll see the exact example I used; a plate being thrown at someone and then them falling on it and dying. It was manslaughter by that definition.
Err, I hate to tell you this, but reading back up the direct chain of posts to the top of the thread, I don't see anything about manslaughter or a plate. Maybe you used it in a response to someone else?
The statement you bolded was: "If you have knowledge of illegal activity, regardless of your own intent, etc. and fail to act you're just as guilty as the person who did it." My point was that's simply not true in general, and in the case of felony murder, it's the foreseeability of the harm that matters. The knowledge is just evidence of foreseeability, not the determining factor.
Mere knowledge of an illegal activity without reporting or resisting it does not indicate criminal conspiracy. You have to commit some overt activity that indicates willingness to join in the action. The same principle applies to felony murder. Just knowing your neighbor has a gun and is planning to rob a bank doesn't make you a conspirator.
As for the issue with texting and foreseeability, well, I've already posted several other posts defending the judge's words there.
Unless the person sending the message had a stipulation that the receiver would be fired, fined, or otherwise punished for not immediately reading and replying; how is ti negligent to send someone a message... driving or not.
Well, in the former case, I think that steps beyond basic negligence into gross negligence / recklessness.
The basic concept of negligence, as linked above, is that "people should exercise reasonable care when they act by taking account of the potential harm that they might foreseeably cause harm to other people." If you know someone else is driving, and you know that your actions will cause them not to pay attention to the road, then you know that your actions cause potential harm. It's basic common sense.
Generalizing the question beyond that is pointless. That's like asking, "How can talking to someone be illegal?" after finding out that someone was arrested for trying to hire a hitman.
So, tell me, if I know someone is a bad driver, and you dont actively stop them from driving, and they hitkill someone, are you responsible?
No, that's covered under the "duty of care" requirement of negligence. There is a strong legal distinction between pushing someone off a cliff, selling them a cheap rope that breaks and causes them to fall, and walking away if they're clinging to the edge.
You have no duty to take positive action to stop someone else from doing something that may cause themselves or others harm. You are, in common law jurisdictions, generally not required to save someone from drowning, for example. That is quite different from the duty not to take an action that causes them to harm or be harmed, which is what negligence is about.
The basics of the tort of negligence are pretty accessible to the layman compared to other areas of the law. I recommend starting with the Wikipedia article I linked above and go from there, reading each of the subsections they present. Learning negligence law and applying it before taking an action may save you a lot of money in the long run as well as simply teach basic mindfulness towards others.
Note: I am not a lawyer, and this should not constitute legal advice.
Supposedly, A knows that B is driving but doesn't expect B to be distracted when A texts B. So A texts B and B responds (regardless who starts the texting session). During their texting session (while B is still driving and A knows that B is driving but believe that B is not being distracted by the text), B was texting back and rear end another car in front at the same time (and may cause a lot of damage).
In this scenario, if B has responded and A continues to text, then A knows enough to theoretically be liable. The core question that will come down to the jury is whether or not a reasonable person in possession of all the same facts would believe that their actions would distract B or whether that distraction was unforeseeable. The reasonable person standard is an objective one; it ignores whether A subjectively believed B shouldn't be distracted in favor of whether or not is was reasonable to do so.
Personally, I think it would be hard to get a jury to rule that it was reasonable to expect that a person could carry on a safe conversation while driving (especially in the face of evidence that would slant perception of the actual risks in the other direction in the form of the crash).
Slashdot Mirror
The show terrified some viewers who apparently didn't realise that their TV screen was powered by the grid."
And ... these people vote .... usually for whomever tells the sweetest lies.
Kind of like the one listed above. The two comments that the article painted as this were of people who thought it was a documentary (because of the use of documentary-style filming techniques and their own biases). No one he quoted said anything about believing it was live television, but hey if it feels good to feel smug and superior to stupid people, then it feels even better if they're even stupider, right? Pretty sweet lie to pander to that.
Not that that's what the show is "about," but candle fires kill an average of 166 people in the US every year and injure about 1,289 more out of 15,260 reported candle fires every year.
It's a small number, but fire + irresponsibility = trouble.
A great idea might be to corrupt save games after some point. Let them get halfway into it then corrupt all save games. Make sure your support team knows you are doing this and corrupt all the files in some very obvious way like changing them text files about the harm piracy does to gaming.
Oh, you mean like EarthBound did? It did all that and so much more: Nag screens, unbearable enemy encounter levels, and after slogging through the whole game it freezes at the final boss and deletes your save too. Epic spite.
Here's a few of the funnier ones. And then there's the supremely ironic one that Game Dev Tycoon added.
This is penetration testing software, isn't it? There's no way it could be that simple, could it?
Telling people how to "crack" your software and add malware is a great idea for poisoning the well on cracked copies and a wonderfully spiteful bit of snark, but he takes it a bit too far by telling people how to give themselves a free license with simple tools using clean version from his own site, at which point they are totally free to stop. (Oh, it's a violation of your license, he points out, but what pirate cares?)
I mean, if this involved something that could more properly be termed an exploit than a simple config file change, that would raise the bar to something that only scary "hackers" can do, leaving you at their unethical mercies if you get a cracked version, but this is kind of shooting himself in the foot.
All humans have "similar" DNA
Wow, what an amazingly useless statement. Hey, scientists! SlithyMagister has declared that there is no point in describing genomics at a more fine-grained level than the species level. Field's closed -- everyone out!
Of course, the issue is the matter of degree of similarity. They found that friends were more similar than strangers, to the point that they were as similar as fourth cousins. That would be fascinating on its own, but they also found that friends were specifically more similar in two ways -- sense of smell and linoleic acid metabolism -- and specifically different in immune system function.
Or are asians and white people far more closely related on a genetic level than i've previously been led to believe?
Actually, yes. There is far more human genetic diversity within the continent of African than in all the areas where human who migrated out of Africa settled. The further away from Africa you get (in terms of prehistoric migration), the less genetic diversity there is.
Most of what people focus on in defining the "races" is superficial traits mostly distinguished by appearance. Beneath the surface, there's a lot more commonality, and there's a lot less variation in areas further removed from Africa.
All that said, the genetic sample base they used was the Framingham Heart Study, which overwhelmingly dealt with white, European-descended people from the same city. This has potential biases to the sample set, which they acknowledge and address where possible.
So we evolved a tendency to monoculture, making us more vulnerable to disease? That would seem ... counterintuitive.
Actually, the study says the opposite. When it comes to immune system function, we strongly prefer people with different genes.
I've lived around the world and have a variety of friends.
Well neat. You alone must be a representative sample set of humanity that dwarfs this mere 1932 person sample group for statistical relevance. Thank goodness you know more about statistics than people doing a population study!
I'm assuming these 2000 individuals for the study were in environments that just happened to have similar genes around them.
Actually, if you read the study (OMG! I must be new here!), then you'll see that they address this point:
"There are (at least) four possible reasons that friends may exhibit homophily in their genotypes. First, correlation in genotypes may be a trivial by-product of the tendency of people to make friends with geographically proximate or ethnoracially similar individuals who also tend to share the same ancestry. Thus, it is important to use strict controls for population stratification in tests of genetic correlation (below, we rely on the widely used principal components method to control for ancestry). [...] Third, people may actively choose particular environments, and, in those environments, they may be more likely to encounter people with similar phenotypes influenced by specific genotypes. If people then choose friends from within these environments (even at random), it would tend to generate correlated genotypes."
[...]
"To eliminate the possibility that the results are influenced by people tending to make friends with distant relatives, we use only the 907 friend pairs where kinship â 0 (recall that kinship can be less than zero when unrelated individuals tend to have negatively correlated genotypes)." (ed: They do the same with 907 stranger pairs.)
In the end, they find that people prefer friends that share genes for the same sense of smell and the same linoleic acid metabolism. We also strongly prefer people with different genotypes for immune system function. While there are hundreds more homophilic and heterophilic gene correlations, those were the three that were most over-represented between people. There are many other genes that friends share, but most of those vary from pair to pair of people and are either idiosyncratic preferences or possibly just coincidences. Those three genes are not.
It's pretty well known that human select their lovers in part by smell. It's interesting that we pick our friends too that way. The paper gives a few good theories for why that's true (based on older research) and also does so for the immune system. The linoleic acid thing seems to have baffled them a bit, though they make a stab at explaining it as possibly being related to food safety and keeping the community on the same page about what's good to eat.
Where do your numbers come from? Who is making the judgment on whether the acts were legal or not? (i.e. Is following a very questionable interpretation of a law that is itself possibly unconstitutional still counted as legal?) Could the answer to both questions be the very agency whose conduct is being called into question?
And if the NSA's portrayal of themselves as ultimately noble and only breaking the law because of training failures and low-level misconduct here and there is accurate, how long can you say that that will remain true? I'm guessing you'd probably just ask the NSA on that one too.
I said a long time ago that the militarization of the internet would cause a lot of problems... and that we had no business developing an offensive cyber-military because it would just encourage others to begin an arms race that would lead to major economic and communications instabilities worldwide. It hasn't gotten that far yet, but it's building to that. Our own aggressive stance has created yet another fucking cold war.
The nitpicker in me wants to say "remilitarization," since the Internet started as a military resource, but that's not what's important.
What's important is that this was inevitable. From the very dawn of the public gaining access to the internet, there were already viruses and worms. Decades before there ever even was an internet, our SF writers were telling tales of computer intrusion and privatized cyber-warfare. The internet provides access to infrastructure and documents that previously required physical breaking and entering to get access to at high-risk to the parties doing the espionage, theft, sabotage, etc. Hackers can strike from the other side of the world without even leaving their homes. Not only was it utterly inevitable that private actors and corporate actors would exploit this, but it was also inevitable that state actors would to.
Yeah, it's perhaps a little sad, but that how politics / war / diplomacy are.
You might have gotten the joke if you'd had a good night's sleep last night.
We have enough studies telling you not to do this particular thing where you feel like complete and utter crap if you do.
Well, cool. You must feel pretty proud about learning absolutely nothing from this study except how your preconceived notions (aka "common sense") were correct to brag about it here and bash the authors for their useless work, but personally, I was fascinated by the info about sleep mediating gene activation and its effects on myelin growth.
Providing a mechanism to explain why you feel like utter crap is important -- especially for people who just like to soldier through chronic sleep deprivation and say they can handle it. Turns out, no, you can't -- you're literally killing your brain slowly, and that candle you're burning will run out much quicker. I've been trying to get myself into bed earlier each night, and I've heard studies that tell me that I'm shortening my life by not getting enough sleep, but now I know how and why and that I may be doing long-term brain damage by not fixing that problem, and that provides extra impetus to stop coasting and solve it right now.
This article, in the long run, may save my life (or at least greatly extend it) by giving the final kick in the pants to do something solid about it. (Especially since I'm half-dead today from lack of sleep.)
IP means "intellectual property," as you well know, which is a broad term for the only semi-related torts and laws governing the use and reproduction of ideas: copyright, patents, trademarks & trade dress, publicity, and trade secrets. Copyright is one of the three main pillars of IP law.
If you want to bitch about how useless "intellectual property" is as a term when it covers such disparate and unrelated laws & torts, then you're several centuries too late. All of property law has long been described as "a bundle of sticks," because there's almost no relation between trespass & nuisance, wills & trusts and other estate law, landlord-tenant law, easements, covenants, water rights, subsurface rights, bailment, all the dozens of other semi-random "involves a thing or place" legal concepts you have learn in Property class. But without the full set, the concept of property falls apart.
Same goes for intellectual property, right or wrong.
Nuclear accidents have not been proven to have killed a single person.
Not a single person. Not a one? I mean, if you had led with "the numbers are vastly inflated," and then provided a supporting link debunking the inflated estimated cancer statistics, you would have sounded reasonable -- though a bit biased in being willing to accept similar loose causation for deaths from coal. Instead, you have revealed yourself as someone who is willing to disregard facts that are inconvenient to your worldview, regardless of how ridiculous the end result may seem.
At least 40 staff members and rescue workers died directly as a result of Chernobyl. 4 died in a tragic helicopter crash attempting to extinguish the fire, but the vast majority died with in a few days or months from acute radiation poisoning. That's just the people on site during the disaster and its aftermath. It doesn't count the 9 children who died of thyroid cancer or the IAEA's estimate of 4000 additional cancer deaths out of 600,000 exposed.
That also doesn't count the Soviet K-431, K-27, and K-19 nuclear submarine reactor incidents (28 acute radiation fatalities and many more radiation injuries between them) or the two radiation deaths in Tokimura in 1999. It also doesn't count non-radiation deaths like the Mihama steam pipe explosion that kill 4 workers in 2004 or the 3 killed by the SL-1 reactor explosion. It doesn't count cancer deaths from those and more incidents such as the Windscale fire or those caused by the Rocky Flats Plant (which, admittedly, was used to create bomb materials and not simply civilian power generation).
One can argue about whether coal is more dangerous in the long-run than nuclear (which I think is true), but one shouldn't do so by making up nonsense about nuclear accidents never once causing harm.
Have you actually considered directly responding to the people who responded to you in separate messages so that they would actually see your response in their own comments page?
Just a tip for the future. Breaking the flow in a forum-type discussion like that is considered a bit boorish.
Whatcouldpossiblygowrong?
Well, it could lose power.
I mean, sure, there's a quite a bit longer time to failure once the power is lost compared to the reactor cooling system (i.e. the time it would take for underground super-chilled ice to melt), but seriously what is it with Tepco and safety systems that rely on the thing they're protecting working right?
Instead of pie-in-the-sky ideas like Hyperloop, Elon should invest his billions into coming out with a new generation of batteries that:
a) don't rob the world of a specific limited resource to produce, need to make it from carbon, period, we have more than enough, use up what we have dumped into the atmosphere as a start.
b) has a much higher energy density than found in today's batteries, extends range and delivery of power comparable to combustion engines.
c) are quicker to charge, ideally 5 minutes for a long enough charge that matters
d) are significantly cheaper to produce, we don't want $20k batteries that have a limited lifetime.
You call Hyperloop "pie-in-the-sky," and then you demand all this from batteries? What do you expect him to be, a wizard? Do you think throwing money at the problem will just magically make all this happen?
The way capitalism works is demand first, then supply shows up. It can't even be done the other way around.
Sure it can. Inventing demand for a waste product is a great way to create new markets. Examples include whey protein as a byproduct of cheese production, biodiesel from waste fryer oil, the huge demand for a process to turn cellulose into ethanol, the invention of silage for animal feed in the 19th century, scrap metal reselling, gasoline and petroleum jelly as byproducts of refining oil into kerosene, etc. These are all examples where supply came first and demand came later.
Also, marketing can be a huge creator of demand for products people didn't even know they wanted. For a humorous, non-scholarly article on that, check out 5 Basic Facts of Life (Were Made Up By Marketing Campaigns). While it doesn't focus on the creation of markets as much as their radical expansion, The 7 Sneakiest Ways Corporations Manipulated Human Behavior is also good for a read on the subject. (Take with a grain of salt; both articles are from a comedy site that doesn't exactly cite its references.)
What fun is a normal car? I mean, I can't think of any activity that involves nearly as much banal, repetitive tedium combined with the need to be vigilant against life-threatening danger that doesn't involve enlisting in the military.
I hate driving. You can't do anything really exciting with a car 95% of the time, because there are (necessary) safety laws preventing it, and the road is full of drivers worse than you (or at least worse then you think you are). I waste about 5% of my life every day on driving the same route back and forth from home to work, and I would trade a fair amount of money to be able to put my attention elsewhere for it. Sure, that won't happen for at least a few decades after driverless cars initially hit the market, but if I still have to drive myself when I'm old and infirm, it will be a huge disappointment.
Fuck! Whatever happened to decent educational programming and real news. I mean real quality content! But whatever; conservatives such as myself are old and obsolete. I should just go away.
Conservatives killed it by getting rid of the fairness doctrine and fueling the growth of entertainment-focused news organizations via talk radio and cable news. Programs that cater to the information-seeking crowd are usually panned as "liberal" and "biased."
Okay, maybe that's a smidge unfair, because the partisan divide is a bit less important than the educational interest divide in the country. (Though one might argue that killing news with a neutral POV policy may have contributed to that shift.)
Conservatives tend to love competitive reality television. Liberals tend to love observational reality television. But both love reality TV, because both sides are filled with idiots. "Low information voters" are actually the majority; we just focused in the last election on the ones who didn't have strong enough opinions to hide their lack of care about getting informed on issues of substance.
Yes, but it's a separate (but related) issue. Flip back a page and you'll see the exact example I used; a plate being thrown at someone and then them falling on it and dying. It was manslaughter by that definition.
Err, I hate to tell you this, but reading back up the direct chain of posts to the top of the thread, I don't see anything about manslaughter or a plate. Maybe you used it in a response to someone else?
The statement you bolded was: "If you have knowledge of illegal activity, regardless of your own intent, etc. and fail to act you're just as guilty as the person who did it." My point was that's simply not true in general, and in the case of felony murder, it's the foreseeability of the harm that matters. The knowledge is just evidence of foreseeability, not the determining factor.
Mere knowledge of an illegal activity without reporting or resisting it does not indicate criminal conspiracy. You have to commit some overt activity that indicates willingness to join in the action. The same principle applies to felony murder. Just knowing your neighbor has a gun and is planning to rob a bank doesn't make you a conspirator.
As for the issue with texting and foreseeability, well, I've already posted several other posts defending the judge's words there.
Unless the person sending the message had a stipulation that the receiver would be fired, fined, or otherwise punished for not immediately reading and replying; how is ti negligent to send someone a message... driving or not.
Well, in the former case, I think that steps beyond basic negligence into gross negligence / recklessness.
The basic concept of negligence, as linked above, is that "people should exercise reasonable care when they act by taking account of the potential harm that they might foreseeably cause harm to other people." If you know someone else is driving, and you know that your actions will cause them not to pay attention to the road, then you know that your actions cause potential harm. It's basic common sense.
Generalizing the question beyond that is pointless. That's like asking, "How can talking to someone be illegal?" after finding out that someone was arrested for trying to hire a hitman.
So, tell me, if I know someone is a bad driver, and you dont actively stop them from driving, and they hitkill someone, are you responsible?
No, that's covered under the "duty of care" requirement of negligence. There is a strong legal distinction between pushing someone off a cliff, selling them a cheap rope that breaks and causes them to fall, and walking away if they're clinging to the edge.
You have no duty to take positive action to stop someone else from doing something that may cause themselves or others harm. You are, in common law jurisdictions, generally not required to save someone from drowning, for example. That is quite different from the duty not to take an action that causes them to harm or be harmed, which is what negligence is about.
The basics of the tort of negligence are pretty accessible to the layman compared to other areas of the law. I recommend starting with the Wikipedia article I linked above and go from there, reading each of the subsections they present. Learning negligence law and applying it before taking an action may save you a lot of money in the long run as well as simply teach basic mindfulness towards others.
Note: I am not a lawyer, and this should not constitute legal advice.
Supposedly, A knows that B is driving but doesn't expect B to be distracted when A texts B. So A texts B and B responds (regardless who starts the texting session). During their texting session (while B is still driving and A knows that B is driving but believe that B is not being distracted by the text), B was texting back and rear end another car in front at the same time (and may cause a lot of damage).
In this scenario, if B has responded and A continues to text, then A knows enough to theoretically be liable. The core question that will come down to the jury is whether or not a reasonable person in possession of all the same facts would believe that their actions would distract B or whether that distraction was unforeseeable. The reasonable person standard is an objective one; it ignores whether A subjectively believed B shouldn't be distracted in favor of whether or not is was reasonable to do so.
Personally, I think it would be hard to get a jury to rule that it was reasonable to expect that a person could carry on a safe conversation while driving (especially in the face of evidence that would slant perception of the actual risks in the other direction in the form of the crash).