Too late, the captain of the expedition realizes that the natives survived the plague by abandoning their cities and started to live simply and with humility. He and his men, save the one, are going to die because they were not willing to display courtesy.
This doesn't make any sense, and for contrast, I'd like to offer the example of despot Bernabò Visconti. When the Black Death was sweeping Italy, he put Milan under strict quarantine, notably having city authorities wall-up any house where plague appeared (leaving both sick and well occupants to starve, presumably). As a result, the plague pretty much skipped Milan as well as Visconti himself.
The issue starts with thinking as we are the only life form, then every thing else has to be like us.
When exhaustive exploration is not an option, you use what you know to prioritize your search, even though that knowledge is incomplete and imperfect. For SETI, it makes sense to use the profile of life as we know it to focus our efforts, even though there may exist lifeforms well outside that descriptive envelope. Doing so gives us (1) a much smaller area to examine, (2) concrete strategies for investigating such areas, and (3) better odds of successfully recognizing extraterrestrial life (should it fall under our surveillance).
The problem is that pilots, in the pitch black of night can see beams of green laser pointers off somewhere in the distance. With no useful reference for actual distance and nothing else in the night sky to compare it to, the pilots assume they're very nearby and must be being pointed at them.
No, laser light is very directional, and having it pointed at you during nightime flying is a very definite experience. Search youtube for "helicopter lasers" to see what I mean.
So we should ban green laser pointers, right?
I know you asked sarcastically, but there are "soft-band" options that society may have to consider if the problem grows. For instance, using green lasers for stargazing could be outlawed (e.g., forcing laser makers to not use this as a selling point). Additionally, pen/pointer-shaped form factors could be prohibited. Gun-mounted green lasers could be forced to have a rail switch. Hopefully the laws don't have to go this far though.
Despite all of the stories and warnings, I have still not seen a video on the effects of lasers from the pilots point of view.
There's one from a police helicopter on youtube somewhere (try Googling it), midway thru the video. The laser light scatters across the windshield like crazy and is pretty distracting. I agree they could do more to dramatize it/educate folks though.
The bad news is that the US has morally declined to the level of the rest of the world. The good news is that the US upheld its morals longer, being the last to abandon the honor system.
Gotta call you on this...the "rest of the world" is very diverse (example 1, example 2). If you're looking for morality, a cold first-world country is your best bet and has been for awhile. Overpopulation + poverty/inequality => human misery.
Seriously? Abandon individual privacy but try to simulate its effects with legislation? Privacy affords one real dignity, autonomy, and economic advantage. It corrects for the excesses of law, limits the will of the ruthless, and satisfies an innate psychological need. When someone learns something private about you, your game-theoretic outcome IS harmed irrevocably. And when they act on that knowledge (as the majority of humans and human institutions will inevitably find a way to do--legal or not since it's very easy and very deniable), the crow comes home to roost. NEVER trade real up-front protection for some sort of bureaucratic after-the-fact promise.
Hey now, I have a cuecat. It's in a drawer somewhere.
CueCat's premise wasn't wrong... people do want to skip/shortcut the process of entering URL's found in print. However, it required users to overcome significant hurdles, both on the publishing side (purchasing a license agreement) and on the consumer side (acquiring and hooking up the scanner, then being near your computer when you wanted to scan something).
A better solution, especially at that time, was URL-shortening in its various forms (including TinyURL, which came along ~1 year later). And now, of course, everyone scans QR codes with their smartphone. CueCat was silly, but a lot of silly internet startups were happening in that '99-'01 timeframe.
Fairness, because if they buy from you only at wholesale rates, they should also sell you at those rates.
That's a funny definition of fairness. You're trickling power into the grid in an unannounced, come-what-may sort of way. No scheduling, no guarantees, no maintenance obligations, and little predictability. By contrast, that retail power you're pulling is a consistent, reliable product backed up by an army of regulatory shotguns. You're providing generation. The power company is on the hook for generation, transmission, distribution, commitment/dispatch, customer service/billing, storm crews, fuel diversity, research, regulatory/environmental compliance, and so forth (even planning 20 years ahead where needed). Big difference.
A fair price would actually be LOWER than wholesale. Even though hour-ahead purchases are typically non-firm and subject to transmission curtailment, the power company still has a clearer picture of what's coming and how to navigate it. (The exception might be if transmission into a service area is heavily constrained... effectively spiking spot prices. Or if enough people adopt solar that they, as a class, become statistically predictable to a degree that rivals wholesale market participants.)
I have no idea who Bruce Sterling is and I'm a huge sci-fi fan too.
Then, hope you don't mind if I interject some recommendations.:-) Set in the near future, Holy Fire is an intimate look at the implication of life-extension and the meaning of youth (but not in a philosophically ponderous way... it's more of a wild chase). Incidentally, it includes a lot of fashion/clothing, which may not sound like a strong selling point, but it definitely broadens the appeal and accessibility of the work outside traditional sci-fi audiences. Technically speaking, I feel it's his most well-executed story, so it's usually what I recommend to people despite it being tamer than...
Schismatrix. This book is set further in the future when first-world humanity has spread thru the solar system. It's my personal favorite for its vast, world-building scope, and unrestrained hacking of the human body (again, much of it in the life-extension vein). I love too that it doesn't revolve around a single gimmicky artifact (e.g., looking at you Stargate) but around a large number of competing technical approaches. Bruce described his work in retrospect as being something like a sea-urchin... ugly and assymetrical, yet pieces break off and embed themselves in you for years.
I'd also recommend Distraction, which is a fun read. All three novels portray a struggling humanity trying to hold life together in the gaping face of limitless technological potential. They are best thought of as biographies of fictional people (Bruce can be weak on plot) that are heroic for their ability to adapt and change.
I feel his other works (the ones I've read anyway) pale in comparison... Heavy Weather is okay. Zenith Angle, while politically insightful, is decidedly mediocre. YMMV.
the breakeven point is about 2600 hours of usage, or about 2.4 years, used three hours a day
Your argument makes sense for a high rate of usage, but there are many lights that only get used a few minutes per day (if that): think closets, bathrooms, basements, garage doors, attics, guest bedrooms, sunrooms, porches, floodlights, harsh bedroom overheads, and out-of-the-way lamps. It depends on your families usage patterns (obviously), but in some households this describes 50-60% of the bulbs. It doesn't make sense to populate these fixtures with something that will take two or three decades to repay itself (and that's best case assuming the more exotic bulb doesn't give out or get broken prior to breakeven).
Why waste time and money creating your own distro when there are many good ones available?
It may not have a custom-compiled kernel, but companies do the same thing with Windows. They take the stock OS, tweak all the settings, add custom scripts, install various software packages (database drivers, antivirus, remote management tools, etc.), put their own branding on it (with wallpapers and other gimmicks), and then burn a disk image. Same thing with PC manufactures, if you've ever had the pleasant experience of scraping away their bloatware.
And it makes a lot of sense for a company to roll their own: it allows a single specialized group of sysadmins to decide best policy, implement it, test it, and roll it out in a single uniform way. Front-line support can then provision a new server or workstation without having to think about it, and everything will tie into LDAP/Active Directory/asset management and the rest of the corporate network just fine.
Seems quick to me... where I work, I saw it take ~8 years for a modestly complex VisualBasic application to be replaced with a.NET one. These sort of transitions take place in an environment with a lot of moving parts and ongoing demands for change and many competing priorities. Heck, we're just now to the point of completing the Windows XP --> Windows 7 transition. Big organizations move slowly... sometimes for reasons that are dumb, but frequently because that's the only way to do it.
We need to balance the benefits of patents (disclosure) with the detriments (short term artificial monopoly).
Have you read modern patents? They consist of dense legalese that's of no practical value to technologists. And twenty years is not "short term" in computing... our industry proceeds much faster than that.
What part of this confuses you? He was arrested, after much consultation, for a crime he admits doing, that a policeman caught him doing, which the school did not give permission for him to do, petty though it is.
Two parts: (1) traditionally, the availability of a readily accessible power outlet has been a cue that the outlet is available for (free) use by everyone who's authorized to be in the area. It's not a theft because--in the language of our existing social norms and conventions--the receptacle is actually an invitation unless there's specific signage to the contrary. If you don't believe that, well, then you'd better not charge your personal cell phone at work, plugin your laptop at the airport, or hookup your GPS to your buddy's lighter port without getting explicit permission.
And (2) the part about it being only 5 cents. It does society no good to saddle innocent, productive citizens with criminal records for a 5-cent infraction. That's just crazy. Seeing things in such black-and-white terms creates a user-hostile society that is focused on legalism and pedantry to the exclusion of real justice.
(1) waiting at lights, (2) stuck in traffic, or (3) travelling side-by-side on multi-laned straight roads in smooth uniform traffic... only the latter situation is actually remotely dangerous.
Wrong: you are operating a motor vehicle. The task is inherently dangerous, even if you aren't texting. Even if you could text and 100% drive "correctly", because part of the responsibility of driving is guarding against other drivers, pedestrians, and road debris that doesn't behave "correctly".
Besides, situations (1) and (2) aren't as safe as they seem. In situation (1), people begin texting at a complete stop but end up trying to finish their texts after beginning to roll again. Though not fatal, low speed rear-endings are still vexing to everyone involved. In situation (2), "stand-still" traffic is pretty rare; usually the traffic you are stuck in is of the lurching "stop-and-go" variety. Texting here increases your odds of low and moderate speed rear-endings.
Sony can't revert to draconian DRM because they promised not to (and the Xbone can't, either).
Meh... it might get them a lawsuit, but they are under no contractual obligation. Even if they were, they could just throw in some twist and call it something different ("it's an anti-virus security feature"). The only thing that prevents this is the threat of competition (since it seems anyone can build a game console these days) and upset buyers potentially boycotting them.
To contradict myself, I guess there's an off-chance that some AG's would notice and try to bring home some much-needed bacon for their state's general fund. Maybe Microsoft and Sony are taking that into account.
Ada begins iterating wherever you tell it to. You can index your arrays from -100 to 0 if you like.
Its a more useful language that way.
Useful until you need to write a method that accepts such an array... then you have to use LBOUND() and UBOUND() (or the Ada equivalents) and write slightly more abstract code. That's a slight reduction in readability for the vast majority of cases.
Thinking [zero-based indexing] is a feature of programming is a sure sign of a inexperienced programmer.
It's the easiest option, given all the tradeoffs (see other responses to this thread).
All it takes is will, and force. China has already demonstrated it is eminently possible to control population toward a goal
Uh... bad precedent, dude. Infanticide, forced abortion, a skewed 5:6 sex ratio. (Though... one could argue that it's better than the pandemic/famine/war/anarchy that a population crash would inevitably bring about... but I still wouldn't hold up China as a model.)
Really, if you want negative population growth (like Japan), you need a large, secular middle-class that's well-versed in family planning and too busy to bonk.
And authority is never the source of truth. It's a good reminder, and one that needs to happen frequently.
At the same time, authority is frequently a necessary shortcut. Most casual participants in the Global Warming "debate" don't have the time to deep-dive the dozens of interrelated specialties needed to understand climate science. Instead we choose the narrative we find most convincing, whether it's ((greedy grant-seeking scientist supporting Al Gore's vision for controlling us all)) or ((greedy carbon-heavy corporations fueling disinformation campaigns against truth-seeking academics)). Arguing-to-consensus supports the latter by reminding us that there's strong agreement among people doing real-world investigation, and that's the closest to the truth we can get in time to make a decision.
Truth is not democratic in nature.
Another good reminder, but I'll nitpick a little: the scientific community isn't a democracy but a worldwide collection of highly-specialized researchers. Fallible? Yes. Corruptible? Some of them. But it's not the same thing as inviting all members of the populous to pick their favorite option after 8 months of intense media campaigns.
Personally the law should step in and make this illegal.
How do you know if someone is tracking you illegally or not? There's huge financial incentive to do so and many ways of doing it without getting caught. So you put that idea into Washington and you'll get back some twisted, ineffective legislation that puts a huge compliance risk on normal companies/webmasters while paving a giant exemption for law enforcement. Welcome to the land of unintended consequences.
it basically shut down the city of san francisco for at least two weeks. they held the guy in jail, but he refused to divulge. the mayor even went to the jail to ask him personally. he deserves prison.
Your understanding misses the essentials. Ultimately, Childs was too ideological/paranoid/stubborn for his own good; however, the city's prosecution of him was malicious and unnecessary. The jury had to convict based on legal specifics, but judge and jury alike felt that this was an unfortunate usage of the system.
Autonomous cars will more than likely drive at exactly the speed limit.
On the plus side, you'll be able to use that time reading, eating, or working on a laptop (assuming it's fully-autonomous and not some sort of supervised thing). The potential for road trips is awesome: get off work Friday night, pack your bags, and depart before midnight... you can fall asleep and wake up at your destination 8 hour later and have--essentially--an extra day of vacation to work with. Even the refueling (whether gas or electric) will be automatic someday.
call me when your injured and they want one of these to drive you to the hospital. then tell me how you think of these "autonomous" cars. i'm alive because someone put me in their car as kid and drove me to the hospital as a kid doing 80 the entire drive.
Eventually, I'd expect these self-driving cars to provide a big red "help me" button that dials an emergency responder and puts them on in-car speakerphone while simultaneously offering to drive you to the nearest ER or police station in a special "emergency transit mode". New laws will permit the car to violate some traffic laws while in this mode. Other self-driving cars will receive advanced notice of your passage and intelligently get out of the way.
Like any technology, version 1 will suck. But even with version 1, you're going to be safer overall: the drawback of not being able to drive 10-20MPH to the hospital (on the extremely rare occasions where that's truly needed) will be outweighed by the benefit of having an always safe, always alert AI driver.
Slashdot Mirror
Too late, the captain of the expedition realizes that the natives survived the plague by abandoning their cities and started to live simply and with humility. He and his men, save the one, are going to die because they were not willing to display courtesy.
This doesn't make any sense, and for contrast, I'd like to offer the example of despot Bernabò Visconti. When the Black Death was sweeping Italy, he put Milan under strict quarantine, notably having city authorities wall-up any house where plague appeared (leaving both sick and well occupants to starve, presumably). As a result, the plague pretty much skipped Milan as well as Visconti himself.
The issue starts with thinking as we are the only life form, then every thing else has to be like us.
When exhaustive exploration is not an option, you use what you know to prioritize your search, even though that knowledge is incomplete and imperfect. For SETI, it makes sense to use the profile of life as we know it to focus our efforts, even though there may exist lifeforms well outside that descriptive envelope. Doing so gives us (1) a much smaller area to examine, (2) concrete strategies for investigating such areas, and (3) better odds of successfully recognizing extraterrestrial life (should it fall under our surveillance).
The problem is that pilots, in the pitch black of night can see beams of green laser pointers off somewhere in the distance. With no useful reference for actual distance and nothing else in the night sky to compare it to, the pilots assume they're very nearby and must be being pointed at them.
No, laser light is very directional, and having it pointed at you during nightime flying is a very definite experience. Search youtube for "helicopter lasers" to see what I mean.
So we should ban green laser pointers, right?
I know you asked sarcastically, but there are "soft-band" options that society may have to consider if the problem grows. For instance, using green lasers for stargazing could be outlawed (e.g., forcing laser makers to not use this as a selling point). Additionally, pen/pointer-shaped form factors could be prohibited. Gun-mounted green lasers could be forced to have a rail switch. Hopefully the laws don't have to go this far though.
Despite all of the stories and warnings, I have still not seen a video on the effects of lasers from the pilots point of view.
There's one from a police helicopter on youtube somewhere (try Googling it), midway thru the video. The laser light scatters across the windshield like crazy and is pretty distracting. I agree they could do more to dramatize it/educate folks though.
The bad news is that the US has morally declined to the level of the rest of the world. The good news is that the US upheld its morals longer, being the last to abandon the honor system.
Gotta call you on this...the "rest of the world" is very diverse (example 1, example 2). If you're looking for morality, a cold first-world country is your best bet and has been for awhile. Overpopulation + poverty/inequality => human misery.
"God"=="supernatural"=="not allowed by physical (natural) law."
Ah... argument by definition you just made up. That's not the empiricist way... more like a theologian's.
Seriously? Abandon individual privacy but try to simulate its effects with legislation? Privacy affords one real dignity, autonomy, and economic advantage. It corrects for the excesses of law, limits the will of the ruthless, and satisfies an innate psychological need. When someone learns something private about you, your game-theoretic outcome IS harmed irrevocably. And when they act on that knowledge (as the majority of humans and human institutions will inevitably find a way to do--legal or not since it's very easy and very deniable), the crow comes home to roost. NEVER trade real up-front protection for some sort of bureaucratic after-the-fact promise.
Hey now, I have a cuecat. It's in a drawer somewhere.
CueCat's premise wasn't wrong... people do want to skip/shortcut the process of entering URL's found in print. However, it required users to overcome significant hurdles, both on the publishing side (purchasing a license agreement) and on the consumer side (acquiring and hooking up the scanner, then being near your computer when you wanted to scan something).
A better solution, especially at that time, was URL-shortening in its various forms (including TinyURL, which came along ~1 year later). And now, of course, everyone scans QR codes with their smartphone. CueCat was silly, but a lot of silly internet startups were happening in that '99-'01 timeframe.
Fairness, because if they buy from you only at wholesale rates, they should also sell you at those rates.
That's a funny definition of fairness. You're trickling power into the grid in an unannounced, come-what-may sort of way. No scheduling, no guarantees, no maintenance obligations, and little predictability. By contrast, that retail power you're pulling is a consistent, reliable product backed up by an army of regulatory shotguns. You're providing generation. The power company is on the hook for generation, transmission, distribution, commitment/dispatch, customer service/billing, storm crews, fuel diversity, research, regulatory/environmental compliance, and so forth (even planning 20 years ahead where needed). Big difference.
A fair price would actually be LOWER than wholesale. Even though hour-ahead purchases are typically non-firm and subject to transmission curtailment, the power company still has a clearer picture of what's coming and how to navigate it. (The exception might be if transmission into a service area is heavily constrained... effectively spiking spot prices. Or if enough people adopt solar that they, as a class, become statistically predictable to a degree that rivals wholesale market participants.)
I have no idea who Bruce Sterling is and I'm a huge sci-fi fan too.
Then, hope you don't mind if I interject some recommendations. :-) Set in the near future, Holy Fire is an intimate look at the implication of life-extension and the meaning of youth (but not in a philosophically ponderous way... it's more of a wild chase). Incidentally, it includes a lot of fashion/clothing, which may not sound like a strong selling point, but it definitely broadens the appeal and accessibility of the work outside traditional sci-fi audiences. Technically speaking, I feel it's his most well-executed story, so it's usually what I recommend to people despite it being tamer than...
Schismatrix. This book is set further in the future when first-world humanity has spread thru the solar system. It's my personal favorite for its vast, world-building scope, and unrestrained hacking of the human body (again, much of it in the life-extension vein). I love too that it doesn't revolve around a single gimmicky artifact (e.g., looking at you Stargate) but around a large number of competing technical approaches. Bruce described his work in retrospect as being something like a sea-urchin... ugly and assymetrical, yet pieces break off and embed themselves in you for years.
I'd also recommend Distraction, which is a fun read. All three novels portray a struggling humanity trying to hold life together in the gaping face of limitless technological potential. They are best thought of as biographies of fictional people (Bruce can be weak on plot) that are heroic for their ability to adapt and change.
I feel his other works (the ones I've read anyway) pale in comparison... Heavy Weather is okay. Zenith Angle, while politically insightful, is decidedly mediocre. YMMV.
the breakeven point is about 2600 hours of usage, or about 2.4 years, used three hours a day
Your argument makes sense for a high rate of usage, but there are many lights that only get used a few minutes per day (if that): think closets, bathrooms, basements, garage doors, attics, guest bedrooms, sunrooms, porches, floodlights, harsh bedroom overheads, and out-of-the-way lamps. It depends on your families usage patterns (obviously), but in some households this describes 50-60% of the bulbs. It doesn't make sense to populate these fixtures with something that will take two or three decades to repay itself (and that's best case assuming the more exotic bulb doesn't give out or get broken prior to breakeven).
Why waste time and money creating your own distro when there are many good ones available?
It may not have a custom-compiled kernel, but companies do the same thing with Windows. They take the stock OS, tweak all the settings, add custom scripts, install various software packages (database drivers, antivirus, remote management tools, etc.), put their own branding on it (with wallpapers and other gimmicks), and then burn a disk image. Same thing with PC manufactures, if you've ever had the pleasant experience of scraping away their bloatware.
And it makes a lot of sense for a company to roll their own: it allows a single specialized group of sysadmins to decide best policy, implement it, test it, and roll it out in a single uniform way. Front-line support can then provision a new server or workstation without having to think about it, and everything will tie into LDAP/Active Directory/asset management and the rest of the corporate network just fine.
10 years is a long time to switch
Seems quick to me... where I work, I saw it take ~8 years for a modestly complex VisualBasic application to be replaced with a .NET one. These sort of transitions take place in an environment with a lot of moving parts and ongoing demands for change and many competing priorities. Heck, we're just now to the point of completing the Windows XP --> Windows 7 transition. Big organizations move slowly... sometimes for reasons that are dumb, but frequently because that's the only way to do it.
We need to balance the benefits of patents (disclosure) with the detriments (short term artificial monopoly).
Have you read modern patents? They consist of dense legalese that's of no practical value to technologists. And twenty years is not "short term" in computing... our industry proceeds much faster than that.
What part of this confuses you? He was arrested, after much consultation, for a crime he admits doing, that a policeman caught him doing, which the school did not give permission for him to do, petty though it is.
Two parts: (1) traditionally, the availability of a readily accessible power outlet has been a cue that the outlet is available for (free) use by everyone who's authorized to be in the area. It's not a theft because--in the language of our existing social norms and conventions--the receptacle is actually an invitation unless there's specific signage to the contrary. If you don't believe that, well, then you'd better not charge your personal cell phone at work, plugin your laptop at the airport, or hookup your GPS to your buddy's lighter port without getting explicit permission.
And (2) the part about it being only 5 cents. It does society no good to saddle innocent, productive citizens with criminal records for a 5-cent infraction. That's just crazy. Seeing things in such black-and-white terms creates a user-hostile society that is focused on legalism and pedantry to the exclusion of real justice.
(1) waiting at lights, (2) stuck in traffic, or (3) travelling side-by-side on multi-laned straight roads in smooth uniform traffic... only the latter situation is actually remotely dangerous.
Wrong: you are operating a motor vehicle. The task is inherently dangerous, even if you aren't texting. Even if you could text and 100% drive "correctly", because part of the responsibility of driving is guarding against other drivers, pedestrians, and road debris that doesn't behave "correctly".
Besides, situations (1) and (2) aren't as safe as they seem. In situation (1), people begin texting at a complete stop but end up trying to finish their texts after beginning to roll again. Though not fatal, low speed rear-endings are still vexing to everyone involved. In situation (2), "stand-still" traffic is pretty rare; usually the traffic you are stuck in is of the lurching "stop-and-go" variety. Texting here increases your odds of low and moderate speed rear-endings.
Sony can't revert to draconian DRM because they promised not to (and the Xbone can't, either).
Meh... it might get them a lawsuit, but they are under no contractual obligation. Even if they were, they could just throw in some twist and call it something different ("it's an anti-virus security feature"). The only thing that prevents this is the threat of competition (since it seems anyone can build a game console these days) and upset buyers potentially boycotting them.
To contradict myself, I guess there's an off-chance that some AG's would notice and try to bring home some much-needed bacon for their state's general fund. Maybe Microsoft and Sony are taking that into account.
Ada begins iterating wherever you tell it to. You can index your arrays from -100 to 0 if you like. Its a more useful language that way.
Useful until you need to write a method that accepts such an array... then you have to use LBOUND() and UBOUND() (or the Ada equivalents) and write slightly more abstract code. That's a slight reduction in readability for the vast majority of cases.
Thinking [zero-based indexing] is a feature of programming is a sure sign of a inexperienced programmer.
It's the easiest option, given all the tradeoffs (see other responses to this thread).
All it takes is will, and force. China has already demonstrated it is eminently possible to control population toward a goal
Uh... bad precedent, dude. Infanticide, forced abortion, a skewed 5:6 sex ratio. (Though... one could argue that it's better than the pandemic/famine/war/anarchy that a population crash would inevitably bring about... but I still wouldn't hold up China as a model.)
Really, if you want negative population growth (like Japan), you need a large, secular middle-class that's well-versed in family planning and too busy to bonk.
consensus is not the same as reality
And authority is never the source of truth. It's a good reminder, and one that needs to happen frequently.
At the same time, authority is frequently a necessary shortcut. Most casual participants in the Global Warming "debate" don't have the time to deep-dive the dozens of interrelated specialties needed to understand climate science. Instead we choose the narrative we find most convincing, whether it's ((greedy grant-seeking scientist supporting Al Gore's vision for controlling us all)) or ((greedy carbon-heavy corporations fueling disinformation campaigns against truth-seeking academics)). Arguing-to-consensus supports the latter by reminding us that there's strong agreement among people doing real-world investigation, and that's the closest to the truth we can get in time to make a decision.
Truth is not democratic in nature.
Another good reminder, but I'll nitpick a little: the scientific community isn't a democracy but a worldwide collection of highly-specialized researchers. Fallible? Yes. Corruptible? Some of them. But it's not the same thing as inviting all members of the populous to pick their favorite option after 8 months of intense media campaigns.
Obligatory comic for conversations about entrapment: http://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/post/19810672629/12-i-was-entrapped
Personally the law should step in and make this illegal.
How do you know if someone is tracking you illegally or not? There's huge financial incentive to do so and many ways of doing it without getting caught. So you put that idea into Washington and you'll get back some twisted, ineffective legislation that puts a huge compliance risk on normal companies/webmasters while paving a giant exemption for law enforcement. Welcome to the land of unintended consequences.
it basically shut down the city of san francisco for at least two weeks. they held the guy in jail, but he refused to divulge. the mayor even went to the jail to ask him personally. he deserves prison.
Your understanding misses the essentials. Ultimately, Childs was too ideological/paranoid/stubborn for his own good; however, the city's prosecution of him was malicious and unnecessary. The jury had to convict based on legal specifics, but judge and jury alike felt that this was an unfortunate usage of the system.
Autonomous cars will more than likely drive at exactly the speed limit.
On the plus side, you'll be able to use that time reading, eating, or working on a laptop (assuming it's fully-autonomous and not some sort of supervised thing). The potential for road trips is awesome: get off work Friday night, pack your bags, and depart before midnight... you can fall asleep and wake up at your destination 8 hour later and have--essentially--an extra day of vacation to work with. Even the refueling (whether gas or electric) will be automatic someday.
call me when your injured and they want one of these to drive you to the hospital. then tell me how you think of these "autonomous" cars. i'm alive because someone put me in their car as kid and drove me to the hospital as a kid doing 80 the entire drive.
Eventually, I'd expect these self-driving cars to provide a big red "help me" button that dials an emergency responder and puts them on in-car speakerphone while simultaneously offering to drive you to the nearest ER or police station in a special "emergency transit mode". New laws will permit the car to violate some traffic laws while in this mode. Other self-driving cars will receive advanced notice of your passage and intelligently get out of the way.
Like any technology, version 1 will suck. But even with version 1, you're going to be safer overall: the drawback of not being able to drive 10-20MPH to the hospital (on the extremely rare occasions where that's truly needed) will be outweighed by the benefit of having an always safe, always alert AI driver.