What's your proposed model for testing an autonomous car driving amidst normal traffic conditions that does not include actually having it drive among normal road traffic?
As far as I've read, Google (Waymo) created an entire fake town to test different traffic situations out before letting their autonomous cars onto the actual roads in actual towns...I have not heard of Uber doing such a thing.
Secondly measured in terms of accidents and fatalities, autonomous cars have already caused less accidents per miles driven than your average human driver, so if that's your metric, the argument can be made that said bar has already been passed, although that obviously does not mean that the safety cannot and should not be further improved until the fatalities drop to zero.
This is a completely irrelevant statistic at this point. You're comparing accidents per miles driven of regular vs. experimental self-driving cars (all of which, btw, have human drivers which are supposed to - and often do - intervene to prevent accidents)...the two "sample sizes" so to speak are so vastly different that no valid comparison is possible. How many miles have self-driven cars driven? Several orders of magnitudes less than regular cars. How many self-driving cars are on the roads at any point? Tens? Hundreds? On the other hand there are hundreds of millions of cars in the US alone, which means tens of millions of cars are on the road every day, i.e. at least a couple of million driving at any one moment. Those regular cars drive in all conditions, on all roads, during all times of day, in every imaginable traffic situation, and, apart from beginner drivers riding around with instructors (who have a second brake to use at the passenger seat), none of those drivers are being constantly supervised by someone who can take control of the vehicle if they make a mistake. So comparing their accident record to self-driving cars which are being tested in a handful of cities and which, by admition of the manufacturers of said self-driving cars, cannot yet handle all weather conditions for example, is just...nonsense.
Bottom line: put 5 million self-driving cars on the road (using current technology), let them drive randomly around (i.e. no careful selection of driving days based on weather, routes based on street suitability for current technology, etc.), remove the human driver supervising them, and I'm pretty sure that accident rate will be higher than with normal cars.
Finally, the link you provided talks only about Google cars. No data about Uber or the other players in this game.
Plane safety has gone up dramatically as a result of tens and hundreds of accidents in both software and hardware, and the same's true with 'regular' cars. Your standard seems to me to be an illogical 'unless it's completely failsafe it should not be used at all', and if we followed that principle we'd still be using horses.
You're missing a crucial point here. When cars first came about, many cities would not allow them...many others allowed them if a person would walk (yes, walk) in front with a red flag, a horn, or shouting "danger!" or something like that (yes, this is true...). Early cars were, in modern terms, painfully slow - not just due to lack of engine power but also due to lack of infrastructure (no paved roads) and regulation ("jaywalking" had to be invented as a crime to allow car traffic to move more smoothly and more safely, on the back of a lot of lobbying by the car companies). There was a gradual ramp up of cars and the necessary infrastructure to support them. Similar things happen with airplanes - airports were placed away from built up areas, flight routes restricted, and this meant that potential harm from a failure was limited to the passengers - whom no one had forced to fly. Testing of self-driving cars on infrastructure not built for them (but built for huma
Primarily, rail lines in America really can't move that many passengers per day because as a rule, they're operating on the tracks owned by railroads who are primarily focused on moving FREIGHT. The commuter rail traffic is viewed as a nuisance, and the railroads often take actions to hamper it whenever they can get away with it. (That's why the MARC in the DC metro area is so often running 45 minutes or more late. CSX owns the rails it runs on, and they like to schedule freight trains to conflict with it and create congestion. That's because from their viewpoint, it's better off if they can discourage people from taking the passenger rail system and stop voting on legislation that lets the states borrow their rails more than they do already.)
This is an issue only for commuter trains, not other transit modes (subway trains, light rail trains, buses, etc.). Furthermore, it's not an argument against public transit per se - if that is the problem (and I do realize that is the problem in many places in the US), the solution is not to build more freeways, but to build more railways. Build more rail lines for the commuter railways, or buy rail lines from the freight operators...
I don't deny that freeways are ridiculously costly to maintain.... but at the end of the day, they're just concrete or asphalt strips with some painted lines on them and signage.
Well, no, they are not. Those would be plain old at grade roads and streets. The stuff you mention is the cheapest part of the freeway, by far. Most of the cost is in the often complicated interchanges and access/exit ramps that allow the traffic to always have its own right of way. This is what makes a freeway - a freeway, and those can be very complex and thus expensive structures. I mean, in the same vein as your comment I could say - a railway is just two steel rods over a bunch of pieces of wood, sitting on top of gravel...
When you invest in a whole transit system like a streetcar or light rail system, you're multiplying the complexity exponentially. You need to hire engineers to operate the vehicles, instead of letting the users drive themselves. You have to employ a skilled maintenance staff that commands higher salaries than the guy who knows how to fill a hole using a shovel.
I don't know when is the last time I saw road crews fix things with just shovels...usually they are operating heavy equipment. You need engineers to supervise the workers...and if you are maintaining freeway structures, it's a non-trival civil engineering task. In a public transit system, almost all of the cost is centralized (in the transit agency), and most of the complexity is visible to the users. In a road-based system, the costs are more distributed and a lot of the complexity is hidden. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. What about the traffic cops? The traffic management people? Signals and signs? Etc.
It's not that I expect a highway to be PROFITABLE (like someone else suggested here). I just expect it to be a relatively good use of my tax dollars as a way to keep infrastructure in place that allows me to get around, and allows deliveries to arrive. The packages coming via the post office or UPS or FedEx or DHL aren't getting transported via mass transit. They're still relying on the highways and roads.
The UPS truck (as well as the ambulance, fire truck, and police cruiser) is going to get to you faster if there are less cars on the road and less traffic jams. Bus lanes (the starting point of this entire discussion) also allow emergency vehicles to get to those who need them quicker (generally, in most places with dedicated bus lanes, emergency vehicles are explicitly allowed and encouraged to use them). Of course there are trips which cannot be efficiently served by public transit, and which need roads and highways...however it's in the interest of people relying on those trips (in whichever way) to have as
I mostly agree with your points, but don't doubt that China can do profoundly stupid things very quickly.
I agree, but we have also seen democratic states do stupid things very quickly. If you look over the past few decades, you will see that in fact China has been more stable in that regard. That doesn't mean things can't go belly up of course.
Naturally, the best would be to be sure that are no backdoors of any kind in any consumer electronic products, belonging to no state or organization.
It is truly mind boggling, they turn out fantastic products, but how they manage to do it with this level of inefficiency I am not able to explain at all. I am missing something, Dont know what.
They manage it by doing insane hours. Similar to Japan...with all the stuff about just-in-time production, kaizen and the like, my impression is that Japanese companies and workers (on an individual level) - especially white collar office workers - are not really that efficient. They are perfectionists, have a strict hierarchy and low tolerance of error, work under huge stress, and put in a ridiculous amount of effort to get things done. So the end product is great...but the process to getting there is bad and terribly inefficient. No wonder the national sport is getting crazy-drunk after work.
I wouldn't be keen to work in the USA unless I could negotiate no more than 40 hours a week and 6 weeks of holiday, and sick time when I am ill.
How well is that working for Greece these days, by the way?
It works great for Switzerland, one of the richest countries in the world.
GDP per capita in Switzerland: $80,837. In the US: $59,495.
Speaking of Greece, it is number 3 in the OECD by total hours worked per year per worker (behind Mexico and South Korea).
Hours worked per year in Greece: 2035. In the US: 1783. In aforementioned Switzerland: 1590.
Hours worked per year/week and vacation weeks per year have very little to do with a country's wealth, economic output, or productivity. Greece's economy did not collapse because Greeks are "lazy" or "slackers" - not the vast majority of Greeks anyway. It had to do primarily with their corrupt political system.
I'm not so much concerned about snooping as I am having my device potentially used as a tool in an enemy power's cyber warfare campaign against my own nation.
OK. That's a legitimate stance. However, think about it more deeply.
What does China care about the most? It's own economic development. How does it achieve that development? By exporting tons of stuff all over the planet.
Now think what would happen if China were to all of a sudden cyber-weaponize every smartphone in a country...and cause some serious damage - it doesn't have to be the US, it can be a small country, say Denmark or Singapore. What would be the result? Everyone (and not just in the affected country, but pretty much everywhere) would ditch their Chinese-made smartphones, never buy them again, and probably start dumping all of their Chinese-made electronics...this would be a disaster - for China primarily. How likely then is China to do such a thing? Highly unlikely.
So, would you want Chinese-made telecom equipment in CIA headquarters or the White House? Surely not. Do you want CEOs of large American companies using Chinese phones for confidential conversations? Probably not. Does it however matter if the average Jane or Joe on the street is using them? It doesn't.
Sure China might've installed a backdoor in every smartphone that could potentially wreak planetary havoc. However if they ever get around to using it, that would mean that the world situation is so bad that you would have a lot of other things to worry about before thinking of your smartphone.
These are, globally speaking, rather arbitrary numbers that may be based on your personal experience of the city in which you live. I, for example, have only lived in cities with bus systems where, at rush hour, buses come about every 5 minutes (or even less); where they are crush-packed over capacity during rush hour (a half-load might occur at 2 in the afternoon, but never at 8 in the morning or 6 in the evening); where buses, if not travelling in dedicated bus lanes, are slower than surrounding car traffic but not 75% slower (at most 30-50% slower - and as fast as cars or negligibly slower on express routes), and where buses certainly do transport, on the main routes, at rush hour, more people per hour than cars do, and are, therefore, more efficient.
Buses are slower than cars since they make frequent stops while having to navigate the car traffic surrounding them. If they drive however in a dedicated bus lane clear of other traffic, the fact that they have a reserved right-of-way will compensate for their frequent stopping. Thus buses in dedicated bus lanes will, despite the stops, often be faster than cars in rush hour - the bus zooms by while the cars are stuck in traffic.
Problem is, I've seen the massive financial losses incurred by some of these mass transit projects. Not talking about just the huge initial expenses, but the continual bleeding of money trying to maintain them -- plus the inevitable demands to expand them and upgrade them over time.
So is it really "proper" to insist cities invest in mass transit solutions instead of upgrading the roads and highways?
Freeways are ridiculously expensive to build and maintain (unless you're building them through a flat desert), especially in cities. Not to mention that in many cities, they are just not feasible - either there is no physical space to add a lane or built a new freeway, or the property that needs to expropriated to enable it costs magnitudes more than the freeway itself. Think of a rail line - how many passengers can it carry per hour? How about a freeway? Then which is more expensive to maintain per mile? Per mile per passenger?
Roads of other types and streets also cost money. They are only not considered as being "subsidised" and "losing money" because everyone views them as essential public infrastructure and because there are taxes collected to cover their expenses...but is any road "profitable"? Apart from some toll freeways built by private investors (which in the US, are generally the exception). Not every toll road or bridge is profitable (if it's publicly owned) - the toll may be there to just cover part of the costs, just like in most public transit systems, the ticket revenue only covers a part of the expenses. I mean - another example - are parks "profitable"? Yet the same people who don't even give a second thought to how roads are funded object about tax dollars subsidizing public transit and demand that public transit projects be "profitable".
Now, there are other costs than those which are upfront. Traffic jams cost money. It's not easy - probably impossible - to exactly calculate how much, but very good estimates exist. If a public transit system reduces traffic jams, i.e. reduces the amount of time people spend commuting - it saves money. Potentially more than the "subsidy" it receives. A good public transit system can greatly increase the productivity of a city's workforce. If all parts of the city are more accessible (including to people that don't have cars) - people benefit, because they potentially have a larger choice of jobs; employers benefit, because they potentially have a larger pool of employees to chose from; and businesses benefit, because they have a larger pool of customers. Public transit systems take up less real estate than roads, for the same capacity - this allows cities to profit by having more land developed, to increase the quality of life for residents by building more parks and pedestrian-oriented streets, and so on. If you don't need a car to get around, you can save money that you spend elsewhere in the economy (this is especially an issue for low-income people - the ones exploited by loan sharks so they can buy a clunker to get them to work in a reasonable amount of time). Public transit systems pollute less (even CO2 emissions laid aside - plain old air pollution is lower per passenger of public transit vs. private car), reducing associated health costs, and so on and so on.
All of this more than justifies investment in public transit.
It probably is from strictly the standpoint of what's efficient for commuters. But living in the DC metro area and seeing our challenges with the existing system? Man, I just don't know? I've tried to use our mass transit options for my daily commute. Assuming I'm trying to get to and from work during normal rush hour times, it potentially cuts my transit time in half to take the train and transfer to the metro, vs. driving in during traffic jams and trying to find parking in a multi-story garage. BUT -- it's a double-edged sword because I occasionally get stuck for hours if a train breaks down and messes up the schedule OR a miss a train because my schedu
For those too autistic as is the author of the original post, this was meant to be irony.
I ain't using a bus.
It's really funny (and also really sad) that you equate taking a bus with having no personal life and personal space. Now, bus service may be quite terrible where you live and this ain't your fault - it just shows the sad state of affairs the society around you is in regards to this. Apologies if you live somewhere where traffic jams are not an issue and where mass public transit is just not feasible (e.g. a small town).
There's another funny issue with buses in NYC that I admit is entirely based on anecdote but I think it's probably not far off from the general truth. The vast majority of my white friends absolutely refuse to take buses. I'm a technology professional in my mid-twenties and I have a number of friends in their twenties to thirties to whom a bus trip would never occur. If the subway is unavailable due to construction or if the area is not accessible by subway, everyone insists on pulling out their phone and ordering Uber cars. Now I'm white and solidly middle class as well, but I grew up in NYC and I suppose to me there is far less stigma or presumed risk and inconvenience in taking the bus, compared to my friends.
In many (most?) US cities buses are an afterthought (especially in cities that do not have a network of higher-capacity transit modes, such as streetcars/LRT, subways, or commuter trains) designed to serve the poor part of the population that can't afford a car. This came out recently for example in, of all people, Elon Musk's comments about his Boring Company ("those [public transit users and cyclists] who can't afford a car should come first"). If forward-looking Musk is "infected" by this mentality (although it might also have something to do with him being South African - although certainly the US didn't "cure" him of this attitude), then imagine how others think about it. The buses are essentially there as some sort of "welfare" service - they're not there to be used by everybody, i.e. not "normal" (e.g. middle-income) people and your average commuter, they are a "social service" for those who can't afford to drive themselves...like, say, food stamps are for those who can't afford to feed themselves. It's no wonder then that bus service is crap, and I'm sure the various comments on this thread about how buses are horrendous in [insert name of American city here] have this as the root cause.
LRT systems, subways, and commuter trains on the other hand are a lot more expensive, and are built for the "normal" and "average" person/commuter. Hence they don't have the poverty (and in the US, unfortunately, often the ensuing racial) stigma attached to it. I'm sure that in NYC it's different in terms of buses (i.e. they are not an afterthought), but NYC is very different from the rest of the US in terms of public transit (it's much closer in that respect to Europe or east Asia).
Are they labeled that way? No? Then fuck off. My taxes paid for that road as well.
What people are trying to say here is that over-use of residential and side streets as alternatives to trunk roads and highways will lead to MORE of those side/residential streets being labelled as "no through traffic", "access only", "residents and emergency vehicles only", and so forth.
It is a bit less convenient for people who live in those areas? Sure. In which case lean on your town planners to avoid narrowing main roads for more bus/special/cycleway lanes, and make the primary roads larger.. because thats what services the majority, rather than pandering to a minority.
Actually, no. You have it all wrong.
Planners have always created residential streets which are meant only for local traffic, not through-traffic. That is wholly a good thing, because maybe people who live there for one, don't want all the noise and pollution (there is a reason why freeways are surrounded by walls, and why generally one's back yard does not face a freeway directly, without obstruction), and for two, they might want to use that street for something other than a mass of cars flowing through (e.g. their children playing in it). I'm always fascinated by people who, once they get in their car, think the entire world (or at least every road) is just empty space that is supposed to have one use and one use only - to get them to their destination...but I digress.
What this study shows is that you can't fix an overcongested road system with optimization (alternative routes, self-driving cars, whatever). If there are too many cars on the road for the network to handle, you will get traffic jams. Simple as that. Now, experience (from the last 60 years or so) shows that widening roads generally does not help - it's only a short-term fix, and if you add a lane, it will soon be filled up. Unless it's - wait for it - a bus lane. Yes, because a bus lane (or a streetcar/LRT right-of-way) can transport magnitudes more people than a car lane (assuming you've got the bus service to enable that, of course - an empty bus lane or one which sees one bus an hour is wasted space).
So the answer is more bus lanes - and more buses - and more public transit in general - not less. That's because experience shows that if you've got a city with millions of people living in it, the proper way to organize it is 1) build it at high density and 2) move people around primarily using high-capacity public transit, not cars. This is exactly the opposite of the way California does it, and in her sprawling car-oriented suburbia, no amount of extra freeways, intelligent GPS machine-learning routing apps, or smart self-driving cars is going to fix traffic problems. As long as the approach is the same, the results will be the same - traffic jams, traffic jams, traffic jams. There is simply a tipping point in terms of population where a primarily car-based transport system becomes inefficient.
I agree - time of sunrise and sunset should be symmetrical around noon.
In order to actually achieve this, you would have to change time zones every couple of miles...by some small amount, minutes, seconds, whatever.
You do realize that time zones are ALSO a convention, don't you? You don't think that when you cross that bridge in Florida which is the boundary between Central and Eastern time that on one side of the bridge, the sun is at its highest point one hour earlier than on the other side of the bridge? You realize that time zones were invented exactly in order to PREVENT people from setting their clocks "naturally" based on the sun at their location, since that created a total mess and made it very difficult if not impossible to keep to things such as train schedules? So time zones were invented to "artificially" divide the Earth into 1 hour-sized chunks with defined borders so we can always know which time it is in a particular location and have that consistent?
This. Time-telling (beyond day & night) is a man-made convention created to suit human purposes. We can and should shape it anyway we want if it suits our purposes.
It's Florida! People on the beach don't care what time it is, the retirees don't care what time it is, so why insist on DST? Business won't make more money, you won't save more energy, and you've got a surplus of sunlight already. If DST is a pain, why not get rid of it?
In Florida, no one goes to work? Only retirees, tourists, and idlers live there? The post-work automation techno-utopia has arrived in the Orange State? Didn't know that.
Of course the people at the beach care what time it is...they care whether they can have 1, 2, or 3 hours at the beach before it gets dark once they got off work. Not to mention there are other things daylight is good/useful/necessary for other than sitting at the beach...
In the modern Western world, we work on a 9-5 schedule (or thereabouts). DST was invented to shift more daylight hours in the summer to the afternoon and evening, so that people could enjoy this daylight after work. Otherwise, a lot of the daylight hours would be very early in the morning, when most people are asleep or getting ready for/going to work.
So going to DST year-round actually makes sense, because it permanently shifts daylight into the afternoon, i.e. into after-work hours. I don't care how far that puts nominal noon away from real/solar noon, because time-keeping is anyway just a convention made up to make people's lives easier. So we can bend this convention a bit to suit our present purposes. Moving to DST permanently is easier than getting everyone to switch to working 7-3 or whatever.
Once general purpose AI is reached (and there's no reason to suspect it won't be reached eventually unless one is stubborn enough to argue for some kind of a 'soul' that would make the capabilities of a human brain beyond achievable for a computerized system) then pretty much any job that requires thinking/analyzing data will be done faster and better by machines.
It's misguided to assume that human labor will remain competitive with super-intelligent systems indefinitely..
It's misguided to assume that a super-intelligent general-purpose AI is at all reachable (at least within the lifetime of anyone currently reading and commenting on Slashdot).
There is absolutely zero (let me repeat that: zero - and again: ZERO) proof that current computer technology and AI research can produce a "general-purpose AI" (let alone super-intelligent - people forget that those two are separate things: I can easily argue that the intelligence of a cat is "general purpose", yet it is far from super-intelligent). It's currently just a mythological belief based on a lot of hand-waving. No recourse to some "soul" argument is required to argue that all of the capabilities of a brain (including, possibly, consciousness) are beyond the reach of a computer. I can easily argue that you cannot reproduce all of the functions of a biological brain in a digital computer built from semiconductors. I don't need to invoke any sort of mind-body duality philosophy or anything, just fundamental differences between organic, living biological systems and mostly inorganic, inert (non-living), electro-mechanical systems.
Sure, you can perhaps simulate a biological system on a computer system - but no simulation is 100% accurate, and the more accurate it gets, the slower it gets. Think of just simulating digital electrical circuits - running a simulation of 1 ps of operation of a digital circuit takes longer than 1 ps. Significantly longer, like orders of magnitude longer (and I want to approach the time of 1 ps - which I can never reach - I would need ever more hardware). And realize that here I'm simulating something by itself as it were - using digital circuits to simulate themselves! Now, take an Intel CPU and run on top of it a simulation of itself. Not so fast, is it? Now think of simulating "alien" (with respect to the CPU's structure) and as yet poorly understood structures, like the brain. Start with the brain of a worm...call me when you get to a tenth of a human brain. It'll be a while.
The myth of super-intelligent general purpose AI is based only on the belief that as computers become more powerful and are able to handle more "hidden layers" in neural networks that this super-intelligence will just magically emerge. That's just plain nonsense. Note, I am NOT saying here that automation, advanced robots, and custom-tailored AI for a large range of tasks will not replace human jobs. They will. I'm saying it will not lead to a super-intelligent general-purpose god-like AI which will outdo and replace humans in every way.
There are two kinds of congestion in cities - cars just going somewhere, and cars looking to park/parked.
Uber/Lyft reduce the second kind, which means traffic flows more smoothly even with more cars. A car just dropping people off does not impact traffic the way cars circling a block looking for parking will, and also will not fill up valuable parking spots that might have otherwise been filled.
That's if you assume an Uber/Lyft car is constantly picking up and dropping off passengers. While this may be the case in certain very busy periods (or places), I'm guessing that it's usually not the case. So what does an Uber driver do when he has a significant "gap" between customers?
1) Drive around in circles aimlessly waiting to be hailed? Or
2) Try to find a convenient parking spot (preferably, free and not time-limited) where next call can be waited for?
Both options seem to increase congestion. Note that traditional licensed taxis have, in most cities, dedicated "taxi stations" - usually curbside parking spot reserved for taxis only. There is no time limit, and they are "free" (the taxi drivers pay for them to the city indirectly, via the licensing fees). Uber/Lyft doesn't have that, they have to use the regular parking.
Also, in many cities, traditional taxis are allowed to use bus lanes - allowing them to both get around quicker and not contribute (as much) to general congestion. Uber vehicles generally are not allowed in bus lanes, but must use the regular lanes, impeding the "normal" traffic. An Uber car can use HOV lanes when transporting a passenger, but not when empty. Taxis are often allowed to use HOV lanes even when empty.
The premise behind "ride-sharing" (stupid name) services is that your car spends most of its time idle, and that by changing that you can turn into a source of income.
If you give people a financial incentive to start driving around their previously mostly-parked cars, it increases the amount of vehicles on the road...and hence congestion. It's a no brainer, really. Also, since Uber is just a cheaper taxi service you call up with an app, no wonder it's pulling in mostly non-driving passengers (traditional taxi passengers, public transit users, walkers, cyclists).
iTunes is happy to rip music from CDs. I can buy music from the iTunes store. It's quick and convenient and not expensive. I can also take music from other sources. I don't see why I should care where it's stored on my computer. I haven't found other music players I want to use instead.
In other words, iTunes serves my purposes. I can buy music from it, or supply my own. I can play it. Since I don't want to fiddle with the details instead of concentrating on more interesting things, I'm perfectly OK with that.
And I never said you shouldn't be OK with that. If that's what rocks your boat...no problem.
I'm just saying that there are lots of people who are not OK with that, and that the idea that Apple products are somehow universally easier or more intuitive to use is wrong. Some people find them easy and love 'em. Some people find them strange and difficult and hate 'em.
The folks calling for higher restrictions, or bans on firearms seem to fall into 2 categories. The first is that we punish everyone for the actions of a few which is not a way to keep a healthy vision of freedom. Or 2, they want the ability to arrest and take away a single persons rights based on circumstantial evidence of what he "MAY" do in the future but hasn't yet. If you take out the emotional "ZOMG! It's a GUN", and think about this in relation to other things as well, and it's easier to see that the ethic's in this are fuzzy at best.
Look, this is the type of world the 2nd amendment was created in:
[E]ach and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia...[and] every citizen so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch with a box therein to contain not less than twenty-four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball: or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder; and shall appear, so armed, accoutred and provided, when called out to exercise, or into service, except, that when called out on company days to exercise only, he may appear without a knapsack.
This is from a law passed by Congress in 1792, which tried to regulate militias (those referred to in the 2nd amendment). The militias were to be established for the purpose of national defense - which tells you that a "good musket or firelock" was the state-of-the-art military equipment at the time.
Let me repeat that: a good musket or firelock.
It's kind of obvious that you can't do mass shootings with a musket or firelock. Not if you're one person at least - you'd need an army of muskets and firelocks to kill people en masse. Weapons which can allow a single person to easily and quickly kill hundreds of people did not exist back in the late 18th century. You have to look at things through a present-day, 21st century lens. Some weapons are too dangerous to be allowed for the general, untrained public to own. Assault weapons would fit this category. These should not be operated by people not specifically trained for their use - and I don't mean only technically trained, but psychologically as well. If one is worried about freedom with regard to the government (the whole "people must be armed to prevent government tyranny" argument), one quickly realizes that arming the people to guarantee this freedom is unpractical. Technology has advanced so much that a government controlled army can wipe out hundreds or thousands of armed citizens with one to five pieces of equipment operated by a single digit number of soldiers. Today, maybe even remotely. Unless you want to allow every citizen to own a B-2 bomber or a fleet of Abrams tanks (or a nuclear warhead), no "armed citizenry" is going to beat a government army. In such cases, you have to think of "freedom" in different terms. It's not the same in 1786 and in 2018.
Is removing weapons from a person that has committed no crime a violation of his or her second amendment rights.
The second amendment says
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Now, I'm guessing, that if one wanted, one could stretch the "well regulated militia" part to justify all sorts of gun control legislation, including the pre-emptive removal of guns of a person deemed dangerous to the public. It's not like your courts have not re-defined or re-interpreted parts of your constitution several times already. All you need is a pro-gun control majority on the Supreme Court.
Actually, yes you are, at least among the developed, rich countries, i.e. countries most comparable to the US.
The fact that there are more gun deaths in countries which have been in a state of never-ending civil war for decades (e.g. Afghanistan, Congo) and those rife with extreme poverty and violent drug cartels (e.g. many countries in Latin America) is not really relevant here. When it comes to mass shooters however, the US tops the world-wide list...
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What's your proposed model for testing an autonomous car driving amidst normal traffic conditions that does not include actually having it drive among normal road traffic?
As far as I've read, Google (Waymo) created an entire fake town to test different traffic situations out before letting their autonomous cars onto the actual roads in actual towns...I have not heard of Uber doing such a thing.
Secondly measured in terms of accidents and fatalities, autonomous cars have already caused less accidents per miles driven than your average human driver, so if that's your metric, the argument can be made that said bar has already been passed, although that obviously does not mean that the safety cannot and should not be further improved until the fatalities drop to zero.
This is a completely irrelevant statistic at this point. You're comparing accidents per miles driven of regular vs. experimental self-driving cars (all of which, btw, have human drivers which are supposed to - and often do - intervene to prevent accidents)...the two "sample sizes" so to speak are so vastly different that no valid comparison is possible. How many miles have self-driven cars driven? Several orders of magnitudes less than regular cars. How many self-driving cars are on the roads at any point? Tens? Hundreds? On the other hand there are hundreds of millions of cars in the US alone, which means tens of millions of cars are on the road every day, i.e. at least a couple of million driving at any one moment. Those regular cars drive in all conditions, on all roads, during all times of day, in every imaginable traffic situation, and, apart from beginner drivers riding around with instructors (who have a second brake to use at the passenger seat), none of those drivers are being constantly supervised by someone who can take control of the vehicle if they make a mistake. So comparing their accident record to self-driving cars which are being tested in a handful of cities and which, by admition of the manufacturers of said self-driving cars, cannot yet handle all weather conditions for example, is just...nonsense.
Bottom line: put 5 million self-driving cars on the road (using current technology), let them drive randomly around (i.e. no careful selection of driving days based on weather, routes based on street suitability for current technology, etc.), remove the human driver supervising them, and I'm pretty sure that accident rate will be higher than with normal cars.
Finally, the link you provided talks only about Google cars. No data about Uber or the other players in this game.
Plane safety has gone up dramatically as a result of tens and hundreds of accidents in both software and hardware, and the same's true with 'regular' cars. Your standard seems to me to be an illogical 'unless it's completely failsafe it should not be used at all', and if we followed that principle we'd still be using horses.
You're missing a crucial point here. When cars first came about, many cities would not allow them...many others allowed them if a person would walk (yes, walk) in front with a red flag, a horn, or shouting "danger!" or something like that (yes, this is true...). Early cars were, in modern terms, painfully slow - not just due to lack of engine power but also due to lack of infrastructure (no paved roads) and regulation ("jaywalking" had to be invented as a crime to allow car traffic to move more smoothly and more safely, on the back of a lot of lobbying by the car companies). There was a gradual ramp up of cars and the necessary infrastructure to support them. Similar things happen with airplanes - airports were placed away from built up areas, flight routes restricted, and this meant that potential harm from a failure was limited to the passengers - whom no one had forced to fly. Testing of self-driving cars on infrastructure not built for them (but built for huma
Primarily, rail lines in America really can't move that many passengers per day because as a rule, they're operating on the tracks owned by railroads who are primarily focused on moving FREIGHT. The commuter rail traffic is viewed as a nuisance, and the railroads often take actions to hamper it whenever they can get away with it. (That's why the MARC in the DC metro area is so often running 45 minutes or more late. CSX owns the rails it runs on, and they like to schedule freight trains to conflict with it and create congestion. That's because from their viewpoint, it's better off if they can discourage people from taking the passenger rail system and stop voting on legislation that lets the states borrow their rails more than they do already.)
This is an issue only for commuter trains, not other transit modes (subway trains, light rail trains, buses, etc.). Furthermore, it's not an argument against public transit per se - if that is the problem (and I do realize that is the problem in many places in the US), the solution is not to build more freeways, but to build more railways. Build more rail lines for the commuter railways, or buy rail lines from the freight operators...
I don't deny that freeways are ridiculously costly to maintain .... but at the end of the day, they're just concrete or asphalt strips with some painted lines on them and signage.
Well, no, they are not. Those would be plain old at grade roads and streets. The stuff you mention is the cheapest part of the freeway, by far. Most of the cost is in the often complicated interchanges and access/exit ramps that allow the traffic to always have its own right of way. This is what makes a freeway - a freeway, and those can be very complex and thus expensive structures. I mean, in the same vein as your comment I could say - a railway is just two steel rods over a bunch of pieces of wood, sitting on top of gravel...
When you invest in a whole transit system like a streetcar or light rail system, you're multiplying the complexity exponentially. You need to hire engineers to operate the vehicles, instead of letting the users drive themselves. You have to employ a skilled maintenance staff that commands higher salaries than the guy who knows how to fill a hole using a shovel.
I don't know when is the last time I saw road crews fix things with just shovels...usually they are operating heavy equipment. You need engineers to supervise the workers...and if you are maintaining freeway structures, it's a non-trival civil engineering task. In a public transit system, almost all of the cost is centralized (in the transit agency), and most of the complexity is visible to the users. In a road-based system, the costs are more distributed and a lot of the complexity is hidden. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. What about the traffic cops? The traffic management people? Signals and signs? Etc.
It's not that I expect a highway to be PROFITABLE (like someone else suggested here). I just expect it to be a relatively good use of my tax dollars as a way to keep infrastructure in place that allows me to get around, and allows deliveries to arrive. The packages coming via the post office or UPS or FedEx or DHL aren't getting transported via mass transit. They're still relying on the highways and roads.
The UPS truck (as well as the ambulance, fire truck, and police cruiser) is going to get to you faster if there are less cars on the road and less traffic jams. Bus lanes (the starting point of this entire discussion) also allow emergency vehicles to get to those who need them quicker (generally, in most places with dedicated bus lanes, emergency vehicles are explicitly allowed and encouraged to use them). Of course there are trips which cannot be efficiently served by public transit, and which need roads and highways...however it's in the interest of people relying on those trips (in whichever way) to have as
I mostly agree with your points, but don't doubt that China can do profoundly stupid things very quickly.
I agree, but we have also seen democratic states do stupid things very quickly. If you look over the past few decades, you will see that in fact China has been more stable in that regard. That doesn't mean things can't go belly up of course.
Naturally, the best would be to be sure that are no backdoors of any kind in any consumer electronic products, belonging to no state or organization.
It is truly mind boggling, they turn out fantastic products, but how they manage to do it with this level of inefficiency I am not able to explain at all. I am missing something, Dont know what.
They manage it by doing insane hours. Similar to Japan...with all the stuff about just-in-time production, kaizen and the like, my impression is that Japanese companies and workers (on an individual level) - especially white collar office workers - are not really that efficient. They are perfectionists, have a strict hierarchy and low tolerance of error, work under huge stress, and put in a ridiculous amount of effort to get things done. So the end product is great...but the process to getting there is bad and terribly inefficient. No wonder the national sport is getting crazy-drunk after work.
I wouldn't be keen to work in the USA unless I could negotiate no more than 40 hours a week and 6 weeks of holiday, and sick time when I am ill.
How well is that working for Greece these days, by the way?
It works great for Switzerland, one of the richest countries in the world.
GDP per capita in Switzerland: $80,837. In the US: $59,495.
Speaking of Greece, it is number 3 in the OECD by total hours worked per year per worker (behind Mexico and South Korea).
Hours worked per year in Greece: 2035. In the US: 1783. In aforementioned Switzerland: 1590.
Hours worked per year/week and vacation weeks per year have very little to do with a country's wealth, economic output, or productivity. Greece's economy did not collapse because Greeks are "lazy" or "slackers" - not the vast majority of Greeks anyway. It had to do primarily with their corrupt political system.
I'm not so much concerned about snooping as I am having my device potentially used as a tool in an enemy power's cyber warfare campaign against my own nation.
OK. That's a legitimate stance. However, think about it more deeply.
What does China care about the most? It's own economic development. How does it achieve that development? By exporting tons of stuff all over the planet.
Now think what would happen if China were to all of a sudden cyber-weaponize every smartphone in a country...and cause some serious damage - it doesn't have to be the US, it can be a small country, say Denmark or Singapore. What would be the result? Everyone (and not just in the affected country, but pretty much everywhere) would ditch their Chinese-made smartphones, never buy them again, and probably start dumping all of their Chinese-made electronics...this would be a disaster - for China primarily. How likely then is China to do such a thing? Highly unlikely.
So, would you want Chinese-made telecom equipment in CIA headquarters or the White House? Surely not. Do you want CEOs of large American companies using Chinese phones for confidential conversations? Probably not. Does it however matter if the average Jane or Joe on the street is using them? It doesn't.
Sure China might've installed a backdoor in every smartphone that could potentially wreak planetary havoc. However if they ever get around to using it, that would mean that the world situation is so bad that you would have a lot of other things to worry about before thinking of your smartphone.
These are, globally speaking, rather arbitrary numbers that may be based on your personal experience of the city in which you live. I, for example, have only lived in cities with bus systems where, at rush hour, buses come about every 5 minutes (or even less); where they are crush-packed over capacity during rush hour (a half-load might occur at 2 in the afternoon, but never at 8 in the morning or 6 in the evening); where buses, if not travelling in dedicated bus lanes, are slower than surrounding car traffic but not 75% slower (at most 30-50% slower - and as fast as cars or negligibly slower on express routes), and where buses certainly do transport, on the main routes, at rush hour, more people per hour than cars do, and are, therefore, more efficient.
Buses are slower than cars since they make frequent stops while having to navigate the car traffic surrounding them. If they drive however in a dedicated bus lane clear of other traffic, the fact that they have a reserved right-of-way will compensate for their frequent stopping. Thus buses in dedicated bus lanes will, despite the stops, often be faster than cars in rush hour - the bus zooms by while the cars are stuck in traffic.
Problem is, I've seen the massive financial losses incurred by some of these mass transit projects. Not talking about just the huge initial expenses, but the continual bleeding of money trying to maintain them -- plus the inevitable demands to expand them and upgrade them over time.
So is it really "proper" to insist cities invest in mass transit solutions instead of upgrading the roads and highways?
Freeways are ridiculously expensive to build and maintain (unless you're building them through a flat desert), especially in cities. Not to mention that in many cities, they are just not feasible - either there is no physical space to add a lane or built a new freeway, or the property that needs to expropriated to enable it costs magnitudes more than the freeway itself. Think of a rail line - how many passengers can it carry per hour? How about a freeway? Then which is more expensive to maintain per mile? Per mile per passenger?
Roads of other types and streets also cost money. They are only not considered as being "subsidised" and "losing money" because everyone views them as essential public infrastructure and because there are taxes collected to cover their expenses...but is any road "profitable"? Apart from some toll freeways built by private investors (which in the US, are generally the exception). Not every toll road or bridge is profitable (if it's publicly owned) - the toll may be there to just cover part of the costs, just like in most public transit systems, the ticket revenue only covers a part of the expenses. I mean - another example - are parks "profitable"? Yet the same people who don't even give a second thought to how roads are funded object about tax dollars subsidizing public transit and demand that public transit projects be "profitable".
Now, there are other costs than those which are upfront. Traffic jams cost money. It's not easy - probably impossible - to exactly calculate how much, but very good estimates exist. If a public transit system reduces traffic jams, i.e. reduces the amount of time people spend commuting - it saves money. Potentially more than the "subsidy" it receives. A good public transit system can greatly increase the productivity of a city's workforce. If all parts of the city are more accessible (including to people that don't have cars) - people benefit, because they potentially have a larger choice of jobs; employers benefit, because they potentially have a larger pool of employees to chose from; and businesses benefit, because they have a larger pool of customers. Public transit systems take up less real estate than roads, for the same capacity - this allows cities to profit by having more land developed, to increase the quality of life for residents by building more parks and pedestrian-oriented streets, and so on. If you don't need a car to get around, you can save money that you spend elsewhere in the economy (this is especially an issue for low-income people - the ones exploited by loan sharks so they can buy a clunker to get them to work in a reasonable amount of time). Public transit systems pollute less (even CO2 emissions laid aside - plain old air pollution is lower per passenger of public transit vs. private car), reducing associated health costs, and so on and so on.
All of this more than justifies investment in public transit.
It probably is from strictly the standpoint of what's efficient for commuters. But living in the DC metro area and seeing our challenges with the existing system? Man, I just don't know? I've tried to use our mass transit options for my daily commute. Assuming I'm trying to get to and from work during normal rush hour times, it potentially cuts my transit time in half to take the train and transfer to the metro, vs. driving in during traffic jams and trying to find parking in a multi-story garage. BUT -- it's a double-edged sword because I occasionally get stuck for hours if a train breaks down and messes up the schedule OR a miss a train because my schedu
For those too autistic as is the author of the original post, this was meant to be irony. I ain't using a bus.
It's really funny (and also really sad) that you equate taking a bus with having no personal life and personal space. Now, bus service may be quite terrible where you live and this ain't your fault - it just shows the sad state of affairs the society around you is in regards to this. Apologies if you live somewhere where traffic jams are not an issue and where mass public transit is just not feasible (e.g. a small town).
There's another funny issue with buses in NYC that I admit is entirely based on anecdote but I think it's probably not far off from the general truth. The vast majority of my white friends absolutely refuse to take buses. I'm a technology professional in my mid-twenties and I have a number of friends in their twenties to thirties to whom a bus trip would never occur. If the subway is unavailable due to construction or if the area is not accessible by subway, everyone insists on pulling out their phone and ordering Uber cars. Now I'm white and solidly middle class as well, but I grew up in NYC and I suppose to me there is far less stigma or presumed risk and inconvenience in taking the bus, compared to my friends.
In many (most?) US cities buses are an afterthought (especially in cities that do not have a network of higher-capacity transit modes, such as streetcars/LRT, subways, or commuter trains) designed to serve the poor part of the population that can't afford a car. This came out recently for example in, of all people, Elon Musk's comments about his Boring Company ("those [public transit users and cyclists] who can't afford a car should come first"). If forward-looking Musk is "infected" by this mentality (although it might also have something to do with him being South African - although certainly the US didn't "cure" him of this attitude), then imagine how others think about it. The buses are essentially there as some sort of "welfare" service - they're not there to be used by everybody, i.e. not "normal" (e.g. middle-income) people and your average commuter, they are a "social service" for those who can't afford to drive themselves...like, say, food stamps are for those who can't afford to feed themselves. It's no wonder then that bus service is crap, and I'm sure the various comments on this thread about how buses are horrendous in [insert name of American city here] have this as the root cause.
LRT systems, subways, and commuter trains on the other hand are a lot more expensive, and are built for the "normal" and "average" person/commuter. Hence they don't have the poverty (and in the US, unfortunately, often the ensuing racial) stigma attached to it. I'm sure that in NYC it's different in terms of buses (i.e. they are not an afterthought), but NYC is very different from the rest of the US in terms of public transit (it's much closer in that respect to Europe or east Asia).
Are they labeled that way? No? Then fuck off. My taxes paid for that road as well.
What people are trying to say here is that over-use of residential and side streets as alternatives to trunk roads and highways will lead to MORE of those side/residential streets being labelled as "no through traffic", "access only", "residents and emergency vehicles only", and so forth.
It is a bit less convenient for people who live in those areas? Sure. In which case lean on your town planners to avoid narrowing main roads for more bus/special/cycleway lanes, and make the primary roads larger.. because thats what services the majority, rather than pandering to a minority.
Actually, no. You have it all wrong.
Planners have always created residential streets which are meant only for local traffic, not through-traffic. That is wholly a good thing, because maybe people who live there for one, don't want all the noise and pollution (there is a reason why freeways are surrounded by walls, and why generally one's back yard does not face a freeway directly, without obstruction), and for two, they might want to use that street for something other than a mass of cars flowing through (e.g. their children playing in it). I'm always fascinated by people who, once they get in their car, think the entire world (or at least every road) is just empty space that is supposed to have one use and one use only - to get them to their destination...but I digress.
What this study shows is that you can't fix an overcongested road system with optimization (alternative routes, self-driving cars, whatever). If there are too many cars on the road for the network to handle, you will get traffic jams. Simple as that. Now, experience (from the last 60 years or so) shows that widening roads generally does not help - it's only a short-term fix, and if you add a lane, it will soon be filled up. Unless it's - wait for it - a bus lane. Yes, because a bus lane (or a streetcar/LRT right-of-way) can transport magnitudes more people than a car lane (assuming you've got the bus service to enable that, of course - an empty bus lane or one which sees one bus an hour is wasted space).
So the answer is more bus lanes - and more buses - and more public transit in general - not less. That's because experience shows that if you've got a city with millions of people living in it, the proper way to organize it is 1) build it at high density and 2) move people around primarily using high-capacity public transit, not cars. This is exactly the opposite of the way California does it, and in her sprawling car-oriented suburbia, no amount of extra freeways, intelligent GPS machine-learning routing apps, or smart self-driving cars is going to fix traffic problems. As long as the approach is the same, the results will be the same - traffic jams, traffic jams, traffic jams. There is simply a tipping point in terms of population where a primarily car-based transport system becomes inefficient.
Lyft, if they have an interest in self-driving cars, doesn't seem to actively pursue it.
Really? Are you sure about that?
I agree - time of sunrise and sunset should be symmetrical around noon.
In order to actually achieve this, you would have to change time zones every couple of miles...by some small amount, minutes, seconds, whatever.
You do realize that time zones are ALSO a convention, don't you? You don't think that when you cross that bridge in Florida which is the boundary between Central and Eastern time that on one side of the bridge, the sun is at its highest point one hour earlier than on the other side of the bridge? You realize that time zones were invented exactly in order to PREVENT people from setting their clocks "naturally" based on the sun at their location, since that created a total mess and made it very difficult if not impossible to keep to things such as train schedules? So time zones were invented to "artificially" divide the Earth into 1 hour-sized chunks with defined borders so we can always know which time it is in a particular location and have that consistent?
This. Time-telling (beyond day & night) is a man-made convention created to suit human purposes. We can and should shape it anyway we want if it suits our purposes.
It's Florida! People on the beach don't care what time it is, the retirees don't care what time it is, so why insist on DST? Business won't make more money, you won't save more energy, and you've got a surplus of sunlight already. If DST is a pain, why not get rid of it?
In Florida, no one goes to work? Only retirees, tourists, and idlers live there? The post-work automation techno-utopia has arrived in the Orange State? Didn't know that.
Of course the people at the beach care what time it is...they care whether they can have 1, 2, or 3 hours at the beach before it gets dark once they got off work. Not to mention there are other things daylight is good/useful/necessary for other than sitting at the beach...
No.
In the modern Western world, we work on a 9-5 schedule (or thereabouts). DST was invented to shift more daylight hours in the summer to the afternoon and evening, so that people could enjoy this daylight after work. Otherwise, a lot of the daylight hours would be very early in the morning, when most people are asleep or getting ready for/going to work.
So going to DST year-round actually makes sense, because it permanently shifts daylight into the afternoon, i.e. into after-work hours. I don't care how far that puts nominal noon away from real/solar noon, because time-keeping is anyway just a convention made up to make people's lives easier. So we can bend this convention a bit to suit our present purposes. Moving to DST permanently is easier than getting everyone to switch to working 7-3 or whatever.
Once general purpose AI is reached (and there's no reason to suspect it won't be reached eventually unless one is stubborn enough to argue for some kind of a 'soul' that would make the capabilities of a human brain beyond achievable for a computerized system) then pretty much any job that requires thinking/analyzing data will be done faster and better by machines.
It's misguided to assume that human labor will remain competitive with super-intelligent systems indefinitely. .
It's misguided to assume that a super-intelligent general-purpose AI is at all reachable (at least within the lifetime of anyone currently reading and commenting on Slashdot).
There is absolutely zero (let me repeat that: zero - and again: ZERO) proof that current computer technology and AI research can produce a "general-purpose AI" (let alone super-intelligent - people forget that those two are separate things: I can easily argue that the intelligence of a cat is "general purpose", yet it is far from super-intelligent). It's currently just a mythological belief based on a lot of hand-waving. No recourse to some "soul" argument is required to argue that all of the capabilities of a brain (including, possibly, consciousness) are beyond the reach of a computer. I can easily argue that you cannot reproduce all of the functions of a biological brain in a digital computer built from semiconductors. I don't need to invoke any sort of mind-body duality philosophy or anything, just fundamental differences between organic, living biological systems and mostly inorganic, inert (non-living), electro-mechanical systems.
Sure, you can perhaps simulate a biological system on a computer system - but no simulation is 100% accurate, and the more accurate it gets, the slower it gets. Think of just simulating digital electrical circuits - running a simulation of 1 ps of operation of a digital circuit takes longer than 1 ps. Significantly longer, like orders of magnitude longer (and I want to approach the time of 1 ps - which I can never reach - I would need ever more hardware). And realize that here I'm simulating something by itself as it were - using digital circuits to simulate themselves! Now, take an Intel CPU and run on top of it a simulation of itself. Not so fast, is it? Now think of simulating "alien" (with respect to the CPU's structure) and as yet poorly understood structures, like the brain. Start with the brain of a worm...call me when you get to a tenth of a human brain. It'll be a while.
The myth of super-intelligent general purpose AI is based only on the belief that as computers become more powerful and are able to handle more "hidden layers" in neural networks that this super-intelligence will just magically emerge. That's just plain nonsense. Note, I am NOT saying here that automation, advanced robots, and custom-tailored AI for a large range of tasks will not replace human jobs. They will. I'm saying it will not lead to a super-intelligent general-purpose god-like AI which will outdo and replace humans in every way.
There are two kinds of congestion in cities - cars just going somewhere, and cars looking to park/parked.
Uber/Lyft reduce the second kind, which means traffic flows more smoothly even with more cars. A car just dropping people off does not impact traffic the way cars circling a block looking for parking will, and also will not fill up valuable parking spots that might have otherwise been filled.
That's if you assume an Uber/Lyft car is constantly picking up and dropping off passengers. While this may be the case in certain very busy periods (or places), I'm guessing that it's usually not the case. So what does an Uber driver do when he has a significant "gap" between customers?
1) Drive around in circles aimlessly waiting to be hailed? Or
2) Try to find a convenient parking spot (preferably, free and not time-limited) where next call can be waited for?
Both options seem to increase congestion. Note that traditional licensed taxis have, in most cities, dedicated "taxi stations" - usually curbside parking spot reserved for taxis only. There is no time limit, and they are "free" (the taxi drivers pay for them to the city indirectly, via the licensing fees). Uber/Lyft doesn't have that, they have to use the regular parking.
Also, in many cities, traditional taxis are allowed to use bus lanes - allowing them to both get around quicker and not contribute (as much) to general congestion. Uber vehicles generally are not allowed in bus lanes, but must use the regular lanes, impeding the "normal" traffic. An Uber car can use HOV lanes when transporting a passenger, but not when empty. Taxis are often allowed to use HOV lanes even when empty.
The premise behind "ride-sharing" (stupid name) services is that your car spends most of its time idle, and that by changing that you can turn into a source of income.
If you give people a financial incentive to start driving around their previously mostly-parked cars, it increases the amount of vehicles on the road...and hence congestion. It's a no brainer, really. Also, since Uber is just a cheaper taxi service you call up with an app, no wonder it's pulling in mostly non-driving passengers (traditional taxi passengers, public transit users, walkers, cyclists).
iTunes is happy to rip music from CDs. I can buy music from the iTunes store. It's quick and convenient and not expensive. I can also take music from other sources. I don't see why I should care where it's stored on my computer. I haven't found other music players I want to use instead.
In other words, iTunes serves my purposes. I can buy music from it, or supply my own. I can play it. Since I don't want to fiddle with the details instead of concentrating on more interesting things, I'm perfectly OK with that.
And I never said you shouldn't be OK with that. If that's what rocks your boat...no problem.
I'm just saying that there are lots of people who are not OK with that, and that the idea that Apple products are somehow universally easier or more intuitive to use is wrong. Some people find them easy and love 'em. Some people find them strange and difficult and hate 'em.
The folks calling for higher restrictions, or bans on firearms seem to fall into 2 categories. The first is that we punish everyone for the actions of a few which is not a way to keep a healthy vision of freedom. Or 2, they want the ability to arrest and take away a single persons rights based on circumstantial evidence of what he "MAY" do in the future but hasn't yet. If you take out the emotional "ZOMG! It's a GUN", and think about this in relation to other things as well, and it's easier to see that the ethic's in this are fuzzy at best.
Look, this is the type of world the 2nd amendment was created in:
[E]ach and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia...[and] every citizen so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch with a box therein to contain not less than twenty-four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball: or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder; and shall appear, so armed, accoutred and provided, when called out to exercise, or into service, except, that when called out on company days to exercise only, he may appear without a knapsack.
This is from a law passed by Congress in 1792, which tried to regulate militias (those referred to in the 2nd amendment). The militias were to be established for the purpose of national defense - which tells you that a "good musket or firelock" was the state-of-the-art military equipment at the time.
Let me repeat that: a good musket or firelock.
It's kind of obvious that you can't do mass shootings with a musket or firelock. Not if you're one person at least - you'd need an army of muskets and firelocks to kill people en masse. Weapons which can allow a single person to easily and quickly kill hundreds of people did not exist back in the late 18th century. You have to look at things through a present-day, 21st century lens. Some weapons are too dangerous to be allowed for the general, untrained public to own. Assault weapons would fit this category. These should not be operated by people not specifically trained for their use - and I don't mean only technically trained, but psychologically as well. If one is worried about freedom with regard to the government (the whole "people must be armed to prevent government tyranny" argument), one quickly realizes that arming the people to guarantee this freedom is unpractical. Technology has advanced so much that a government controlled army can wipe out hundreds or thousands of armed citizens with one to five pieces of equipment operated by a single digit number of soldiers. Today, maybe even remotely. Unless you want to allow every citizen to own a B-2 bomber or a fleet of Abrams tanks (or a nuclear warhead), no "armed citizenry" is going to beat a government army. In such cases, you have to think of "freedom" in different terms. It's not the same in 1786 and in 2018.
Is removing weapons from a person that has committed no crime a violation of his or her second amendment rights.
The second amendment says
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Now, I'm guessing, that if one wanted, one could stretch the "well regulated militia" part to justify all sorts of gun control legislation, including the pre-emptive removal of guns of a person deemed dangerous to the public. It's not like your courts have not re-defined or re-interpreted parts of your constitution several times already. All you need is a pro-gun control majority on the Supreme Court.
If the US is having a civil war, what's top stop Russian sending troops into the Eastern members of NATO
The nuclear bombs that would be falling on Moscow and St. Petersburg within 10 minutes of them crossing the border
Actually, yes you are, at least among the developed, rich countries, i.e. countries most comparable to the US.
The fact that there are more gun deaths in countries which have been in a state of never-ending civil war for decades (e.g. Afghanistan, Congo) and those rife with extreme poverty and violent drug cartels (e.g. many countries in Latin America) is not really relevant here. When it comes to mass shooters however, the US tops the world-wide list...