They just don't care. The wheels have been greased, the appropriate promises and payoffs have been made in the backrooms of Washington D.C., and this bill is slated to pass no matter what a bunch of geeks have to say about it.
This isn't a one-study thing. Over the past five years a bunch of studies have come out saying, basically "cell phones increase your likelihood of crashing as much as drinking" and "hands free headsets do not lower this risk significantly".
Only thing is, they fail to explain the cell phone accident paradox. Which is, in the time that cell phones have gone from rare to ubiquitous, fatality and accident rates have not increased. They have fallen. Which means either 1) Cell phones aren't all that dangerous, and these studies are wrong 2) Drunk driving isn't all that dangerous 3) Some other factor is reducing fatal accidents faster than the increase in cell phones
Number 3 fails to survive Occam's Razor. Number 2 seems unlikely to say the least -- the one study I've seen rigged the scales a bit by using drivers with 0.08 BAC (at which impairment is minimal).
I can only imagine that most people replying with derision about metrics have never been in the position of having to justify what they are doing, and when they have been they have acted dishonestly.
No, just the opposite. The people who have never been in that position probably don't understand why there's so much derision. The people who act dishonestly aren't derisive at all; they're busy writing themselves a new minivan.
People that actually work in the real world, with real companies with real budgets, and that have some self respect, honesty and pride in what they do will have to justify their salaries or rates somehow, and one of the tools used is some kind of metrics.
Actually, those of us with self respect, honesty, and pride in what we do tend to get our back up when "Bob" shows up and demands we justify ourselves ("So, what exactly do you DO here?"). It's insulting to both one's sense of pride and self respect. When metrics are introduced which are so obviously easily gamed, the reaction from an honest, proud, and self-respectful person is to continue to do what they do anyway (knowing that it's the right thing to do, and often naively figuring management can't be serious) and let the metric fall where it will. The reaction from person with more ambition than self-respect will be to game the metric. Guess who gets laid off?
A professional will find metrics that are meaningful to both their team and their bosses or paymasters, and contrary to what most people are implying here, they can be quite useful to identify reasons for which a team is overworked and maybe bring somebody else on board.
Finding meaningful metrics is actually quite difficult. Finding metrics that remain meaningful once you start using them is nigh impossible.
When your control channel is being jammed. As others have pointed out though, it really should be using military encrypted GPS - in fact this seems to be a requirement since September 2006 - in which case it seems that they shouldn't have been able to spoof it...
I can think of one reason not to use encrypted GPS, and that's if losing the drone was expected. You wouldn't want to hand a current key to the enemy, so it might be worth a greater chance of them spoofing GPS. If that's the case, the drone will probably have pretty much nothing in the way of secret technology; basically they'll have gotten themselves a really nice remote control airplane that they could have ordered off the shelf from Taiwan or something.
. Simply being at a party, drinking, is often frowned upon as the companies have outright stated when interviewed on this subject.
Personally I'm glad that these companies do this filtering, because it saves me the potential trouble of going to work for them, finding out they've got a stick up their corporate asses, and then having to look for another job and quit. However I understand other people might be in more need of a job, so I fully support finding anyone who hires and fires based on such things and photographing them in compromising positions.
Losers realize this simple fact, instantly think of several ways to game the metric, then don't do it figuring that "obviously" the decisionmakers realize the metric is horribly broken. Then they get laid off. Winners spend hours, days, or weeks coming up with one way to game the metric, pat themselves on the back for being so clever, and do it. Then they get promoted, eventually to a position where they come up with metrics of their own.
How about preventing 2600 deaths and 330,000 injuries per year?
I do not believe those figures are accurate.
What's the cost of people imprisoned for the sequela of drinking while driving (DUI -> suspended license -> driving while suspended -> prison -> prison rape)? I see no difference. You would legalize drunk driving?
The cost is presumably the same on a per-person basis. However, the benefits of penalizing drunk driving (at least if you restrict it to actual drunks, and not the mildly buzzed at 0.08) are much greater.
Spend some time in a court. Don't feed your opinion of law enforcement from Television shows. Stop reading sensationalist press.
I've been in court several times where the cop lied. Most recently a cop accused me of running a red light on a bicycle, riding on the sidewalk, and nearly running over a pedestrian. Now, he was standing directly under the light and could not see it (nor was any lamp visible from his position), but we can perhaps put that down as an honest mistake. I only rode on the sidewalk after he stepped in front of me and I turned to avoid him (bicycles obey the laws of physics and cannot stop instantaneously), but at least it's true I was on the sidewalk. However, no pedestrian was anywhere around. So why did the cop say there was one?
Answer: The judge for that district is known to be harsh on bicyclists who endanger pedestrians, often sending them to jail.
Unfortunately for that cop, the hanging judge wasn't in on the day of my hearing, so I got off easy.
On another occasion, in a different jurisdiction, a cop wrote that after he had me step out of the car I was "screaming and waving my arms". If you've ever seen a number of court cases you know they say that a lot, and probably wondered why. Well, the answer is they just make it up; it's part of the script they use to obtain convictions. I didn't say, let alone scream, one word to that cop after he had me step out of the car, nor did I wave my arms.
What cops do in court is not so much lying as telling a story to obtain a conviction. A lie has a relationship to the truth; it is its opposite. Cops' testilying has no relationship to the truth, aside from a few real details being thrown in to add verisimilitude. The courts believe (or act as if they believe) the stories unquestioningly, so why should the cops do otherwise?
So with a cell phone law, if the cop wants to give you a hard time, he'll stand up in court and say you were using your cell phone when you were pulled over. Whether you were or not. If you pull up call records, the cop will simply point out that he could have interrupted you before making the call. Just another tool of oppression.
Accident rates (and especially fatalities) have been dropping (per capita) for decades. However, there is no science that can explain how much reduced drunk driving, cell phone outlawing, safer cars, etc each contribute to the drop.
Indeed. Accident rates dropped as cell phone use skyrocketed. Yet there's an 'epidemic' of distracted driving.
How about we stop passing laws on the basis of "if it could possibly save just one life"? Perhaps we should consider the cost of such laws as well... what's the cost of people imprisoned for the sequela of cell phone use while driving (cell phone tickets -> suspended license -> driving while suspended -> prison -> prison rape)?
What's the cost of impaired mobility due to people not driving because they got suspended after using a hands-free device not made by the car manufacturer?
I'd love to know exactly what all these unjust laws are tht everryone here is so upset about. I mean, most criminal trials are about violent assault or theft.
Drug possession and distribution, prostitution, solicitation, and (for us nerds) violation of the DMCA.
That's nothing compared to what we did to Cromwell. After he died, we dug up the corpse and executed him anyway. Cromwell was not very popular by the time of his death.
Then you put up a statue to him outside Parliament, within sight of the monarch's entrance, presumably to remind the Queen what happens if she's naughty. Hmm... Oliver Cromwell as Santa Claus...
If you* had ignored Afghanistan in the first place they wouldn't have developed the Taliban and if you had ignored Korea there wouldn't be a North and a South.
About Afghanistan it's hard to say; perhaps they'd still be under Soviet domination, with the collapse of the Soviet state put off by the weaker opposition there. Or perhaps something like the Taliban would have appeared in the wake of the fall of the USSR.
About Korea it's a little easier to say; it would be all the land of the Dear Leader. Some improvement.
In the mean time.... a cocaine pipeline would be easy to build. Dissolve in vats of solvent on one end, send it through, distill the solvent out at the other end, and send it back.... assuming you want to reduce waste and recycle. Sadly as there are no evnironmental regulations on the black market, and prohibition has sent their profit margins so high, they would likely just evaporate it off or dump the left over solvent into a sump.
Cocaine hydrochloride ("powder") is water soluble. The freebase is soluble in alcohol. So no worries about the environment, cheap and relatively benign solvents can be used.
OK, so you hit it big at some point, bought a home for cash, and are now bragging about it. Or you've been saving for a long time, paid off your home, and managed to not take too much of a hit in 2008. Not sure what that has to do with goals.
And let alone, have a computer on you 24/7. a nice tablet can get you LAID!
I'm pretty sure that when they were new, a titanium PowerBook could as well. At least create the opportunity, anyway, alas for most geeks that would not be sufficient.
That time is probably already past for tablets, they are too common now.
Like 24 megapixel,36x zoom cameras: it's not about the camera. It's about the photographer.
And that's only partially true. A better camera (and lens) will allow a good photographer to get shots he couldn't have gotten without them.
Let's get over the sensationalism and realize the real problem: We had false expectations of GPS and therefore should not have depended on this technology in defense systems.
Defense systems have had direct P(Y)/L3 acquisition for a while. On a battlefield, they can also eliminate the interference with a HARM if they so choose. And they have inertial guidance and other backup systems for when GPS is being jammed. This isn't about defense; this is about civilian GPS use.
It's just assumed that Stuxnet is SOOOO advanced that only a nation-state could devise this zero-day infiltration into the centrifuge system of Iran.
Well, there are others who would have the means -- Siemens, for instance. Building Stuxnet would have required someone familiar with PC viruses and someone with extensive knowledge about the PLCs used for centrifuges, but that's not an impossible bar for a private entity. But the motive for a private concern to screw with Iran is pretty weak, and the infecting of the Iranian computers (if done by USB keys left for employees to find) would require actually having people on the ground in Iran to do it. Further, building such a virus as a private concern can get you in a lot of hot water with your own government (even if you are trying to screw with an enemy), which makes it even more unlikely.
That really glosses over the importance of the centrifuges. They are massive, expensive machines to replace, and they directly handle the material. If failure occurred during operation (which was exactly what Stuxnet was designed to do), then on top of losing the machines, the nuclear material itself would be lost. The centrifuges are a critical part of the entire program, and their loss set Iran back years
IIRC, it was more subtle than that. It changed the speeds of the centrifuges, not enough to actually destroy them, but enough to ruin the batch. Seems a little too subtle for Russia.
Research the average wage in the US and look up how much say a Bill Gates make. Then realize how many people are begging on the street so Bill Gate can be so rich.
Nobody is begging on the street so Bill Gates can be so rich. It's not zero-sum.
Treason? No that's only for playing Russians at Chess.
Bobby Fischer wasn't charged with treason, and he wasn't charged for playing Russians. He was charged for violating sanctions against Yugoslavia.
Treason is defined in the US Constitution, and while it might cover Fischer's actions, it'd be more than a bit of a stretch. It certainly doesn't cover stealing from the government in ordinary ways. Nor does it cover selling arms to Eastasia when the current enemy is Eurasia, even if Eastasia was the enemy last week.
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You don't need a terrorist organization, but we already have the member companies of the RIAA and MPAA to do this already.
I for one welcome our new and enlightened Dark Age.
They just don't care. The wheels have been greased, the appropriate promises and payoffs have been made in the backrooms of Washington D.C., and this bill is slated to pass no matter what a bunch of geeks have to say about it.
Not only have deaths dropped, but accidents have dropped as well. So no, auto safety features fail to explain the drop. mva stats
Only thing is, they fail to explain the cell phone accident paradox. Which is, in the time that cell phones have gone from rare to ubiquitous, fatality and accident rates have not increased. They have fallen. Which means either
1) Cell phones aren't all that dangerous, and these studies are wrong
2) Drunk driving isn't all that dangerous
3) Some other factor is reducing fatal accidents faster than the increase in cell phones
Number 3 fails to survive Occam's Razor. Number 2 seems unlikely to say the least -- the one study I've seen rigged the scales a bit by using drivers with 0.08 BAC (at which impairment is minimal).
Einstein was terrible at multitasking. Schroedinger, on the other hand, was a champion at it.
No, just the opposite. The people who have never been in that position probably don't understand why there's so much derision. The people who act dishonestly aren't derisive at all; they're busy writing themselves a new minivan.
Actually, those of us with self respect, honesty, and pride in what we do tend to get our back up when "Bob" shows up and demands we justify ourselves ("So, what exactly do you DO here?"). It's insulting to both one's sense of pride and self respect. When metrics are introduced which are so obviously easily gamed, the reaction from an honest, proud, and self-respectful person is to continue to do what they do anyway (knowing that it's the right thing to do, and often naively figuring management can't be serious) and let the metric fall where it will. The reaction from person with more ambition than self-respect will be to game the metric. Guess who gets laid off?
Finding meaningful metrics is actually quite difficult. Finding metrics that remain meaningful once you start using them is nigh impossible.
I can think of one reason not to use encrypted GPS, and that's if losing the drone was expected. You wouldn't want to hand a current key to the enemy, so it might be worth a greater chance of them spoofing GPS. If that's the case, the drone will probably have pretty much nothing in the way of secret technology; basically they'll have gotten themselves a really nice remote control airplane that they could have ordered off the shelf from Taiwan or something.
Two pints of beer in an hour will do it.
Personally I'm glad that these companies do this filtering, because it saves me the potential trouble of going to work for them, finding out they've got a stick up their corporate asses, and then having to look for another job and quit. However I understand other people might be in more need of a job, so I fully support finding anyone who hires and fires based on such things and photographing them in compromising positions.
Losers realize this simple fact, instantly think of several ways to game the metric, then don't do it figuring that "obviously" the decisionmakers realize the metric is horribly broken. Then they get laid off. Winners spend hours, days, or weeks coming up with one way to game the metric, pat themselves on the back for being so clever, and do it. Then they get promoted, eventually to a position where they come up with metrics of their own.
I do not believe those figures are accurate.
The cost is presumably the same on a per-person basis. However, the benefits of penalizing drunk driving (at least if you restrict it to actual drunks, and not the mildly buzzed at 0.08) are much greater.
I've been in court several times where the cop lied. Most recently a cop accused me of running a red light on a bicycle, riding on the sidewalk, and nearly running over a pedestrian. Now, he was standing directly under the light and could not see it (nor was any lamp visible from his position), but we can perhaps put that down as an honest mistake. I only rode on the sidewalk after he stepped in front of me and I turned to avoid him (bicycles obey the laws of physics and cannot stop instantaneously), but at least it's true I was on the sidewalk. However, no pedestrian was anywhere around. So why did the cop say there was one?
Answer: The judge for that district is known to be harsh on bicyclists who endanger pedestrians, often sending them to jail.
Unfortunately for that cop, the hanging judge wasn't in on the day of my hearing, so I got off easy.
On another occasion, in a different jurisdiction, a cop wrote that after he had me step out of the car I was "screaming and waving my arms". If you've ever seen a number of court cases you know they say that a lot, and probably wondered why. Well, the answer is they just make it up; it's part of the script they use to obtain convictions. I didn't say, let alone scream, one word to that cop after he had me step out of the car, nor did I wave my arms.
What cops do in court is not so much lying as telling a story to obtain a conviction. A lie has a relationship to the truth; it is its opposite. Cops' testilying has no relationship to the truth, aside from a few real details being thrown in to add verisimilitude. The courts believe (or act as if they believe) the stories unquestioningly, so why should the cops do otherwise?
So with a cell phone law, if the cop wants to give you a hard time, he'll stand up in court and say you were using your cell phone when you were pulled over. Whether you were or not. If you pull up call records, the cop will simply point out that he could have interrupted you before making the call. Just another tool of oppression.
Indeed. Accident rates dropped as cell phone use skyrocketed. Yet there's an 'epidemic' of distracted driving.
How about we stop passing laws on the basis of "if it could possibly save just one life"? Perhaps we should consider the cost of such laws as well... what's the cost of people imprisoned for the sequela of cell phone use while driving (cell phone tickets -> suspended license -> driving while suspended -> prison -> prison rape)?
What's the cost of impaired mobility due to people not driving because they got suspended after using a hands-free device not made by the car manufacturer?
Drug possession and distribution, prostitution, solicitation, and (for us nerds) violation of the DMCA.
Then you put up a statue to him outside Parliament, within sight of the monarch's entrance, presumably to remind the Queen what happens if she's naughty. Hmm... Oliver Cromwell as Santa Claus...
About Afghanistan it's hard to say; perhaps they'd still be under Soviet domination, with the collapse of the Soviet state put off by the weaker opposition there. Or perhaps something like the Taliban would have appeared in the wake of the fall of the USSR.
About Korea it's a little easier to say; it would be all the land of the Dear Leader. Some improvement.
Cocaine hydrochloride ("powder") is water soluble. The freebase is soluble in alcohol. So no worries about the environment, cheap and relatively benign solvents can be used.
OK, so you hit it big at some point, bought a home for cash, and are now bragging about it. Or you've been saving for a long time, paid off your home, and managed to not take too much of a hit in 2008. Not sure what that has to do with goals.
I'm pretty sure that when they were new, a titanium PowerBook could as well. At least create the opportunity, anyway, alas for most geeks that would not be sufficient.
That time is probably already past for tablets, they are too common now.
And that's only partially true. A better camera (and lens) will allow a good photographer to get shots he couldn't have gotten without them.
Defense systems have had direct P(Y)/L3 acquisition for a while. On a battlefield, they can also eliminate the interference with a HARM if they so choose. And they have inertial guidance and other backup systems for when GPS is being jammed. This isn't about defense; this is about civilian GPS use.
Well, there are others who would have the means -- Siemens, for instance. Building Stuxnet would have required someone familiar with PC viruses and someone with extensive knowledge about the PLCs used for centrifuges, but that's not an impossible bar for a private entity. But the motive for a private concern to screw with Iran is pretty weak, and the infecting of the Iranian computers (if done by USB keys left for employees to find) would require actually having people on the ground in Iran to do it. Further, building such a virus as a private concern can get you in a lot of hot water with your own government (even if you are trying to screw with an enemy), which makes it even more unlikely.
IIRC, it was more subtle than that. It changed the speeds of the centrifuges, not enough to actually destroy them, but enough to ruin the batch. Seems a little too subtle for Russia.
Nobody is begging on the street so Bill Gates can be so rich. It's not zero-sum.
Bobby Fischer wasn't charged with treason, and he wasn't charged for playing Russians. He was charged for violating sanctions against Yugoslavia.
Treason is defined in the US Constitution, and while it might cover Fischer's actions, it'd be more than a bit of a stretch. It certainly doesn't cover stealing from the government in ordinary ways. Nor does it cover selling arms to Eastasia when the current enemy is Eurasia, even if Eastasia was the enemy last week.