Yup. If you want to know how much the US spends subsidizing oil, just look at how much money we've spent on Iran, Iraq, and Syria in comparison to Sudan, Rwanda, and Ethiopia.
Some significant fraction of our military is charged with maintaining the Freedom of the Seas. So I guess we are subsidizing all of American commerce that ships or imports stuff via cargo ships.
Well, we need a Navy, and it doesn't cost all that much more for them to respond to the occasional ship in distress. The incremental cost of that has to be quite a bit lower than Gulf War I/II. If Iran, Iraq, Israel, and Syria were countries in the middle of Africa nobody would care about them at all. Oil is what causes us to spend incredible fortunes securing these areas.
If they just recovered it via a tax on imported oil that would probably fix a lot of problems. For starters, you'd have a lot more lobbying against the US going to war...
Certainly agree in principle, but the real challenge with the counting approaches is that in many cases they aren't as accurate. Everybody wants to ditch the current kilogram, but it works so well that none of the alternatives are suitable replacements.
Defining both the second and the meter on wavelength/frequency measurements probably still effectively fixes the speed of light, assuming the speed of light really is fixed as everybody believes it is.
The mol is the most obvious case where you can define it by counting, since it really is a counting measure.
In classical statistical mechanics, you can have a solid that has a low enough, but non-zero temperature such that the change of any given atom having enough energy to leave the surface has effectively zero probability on a relevant timescale.
That "effectively zero probability" means that it sublimes. It just does it REALLY slowly. And that is if you want to keep the standard at a near-absolute-zero temperatures for decades. That creates a whole different set of problems. Can you weigh it as accurately at those temperatures? If you have to warm and cool it, does the mass change due to damage during expansion/etc? Can you maintain it at that temperature without any contamination (if it is that cold than any molecule of gas that leaks in will condense or solidify).
That's the whole problem with the kilogram standard. They're probably managing it as best as they can already, but it will never be perfect, and they're well past the point of diminishing returns so anytime you want to consider any improvement you have to factor in all of physics.
* the seven SI base units are not independent e.g. the Amp depends on the definition of the kilogram ?!?!
Well, it is kind of hard to build an apparatus to measure the value of the amp without constructing it out of matter or energy, and matter and energy are both described by other units. The forces of nature are interesting to us because they affect things that we can see and feel, and indeed sight and feeling are themselves the result of the forces of nature. So, there is really no such thing as a pure force that acts independently of anything else and therefore can be defined independently of anything else, unless you want to talk about the supernatural.
Distance would be meaningless without motion, and motion is meaningless without time. Mass is really just a measurement of inertia, and that is meaningless without motion or force. You could look at mass as a measurement of gravity instead, but again that is a force.
So, the relationship between the fundamental units of measure is tied up in the nature of physics.
Also, which units are fundamental is entirely a matter of convenience. You could just as easily make either the Amp or the Coulomb fundamental, or make velocity fundamental and distance derived (indeed, that's basically how the definition works anyway).
The mol is a bit of an interesting unit, because ultimately it is a counting unit. If NA were determined with absolute precision it would basically be dimensionless, like the unit of the "dozen." Certainly a level of tradition is caught up in the SI base units, but it doesn't really make them defective in any way. Whether we have a special unit for the Cd has a lot less impact on physics than whether the mathematicians embrace the axiom of choice.:)
The whole problem with these approaches is that for all its flaws that hunk of metal works remarkably well. There have been many attempts to replace it for all the obvious reasons.
I think silicon is one of the big contenders for the atom to count because the electronics industry has gotten so good and preparing samples of it at incredibly high purity. However, creating a sample of known density and volume at a scale large enough to measure its mass is very difficult. It isn't like you can just grab NA C-12 atoms with tweezers and stick them in a pile. It would be a chore keeping out all the non-Carbon atoms, let alone the isotopes of carbon. And of course if you get any C14 in there then there will be non-Carbon atoms in due time.
Sure it can. It just does it VERY slowly. The solid state is greatly preferred for these metals at room temperature, but at any temperature and pressure solid, liquid, and gas are all in equilibrium. When you're talking about thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, about the only absolute is zero, and that is a state that doesn't physically exist anywhere.
Then throw in quantum mechanics. There is probably some small but finite probability that I'll appear in your living room before I finish typ
I see a lot of people playing music in a Youtube (or whatever) tab while doing other things in the other tabs. Automatically muting any background tabs will break that usage.
Yup - I know somebody who went nuts over the fact that he couldn't get his Android tablet to do that no matter what. There was what amounted to a podcast in video form that he wanted to listen to, and the video was superfluous. He wanted to still do other things on the tablet while it was playing. It was impossible, because he couldn't find an app that would let you play a video in the background.
Granted, this was a few years ago - perhaps the situation has changed since. I haven't gone looking for video players that work in the background on Android.
In any case, seems like the defaults should be configurable. There should be a default on-vs-off setting, and a default for what happens when you switch tabs. Then there should be the ability to override any of this for any site.
Carriers might be the backbone of the navy, but the backbone of the Western world are the SLBMs in the launch tubes of our nuclear submarines. We need to develop hypersonic SLBMs, because "they" most certainly will.
There is such a thing as non-hypersonic SLBMs? I don't mean those 1950s things where you basically surfaced and constructed a missile base on the deck.
Any long-range ballistic missile has to be hypersonic, or it wouldn't be long-range (or ballistic).
I tend to doubt the nuclear detonation angle - maybe some extra neutrons irradiating the crew before they drown, but I'd be interested in anything reputable you have to point me at.
However, no question that a torpedo hit on a ship either sinks it, or at least makes it irrelevant to the battle. Carriers can't launch aircraft loaded with bombs if they're dead in the water, or underwater. Maybe they'll get off lightly-loaded aircraft for patrols, or helicopters to go chase the sub.
I'm not sure that is the correct question. Even if utility is increased by forcing children of well-meaning but poor parents to attend schools with their less-involved neighbors, I would not say that is just.
It certainly isn't just, but at least somebody could afford to pay for their welfare benefits down the road.
The whole system needs MAJOR reform, and I doubt the political will exists to make it happen.
There is one thing, however, which I don't know how we can fix, at least not from a legislative or policy standpoint, and that is the lack of parental participation.
Well, there are certainly ways to fix it from a legislative/policy standpoint. However, whether anybody would actually vote for the fixes is an entirely different matter. People really like to be able to have their kids, show them off, and send them off when they become a bother. Making everybody else pay for them when they become adults unable to function in society is just the next logical step. Oh, and I'll say that this is just as true in affluent and poor families - the affluent just sometimes (but not always) do a better job hiring more qualified people to tend to their kids when they can't be bothered by them, and tend to leave them enough money that only the most incompetent manage to become destitute.
They have no right to those people's first born children.
You seem to forget that these children are the property of society, and only on loan to the parents at the pleasure of the State, and only so long as they maintain good behavior.
While I get your point, the fact is that children aren't the property of their parents, and they're not able to effectively represent themselves.
I don't think parents have any inherent right to raise their kids however they see fit. Their rights end at their own bodies (assuming they don't expect anybody else to help care for them - their rights end sooner than that if they do). Since society ends up having to take care of delinquent children who grow up into delinquent adults, society also has a say in how those kids are raised.
That said, simply forcing rich people to send their kids to the status quo public school meat grinder isn't the solution.
Claiming you have to put your kid in public education in order to have a say in fixing it is as idiotic as claiming you have to move to Africa to help them.
So, while I disagree with forcing people to put their kids in public education, I think you're mischaracterizing the position of those who do advocate this.
They're not suggesting that you need to put your kids into public education in order to have a say. The advocate forcing kids into public education so that parents bother to have a say.
For the most part the schools will ignore community suggestions either way, but at least if all the children of rich people get punished for this the rich people are more likely to escalate the issue and force a change upon the schools. Or so the theory goes.
More likely the rich people just move into a community nobody else can afford to live in, and thus they can vote for whatever laws they want, and appoint whatever school board they want. There are plenty of public schools that work fine - most people just can't afford to attend them.
2. Media campaign targeted at parents, showing them that even though they got by chances are your kids won't.
Frankly, the only thing that is going to help here is requiring a license to have children, making that license hard to obtain, making failure to uphold the terms of the license grounds for giving the kids to somebody else who wants a license, and enforcing all of this stuff in a manner that it sticks. The last bit is why you'll probably never see it happen - it would either require draconian punishments after-the-fact, or forced contraception before-the-fact (and only the latter is likely to actually work, assuming a male implantable contraceptive could be developed, though I think there are reversible forms of sterilization for males).
If it were up to me parents would be required to fund their kids education and welfare through adulthood before they were allowed to have kids. In the interest of diversity/etc I'd make scholarships available, but they would be such that parents would have to REALLY want kids before they'd get one. If kids cost as much as fancy cars then chances are they'd be cared for like fancy cars.
So, being a product of public education, I wouldn't be so quick to leave the teachers out of it.
I've had really great teachers, and really lousy ones. The problem is that as far as I can tell nothing was really done about either. Maybe the great ones get the special page in the yearbook more often, but that's about it.
I had teachers who turned the most interesting classes into exercises in rote and process. "Notebook reviews" were checks to see if the material that was placed on the overhead was copied verbatim. Two teachers forced the class to memorize all the prepositions in the english language and provide them verbatim in alphabetical order - must be some kind of rite of passage for middle school english or something as it happened in two different grades.
None of this stuff would fly in any business that depended on selling services to adults who actually had to consume those services. Kids just have to live with it, and their parents don't get any choice about paying for it anyway. Colleges do somewhat better, but most of their students are barely more than children themselves and certainly not critical about the use of their money. I love learning, but I could never see myself actually paying for a degreed class - too much nonsense.
Not making this up - some groups in Afghanistan think that spreading polio is a good way to get back at the Great Satan.
Sounds like a genius plan. Spread a disease which is almost universally vaccinated against within the USA, but not within your own community. That will get them far...
The system should be designed so that they can't be negligent in the first place.
Since negligence includes failing to follow the system properly (and often does), this is not possible.
Sure it is - design the system so that if you don't follow it, transactions are impossible.
It is fairly trivial to design a system such that a transaction is impossible without the card present and the card owner's authorization (two factor authentication). All data entering and leaving the card could be intercepted or recorded, and the most that could be done by an attacker would be to block the transaction (denial of service). The credentials required to authorize a transaction (one time only) would never leave the card. The card would only sign a transaction after displaying the details on its screen and obtaining a PIN on its keypad (no dependence on the security of a terminal that belongs to the retailer).
If you didn't want something quite that fancy you could just issue a OTP-generator with every card and that would be almost as good, though it would be susceptible to MITM attacks since the customer would just be blindly giving out their one-time PIN and would have no way to guarantee that it gets applied to the correct transaction.
Credit cards are inherently insecure. They rely on a shared secret that isn't kept secret.
In the Oracle world, patching does not affect version numbers. A different version means different or new functionality, even if it is the last part of the version. Based on the version, you cannot determine if it is patched or not.
Makes sense - if they wanted to actually show patch level they'd need a more complex version numbering scheme. Just how much information do you think can really be communicated in 5 separate version numbers?
How is that? It sounds to me like you've circled Linus Torvalds, who talks about what he's interested in. If you instead follow his Linux page you'd get only Linux stuff with no diving content (personally, as a Linux user and a SCUBA diver, I like following both, plus I find Linus to be a generally interesting fellow).
Sure, and for Linus I'll tolerate it. However, if I extend that to every other person who posts anything of interest on Linux I'll be drowning in cat pictures, jokes, and politics.
Linus should be able to post publicly about whatever he wants to, and I should be able to see 100% of his Linux-oriented posts and maybe 10% of the rest. It isn't that I don't care about him as a person, but, well, frankly if I told you that I cared about everybody whose feeds I browse you'd know I was lying.
Sure. I don't post publicly in general, because I know that most people aren't interested in half of what I write. If I'm writing about something FOSS-related it goes to one circle, and if it is family-related it goes to another. I have circles for people I follow, and I have circles that I broadcast to but don't read.
My threshold for putting somebody in a broadcast-only circle is VERY low. Why would I want to restrict access to my own posts? Again, I don't post publicly most of the time.
If Google fixed their broken model which is based on the assumption that if I'm interested in Linux then I'm interested in Subsurface then perhaps I'd change my habits...
Because all vehicles will not become automated overnight.
Honestly making them all automated overnight seems like the simplest solution to me. Just give everybody a free car if you have to. It would be cheaper than a war in Iraq, and would probably pay for itself quickly in a huge reduction in the need for road expansion.
Think about how poorly people maintain their vehicles, and you can expect several cars in a "train" to have one or more faulty sensors.
In a world of automated cars a vehicle with a faulty sensor would refuse to drive. Or, it would run in reduced capability mode to the nearest repair center with all the other cars giving it a wide berth. A world in which cars drive themselves is a world in which it is impossible to operate a car illegally.
But, what happens when the stupid meat-bag in the "driver's" seat decides to hit the brakes, or fiddle with the steering wheel while in a train? Or a tire blows out?
Well, the first problem has a trivial solution - remove all driver-operable controls from the car. I'm not sure how you're going to safely manually drive a car across an intersection with 4 lanes of traffic going each way continuously with no traffic light.
The second problem simply needs the right level of tolerances in the system. A car with three tires isn't going to pull more Gs maneuvering than a car nearby with four tires is able to manage, and a car under computer control isn't going to do something in panic either. When the car loses a tire the computer will simply start a gentle turn/accelerate/brake to balance the car on the other three tires while all the surrounding traffic rapidly creates a path to safety. Even if the car bumped a nearby one it would only have maybe a few inches in which to accelerate so the forces would be low. In fact, perhaps the safesty way to handle a car with a blowout in the middle of a train would be for the cars on either side to sandwich it and decelerate. Considering that a blowout in a manually-driven car at highway speeds can easily be fatal (and for more than one car), a little bumper damage is a small price to pay for averting a catastrophe.
Of course, the self-driving car will just drive itself to a garage if it detects a tire pressure or wear problem. If the owner refuses to properly maintain the car then it will just impound itself. Catastrophic failures are pretty rare when cars are properly maintained. But, sure, somebody could shoot out a tire with a rifle or whatever - have to plan for anything.
I'm more worried about the govt being able to track where every car is, since once they're driverless the next step is to allow them to communicate with each other, and if they can talk then the govt can see where the cars are.
News flash - the government is already tracking your car. Practical license plate readers are 10-year-old technology. I imagine any government-owned camera is logging every plate they see. Around here every little bridge has a camera on it - natural choke point.
As for who's responsible when a driverless car crashes it will probably be the same as when a dog kills someone, the owner of the dog is responsible.
Honestly, we need to get beyond the whole where-do-I-get-my-check-for-$500k-from thing anytime something goes wrong. Will the car owner get paid every time somebody doesn't get run over by a car? Then why should they pay when somebody does get run over? Right now 32k people die each year - that's a dead body every 20 minutes or so. If automating cars reduces that figure to 500/yr do we really want to bankrupt the auto industry as a reward?
Better to have the government set standards and continually tighten them. By all means punish companies that don't comply, but the bar should be set at better-than-what-we-have-now, and not nobody-ever-dies.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. If you want to know how much the US spends subsidizing oil, just look at how much money we've spent on Iran, Iraq, and Syria in comparison to Sudan, Rwanda, and Ethiopia.
Some significant fraction of our military is charged with maintaining the Freedom of the Seas. So I guess we are subsidizing all of American commerce that ships or imports stuff via cargo ships.
Well, we need a Navy, and it doesn't cost all that much more for them to respond to the occasional ship in distress. The incremental cost of that has to be quite a bit lower than Gulf War I/II. If Iran, Iraq, Israel, and Syria were countries in the middle of Africa nobody would care about them at all. Oil is what causes us to spend incredible fortunes securing these areas.
If they just recovered it via a tax on imported oil that would probably fix a lot of problems. For starters, you'd have a lot more lobbying against the US going to war...
Certainly agree in principle, but the real challenge with the counting approaches is that in many cases they aren't as accurate. Everybody wants to ditch the current kilogram, but it works so well that none of the alternatives are suitable replacements.
Defining both the second and the meter on wavelength/frequency measurements probably still effectively fixes the speed of light, assuming the speed of light really is fixed as everybody believes it is.
The mol is the most obvious case where you can define it by counting, since it really is a counting measure.
In classical statistical mechanics, you can have a solid that has a low enough, but non-zero temperature such that the change of any given atom having enough energy to leave the surface has effectively zero probability on a relevant timescale.
That "effectively zero probability" means that it sublimes. It just does it REALLY slowly. And that is if you want to keep the standard at a near-absolute-zero temperatures for decades. That creates a whole different set of problems. Can you weigh it as accurately at those temperatures? If you have to warm and cool it, does the mass change due to damage during expansion/etc? Can you maintain it at that temperature without any contamination (if it is that cold than any molecule of gas that leaks in will condense or solidify).
That's the whole problem with the kilogram standard. They're probably managing it as best as they can already, but it will never be perfect, and they're well past the point of diminishing returns so anytime you want to consider any improvement you have to factor in all of physics.
There are numerous problems, the primary being:
* the seven SI base units are not independent
e.g. the Amp depends on the definition of the kilogram ?!?!
Well, it is kind of hard to build an apparatus to measure the value of the amp without constructing it out of matter or energy, and matter and energy are both described by other units. The forces of nature are interesting to us because they affect things that we can see and feel, and indeed sight and feeling are themselves the result of the forces of nature. So, there is really no such thing as a pure force that acts independently of anything else and therefore can be defined independently of anything else, unless you want to talk about the supernatural.
Distance would be meaningless without motion, and motion is meaningless without time. Mass is really just a measurement of inertia, and that is meaningless without motion or force. You could look at mass as a measurement of gravity instead, but again that is a force.
So, the relationship between the fundamental units of measure is tied up in the nature of physics.
Also, which units are fundamental is entirely a matter of convenience. You could just as easily make either the Amp or the Coulomb fundamental, or make velocity fundamental and distance derived (indeed, that's basically how the definition works anyway).
The mol is a bit of an interesting unit, because ultimately it is a counting unit. If NA were determined with absolute precision it would basically be dimensionless, like the unit of the "dozen." Certainly a level of tradition is caught up in the SI base units, but it doesn't really make them defective in any way. Whether we have a special unit for the Cd has a lot less impact on physics than whether the mathematicians embrace the axiom of choice. :)
The whole problem with these approaches is that for all its flaws that hunk of metal works remarkably well. There have been many attempts to replace it for all the obvious reasons.
I think silicon is one of the big contenders for the atom to count because the electronics industry has gotten so good and preparing samples of it at incredibly high purity. However, creating a sample of known density and volume at a scale large enough to measure its mass is very difficult. It isn't like you can just grab NA C-12 atoms with tweezers and stick them in a pile. It would be a chore keeping out all the non-Carbon atoms, let alone the isotopes of carbon. And of course if you get any C14 in there then there will be non-Carbon atoms in due time.
Platinum and Iridium sublimate? Are you serious?
Sure it can. It just does it VERY slowly. The solid state is greatly preferred for these metals at room temperature, but at any temperature and pressure solid, liquid, and gas are all in equilibrium. When you're talking about thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, about the only absolute is zero, and that is a state that doesn't physically exist anywhere.
Then throw in quantum mechanics. There is probably some small but finite probability that I'll appear in your living room before I finish typ
I see a lot of people playing music in a Youtube (or whatever) tab while doing other things in the other tabs. Automatically muting any background tabs will break that usage.
Yup - I know somebody who went nuts over the fact that he couldn't get his Android tablet to do that no matter what. There was what amounted to a podcast in video form that he wanted to listen to, and the video was superfluous. He wanted to still do other things on the tablet while it was playing. It was impossible, because he couldn't find an app that would let you play a video in the background.
Granted, this was a few years ago - perhaps the situation has changed since. I haven't gone looking for video players that work in the background on Android.
In any case, seems like the defaults should be configurable. There should be a default on-vs-off setting, and a default for what happens when you switch tabs. Then there should be the ability to override any of this for any site.
Carriers might be the backbone of the navy, but the backbone of the Western world are the SLBMs in the launch tubes of our nuclear submarines. We need to develop hypersonic SLBMs, because "they" most certainly will.
There is such a thing as non-hypersonic SLBMs? I don't mean those 1950s things where you basically surfaced and constructed a missile base on the deck.
Any long-range ballistic missile has to be hypersonic, or it wouldn't be long-range (or ballistic).
I tend to doubt the nuclear detonation angle - maybe some extra neutrons irradiating the crew before they drown, but I'd be interested in anything reputable you have to point me at.
However, no question that a torpedo hit on a ship either sinks it, or at least makes it irrelevant to the battle. Carriers can't launch aircraft loaded with bombs if they're dead in the water, or underwater. Maybe they'll get off lightly-loaded aircraft for patrols, or helicopters to go chase the sub.
I'm not sure that is the correct question. Even if utility is increased by forcing children of well-meaning but poor parents to attend schools with their less-involved neighbors, I would not say that is just.
It certainly isn't just, but at least somebody could afford to pay for their welfare benefits down the road.
The whole system needs MAJOR reform, and I doubt the political will exists to make it happen.
There is one thing, however, which I don't know how we can fix, at least not from a legislative or policy standpoint, and that is the lack of parental participation.
Well, there are certainly ways to fix it from a legislative/policy standpoint. However, whether anybody would actually vote for the fixes is an entirely different matter. People really like to be able to have their kids, show them off, and send them off when they become a bother. Making everybody else pay for them when they become adults unable to function in society is just the next logical step. Oh, and I'll say that this is just as true in affluent and poor families - the affluent just sometimes (but not always) do a better job hiring more qualified people to tend to their kids when they can't be bothered by them, and tend to leave them enough money that only the most incompetent manage to become destitute.
They have no right to those people's first born children.
You seem to forget that these children are the property of society, and only on loan to the parents at the pleasure of the State, and only so long as they maintain good behavior.
While I get your point, the fact is that children aren't the property of their parents, and they're not able to effectively represent themselves.
I don't think parents have any inherent right to raise their kids however they see fit. Their rights end at their own bodies (assuming they don't expect anybody else to help care for them - their rights end sooner than that if they do). Since society ends up having to take care of delinquent children who grow up into delinquent adults, society also has a say in how those kids are raised.
That said, simply forcing rich people to send their kids to the status quo public school meat grinder isn't the solution.
Claiming you have to put your kid in public education in order to have a say in fixing it is as idiotic as claiming you have to move to Africa to help them.
So, while I disagree with forcing people to put their kids in public education, I think you're mischaracterizing the position of those who do advocate this.
They're not suggesting that you need to put your kids into public education in order to have a say. The advocate forcing kids into public education so that parents bother to have a say.
For the most part the schools will ignore community suggestions either way, but at least if all the children of rich people get punished for this the rich people are more likely to escalate the issue and force a change upon the schools. Or so the theory goes.
More likely the rich people just move into a community nobody else can afford to live in, and thus they can vote for whatever laws they want, and appoint whatever school board they want. There are plenty of public schools that work fine - most people just can't afford to attend them.
2. Media campaign targeted at parents, showing them that even though they got by chances are your kids won't.
Frankly, the only thing that is going to help here is requiring a license to have children, making that license hard to obtain, making failure to uphold the terms of the license grounds for giving the kids to somebody else who wants a license, and enforcing all of this stuff in a manner that it sticks. The last bit is why you'll probably never see it happen - it would either require draconian punishments after-the-fact, or forced contraception before-the-fact (and only the latter is likely to actually work, assuming a male implantable contraceptive could be developed, though I think there are reversible forms of sterilization for males).
If it were up to me parents would be required to fund their kids education and welfare through adulthood before they were allowed to have kids. In the interest of diversity/etc I'd make scholarships available, but they would be such that parents would have to REALLY want kids before they'd get one. If kids cost as much as fancy cars then chances are they'd be cared for like fancy cars.
So, being a product of public education, I wouldn't be so quick to leave the teachers out of it.
I've had really great teachers, and really lousy ones. The problem is that as far as I can tell nothing was really done about either. Maybe the great ones get the special page in the yearbook more often, but that's about it.
I had teachers who turned the most interesting classes into exercises in rote and process. "Notebook reviews" were checks to see if the material that was placed on the overhead was copied verbatim. Two teachers forced the class to memorize all the prepositions in the english language and provide them verbatim in alphabetical order - must be some kind of rite of passage for middle school english or something as it happened in two different grades.
None of this stuff would fly in any business that depended on selling services to adults who actually had to consume those services. Kids just have to live with it, and their parents don't get any choice about paying for it anyway. Colleges do somewhat better, but most of their students are barely more than children themselves and certainly not critical about the use of their money. I love learning, but I could never see myself actually paying for a degreed class - too much nonsense.
Not making this up - some groups in Afghanistan think that spreading polio is a good way to get back at the Great Satan.
Sounds like a genius plan. Spread a disease which is almost universally vaccinated against within the USA, but not within your own community. That will get them far...
Since negligence includes failing to follow the system properly (and often does), this is not possible.
Sure it is - design the system so that if you don't follow it, transactions are impossible.
It is fairly trivial to design a system such that a transaction is impossible without the card present and the card owner's authorization (two factor authentication). All data entering and leaving the card could be intercepted or recorded, and the most that could be done by an attacker would be to block the transaction (denial of service). The credentials required to authorize a transaction (one time only) would never leave the card. The card would only sign a transaction after displaying the details on its screen and obtaining a PIN on its keypad (no dependence on the security of a terminal that belongs to the retailer).
If you didn't want something quite that fancy you could just issue a OTP-generator with every card and that would be almost as good, though it would be susceptible to MITM attacks since the customer would just be blindly giving out their one-time PIN and would have no way to guarantee that it gets applied to the correct transaction.
Credit cards are inherently insecure. They rely on a shared secret that isn't kept secret.
In the Oracle world, patching does not affect version numbers. A different version means different or new functionality, even if it is the last part of the version.
Based on the version, you cannot determine if it is patched or not.
Makes sense - if they wanted to actually show patch level they'd need a more complex version numbering scheme. Just how much information do you think can really be communicated in 5 separate version numbers?
How is that? It sounds to me like you've circled Linus Torvalds, who talks about what he's interested in. If you instead follow his Linux page you'd get only Linux stuff with no diving content (personally, as a Linux user and a SCUBA diver, I like following both, plus I find Linus to be a generally interesting fellow).
Sure, and for Linus I'll tolerate it. However, if I extend that to every other person who posts anything of interest on Linux I'll be drowning in cat pictures, jokes, and politics.
Linus should be able to post publicly about whatever he wants to, and I should be able to see 100% of his Linux-oriented posts and maybe 10% of the rest. It isn't that I don't care about him as a person, but, well, frankly if I told you that I cared about everybody whose feeds I browse you'd know I was lying.
Spam City, here we come.
Do you circle a lot of people who will spam you?
Sure. I don't post publicly in general, because I know that most people aren't interested in half of what I write. If I'm writing about something FOSS-related it goes to one circle, and if it is family-related it goes to another. I have circles for people I follow, and I have circles that I broadcast to but don't read.
My threshold for putting somebody in a broadcast-only circle is VERY low. Why would I want to restrict access to my own posts? Again, I don't post publicly most of the time.
If Google fixed their broken model which is based on the assumption that if I'm interested in Linux then I'm interested in Subsurface then perhaps I'd change my habits...
Why would there be a need for passing?
Because all vehicles will not become automated overnight.
Honestly making them all automated overnight seems like the simplest solution to me. Just give everybody a free car if you have to. It would be cheaper than a war in Iraq, and would probably pay for itself quickly in a huge reduction in the need for road expansion.
Think about how poorly people maintain their vehicles, and you can expect several cars in a "train" to have one or more faulty sensors.
In a world of automated cars a vehicle with a faulty sensor would refuse to drive. Or, it would run in reduced capability mode to the nearest repair center with all the other cars giving it a wide berth. A world in which cars drive themselves is a world in which it is impossible to operate a car illegally.
But, what happens when the stupid meat-bag in the "driver's" seat decides to hit the brakes, or fiddle with the steering wheel while in a train? Or a tire blows out?
Well, the first problem has a trivial solution - remove all driver-operable controls from the car. I'm not sure how you're going to safely manually drive a car across an intersection with 4 lanes of traffic going each way continuously with no traffic light.
The second problem simply needs the right level of tolerances in the system. A car with three tires isn't going to pull more Gs maneuvering than a car nearby with four tires is able to manage, and a car under computer control isn't going to do something in panic either. When the car loses a tire the computer will simply start a gentle turn/accelerate/brake to balance the car on the other three tires while all the surrounding traffic rapidly creates a path to safety. Even if the car bumped a nearby one it would only have maybe a few inches in which to accelerate so the forces would be low. In fact, perhaps the safesty way to handle a car with a blowout in the middle of a train would be for the cars on either side to sandwich it and decelerate. Considering that a blowout in a manually-driven car at highway speeds can easily be fatal (and for more than one car), a little bumper damage is a small price to pay for averting a catastrophe.
Of course, the self-driving car will just drive itself to a garage if it detects a tire pressure or wear problem. If the owner refuses to properly maintain the car then it will just impound itself. Catastrophic failures are pretty rare when cars are properly maintained. But, sure, somebody could shoot out a tire with a rifle or whatever - have to plan for anything.
I'm more worried about the govt being able to track where every car is, since once they're driverless the next step is to allow them to communicate with each other, and if they can talk then the govt can see where the cars are.
News flash - the government is already tracking your car. Practical license plate readers are 10-year-old technology. I imagine any government-owned camera is logging every plate they see. Around here every little bridge has a camera on it - natural choke point.
As for who's responsible when a driverless car crashes it will probably be the same as when a dog kills someone, the owner of the dog is responsible.
Honestly, we need to get beyond the whole where-do-I-get-my-check-for-$500k-from thing anytime something goes wrong. Will the car owner get paid every time somebody doesn't get run over by a car? Then why should they pay when somebody does get run over? Right now 32k people die each year - that's a dead body every 20 minutes or so. If automating cars reduces that figure to 500/yr do we really want to bankrupt the auto industry as a reward?
Better to have the government set standards and continually tighten them. By all means punish companies that don't comply, but the bar should be set at better-than-what-we-have-now, and not nobody-ever-dies.