The problem with this kind of approach is that it isn't properly applied.
There is a large highway project going on near me. The work is all being done in the lane division area, with concrete barriers between it and the road. If you wanted to deliberately run a worker over you'd have a heck of a time coming up with a way to do it - it would probably involve reversing through entrance-ways and dodging parked cars to actually get at a person - maybe if you were literally driving in a tank you could get past the barrier.
And yet, it is marked as a construction zone, limited to 45mph (on a highway that normally is 65mph with exits every 10-30 miles), with all the usual warnings about increased fines and radar-equipped speed indicator signs.
All this sort of thing does is desensitize people to work areas. Everybody blasts through at 65mph at least, because there is no genuine safety issue. If for some reason they really did need to take down a barrier they'd have issues because people wouldn't realize there is actually something going on.
Most drivers are going to be conscientious. When I see a utility vehicle parked on the side of the road with cones, I slow down and carefully take a wide path around it, cognizant that somebody could step out from behind the truck at any time. When I have to navigate cones with people working on the road, I go slowly and carefully. If the signs gave me warning to expect that sort of thing up ahead I'd appreciate them. Instead they get left up nights and weekends when nobody is around, and even when people are around there is no safety issue.
A power grid that can't be kept up reliably? That's not something customers want to see when you're trying to convince them to let you launch multi-million dollar pieces of equipment up into space.
Their customers don't care as long as the launch facility can operate when the locals are in darkness. Companies have figured out that by operating in the third world they can still have first-world conditions in their manufacturing facilities when it improves efficiency, but not have to pay for their employees or the rest of the country to have it when they go home. If you operate in the US you have to pay all kinds of taxes (or pay employees who have to be able to afford taxes) so that the city streets aren't covered in garbage. From a pure productivity standpoint it is much cheaper to only pay to remove garbage from areas where it could actually interfere with whatever work you're getting done.
The only reason the US doesn't bomb power plants is because this is counter to US interests. The US doesn't need to bomb the power plant to accomplish their objectives, and it is one less mess to deal with once they move into the decade-long mop-up before we give up and pull out.
If the US were dealing with an adversary where it actually could lose the war, the power plants would be gone in the first night. They're trivial to disrupt. Bridges, road junctions, you name it would all be on the target list. The goal is to disrupt the enemy's logistics, because they can't land an invasion force on Hawaii if they are busy trying to keep half their population from starving or freezing in the winter.
If you live near a big power plant, then say goodbye come WWIII.
Honestly, if it were up to me the court would bear the burden of investigating every case. The parties participation would be completely optional, other than responding to subpoenas/etc. The bill would be paid by the loser.
If one party doesn't show up, the court should still act as their advocate.
Does that cover the defendant? And does it cover the entire trial, or just the first day?
Also, the daily rate is only $40, which will hardly cover a hotel and lost wages. The mileage isn't unreasonable, and you might come out ahead for a cross-country flight as long as the trip is short.
However, no-ip has certain legal responsibilities as a service provider and if they don't meet them their legitimate customers may end up getting caught in the crossfire.
What would those be? They're a DNS provider. Somebody tells them that domain A is IP B, and then somebody asks them what the IP for A is, and they say B.
They don't carry traffic. No attack would come from their servers.
I could see a court ordering them to lock an account or remove a domain being used to coordinate malicious activity, and then they'd have a duty to comply. However, that isn't what happened here.
The problem is that we substitute "due process" for justice and define due process as whatever the rules of the court says that it is. Are court rules even legislated?
Ex parte petitions should only be used in the most extreme of circumstances and there should be a high burden of proof before a court grants them.
Also, even default judgments should work far differently. The court should examine the evidence itself to determine that there is a reasonable chance of prevailing. I'm not saying that the threshold has to be the same as for a summary judgment, but there should still be an examination of the evidence and arguments, and the judge should be skeptical of any evidence submitted. Ideally the court should just appoint an attorney for the side that didn't show up.
Also, in a country as large as the US we really need to get rid of this system that assumes that both parties will appear in person for everything. It is already a burden to show up to a local court. If you're summoned to a court on the other side of the country that is a huge expense, especially since it might just be for an hour long hearing. There is no reason that hearings couldn't be conducted via phone in many cases. Another option would be to have telepresence rooms at all courthouses so that you'd only have to show up at a local court. Heck, you could probably fit 5x as many courtrooms in a courthouse if instead of a big room you just had a bunch of individual boxes with a desk, a few chairs, and a screen/camera and the court linked the appropriate boxes together to create a courtroom, even if everybody was at the same facility. Also, for popular cases you could have as many people in the "gallery" as you have bandwidth to serve.
Not showing up should not result in a suspension of justice and free reign to dispense outrageous judgements.
Uhh, that's exactly what happens. It's called a default judgment. What exactly do you think the court should do if a party fails to appear in a civil case?
The court should consider the validity of the arguments against them and the facts of the case.
The problem with the US court system is that it is basically like a game show. There are a set of rules and two competitors, and the judge is the referee. If you have a game of jeopardy and only one contestant shows up, they should naturally win. The problem is that this is rarely a just outcome.
Add to this the fact that courts rarely allow parties to participate remotely. If you're summoned to court you have to show up in person. If you aren't paid to be there, then you probably aren't being paid that day. If the court is on the other side of the country you get to choose between a default judgment, hiring a lawyer to represent you there, or airfare and hotel for a one day appearance.
Courts really need to be about determining the facts and applying the law, not letting the parties slug it out and declare a winner. If only one party shows up, then the judge can question the other party to determine the facts and apply the law.
While I think it makes an interesting ethical debate, I find it rather sickening that our legal system would probably come down on the side of having a pile of 40k bodies each year vs just automating things at the risk of a few people ending up dead.
It is just the trolley problem in another guise, except instead of one person on one track and 10 on the other, it is probably a few on one track and 40k on the other. Heaven help the guy who wants to flip the switch.
So, how exactly does Google know if an applicant is a woman or not? Are they going to do background checks?
The form that is linked doesn't even contain a declaration that somebody is a woman or minority in the first place, or a definition of what constitutes either.
No current physical law. All the advances were preceded by a new understanding of how the universe worked.
None of the examples you cited involved a change in the understanding of the laws of physics.
We don't get to invent the laws of nature - we can only exploit what we discover, and there may or may not be anything useful to discover.
Oh, I see we did reason in the same direction. Ok, then I agree with you in everything but the "may not be anything useful to discover".
I said, "there may or may not be anything useful to discover." That is actually a tautology, so there really isn't much to disagree with.
You may happen to believe that there is something useful to discover that will enable light speed travel. That's nice, and I'd like to hope that it is true. However, there is really no reason to believe that it is. The universe could simply suck.
That only works if you have a stable driver ABI. We can't even get that within a single OS over very long periods of time, let alone across competing OSes.
I think you're on to something with the camera though. The camera tends to run the full thickness of the case, and tends to be approximated by a rectangular box. That does make it a candidate for interchangeability.
On the other hand, it tends to become outdated as fast as the rest of the phone, so nobody will want to keep their old camera. At best modularity might let you adjust the price of the device by $50 if you want a better unit. It would be a bit like RAM or flash - something that is trivial to extend from a design standpoint, though nobody is marketing phones by the amount of RAM inside right now.
Care to compare humanity's travel technology between four million years in the past and now?
Sure - our ancestors traveled at a minuscule fraction of the speed of light, as do we today.:)
I get your point, but it is pretty speculative to suggest that travel faster than the speed of light will ever be possible. No physical law of nature prevented any of the advances you've quoted - they were just engineering challenges. Over a span of even thousands of years I'm sure we'll be impressed with what mankind achieves with engineering.
However, I don't think anybody can make any bets either way on whether there are ways to effectively travel faster than the speed of light. There may or may not be new physics out there that we can rely on. We don't get to invent the laws of nature - we can only exploit what we discover, and there may or may not be anything useful to discover.
Ok, you're right. In automobile technology, in the last century, there have been no fundamental scotsmen.... I mean... changes.
Why don't you ask the original person quoted what he meant by "radical?" The statement is vague, and anybody can endlessly debate what constitutes a "radical" change.
Presumably when he made the quote cars were in fact changing just as they change today.
The one change to cars that I would consider a fairly radical one is the hybrid. They typically incorporate continuous transmissions, regenerative braking, the ability to operate from power sources, and the ability to recharge. Combining all of those things at once really does get to a level I think most people of that day would consider radically different from their own experience.
But, whatever, the whole "no true scottsman" argument is one of degree and nobody is debating that cars today are better than the cars of yesterday.
There's also the issue that the tests accuracy drops of quickly as you move away from the median.
That and all the usual test-taking issues apply. I was tested as a child and got a well under 130 result the first time as a result of distraction. I was re-tested and scored significantly higher than that the second time, which was fortunate since a score around there was a threshold for being in the state's special education program at the time.
So at the end of the day "success" is a combination of multiple factors and IQ alone is non-determinant. So who cares about IQ anyway?
Maybe those who don't care about "success?":)
In my experience people who are more intelligent tend to be less likely to be influenced by fashion/tradition/culture/etc, and the typical definition of success is part of that.
It's more than even just that. Netflix was not pushing data through Comcast's network, Comcast's network was asking to receive the data; then Comcast turned around and claimed that Netflix would need to pay Comcast for the privilege of responding to the requests from Comcast.
Exactly. If I happened to have a private driveway that cuts through a block and UPS wanted to drive through it in order to more quickly reach houses on the other side of the block, there would be nothing wrong with me charging them for the privilege.
However, suppose UPS wants to deliver a package TO ME. Would it make sense for me to try to charge them to deliver to me a box that I ordered? Driving through my driveway is no longer just one option among many - it is the only way to get to my house.
Comcast basically is in the business of selling people the right to download stuff from Netflix, but then refusing to let Netflix deliver it to them without an additional fee.
So, the problems you cite with Bitcoin are a bit like the problems we have with most forms of encrypted email/etc. Lots of companies get into the game of making things easy so that the people who use the system don't need to know how things work. The problem is that they take short-cuts to make things easier, which break all the security.
If you want to own bitcoin without running a bitcoin client, then you're really trusting somebody else with your wallet.
Likewise, if you want to send gpg-encrypted email without installing a copy of gpg anywhere and managing your keys, then you're basically trusting whoever does have a copy of your key to not go reading your email.
Security and convenience rarely go hand-in-hand, and it applies as much to money as anything else.
That's nice and all, but unless somebody actually does something about it, all those laws don't matter a hill of beans.
Russia is being embargoed half-heartedly by half the world and I'd be shocked if they ever gave up Crimea. Nobody cares enough about some artificial islands to go to war over them, and next thing you know they'll be setting up oil rigs. Unless everybody agrees to sanction China in a way that costs more than all that oil is worth, China will get what it wants. The problem is that sanctions cut both ways, and politicians get far more money if they keep trade going than if they shut it down.
Nuclear may provide energy dense alternatives but you'd need to have been building plants 10 years ago.
And what portable energy do we use to run all that equipment to mine the uranium? Oh yeah, oil.
I doubt the demand for oil will ever go away entirely. Heck, you'll want it for plastics if nothing else. However, right now we burn it on an insane scale when nuclear is a viable alternative for much of it. As was pointed out, it will take a while to switch over even if we started today, but we're not starting at all. And that isn't even talking about global warming.
Mining equipment could be powered electrically, but if we're switched over to an economy where power consumption is 95% nuclear and 5% oil that makes a HUGE change on the global demand for oil and the need to fight wars over it. Heck, if you start getting down to that low an oil consumption you open the door for synthetic oil or other power sources (and synthetic "fossil fuels" can even be carbon-neutral). We won't be at the point where jets are going to run on batteries anytime soon, but anything that you can do to cut the demand for oil helps.
Probably the simplest solution is to just pay for the military using a tax on oil. Price increases would reduce demand, and then those who feel bad about wars in the Middle East can just stop buying gas and know that their tax dollars aren't going towards bombing civilians. It is nothing more than eliminating an externalized cost.
I'm not sure that they are sufficient in power or independent targetabiliy to have that effect, but certainly they'd make for quite a bit mess. Russia would be a different story.
However, nuclear war is really not something that anybody can afford. The cost of one big conventional bomb in the middle of a US city would be astronomical. Things like skyscrapers are impressive feats of engineering, but they're certainly not designed with war in mind.
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The problem with this kind of approach is that it isn't properly applied.
There is a large highway project going on near me. The work is all being done in the lane division area, with concrete barriers between it and the road. If you wanted to deliberately run a worker over you'd have a heck of a time coming up with a way to do it - it would probably involve reversing through entrance-ways and dodging parked cars to actually get at a person - maybe if you were literally driving in a tank you could get past the barrier.
And yet, it is marked as a construction zone, limited to 45mph (on a highway that normally is 65mph with exits every 10-30 miles), with all the usual warnings about increased fines and radar-equipped speed indicator signs.
All this sort of thing does is desensitize people to work areas. Everybody blasts through at 65mph at least, because there is no genuine safety issue. If for some reason they really did need to take down a barrier they'd have issues because people wouldn't realize there is actually something going on.
Most drivers are going to be conscientious. When I see a utility vehicle parked on the side of the road with cones, I slow down and carefully take a wide path around it, cognizant that somebody could step out from behind the truck at any time. When I have to navigate cones with people working on the road, I go slowly and carefully. If the signs gave me warning to expect that sort of thing up ahead I'd appreciate them. Instead they get left up nights and weekends when nobody is around, and even when people are around there is no safety issue.
A power grid that can't be kept up reliably? That's not something customers want to see when you're trying to convince them to let you launch multi-million dollar pieces of equipment up into space.
Their customers don't care as long as the launch facility can operate when the locals are in darkness. Companies have figured out that by operating in the third world they can still have first-world conditions in their manufacturing facilities when it improves efficiency, but not have to pay for their employees or the rest of the country to have it when they go home. If you operate in the US you have to pay all kinds of taxes (or pay employees who have to be able to afford taxes) so that the city streets aren't covered in garbage. From a pure productivity standpoint it is much cheaper to only pay to remove garbage from areas where it could actually interfere with whatever work you're getting done.
Which by the sound of what dnavid said, would require a constitutional amendment to achieve. Those are pretty rare, are they not?
Absolutely. I doubt it would ever happen. I'm just saying that it should happen.
The only reason the US doesn't bomb power plants is because this is counter to US interests. The US doesn't need to bomb the power plant to accomplish their objectives, and it is one less mess to deal with once they move into the decade-long mop-up before we give up and pull out.
If the US were dealing with an adversary where it actually could lose the war, the power plants would be gone in the first night. They're trivial to disrupt. Bridges, road junctions, you name it would all be on the target list. The goal is to disrupt the enemy's logistics, because they can't land an invasion force on Hawaii if they are busy trying to keep half their population from starving or freezing in the winter.
If you live near a big power plant, then say goodbye come WWIII.
I fully realize that what I proposed was not the way things are done in the US. I was saying that this OUGHT to be what is done.
I do realize that, but for whatever reason every patent case seems to still end up in East Texas. Those protections aren't really ideal.
Honestly, if it were up to me the court would bear the burden of investigating every case. The parties participation would be completely optional, other than responding to subpoenas/etc. The bill would be paid by the loser.
If one party doesn't show up, the court should still act as their advocate.
Does that cover the defendant? And does it cover the entire trial, or just the first day?
Also, the daily rate is only $40, which will hardly cover a hotel and lost wages. The mileage isn't unreasonable, and you might come out ahead for a cross-country flight as long as the trip is short.
However, no-ip has certain legal responsibilities as a service provider and if they don't meet them their legitimate customers may end up getting caught in the crossfire.
What would those be? They're a DNS provider. Somebody tells them that domain A is IP B, and then somebody asks them what the IP for A is, and they say B.
They don't carry traffic. No attack would come from their servers.
I could see a court ordering them to lock an account or remove a domain being used to coordinate malicious activity, and then they'd have a duty to comply. However, that isn't what happened here.
The problem is that we substitute "due process" for justice and define due process as whatever the rules of the court says that it is. Are court rules even legislated?
Ex parte petitions should only be used in the most extreme of circumstances and there should be a high burden of proof before a court grants them.
Also, even default judgments should work far differently. The court should examine the evidence itself to determine that there is a reasonable chance of prevailing. I'm not saying that the threshold has to be the same as for a summary judgment, but there should still be an examination of the evidence and arguments, and the judge should be skeptical of any evidence submitted. Ideally the court should just appoint an attorney for the side that didn't show up.
Also, in a country as large as the US we really need to get rid of this system that assumes that both parties will appear in person for everything. It is already a burden to show up to a local court. If you're summoned to a court on the other side of the country that is a huge expense, especially since it might just be for an hour long hearing. There is no reason that hearings couldn't be conducted via phone in many cases. Another option would be to have telepresence rooms at all courthouses so that you'd only have to show up at a local court. Heck, you could probably fit 5x as many courtrooms in a courthouse if instead of a big room you just had a bunch of individual boxes with a desk, a few chairs, and a screen/camera and the court linked the appropriate boxes together to create a courtroom, even if everybody was at the same facility. Also, for popular cases you could have as many people in the "gallery" as you have bandwidth to serve.
Not showing up should not result in a suspension of justice and free reign to dispense outrageous judgements.
Uhh, that's exactly what happens. It's called a default judgment. What exactly do you think the court should do if a party fails to appear in a civil case?
The court should consider the validity of the arguments against them and the facts of the case.
The problem with the US court system is that it is basically like a game show. There are a set of rules and two competitors, and the judge is the referee. If you have a game of jeopardy and only one contestant shows up, they should naturally win. The problem is that this is rarely a just outcome.
Add to this the fact that courts rarely allow parties to participate remotely. If you're summoned to court you have to show up in person. If you aren't paid to be there, then you probably aren't being paid that day. If the court is on the other side of the country you get to choose between a default judgment, hiring a lawyer to represent you there, or airfare and hotel for a one day appearance.
Courts really need to be about determining the facts and applying the law, not letting the parties slug it out and declare a winner. If only one party shows up, then the judge can question the other party to determine the facts and apply the law.
While I think it makes an interesting ethical debate, I find it rather sickening that our legal system would probably come down on the side of having a pile of 40k bodies each year vs just automating things at the risk of a few people ending up dead.
It is just the trolley problem in another guise, except instead of one person on one track and 10 on the other, it is probably a few on one track and 40k on the other. Heaven help the guy who wants to flip the switch.
So, how exactly does Google know if an applicant is a woman or not? Are they going to do background checks?
The form that is linked doesn't even contain a declaration that somebody is a woman or minority in the first place, or a definition of what constitutes either.
No current physical law. All the advances were preceded by a new understanding of how the universe worked.
None of the examples you cited involved a change in the understanding of the laws of physics.
We don't get to invent the laws of nature - we can only exploit what we discover, and there may or may not be anything useful to discover.
Oh, I see we did reason in the same direction. Ok, then I agree with you in everything but the "may not be anything useful to discover".
I said, "there may or may not be anything useful to discover." That is actually a tautology, so there really isn't much to disagree with.
You may happen to believe that there is something useful to discover that will enable light speed travel. That's nice, and I'd like to hope that it is true. However, there is really no reason to believe that it is. The universe could simply suck.
That only works if you have a stable driver ABI. We can't even get that within a single OS over very long periods of time, let alone across competing OSes.
I think you're on to something with the camera though. The camera tends to run the full thickness of the case, and tends to be approximated by a rectangular box. That does make it a candidate for interchangeability.
On the other hand, it tends to become outdated as fast as the rest of the phone, so nobody will want to keep their old camera. At best modularity might let you adjust the price of the device by $50 if you want a better unit. It would be a bit like RAM or flash - something that is trivial to extend from a design standpoint, though nobody is marketing phones by the amount of RAM inside right now.
Care to compare humanity's travel technology between four million years in the past and now?
Sure - our ancestors traveled at a minuscule fraction of the speed of light, as do we today. :)
I get your point, but it is pretty speculative to suggest that travel faster than the speed of light will ever be possible. No physical law of nature prevented any of the advances you've quoted - they were just engineering challenges. Over a span of even thousands of years I'm sure we'll be impressed with what mankind achieves with engineering.
However, I don't think anybody can make any bets either way on whether there are ways to effectively travel faster than the speed of light. There may or may not be new physics out there that we can rely on. We don't get to invent the laws of nature - we can only exploit what we discover, and there may or may not be anything useful to discover.
Ok, you're right. In automobile technology, in the last century, there have been no fundamental scotsmen. ... I mean... changes.
Why don't you ask the original person quoted what he meant by "radical?" The statement is vague, and anybody can endlessly debate what constitutes a "radical" change.
Presumably when he made the quote cars were in fact changing just as they change today.
The one change to cars that I would consider a fairly radical one is the hybrid. They typically incorporate continuous transmissions, regenerative braking, the ability to operate from power sources, and the ability to recharge. Combining all of those things at once really does get to a level I think most people of that day would consider radically different from their own experience.
But, whatever, the whole "no true scottsman" argument is one of degree and nobody is debating that cars today are better than the cars of yesterday.
There's also the issue that the tests accuracy drops of quickly as you move away from the median.
That and all the usual test-taking issues apply. I was tested as a child and got a well under 130 result the first time as a result of distraction. I was re-tested and scored significantly higher than that the second time, which was fortunate since a score around there was a threshold for being in the state's special education program at the time.
So at the end of the day "success" is a combination of multiple factors and IQ alone is non-determinant. So who cares about IQ anyway?
Maybe those who don't care about "success?" :)
In my experience people who are more intelligent tend to be less likely to be influenced by fashion/tradition/culture/etc, and the typical definition of success is part of that.
It's more than even just that. Netflix was not pushing data through Comcast's network, Comcast's network was asking to receive the data; then Comcast turned around and claimed that Netflix would need to pay Comcast for the privilege of responding to the requests from Comcast.
Exactly. If I happened to have a private driveway that cuts through a block and UPS wanted to drive through it in order to more quickly reach houses on the other side of the block, there would be nothing wrong with me charging them for the privilege.
However, suppose UPS wants to deliver a package TO ME. Would it make sense for me to try to charge them to deliver to me a box that I ordered? Driving through my driveway is no longer just one option among many - it is the only way to get to my house.
Comcast basically is in the business of selling people the right to download stuff from Netflix, but then refusing to let Netflix deliver it to them without an additional fee.
So, the problems you cite with Bitcoin are a bit like the problems we have with most forms of encrypted email/etc. Lots of companies get into the game of making things easy so that the people who use the system don't need to know how things work. The problem is that they take short-cuts to make things easier, which break all the security.
If you want to own bitcoin without running a bitcoin client, then you're really trusting somebody else with your wallet.
Likewise, if you want to send gpg-encrypted email without installing a copy of gpg anywhere and managing your keys, then you're basically trusting whoever does have a copy of your key to not go reading your email.
Security and convenience rarely go hand-in-hand, and it applies as much to money as anything else.
China is in complete violation of international law and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea which China itself signed and had agreed to and ">ratified in 1996.
That's nice and all, but unless somebody actually does something about it, all those laws don't matter a hill of beans.
Russia is being embargoed half-heartedly by half the world and I'd be shocked if they ever gave up Crimea. Nobody cares enough about some artificial islands to go to war over them, and next thing you know they'll be setting up oil rigs. Unless everybody agrees to sanction China in a way that costs more than all that oil is worth, China will get what it wants. The problem is that sanctions cut both ways, and politicians get far more money if they keep trade going than if they shut it down.
Nuclear may provide energy dense alternatives but you'd need to have been building plants 10 years ago.
And what portable energy do we use to run all that equipment to mine the uranium? Oh yeah, oil.
I doubt the demand for oil will ever go away entirely. Heck, you'll want it for plastics if nothing else. However, right now we burn it on an insane scale when nuclear is a viable alternative for much of it. As was pointed out, it will take a while to switch over even if we started today, but we're not starting at all. And that isn't even talking about global warming.
Mining equipment could be powered electrically, but if we're switched over to an economy where power consumption is 95% nuclear and 5% oil that makes a HUGE change on the global demand for oil and the need to fight wars over it. Heck, if you start getting down to that low an oil consumption you open the door for synthetic oil or other power sources (and synthetic "fossil fuels" can even be carbon-neutral). We won't be at the point where jets are going to run on batteries anytime soon, but anything that you can do to cut the demand for oil helps.
Probably the simplest solution is to just pay for the military using a tax on oil. Price increases would reduce demand, and then those who feel bad about wars in the Middle East can just stop buying gas and know that their tax dollars aren't going towards bombing civilians. It is nothing more than eliminating an externalized cost.
I'm not sure that they are sufficient in power or independent targetabiliy to have that effect, but certainly they'd make for quite a bit mess. Russia would be a different story.
However, nuclear war is really not something that anybody can afford. The cost of one big conventional bomb in the middle of a US city would be astronomical. Things like skyscrapers are impressive feats of engineering, but they're certainly not designed with war in mind.