"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong."
Wanting to help the US economy is fine. Wanting to encourage companies to manufacture more things in the US is fine. This "simple and obvious" solution to the problem would end up causing more problems than it solved. Tax dodging through technicalities, decline in quality and/or increase in prices, US companies moving off shore, treaty violations, and i'm sure others that haven't been brought up yet.
Programmable circuits were trained through an evolutionary process to perform certain tasks. At the end of the process they performed the tasks perfectly, but the actual circuits that were produced were not understandable or functional under the normal rules of circuit design, using roundabout methods for the components to effect each other that were dependent on the exact design of the model of programmable circuit they were using. Try to implement the same circuit design using other hardware and it would just fail to do anything at all.
Evolution will "make use" of anything it can, even and perhaps especially factors that no intelligent designer would ever consider.
There's Rush's latest (and possibly last? =/) album, "Clockwork Angels." And i'd suggest giving Poe's "Haunted" a try. Supposedly even better if you've read her brother's book, "House of Leaves". (I haven't read it yet, so i can't attest one way or the other.)
I've seen a number of solutions like that one where the first step is "uninstall the current version of IE". Which as i mentioned in the first post i have tried to do. Multiple times. If i try to uninstall IE via Programs & Features all i get is "An error has occurred. Not all of the updates were successfully uninstalled."
Also already tried:
Repairing Update process with Microsoft Fix it 50123
System Update Readiness Tool
Manually Reinstalling IE9
Manually Reinstalling IE10
Manually Installing IE11
Uninstalling IE via Microsoft Fix it 50778
Uninstalling via Revo Uninstaller
Uninstalling via the command line from Safe Mode
Every time i reboot my computer it tries to install "Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems" (despite the fact that i can run IE and it claims to be version 10) and gets a 9C48 error, and it also tries to install "Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems" and gets a 9C59 error. Plus a lot of the time after that the system will slow to a crawl as it deals with a ton of "WindowsWcpStoreCorruption" errors for about an hour. It won't let me install Windows 10, but it's not listed in the updates so i can try to uninstall it and do a fresh install. There is a "Windows Internet Explorer 9" but it won't let me uninstall that. (Or rather, it will let me try, but it never works.) I've tried at least a half-dozen fixes suggested on various Microsoft forums and none of them have worked.
I wouldn't actually care (well, aside from the "slowing to a crawl" thing) except this is on a work machine and i need to use IE for some things for compatibility reasons. I figure at this point i'm going to have to get IT to reinstall the OS (unless i can talk them into just giving me a new machine. =) Isn't having the OS tightly integrated with a browser just great? =P
There are already a number of comments saying things to the effect of "this doesn't matter because winamp is outdated and there are much better alternatives."
So as someone who still uses WinAmp, what are those alternatives and how are they better?
I still use winamp because it's simple and efficient at what i want it to do. It works with the library of mp3 files i have (supposedly it also handles flac, but i my ears aren't good enough to require using up that much drive space) without requiring me to connect to some service. It allows me to create and save playlists with ease using the "Media Library." In theory it allows me to update the music on my phone though i usually just do that manually. (Copy m3us and new mp3s by hand.)
The shuffle is kind of a joke, but i'm not sure that any music player has really "perfected" shuffle. (I'm not sure it's even possible to meet human expectations of what "random" ought to be in this context.)
I generally use VLC to watch videos, but i find its Media Library and playlist editor much less intuitive than winamp, though that admittedly might just be due to relative use. However so far i have not discovered any features in VLC that would make it a superior music player and thus prompt me to get more practice using it for that purpose.
So again, what are the newer, better alternatives, and what features do they offer that winamp lacks?
+1 this. It's not like if the Red Delicious and Cavendish disappeared that local farmers would suddenly start growing the fruit in every state so people could get the "good" fruit locally. Instead the prices would go up and availability would go down, until the new varieties were bred to be as hardy and shipable as the old varieties (and thus less flavorful.)
If someone wants to pay to import special varietals or travel somewhere to get them that's fine. But without handling fruit in a mass production manner there wouldn't be enough of it for the millions of people who'd like something easily available and reasonable priced, even if it was grown thousands of miles away.
"The 'unaddressed' can't open a bank account, can't deal properly with a hospital or an administration, and can even struggle to get a delivery."
Putting a "can even" or "can't even" at the end of a list implies that that last option is especially surprising or shocking. However in this case struggling to get a delivery is pretty much a no brainer.
If you want someone to send you something, the person you're asking needs to know where to actually send it. If you can't accurately describe where you are then they have no way to get to you.
Opening bank accounts or going to a hospital on the other hand are things that shouldn't actually require you to have a permanent place of residence, labeled or not.
"And now, ongoing research [...] looks poised to deliver the first practical device by the end of this decade."
So up until now the multibillion-dollar industry has been founded entirely on impractical devices? Or if they mean the first practical vacuum tube of that particular type it might be useful if the summary gave some kind of brief explanation about what makes it different from/better than other vacuum tubes.
(The TFA probably explains it, but the site is blocked for me.)
#1 It's a spokesman for Nest saying that it isn't transmitting when you think you've turned it off.
#2 If the device is already hardwired to allow it to shut down the LED without shutting down the camera then it's only one software update/hack away from transmitting while it appears to be off. (Assuming that such a "feature" hasn't already been included and is just waiting for a signal to activate.)
I don't think i tend towards excessive paranoia, but having a camera attached to the internet with a power switch which doesn't actually power it down seems a bit sketchy to me. Even if Nest/Google the corporation has fully honorable intentions the situation still seems liable to potential abuse.
"seven people present in the train cab instead of train" What is that suppose to even mean?
I'm not one of those grammar knowing people, but i think that's technically correct english that's made needlessly vague by a couple omissions.
"seven people present in the train cab instead of (in the) train (cars)."
The cab being the driving compartment. The more colloquial term (at least in my neck of the woods) is usually the engine, but perhaps this train didn't have a separate engine car?
You could argue that saying they were in the engine/cab instead of the train is inaccurate, since the cab is in fact a part of the train, but the implication was clearly intended to be "in the off limits to passengers part of the train rather than the part they were supposed to be in."
I'm pretty sure that saying "In the X instead of Y" is an accepted abbreviation of "In the X instead of in the Y", but i don't think it's a very common construction, at least in the US.
"I'm talking about the poor fool who agrees to be sent on a suicide mission in the hope of a better life. He's the one who needs education."
An education would be nice, but what they really need is a decent economy.
Having a large middle class is a societal stabilizer. So is having an economy in which even most of the lower class can afford at least some luxuries. There are people in America and Europe who are just as religous and/or political as the members of ISIS, but they _generally_ don't engage in terrorist activities. There are a few loons who decide to bomb abortion clinics or government buildings or black churches or what have you, but not entire armies of them.
As much as conservatives like to complain about poor people having iPhones and such, given the choice between dying for your beliefs and spending the afternoon playing flappy bird the vast majority of people will go with flappy bird. And as banal as that makes it sound it still seems like the right choice to me. It's the people who don't have flappy bird, or jobs, or food, (or who have families or fellow countrymen in that position) who decide they have nothing to lose and are willing to go out and kill people in hopes of an afterlife that's better than their current life.
Not sure that would help. How to tell if something has a Californian cancer warning sticker:
1: Is it in California?
A: Yes - It has a sticker.
B: No - It does not.
(One of my favorites was a bottle of balsamic vinegar that advertised itself as being "certified organic" on the label and had a California sticker warning that it contained lead.)
So it's only noticing if something is in the way when it gets within 10 meters?
30 mph = ~48 kph = ~13 mps. So it has less than a second to respond to whatever it does see. What's the turning radius for this thing when traveling at 30 mph? Or the stopping distance?
It's amusing that the thought line is "it's traveling so slow that i can do the processing to allow it to travel faster than many people would be comfortable with".
Malthus looked at the population trend during the time that he was alive, and the amount of food humans were able to produce, and concluded that a continuously growing population would eventually meet or exceed its food supply, resulting in either general misery or starvation and catastrophe. Malthus proposed a number of possible solutions to this problem, which included birth control
The catastrophe that Malthus warned against didn't happen for two reasons. One, the population stopped increasing as quickly. This was due to a number of factors, one of which was the use of birth control, as Malthus suggested. The other reason was the Green Revolution greatly increasing how much food we could grow on arable land, which Malthus did not predict.
So Malthus looked at current trends, predicted a possible future problem, suggested means of dealing with the problem, people took steps to address the problem, and the problem was avoided. The people who solved the problem probably didn't do the things they did directly because of what Malthus said, but it's impossible to say with any surety they weren't influenced by his work at all. As such i would say that Malthus and Malthusianism were not discredited, but were merely rendered irrelevant, at least as specifically applied to population and food supply. Predicting a problem and helping bring about a situation that prevents the problem is not a failure of theory, it is a practical success.
The population crisis seems to have been dealt with. (For the moment at least.) But in a more general sense the concerns of Malthus are still relevant. _Any_ process that exhibits continual growth but depends on a finite resource will eventually lead to overuse, resulting in some kind of stagnation or collapse. It is always important to try and identify those kinds of situations well ahead of time. Not for the purpose of promoting a general feeling of doom and gloom but so that means can be found to either limit the growth (ideally in a positive way, not through draconian restrictions) or circumvent the finite resource and thus prevent, or at least delay, the problem.
And note that although it would be silly to put concerns about population growth at the top of your current list of concerns, it _is_ something that needs to be continually dealt with. We need to make sure that the situation where the general population receives good education, has access to birth control, and participates in a relatively robust economy continues to be true in those parts of the world where it is currently the case, and try to help extend those conditions to those areas of the world that do not currently benefit from that situation.
As others have said it might be due simply to the policy not being 100% effective, but even aside form that math can easily provide another answer.
For simplicity let's assume a perfect 50/50 male/female ratio, that everyone gets married, and every family has six children been ages 20 and 40, thus tripling the population every generation. Let's also assume everyone lives to sometime between 60-80 before dropping dead from old age. That means the population of people from 0 to 20 will be thee times that of the population from 20 to 40. However that also means that the population from 60-80 will be one third of that from 40 to 60, which will be one third of that from 20 to 40.
So every 20 years for a given X people in the child bearing range, there will be 3X children being born, but only X/9 old people dying. If you enforced a birth rate of one child per family then for the next twenty years instead of 3X children you would have X/2 children, but that would _still_ be more than the X/9 old people dying during the same period, so the _total_ population would continue to rise for awhile. If you enforced that policy for another 60 years you then would have a steadily decreasing population instead of a steadily increasing one, but the effect does not happen instantaneously.
Obviously the math doesn't work out nearly as neatly in the real world* and the numbers we're talking about usually aren't that extreme. But that should demonstrate how such a thing is possible and this kind of thing is pretty common in delayed feedback loops.
(*Among all the more usual factors, i'm guessing the combination of WW2 and the Cultural Revolution had a significant effect on demographics. I believe such things usually disproportionately affect older people and lead to "bubbles" in the population pyramid.)
Let's start the list of "potentially dangerous" bacteria with E. Coli. Since there are humans on the station E Coli is there. Usually harmless, but every so often it does kill people.
It's certainly _unlikely_ that anyone on board the station has any of the dangerous strains (though i have no idea how big a mutation it takes to jump from harmless to deadly,) but it is technically correct to say that anywhere there are humans there are "potentially dangerous" bacteria present.
Aside from the rounding thing i suspect this is more a combination of (reasonable) bias and people sucking at rating than some active attempt at deception. ("You have attributed conditions to villainy...")
If someone goes out and sees a movie or plays a game and thinks it's awesome they're much more likely to go online and rate it highly, possibly 4 stars but more likely 5 stars (because people tend to extremes, especially when feeling emotional.) If someone sees a movie or plays a game and thinks it sucks they're much more likely to go online and lambast it, giving it 1 or 2 stars. (I believe 2 stars is the popular option for people who want to appear as if they're giving it a fair shake.)
How many people go see a movie, decide it's kinda mediocre, and feel really compelled to rush online and tell everyone about how they really don't feel much one way or the other?
Compounding this is the fact that, despite all the jokes to the contrary, the average person isn't stupid. Most of us have some kind of idea what kind of movies we like and are able to make a fairly reasonable guess as to how much we will enjoy an upcoming movie. And most of us choose not to spend money going to a theatre to see a movie we don't like.
So for new movies, the ones for which the ratings have the most financial impact and are the most closely watched, most people go to see it because they expect to enjoy it, and most of the time they're right, so they give it high ratings. And if they're _wrong_, they're probably going to be pretty pissed about it and may give correspondingly bad ratings. There are probably also a lot of people who go to a movie expecting it to be decent but not outstanding, and their expectations of decent mediocrity are met. But they're not going to bother taking the time to submit a rating like that.
I would expect that the majority of mediocre ratings would come at least a year after a movie's been out, when people have the chance to catch it on TV or online or rent it for a lark. There are lower expectations and less investment and therefore people will give something random a try and be okay giving it a median review. And if it's an online system, especially one that will make recommendations based on your ratings, the threshold of effort is low enough that the promise of some (minuscule) reward is enough to provide the motivation to leave a mediocre rating.
It's like a bunch of Pacific islanders moving to the Pacific Northwest in the summer and building open air huts. And when people point out those might not be such a wise idea come winter, the islanders argue that people live in Alaska, so it's been proven that winter weather isn't a problem. (The difference in this case of course being that the area itself is changing, rather than the people moving to a different area.)
In a less hyperbolic example, the Jr high school i went to in Washington was designed by a California architect. It had exterior walkways instead of hallways. They made enough of a concession to put roofs over most of the walkways, the ones running around the edges of the building, but that still left the sides exposed to wind, rain being carried by the wind, and runoff from the rain dripping off the roofs. And to get from one side of rectangular building to the other the easiest way was to use the entirely exposed walkways going through the courtyard in the middle. I'm sure it was a great design for the California climate. It was even great in Washington... for about the last month or two before summer vacation and the first month or two when school started up again. For the rest of the fall, winter, and early spring it was pretty damn miserable.
There are already systems that will warn you if you're drifting out of your lane, and systems that will warn you/apply brakes if you're in danger of collision. And of course systems that will plot a route for you and give you step by step directions to your destination have been around for quite awhile at this point.
If the goal isn't full autonomy then it doesn't really seem like we need to do much more research and development. How boring will it be to be "driving" a car that can do 99% of the driving by itself but insists on you paying attention (at least intermittently) to do the remaining 1%, instead of kicking back and enjoying your time doing something else?
(And note that anything less than full automation will provide little benefit to the biggest commercial interest, long distance trucking. Having to pay a person to ride along and babysit the automation doesn't save anything over just making that person drive in the first place.)
"Keys waived his Miranda rights at the time of the interview and was concerned that the case not be publicized, apparently believing he might get off as a cooperating witness."
I think that means "he would rather that the case not be publicized but was worried it would be" and not "he was worried because he didn't think the case would be publicized and he thought it ought to be", but i'm not entirely sure.
Slashdot Mirror
"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong."
Wanting to help the US economy is fine. Wanting to encourage companies to manufacture more things in the US is fine. This "simple and obvious" solution to the problem would end up causing more problems than it solved. Tax dodging through technicalities, decline in quality and/or increase in prices, US companies moving off shore, treaty violations, and i'm sure others that haven't been brought up yet.
Almost the exact same thing was demonstrated with evolovable hardware in the 90s:
http://www.damninteresting.com...
Programmable circuits were trained through an evolutionary process to perform certain tasks. At the end of the process they performed the tasks perfectly, but the actual circuits that were produced were not understandable or functional under the normal rules of circuit design, using roundabout methods for the components to effect each other that were dependent on the exact design of the model of programmable circuit they were using. Try to implement the same circuit design using other hardware and it would just fail to do anything at all.
Evolution will "make use" of anything it can, even and perhaps especially factors that no intelligent designer would ever consider.
There's Rush's latest (and possibly last? =/) album, "Clockwork Angels." And i'd suggest giving Poe's "Haunted" a try. Supposedly even better if you've read her brother's book, "House of Leaves". (I haven't read it yet, so i can't attest one way or the other.)
Looks like wikipedia has a list of concept albums, though i've gotta say at least some of the items on there seem a little dubious.
I've seen a number of solutions like that one where the first step is "uninstall the current version of IE". Which as i mentioned in the first post i have tried to do. Multiple times. If i try to uninstall IE via Programs & Features all i get is "An error has occurred. Not all of the updates were successfully uninstalled."
Also already tried:
Repairing Update process with Microsoft Fix it 50123
System Update Readiness Tool
Manually Reinstalling IE9
Manually Reinstalling IE10
Manually Installing IE11
Uninstalling IE via Microsoft Fix it 50778
Uninstalling via Revo Uninstaller
Uninstalling via the command line from Safe Mode
Every time i reboot my computer it tries to install "Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems" (despite the fact that i can run IE and it claims to be version 10) and gets a 9C48 error, and it also tries to install "Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems" and gets a 9C59 error. Plus a lot of the time after that the system will slow to a crawl as it deals with a ton of "WindowsWcpStoreCorruption" errors for about an hour. It won't let me install Windows 10, but it's not listed in the updates so i can try to uninstall it and do a fresh install. There is a "Windows Internet Explorer 9" but it won't let me uninstall that. (Or rather, it will let me try, but it never works.) I've tried at least a half-dozen fixes suggested on various Microsoft forums and none of them have worked.
I wouldn't actually care (well, aside from the "slowing to a crawl" thing) except this is on a work machine and i need to use IE for some things for compatibility reasons. I figure at this point i'm going to have to get IT to reinstall the OS (unless i can talk them into just giving me a new machine. =) Isn't having the OS tightly integrated with a browser just great? =P
There are already a number of comments saying things to the effect of "this doesn't matter because winamp is outdated and there are much better alternatives."
So as someone who still uses WinAmp, what are those alternatives and how are they better?
I still use winamp because it's simple and efficient at what i want it to do. It works with the library of mp3 files i have (supposedly it also handles flac, but i my ears aren't good enough to require using up that much drive space) without requiring me to connect to some service. It allows me to create and save playlists with ease using the "Media Library." In theory it allows me to update the music on my phone though i usually just do that manually. (Copy m3us and new mp3s by hand.)
The shuffle is kind of a joke, but i'm not sure that any music player has really "perfected" shuffle. (I'm not sure it's even possible to meet human expectations of what "random" ought to be in this context.)
I generally use VLC to watch videos, but i find its Media Library and playlist editor much less intuitive than winamp, though that admittedly might just be due to relative use. However so far i have not discovered any features in VLC that would make it a superior music player and thus prompt me to get more practice using it for that purpose.
So again, what are the newer, better alternatives, and what features do they offer that winamp lacks?
+1 this. It's not like if the Red Delicious and Cavendish disappeared that local farmers would suddenly start growing the fruit in every state so people could get the "good" fruit locally. Instead the prices would go up and availability would go down, until the new varieties were bred to be as hardy and shipable as the old varieties (and thus less flavorful.)
If someone wants to pay to import special varietals or travel somewhere to get them that's fine. But without handling fruit in a mass production manner there wouldn't be enough of it for the millions of people who'd like something easily available and reasonable priced, even if it was grown thousands of miles away.
"The 'unaddressed' can't open a bank account, can't deal properly with a hospital or an administration, and can even struggle to get a delivery."
Putting a "can even" or "can't even" at the end of a list implies that that last option is especially surprising or shocking. However in this case struggling to get a delivery is pretty much a no brainer.
If you want someone to send you something, the person you're asking needs to know where to actually send it. If you can't accurately describe where you are then they have no way to get to you.
Opening bank accounts or going to a hospital on the other hand are things that shouldn't actually require you to have a permanent place of residence, labeled or not.
"And now, ongoing research [...] looks poised to deliver the first practical device by the end of this decade."
So up until now the multibillion-dollar industry has been founded entirely on impractical devices? Or if they mean the first practical vacuum tube of that particular type it might be useful if the summary gave some kind of brief explanation about what makes it different from/better than other vacuum tubes.
(The TFA probably explains it, but the site is blocked for me.)
"Occasionally the family gets together for a move."
I sure hope you get together when moving! I'd hate to be the one who got left behind!
#1 It's a spokesman for Nest saying that it isn't transmitting when you think you've turned it off.
#2 If the device is already hardwired to allow it to shut down the LED without shutting down the camera then it's only one software update/hack away from transmitting while it appears to be off. (Assuming that such a "feature" hasn't already been included and is just waiting for a signal to activate.)
I don't think i tend towards excessive paranoia, but having a camera attached to the internet with a power switch which doesn't actually power it down seems a bit sketchy to me. Even if Nest/Google the corporation has fully honorable intentions the situation still seems liable to potential abuse.
"seven people present in the train cab instead of train" What is that suppose to even mean?
I'm not one of those grammar knowing people, but i think that's technically correct english that's made needlessly vague by a couple omissions.
"seven people present in the train cab instead of (in the) train (cars)."
The cab being the driving compartment. The more colloquial term (at least in my neck of the woods) is usually the engine, but perhaps this train didn't have a separate engine car?
You could argue that saying they were in the engine/cab instead of the train is inaccurate, since the cab is in fact a part of the train, but the implication was clearly intended to be "in the off limits to passengers part of the train rather than the part they were supposed to be in."
I'm pretty sure that saying "In the X instead of Y" is an accepted abbreviation of "In the X instead of in the Y", but i don't think it's a very common construction, at least in the US.
"I'm talking about the poor fool who agrees to be sent on a suicide mission in the hope of a better life. He's the one who needs education."
An education would be nice, but what they really need is a decent economy.
Having a large middle class is a societal stabilizer. So is having an economy in which even most of the lower class can afford at least some luxuries. There are people in America and Europe who are just as religous and/or political as the members of ISIS, but they _generally_ don't engage in terrorist activities. There are a few loons who decide to bomb abortion clinics or government buildings or black churches or what have you, but not entire armies of them.
As much as conservatives like to complain about poor people having iPhones and such, given the choice between dying for your beliefs and spending the afternoon playing flappy bird the vast majority of people will go with flappy bird. And as banal as that makes it sound it still seems like the right choice to me. It's the people who don't have flappy bird, or jobs, or food, (or who have families or fellow countrymen in that position) who decide they have nothing to lose and are willing to go out and kill people in hopes of an afterlife that's better than their current life.
Not sure that would help. How to tell if something has a Californian cancer warning sticker:
1: Is it in California?
A: Yes - It has a sticker.
B: No - It does not.
(One of my favorites was a bottle of balsamic vinegar that advertised itself as being "certified organic" on the label and had a California sticker warning that it contained lead.)
So it's only noticing if something is in the way when it gets within 10 meters?
30 mph = ~48 kph = ~13 mps. So it has less than a second to respond to whatever it does see. What's the turning radius for this thing when traveling at 30 mph? Or the stopping distance?
It's amusing that the thought line is "it's traveling so slow that i can do the processing to allow it to travel faster than many people would be comfortable with".
Let's unpack this.
Malthus looked at the population trend during the time that he was alive, and the amount of food humans were able to produce, and concluded that a continuously growing population would eventually meet or exceed its food supply, resulting in either general misery or starvation and catastrophe. Malthus proposed a number of possible solutions to this problem, which included birth control
The catastrophe that Malthus warned against didn't happen for two reasons. One, the population stopped increasing as quickly. This was due to a number of factors, one of which was the use of birth control, as Malthus suggested. The other reason was the Green Revolution greatly increasing how much food we could grow on arable land, which Malthus did not predict.
So Malthus looked at current trends, predicted a possible future problem, suggested means of dealing with the problem, people took steps to address the problem, and the problem was avoided. The people who solved the problem probably didn't do the things they did directly because of what Malthus said, but it's impossible to say with any surety they weren't influenced by his work at all. As such i would say that Malthus and Malthusianism were not discredited, but were merely rendered irrelevant, at least as specifically applied to population and food supply. Predicting a problem and helping bring about a situation that prevents the problem is not a failure of theory, it is a practical success.
The population crisis seems to have been dealt with. (For the moment at least.) But in a more general sense the concerns of Malthus are still relevant. _Any_ process that exhibits continual growth but depends on a finite resource will eventually lead to overuse, resulting in some kind of stagnation or collapse. It is always important to try and identify those kinds of situations well ahead of time. Not for the purpose of promoting a general feeling of doom and gloom but so that means can be found to either limit the growth (ideally in a positive way, not through draconian restrictions) or circumvent the finite resource and thus prevent, or at least delay, the problem.
And note that although it would be silly to put concerns about population growth at the top of your current list of concerns, it _is_ something that needs to be continually dealt with. We need to make sure that the situation where the general population receives good education, has access to birth control, and participates in a relatively robust economy continues to be true in those parts of the world where it is currently the case, and try to help extend those conditions to those areas of the world that do not currently benefit from that situation.
As others have said it might be due simply to the policy not being 100% effective, but even aside form that math can easily provide another answer.
For simplicity let's assume a perfect 50/50 male/female ratio, that everyone gets married, and every family has six children been ages 20 and 40, thus tripling the population every generation. Let's also assume everyone lives to sometime between 60-80 before dropping dead from old age. That means the population of people from 0 to 20 will be thee times that of the population from 20 to 40. However that also means that the population from 60-80 will be one third of that from 40 to 60, which will be one third of that from 20 to 40.
So every 20 years for a given X people in the child bearing range, there will be 3X children being born, but only X/9 old people dying. If you enforced a birth rate of one child per family then for the next twenty years instead of 3X children you would have X/2 children, but that would _still_ be more than the X/9 old people dying during the same period, so the _total_ population would continue to rise for awhile. If you enforced that policy for another 60 years you then would have a steadily decreasing population instead of a steadily increasing one, but the effect does not happen instantaneously.
Obviously the math doesn't work out nearly as neatly in the real world* and the numbers we're talking about usually aren't that extreme. But that should demonstrate how such a thing is possible and this kind of thing is pretty common in delayed feedback loops.
(*Among all the more usual factors, i'm guessing the combination of WW2 and the Cultural Revolution had a significant effect on demographics. I believe such things usually disproportionately affect older people and lead to "bubbles" in the population pyramid.)
Let's start the list of "potentially dangerous" bacteria with E. Coli. Since there are humans on the station E Coli is there. Usually harmless, but every so often it does kill people.
It's certainly _unlikely_ that anyone on board the station has any of the dangerous strains (though i have no idea how big a mutation it takes to jump from harmless to deadly,) but it is technically correct to say that anywhere there are humans there are "potentially dangerous" bacteria present.
"fuck these out-of-ideas morons. fire the execs and start fresh FFS"
Final Fantasy S? I don't think i've heard of that one!
Aside from the rounding thing i suspect this is more a combination of (reasonable) bias and people sucking at rating than some active attempt at deception. ("You have attributed conditions to villainy...")
If someone goes out and sees a movie or plays a game and thinks it's awesome they're much more likely to go online and rate it highly, possibly 4 stars but more likely 5 stars (because people tend to extremes, especially when feeling emotional.) If someone sees a movie or plays a game and thinks it sucks they're much more likely to go online and lambast it, giving it 1 or 2 stars. (I believe 2 stars is the popular option for people who want to appear as if they're giving it a fair shake.)
How many people go see a movie, decide it's kinda mediocre, and feel really compelled to rush online and tell everyone about how they really don't feel much one way or the other?
Compounding this is the fact that, despite all the jokes to the contrary, the average person isn't stupid. Most of us have some kind of idea what kind of movies we like and are able to make a fairly reasonable guess as to how much we will enjoy an upcoming movie. And most of us choose not to spend money going to a theatre to see a movie we don't like.
So for new movies, the ones for which the ratings have the most financial impact and are the most closely watched, most people go to see it because they expect to enjoy it, and most of the time they're right, so they give it high ratings. And if they're _wrong_, they're probably going to be pretty pissed about it and may give correspondingly bad ratings. There are probably also a lot of people who go to a movie expecting it to be decent but not outstanding, and their expectations of decent mediocrity are met. But they're not going to bother taking the time to submit a rating like that.
I would expect that the majority of mediocre ratings would come at least a year after a movie's been out, when people have the chance to catch it on TV or online or rent it for a lark. There are lower expectations and less investment and therefore people will give something random a try and be okay giving it a median review. And if it's an online system, especially one that will make recommendations based on your ratings, the threshold of effort is low enough that the promise of some (minuscule) reward is enough to provide the motivation to leave a mediocre rating.
We choose to consume cheese in this decade and consume the other things, not because they are necessary, but because they are awesome!
It's like a bunch of Pacific islanders moving to the Pacific Northwest in the summer and building open air huts. And when people point out those might not be such a wise idea come winter, the islanders argue that people live in Alaska, so it's been proven that winter weather isn't a problem. (The difference in this case of course being that the area itself is changing, rather than the people moving to a different area.)
In a less hyperbolic example, the Jr high school i went to in Washington was designed by a California architect. It had exterior walkways instead of hallways. They made enough of a concession to put roofs over most of the walkways, the ones running around the edges of the building, but that still left the sides exposed to wind, rain being carried by the wind, and runoff from the rain dripping off the roofs. And to get from one side of rectangular building to the other the easiest way was to use the entirely exposed walkways going through the courtyard in the middle. I'm sure it was a great design for the California climate. It was even great in Washington... for about the last month or two before summer vacation and the first month or two when school started up again. For the rest of the fall, winter, and early spring it was pretty damn miserable.
There are already systems that will warn you if you're drifting out of your lane, and systems that will warn you/apply brakes if you're in danger of collision. And of course systems that will plot a route for you and give you step by step directions to your destination have been around for quite awhile at this point.
If the goal isn't full autonomy then it doesn't really seem like we need to do much more research and development. How boring will it be to be "driving" a car that can do 99% of the driving by itself but insists on you paying attention (at least intermittently) to do the remaining 1%, instead of kicking back and enjoying your time doing something else?
(And note that anything less than full automation will provide little benefit to the biggest commercial interest, long distance trucking. Having to pay a person to ride along and babysit the automation doesn't save anything over just making that person drive in the first place.)
The last couple times i've visited home the number of jaywalkers i've seen has made me inordinately sad :(
"Keys waived his Miranda rights at the time of the interview and was concerned that the case not be publicized, apparently believing he might get off as a cooperating witness."
I think that means "he would rather that the case not be publicized but was worried it would be" and not "he was worried because he didn't think the case would be publicized and he thought it ought to be", but i'm not entirely sure.