Humans actually have one of the weakest immune systems out there, mostly because we've been breeding less and less for hardiness (and worse, in the past ~400 years less for intelligence as well) thanks to the "contributions" of the few bright sparks who come up with things like, say, "the crapper" and make it so that those with downright piss-poor immune systems pass them on to the next generation.
Are you kidding?
If your ancestors come from a city-based civilization (i.e. most likely), then it's almost a certainty that the #1 thing your genes have been selected for is resistance to communicable diseases. Indoor plumbing is a recent invention, antibiotics even more so. Sanitation in cities, for the vast majority of human history in which cities existed, was terrible. Refuse and waste littering the roads. Rats, insects, and other disease carriers running rampant. They were nasty, unsanitary, filthy places rife with disease. And with many potential hosts in close proximity, even lethal diseases can spread and survive whereas in a small tribe or village if they kill everyone off then the disease dies too. Roads that improved travel between cities only made this worse.
What do you think the Black Death was if not a big selective pressure bottleneck that wiped out a third of the European population with the weakest immune systems in one fell swoop? And this is only the most famous of many, many plagues that have, well, plagued civilization.
No, my friend, you are the result of millenia of selection based largely on the strength of your immune system. You're a bad-ass. Antibiotics are too new an invention to have changed this.
But just to be sure, I don't use anti-bacterial soap.:)
Fish don't care that they live in water in which they, and all the other fish as well as plenty of mammals and birds, have pissed and shit. There are organisms out there that take advantage of it - one animal's waste is another's food.
Nobody cares as long as the concentration is very low. Try not cleaning your fish tank for a month or so and see how much your fish care. Well of course they won't care, they'll be dead.
That some animals are perfectly capable of using other animal's excrement for food is great for them, but should not be used as the metric by which to judge all animals.
Big corporations generally screw you six ways from Sunday by buying up the law in one way or another. The more you regulate the economy, the more likely that guys who have connections will have the ability to ruin you.
Yes, that's why it's the Reagan Free Market, and not just a free market. In Reaganomics, regulations that prevent a corporation from fucking you six ways till Sunday are bad, but regulations that help a corporation fuck you six ways till Sunday are good. Because after raping your wallet, some of that money will trickle back down on your head.
That it isn't the REAL free market was entirely my point.:P
Part of the theme of that movie (and part of what the show missed and I hated it for) was that Skynet was sort of an unavoidable eventuality of humanity's drive towards better computers and technology. Skynet is going to come about regardless, and everything the Connor's do is only staving off the inevitable.
Why do you think they missed it? They failed to prevent Skynet. They changed the future -- several times in the series, in fact -- but the future always had Skynet in it.
Sure they tried to prevent Skynet, but they tried in T3 as well, and similarly failed. All that changed was the date of Judgement Day and other minor details.
That's the neat thing about the last episode of the show that I did like (thought it was not addressed too deeply). When John jumps forward that last time, he jumps into the future. He skipped the entire time that he was supposed to be fighting. NOBODY knew him or had every heard of John Connor . . . yet the resistance was still there and fighting.
Yeah, I was actually thinking that this was going to be a direct tie-in with the new movie, and the show was over because the movie was about to come out and it would tie all that up. Which obviously isn't the case, but hey it made sense as T4 seems to have a rebel-terminator plot as well. I'm sure the next season would have covered that, anyway.
That's what bugs me about Sarah Connor. Rather than trying to prevent the war which is basically going to happen regardless, her ass should be stocking up on weapons, ammo, etc, and John should be becoming as badass as possible. Essentially, everything that was implied as happening off-screen between T1 and T2 that they just gave up on after another terminator showed up.
But all those things did happen. Sarah had weapon stock piles and safe houses and was teaching John everything she knew about being a bad-ass. Then T2 happened, and they thought Skynet was defeated. Then another Terminator shows up, turns out Skynet still happens, and Sarah wants to go back into hiding-and-bad-ass-training mode, but John wants a normal life and wants to prevent Skynet for real, and Sarah goes along because she's afraid of losing her son. Remember they don't really know that Judgement Day can't be prevented. Yet over the course of the series, John slowly figures out that he can't escape his destiny and begins to accept it.
That's what was hugely missing from T3 for me -- John in that movie was the same whiny punk as in T2, only now a 20-something which just makes him pathetic. He didn't change over the movie into anyone that could plausibly take up the mantle of leader of the resistance. In contrast the SSC John looks well on his way to becoming the famed leader John Conner.
The last half-dozen episodes, tying up the whole Riley thread and all, were very, very good. But, the show died because it deserved to. It could have been a good show. Unfortunately, it was a very uneven effort.
They were good, yet I still thought there was no reason for it to take, what, four episodes to resolve that?
The show's problem as far as I'm concerned was pacing. The story itself was good, and it did a great job of showing how John Conner was slowly developing into the man he was destined to become -- the one thing I wanted from T3 and didn't get. The characters were good, the writing had some great moments. But then there was tons of slow, tedious filler. And that was when it was an episode that was actually advancing the plot as opposed to as you call it "Touched by a Terminator".
I think the whole two season story arc could have been compressed into a single season (okay maybe it would take a little more than that) and ended up with a much better show with a lot more punch.
Im starting to wonder if Summer Glau is cursed. We will see with the next series she is in that is absolutely fantastic and get's canceled. Third time is the charm right?
Hmm, well, let's see... She played a minor character for a number of episodes in The Unit (a show I like for being both a Hoo-Rah! pro-US/military action show with a brain and ability to point out flaws in military life, U.S. policies, etc), and it went off the air for a while after that very season. But then it came back.
So maybe she is cursed, and the effect depends on how much screen time she gets? Hmm... Nevertheless, I don't think that puts me on the "against" side of giving her more screen time...
That's true, but nevertheless Friday was and still is a night where shows aren't expected to do as well. It's the night where most people, even many of the Sunday church going crowd, can go out and drink themselves into a Saturday morning hangover.
So it's not exactly the Kiss of Death, but moving SSC from Sunday (I think?) to Monday to Friday shows decreasing expectations coupled with a move likely to reinforce those expectations. Not to mention just moving a show's time will play havoc with its ratings to begin with.
I'm sure I'll get the DVD for the second series and will probably like it a lot.
I'm a big Heroes fan, but I'd say rent the second season DVD. It's honestly not nearly as good as the first season, or the 3rd for that matter. It was crippled by the writer's strike -- they got the writers to hammer out a few episodes before going on strike, basically forcing a season's worth of story into a short period of time with all the shortcuts that implies -- and just didn't seem like that great an idea to begin with. Hiro's story is the most well done though and quite fun.
That's not freedom; that's not capitalism, that's corporatism.
Also known as "Trickle-Down Economics" aka "Trickle-Upon Economics" aka "Reagan Free Market Capitalism", as in big corporations a "free" to fuck you six ways till Sunday.
He made it perfectly clear what he was referring to. I don't know why you were confused!
One of the primary arguments is that machines may better suited for making the nebulous civilian/non-civilian distinction.
How can they if you cannot specify how to make that decision in the rigorous way a machine requires?
The cost of misclassification in this case is merely some hardware and not a human life.
In the situations of interest, it is rarely the case that only the soldier's life is on the line. Consider a check point outside a bazaar in Baghdad, or near a police recruiting station, or an embassy. The soldiers manning that checkpoint aren't just trying to prevent suicide bombers from blowing them up, they're trying to keep everyone inside safe too. A robot that makes a default judgment of "non-combatant" will put people at risk and fail to accomplish its mission, even if you limit it to situations where the civilian population isn't going to be the target of the combatants like the invasion of Falluja.
First of all, there's the training. They spend at most a few months learning how to foil every single method to get something through security. There's no way they'll catch everything. The x-ray scans of bags moving through the conveyor belts are hard to read and easy to foil. Anyone remember the guy who hid lockpicks in his luggage without any extra scrutiny?
Feh. From what I've heard from people who have done it, it sounds more like they learn how to foil the half dozen or so specific things TSA auditors try to sneak through. They aren't even trying to teach them how to foil every method an actual terrorist might use to smuggle things on a plane, they're teaching them how to pass the tests.
If not wanting people to look at me naked is uptight, then yes, I'm uptight. Post nude pics of yourself and show how non-uptight you are, pls thx j/k.
The locker room is different, because everyone is getting dressed and undressed in there. It's context. Similarly, taking off my shoes when entering a friend's house isn't humiliating, being forced to take them off by security personal is.
The biggest time delay in security is having your carry-on scanned, and that's not going to change, neither is having to take off your shoes. Walking through the metal detector takes as long as it takes you to walk through an arch, so it'd be quite a trick to make the scanner faster than that. There's no advantage here, just further indignity. Just because in your logical world it shouldn't be an indignity means nothing -- keep that way of thinking away from the law.
the one thing the politicians take issue with is the one device that might actually make security FASTER because OMG BOOBIES.
Yeah well I for one am glad they decided to draw the line fucking somewhere. The Herald is slashdotted or something, but if the images are close to as described, I don't want anyone fucking looking at me like that. It is a matter of dignity. It's bad enough having to take off my shoes, taking off my clothes (virtually or otherwise) is out of the question.
And how is this faster? The 'previously on slashdot' link says it takes 30 seconds to scan. Security spends a lot less time than that on me personally today in a typical situation. So I'm not seeing any advantage, not that it would be worth it anyway.
If we can draw a line in the sand with this bullshit, maybe eventually we can start peeling back all the other bullshit too instead of continually losing ground.
No they weren't. The laws were flawed and the only modifications that ever occurred were made in order to fix these flaws and prevent paradoxical situations from occurring. There was never a situation where things went wrong due to someone trying to modify the laws to my knowledge.
Sure there was. One of the stories in I, Robot involved robots whom the military had modified by relaxing the 1st and 2nd (I think) laws. One of them escaped, and hid itself amongst a population of unmodified mining robots. The robopsychologist they brought in was horrified to learn they had mucked with the laws. She ended up tricking the robot into revealing itself by performing 3-laws tests on the whole group of robots, taking advantage of the fact that the robot in question was extremely intelligent, and also apparently vain. Been a long time since I read it, my summary might be off, but they definitely mucked with the 1st law.
Nevertheless, you are correct in general, that the laws worked perfectly such as they were, and the problems arose by conflicts and contradictions or simply unexpected ways in which the laws would work in unexpected situations. But work they did.
If you think that changing our system of justice in a way that affects millions of people will run perfectly smoothly, we disagree. If you think it will mostly run smoothly, we disagree. I think it will often be o.k., but there will be lots of issues.
Of course it won't be "perfectly smooth" but what problems will there be of consequence? Don't just keep saying "if you don't think there will be a problem..." Tell me what problem you think there will be, for goodness sake. What is it? Crime? What crime? Unemployment? We've got that problem already, and we can't keep people in prison because of a slight tick in unemployment.
If you don't think a cop noticing you using a banned substance represents a poor decision, we disagree.
Everyone makes bad decisions.
If you don't see a large influx of people with a proven history of making poor decisions, into communities that will not trust them highly, with better, cheaper access to substances that have proved to cause them issues in the past, as a potential problem, it is safe to say that we disagree.
Yeah, so a significantly larger number of non-violent offenders will be released than typically are at one time. How is it anything our society can't absorb without even really noticing? The only proven issue the person had with the substance, the reason it was a poor decision, was that it was illegal. The whole premise here is that we, as a society, have decided that incarcerating people for these mistakes is stupid and unjust. How judgmental are you expecting people to be over their frickin weed conviction given that? "What were you in for?" "Weed." "Oh sorry." You think people coming back from being in jail for using the wrong color of bathroom were ostracized by their communities? And don't think it's viewed that differently in a lot of places.
None of this dissuades me from thinking that decriminalization and legalization are good ideas that would be far better than the current fucking mess.
Uh huh okay so again given most people feel the same way what is the issue? Really I'm dying here.
Ha! Frickin Laser Beems indeed, I wouldn't want to live in a universe in which they are natural. That reminds me of other scary unnatural shark augmentations...
Also, I don't believe that homo sapiens is naturally an aquatic creature.
Well not like that no. I heard a theory once though that homo sapiens lost their hair when they reached the coasts as an adaptation for swimming and fishing.
Unless you're talking about the dreaded landshark, but I simply don't believe they exist.
Wait, someone's knocking at the door. [pause] I didn't order any pizza.
Aaaagh!
Noooo!
*gasp*
Oh poor, poor fool...
Of course land sharks don't exist. I was trying to tell you about sharks with FSCABA -- Frickin Self-Contained Above Water Breathing Apparatuses -- on their mother fucking heads! Um and they can talk. Yeah they suck... I tried to warn you...
Gee golly, I can get about 20 kinds of beer that aren't Bud, and they're all pasteurized. I don't know what backwater you live in.
Of course they're all pasteurized that was exactly my point. It's illegal to distribute non-pasteurized beer in the U.S. Which is part of why people think U.S. beer sucks, and imported beers suck. I've been to a lot of micro-breweries of varying qualities. The common denominator? Non-pasteurized beer tastes better. It's like OJ vs OJ from concentrate. Anyway.
Yes, that may be, but it really takes the wind out of the DEA's sails, so they're fewer people killed by them, and illegal grow ops are both smaller and less hazardous to the growers.
Yeah it's way better that's a given. It's exactly like Prohibition, a solution worse than the problem.
The cold logic can be better though, if you know what you actually want to optimize. Humans often make decisions that don't do what they claim they want, e.g. minimizing civilian casualties.
Yeah it's that 'if' that's the killer. The problem is that you have to be able to express what you want to optimize using cold logic before a machine can start making that decision, and we aren't able to do that. Terms like "civilian" are nebulous, and attempts to rigidly codify them fail to capture the intent and connotation behind those words that we understand, but can't express. We can reason about that, while machines can't. Fuzzy logic doesn't help, that's just a way of decision making on non-binary factors. With a lot of types of fuzzy logic (neural nets, genetic algorithms) it can be even more important to precisely define what you want, since they can produce solutions that "work" correctly and optimize your problem as specified, but do so in a way very unlike you expected.
People of course have the disadvantages of being error prone, and well sometimes being bastards who just don't give a shit what you want them to optimize, so there's appeal to the machine. Yet nothing fails as spectacularly and efficiently as a machine doing exactly what it was programmed to do when it's exactly what you didn't want. To use a machine in situations where even humans equipped with honest intentions, solid faculties, and experience have enormous trouble determining who is "enemy" vs "innocent"? As in most situations our military has been in since the 50s and is going to be involved in for the foreseeable future? That sounds crazy to me. I'll take human judgment and its failure modes any day.
Kinda off topic, but speaking of honest intentions, I gotta say the humans making the judgments in question, i.e. our soldiers, have a damn hard problem to solve and it shows how human potential is pretty damn amazing. We're biologically the same animal we were a hundred thousand years ago and more. But in the past, even recent past, the most difficult ethical decision a warrior was asked to make was whether to decide if someone was a threat and should be killed or wasn't and should be enslaved, and it wasn't of any consequence so nobody cared to go over those decisions with a fine-toothed comb. So given the difficulty of what we're asking them to do today, and considering what's going on, the results are pretty amazing. Seriously, think about it. Anyway, yeah, off topic.
A few years ago I was doing a 700 km commute every couple of weeks. I have a ten year old Chrysler mini-van (3 litre) which gets 10 litres/100 km (dunno what that is in mpg, US or imperial.) As a test I tried windows open vs AC on different trips, and found my fuel efficiency at highway speeds was undetectably different.
In my Toyota Echo (the smallest Toyota of its day) I've compared mileage on road trips (varying between 300 and 1200 miles) with AC vs open windows, and found that the AC lowered my fuel economy significantly. It went from 38 mpg with windows down, to around 32 with them up and the AC on.
I attribute this to the fact that the Echo engine is tiny and thus the compressor uses a larger portion of its output than it would in other cars. That and the AC unit may be oversized/shitty. Either way, a clear benefit to not running the AC. I don't expect that to transfer to other cars, and expect what you saw is more typical.
Technically, she was blown out.:-) (Yes, that's a silly TNG reference.)
Had to look that one up. Been a long time since I watched season 1 TNG.:)
Due to my electrical engineering background, I'm perfectly comfortable describing things as the opposite of how they really are, and just flipping the sign.:)
So start a company that doesn't do that. Jeez, you make it sound like the world is static. Not everybody drinks budweiser.
Yeah, so I'll just run down to the store and buy some non-pasteurized beer...
Oh wait.
My fear is that in the course of legalizing it, in order to get to the next step which is taxing it, the government will have to keep control over who is allowed to grow and sell it. Much like with tobacco and alcohol today. Which is why there is, as far as I know, one cigarette brand that doesn't use tons of additives that make them even less healthy. And I can't buy a non-pasteurized beer unless it was brewed on the premises. And I can't buy my favorite beer from my home state because they aren't licensed to distribute over state lines. And so on.
If it's completely legalized, as in non-regulated, then this will be a complete non-issue. But I fear that won't be the case, and economics will favor big players, and sure not everyone drinks Bud but what most people will have access to and will buy will be tobacco-cut addictive crap.
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Yes, the fish depend upon natural filters (and simple dilution) to enable them to live where they shit.
Has nothing to do with superior immune systems. That's just bologna.
Humans actually have one of the weakest immune systems out there, mostly because we've been breeding less and less for hardiness (and worse, in the past ~400 years less for intelligence as well) thanks to the "contributions" of the few bright sparks who come up with things like, say, "the crapper" and make it so that those with downright piss-poor immune systems pass them on to the next generation.
Are you kidding?
If your ancestors come from a city-based civilization (i.e. most likely), then it's almost a certainty that the #1 thing your genes have been selected for is resistance to communicable diseases. Indoor plumbing is a recent invention, antibiotics even more so. Sanitation in cities, for the vast majority of human history in which cities existed, was terrible. Refuse and waste littering the roads. Rats, insects, and other disease carriers running rampant. They were nasty, unsanitary, filthy places rife with disease. And with many potential hosts in close proximity, even lethal diseases can spread and survive whereas in a small tribe or village if they kill everyone off then the disease dies too. Roads that improved travel between cities only made this worse.
What do you think the Black Death was if not a big selective pressure bottleneck that wiped out a third of the European population with the weakest immune systems in one fell swoop? And this is only the most famous of many, many plagues that have, well, plagued civilization.
No, my friend, you are the result of millenia of selection based largely on the strength of your immune system. You're a bad-ass. Antibiotics are too new an invention to have changed this.
But just to be sure, I don't use anti-bacterial soap. :)
Fish don't care that they live in water in which they, and all the other fish as well as plenty of mammals and birds, have pissed and shit. There are organisms out there that take advantage of it - one animal's waste is another's food.
Nobody cares as long as the concentration is very low. Try not cleaning your fish tank for a month or so and see how much your fish care. Well of course they won't care, they'll be dead.
That some animals are perfectly capable of using other animal's excrement for food is great for them, but should not be used as the metric by which to judge all animals.
Big corporations generally screw you six ways from Sunday by buying up the law in one way or another. The more you regulate the economy, the more likely that guys who have connections will have the ability to ruin you.
Yes, that's why it's the Reagan Free Market, and not just a free market. In Reaganomics, regulations that prevent a corporation from fucking you six ways till Sunday are bad, but regulations that help a corporation fuck you six ways till Sunday are good. Because after raping your wallet, some of that money will trickle back down on your head.
That it isn't the REAL free market was entirely my point. :P
Part of the theme of that movie (and part of what the show missed and I hated it for) was that Skynet was sort of an unavoidable eventuality of humanity's drive towards better computers and technology. Skynet is going to come about regardless, and everything the Connor's do is only staving off the inevitable.
Why do you think they missed it? They failed to prevent Skynet. They changed the future -- several times in the series, in fact -- but the future always had Skynet in it.
Sure they tried to prevent Skynet, but they tried in T3 as well, and similarly failed. All that changed was the date of Judgement Day and other minor details.
That's the neat thing about the last episode of the show that I did like (thought it was not addressed too deeply). When John jumps forward that last time, he jumps into the future. He skipped the entire time that he was supposed to be fighting. NOBODY knew him or had every heard of John Connor . . . yet the resistance was still there and fighting.
Yeah, I was actually thinking that this was going to be a direct tie-in with the new movie, and the show was over because the movie was about to come out and it would tie all that up. Which obviously isn't the case, but hey it made sense as T4 seems to have a rebel-terminator plot as well. I'm sure the next season would have covered that, anyway.
That's what bugs me about Sarah Connor. Rather than trying to prevent the war which is basically going to happen regardless, her ass should be stocking up on weapons, ammo, etc, and John should be becoming as badass as possible. Essentially, everything that was implied as happening off-screen between T1 and T2 that they just gave up on after another terminator showed up.
But all those things did happen. Sarah had weapon stock piles and safe houses and was teaching John everything she knew about being a bad-ass. Then T2 happened, and they thought Skynet was defeated. Then another Terminator shows up, turns out Skynet still happens, and Sarah wants to go back into hiding-and-bad-ass-training mode, but John wants a normal life and wants to prevent Skynet for real, and Sarah goes along because she's afraid of losing her son. Remember they don't really know that Judgement Day can't be prevented. Yet over the course of the series, John slowly figures out that he can't escape his destiny and begins to accept it.
That's what was hugely missing from T3 for me -- John in that movie was the same whiny punk as in T2, only now a 20-something which just makes him pathetic. He didn't change over the movie into anyone that could plausibly take up the mantle of leader of the resistance. In contrast the SSC John looks well on his way to becoming the famed leader John Conner.
The last half-dozen episodes, tying up the whole Riley thread and all, were very, very good. But, the show died because it deserved to. It could have been a good show. Unfortunately, it was a very uneven effort.
They were good, yet I still thought there was no reason for it to take, what, four episodes to resolve that?
The show's problem as far as I'm concerned was pacing. The story itself was good, and it did a great job of showing how John Conner was slowly developing into the man he was destined to become -- the one thing I wanted from T3 and didn't get. The characters were good, the writing had some great moments. But then there was tons of slow, tedious filler. And that was when it was an episode that was actually advancing the plot as opposed to as you call it "Touched by a Terminator".
I think the whole two season story arc could have been compressed into a single season (okay maybe it would take a little more than that) and ended up with a much better show with a lot more punch.
Im starting to wonder if Summer Glau is cursed. We will see with the next series she is in that is absolutely fantastic and get's canceled. Third time is the charm right?
Hmm, well, let's see... She played a minor character for a number of episodes in The Unit (a show I like for being both a Hoo-Rah! pro-US/military action show with a brain and ability to point out flaws in military life, U.S. policies, etc), and it went off the air for a while after that very season. But then it came back.
So maybe she is cursed, and the effect depends on how much screen time she gets? Hmm... Nevertheless, I don't think that puts me on the "against" side of giving her more screen time...
That's true, but nevertheless Friday was and still is a night where shows aren't expected to do as well. It's the night where most people, even many of the Sunday church going crowd, can go out and drink themselves into a Saturday morning hangover.
So it's not exactly the Kiss of Death, but moving SSC from Sunday (I think?) to Monday to Friday shows decreasing expectations coupled with a move likely to reinforce those expectations. Not to mention just moving a show's time will play havoc with its ratings to begin with.
I'm sure I'll get the DVD for the second series and will probably like it a lot.
I'm a big Heroes fan, but I'd say rent the second season DVD. It's honestly not nearly as good as the first season, or the 3rd for that matter. It was crippled by the writer's strike -- they got the writers to hammer out a few episodes before going on strike, basically forcing a season's worth of story into a short period of time with all the shortcuts that implies -- and just didn't seem like that great an idea to begin with. Hiro's story is the most well done though and quite fun.
That's not freedom; that's not capitalism, that's corporatism.
Also known as "Trickle-Down Economics" aka "Trickle-Upon Economics" aka "Reagan Free Market Capitalism", as in big corporations a "free" to fuck you six ways till Sunday.
He made it perfectly clear what he was referring to. I don't know why you were confused!
1 TB = Terra-Bimbo?
s/drive/drives/;
Seems like a plausible enough explanation for me.
One of the primary arguments is that machines may better suited for making the nebulous civilian/non-civilian distinction.
How can they if you cannot specify how to make that decision in the rigorous way a machine requires?
The cost of misclassification in this case is merely some hardware and not a human life.
In the situations of interest, it is rarely the case that only the soldier's life is on the line. Consider a check point outside a bazaar in Baghdad, or near a police recruiting station, or an embassy. The soldiers manning that checkpoint aren't just trying to prevent suicide bombers from blowing them up, they're trying to keep everyone inside safe too. A robot that makes a default judgment of "non-combatant" will put people at risk and fail to accomplish its mission, even if you limit it to situations where the civilian population isn't going to be the target of the combatants like the invasion of Falluja.
First of all, there's the training. They spend at most a few months learning how to foil every single method to get something through security. There's no way they'll catch everything. The x-ray scans of bags moving through the conveyor belts are hard to read and easy to foil. Anyone remember the guy who hid lockpicks in his luggage without any extra scrutiny?
Feh. From what I've heard from people who have done it, it sounds more like they learn how to foil the half dozen or so specific things TSA auditors try to sneak through. They aren't even trying to teach them how to foil every method an actual terrorist might use to smuggle things on a plane, they're teaching them how to pass the tests.
Yes they fucking are, and if you don't think so, then you must have your eyes shut to avoid seeing the BIG FUCKING DONG.
If not wanting people to look at me naked is uptight, then yes, I'm uptight. Post nude pics of yourself and show how non-uptight you are, pls thx j/k.
The locker room is different, because everyone is getting dressed and undressed in there. It's context. Similarly, taking off my shoes when entering a friend's house isn't humiliating, being forced to take them off by security personal is.
The biggest time delay in security is having your carry-on scanned, and that's not going to change, neither is having to take off your shoes. Walking through the metal detector takes as long as it takes you to walk through an arch, so it'd be quite a trick to make the scanner faster than that. There's no advantage here, just further indignity. Just because in your logical world it shouldn't be an indignity means nothing -- keep that way of thinking away from the law.
the one thing the politicians take issue with is the one device that might actually make security FASTER because OMG BOOBIES.
Yeah well I for one am glad they decided to draw the line fucking somewhere. The Herald is slashdotted or something, but if the images are close to as described, I don't want anyone fucking looking at me like that. It is a matter of dignity. It's bad enough having to take off my shoes, taking off my clothes (virtually or otherwise) is out of the question.
And how is this faster? The 'previously on slashdot' link says it takes 30 seconds to scan. Security spends a lot less time than that on me personally today in a typical situation. So I'm not seeing any advantage, not that it would be worth it anyway.
If we can draw a line in the sand with this bullshit, maybe eventually we can start peeling back all the other bullshit too instead of continually losing ground.
No they weren't. The laws were flawed and the only modifications that ever occurred were made in order to fix these flaws and prevent paradoxical situations from occurring. There was never a situation where things went wrong due to someone trying to modify the laws to my knowledge.
Sure there was. One of the stories in I, Robot involved robots whom the military had modified by relaxing the 1st and 2nd (I think) laws. One of them escaped, and hid itself amongst a population of unmodified mining robots. The robopsychologist they brought in was horrified to learn they had mucked with the laws. She ended up tricking the robot into revealing itself by performing 3-laws tests on the whole group of robots, taking advantage of the fact that the robot in question was extremely intelligent, and also apparently vain. Been a long time since I read it, my summary might be off, but they definitely mucked with the 1st law.
Nevertheless, you are correct in general, that the laws worked perfectly such as they were, and the problems arose by conflicts and contradictions or simply unexpected ways in which the laws would work in unexpected situations. But work they did.
If you think that changing our system of justice in a way that affects millions of people will run perfectly smoothly, we disagree. If you think it will mostly run smoothly, we disagree. I think it will often be o.k., but there will be lots of issues.
Of course it won't be "perfectly smooth" but what problems will there be of consequence? Don't just keep saying "if you don't think there will be a problem..." Tell me what problem you think there will be, for goodness sake. What is it? Crime? What crime? Unemployment? We've got that problem already, and we can't keep people in prison because of a slight tick in unemployment.
If you don't think a cop noticing you using a banned substance represents a poor decision, we disagree.
Everyone makes bad decisions.
If you don't see a large influx of people with a proven history of making poor decisions, into communities that will not trust them highly, with better, cheaper access to substances that have proved to cause them issues in the past, as a potential problem, it is safe to say that we disagree.
Yeah, so a significantly larger number of non-violent offenders will be released than typically are at one time. How is it anything our society can't absorb without even really noticing? The only proven issue the person had with the substance, the reason it was a poor decision, was that it was illegal. The whole premise here is that we, as a society, have decided that incarcerating people for these mistakes is stupid and unjust. How judgmental are you expecting people to be over their frickin weed conviction given that? "What were you in for?" "Weed." "Oh sorry." You think people coming back from being in jail for using the wrong color of bathroom were ostracized by their communities? And don't think it's viewed that differently in a lot of places.
None of this dissuades me from thinking that decriminalization and legalization are good ideas that would be far better than the current fucking mess.
Uh huh okay so again given most people feel the same way what is the issue? Really I'm dying here.
Sharks with FLBs are decidedly unnatural.
Ha! Frickin Laser Beems indeed, I wouldn't want to live in a universe in which they are natural. That reminds me of other scary unnatural shark augmentations...
Also, I don't believe that homo sapiens is naturally an aquatic creature.
Well not like that no. I heard a theory once though that homo sapiens lost their hair when they reached the coasts as an adaptation for swimming and fishing.
Unless you're talking about the dreaded landshark, but I simply don't believe they exist.
Wait, someone's knocking at the door. [pause] I didn't order any pizza.
Aaaagh!
Noooo!
*gasp*
Oh poor, poor fool...
Of course land sharks don't exist. I was trying to tell you about sharks with FSCABA -- Frickin Self-Contained Above Water Breathing Apparatuses -- on their mother fucking heads! Um and they can talk. Yeah they suck... I tried to warn you...
Gee golly, I can get about 20 kinds of beer that aren't Bud, and they're all pasteurized. I don't know what backwater you live in.
Of course they're all pasteurized that was exactly my point. It's illegal to distribute non-pasteurized beer in the U.S. Which is part of why people think U.S. beer sucks, and imported beers suck. I've been to a lot of micro-breweries of varying qualities. The common denominator? Non-pasteurized beer tastes better. It's like OJ vs OJ from concentrate. Anyway.
Yes, that may be, but it really takes the wind out of the DEA's sails, so they're fewer people killed by them, and illegal grow ops are both smaller and less hazardous to the growers.
Yeah it's way better that's a given. It's exactly like Prohibition, a solution worse than the problem.
The cold logic can be better though, if you know what you actually want to optimize. Humans often make decisions that don't do what they claim they want, e.g. minimizing civilian casualties.
Yeah it's that 'if' that's the killer. The problem is that you have to be able to express what you want to optimize using cold logic before a machine can start making that decision, and we aren't able to do that. Terms like "civilian" are nebulous, and attempts to rigidly codify them fail to capture the intent and connotation behind those words that we understand, but can't express. We can reason about that, while machines can't. Fuzzy logic doesn't help, that's just a way of decision making on non-binary factors. With a lot of types of fuzzy logic (neural nets, genetic algorithms) it can be even more important to precisely define what you want, since they can produce solutions that "work" correctly and optimize your problem as specified, but do so in a way very unlike you expected.
People of course have the disadvantages of being error prone, and well sometimes being bastards who just don't give a shit what you want them to optimize, so there's appeal to the machine. Yet nothing fails as spectacularly and efficiently as a machine doing exactly what it was programmed to do when it's exactly what you didn't want. To use a machine in situations where even humans equipped with honest intentions, solid faculties, and experience have enormous trouble determining who is "enemy" vs "innocent"? As in most situations our military has been in since the 50s and is going to be involved in for the foreseeable future? That sounds crazy to me. I'll take human judgment and its failure modes any day.
Kinda off topic, but speaking of honest intentions, I gotta say the humans making the judgments in question, i.e. our soldiers, have a damn hard problem to solve and it shows how human potential is pretty damn amazing. We're biologically the same animal we were a hundred thousand years ago and more. But in the past, even recent past, the most difficult ethical decision a warrior was asked to make was whether to decide if someone was a threat and should be killed or wasn't and should be enslaved, and it wasn't of any consequence so nobody cared to go over those decisions with a fine-toothed comb. So given the difficulty of what we're asking them to do today, and considering what's going on, the results are pretty amazing. Seriously, think about it. Anyway, yeah, off topic.
A few years ago I was doing a 700 km commute every couple of weeks. I have a ten year old Chrysler mini-van (3 litre) which gets 10 litres/100 km (dunno what that is in mpg, US or imperial.) As a test I tried windows open vs AC on different trips, and found my fuel efficiency at highway speeds was undetectably different.
In my Toyota Echo (the smallest Toyota of its day) I've compared mileage on road trips (varying between 300 and 1200 miles) with AC vs open windows, and found that the AC lowered my fuel economy significantly. It went from 38 mpg with windows down, to around 32 with them up and the AC on.
I attribute this to the fact that the Echo engine is tiny and thus the compressor uses a larger portion of its output than it would in other cars. That and the AC unit may be oversized/shitty. Either way, a clear benefit to not running the AC. I don't expect that to transfer to other cars, and expect what you saw is more typical.
He said ethical!
Technically, she was blown out. :-) (Yes, that's a silly TNG reference.)
Had to look that one up. Been a long time since I watched season 1 TNG. :)
Due to my electrical engineering background, I'm perfectly comfortable describing things as the opposite of how they really are, and just flipping the sign. :)
So start a company that doesn't do that. Jeez, you make it sound like the world is static. Not everybody drinks budweiser.
Yeah, so I'll just run down to the store and buy some non-pasteurized beer...
Oh wait.
My fear is that in the course of legalizing it, in order to get to the next step which is taxing it, the government will have to keep control over who is allowed to grow and sell it. Much like with tobacco and alcohol today. Which is why there is, as far as I know, one cigarette brand that doesn't use tons of additives that make them even less healthy. And I can't buy a non-pasteurized beer unless it was brewed on the premises. And I can't buy my favorite beer from my home state because they aren't licensed to distribute over state lines. And so on.
If it's completely legalized, as in non-regulated, then this will be a complete non-issue. But I fear that won't be the case, and economics will favor big players, and sure not everyone drinks Bud but what most people will have access to and will buy will be tobacco-cut addictive crap.
It's just a fear. Still all for legalization. :)