Oh, I don't deny that the process is often abused; I just don't think it's desirable (or even possible) to eliminate it entirely because of that. Reform the practice and put reasonable restrictions on its use, sure, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are valid uses of plea bargains to go along with those easily-conceived abuses.
And what of the situation where the prosecutor is sure a person committed a crime, but isn't confident he has a strong enough case to prove it in court? If he offers a plea deal and the perpetrator confesses and pleads guilty, it may not lead to the maximum sentence, but at least it gets the criminal off the streets for a while.
You make very good points there. I agree that the law is for the immature and irresponsible, and on general philosophical terms, you're entirely correct there.
When it comes to putting those principles into practice, I think there's an approach that would be more effective than what we're doing now, given that this is an issue of an activity that requires a license: keep the prohibitions broad (e.g. "distracted" driving, rather than listing each possible distraction), and the consequences with respect to one's license to drive more severe. Get a ticket for distracted driving, that's 6 points on your license (of the 12 that would trigger a suspension). Cause an accident because you were distracted, your license is automatically suspended. Get caught driving without a license, and face even more severe consequences, etc. It'll never happen, because our society is structured such that every idiot is expected to be allowed to drive on the public roads, but the way things are structured now, it's more that we have a tax on politically incorrect driving habits (e.g. speeding) than actual disincentives to discourage dangerous ones (e.g. inattentiveness).
If you don't want predators seeing women and children at home as a result of electric illumination, close the curtains.
Now there, we're on the same page. And I agree that when used as an excuse to cause a 'panic' the issue is not truly one of morality at all. I just took your initial wording as a bit stronger in discounting morality as a valid concern when objectively evaluating technologies; sorry if I misread you.
Its moral because we can't come up with a reasoned argument not to do it, or at least to take it slowly. Making things a moral issue creates a taboo that we are not supposed to question. Or we might be on the slippery slope to having sex with animals or some such nonsense.
... When I hear 'moral', I start looking for a group seeking to control society to suit their own agendas.
Or, perhaps, molesting children isn't immoral because someone is looking to control society or being irrational, but because it's just inherently (and rationally) wrong! I'm not saying that raising a panic over innocuous technologies is good, but rationally thinking about whether a given development is actually a moral good or evil is beneficial. The assumption here that morality is a sham is flawed, I think...
are you saying cellphone use should be allowed while driving because younger drivers will be distracted anyway?
Not sure if he was saying that, but I would, out of agreement with this:
Obviously you can't eliminate all distractions.
I don't think that trying to come up with laws to cover every particular distraction is a good approach. We should through the education/licensing process encourage people to be more attentive drivers, and laws against distracted driving in general that can be applied whatever the distraction to reinforce this can be beneficial. But trying to single out some distractions (e.g. cell phone use) comes at the expense of others, implying that they're somehow safer. It's certainly more dangerous to be turned around yelling at your kids while driving down the interstate than it is to be texting while stopped at a red light, but being overly specific with our laws serves to reinforce the idea that the opposite is true, and creates the expectation that drivers can be irresponsible because they'll be told every thing they shouldn't do, rather than being required to behave as thoughtful, responsible adults.
Indirectly, as it affects their flagship product's reputation for security. If botnets spread unchecked, with most targeting Windows machines almost exclusively, that looks bad for Windows' reputation (even if it's due to moronic users who could manage to infect any given system). Declaring war on the botnets and actively taking them down both helps avoid negative reputation issues for Windows, and build Microsoft's reputation as a company that does the right thing for security, which is especially important now they're rolling out more cloud services, etc. (Yes, I know this is slashdot, and I'll probably be modded down for not taking this opportunity to bash Microsoft, but nonetheless, that is the strategic benefit to them.)
Probably add US Cellular (they have a mix of their own towers + roaming agreements with Verizon).
Everybody else is either a regional carrier that only provides service in a small area or is an MVNO that leases service from one of the services above.
Sure, but even regional carriers like Cellular South still cover larger areas than many European carriers do...
That's not necessarily an oversight on their part. I don't usually have a passcode enabled on my (non-i)phone, since it's almost always in one of three places: in my pocket, in my hand, or on my headboard. It's just a hassle to type in every single time I unlock the phone, and an unnecessary one as long as I maintain sole access to the device. The slight risk that someone could mug me and steal it is one I'll just live with.
On the other hand, the passcode I do use when I occasionally enable one (e.g. phone sitting around on the table where other people could pick it up) certainly doesn't fit the 1-2-x-x pattern in the story.
The particular control strategies I mentioned (variable cam timing to reduce effective compression ratio when using gasoline) aren't in production yet. I suppose I worded it a bit poorly if it implied that nothing in production is optimized for E85. But the vast majority of production FFVs (in the US market at least; Brazil and some others have notable exceptions) are still optimized for gasoline, rather than E85.
True, but Congress generally has enough respect for the opinion of the President that not all of those 73 would vote to override the veto. I could easily imagine 5-10 senators deciding that the political consequences of picking a fight with the President over this issue by voting to override his veto isn't worth it, given that they're going to expire at the end of the year anyway if they do nothing at all.
The damned requirement for it to be in the gasoline. IT ruins gas mileage and the gas stations are NOT selling it for 5%-10% cheaper because that is what your gas mileage loss is from running E10.
Ethanol has a lower heating value (energy content per unit mass) of 26.9 MJ/kg. Gasoline has a LHV of 44 MJ/kg. So on a mass basis, ethanol has 61% of the energy content of gasoline. Converting to a volume basis (since fuels are blended and sold by volume), the slightly higher density of ethanol (0.785 kg/m3 vs ~0.75 for gasoline) takes the ratio to 64%. Since E10 is 90% gasoline and 10% ethanol by volume, this works out to E10 having 94% of the energy content of pure gasoline. The mileage/range loss will be 6% compared to pure gasoline. Most people aren't going to notice that (it's on the order of about 1-2 mpg or 20 miles of range per tank), so there's no strong incentive to price it differently. E10 is usually cheaper, however, than E0 blends in most markets, owing to the EPA requirements for oxygenated fuels, etc. Since E10 is mandated in most major markets, even in the ones where it isn't E0 tends to be more expensive due to its scarcity if for no other reason.
With E85, on the other hand, the mileage/range loss works out to be around 40%, which people do notice. There are some properties of the fuel that we could take advantage of in modern engines, though, to try to reduce this. Since it has a higher octane rating (i.e. better knock resistance), we can run engines at a higher compression ratio and/or with more advanced spark timing, which is more efficient. In direct-injection engines, there's a significant charge cooling effect (ethanol's heat of vaporization is more than double that of gasoline), which aids efficiency too. With variable cam timing, it's possible to reduce the effective compression ratio when running on E0/E10, essentially treating it as inferior fuel rather than optimizing for it. Flex-fuel vehicles currently on the market don't have these control strategies in place yet (they're still optimized for gasoline), but there are active R&D programs to develop them, so in the near future, that disadvantage may be somewhat (though not entirely) mitigated.
Except that's not how those who have faith would define it. To quote Lewis:
I must talk in this chapter about what the Christians call Faith. Roughly speaking, the word Faith seems to be used by Christians in two senses or on two levels, and I will take them in turn. In the first sense it means simply Belief-accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people-at least it used to puzzle me-is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a virtue, I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue-what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid.
Well, I think I still take that view. But what I did not see then- and a good many people do not see still-was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so. For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anaesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I start thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start cutting me up before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anaesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.
When you think of it you will see lots of instances of this. A man knows, on perfectly good evidence, that a pretty girl of his acquaintance is a liar and cannot keep a secret and ought not to be trusted; but when he finds himself with her his mind loses its faith in that bit of knowledge and he starts thinking, "Perhaps she'll be different this time," and once more makes a fool of himself and tells her something he ought not to have told her. His senses and emotions have destroyed his faith in what he really knows to be true. Or take a boy learning to swim. His reason knows perfectly well that an unsupported human body will not necessarily sink in water: he has seen dozens of people float and swim. But the whole question is whether he will be able to go on believing this when the instructor takes away his hand and leaves him unsupported in the water-or whether he will suddenly cease to believe it and get in a fright and go down.
Now just the same thing happens about Christianity. I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. But supposing a man's reason once decides that the weight of the evidence is for it. I can tell that man what is going to happen to him in the next few weeks. There will come a moment when there is bad news, or he is in trouble, or is living among a lot of other people who do not believe it, and all at once his emotions will rise up and carry out a sort of blitz on his belief. Or else there will come a moment when he wants a woman, or wants to tell a lie, or feels very pleased with himself, or sees a chance of making a little money in some way that is not perfectly fair: some moment, in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true. And once again his wishes
OK, give me a concrete example of how that would play out on a math test. I'll acknowledge the difficulty in standardizing an exam for history or literature, but that's not what we're talking about here. Algebra is objective and has clearly correct or incorrect answers, and thus lends itself quite well to standardization of testing (as opposed to being best examined by evaluation of individual essays and the like). Reducing a history class to the level of memorizing dates and facts for a standardized test is a bad idea, I agree. But algebra? If your goal is to get students to perform well on a standardized algebra test, the easiest (only?) way to go about that is to teach them how to do algebra.
It's a common talking point to complain about "teaching to the exam" but if the exam is compiled appropriately to test the students' knowledge of the material, how exactly is that a bad thing, especially in STEM classes, where the knowledge being gained is objective? If the student can pass a reasonable exam over the material covered, that's evidence that the student has learned that material. That's the whole point of an examination!
*IF* there were true photographic memory, then the prizes at these world memory championships would be scooped up by people that have it. But they're not. They're won by ordinary people with pretty average memories who dedicate their spare time to mastering memory techniques.
Perhaps... but if you had a photographic memory, don't you think you'd have better things to do with your time than bore yourself with memory contests?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the last few weeks were also within the last few months. They could've also said, "this year." It's not inaccurate, only imprecise.
So when did the federal approval go through?
About a month ago: Microsoft gets antitrust approval to buy Skype
Oh, I don't deny that the process is often abused; I just don't think it's desirable (or even possible) to eliminate it entirely because of that. Reform the practice and put reasonable restrictions on its use, sure, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are valid uses of plea bargains to go along with those easily-conceived abuses.
And what of the situation where the prosecutor is sure a person committed a crime, but isn't confident he has a strong enough case to prove it in court? If he offers a plea deal and the perpetrator confesses and pleads guilty, it may not lead to the maximum sentence, but at least it gets the criminal off the streets for a while.
You make very good points there. I agree that the law is for the immature and irresponsible, and on general philosophical terms, you're entirely correct there.
When it comes to putting those principles into practice, I think there's an approach that would be more effective than what we're doing now, given that this is an issue of an activity that requires a license: keep the prohibitions broad (e.g. "distracted" driving, rather than listing each possible distraction), and the consequences with respect to one's license to drive more severe. Get a ticket for distracted driving, that's 6 points on your license (of the 12 that would trigger a suspension). Cause an accident because you were distracted, your license is automatically suspended. Get caught driving without a license, and face even more severe consequences, etc. It'll never happen, because our society is structured such that every idiot is expected to be allowed to drive on the public roads, but the way things are structured now, it's more that we have a tax on politically incorrect driving habits (e.g. speeding) than actual disincentives to discourage dangerous ones (e.g. inattentiveness).
If you don't want predators seeing women and children at home as a result of electric illumination, close the curtains.
Now there, we're on the same page. And I agree that when used as an excuse to cause a 'panic' the issue is not truly one of morality at all. I just took your initial wording as a bit stronger in discounting morality as a valid concern when objectively evaluating technologies; sorry if I misread you.
Its moral because we can't come up with a reasoned argument not to do it, or at least to take it slowly. Making things a moral issue creates a taboo that we are not supposed to question. Or we might be on the slippery slope to having sex with animals or some such nonsense.
... When I hear 'moral', I start looking for a group seeking to control society to suit their own agendas.
Or, perhaps, molesting children isn't immoral because someone is looking to control society or being irrational, but because it's just inherently (and rationally) wrong! I'm not saying that raising a panic over innocuous technologies is good, but rationally thinking about whether a given development is actually a moral good or evil is beneficial. The assumption here that morality is a sham is flawed, I think ...
are you saying cellphone use should be allowed while driving because younger drivers will be distracted anyway?
Not sure if he was saying that, but I would, out of agreement with this:
Obviously you can't eliminate all distractions.
I don't think that trying to come up with laws to cover every particular distraction is a good approach. We should through the education/licensing process encourage people to be more attentive drivers, and laws against distracted driving in general that can be applied whatever the distraction to reinforce this can be beneficial. But trying to single out some distractions (e.g. cell phone use) comes at the expense of others, implying that they're somehow safer. It's certainly more dangerous to be turned around yelling at your kids while driving down the interstate than it is to be texting while stopped at a red light, but being overly specific with our laws serves to reinforce the idea that the opposite is true, and creates the expectation that drivers can be irresponsible because they'll be told every thing they shouldn't do, rather than being required to behave as thoughtful, responsible adults.
How are they making money from this?
Indirectly, as it affects their flagship product's reputation for security. If botnets spread unchecked, with most targeting Windows machines almost exclusively, that looks bad for Windows' reputation (even if it's due to moronic users who could manage to infect any given system). Declaring war on the botnets and actively taking them down both helps avoid negative reputation issues for Windows, and build Microsoft's reputation as a company that does the right thing for security, which is especially important now they're rolling out more cloud services, etc. (Yes, I know this is slashdot, and I'll probably be modded down for not taking this opportunity to bash Microsoft, but nonetheless, that is the strategic benefit to them.)
(Unless you're unfortunate enough to not live in an area where Sprint has good coverage, to which I must say, that sucks.)
Sprint actually has coverage? News to me ...
Probably add US Cellular (they have a mix of their own towers + roaming agreements with Verizon).
Everybody else is either a regional carrier that only provides service in a small area or is an MVNO that leases service from one of the services above.
Sure, but even regional carriers like Cellular South still cover larger areas than many European carriers do ...
That's not necessarily an oversight on their part. I don't usually have a passcode enabled on my (non-i)phone, since it's almost always in one of three places: in my pocket, in my hand, or on my headboard. It's just a hassle to type in every single time I unlock the phone, and an unnecessary one as long as I maintain sole access to the device. The slight risk that someone could mug me and steal it is one I'll just live with.
On the other hand, the passcode I do use when I occasionally enable one (e.g. phone sitting around on the table where other people could pick it up) certainly doesn't fit the 1-2-x-x pattern in the story.
"Metabolism keeping it warm enough" is pretty much the definition of warm-blooded, right? ...
The particular control strategies I mentioned (variable cam timing to reduce effective compression ratio when using gasoline) aren't in production yet. I suppose I worded it a bit poorly if it implied that nothing in production is optimized for E85. But the vast majority of production FFVs (in the US market at least; Brazil and some others have notable exceptions) are still optimized for gasoline, rather than E85.
True, but Congress generally has enough respect for the opinion of the President that not all of those 73 would vote to override the veto. I could easily imagine 5-10 senators deciding that the political consequences of picking a fight with the President over this issue by voting to override his veto isn't worth it, given that they're going to expire at the end of the year anyway if they do nothing at all.
The damned requirement for it to be in the gasoline. IT ruins gas mileage and the gas stations are NOT selling it for 5%-10% cheaper because that is what your gas mileage loss is from running E10.
Ethanol has a lower heating value (energy content per unit mass) of 26.9 MJ/kg. Gasoline has a LHV of 44 MJ/kg. So on a mass basis, ethanol has 61% of the energy content of gasoline. Converting to a volume basis (since fuels are blended and sold by volume), the slightly higher density of ethanol (0.785 kg/m3 vs ~0.75 for gasoline) takes the ratio to 64%. Since E10 is 90% gasoline and 10% ethanol by volume, this works out to E10 having 94% of the energy content of pure gasoline. The mileage/range loss will be 6% compared to pure gasoline. Most people aren't going to notice that (it's on the order of about 1-2 mpg or 20 miles of range per tank), so there's no strong incentive to price it differently. E10 is usually cheaper, however, than E0 blends in most markets, owing to the EPA requirements for oxygenated fuels, etc. Since E10 is mandated in most major markets, even in the ones where it isn't E0 tends to be more expensive due to its scarcity if for no other reason.
With E85, on the other hand, the mileage/range loss works out to be around 40%, which people do notice. There are some properties of the fuel that we could take advantage of in modern engines, though, to try to reduce this. Since it has a higher octane rating (i.e. better knock resistance), we can run engines at a higher compression ratio and/or with more advanced spark timing, which is more efficient. In direct-injection engines, there's a significant charge cooling effect (ethanol's heat of vaporization is more than double that of gasoline), which aids efficiency too. With variable cam timing, it's possible to reduce the effective compression ratio when running on E0/E10, essentially treating it as inferior fuel rather than optimizing for it. Flex-fuel vehicles currently on the market don't have these control strategies in place yet (they're still optimized for gasoline), but there are active R&D programs to develop them, so in the near future, that disadvantage may be somewhat (though not entirely) mitigated.
Something along those lines is discussed in the linked Economist article.
Except that's not how those who have faith would define it. To quote Lewis:
I must talk in this chapter about what the Christians call Faith. Roughly speaking, the word Faith seems to be used by Christians in two senses or on two levels, and I will take them in turn. In the first sense it means simply Belief-accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people-at least it used to puzzle me-is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a virtue, I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue-what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid.
Well, I think I still take that view. But what I did not see then- and a good many people do not see still-was this. I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a thing as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up. In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason. But that is not so. For example, my reason is perfectly convinced by good evidence that anaesthetics do not smother me and that properly trained surgeons do not start operating until I am unconscious. But that does not alter the fact that when they have me down on the table and clap their horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic begins inside me. I start thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start cutting me up before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anaesthetics. It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.
When you think of it you will see lots of instances of this. A man knows, on perfectly good evidence, that a pretty girl of his acquaintance is a liar and cannot keep a secret and ought not to be trusted; but when he finds himself with her his mind loses its faith in that bit of knowledge and he starts thinking, "Perhaps she'll be different this time," and once more makes a fool of himself and tells her something he ought not to have told her. His senses and emotions have destroyed his faith in what he really knows to be true. Or take a boy learning to swim. His reason knows perfectly well that an unsupported human body will not necessarily sink in water: he has seen dozens of people float and swim. But the whole question is whether he will be able to go on believing this when the instructor takes away his hand and leaves him unsupported in the water-or whether he will suddenly cease to believe it and get in a fright and go down.
Now just the same thing happens about Christianity. I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in. But supposing a man's reason once decides that the weight of the evidence is for it. I can tell that man what is going to happen to him in the next few weeks. There will come a moment when there is bad news, or he is in trouble, or is living among a lot of other people who do not believe it, and all at once his emotions will rise up and carry out a sort of blitz on his belief. Or else there will come a moment when he wants a woman, or wants to tell a lie, or feels very pleased with himself, or sees a chance of making a little money in some way that is not perfectly fair: some moment, in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true. And once again his wishes
Only the ones who, like such as, don't have maps.
OK, give me a concrete example of how that would play out on a math test. I'll acknowledge the difficulty in standardizing an exam for history or literature, but that's not what we're talking about here. Algebra is objective and has clearly correct or incorrect answers, and thus lends itself quite well to standardization of testing (as opposed to being best examined by evaluation of individual essays and the like). Reducing a history class to the level of memorizing dates and facts for a standardized test is a bad idea, I agree. But algebra? If your goal is to get students to perform well on a standardized algebra test, the easiest (only?) way to go about that is to teach them how to do algebra.
It's a common talking point to complain about "teaching to the exam" but if the exam is compiled appropriately to test the students' knowledge of the material, how exactly is that a bad thing, especially in STEM classes, where the knowledge being gained is objective? If the student can pass a reasonable exam over the material covered, that's evidence that the student has learned that material. That's the whole point of an examination!
Of course not: this is Slashdot and Microsoft was mentioned.
Teeth? Subtract again.
I happen to rather like people with teeth, myself.
There should be a name for this.
There is:
Hasty Generalization
*IF* there were true photographic memory, then the prizes at these world memory championships would be scooped up by people that have it. But they're not. They're won by ordinary people with pretty average memories who dedicate their spare time to mastering memory techniques.
Perhaps ... but if you had a photographic memory, don't you think you'd have better things to do with your time than bore yourself with memory contests?