It strikes me as reasonable to ask the government to step in and tell you that you can't have such things on your property because it affects me.
Why the government? Because my other option (if we remove government) is to come over to your house and shoot you. I don't think we want to live in THAT world.
Regulation is the wrong approach though. This is why we have COURTS. If its leaking an effecting your health / property, then your neighbor has not met his obligation to not damage the property of others. You should not ask for regulation, you should not go shoot him. You should sue, a court should arrive at an solution for your particular situation rather than the FEDS slapping a one size fits all crappy answer for the entire nation.
Why do you have windows open in the winter? That can't be very energy efficient. Fuck you for increasing your carbon foot print and contributing to global warming. Its to bad the local municipality is to lame to come by and nail your windows shut in September.
See it works both ways. Maybe you should just mind your own damn business.
It's one that works rather well at maintaining a modern society, but it's still not a freedom.
This is wrong private property is the corner stone from where all other freedoms are essentially derived. The idea that you can have something that is yours to with as you please a nobody should stop you is fundamental.
And these regulations are not helping with that. For the last 30 years or so GDP has gone up faster than standard of living for most, and reported happiness is almost unchanged!
People are having to work longer and harder to stay in place, and the marginal gains are having no payoff in happiness.
Government and excessive regulation is absorbing all growth, whether its trans-fats, high tech light bulbs, higher electrical rates because the administration decided to regulate an industry to death. Taken in isolation none of these things hurt much but they all add up.
The trouble with great schemes like that is people always get greedy. Had he not tried to power the entire house with it, but say maybe just moved the circuits for several rooms as load for the induction coil, so that he still used some power from the grid and paid his bill, i bet he could have got about half his power free and they'd have never caught on.
Yes and stacking the membership on standards bodies to make sure those improvements are not useful to the general public. Here will give you a great cryptographic cipher but make sure your key exchange process is hopeless borked. Screw the NSA we'd all be safer without them.
And no we don't need them for international spying we have the CIA for that and they have their own signals intelligence groups. The best thing for the nation would be if we just shuttered the whole agency tomorrow.
They are trying to dance in too many rodeos, and it's starting to show. Focus on Enterprise, Windows, and Office products.
I think that would be a death sentence. That revenue stream is not going to last. There are three prevailing trends right now, back to centralization ( dumb terminals basically ), BYOD, and web based office apps (where the jury is still very much out as it if it be possible to charge a premium long term).
The centralization where you have a handful of terminal servers, ruing in virtualization themselves does not sell many windows licenses. The lack of so many boxes around, eliminates a lot of the management needs, you don't need SCCM + WSUS to keep 12 terminal servers patched with your latest app versions deployed, for example.
The "attractive" ( really quite terrifying thing ) about BYOD from a business perspective is you don't shoulder the burden management of the devices you let your employees do that. So no enterprisey market there other than some security tools like MDM ( Which we all know are worthless crap sold by shysters.) On the Droid side you can't really tell if the devices are rooted or not, so you can't really promise anything security wise, on the Apple side, well Apple policy more or less prevents you managing the devices in any meaningful way ( what apps are on them, can the user upgrade IOS, etc), other then enabling "require password" so your CIO feels good about them usless. MDM over consumer devices is already a commodity space, and nobody cares about Microsoft logo there, so little money to be made.
The web based office and productivity tools are getting better, they are good enough for many workers now. Honestly what is probably keeping many smaller players from just moving to Google Docs are intellectual property issues and concerns. Microsoft is going after them with Office Live, because well they see the writing on the wall, people are going to do their basic office composition work in some web app or with some OSS package. "I gotta have Word and Excel" is not nearly so strong a force as it once was, I suspect "I gotta have Outlook because I run Exchange" is as big a driver.
No I don't think "the living room" is the next great frontier some at MS do but they are correct they need to find some new markets because Office 2020 and Windows 10 are not going to sustain them. There was talk about a decade ago about Microsoft just selling off its software lines and becoming an investment bank or big hedge fund, probably what they should have done honestly.
We are no where near the point where this does any real harm. At worst its revealed some services and tools are not so safe to some minor criminal enterprises who probably already could have guessed.
Beyond that NOTHING Snowden has revealed has done anything but confirm things people had been hearing murmured rumors about and speculating on for some time. I know people who worked at the telco and were well aware of various people around who were feds, they could guess what they were up to based on which buildings/floors they visited etc, they just did not know the details.
I find it almost impossible to think anyone with an espionage capability even a couple rungs down from ours did not know most of this or did not already assume it was so and take counter measures. If Snoden could get this stuff them certainly someone with similar back ground ( US citizen by blood, good looking home grown corn fed guy/gal ) and a willingness to accept a sack of Russian or Chinese money could too and probably has.
The real surprise is the Germans claim to have not know Merkels phone was monitored, but even that now looks like a false flag, in that they were basically helping us do it. Its more likely it showed up in the Snowden documents and Merkel thought hey this would be a good way to make Obama, who at least was politically popular here and keeps disputing my fiscal policy, look bad.
One provision of the bill would earmark a classified sum of money
Nothing like unaccountable monies in unknown quantity; that'll show'em. The NSA will never make such mistakes again after getting such harsh treatment.
You see, we should be civilized enough to have Germany cooperate. (BTW if all were exporters who would consume? That point is lost on the Germans.)
You seem to be caught in the zero sum game mental trap. The Germans are correct, the rest of Europe needs to catch up. While the net flow of wealth needs to eventually balance you can all be exporters in terms of product. Eventually the Germans will want to spend that money on something, that is something some other economy can sell them, something can't perhaps produce themselves.
Without the euro, you are right the DM would have shot up, but if the rest of the euro zone became as productive as the German economy, then prices of everything would fall, dragging the DM back down with them. Consumption would increase as it always does when prices fall, when everyone becomes more productive living standards increase! That is the way you should want to solve the problem.
This is truth in both arguments. We would probably use much less energy and maintain the activities we currently enjoy. Higher energy prices might lead you to replace that 15 year old 85% efficient furnace with a modern 98% efficient one. Naturally there is opportunity cost in making that investment. You have to give up something else you could have put that capital toward.
I think the difference between me and the grandparent is I am opposed to artificial steps to raise the cost of any type of energy because I don't think its my place or governments to try and tell you how or manipulate how you allocate your wealth.
Energy is already expensive enough, nobody is "doing it badly on purpose any more" 70 years ago people hardly bothered to insulate buildings. Heating fuel was cheap and wages were rising. Nobody cared, how much heat bled through the walls; nobody builds houses that way any more in North America; everyone cares about energy efficiency. They question for society is do you actively hurt people who are still living in old houses by interfering in the energy economy to force certain behavior form them? I think that kind of environmentalism is immoral and despicable, people who support it whether they admit it or not are anit-freedom.
And right here is why education should NOT be done at the federal level or multi-state level. Another poster suggested the test should have used a Piggy banks. You and I would recognize that, because of cultural knowledge. Some immigrant child might very well not; and who could blame them there is nothing rational about inserting coins into pigglet, if you don't recognize it as a bank, and there is really nothing rational about making pig shaped banks for that matter.
Individual teachers should be evaluating their students based on their own understanding of how best to communicate with their particular students.
This question sucks because nobody should reasonable be expecting change to be stored in a tea/coffee cup. For most students the best way to ask this question ( assuming you want to evaluate their understanding of subtraction and the relationship of the minuend, subtrahend and difference, not their ability to follow directions or interpret pictograms ) is probably just ask it like:
"If you have 6 pennies and I take away 5 how many do you have left?"
That is one of the reasons I chose to use percentage of income paid in taxes rather than income. We are told constantly how the wealthy only pay 14% in taxes and the rest of us pay much more. This would discourage that sort of maneuvering to some degree or give the middle class more influence.
I want to use percent paid in taxes on your TOTAL income not your taxable income. So Mitt Romney might get 14 votes but someone single guy earns a paltry 80K or something might very well end up with 20.
forget guns, we should ban all bricks; someone might break a window or bash in a skull.
The issue here is really not one of tools ( generally tools should never be banned be they guns or whatever )
The question here is of use, which society does have an interest in regulating. Bricks fine to use them for construction or weights, but not okay for breaking the neighbors window glass. The car ( a tool ) should or should not be used while using specific other tools. Some decision needs to be arrived at, can Google Glass be used safely while operating the car, if the answer is yes than maybe rules about Car + Google Glass + GPS = Fine, Car + Google Glass + Facebook = Illegal.
That gets to tricking questions about enforcement though, generally laws you can't or don't enforce are not good. They tend to be broken, which tends to reward being a scoff law, which lowers respect for the law. On the other hand being able to effectively enforce Car + Google Glass + GPS = Fine, Car + Google Glass + Facebook = Illegal, is probably more invasive than many of us would want to put up with. Societies best choice might be just Car + Google Glass = illegal.
It would be cool if some sorto glass or HUD like system could actually monitor your eyes, guess at the focal depth and emit the image accordingly, so the the text/icons would appear to your right sized and in focus where your vision is focused.
Its all anecdotal but almost everyone I know who has been driving long enough has experienced a stuck ( or at least sticky ) mechanical throttle at some point. I would bet its a much greater number than have encountered Toyota's electronic throttle issue.
There are lots of things as you point out you could do to reign a conventional auto design in, pop the clutch, shit to neutral, turn off the ignition etc. The same is largely true of the Toyota incidents. Had they driver been educated enough to try shifting neutral, shutting off the ignition, or even just standing on the breaks long enough its very very likely they still could have stopped the vehicle safely.
There all kinds of other odd mechanical failures that can happen to classic cars too. You talk about feeling certain you can get the gears to disengage, I don't feel that way. Why? Well I have the experience of my shift linkage coming apart while on the road. I guess one advantage of a pure mechanical design is that you can try convincing your dad to come out to where you are will his car, some old blankets and cord to wrap around the bumper, then you crawl under the car and set the transmission in 4th. He noses up to you and gives you a nice push to 30mph or so where you can let the clutch out, repeat at ever stop and traffic signal. Saves a tow, -try that with fancy electronically controlled automatic;-)
Equal representation was NEVER part of the original plan, and its not a feature or even desirable.
We had it mostly right at the time when the vote was restricted to land owners. We hear all the news these days about how people are disenfranchised, but many of them have done nothing to earn their franchise in the first place.
I don't think land ownership is a good model for today but we can still look back at the original ideas that build this nation and use a corollary. Rather than "no taxation without representation", I saw we flip it around and go "no representation without taxation".
Rather than one-man-one vote in federal elections I think it out to be you get X votes, which you must all use on the same candidate in a given race. X is the percentage of your income you pay in federal taxes rounded UP (ceiling) to the nearest whole number. X may also be constrained to be at least 0, that is you cannot get negative votes, if you say get more from the EIT, than you owe in other taxes.
This will give the people with the most skin in the game the most say, it will also discourage them trying to avoid taxation or form voting themselves favorable tax law because it would serve to reduce their own ability to influence elections.
I tend to think Obama knows knew more about all thoes things than he lets on, I just think he isn't big on personal responsibility. Truman said, "the buck stops here" Obama says "I inherited this mess" that right there folks is the difference between a real leader and the great pretender we have in office now.
That says I thinks it's highly possible the government has become such a large unaccountable mess that its been more or less autopilot for the last decade or so and the guys who occupied the whitehouse largely don't even know what most of buttons do, so to speak.
I call bs. I doesn't take much time sit through a round of test cases on a website. You expect any us to think that the CEO and board of directors at f500s don't sit down for a working demonstration before major go lives? I happen to know from first hand experience they do! Yea the POTUS probably has much more on his plate than those guys but this thing is his biggest political objective, it's at the very center of his parties agenda, central to their election strategy, everything.
He knew.
But he could not admit he new because it would have screwed up the shutdown narrative, it would have made the GOPs demand for an implementation delay appear prudent and shown him and Reid to be the unreasonable ones. Now we both know long term the GoP wants to delay until the ACA dies of neglect but that's another matter as far as the public is concerned, For Obama it's his legacy and if he has to harm millions of Americans to protect it, he damn well will.
because small animals and children not under robotic controll never run into streets; nor do large animals moose, deer, etc for that matter.
I am sure robotic cars can go somewhat faster and still offer better saftey than human drivers because of better reaction times, but sometimes in the real world you will still need to stop that 2 tons of steel pretty quick and there are limits to have fast that can be effected, namely you only have some much force of friction between the wheels and the road.
Is it about vengeance for the wronged? If so, then this is a broken judicial system. The law should never have this in mind.
I don't have a strong opinion for or against capital punishment. I suppose I would venture toward the against camp in general because I don't think the State should be entrusted with peoples lives.
That said I am not sure that the judicial system should be unconcerned with vengeance. For people that have suffered a great deal of harm at the hands of some criminal and in cases if larger tragedies where communities or even the entire nation is affected there can be a psychological value and sense of closure to know that perpetrator "got what was coming to them" be that a needle in the arm or the certainty of spending the rest of their life in a miserable cage.
Maybe its not the most evolved way of thinking but for many people having a sense vengeance somewhat satisfied is away to get back a sense of order to the world someone else criminal actions have taken from them; and I don't think that is an inappropriate objective for justice.
I think the problem with methods like nitrogen asphyxiation is that humans are not dump animals, they have imaginations. If I lock you in the gas chamber while you may not feel anything happening physically that in itself is likely to cause you to self-induce quite a lot of psychological terror.
I think the terror of not knowing what is happening would be pretty great.
Personal property rights are the very corner stone of freedom. We are propagandized all the time about how our soldiers die to keep us free, and with slogans like "give me liberty or give me death". So yes as a society we certainly have determined that $PROPERTY > life can be and often is true, its just a question of who's life and how much property.
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It strikes me as reasonable to ask the government to step in and tell you that you can't have such things on your property because it affects me.
Why the government? Because my other option (if we remove government) is to come over to your house and shoot you. I don't think we want to live in THAT world.
Regulation is the wrong approach though. This is why we have COURTS. If its leaking an effecting your health / property, then your neighbor has not met his obligation to not damage the property of others. You should not ask for regulation, you should not go shoot him. You should sue, a court should arrive at an solution for your particular situation rather than the FEDS slapping a one size fits all crappy answer for the entire nation.
Why do you have windows open in the winter? That can't be very energy efficient. Fuck you for increasing your carbon foot print and contributing to global warming. Its to bad the local municipality is to lame to come by and nail your windows shut in September.
See it works both ways. Maybe you should just mind your own damn business.
It's one that works rather well at maintaining a modern society, but it's still not a freedom.
This is wrong private property is the corner stone from where all other freedoms are essentially derived. The idea that you can have something that is yours to with as you please a nobody should stop you is fundamental.
Yes its about:
it's more often about about quality of life.
And these regulations are not helping with that. For the last 30 years or so GDP has gone up faster than standard of living for most, and reported happiness is almost unchanged!
People are having to work longer and harder to stay in place, and the marginal gains are having no payoff in happiness.
Government and excessive regulation is absorbing all growth, whether its trans-fats, high tech light bulbs, higher electrical rates because the administration decided to regulate an industry to death. Taken in isolation none of these things hurt much but they all add up.
The trouble with great schemes like that is people always get greedy. Had he not tried to power the entire house with it, but say maybe just moved the circuits for several rooms as load for the induction coil, so that he still used some power from the grid and paid his bill, i bet he could have got about half his power free and they'd have never caught on.
Yes and stacking the membership on standards bodies to make sure those improvements are not useful to the general public. Here will give you a great cryptographic cipher but make sure your key exchange process is hopeless borked. Screw the NSA we'd all be safer without them.
And no we don't need them for international spying we have the CIA for that and they have their own signals intelligence groups. The best thing for the nation would be if we just shuttered the whole agency tomorrow.
They are trying to dance in too many rodeos, and it's starting to show. Focus on Enterprise, Windows, and Office products.
I think that would be a death sentence. That revenue stream is not going to last. There are three prevailing trends right now, back to centralization ( dumb terminals basically ), BYOD, and web based office apps (where the jury is still very much out as it if it be possible to charge a premium long term).
The centralization where you have a handful of terminal servers, ruing in virtualization themselves does not sell many windows licenses. The lack of so many boxes around, eliminates a lot of the management needs, you don't need SCCM + WSUS to keep 12 terminal servers patched with your latest app versions deployed, for example.
The "attractive" ( really quite terrifying thing ) about BYOD from a business perspective is you don't shoulder the burden management of the devices you let your employees do that. So no enterprisey market there other than some security tools like MDM ( Which we all know are worthless crap sold by shysters.) On the Droid side you can't really tell if the devices are rooted or not, so you can't really promise anything security wise, on the Apple side, well Apple policy more or less prevents you managing the devices in any meaningful way ( what apps are on them, can the user upgrade IOS, etc), other then enabling "require password" so your CIO feels good about them usless. MDM over consumer devices is already a commodity space, and nobody cares about Microsoft logo there, so little money to be made.
The web based office and productivity tools are getting better, they are good enough for many workers now. Honestly what is probably keeping many smaller players from just moving to Google Docs are intellectual property issues and concerns. Microsoft is going after them with Office Live, because well they see the writing on the wall, people are going to do their basic office composition work in some web app or with some OSS package. "I gotta have Word and Excel" is not nearly so strong a force as it once was, I suspect "I gotta have Outlook because I run Exchange" is as big a driver.
No I don't think "the living room" is the next great frontier some at MS do but they are correct they need to find some new markets because Office 2020 and Windows 10 are not going to sustain them. There was talk about a decade ago about Microsoft just selling off its software lines and becoming an investment bank or big hedge fund, probably what they should have done honestly.
We are no where near the point where this does any real harm. At worst its revealed some services and tools are not so safe to some minor criminal enterprises who probably already could have guessed.
Beyond that NOTHING Snowden has revealed has done anything but confirm things people had been hearing murmured rumors about and speculating on for some time. I know people who worked at the telco and were well aware of various people around who were feds, they could guess what they were up to based on which buildings/floors they visited etc, they just did not know the details.
I find it almost impossible to think anyone with an espionage capability even a couple rungs down from ours did not know most of this or did not already assume it was so and take counter measures. If Snoden could get this stuff them certainly someone with similar back ground ( US citizen by blood, good looking home grown corn fed guy/gal ) and a willingness to accept a sack of Russian or Chinese money could too and probably has.
The real surprise is the Germans claim to have not know Merkels phone was monitored, but even that now looks like a false flag, in that they were basically helping us do it. Its more likely it showed up in the Snowden documents and Merkel thought hey this would be a good way to make Obama, who at least was politically popular here and keeps disputing my fiscal policy, look bad.
One provision of the bill would earmark a classified sum of money
Nothing like unaccountable monies in unknown quantity; that'll show'em. The NSA will never make such mistakes again after getting such harsh treatment.
You see, we should be civilized enough to have Germany cooperate. (BTW if all were exporters who would consume? That point is lost on the Germans.)
You seem to be caught in the zero sum game mental trap. The Germans are correct, the rest of Europe needs to catch up. While the net flow of wealth needs to eventually balance you can all be exporters in terms of product. Eventually the Germans will want to spend that money on something, that is something some other economy can sell them, something can't perhaps produce themselves.
Without the euro, you are right the DM would have shot up, but if the rest of the euro zone became as productive as the German economy, then prices of everything would fall, dragging the DM back down with them. Consumption would increase as it always does when prices fall, when everyone becomes more productive living standards increase! That is the way you should want to solve the problem.
This is truth in both arguments. We would probably use much less energy and maintain the activities we currently enjoy. Higher energy prices might lead you to replace that 15 year old 85% efficient furnace with a modern 98% efficient one. Naturally there is opportunity cost in making that investment. You have to give up something else you could have put that capital toward.
I think the difference between me and the grandparent is I am opposed to artificial steps to raise the cost of any type of energy because I don't think its my place or governments to try and tell you how or manipulate how you allocate your wealth.
Energy is already expensive enough, nobody is "doing it badly on purpose any more" 70 years ago people hardly bothered to insulate buildings. Heating fuel was cheap and wages were rising. Nobody cared, how much heat bled through the walls; nobody builds houses that way any more in North America; everyone cares about energy efficiency. They question for society is do you actively hurt people who are still living in old houses by interfering in the energy economy to force certain behavior form them? I think that kind of environmentalism is immoral and despicable, people who support it whether they admit it or not are anit-freedom.
Right there clearly should have been 5 cans on the left and a six pack on the right.
And right here is why education should NOT be done at the federal level or multi-state level. Another poster suggested the test should have used a Piggy banks. You and I would recognize that, because of cultural knowledge. Some immigrant child might very well not; and who could blame them there is nothing rational about inserting coins into pigglet, if you don't recognize it as a bank, and there is really nothing rational about making pig shaped banks for that matter.
Individual teachers should be evaluating their students based on their own understanding of how best to communicate with their particular students.
This question sucks because nobody should reasonable be expecting change to be stored in a tea/coffee cup. For most students the best way to ask this question ( assuming you want to evaluate their understanding of subtraction and the relationship of the minuend, subtrahend and difference, not their ability to follow directions or interpret pictograms ) is probably just ask it like:
"If you have 6 pennies and I take away 5 how many do you have left?"
Does not have to project out into space. It could project into your eye.
That is one of the reasons I chose to use percentage of income paid in taxes rather than income. We are told constantly how the wealthy only pay 14% in taxes and the rest of us pay much more. This would discourage that sort of maneuvering to some degree or give the middle class more influence.
I want to use percent paid in taxes on your TOTAL income not your taxable income. So Mitt Romney might get 14 votes but someone single guy earns a paltry 80K or something might very well end up with 20.
forget guns, we should ban all bricks; someone might break a window or bash in a skull.
The issue here is really not one of tools ( generally tools should never be banned be they guns or whatever )
The question here is of use, which society does have an interest in regulating. Bricks fine to use them for construction or weights, but not okay for breaking the neighbors window glass. The car ( a tool ) should or should not be used while using specific other tools. Some decision needs to be arrived at, can Google Glass be used safely while operating the car, if the answer is yes than maybe rules about Car + Google Glass + GPS = Fine, Car + Google Glass + Facebook = Illegal.
That gets to tricking questions about enforcement though, generally laws you can't or don't enforce are not good. They tend to be broken, which tends to reward being a scoff law, which lowers respect for the law. On the other hand being able to effectively enforce Car + Google Glass + GPS = Fine, Car + Google Glass + Facebook = Illegal, is probably more invasive than many of us would want to put up with. Societies best choice might be just Car + Google Glass = illegal.
It would be cool if some sorto glass or HUD like system could actually monitor your eyes, guess at the focal depth and emit the image accordingly, so the the text /icons would appear to your right sized and in focus where your vision is focused.
Its all anecdotal but almost everyone I know who has been driving long enough has experienced a stuck ( or at least sticky ) mechanical throttle at some point. I would bet its a much greater number than have encountered Toyota's electronic throttle issue.
There are lots of things as you point out you could do to reign a conventional auto design in, pop the clutch, shit to neutral, turn off the ignition etc. The same is largely true of the Toyota incidents. Had they driver been educated enough to try shifting neutral, shutting off the ignition, or even just standing on the breaks long enough its very very likely they still could have stopped the vehicle safely.
There all kinds of other odd mechanical failures that can happen to classic cars too. You talk about feeling certain you can get the gears to disengage, I don't feel that way. Why? Well I have the experience of my shift linkage coming apart while on the road. I guess one advantage of a pure mechanical design is that you can try convincing your dad to come out to where you are will his car, some old blankets and cord to wrap around the bumper, then you crawl under the car and set the transmission in 4th. He noses up to you and gives you a nice push to 30mph or so where you can let the clutch out, repeat at ever stop and traffic signal. Saves a tow, -try that with fancy electronically controlled automatic ;-)
Equal representation was NEVER part of the original plan, and its not a feature or even desirable.
We had it mostly right at the time when the vote was restricted to land owners. We hear all the news these days about how people are disenfranchised, but many of them have done nothing to earn their franchise in the first place.
I don't think land ownership is a good model for today but we can still look back at the original ideas that build this nation and use a corollary. Rather than "no taxation without representation", I saw we flip it around and go "no representation without taxation".
Rather than one-man-one vote in federal elections I think it out to be you get X votes, which you must all use on the same candidate in a given race. X is the percentage of your income you pay in federal taxes rounded UP (ceiling) to the nearest whole number. X may also be constrained to be at least 0, that is you cannot get negative votes, if you say get more from the EIT, than you owe in other taxes.
This will give the people with the most skin in the game the most say, it will also discourage them trying to avoid taxation or form voting themselves favorable tax law because it would serve to reduce their own ability to influence elections.
I tend to think Obama knows knew more about all thoes things than he lets on, I just think he isn't big on personal responsibility. Truman said, "the buck stops here" Obama says "I inherited this mess" that right there folks is the difference between a real leader and the great pretender we have in office now.
That says I thinks it's highly possible the government has become such a large unaccountable mess that its been more or less autopilot for the last decade or so and the guys who occupied the whitehouse largely don't even know what most of buttons do, so to speak.
I call bs. I doesn't take much time sit through a round of test cases on a website. You expect any us to think that the CEO and board of directors at f500s don't sit down for a working demonstration before major go lives? I happen to know from first hand experience they do! Yea the POTUS probably has much more on his plate than those guys but this thing is his biggest political objective, it's at the very center of his parties agenda, central to their election strategy, everything.
He knew.
But he could not admit he new because it would have screwed up the shutdown narrative, it would have made the GOPs demand for an implementation delay appear prudent and shown him and Reid to be the unreasonable ones. Now we both know long term the GoP wants to delay until the ACA dies of neglect but that's another matter as far as the public is concerned, For Obama it's his legacy and if he has to harm millions of Americans to protect it, he damn well will.
because small animals and children not under robotic controll never run into streets; nor do large animals moose, deer, etc for that matter.
I am sure robotic cars can go somewhat faster and still offer better saftey than human drivers because of better reaction times, but sometimes in the real world you will still need to stop that 2 tons of steel pretty quick and there are limits to have fast that can be effected, namely you only have some much force of friction between the wheels and the road.
Is it about vengeance for the wronged? If so, then this is a broken judicial system. The law should never have this in mind.
I don't have a strong opinion for or against capital punishment. I suppose I would venture toward the against camp in general because I don't think the State should be entrusted with peoples lives.
That said I am not sure that the judicial system should be unconcerned with vengeance. For people that have suffered a great deal of harm at the hands of some criminal and in cases if larger tragedies where communities or even the entire nation is affected there can be a psychological value and sense of closure to know that perpetrator "got what was coming to them" be that a needle in the arm or the certainty of spending the rest of their life in a miserable cage.
Maybe its not the most evolved way of thinking but for many people having a sense vengeance somewhat satisfied is away to get back a sense of order to the world someone else criminal actions have taken from them; and I don't think that is an inappropriate objective for justice.
I think the problem with methods like nitrogen asphyxiation is that humans are not dump animals, they have imaginations. If I lock you in the gas chamber while you may not feel anything happening physically that in itself is likely to cause you to self-induce quite a lot of psychological terror.
I think the terror of not knowing what is happening would be pretty great.
Personal property rights are the very corner stone of freedom. We are propagandized all the time about how our soldiers die to keep us free, and with slogans like "give me liberty or give me death". So yes as a society we certainly have determined that $PROPERTY > life can be and often is true, its just a question of who's life and how much property.