If the car knows there is a cliff on the right (which it should, otherwise it shouldn't be driving at all) then it will have to quickly brake and possibly hit the car in front of it. It can handle this better than a human driver in a few ways:
1. It can gauge the right balance of braking force to minimize impact and inertia transferred to the passengers. 2. It can pre-emptively deploy safety measures a fraction of a second sooner to protect the passengers.
There are going to be situations where an accident is simply unavoidable. A self-driving car can make the determination on how best to minimize trauma to the passengers a lot faster than a human driver could. Cars aren't magic--they're physics, and rather simple physics, as far as that goes.
Besides that, I find it hard to believe anyone developing these systems wouldn't try everything they know to make it screw up--and then fix its responses to any situation it didn't handle properly.
I would describe version control as providing the following benefits:
* Accountable auditing of all code changes. Managers like this, because it helps with legal compliance. * More flexible release scheduling. Got a high-risk project? No problem, keep it in a separate branch so it doesn't hold up your current release cycle. * When combined with a continuous integration system and unit testing, you can track down new regressions very quickly. This cuts down QA time. * You can easily track and replicate customer versions to reproduce reported bugs.
Managers want to know how new tools will save time and money and get code out the door faster. Benefits to developers are nice, but not enough to sell the change.
Anyway, no need to pay for any of this stuff. Use git, Subversion, Mercurial, Bazaar, whatever. I've worked with just about every system out there. They can all do the job, they just bring different features and possible workflows to the table.
Must be local building codes, which are set by the county, state, and/or municipality. Certainly not something s/he could blame the federal government for.
How can the government doing what your religion tells you to do "override" or "conflict" with your religious values?
"My religion says I should do this because it's right. Government is trying to make me do it! That's wrong!"
Of course, I know the real reason certain sects of American Protestants think this way. To them, charity isn't about helping anyone--it's about enriching your own soul, paving your own way to heaven. You want God to see you depriving yourself to the benefit of someone else, deliberately and intentionally. If the government does it by taking taxes from your paycheck, then you don't get brownie points with the Almighty, and that makes it wrong. These are the same people who believe this is a world of ruin that's doomed to burn when Christ returns, so the eventual fate of this world is completely irrelevant to them.
It's a horrifying worldview to anyone who doesn't share it, because it claims quite unambiguously that this life doesn't matter, except insofar as it helps you get to heaven. Anyone not working on getting to heaven is irrelevant and deserves whatever fate they get. It's an attitude completely against what communities and civilized states stand for.
European Catholics, I have noticed, tend not to have this problem. They seem quite comfortable with an expansive safety net that helps those who need it.
Tell them you're very angry and you don't want to take it out on someone who is low on the totem pole, and that you'd rather be escalated to a manager/supervisor. Insist on it. That way, you make it sound like you are doing them a favor (by not yelling at them) and you aren't insulting their English.
What's wrong with someone who holds a political science degree running a company?
This particular person has a dumb idea (not really understanding the skills and mindset required to write effective, competent, maintainable code), but there is a growing trend in management to get away from having MBAs run everything. Instead, you get people with degrees in social sciences like history, political science, psychology, etc. Ultimately, running a business means understanding managing human behavior, and people with degrees in those areas tend to have a better grasp on that than some guy with an MBA who knows a lot of buzzwords about "maximizing shareholder value" and very little about how to understand and motivate people.
Count me in with the others recommending git. I'm using it in a very diverse environment, where different teams have different platforms, workflows, and deployment strategies. I convinced them all to use git. They are extremely happy with it, and they love the flexibility it offers them over their old (or nonexistent) systems.
No. The law makes exceptions for imminent threats of harm to others. Someone engaged in criminal behavior who is threatening the lives and safety of others may be killed in the immediate defense of those other people.
I'm sorry, who else has seriously argued that getting rid of the death penalty denies people liberty? This is the first and only time I have ever seen such an argument.
It also says that the evidence could easily be read to show that increased executions result in increased murders, though they are unwilling to directly draw that conclusion.
What I did find in my research is that any studies which claim to show a deterrence effect from capital punishment tend to fall apart under serious scrutiny. To show a deterrence effect requires massaging the numbers in such a way to get the results you want. So, at best, it does nothing to deter murders, and based on the available evidence, it looks like murders are actually increased, but that would require more study.
The vast majority of criminologists agree that there's no evidence of a deterrence effect from capital punishment, though.
That's part of why it's not a deterrent. It can make a violent crime more violent, as the criminal takes extra measures to ensure they won't be caught.
In fact, this is why expanding the death penalty to crimes like rape is counterproductive. If rape will get you executed, then why even leave a living victim? Better to kill them and reduce your chances of getting caught. This is what they call a perverse incentive.
Your argument makes very little sense given that Western countries which have abolished the death penalty have lower murder rates. You would assume that, in the absence of a death penalty, people would go out and get justice themselves, through deadly force. But this is not the case.
In a lot of the cases where people are exonerated, it doesn't come from the appeals process--it comes from nonprofit researchers who examine the evidence themselves and try to build a case to present to the appeals court. Appeals courts themselves do not do any of the work to try to ascertain guilt or innocence based on the evidence.
Locking up an innocent person until they die is bad, too, but that doesn't make the death penalty any more attractive. Our criminal justice system has a lot of problems. This is only one of them.
I agree that the death penalty is legal ritual to enable vengeance. I think that's a bad thing. Others may think it's just fine. I am not sure which way you lean!:)
If we are going to execute someone, should we really not give them full due process of law? Taking a life is the most extreme action available to our justice system. We owe it to ourselves to take every measure possible to ensure the accused is guilty of the crime in question under the circumstances related by the prosecution. This is why we have multiple appeals: so different individuals can take a fresh look at the facts and the trial and any previous appeals and see if anything went wrong.
Even then, we stand a good chance of missing exculpatory evidence. For instance, there are death row convictions based on eyewitness testimony which are later ruled out by DNA evidence. This happens way too often, and it is naive to think we have caught or will catch every instance where an innocent person has gone to death row--just as a matter of statistical probability, we must have executed innocent people. There is no legal process to prove this since there is no victim to redress or petition the court (the victim is dead) so you will never see a court case where an executed individual is exonerated by a court of law.
As the AC said, deterrence and recidivism are separate issues. The death penalty has been demonstrated to, at best, have no effect on murder rates. Some studies have shown it actually increases murder rates.
In any case, this is all beside the point as far as I'm concerned, given that this is a power government should not possess in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
If the car knows there is a cliff on the right (which it should, otherwise it shouldn't be driving at all) then it will have to quickly brake and possibly hit the car in front of it. It can handle this better than a human driver in a few ways:
1. It can gauge the right balance of braking force to minimize impact and inertia transferred to the passengers.
2. It can pre-emptively deploy safety measures a fraction of a second sooner to protect the passengers.
There are going to be situations where an accident is simply unavoidable. A self-driving car can make the determination on how best to minimize trauma to the passengers a lot faster than a human driver could. Cars aren't magic--they're physics, and rather simple physics, as far as that goes.
Besides that, I find it hard to believe anyone developing these systems wouldn't try everything they know to make it screw up--and then fix its responses to any situation it didn't handle properly.
I would describe version control as providing the following benefits:
* Accountable auditing of all code changes. Managers like this, because it helps with legal compliance.
* More flexible release scheduling. Got a high-risk project? No problem, keep it in a separate branch so it doesn't hold up your current release cycle.
* When combined with a continuous integration system and unit testing, you can track down new regressions very quickly. This cuts down QA time.
* You can easily track and replicate customer versions to reproduce reported bugs.
Managers want to know how new tools will save time and money and get code out the door faster. Benefits to developers are nice, but not enough to sell the change.
Anyway, no need to pay for any of this stuff. Use git, Subversion, Mercurial, Bazaar, whatever. I've worked with just about every system out there. They can all do the job, they just bring different features and possible workflows to the table.
I'm assuming you put an extra 0 on your cable/cell bill. Or you have 10 TVs and a dozen cell phones in your house, I guess.
Must be local building codes, which are set by the county, state, and/or municipality. Certainly not something s/he could blame the federal government for.
How can the government doing what your religion tells you to do "override" or "conflict" with your religious values?
"My religion says I should do this because it's right. Government is trying to make me do it! That's wrong!"
Of course, I know the real reason certain sects of American Protestants think this way. To them, charity isn't about helping anyone--it's about enriching your own soul, paving your own way to heaven. You want God to see you depriving yourself to the benefit of someone else, deliberately and intentionally. If the government does it by taking taxes from your paycheck, then you don't get brownie points with the Almighty, and that makes it wrong. These are the same people who believe this is a world of ruin that's doomed to burn when Christ returns, so the eventual fate of this world is completely irrelevant to them.
It's a horrifying worldview to anyone who doesn't share it, because it claims quite unambiguously that this life doesn't matter, except insofar as it helps you get to heaven. Anyone not working on getting to heaven is irrelevant and deserves whatever fate they get. It's an attitude completely against what communities and civilized states stand for.
European Catholics, I have noticed, tend not to have this problem. They seem quite comfortable with an expansive safety net that helps those who need it.
Tell them you're very angry and you don't want to take it out on someone who is low on the totem pole, and that you'd rather be escalated to a manager/supervisor. Insist on it. That way, you make it sound like you are doing them a favor (by not yelling at them) and you aren't insulting their English.
What's wrong with someone who holds a political science degree running a company?
This particular person has a dumb idea (not really understanding the skills and mindset required to write effective, competent, maintainable code), but there is a growing trend in management to get away from having MBAs run everything. Instead, you get people with degrees in social sciences like history, political science, psychology, etc. Ultimately, running a business means understanding managing human behavior, and people with degrees in those areas tend to have a better grasp on that than some guy with an MBA who knows a lot of buzzwords about "maximizing shareholder value" and very little about how to understand and motivate people.
Popplers have already been murdered by your teeth well before they reach your stomach. No screaming.
I never, ever get tired of this story.
Count me in with the others recommending git. I'm using it in a very diverse environment, where different teams have different platforms, workflows, and deployment strategies. I convinced them all to use git. They are extremely happy with it, and they love the flexibility it offers them over their old (or nonexistent) systems.
No. The law makes exceptions for imminent threats of harm to others. Someone engaged in criminal behavior who is threatening the lives and safety of others may be killed in the immediate defense of those other people.
Imminence is the key point there.
I'm sorry, who else has seriously argued that getting rid of the death penalty denies people liberty? This is the first and only time I have ever seen such an argument.
Yup. There is no reason to invent a new format for this except to a) add DRM and/or b) get people to pay money for it.
Besides, what even plays a Pono file? At least FLAC is well-established.
I sure hope that's a joke or satire and not a serious suggestion.
And executes innocent people. I guess you think that kind of "collateral damage" is fine as long as you appear "tough on crime," right?
Well, apparently the idea that it increases murders is a response to those trying to distort statistics to show that it reduces them.
This article discusses that particular phenomenon: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/DonohueDeter.pdf
It also says that the evidence could easily be read to show that increased executions result in increased murders, though they are unwilling to directly draw that conclusion.
What I did find in my research is that any studies which claim to show a deterrence effect from capital punishment tend to fall apart under serious scrutiny. To show a deterrence effect requires massaging the numbers in such a way to get the results you want. So, at best, it does nothing to deter murders, and based on the available evidence, it looks like murders are actually increased, but that would require more study.
The vast majority of criminologists agree that there's no evidence of a deterrence effect from capital punishment, though.
That's part of why it's not a deterrent. It can make a violent crime more violent, as the criminal takes extra measures to ensure they won't be caught.
In fact, this is why expanding the death penalty to crimes like rape is counterproductive. If rape will get you executed, then why even leave a living victim? Better to kill them and reduce your chances of getting caught. This is what they call a perverse incentive.
Your argument makes very little sense given that Western countries which have abolished the death penalty have lower murder rates. You would assume that, in the absence of a death penalty, people would go out and get justice themselves, through deadly force. But this is not the case.
In a lot of the cases where people are exonerated, it doesn't come from the appeals process--it comes from nonprofit researchers who examine the evidence themselves and try to build a case to present to the appeals court. Appeals courts themselves do not do any of the work to try to ascertain guilt or innocence based on the evidence.
Locking up an innocent person until they die is bad, too, but that doesn't make the death penalty any more attractive. Our criminal justice system has a lot of problems. This is only one of them.
Only a deranged individual could argue that the abolition of the death penalty is an erosion of liberty.
I agree that the death penalty is legal ritual to enable vengeance. I think that's a bad thing. Others may think it's just fine. I am not sure which way you lean! :)
Well, I hope I didn't seem hostile. I figured you were mostly playing devil's advocate. ;)
"Give me Liberty, or give me Death" was a statement of conviction, of being willing to die for one's beliefs.
An individual being willing to die for their beliefs does not validate the government's power to oblige them.
If we are going to execute someone, should we really not give them full due process of law? Taking a life is the most extreme action available to our justice system. We owe it to ourselves to take every measure possible to ensure the accused is guilty of the crime in question under the circumstances related by the prosecution. This is why we have multiple appeals: so different individuals can take a fresh look at the facts and the trial and any previous appeals and see if anything went wrong.
Even then, we stand a good chance of missing exculpatory evidence. For instance, there are death row convictions based on eyewitness testimony which are later ruled out by DNA evidence. This happens way too often, and it is naive to think we have caught or will catch every instance where an innocent person has gone to death row--just as a matter of statistical probability, we must have executed innocent people. There is no legal process to prove this since there is no victim to redress or petition the court (the victim is dead) so you will never see a court case where an executed individual is exonerated by a court of law.
As the AC said, deterrence and recidivism are separate issues. The death penalty has been demonstrated to, at best, have no effect on murder rates. Some studies have shown it actually increases murder rates.
In any case, this is all beside the point as far as I'm concerned, given that this is a power government should not possess in the first place.
Nope. In fact, states that brought back the death penalty after getting rid of it saw an upsurge in murders.