According to the summary, 30,000 Europeans were killed in car accidents, it doesn't say how many were high speed, but even if only 10% were, that is 3,000 people, about the number killed on 9/11 in the US. The US went to war because those deaths were viewed as being for no good reason. Are traffic fatalities because of reckless high speed driving any better?
yes, because the human mind is programmed to underestimate risks for an individual when he feels he has control over the situation, and to overestimate it in the opposite case.
I once met Nassim Taleb, and he told me that most of the fatalities of 9/11 happened after the event; of all the people who renounced flying in favour of driving, a number died simply because even counting the horror, flying is safer than driving. So, when you have something like traffic fatalities, in which:
1. the individual is fully in the loop: 2. the yearly number is high, but the occurences are sparse and average fatalities per accident are low;
3. the frequency is high enough to make it seem an "everyday" occurrence;
the average joe registers "no signal".
the incidence of no.3 is particularly curious, but remember mad cow disease; it started a global scare because the occurrence of the malady in the UK went fro about 70 cases per year to about double, on a 50 millionish population. Want to know how many people die from insect puncture each year?
One only needs to read the paper to know that most of the fatalities related to 9/11 were post 9/11. There have been far more casualties to the troops the US sent, let alone the civilian population in Iraq, then were killed in the attack on 9/11. There is no great insight or wisdom to that statement. As for the assumption that an additional 3,000 or so people have died post 9/11 because they refused to fly, well, the statistics don't show that. Cumulative traffic fatalities since then on highways aren't up enough to support that position. Even if you include residential, they would only be close and since you can't fly from your home to the local grocery store, you really shouldn't include residential.
So, while it makes for a good sound bite, the math itself doesn't work out.
Speed is not the only cause of road accidents, and in many cases a crash would have occurred anyway. Also setting a maximum speed would do nothing to stop people speeding at 70mph down residential streets, which is far more dangerous than doing 90mph on a highway.
In fact many crashes are caused by lack of speed, or significant differences in speed. Someone driving well below the speed limit is often far more dangerous than someone driving way above it, especially on roads where its not easy to pass them because they will cause a queue of frustrated drivers to form behind them. Someone driving slowly on the highway is also extremely dangerous.
Also speed limits today were set many years ago, when cars were much slower and more dangerous... While lowend cars then would have struggled to reach 70mph if they could at all, today virtually any car is capable of 100mph. More importantly, while driving 70mph back then was noisy and resulted in a lot of vibration from the vehicle, today 70mph is a trivial cruising speed and you barely realise you're moving... This significantly increases the change of people falling asleep at the wheel.
Everything you say is true, however, human been reaction times haven't improved and except in the USA where cars are bigger and heavier, the rest of the world tends towards smaller, lighter, and more fuel efficient vehicles. Many of these cars are not 100mph vehicles. The fact that at 70mph you barely realize you're moving doesn't make you more safe, it makes you less safe because you are more likely to be less focussed on driving. Highway studies in the USA show that the optimal speed for safety (fewer accidents), fuel efficiency and minimizing damage to the highways is 57.4mph. Those studies are repeated about every 10 years and the numbers haven't changed in 40 years.
That's fine to the safety nazis. They would say "Well just don't overtake and be more patient".
We already see this with motorways with lorries. You get one lorry with its limiter set to 55.9999998 mph and another lorry with its limiter set to 56.0000001 catches it up and starts to overtake. 15 miles later it's finally past after causing all of lanes 1 and 2 to be going at 56 mph for the last 15 miles, and lane 3 bunched up nose to tail traffic doing about 60.
It doesn't matter. People tend to travel with the flow of traffic. Whether that traffic is going 56 in a 55 zone or 75 in a 70 zone. So, if cars have a limiter or not, people will go with the flow. Most likely, if automated, the maximum speed would be set higher than the maximum legal speed but not significantly higher (maybe 10mph) and a warning would go off that you are speeding.
It's impossible to pass someone safely on the motorway if you can only get your speed 1mph higher than theirs – it means you sit in their blind spot for ages. It's worse on country roads, where you're going to make it completely impossible to overtake someone doing any speed over 50mph, because a 10mph passing speed is not significant enough to get you past on any of the short straights on Britain's windy country roads. Worse, if you come up against someone doing 60mph on the straights, but slowing down unduly on the bends, you now have only one option –to overtake them on the bends. I'd bet heavily that that alone would increase the accident rate, not decrease it, because people would start overtaking in stupid places.
If the speed limit is 70 (or 60 or 55 or whatever) and the vehicle in front of you is already doing that, then what is the rationale for passing them in the first place? Logically, even in the example you give with the slowing down on the curves, if one drives the speed limit, how much time is lost by not passing the vehicle over a 60 mile stretch? At most a few minutes, that's it. If the slowing down on curves increases the accident rate, it's not the car slowing down, it's the driver behind who decides he/she should pass in the stupid places you mention. Nobody forces a person to pass another person. It is a personal decision with consequences when done in an unsafe manner.
AFAIK, border guards have no authority except to question you, and to deny visitors entry. They have no authority that I am aware of to arrest you or imprison you. Even TFA says as much.
They can detain you for questioning. Then they can detain you while they wait for transportation to send you to the next government agency, that can take up to a week depending on your priority. But technically, they cannot detain you indefinitely, they would turn you over to the FBI or some other agency for that.
That just emphasises my point. You as an individual parent are interested in your daughter's education. That is good, but unless the community values education your individual efforts are largely ignored. The school system will reflect the community's educational values. Then, since your daughter has special needs, there is the added frustration of how the community values special needs. Most likely, not very highly.
Public schools, well any school, for that matter, will reflect the wider community's values of education. Change that and we change the schools.
Hi, Mark Fucking Zuckerberg here. I own you're fucking asses, you pathetic like pukes. If I want to sell your left fucking kidney, I can do it because I'm Mark Fucking Zuckerberg and you're pathetic addicts.
No, he can't do that because it would be a HIPAA violation, but just about anything else would be correct.
I've often thought about doing that, using plausible deniability, and making the password for the "safe" partition: GoFuckYourselfYouFascistPig . The first time they ask for the password I would answer "Go Fuck Yourself You Fascist Pig", and after that I would simply ask them if they had problems hearing me the first time. When I got to court and they tried to screw me for failing to reveal the password I could state all innocent like:... but your honor. I told them! It's GoFuckYourselfYouFascistPig .;-) Of course, that was back when we had due process:-( [not to mention it is obviously pure fantasy, and not something I would ever actually do... but I sure wish someone would ]
You realize that under the Patriot act, you don't necessarily get to go to court. You piss them off all, particularly with something that can be considered antagonistic and hating of America in their eyes and you could have a very nice Carribean vacation at Gitmo.
Two things to keep in mind. Never joke about hijacking a plane at an airport and don't piss off the border guards. Doing either one can make what you used to consider your worst day ever not seem that bad after all.
. It may also get you thrown in prison for a while
On what charges? They may deny you entry, and detain you for a little while, but actual imprisonment without charges seems like it would be a huge constitutional issue.
They only need to suspect that you are somehow involved with terrorism to hold you indefinitely. With six degrees of separation plus an encrypted partition, it's not that hard to see that happening. Don't you just love the Patriot Act. Just about everything in it is something the founding fathers/patriots would have called tyranny.
What power does anyone have to get a school to change, in any way?
They key aspect, teachers, CANNOT be modified from the outside. Or even really from the inside.
An outside agent might be able to get slightly nicer books or equipment but just because if I try REALLY hard I get to chose some of the flair on the crews uniforms, I still don't want to send my kid off on the titanic.
It has nothing to do with teachers. Teachers have very little say in anything, even in the curriculum they teach. Now, if you mean administration, particularly the higher postions, like superintendants and school boards, then you have a point. But blaming the teachers is hardly productive since they only abide by the rules that are set by others who are in positions of authority. If you want to change public education in America, it's easy to focus on the lowest positions in the process - the teachers, however, real change comes from the top down. Change the school administration and its focus and you will improve education, but simply replacing teachers with new cogs in the wheel will only get the same results because teachers don't make the rules or policies.
There are successful public schools and there are poorly performing public schools. There are successful private schools and poorly performing private schools. On the surface, it would appear to be funding, and while a basica amount of funding is necessary, the real difference is parental involvement/interest.
If parents view school as the place where the kids are dropped off/cared for during the day, kind of like extended day care, those schools will have poor records. It doesn't matter whether those schools are public or private. OTOH, if parents value a good education and are engaged in the education process and take an interest in what their children study/learn, those schools tend to be much more successful.
The problem is, it's not upto individual parents to set that standard, but the community as a whole. In many college towns, particularly where the local university is one of the major employers, there tend to be good public schools. Why? Because people who work in academia tend to value education and it is reflected in the public school system.
OTOH, if the community doesn't value education or views education as a method to indoctrinate students in social norms or to act as surrogate parents, well, that is what you will get, but the educational component will lack.
Now, private schools, while they exist in the larger community, have their own micro-community and usually that micro-community values education more highly, why else would they pay so much for it if they didn't? In the end a community gets the exact quality of education that the community values. To be fair, many people in the community and the public school system do value education, but in many states, there is a state board of education that sets programs and requirements, further removing the local community's values from the mix.
But, it is quite simple, really. If you want successful schools, you need to first need to define what that means and then you need to get the community to value it (which is different than merely supporting it). Private schools have a huge advantage there. They have a defined and usually focused purpose and mission. People who agree with it send their kids there. People who don't look elsewhere.
There is one major flaw with her logic. People who send their kids to private schools still pay taxes that support the public schools. By not sending their child to the public school, there is actually more revenue per student enrolled in the public school, unless the state legislature does something like reappropriate it elsewhere (which would make them evil, but again, they are politicians).
So, if people pay for the public schools but don't cause an increase in the variable cost of running the public schools because their kids are in a private school, that is evil how?
As American society becomes more culturally, linguistically, religiously, etc. diverse, public schools are one of the few things holding it together. The U.S. is the great "melting pot" that takes people from various backgrounds and melds them into a somewhat coherent society with certain shared values. The free-to-enroll public school is one of the things that made that possible, teaching the majority of young people a common national history, a shared understanding of science, and so on.
But as education becomes increasingly factionalized, with Catholic schools teaching that contraception is evil, Fundamentalist Protestant schools teaching that evolution is a lie, charter schools endorsing the cult of the Market (which is their reason for being), home schools teaching who-the-hell-knows-what, and each one editing history to support their individual agenda, that commonality is being lost. Families who once insisted (in the face of racially-integrated bussing) that neighborhood schools were essential to the healthy social development of children are now driving their kids miles to the education outlet whose curriculum and student body matches their preconceptions (and their racial, religious, and economic standards). When you look at survey or poll results and wonder "how can these people believe that?", or looked at the legislators elected by people of other districts, the answer is that it reflects whatever they were taught to believe, at whatever school they attended.
If catholic schools are teaching that contraception is evil, they must not be doing a good job because the majority of catholic women use contraception. Maybe you should find a different argument to support your bias.
In France, a lot of highways have a speed limit of 130 (in modern units) and 110 when it is raining
110 max in the rain strikes me as unfairly conservative; my '91 200Q with Falken FK452's (225/40R18) had no problem doing 130+ in heavy rain with no hydroplaning issues whatsoever... wait, were you talking KPH?!
What difference does it make how fast your car can go if the speed limit is 70mph or the European equivalent? Holywood starlets often shoplift for the thrill of it, even though they can easily afford the stuff they still. That doesn't make it any less illegal. So sure, your car can safely handle a lot faster than the posted speed limit, it's still breaking the law.
That wouldn't work in lots of place - for example in Germany - where there are speed limits that are variables and are adapted with traffic or weather conditions. That's a principal problem for every area where the speed limit is dependent on weather. In France, a lot of highways have a speed limit of 130 (in modern units) and 110 when it is raining or the road is wet. How would such as system work under such regulations? Regardless of with or without a camera, its not easy.
Then if you don't have a camera, the system would need accurate to the minute information on construction work. Else you'll see someone race at 120 through a 60 construction zone... and it's quite a critical point because once you have automatic speed limiters, people rely on them and stop driving. They just move ahead, without any consideration for the speed they are at. This is dangerous, because they totally lose situational awareness.
Lets say you have a camera. How does it handle multiple speed limits for trucks or cars with trailers? How about lane dependent speed limit? It must also see and interpret the signs associated with the speed limits. That makes quite a lot of data to process and artificial intelligence built in a critical system. Not that its impossible... this is some sort of minimum for self driving cars. But that's going to be expensive. You might just as well make the car self driving if it already has this level of situational awareness.
Speak of it again, I don't think this is a good measure. Either make the car fully automatic or leave it be. Any measure that detaches the driver from situational awareness is the wrong way to go around it in my (non expert) opinion. I would rather consider an alternative, based on the same system, that issues warnings rather than take control of critical systems.
Lets give an illustrative example (I can't find a car analogy right now)... a car passes a truck on a country road. He's almost past the front of the truck, but the driver realizes he miss judged the distance with oncoming traffic. In most cases, the only way out of this, is to accelerate and quickly get for the truck. Breaking to get back behind when you almost past it would take longer... and that's assuming the spot behind it is still there and not closed by another car. Suddenly, your built in speed limiter decides you are going too fast for your safety and cuts the ignition, obviously not aware that you are trying to avoid a face to face collision.
I'd take a lot of time thinking such a system through before implementing it...
You don't think that if there is a computer determining what the speed limit should be based on weather, construction, traffic, etc. that a car couldn't simply have a receiver to pick up that information, too?
When I was in Holland last year, we had a car with a GPS and speed limit display. Only problem was, if you were on a main highway and passed over a local road, the speed limit would often switch to something like 50km/h as it briefly became confused about which road you were on.
Needless to say, having every car hitting the brakes at that point would probably be a bad idea.
But the speed limit signs really make no more sense, since they can trivially be 'hacked'; I've seen local kids in Britain turn speed limit signs around for grins, so you'd end up with a sixty mph limit in the town and a thirty on the road leading out of town.
All in all, it's a really stupid idea. Which is what you'd expect from the EU.
Not really, if the maxium speed limit is 70mph, which seems odd in the EU since it's supposed to be metric, but if the maximum speed limit is whatever, then setting the sensor to go off when you go above the maximum won't be impacted by side roads or the like. It will only kick in if you go over the maximum speedlimit. In the US, for most states that would be 70mph, although there are a few which allow faster.
Giving a warning when one is breaking the law isn't taking away one's legal freedoms, just their illegal freedoms, which by definition, they aren't free to exercise in the first place.
Of course, there is a much simpler method than using computers and the like. Go back to putting appropriately sized engines and gear ratios in cars and they will be able to accelerate quickly, get good fuel economy, and limit their top speed to about 1.25 times the maximum speed limit allowed. After all, why manufacture cars with a top speed of 150-200mph when the maximum legal speed limit is 70mph? It seems that if the state can revoke your license for dwi because you might hurt somebody while driving while intoxicated, the same rational would work for driving well above the posted speed limit.
According to the summary, 30,000 Europeans were killed in car accidents, it doesn't say how many were high speed, but even if only 10% were, that is 3,000 people, about the number killed on 9/11 in the US. The US went to war because those deaths were viewed as being for no good reason. Are traffic fatalities because of reckless high speed driving any better?
Interesting. If calculus professors are pushing online calculus courses instead of traditional in class courses and calculus hasn't had any really new developments in about 100 years, do we even need calculus professors anymore?
It would seem odd that this group of professors feel that MOOCs do as good of a job as they do at a fraction of the cost.
That's also a total non-sequitur in a discussion about an economy where the robots make enough for everyone. In such a case, sure, there still may be a few hoarders, but who cares?
The comment was in response to the "No matter how rich you are comments" not the robots making enough for everyone. But in an economy where robots make enough for everyone, it still doesn't answer the question where the non-rich get the money to buy the goods and services they need if they don't have jobs.
That's why the current capitalist system is unsustainable.
If people are replaced by machines, can't find a job and don't have any income, they won't be able to pay the owner of the machines for the things the machines make.
Has nothing to do with capitalism. The same thing happens in socialism and communism. Basically, whomever owns production needs some sort of income to maintain production. If there aren't any workers earning income, there aren't any income taxes and since there is no money for sales, no sales taxes. So the government, if they own production can't sustain it either. With capitalists, the government could tax the cr*p out of the businesses to provide for the many, but then why put the effort to own and run a business in the first place if there is no benefit to yourself?
Ultimately for a society to survive, it needs an economy and for an economy to be successful, it needs a working middle class. There is no free ride. It also doesn't matter who owns production. Ultimately, for a society to grow it needs an economy and an economy needs producers and consumers. Without work, the consumers don't have the means to purchase products to consume and without consumption, the economy fails, then the society.
When that day comes, in whomever's lifetime, when nobody has to work anymore, where will people get food from? Where will people get energy from? Where will people get entertainment from?
Where do you take your food from? Agriculture today is already automated to a great degree. Where do you get your energy from? You employ Chinese guys to run in treadmills to light your house? Entertainment will continue to employ people, of course. I don't imagine robots as being very creative in any meaningful time frame.
Oh, you mean in the future when we have a two tier system where the top 1% don't have to work, but the rest of us have menial jobs because technology has replaced all of the formerly middle class jobs that one could raise a family on.
You don't make any sense. Menial jobs will be replaced by machines, they won't be needed any more.
Now, seriously, what the fuck are you talking about?
It doesn't matter whether agriculture is automated or not. It doesn't matter whether energy production is automated it or not. Who ever owns those farms, factories, productions facilities, etc. even if 100% automated aren't going to give you stuff for free, you will still have to pay for it, will you not?
As for menial jobs, they are all that will be left. I guess they make robots to wash windows and wipe down tables and the like, but then there won't be any jobs, with the exception of entertainment. So with people with no able to work, how will they pay for goods and services? And if they are given away free, why would anybody want to work in the entertainment industry (which requires a lot more than just actors and actresses).
No, the utopia where nobody has to work and everything is provided may exist in the christian heaven, but it can't exist here.
I believe the article was talking about single cell organisms, but yes, tardigrades can survive boiling, freezing and vacuum. I wonder, though could they survive the 2800 degree F (hot enough to melt iron) temperature that would be involved on both leaving Mars and re-entering Earth's atmosphere? Then there is the cosmic radiation of such a trip and of course they would have to have existed on Mars at the time the chunk of rock was blown off it's surface and made it's way here.
Not saying it couldn't have happened, but that would mean that any life on Mars would have developed significantly earlier than current estimates or the collision that blew off the chunk of rock happened a lot later and life on this planet is a lot younger (if Mars was the source).
On the contrary, and Samantha Wright please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd think a whole big hunking lot of single-cellular life can in fact survive being frozen. I mean, come on, human fucking sperm even does. Never mind that frozen life is well, frozen. While the DNA repair mechanisms are dormant, so are the copying mechanisms. Bacteria can live quite deep within porous rocks. I'm not exactly sure if it's really necessary for ejecta to be always heated up to sterilization. Now I'm not saying that this little life-from-Mars theory has got any legs to stand on just yet, but your arguments don't really do much to discount it, I don't think.
We have found microbes that can survive frozen. We have found microbes that can live in toxic environments to every other life form on earth. We have found microbes that can survive in each of the conditions the OP mentions. What we have not found are microbes that could survive in all of those environments that would be required to get from Mars to Earth and the changes involved would happen so quickly its unlikely there would be time for any kind of evolution or adaptation to occur.
In short, for life to originate on Mars and make it to Earth from debris being blasted into space would mean that whatever life happened to be on those rocks would need all of those adaptions for the various transition states the trip would require. That, in itself, seems much less likely than whether life ever existed on Mars.
If you can only imagine the future in terms of the current economic system, you can't really imagine the future. We don't have the same economy we had 50 years ago, and that one was nothing like those before it. To presume the current model will persist indefinitely is pure ego.
They may all be true, but unless food and medicine and housing and other necessities all become free in the new future undefined economic system, there has to be some way to pay for them and some way to earn the wages. That has been a constant regardless of the economic system now or in the past.
Oh, you mean in the future when we have a two tier system where the top 1% don't have to work, but the rest of us have menial jobs because technology has replaced all of the formerly middle class jobs that one could raise a family on.
Do you realize how silly that sounds? The rich just can't consume that much more than the rest of us.
No matter how rich you are, you can only drive 1 car at a time. You might buy "four Cadillacs, one for each direction", or forty it you're a collector and just like to look at them, but you have no use for 1000.
No matter how rich you are, you can only live in 1 house at a time. You might buy four houses, one for each season, but there's no point in buying forty.
No matter how rich you are, you can't drink more than 100 beers a week (someone used to have that as his sig). You can only eat so much. You can spend all you want on hookers and blow, but that just means you die and the money gets redistributed.
Money is just a placeholder. If robots are making enough cars, house, food, and drink for everyone, it just won't matter if the "1%" (really the 100 richest families) consumes 10x everyone else. The robots are still making enough for everyone.
People spouting this doom and gloom stuff are just projecting the latest economic downturn to infinity, when the economy is cyclic. It's like measuring the temperatures rising throughout summer, and predicting the oceans will boil in 5 years. Give it a rest.
The price of 1 yacht does little to help the economy. That same price purchasing 10 cars has a much bigger impact on the economy. Now multiply that by most luxury items. You may want to believe it's not so, but since the 1970s there has been a massive transfer of wealth upwards. Invested money helps investors, but doesn't help the economy. That's a fact.
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According to the summary, 30,000 Europeans were killed in car accidents, it doesn't say how many were high speed, but even if only 10% were, that is 3,000 people, about the number killed on 9/11 in the US. The US went to war because those deaths were viewed as being for no good reason. Are traffic fatalities because of reckless high speed driving any better?
yes, because the human mind is programmed to underestimate risks for an individual when he feels he has control over the situation, and to overestimate it in the opposite case.
I once met Nassim Taleb, and he told me that most of the fatalities of 9/11 happened after the event; of all the people who renounced flying in favour of driving, a number died simply because even counting the horror, flying is safer than driving.
So, when you have something like traffic fatalities, in which:
1. the individual is fully in the loop:
2. the yearly number is high, but the occurences are sparse and average fatalities per accident are low;
3. the frequency is high enough to make it seem an "everyday" occurrence;
the average joe registers "no signal".
the incidence of no.3 is particularly curious, but remember mad cow disease; it started a global scare because the occurrence of the malady in the UK went fro about 70 cases per year to about double, on a 50 millionish population. Want to know how many people die from insect puncture each year?
One only needs to read the paper to know that most of the fatalities related to 9/11 were post 9/11. There have been far more casualties to the troops the US sent, let alone the civilian population in Iraq, then were killed in the attack on 9/11. There is no great insight or wisdom to that statement. As for the assumption that an additional 3,000 or so people have died post 9/11 because they refused to fly, well, the statistics don't show that. Cumulative traffic fatalities since then on highways aren't up enough to support that position. Even if you include residential, they would only be close and since you can't fly from your home to the local grocery store, you really shouldn't include residential.
So, while it makes for a good sound bite, the math itself doesn't work out.
Speed is not the only cause of road accidents, and in many cases a crash would have occurred anyway. Also setting a maximum speed would do nothing to stop people speeding at 70mph down residential streets, which is far more dangerous than doing 90mph on a highway.
In fact many crashes are caused by lack of speed, or significant differences in speed. Someone driving well below the speed limit is often far more dangerous than someone driving way above it, especially on roads where its not easy to pass them because they will cause a queue of frustrated drivers to form behind them. Someone driving slowly on the highway is also extremely dangerous.
Also speed limits today were set many years ago, when cars were much slower and more dangerous... While lowend cars then would have struggled to reach 70mph if they could at all, today virtually any car is capable of 100mph. More importantly, while driving 70mph back then was noisy and resulted in a lot of vibration from the vehicle, today 70mph is a trivial cruising speed and you barely realise you're moving... This significantly increases the change of people falling asleep at the wheel.
Everything you say is true, however, human been reaction times haven't improved and except in the USA where cars are bigger and heavier, the rest of the world tends towards smaller, lighter, and more fuel efficient vehicles. Many of these cars are not 100mph vehicles. The fact that at 70mph you barely realize you're moving doesn't make you more safe, it makes you less safe because you are more likely to be less focussed on driving. Highway studies in the USA show that the optimal speed for safety (fewer accidents), fuel efficiency and minimizing damage to the highways is 57.4mph. Those studies are repeated about every 10 years and the numbers haven't changed in 40 years.
That's fine to the safety nazis. They would say "Well just don't overtake and be more patient".
We already see this with motorways with lorries. You get one lorry with its limiter set to 55.9999998 mph and another lorry with its limiter set to 56.0000001 catches it up and starts to overtake. 15 miles later it's finally past after causing all of lanes 1 and 2 to be going at 56 mph for the last 15 miles, and lane 3 bunched up nose to tail traffic doing about 60.
It doesn't matter. People tend to travel with the flow of traffic. Whether that traffic is going 56 in a 55 zone or 75 in a 70 zone. So, if cars have a limiter or not, people will go with the flow. Most likely, if automated, the maximum speed would be set higher than the maximum legal speed but not significantly higher (maybe 10mph) and a warning would go off that you are speeding.
What about simply overtaking safely.
It's impossible to pass someone safely on the motorway if you can only get your speed 1mph higher than theirs – it means you sit in their blind spot for ages.
It's worse on country roads, where you're going to make it completely impossible to overtake someone doing any speed over 50mph, because a 10mph passing speed is not significant enough to get you past on any of the short straights on Britain's windy country roads.
Worse, if you come up against someone doing 60mph on the straights, but slowing down unduly on the bends, you now have only one option –to overtake them on the bends. I'd bet heavily that that alone would increase the accident rate, not decrease it, because people would start overtaking in stupid places.
If the speed limit is 70 (or 60 or 55 or whatever) and the vehicle in front of you is already doing that, then what is the rationale for passing them in the first place? Logically, even in the example you give with the slowing down on the curves, if one drives the speed limit, how much time is lost by not passing the vehicle over a 60 mile stretch? At most a few minutes, that's it. If the slowing down on curves increases the accident rate, it's not the car slowing down, it's the driver behind who decides he/she should pass in the stupid places you mention. Nobody forces a person to pass another person. It is a personal decision with consequences when done in an unsafe manner.
Do you have any source. or example. or statute?
AFAIK, border guards have no authority except to question you, and to deny visitors entry. They have no authority that I am aware of to arrest you or imprison you. Even TFA says as much.
They can detain you for questioning. Then they can detain you while they wait for transportation to send you to the next government agency, that can take up to a week depending on your priority. But technically, they cannot detain you indefinitely, they would turn you over to the FBI or some other agency for that.
That just emphasises my point. You as an individual parent are interested in your daughter's education. That is good, but unless the community values education your individual efforts are largely ignored. The school system will reflect the community's educational values. Then, since your daughter has special needs, there is the added frustration of how the community values special needs. Most likely, not very highly.
Public schools, well any school, for that matter, will reflect the wider community's values of education. Change that and we change the schools.
Hi, Mark Fucking Zuckerberg here. I own you're fucking asses, you pathetic like pukes. If I want to sell your left fucking kidney, I can do it because I'm Mark Fucking Zuckerberg and you're pathetic addicts.
No, he can't do that because it would be a HIPAA violation, but just about anything else would be correct.
I've often thought about doing that, using plausible deniability, and making the password for the "safe" partition: GoFuckYourselfYouFascistPig . The first time they ask for the password I would answer "Go Fuck Yourself You Fascist Pig", and after that I would simply ask them if they had problems hearing me the first time. When I got to court and they tried to screw me for failing to reveal the password I could state all innocent like: ... but your honor. I told them! It's GoFuckYourselfYouFascistPig . ;-) Of course, that was back when we had due process :-( [not to mention it is obviously pure fantasy, and not something I would ever actually do ... but I sure wish someone would ]
You realize that under the Patriot act, you don't necessarily get to go to court. You piss them off all, particularly with something that can be considered antagonistic and hating of America in their eyes and you could have a very nice Carribean vacation at Gitmo.
Two things to keep in mind. Never joke about hijacking a plane at an airport and don't piss off the border guards. Doing either one can make what you used to consider your worst day ever not seem that bad after all.
. It may also get you thrown in prison for a while
On what charges? They may deny you entry, and detain you for a little while, but actual imprisonment without charges seems like it would be a huge constitutional issue.
They only need to suspect that you are somehow involved with terrorism to hold you indefinitely. With six degrees of separation plus an encrypted partition, it's not that hard to see that happening. Don't you just love the Patriot Act. Just about everything in it is something the founding fathers/patriots would have called tyranny.
What power does anyone have to get a school to change, in any way?
They key aspect, teachers, CANNOT be modified from the outside. Or even really from the inside.
An outside agent might be able to get slightly nicer books or equipment but just because if I try REALLY hard I get to chose some of the flair on the crews uniforms, I still don't want to send my kid off on the titanic.
It has nothing to do with teachers. Teachers have very little say in anything, even in the curriculum they teach. Now, if you mean administration, particularly the higher postions, like superintendants and school boards, then you have a point. But blaming the teachers is hardly productive since they only abide by the rules that are set by others who are in positions of authority. If you want to change public education in America, it's easy to focus on the lowest positions in the process - the teachers, however, real change comes from the top down. Change the school administration and its focus and you will improve education, but simply replacing teachers with new cogs in the wheel will only get the same results because teachers don't make the rules or policies.
There are successful public schools and there are poorly performing public schools. There are successful private schools and poorly performing private schools. On the surface, it would appear to be funding, and while a basica amount of funding is necessary, the real difference is parental involvement/interest.
If parents view school as the place where the kids are dropped off/cared for during the day, kind of like extended day care, those schools will have poor records. It doesn't matter whether those schools are public or private. OTOH, if parents value a good education and are engaged in the education process and take an interest in what their children study/learn, those schools tend to be much more successful.
The problem is, it's not upto individual parents to set that standard, but the community as a whole. In many college towns, particularly where the local university is one of the major employers, there tend to be good public schools. Why? Because people who work in academia tend to value education and it is reflected in the public school system.
OTOH, if the community doesn't value education or views education as a method to indoctrinate students in social norms or to act as surrogate parents, well, that is what you will get, but the educational component will lack.
Now, private schools, while they exist in the larger community, have their own micro-community and usually that micro-community values education more highly, why else would they pay so much for it if they didn't? In the end a community gets the exact quality of education that the community values. To be fair, many people in the community and the public school system do value education, but in many states, there is a state board of education that sets programs and requirements, further removing the local community's values from the mix.
But, it is quite simple, really. If you want successful schools, you need to first need to define what that means and then you need to get the community to value it (which is different than merely supporting it). Private schools have a huge advantage there. They have a defined and usually focused purpose and mission. People who agree with it send their kids there. People who don't look elsewhere.
There is one major flaw with her logic. People who send their kids to private schools still pay taxes that support the public schools. By not sending their child to the public school, there is actually more revenue per student enrolled in the public school, unless the state legislature does something like reappropriate it elsewhere (which would make them evil, but again, they are politicians).
So, if people pay for the public schools but don't cause an increase in the variable cost of running the public schools because their kids are in a private school, that is evil how?
As American society becomes more culturally, linguistically, religiously, etc. diverse, public schools are one of the few things holding it together. The U.S. is the great "melting pot" that takes people from various backgrounds and melds them into a somewhat coherent society with certain shared values. The free-to-enroll public school is one of the things that made that possible, teaching the majority of young people a common national history, a shared understanding of science, and so on.
But as education becomes increasingly factionalized, with Catholic schools teaching that contraception is evil, Fundamentalist Protestant schools teaching that evolution is a lie, charter schools endorsing the cult of the Market (which is their reason for being), home schools teaching who-the-hell-knows-what, and each one editing history to support their individual agenda, that commonality is being lost. Families who once insisted (in the face of racially-integrated bussing) that neighborhood schools were essential to the healthy social development of children are now driving their kids miles to the education outlet whose curriculum and student body matches their preconceptions (and their racial, religious, and economic standards). When you look at survey or poll results and wonder "how can these people believe that?", or looked at the legislators elected by people of other districts, the answer is that it reflects whatever they were taught to believe, at whatever school they attended.
If catholic schools are teaching that contraception is evil, they must not be doing a good job because the majority of catholic women use contraception. Maybe you should find a different argument to support your bias.
I assume she only goes to the county hospital, too. Otherwise, wouldn't she be evil for ruining that institution?
In France, a lot of highways have a speed limit of 130 (in modern units) and 110 when it is raining
110 max in the rain strikes me as unfairly conservative; my '91 200Q with Falken FK452's (225/40R18) had no problem doing 130+ in heavy rain with no hydroplaning issues whatsoever... wait, were you talking KPH?!
What difference does it make how fast your car can go if the speed limit is 70mph or the European equivalent? Holywood starlets often shoplift for the thrill of it, even though they can easily afford the stuff they still. That doesn't make it any less illegal. So sure, your car can safely handle a lot faster than the posted speed limit, it's still breaking the law.
That wouldn't work in lots of place - for example in Germany - where there are speed limits that are variables and are adapted with traffic or weather conditions. That's a principal problem for every area where the speed limit is dependent on weather. In France, a lot of highways have a speed limit of 130 (in modern units) and 110 when it is raining or the road is wet. How would such as system work under such regulations? Regardless of with or without a camera, its not easy.
Then if you don't have a camera, the system would need accurate to the minute information on construction work. Else you'll see someone race at 120 through a 60 construction zone... and it's quite a critical point because once you have automatic speed limiters, people rely on them and stop driving. They just move ahead, without any consideration for the speed they are at. This is dangerous, because they totally lose situational awareness.
Lets say you have a camera. How does it handle multiple speed limits for trucks or cars with trailers? How about lane dependent speed limit? It must also see and interpret the signs associated with the speed limits. That makes quite a lot of data to process and artificial intelligence built in a critical system. Not that its impossible... this is some sort of minimum for self driving cars. But that's going to be expensive. You might just as well make the car self driving if it already has this level of situational awareness.
Speak of it again, I don't think this is a good measure. Either make the car fully automatic or leave it be. Any measure that detaches the driver from situational awareness is the wrong way to go around it in my (non expert) opinion. I would rather consider an alternative, based on the same system, that issues warnings rather than take control of critical systems.
Lets give an illustrative example (I can't find a car analogy right now)... a car passes a truck on a country road. He's almost past the front of the truck, but the driver realizes he miss judged the distance with oncoming traffic. In most cases, the only way out of this, is to accelerate and quickly get for the truck. Breaking to get back behind when you almost past it would take longer... and that's assuming the spot behind it is still there and not closed by another car. Suddenly, your built in speed limiter decides you are going too fast for your safety and cuts the ignition, obviously not aware that you are trying to avoid a face to face collision.
I'd take a lot of time thinking such a system through before implementing it...
You don't think that if there is a computer determining what the speed limit should be based on weather, construction, traffic, etc. that a car couldn't simply have a receiver to pick up that information, too?
When I was in Holland last year, we had a car with a GPS and speed limit display. Only problem was, if you were on a main highway and passed over a local road, the speed limit would often switch to something like 50km/h as it briefly became confused about which road you were on.
Needless to say, having every car hitting the brakes at that point would probably be a bad idea.
But the speed limit signs really make no more sense, since they can trivially be 'hacked'; I've seen local kids in Britain turn speed limit signs around for grins, so you'd end up with a sixty mph limit in the town and a thirty on the road leading out of town.
All in all, it's a really stupid idea. Which is what you'd expect from the EU.
Not really, if the maxium speed limit is 70mph, which seems odd in the EU since it's supposed to be metric, but if the maximum speed limit is whatever, then setting the sensor to go off when you go above the maximum won't be impacted by side roads or the like. It will only kick in if you go over the maximum speedlimit. In the US, for most states that would be 70mph, although there are a few which allow faster.
Giving a warning when one is breaking the law isn't taking away one's legal freedoms, just their illegal freedoms, which by definition, they aren't free to exercise in the first place.
Of course, there is a much simpler method than using computers and the like. Go back to putting appropriately sized engines and gear ratios in cars and they will be able to accelerate quickly, get good fuel economy, and limit their top speed to about 1.25 times the maximum speed limit allowed. After all, why manufacture cars with a top speed of 150-200mph when the maximum legal speed limit is 70mph? It seems that if the state can revoke your license for dwi because you might hurt somebody while driving while intoxicated, the same rational would work for driving well above the posted speed limit.
According to the summary, 30,000 Europeans were killed in car accidents, it doesn't say how many were high speed, but even if only 10% were, that is 3,000 people, about the number killed on 9/11 in the US. The US went to war because those deaths were viewed as being for no good reason. Are traffic fatalities because of reckless high speed driving any better?
Interesting. If calculus professors are pushing online calculus courses instead of traditional in class courses and calculus hasn't had any really new developments in about 100 years, do we even need calculus professors anymore?
It would seem odd that this group of professors feel that MOOCs do as good of a job as they do at a fraction of the cost.
That's also a total non-sequitur in a discussion about an economy where the robots make enough for everyone. In such a case, sure, there still may be a few hoarders, but who cares?
The comment was in response to the "No matter how rich you are comments" not the robots making enough for everyone. But in an economy where robots make enough for everyone, it still doesn't answer the question where the non-rich get the money to buy the goods and services they need if they don't have jobs.
That's why the current capitalist system is unsustainable.
If people are replaced by machines, can't find a job and don't have any income, they won't be able to pay the owner of the machines for the things the machines make.
Has nothing to do with capitalism. The same thing happens in socialism and communism. Basically, whomever owns production needs some sort of income to maintain production. If there aren't any workers earning income, there aren't any income taxes and since there is no money for sales, no sales taxes. So the government, if they own production can't sustain it either. With capitalists, the government could tax the cr*p out of the businesses to provide for the many, but then why put the effort to own and run a business in the first place if there is no benefit to yourself?
Ultimately for a society to survive, it needs an economy and for an economy to be successful, it needs a working middle class. There is no free ride. It also doesn't matter who owns production. Ultimately, for a society to grow it needs an economy and an economy needs producers and consumers. Without work, the consumers don't have the means to purchase products to consume and without consumption, the economy fails, then the society.
When that day comes, in whomever's lifetime, when nobody has to work anymore, where will people get food from? Where will people get energy from? Where will people get entertainment from?
Where do you take your food from? Agriculture today is already automated to a great degree. Where do you get your energy from? You employ Chinese guys to run in treadmills to light your house? Entertainment will continue to employ people, of course. I don't imagine robots as being very creative in any meaningful time frame.
Oh, you mean in the future when we have a two tier system where the top 1% don't have to work, but the rest of us have menial jobs because technology has replaced all of the formerly middle class jobs that one could raise a family on.
You don't make any sense. Menial jobs will be replaced by machines, they won't be needed any more.
Now, seriously, what the fuck are you talking about?
It doesn't matter whether agriculture is automated or not. It doesn't matter whether energy production is automated it or not. Who ever owns those farms, factories, productions facilities, etc. even if 100% automated aren't going to give you stuff for free, you will still have to pay for it, will you not?
As for menial jobs, they are all that will be left. I guess they make robots to wash windows and wipe down tables and the like, but then there won't be any jobs, with the exception of entertainment. So with people with no able to work, how will they pay for goods and services? And if they are given away free, why would anybody want to work in the entertainment industry (which requires a lot more than just actors and actresses).
No, the utopia where nobody has to work and everything is provided may exist in the christian heaven, but it can't exist here.
Waterbears. That wasn't even hard.
I believe the article was talking about single cell organisms, but yes, tardigrades can survive boiling, freezing and vacuum. I wonder, though could they survive the 2800 degree F (hot enough to melt iron) temperature that would be involved on both leaving Mars and re-entering Earth's atmosphere? Then there is the cosmic radiation of such a trip and of course they would have to have existed on Mars at the time the chunk of rock was blown off it's surface and made it's way here.
Not saying it couldn't have happened, but that would mean that any life on Mars would have developed significantly earlier than current estimates or the collision that blew off the chunk of rock happened a lot later and life on this planet is a lot younger (if Mars was the source).
very little life can survive being frozen
On the contrary, and Samantha Wright please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd think a whole big hunking lot of single-cellular life can in fact survive being frozen. I mean, come on, human fucking sperm even does. Never mind that frozen life is well, frozen. While the DNA repair mechanisms are dormant, so are the copying mechanisms. Bacteria can live quite deep within porous rocks. I'm not exactly sure if it's really necessary for ejecta to be always heated up to sterilization. Now I'm not saying that this little life-from-Mars theory has got any legs to stand on just yet, but your arguments don't really do much to discount it, I don't think.
We have found microbes that can survive frozen. We have found microbes that can live in toxic environments to every other life form on earth. We have found microbes that can survive in each of the conditions the OP mentions. What we have not found are microbes that could survive in all of those environments that would be required to get from Mars to Earth and the changes involved would happen so quickly its unlikely there would be time for any kind of evolution or adaptation to occur.
In short, for life to originate on Mars and make it to Earth from debris being blasted into space would mean that whatever life happened to be on those rocks would need all of those adaptions for the various transition states the trip would require. That, in itself, seems much less likely than whether life ever existed on Mars.
If you can only imagine the future in terms of the current economic system, you can't really imagine the future. We don't have the same economy we had 50 years ago, and that one was nothing like those before it. To presume the current model will persist indefinitely is pure ego.
They may all be true, but unless food and medicine and housing and other necessities all become free in the new future undefined economic system, there has to be some way to pay for them and some way to earn the wages. That has been a constant regardless of the economic system now or in the past.
Oh, you mean in the future when we have a two tier system where the top 1% don't have to work, but the rest of us have menial jobs because technology has replaced all of the formerly middle class jobs that one could raise a family on.
Do you realize how silly that sounds? The rich just can't consume that much more than the rest of us.
No matter how rich you are, you can only drive 1 car at a time. You might buy "four Cadillacs, one for each direction", or forty it you're a collector and just like to look at them, but you have no use for 1000.
No matter how rich you are, you can only live in 1 house at a time. You might buy four houses, one for each season, but there's no point in buying forty.
No matter how rich you are, you can't drink more than 100 beers a week (someone used to have that as his sig). You can only eat so much. You can spend all you want on hookers and blow, but that just means you die and the money gets redistributed.
Money is just a placeholder. If robots are making enough cars, house, food, and drink for everyone, it just won't matter if the "1%" (really the 100 richest families) consumes 10x everyone else. The robots are still making enough for everyone.
People spouting this doom and gloom stuff are just projecting the latest economic downturn to infinity, when the economy is cyclic. It's like measuring the temperatures rising throughout summer, and predicting the oceans will boil in 5 years. Give it a rest.
The price of 1 yacht does little to help the economy. That same price purchasing 10 cars has a much bigger impact on the economy. Now multiply that by most luxury items. You may want to believe it's not so, but since the 1970s there has been a massive transfer of wealth upwards. Invested money helps investors, but doesn't help the economy. That's a fact.