I realize that the OP's suggestion ("programmed to avoid getting in accidents and nothing else") was ridiculously oversimplified, but... that's no less ridiculous than the "dilemmas" presented in the game.
Scenario 1: Crash directly into a concrete barrier or into a crowd of people and cats. Really, there are no other possible outcomes at all? Not rapid controlled deceleration, not swerving off the road, nothing else comes to mind?
Come back to me when you have *realistic* scenarios.
Personally, I don't like the acceleration very much unless I can get captioning to work at the accelerated speeds (works great on my Roku; on DVDs not so much). Instead I just fast-forward through the predictable boring scenes -- skip 5 minutes of scenic driving here, 2 minutes of overhead establishing shot there, 10 minutes of chopsocky fight scene, upwards of 15 minutes of characters agonizing over some trivial emotional trainwreck that doesn't advance the plot... I can easily see a movie or TV episode in half the production time just by skipping past the filler scenes that I don't care about.
You know what would be a hugely profitable business? Providing TL;DR (or is that TL;DW) truncated versions of movies.
I have a 2013 Prius, and that's been a constant problem.
On at least one occasion (that I know of), I was able to exit the vehicle and enter my house, taking my key with me, and even without the presence of the key the car remained in reverse. It was only the fact that it was parked on a slight upward (to the rear) incline with cinder blocks as a barrier (it's a rural neighborhood with no paved driveway or parking area, don't judge me) that prevented it from continuing to idle backwards into the outside stairwell in front of the house.
On at least one other occasion, I started to get out only to find the car continued moving backwards because it was not clearly signaling that it was still in reverse.
At the very least, they should prevent motion when the key is moved away from the vehicle.
It would be suicidal of them to implement ads though.
Some of us are old enough to remember when the whole point of cable TV was that by paying a fixed fee every month, we were spared the annoyance of ads.
It'll come. Sooner or later, probably sooner, streaming content will be just as ad-choked and invasive as broadcast TV and cable/dish services.
Enraged Killer:I was going to go into that club and kill everyone whose behavior I find distasteful, but thanks be to my teachers who made me realize that violence is the wrong way to solve my problems!
My friends on the left say that the only solution is to ban all guns. My friends on the right say the only solution is to ban all immigrants. They're all looking for a one-size-fits-all easy answer to a complex problem. The thing is, society is messy. Another reply in this thread said that there aren't just good guys and bad guys; people are good sometimes and bad sometimes. That's exactly it. Banning guns won't work because (a) that genie has left the bottle and (2) criminals can always get guns, especially now that they can print them; banning immigrants won't work because (a) doing so would punish the innocent as well as the guilty, thus taking away the freedom that makes this country what it is and (2) criminals can always sneak in no matter how high we build the wall; education and common sense won't work because rage and fanaticism are toxic to common sense (see above hypothetical situation); more guns won't work because then you have a crowd of frightened, angry vigilantes firing into a random mix of killers and innocent bystanders. One of my friends mentioned a statistic today that for every attack thwarted by armed self-defense, 34 additional deaths occur because of armed self-defense.
You can't stop or even measurably reduce terrible things happening, because human beings are chaotic and irrational. The best we can do is find a balance of laws that prevent honest people from doing terrible things while they're thinking rationally, without stifling freedom so much that we are a police state. Too much regulation and even honest people will rebel against authoritarianism; too little regulation and criminals can get away with murder. The hard part is finding that balance between the two extremes.
Yup. I was able to teach my kids how to open and use QuickBASIC when they were little in the 90s. Now I'm not sure what approach I would use to teach a child actual coding (vs. moving stupid blocks around on a screen that PR flaks call "coding").
To answer the OP question (and agree with the GP of this reply), it was absolutely all self-taught, as were the additional languages I've picked up over the last 40 years.
Started with the TRS-80 in Radio Shack. I checked out "Basic BASIC" from the library and took it over to the mall every day after school, typing in all the exercises.
When they threw me out of Radio Shack, I moved over to Foley's where they had the shiny new Commodore PET on display. After I finished Basic BASIC, I moved on to Dave Ahl's BASIC Computer Games. I got to know the evening shift salesgeek pretty well and he let me spend all my time hogging the display computer. He would sometimes show me some cool hack and challenge me to figure out how he did it, such as POKEing directly into video memory for fast animation. I eventually bought my first computer* from that guy.
All of which is to say: Suck it, Radio Shack.
*The PET. Although Foley's also had an Altair on display, it was more expensive and all the blinkenlights frightened and confused me.
And by deciding what is and what isn't religion, we are a step closer to a state religion.
This. I'm a fairly conservative evangelical Christian, and I agree with the judge that the guy in question is obviously just yanking the legislative chain for lulz, but... we can't establish a precedent for thoughtcrime. What the judge is trying to do is rule on what he believes the guy is thinking, and that is just not something you can demonstrate with hard evidence. As unlikely as it is, there is some minuscule chance that this guy totally missed the "ha ha this is satire" boat, read all the pastafarianism material as straight scripture, and truly believes in his heart what he says about the FSM. How can we objectively prove otherwise?
I mean, I'm not unaware that some of the things I believe involving an undead Jewish carpenter and an indefinable omniscient sentient being are pretty implausible from the outside. So I'm at a Martin Niemöller moment: "First they came for the pastafarians, but I didn't speak up because they obviously didn't truly believe such outlandish silliness..." When will the next judge decide that my beliefs don't represent a true religion?
So, yeah. I can't defend my own First Amendment rights unless I'm willing to defend those of someone who is most likely just cynically gaming the system.
Two different, and almost completely opposite, uses of the same expression. The FAA calls a "black box" a device that records your every movement, but in the techno geek world we use the phrase to describe impenetrable technology -- stuff goes in and stuff comes out, but we have no idea what happens in between. Tiny elves? Alien magic? Who knows? It sounds like Mr. Obama is using the latter concept -- he doesn't believe our phones should be so impenetrable and mysterious.
Obviously each of those releases includes compelling features that have been added. They wouldn't bump up the major version number for a few trivial tweaks and patches, would they?
The key to NOT being such a short hop away from everyone on the planet is to not let them into your life in the first place. Yes, some people -- perhaps even most of them -- will just blindly accept friend requests unconditionally, giving them thousands of "friends" who are just names on a list.
The only reason I touch Facebook at all, and then only with all of what flimsy privacy protection they offer enabled, is to easily keep contact with actual friends from that bizarre world called Real Life. With a handful of exceptions (because I telecommute and don't visit the home office often enough to meet all my colleagues face-to-face) all my friends on Facebook are people I have met in person and had more than a fleeting acquaintance with. I happily befriended Praneeth and Sasideep even though I have never met them in person being as how they are on the other side of the planet, but I work with them every day. On the other hand I'll probably never add Bob from accounting because my only contact with him in 25 years has been a question about a travel expense.
I don't accept requests from friends or relatives of my friends either, until I have met them in person. I'm sure my friend Paul's brother Ron is a great guy, but we have nothing to do with each other, no reason to speak to each other, no interest in each other's careers or families or hip surgery or lottery winnings.
Some of my friends feel the same way; others (mostly the younger ones, children of my peer group) go with the "friends with the world" approach. So I like to think I'm keeping my degrees of separation to an acceptably high number, and I intend to keep it that way as long as it is within my power.
The whole "free range kids" terminology makes it sound like a new fad, but it's a retronym meaning exactly the same thing as "regular kids" did 30+ years ago. When I was about 12 (which is to say, circa 1975) I regularly rode my bike to the nearest library in Houston... which according to Google Maps is just over 2 miles, most of which goes along one of the busiest streets in that suburb. If I missed the bus I would walk or ride my bike to school (2.2 miles) and I always walked or rode my bike to work at McDonald's (0.7 miles), even late at night.
"It looks like you're trying to merge from a right lane doing 35 MPH into the left lane doing 80MPH. I can help with that! But the speed limit is only 70, so we're going to make sure you don't violate any traffic laws."
As a recovering geek (at GA meetings we give out little pins to commemorate how many months or years we remain humble) I don't think your somewhat snarky reply is very far off. Here's my completely unqualified, half-assed armchair psychologist analysis...
Geeks tend to be on the high end of the scale for creativity which (based entirely on my observation of a very small and not at all random set of geeks including myself) usually but not always correlates with above-average intelligence. For whatever reason, that combination really does seem to produce some seriously unpleasant characteristics -- my friends and I took every opportunity to prove our superiority by being condescending to any non-geeks. I was especially harsh with cheerleaders and jocks, and heaven help you if you didn't know Star Trek from Star Wars. Nowadays some of my best friends are ranchers and hunters, some of whom don't even own a computer, and I'm just fine with that. They accept me even though I don't own any hunting gear or power tools (or know how to use them), and we get along fine. But it took decades of growing up to reach that point.
All of which is to say, my own anecdotal evidence confirms TFA.
Same with dBase (.dbf) files. Sometimes the customers who used our database programs discovered that they could browse the data in Excel, and if they tried to save changes... {shudder} good-bye, data.
If his algorithm only looks at pictures, "female and alive" seems to be about the level of his priorities. Mrs. Esophagus and I were already talking about marriage and children after a week of online, text-only chats before we ever knew what the other looked like.
You mean people still wear watches? How archaic! They'd have to record the micro-movements of my pants pocket where I keep my cell phone, which is the only thing I carry to tell time.
Well, I'm of two minds on this subject. I have never installed adblock and its ilk, because I know that "free" content comes at a cost. So as much as possible I sit through commercials from network TV's streamed shows, I allow sidebar ads to populate some screen real estate on websites, etc.
But I have my limits.
I don't feel guilty at all about skipping past ads more than 30 seconds long
I will do everything I can to block ad content that changes my browser's behavior (e.g., pop-up messages, float divisions that obscure the page content, etc.)
I will block ad content that takes up more than half my browser real estate
I suppose in the end that makes me no better than folks who aggressively block every single advertisement in any form -- "We already established what kind of woman you are; now we're just negotiating on the price". But it helps me sleep better at night knowing I'm at least willing to try to give them some of my attention in return for free content.
Soon, stand-up comedians in Mumbai will be complaining: "Have you tried getting a taxi lately? They're all like imitates midwestern American accent 'Howdy, folks, my name is Jim-Bob. Where can I take y'all today?' You can't understand a word they say!"
No. Any mechanism by which copyrights can be maintained forever will be abused. The DisneyCorps of the world will just automate the system to the point that long after human life is extinct, their computers will continue renewing copyright and submitting payments.
Why? Because if they ever let copyright lapse, even on property they doubt will ever make another dime, somebody else might make a profit off that work, and that would be money the copyright holders would feel they lost due to negligence.
How about this: Copyrights can be renewed periodically... by the original creator of the work. Make copyrights non-transferable, and no matter how stubborn and greedy the content creator is, that iron grip will die with him or her.
Slashdot Mirror
I realize that the OP's suggestion ("programmed to avoid getting in accidents and nothing else") was ridiculously oversimplified, but... that's no less ridiculous than the "dilemmas" presented in the game.
Scenario 1: Crash directly into a concrete barrier or into a crowd of people and cats. Really, there are no other possible outcomes at all? Not rapid controlled deceleration, not swerving off the road, nothing else comes to mind?
Come back to me when you have *realistic* scenarios.
Yes, exactly.
Personally, I don't like the acceleration very much unless I can get captioning to work at the accelerated speeds (works great on my Roku; on DVDs not so much). Instead I just fast-forward through the predictable boring scenes -- skip 5 minutes of scenic driving here, 2 minutes of overhead establishing shot there, 10 minutes of chopsocky fight scene, upwards of 15 minutes of characters agonizing over some trivial emotional trainwreck that doesn't advance the plot... I can easily see a movie or TV episode in half the production time just by skipping past the filler scenes that I don't care about.
You know what would be a hugely profitable business? Providing TL;DR (or is that TL;DW) truncated versions of movies.
I have a 2013 Prius, and that's been a constant problem.
On at least one occasion (that I know of), I was able to exit the vehicle and enter my house, taking my key with me, and even without the presence of the key the car remained in reverse. It was only the fact that it was parked on a slight upward (to the rear) incline with cinder blocks as a barrier (it's a rural neighborhood with no paved driveway or parking area, don't judge me) that prevented it from continuing to idle backwards into the outside stairwell in front of the house.
On at least one other occasion, I started to get out only to find the car continued moving backwards because it was not clearly signaling that it was still in reverse.
At the very least, they should prevent motion when the key is moved away from the vehicle.
It would be suicidal of them to implement ads though.
Some of us are old enough to remember when the whole point of cable TV was that by paying a fixed fee every month, we were spared the annoyance of ads.
It'll come. Sooner or later, probably sooner, streaming content will be just as ad-choked and invasive as broadcast TV and cable/dish services.
Why don't you try education and common sense?
Yes, that should do the trick.
Enraged Killer: I was going to go into that club and kill everyone whose behavior I find distasteful, but thanks be to my teachers who made me realize that violence is the wrong way to solve my problems!
My friends on the left say that the only solution is to ban all guns. My friends on the right say the only solution is to ban all immigrants. They're all looking for a one-size-fits-all easy answer to a complex problem. The thing is, society is messy. Another reply in this thread said that there aren't just good guys and bad guys; people are good sometimes and bad sometimes. That's exactly it. Banning guns won't work because (a) that genie has left the bottle and (2) criminals can always get guns, especially now that they can print them; banning immigrants won't work because (a) doing so would punish the innocent as well as the guilty, thus taking away the freedom that makes this country what it is and (2) criminals can always sneak in no matter how high we build the wall; education and common sense won't work because rage and fanaticism are toxic to common sense (see above hypothetical situation); more guns won't work because then you have a crowd of frightened, angry vigilantes firing into a random mix of killers and innocent bystanders. One of my friends mentioned a statistic today that for every attack thwarted by armed self-defense, 34 additional deaths occur because of armed self-defense.
You can't stop or even measurably reduce terrible things happening, because human beings are chaotic and irrational. The best we can do is find a balance of laws that prevent honest people from doing terrible things while they're thinking rationally, without stifling freedom so much that we are a police state. Too much regulation and even honest people will rebel against authoritarianism; too little regulation and criminals can get away with murder. The hard part is finding that balance between the two extremes.
Yup. I was able to teach my kids how to open and use QuickBASIC when they were little in the 90s. Now I'm not sure what approach I would use to teach a child actual coding (vs. moving stupid blocks around on a screen that PR flaks call "coding").
To answer the OP question (and agree with the GP of this reply), it was absolutely all self-taught, as were the additional languages I've picked up over the last 40 years.
Started with the TRS-80 in Radio Shack. I checked out "Basic BASIC" from the library and took it over to the mall every day after school, typing in all the exercises.
When they threw me out of Radio Shack, I moved over to Foley's where they had the shiny new Commodore PET on display. After I finished Basic BASIC, I moved on to Dave Ahl's BASIC Computer Games. I got to know the evening shift salesgeek pretty well and he let me spend all my time hogging the display computer. He would sometimes show me some cool hack and challenge me to figure out how he did it, such as POKEing directly into video memory for fast animation. I eventually bought my first computer* from that guy.
All of which is to say: Suck it, Radio Shack.
*The PET. Although Foley's also had an Altair on display, it was more expensive and all the blinkenlights frightened and confused me.
You know what would be even better? Combine Siri and Clippy.
"The researchers graded each sock and t-shirt on a scale of 0 (no malodor) to 10 (malodorous) by smelling them. "
Worst. Job. Ever.
And by deciding what is and what isn't religion, we are a step closer to a state religion.
This. I'm a fairly conservative evangelical Christian, and I agree with the judge that the guy in question is obviously just yanking the legislative chain for lulz, but... we can't establish a precedent for thoughtcrime. What the judge is trying to do is rule on what he believes the guy is thinking, and that is just not something you can demonstrate with hard evidence. As unlikely as it is, there is some minuscule chance that this guy totally missed the "ha ha this is satire" boat, read all the pastafarianism material as straight scripture, and truly believes in his heart what he says about the FSM. How can we objectively prove otherwise?
I mean, I'm not unaware that some of the things I believe involving an undead Jewish carpenter and an indefinable omniscient sentient being are pretty implausible from the outside. So I'm at a Martin Niemöller moment: "First they came for the pastafarians, but I didn't speak up because they obviously didn't truly believe such outlandish silliness..." When will the next judge decide that my beliefs don't represent a true religion?
So, yeah. I can't defend my own First Amendment rights unless I'm willing to defend those of someone who is most likely just cynically gaming the system.
Two different, and almost completely opposite, uses of the same expression. The FAA calls a "black box" a device that records your every movement, but in the techno geek world we use the phrase to describe impenetrable technology -- stuff goes in and stuff comes out, but we have no idea what happens in between. Tiny elves? Alien magic? Who knows? It sounds like Mr. Obama is using the latter concept -- he doesn't believe our phones should be so impenetrable and mysterious.
Obviously each of those releases includes compelling features that have been added. They wouldn't bump up the major version number for a few trivial tweaks and patches, would they?
The key to NOT being such a short hop away from everyone on the planet is to not let them into your life in the first place. Yes, some people -- perhaps even most of them -- will just blindly accept friend requests unconditionally, giving them thousands of "friends" who are just names on a list.
The only reason I touch Facebook at all, and then only with all of what flimsy privacy protection they offer enabled, is to easily keep contact with actual friends from that bizarre world called Real Life. With a handful of exceptions (because I telecommute and don't visit the home office often enough to meet all my colleagues face-to-face) all my friends on Facebook are people I have met in person and had more than a fleeting acquaintance with. I happily befriended Praneeth and Sasideep even though I have never met them in person being as how they are on the other side of the planet, but I work with them every day. On the other hand I'll probably never add Bob from accounting because my only contact with him in 25 years has been a question about a travel expense.
I don't accept requests from friends or relatives of my friends either, until I have met them in person. I'm sure my friend Paul's brother Ron is a great guy, but we have nothing to do with each other, no reason to speak to each other, no interest in each other's careers or families or hip surgery or lottery winnings.
Some of my friends feel the same way; others (mostly the younger ones, children of my peer group) go with the "friends with the world" approach. So I like to think I'm keeping my degrees of separation to an acceptably high number, and I intend to keep it that way as long as it is within my power.
The whole "free range kids" terminology makes it sound like a new fad, but it's a retronym meaning exactly the same thing as "regular kids" did 30+ years ago. When I was about 12 (which is to say, circa 1975) I regularly rode my bike to the nearest library in Houston... which according to Google Maps is just over 2 miles, most of which goes along one of the busiest streets in that suburb. If I missed the bus I would walk or ride my bike to school (2.2 miles) and I always walked or rode my bike to work at McDonald's (0.7 miles), even late at night.
Now GIT off my lawn, dagnabbit
My car went on a coast-to-coast trip without me and all I got was this lousy lawsuit.
"It looks like you're trying to merge from a right lane doing 35 MPH into the left lane doing 80MPH. I can help with that! But the speed limit is only 70, so we're going to make sure you don't violate any traffic laws."
As a recovering geek (at GA meetings we give out little pins to commemorate how many months or years we remain humble) I don't think your somewhat snarky reply is very far off. Here's my completely unqualified, half-assed armchair psychologist analysis...
Geeks tend to be on the high end of the scale for creativity which (based entirely on my observation of a very small and not at all random set of geeks including myself) usually but not always correlates with above-average intelligence. For whatever reason, that combination really does seem to produce some seriously unpleasant characteristics -- my friends and I took every opportunity to prove our superiority by being condescending to any non-geeks. I was especially harsh with cheerleaders and jocks, and heaven help you if you didn't know Star Trek from Star Wars. Nowadays some of my best friends are ranchers and hunters, some of whom don't even own a computer, and I'm just fine with that. They accept me even though I don't own any hunting gear or power tools (or know how to use them), and we get along fine. But it took decades of growing up to reach that point.
All of which is to say, my own anecdotal evidence confirms TFA.
Los Angeles is not just flirting with pre-crime; it's driving down streets known to have a pre-crime problem.
Same with dBase (.dbf) files. Sometimes the customers who used our database programs discovered that they could browse the data in Excel, and if they tried to save changes... {shudder} good-bye, data.
If his algorithm only looks at pictures, "female and alive" seems to be about the level of his priorities. Mrs. Esophagus and I were already talking about marriage and children after a week of online, text-only chats before we ever knew what the other looked like.
You mean people still wear watches? How archaic! They'd have to record the micro-movements of my pants pocket where I keep my cell phone, which is the only thing I carry to tell time.
Well, I'm of two minds on this subject. I have never installed adblock and its ilk, because I know that "free" content comes at a cost. So as much as possible I sit through commercials from network TV's streamed shows, I allow sidebar ads to populate some screen real estate on websites, etc.
But I have my limits.
I suppose in the end that makes me no better than folks who aggressively block every single advertisement in any form -- "We already established what kind of woman you are; now we're just negotiating on the price". But it helps me sleep better at night knowing I'm at least willing to try to give them some of my attention in return for free content.
Soon, stand-up comedians in Mumbai will be complaining: "Have you tried getting a taxi lately? They're all like imitates midwestern American accent 'Howdy, folks, my name is Jim-Bob. Where can I take y'all today?' You can't understand a word they say!"
No. Any mechanism by which copyrights can be maintained forever will be abused. The DisneyCorps of the world will just automate the system to the point that long after human life is extinct, their computers will continue renewing copyright and submitting payments.
Why? Because if they ever let copyright lapse, even on property they doubt will ever make another dime, somebody else might make a profit off that work, and that would be money the copyright holders would feel they lost due to negligence.
How about this: Copyrights can be renewed periodically... by the original creator of the work. Make copyrights non-transferable, and no matter how stubborn and greedy the content creator is, that iron grip will die with him or her.
With heated competition in the world to improve the performance of lasers...
I see what he did there.
Yeah. While I agree with his sentiment, his response was a bit excessive.
Hmmm, sounds like a good application for some kind of EMP emitter.