A man threatens a convenience store owner with a gun. Tell me again how it matters what "race" he is? He is of the "race" of people who will threaten to kill you with weapons for whatever reason. That's really enough for me.
I'm going to explain this nice and slowly because it's clear that you're a simpleton.
A white guy threatens a convenience store owner with a gun, and kills him. He gets life.
A black guy threatens a convenience store owner with a gun, and kills him. He gets death.
That and the fact that it rarely works, unless by "rehabilitation" you mean "execution" which is 100% effective and which I would recommend for all armed robbers, con men and wealthy people who double-park.
Oh really? And how, pray tell, does executing predominantly black people, many of whom may be innocent, prevent crime?
The incentives of the system reward high occupancy. If there were more funding for wardens and prisons who had lower recidivism rates then there'd be less of a clamour for tougher sentencing laws funded by the prison industrial complex, America wouldn't have such an obscenely high incarceration rate, and there'd be a lot less crime committed by inmates after release since there would have been more investment in rehabilitation.
Most people get the market case for automatic driving wrong. It's not for driving on freeways. It's for driving your car without you, to and from parking. You drive to where you want to go, and then your car goes off and parks somewhere. When you want your car back, you call it, and it comes to you. Malls, airports, and downtowns equipped for this will be very popular.
Parking gets cheaper, because it can be further away, stacked higher, and not on high-value land. Automatic cars aren't bothered by having to drive to level 14 of the parking structure.
"Vending machine" type parking (or whatever it's called) solves the same problem without having to develop a self-driving car.
... who just isn't in a rush when I'm driving. I just leave on time to get where I'm going.
I sit in the right lane on cruise control, listen to the radio, and relax while all the speeders to my left are constantly sweating and looking around for cops.
I agree. But there's a number of bigger points that are being missed here.
1 - Both TFAs talk about how the popularity of the car in America is a product of a national culture that prizes individual liberty over collective cooperation. I say it's a relatively recent phenomenon and a product of industry-sponsored government interference in how cities have been allowed to grow. At the behest of automotive interests* single-use zoning ordinances have shaped a lot of the post 1950s growth of American cities whereby people are forced to drive to get between daily needs and mass transit has become impractical. Yet prior to then Americans never had a problem with mass transit, nor do they have a problem with it in older high-density walkable cities like San Francisco (home of the beloved cable cars) and New York where the subway makes Manhattan feel like one big easily-accessible playground. There's nothing "un-American" (how I hate that word) about these iconic and most American of cities. Getting the subway and walking to the building where you take an elevator to your office in the sky is as American as apple pie, not some pinko liberal European idea that will never take off here.
2 - American culture seems to be heavily influenced by the "silver bullet" idea. It's as if technology/gadgets/pills are the solution to all of our problems. We can be as lazy and inefficient as we like, and then some technical solution will come along and put everything right without any effort from us. We can have our cake and eat it. We can eat all the junk food we like and then take a magic pill that will burn the fat off. We can continue to build our cities in ugly inefficient sprawling patterns, but when the inevitable gridlock emerges we can just build wider and wider roads. When that doesn't seem to work we can tinker with the traffic lights to give us synchronized signals. When that doesn't work we can just build self-driving cars so we can read the paper while we get to work and not have to look at the congestion we're creating. The self-driving car as the solution to all of our traffic woes is just another attempt to make that elusive silver bullet and save us the trouble of taking a long hard look at our wasteful settlement patterns and why we're creating so much traffic in the first place.
3 - They are correct that speed limits can be increased if safety is improved. Germany has very stringent standards when it comes to obtaining a driver's license. They have a culture in which people obey the rules to the letter. For those reasons (and because they're only two lanes in each direction and hence you can't always get up to a very high speed) they can afford to have autobahns with no speed limits. However, that works in a reasonably self-contained area like Germany in which just about everyone is on the same page. Drop a few California drivers into the middle of it and it becomes a bit more dangerous since Californians only have to drive around the block in their driving test. Self-driving cars would be great if they were only on a road with other self-driving cars (like in Minority Report) but mixing them up with manual drivers makes it a bit more complicated. You can't have a 90MPH limit for self-drivers and a 65MPH limit for manual drivers on the same road. The only way I could see self-drivers working would be in dedicated freeway lanes by the median, but getting those things built is going to be a political minefield.
*As recently as a few months ago I saw this in action at first hand. Our city council was voting on whether to go ahead with a feasibility study on Bus Rapid Transit on a busy road that would have entailed removing two traffic lanes in favour of dedicated bus lanes. During the public comments section of the meeting over two dozen people spoke in favour of the proposal and about five spoke against it. Some who spoke against it were Tea Party types, but three of them were car dealers who claimed that they would lose customers and hence the city would lose tax revenue if the dedicated lanes were installed. The council voted 4 to 3 against the proposal, the swing vote was decided by the Mayor who cited the exaggerated concerns of the car dealers. It was like the destruction of LA's trolley system all over again.
Why? Cyclists never pay attention to traffic lights anyway.
And motorists never pay attention to speed limits or cellphone/texting laws, never stop on red until at least tho seconds after the light turns red, nor do they ever come to a complete stop at stop signs. Point...?
Yup. The light on top (which originally was a gas light but was later electrified) was a remotely-operated signal to bobbies on the beat that they had to call the station for instructions.
On a related note, have you ever wondered what that Police Public Call Box thing is that The Doctor uses to travel through space and time? I used to wonder too. It wasn't until I went to Edinburgh that I saw them and other objects that looked like them. I remember jumping out of my seat and saying "There's a Tardis!"
Well apparently they had a phone accessible from the outside that the public could use to call the cops in an emergency. Cops would have access to the inside where they could go in and hang their hat, hold a prisoner while help came, and effectively use it as a mini police station. Some of them remain and have been re-purposed for other uses like coffee shops or news stands. There were a lot of designs and didn't seem to standardize like the classic red phone box did.
Cities like Manchester, Glasgow and Liverpool have updated the concept with "help points", little computerized kiosks that are under CCTV surveillance and have a direct line to the police. It'd be cool if they could introduce the modern functionality but contain it in the form of the old 1929 Mackenzie Trench design that was popularized by Doctor Who.
Er, that is the article I'm quoting from. Scroll down to Figure 3 and you'll see precisely what I'm talking about. Please read the whole fucking article before rushing to an uneducated judgement.
The article raises the obvious problems of maintaining a vacuum and the inevitable costs that go with it. But it also raised safety concerns based on the idea that these trains would be carrying passengers. Why would you make that assumption? This would be great for freight if you could pull it off. You could scale it down a bit so that the "series of tubes" have just a big enough diameter to hold a standardized container about the size of a forklift pallet-load. Would shave a considerable amount of cost off drilling and maintenance, although could be a tight squeeze during construction if you were to need people in the tunnels to operate any of the machinery.
Will never happen because: one- The United States is broke. They pissed away all their money on permanent unwinnable wars, housing scams, and Wall-Street bank bailouts. The idea that they would be able to spend trillions of dollars to build 1000 mile long tubes to convey peasants across North America at 4000 MPH is absurd.
two: Present company excepted, but Americans are technologically incompetent at long-term projects. All their bridges and highways are in disrepair, and they can't even get 50MPH trains to run competently. Didn't they once even have a space program?
three: What's the point of moving thousands of people around? For every person in one place, there is a another person in just like them in any place that you would send them to.
four: Walk to any corner and there's a McDonalds, a Bank of America, a Chevron gas station, and a Starbucks. Travel a thousand miles in any direction and you're on a corner with a McDonalds, a Bank of America, a Chevron gas station, and a Starbucks. What's the point of travel?
On a point of order: "It will never happen" != "It will never happen in the USA."
That's a good point actually. I remember when texting when driving was no big deal because you could do it without looking at the phone and keep your eyes on the road, but in the smartphone age you have to look at the damn thing. Maybe someone will invent an interface that has the flexibility of a touchscreen but also has the tactile feel of traditional buttons.
In addition - to the editor, or lack thereof, who allowed, or ignored, the article submission above - complete with excessive, overuse, of commas, and dashes - such as these - used excessively, to excess, throughout the submission - please stop.
Your ass. Commas, when used correctly, make long sentences a lot more readable. Using an unusually high number of commas in a particular piece of writing is not grammatically incorrect, nor is it stylistically incorrect. Sure there were a lot of commas in the submission, but they didn't get in the way of readability and they were not excessive.
It was also nice to see the correct use of dashes. What you indicated in your snarky comment was not dashes, they are hyphens. The dash is something of an endangered punctuation mark. Pity.
Home theaters are just begging for simplification – and I don’t expect that Microsoft will be the one to deliver.
Preach it brother! I was staying in a hotel in LA recently and had to call the front desk to send someone up to show me how to switch the bloody TV on. And I'm an engineer! (Had to press the TV button before holding down the Power button on the remote, by default it just affects the cable box.) The single remote with a squillion buttons is just not cutting it. If it were an Apple product it would have almost no buttons and a simple touchscreen interface. In fact it'd probably be a modified iPod Touch. TV listings would probably be viewable on the remote rather than blocking your view of what you're watching on the telly, and recording stuff to DVR would be a snap.
it's fair to argue that attempting to innovate everywhere can often result in innovation nowhere. A big part of the reason Apple has been so successful is that they devote the bulk of their attention to only a few select market areas. By trying to innovate everywhere, so to speak, Microsoft runs the continued risk of spreading itself too thin and not really having a fundamental impact in any one market.
Doesn't seem to stop Google. Lots of companies have diverse portfolios and still manage to be successful. Look at those giant Korean industrial outfits like Hyundai and Daewoo. I suspect that corporate culture plays a bigger role.
On a more stylistic point:
let's be honest. Sure,... Granted,... If anything,... "too little too late" And it goes without saying that... Now,... you can't deny... it was abundantly clear it's fair to argue that
If I submitted an article with this many clichés and redundant filler I'd expect my editor to send it back to me and tell me to clean it up.
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A man threatens a convenience store owner with a gun. Tell me again how it matters what "race" he is? He is of the "race" of people who will threaten to kill you with weapons for whatever reason. That's really enough for me.
I'm going to explain this nice and slowly because it's clear that you're a simpleton.
A white guy threatens a convenience store owner with a gun, and kills him. He gets life.
A black guy threatens a convenience store owner with a gun, and kills him. He gets death.
See the difference?
That and the fact that it rarely works, unless by "rehabilitation" you mean "execution" which is 100% effective and which I would recommend for all armed robbers, con men and wealthy people who double-park.
Oh really? And how, pray tell, does executing predominantly black people, many of whom may be innocent, prevent crime?
The incentives of the system reward high occupancy. If there were more funding for wardens and prisons who had lower recidivism rates then there'd be less of a clamour for tougher sentencing laws funded by the prison industrial complex, America wouldn't have such an obscenely high incarceration rate, and there'd be a lot less crime committed by inmates after release since there would have been more investment in rehabilitation.
Most people get the market case for automatic driving wrong. It's not for driving on freeways. It's for driving your car without you, to and from parking. You drive to where you want to go, and then your car goes off and parks somewhere. When you want your car back, you call it, and it comes to you. Malls, airports, and downtowns equipped for this will be very popular.
Parking gets cheaper, because it can be further away, stacked higher, and not on high-value land. Automatic cars aren't bothered by having to drive to level 14 of the parking structure.
"Vending machine" type parking (or whatever it's called) solves the same problem without having to develop a self-driving car.
... who just isn't in a rush when I'm driving. I just leave on time to get where I'm going.
I sit in the right lane on cruise control, listen to the radio, and relax while all the speeders to my left are constantly sweating and looking around for cops.
I agree. But there's a number of bigger points that are being missed here.
1 - Both TFAs talk about how the popularity of the car in America is a product of a national culture that prizes individual liberty over collective cooperation. I say it's a relatively recent phenomenon and a product of industry-sponsored government interference in how cities have been allowed to grow. At the behest of automotive interests* single-use zoning ordinances have shaped a lot of the post 1950s growth of American cities whereby people are forced to drive to get between daily needs and mass transit has become impractical. Yet prior to then Americans never had a problem with mass transit, nor do they have a problem with it in older high-density walkable cities like San Francisco (home of the beloved cable cars) and New York where the subway makes Manhattan feel like one big easily-accessible playground. There's nothing "un-American" (how I hate that word) about these iconic and most American of cities. Getting the subway and walking to the building where you take an elevator to your office in the sky is as American as apple pie, not some pinko liberal European idea that will never take off here.
2 - American culture seems to be heavily influenced by the "silver bullet" idea. It's as if technology/gadgets/pills are the solution to all of our problems. We can be as lazy and inefficient as we like, and then some technical solution will come along and put everything right without any effort from us. We can have our cake and eat it. We can eat all the junk food we like and then take a magic pill that will burn the fat off. We can continue to build our cities in ugly inefficient sprawling patterns, but when the inevitable gridlock emerges we can just build wider and wider roads. When that doesn't seem to work we can tinker with the traffic lights to give us synchronized signals. When that doesn't work we can just build self-driving cars so we can read the paper while we get to work and not have to look at the congestion we're creating. The self-driving car as the solution to all of our traffic woes is just another attempt to make that elusive silver bullet and save us the trouble of taking a long hard look at our wasteful settlement patterns and why we're creating so much traffic in the first place.
3 - They are correct that speed limits can be increased if safety is improved. Germany has very stringent standards when it comes to obtaining a driver's license. They have a culture in which people obey the rules to the letter. For those reasons (and because they're only two lanes in each direction and hence you can't always get up to a very high speed) they can afford to have autobahns with no speed limits. However, that works in a reasonably self-contained area like Germany in which just about everyone is on the same page. Drop a few California drivers into the middle of it and it becomes a bit more dangerous since Californians only have to drive around the block in their driving test. Self-driving cars would be great if they were only on a road with other self-driving cars (like in Minority Report) but mixing them up with manual drivers makes it a bit more complicated. You can't have a 90MPH limit for self-drivers and a 65MPH limit for manual drivers on the same road. The only way I could see self-drivers working would be in dedicated freeway lanes by the median, but getting those things built is going to be a political minefield.
*As recently as a few months ago I saw this in action at first hand. Our city council was voting on whether to go ahead with a feasibility study on Bus Rapid Transit on a busy road that would have entailed removing two traffic lanes in favour of dedicated bus lanes. During the public comments section of the meeting over two dozen people spoke in favour of the proposal and about five spoke against it. Some who spoke against it were Tea Party types, but three of them were car dealers who claimed that they would lose customers and hence the city would lose tax revenue if the dedicated lanes were installed. The council voted 4 to 3 against the proposal, the swing vote was decided by the Mayor who cited the exaggerated concerns of the car dealers. It was like the destruction of LA's trolley system all over again.
All 3 routes given avoid the steep, twisty, tight road that those Iron-man-wanna-be try to get themselves run over during rush hour on. Excellent.
Safety? Not so much.
Route still includes stop signs, which I'm pretty sure are invisible to people on bicycles.
Well they must be made of the same material as speed limit signs that seem to be invisible to motorists.
Dickhead.
Why? Cyclists never pay attention to traffic lights anyway.
And motorists never pay attention to speed limits or cellphone/texting laws, never stop on red until at least tho seconds after the light turns red, nor do they ever come to a complete stop at stop signs. Point...?
Yup. The light on top (which originally was a gas light but was later electrified) was a remotely-operated signal to bobbies on the beat that they had to call the station for instructions.
On a related note, have you ever wondered what that Police Public Call Box thing is that The Doctor uses to travel through space and time? I used to wonder too. It wasn't until I went to Edinburgh that I saw them and other objects that looked like them. I remember jumping out of my seat and saying "There's a Tardis!"
Well apparently they had a phone accessible from the outside that the public could use to call the cops in an emergency. Cops would have access to the inside where they could go in and hang their hat, hold a prisoner while help came, and effectively use it as a mini police station. Some of them remain and have been re-purposed for other uses like coffee shops or news stands. There were a lot of designs and didn't seem to standardize like the classic red phone box did.
Cities like Manchester, Glasgow and Liverpool have updated the concept with "help points", little computerized kiosks that are under CCTV surveillance and have a direct line to the police. It'd be cool if they could introduce the modern functionality but contain it in the form of the old 1929 Mackenzie Trench design that was popularized by Doctor Who.
Tree hugger luddites sing same old tune; Losing my religion.
(Don't mod it if you don't understand it.)
Show me anyone who fully understands REM's lyrics.
"Global Temperatures Were a Falling Trend."
The long term graphs in TFA show a long term decline, but they all still kick up sharply at the end when we get to the industrial age.
Please look at more than one picture before rushing to an uneducated judgement.
The whole article is here: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1589.html
Er, that is the article I'm quoting from. Scroll down to Figure 3 and you'll see precisely what I'm talking about. Please read the whole fucking article before rushing to an uneducated judgement.
The article raises the obvious problems of maintaining a vacuum and the inevitable costs that go with it. But it also raised safety concerns based on the idea that these trains would be carrying passengers. Why would you make that assumption? This would be great for freight if you could pull it off. You could scale it down a bit so that the "series of tubes" have just a big enough diameter to hold a standardized container about the size of a forklift pallet-load. Would shave a considerable amount of cost off drilling and maintenance, although could be a tight squeeze during construction if you were to need people in the tunnels to operate any of the machinery.
Will never happen because:
one- The United States is broke. They pissed away all their money on permanent unwinnable wars, housing scams, and Wall-Street bank bailouts. The idea that they would be able to spend trillions of dollars to build 1000 mile long tubes to convey peasants across North America at 4000 MPH is absurd.
two: Present company excepted, but Americans are technologically incompetent at long-term projects. All their bridges and highways are in disrepair, and they can't even get 50MPH trains to run competently. Didn't they once even have a space program?
three: What's the point of moving thousands of people around? For every person in one place, there is a another person in just like them in any place that you would send them to.
four: Walk to any corner and there's a McDonalds, a Bank of America, a Chevron gas station, and a Starbucks. Travel a thousand miles in any direction and you're on a corner with a McDonalds, a Bank of America, a Chevron gas station, and a Starbucks. What's the point of travel?
On a point of order: "It will never happen" != "It will never happen in the USA."
We're terrible at predicting weather beyond 7 days, so what makes us think we can predict climate (weather's progenitor) with any more reliability?
I give up.
I don't think we're very good at predicting the weather...
"Weather"?
"Global Temperatures Were a Falling Trend."
The long term graphs in TFA show a long term decline, but they all still kick up sharply at the end when we get to the industrial age.
That's a good point actually. I remember when texting when driving was no big deal because you could do it without looking at the phone and keep your eyes on the road, but in the smartphone age you have to look at the damn thing. Maybe someone will invent an interface that has the flexibility of a touchscreen but also has the tactile feel of traditional buttons.
In addition - to the editor, or lack thereof, who allowed, or ignored, the article submission above - complete with excessive, overuse, of commas, and dashes - such as these - used excessively, to excess, throughout the submission - please stop.
Your ass. Commas, when used correctly, make long sentences a lot more readable. Using an unusually high number of commas in a particular piece of writing is not grammatically incorrect, nor is it stylistically incorrect. Sure there were a lot of commas in the submission, but they didn't get in the way of readability and they were not excessive.
It was also nice to see the correct use of dashes. What you indicated in your snarky comment was not dashes, they are hyphens. The dash is something of an endangered punctuation mark. Pity.
Please mod this entire fucking thread offtopic before it engulfs a potentially interesting discussion about Titan.
As they say in Texas, Microsoft is all hat and no cattle.
Or quoth Paul Keating, former Australian Prime Minister, talking about one of his opponents: "He's all tip and no iceberg."
Home theaters are just begging for simplification – and I don’t expect that Microsoft will be the one to deliver.
Preach it brother! I was staying in a hotel in LA recently and had to call the front desk to send someone up to show me how to switch the bloody TV on. And I'm an engineer! (Had to press the TV button before holding down the Power button on the remote, by default it just affects the cable box.) The single remote with a squillion buttons is just not cutting it. If it were an Apple product it would have almost no buttons and a simple touchscreen interface. In fact it'd probably be a modified iPod Touch. TV listings would probably be viewable on the remote rather than blocking your view of what you're watching on the telly, and recording stuff to DVR would be a snap.
it's fair to argue that attempting to innovate everywhere can often result in innovation nowhere. A big part of the reason Apple has been so successful is that they devote the bulk of their attention to only a few select market areas. By trying to innovate everywhere, so to speak, Microsoft runs the continued risk of spreading itself too thin and not really having a fundamental impact in any one market.
Doesn't seem to stop Google. Lots of companies have diverse portfolios and still manage to be successful. Look at those giant Korean industrial outfits like Hyundai and Daewoo. I suspect that corporate culture plays a bigger role.
On a more stylistic point:
let's be honest.
Sure,...
Granted,...
If anything,...
"too little too late"
And it goes without saying that...
Now,...
you can't deny...
it was abundantly clear
it's fair to argue that
If I submitted an article with this many clichés and redundant filler I'd expect my editor to send it back to me and tell me to clean it up.
What's Bing?
Google it.