Yes, King George lost the colonies. No, the new rulers weren't any better.
The French just legitimized the rule of the French monarchy, ok so it took a bad turn but eventually they ended up with democracy.
They replaced an incompetent tool with Robespierre, who's rule earned the endearing nickname The Reign of Terror. Then he was replaced with Napoleon.
Then the Germans tried to take it away, twice, and both times the armed French resistance just legitimized the oppressive regimes didn't they.
So did French Resistance oust the Nazis? Of course not. How could it? The Nazis were experts in violence, and far stronger. Confronting them with violence was attacking a superior enemy at its strongest point. You can't out-evil the devil. You have to hit the weak point for maximum damage - in other words, don't blow up the tracks, but tell everyone in the train industry to get a cold simultaneously. Which is how you'd fight a civil war succesfully, BTW.
An armed resistance against an oppressive regime is very possible. In the US the government would fall in weeks were a national movement to rise against it.
Tzar's government in Russia fell to armed revolution. Would you say Comrade Stalin was an improvement? Because that's my point: it doesn't matter who's wearing the jackboot, it only matters that it's stomping on your face. Armed revolutions tend to favour people who aren't shy on using violence, thus the end result is almost always some form of military dictatorship that'll murder people en masse.
It's not a dream, it's not a fantasy, and it's not an RPG. It is real, and it is possible. Do I think it's just around the corner? Nope, we are nowhere near that point. But if we don't get some of the policies and laws of the last couple administrations (Clinton, Bush and Obama) repealed, it is going to get closer to that point.
And for all that, Snowden and Manning have actually done something towards overturning those, both through nonviolent means, while the militias have done nothing but posture.
Just that the British authorities are so worried about losing control over the serf's abilities to defend themselves that they have taken to making propaganda vids to scare them into remaining helpless.
Armed resistance is a godsent (devilsent?) for oppressive regimes, since it justifies tightening the "security" measures ever more. The US milking the War on Terror (and the War on Drugs, and the War on Whatever) for all its worth is a good example. Nonviolent resistance, on the other hand, is impossible to deal with. Sure, you can kill the protesters, but you'll also kill your own legitimacy. That's why every regime ever tries to pain its victims as violent extremists. And even if you win a violent revolution, chances are that you're replacing a Tzar with a Stalin.
The people who dream of taking down an oppressive regime with a violent uprising are in reality legitimazing that very regime by justifying its oppression as a sad necessity to ensure "security", rather than an inexcusible intrusion upon people's personal and collective rights. Stop being a tool to the system. Even if you don't have the guts to fight effectively, at the very least you can stop giving it excuses.
Alternatively, of course, you aren't being oppressed and are simply role-playing Red Dawn or something. In that case, could you please switch to D&D, just in case we ever do get an oppressive regime? Old habits die hard, after all, so why pick some that actually do leave you helpless.
IM not because it forces people to confront the edge-case uses of this tech. Better now than later.
The problem is that this can lead to comparing only edge cases, rather than typical cases. This can lead to situations like Germany choosing coal over nuclear in the name of environment: they compared wind power in optimal conditions to nuclear meltdown, then when real world was less than optimal defaulted to coal. Similarly, 3D printers could end up being banned due to the possibility of printing (crappy) guns with no regard to the typical case of printing artworks, spare parts or rapid prototypes.
And you should notice, that root causes for abuse are different.
No, they aren't. The root cause of all abuse is thinking other people are less important than your self, and as such can be treated worse than you. Once that step has been taken, the rest is just filling in the blanks.
Unless you have an abuse solving fairy grandmother, that can magically solve all abuse, I am all for differential approach for reducing violence.
So tell me, how does shit-talking on the Internet reduce violence? What particular form of abuse is it efficient at solving?
Please give specific examples where insults worked. We wouldn't want anyone to mistake the awesome concrete power of verbal diarrhea for a mere myth like the proverbial fairy godmother, after all.
What this system proposes is to vary the steering ratio with vehicle speed. I honestly have no idea how they plan to do this mechanically, unless they're going to eliminate the direct coupling between the steering and the front wheels, which sounds like a terrible idea to me
Some form of continuously variable transmission in the steering shaft, most likely. And it's still a bad idea, since more moving parts means a bigger chance of failure. I'd much rather take a simple straight shaft and just move my arms more, thank you very much.
Why is the idea of wanting to unplug our computers before bedtime so alien to everybody?
Nobody's stopping you from unplugging your computer, or are they? But this isn't about "we" can do. It's about other people doing things you don't like them to do, such as leaving their computers running performing work you deem unworthy.
Money is needed as a way for people to handle the flow of resources, not just for handling more money. Dollars can also be handled electronically. They do not consume natural resources when printed except for the piece of paper. A dollar doesn't derive its value from a scarcity of paper.
A dollar derives its value from the cmbination of a scarcity of dollars and the ability to give them to other people. Both scarcity and transferability require resources to maintain. In the case of dollars these amount to elaborate manufacturing process, armored deposit boxes, armored vehicles, guards, police, bank central computers, mailed checks, etc. In the case of Bitcoins they amount to the energy costs of Bitcoin mining, which is a lot cheaper.
Mining Bitcoins is environmentally destructive. As time goes on and the keys get exponentially sparser, the system nominally sustains expansion of its monetary base by surfing on Moore's Law forever- which is a failure point since electrical power is becoming the rate limiting factor to Bitcoin production.
Bitcoin monetary base has a fixed point where all the coins have been mined, it isn't going to expand forever. The real purpose of the mining process is to determine which log of transactions is the "official" version. Doing this algorithmically is far less destructive - enviromentally or otherwise - than doing it through physical force, as is done for the US dollar.
Bitcoins are a currency that requires cotinuous destruction of real resources just to sustain its monetary base.
This is true for all currencies, and for all systems for that matter. Entropy is merciless mistress, or alternatively a very efficient cleanup process.
It's not as simple as the "total energy consumed per dollar/Bitcoin transaction".
True, you also have to add the energy consumed by anti-counterfeiting and anti-theft operations.
We need bank branches because the public actually has dollars to put in them.
We need bank branches because our current economy is based on debt, and someone has to manage it. But the really fancy banks are simply investment firms that want public to cover their potential losses. The inability to tell those from actual banks is what ultimately caused the current economic crisis.
The inherent energy inefficiencies in transferring and handling ordinary money within bank branches is generally considered a nuisance, not a founding principle behind the currency's supposed value. People want dollars because they can be traded, not because finding them consumed someone a lot of work. The energy inefficiencies involved with handling money itself are generally considered to be a nuisance, something to avoid. but now we're sowing a new currency based on the kilowatt-hours that must be wasted by minting it. A Bitcoin economy makes resource scarcity worse to deal with, and it's a bad currency with no usefulness to the vast majority of us.
You are incorrect. The guarantees backing dollar ultimately depend on the US government being able to expend more energy - or work - than an attacker. This is inherent in fiat currencies, altough still a better deal than the idea of mining and then guarding gold.
Bitcoin is also based on the network being able to outpower an attacker. The difference is that with Bitcoin, every attack must take on the network as a whole. With dollars, you can find a bank or a store that is lax with enforceme
Also, if their mining power exceeded 50%, of the Bitcoin network: they might be able to cheat.
The fastest current supercomputer, according to Wikipedia, has a bit over 55 petaFLOPS. The Bitcoin network, on the other hand, has around 980,000 petaFLOPS, accordgint to Bitcoin charts. So that's a pretty big "if".
However, tapping foreign leader's phones is completely legal and every country on Earth does it -- disclosing this serves no purpose, Snowden has disclosed it because he believes he's qualified to morally arbitrate which US programs should be secret and which shouldn't.
If this is public knowledge, then what has Snowden disclosed? And if it isn't, what is your source? Are you simply projecting?
The US more and more resembles an alcoholic who gets all annoyed when someone doesn't keep up the charade. Man up, admit you have a problem and go to rehab or go the way all empires have before you. You might not get another chance, with various agencies tightening their internal security.
So they scan your arm, then a computer designs your prosthesis, and it is printed out on a 3D printer.
Or you can just mill it to specification. That process is already in use today. And even traditional assembly lines could be designed to switch the mold without stopping. With modern computer simulation capabilities to design them, you could potentially have unique assembly instructions accompany every part on the line.
If you want to class these people as trolls - these people who face discrimination every day, who are afraid to speak out on the internet because of what happens to women who do that, who deal with these creeps on buses and trains and in alleys day in and day out, who have a one in three chance of facing some form of abuse in their lives - then I'm ashamed to share the planet with you.
Every single person faces some form of abuse in their lives. Unless you're fantastically lucky, at least some of that abuse is violent. If you want to stop abuse against any particular group, such as women, you need to stop abuse in general. So how do you do that? Well, the iceberg model works here too: every small insult normalizes aggression towards other humans, which lowers the barrier against threats, which lower the barrier against actual violence and dehumanization, which lowers the barrier against institutionalized violence.
Go away and let the adults talk. We have a problem and people like you are making it worse.
Talk like an adult, then. You're part of the problem; your "go fuck yourself" and the attitude of condescending superiority is the fertile soil from which the rotten fruit grows.
And now we're stuck with an asshole too many, that thinks that people aren't entitled to their own opinion, no matter how subversive it may be.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. That doesn't mean you can't be judged by those opinions. Also, "The majority of parents who have children do so because" is not an opinion but a claim, an assertion about the factual state of affairs, for which the grandparent presented no evidence. And no, everyone is not entitled to their own facts.
So what's the police doing there? Enforcing the interest of a PRIVATE party?
I think it's about time we stop pretending mega-corporations are "private". I propose a threefold model: there's the "official" sector, composed of the institutions that are officially the part of the government structure, the "public" sector, composed of various non-governmental institutions (corporations, nonprofits, religious organizations, etc), and the "private" sector, composed of individuals.
Among other things, this would let us cleanly separate individuals controlling the official sector (good) and corporations controlling the official sector (bad). It would also let us have separate sets of rights for institutions and individuals, thus avoiding concepts like "corporate personhood" in its current, defective form.
Is there a fundamental reason why we cannot have free, anonymous file exchange?
Most people have things they don't want to have freely available (child porn, for example) and prioritize suppressing them over free availability of other things, thus they shy away from free, anonymous file exchanges.
That's the problem with anarchy in general: everyone's free to do what they want, including things I don't want them to do.
He is the one programming the destination. The one who ultimately decides whether the run is within the car's operational parameters.
Which, in practice, means checking the actually is a road where the map says it is, and there's enough fuel in the tank. The latter is trivial, and the first one is an absolute requirement for any kind of self-driving car.
I don't want to see a young child or an impaired adult making those decisions.
You haven't given any compelling reason why they would need to.
I learned to drive on country back roads
Which is irrelevant, since most people live in the city.
Why this steep narrow cut with an S-curve halfway down had earned its reputation as a suicide hill.
Presumably because humans suck at situational awareness and planning ahead.
The computer is clueless about compound cause-effect situations where prevention is better than reaction.
So are humans. Every single workplace safety program starts and ends with "stop and think what you're about to do before doing it". Our higher functions operate at the timespan of minutes, not fractions of a second. This is also the reason we have traffick laws: they turn driving from an activity requiring judgement into a mechanical exercise. When that fails, accidents follow.
You have it backwards. If the automated system can handle 90% of the situational dynamics of driving, you want the human to be able to override it when it's clearly about to get something wrong.
Apart from negating the entire reason one might want to get an automated vehicle in the first place, it's also not physically possible to stay alert and pay attention to a system - in this case traffick - that you aren't actively participating in. This means that you have no idea when the computer is about to do something wrong, much less what to do about it.
computers are faster, but humans have far better intellectual contextual awareness.
Humans have next to no intellectual contextual awareness in realtime situations. Various levels of automation drive your body, most social situations, and even activities usually considered intellectual, like math or programming. "Intellectual contextual awareness" is what you use to pick a career, and often not even then.
(is that a plastic bag or a big rock in the road?)
Is there a rock beneath the bag? You can't know. You can, however, guess there isn't and adjust your estimates about any future bags containing rocks should this one be harmless. That happens all the time, and is one of the numerous ways in which human rationality tends to break down.
and have an interest in survival, which makes up for their less consistent behavior.
No, it doesn't. Your survival instinct manifests as a bunch of reflexes, which do little to help (shielding yourself with your arms) or even need to be worked around (ABS brakes). It doesn't stop people from speeding or ignoring the road in favour of their cellphone, whereas a computer that's told to obey the speed limit will obey the speed limit.
'Safe' to you might be a computer controlled everything robot that makes gross, heuristic assumptions about the reality around it.. 'Safe' to me is a mechanically cabled accelerator, spring-loaded to drop to idle RPM if it breaks,
This being a good example of a gross, heuristic assumption. Your "safe" accelerator can be defeated by a cable jam, metal fatigue in the spring, or even a simple bit of sticky dirt on the cabin floor.
and a human with superior situational awareness capability who cares about his survival behind the wheel.
And this calling for something that doesn't exist.
Lets fix the human rather than hobble and distract him with more uselessly complex machines.
Rand shows that the victims of social programs have the right to reclaim whatever was taken from them by force.
Atlas Shrugged doesn't "show" anything except its author's personal beliefs any more than Mein Kampft does.
that a man receives his own money which was taken from him by force
His own money? By all means, keep any colourful rectangles you might have designed for your home-brewed version of Monopoly.
Oh, you meant US dollars? Even the gold-backed variant depend on both anti-counterfeiting features and active enforcement of anti-counterfeiting laws for any value. So how did you come by them? Oh my, they were the profits from a factory you own? Meaning your claim of ownership was dependent on real estate registry.
and they would not advance the cause of freedom if they left their money, unclaimed, for the benefit of the welfare-state administration.
This being the same welfare state that provided the elementary education for your work force? And built the roads that let them, raw materials and products to move in and out? Negotiated right-of-ways that allowed utilities to reach it? Enforced the contracts between you and the people who built it? Enforced your ownership rights when you were sleeping? Kept any foreign governments from invading and claiming it as spoils of war?
Tell me, honestly: do you simply want all the benefits of civilization while shouldering none of the cost? Or are you simply so short-sighted that you think you can remove everything that doesn't benefit you directly yet suffer no consequences in the long term?
First we hear how BitCoin rules because it side steps those evil governments and their rules and regulations.
No, it rules because it lets me buy things over the Internet without having to give my credit card number to people I don't know, and sell things over the Internet without requiring the approval or cooperation of credit card companies. It solves the "cash over Internet" problem; that it also helps stop any government that oversteps its bounds from cutting funding to Wikileaks or other watchdog organizations is a happy coincidence..
What buffoons. First its "The government is evil! We rule because we are outside their jurisdiction". Then when the completely obvious consequence of having an unregulated and anonymous system for monetary transactions happens its "Hey, what the ???? Someone has stolen our money! Quick! Call the police! Government, come save us!".
The same volcano that today provides you with fertile land to farm can burn down your home tomorrow; the same cells that make your blood may turn cancerous tomorrow; and the same government that fought the Nazis yesterday might wiretap your phone today yet still hunt a thief tomorrow. There's nothing buffoonish in praising the good and condemning the evil of any given entity. Indeed, any other approach would be at odds with reality itself to the point of being insane.
I personally don't want my money helping pay for your new car.
Well, you get to choose: help me pay for a new car, or pay to send your kids to be shot at in order to secure fuel for the old, or pay for my upkeep since I need a car to get to work, or pay for an army of guards to protect you since I'm not going to just die quietly.
Combine with their dislike of regulations in general,
Ask a Republican whether you should be allowed to ingest LSD or whether two men should be able to marry and you'll see how much he dislikes regulations.
No, right wing loves regulations that affect their neighbour and hates regulations that affect them. Just like all other human beings.
Do you think in this cut throat world that a CEO isn't already exhausting every resource he can muster in order to cap the damages on a loss before saying don't give us your business?
We're talking about CEOs, not clerks. If things go south, they'll just bail out on their golden parachutes and have their friends hire them somewhere else. Status quo serves them well, so they have every incentive to avoid rocking the boat.
It's a cutthroat world only for the expendables, not those doing the expending.
I still don't understand why the lethal injection isn't just a bunch of heroin that's been confiscated in the latest raid. People OD on heroin without being horribly uncomfortable.
Because the association with drugs might serve to bring the legitimacy of the institution of death penalty into question. Like all institutions, it too is primarily concerned with its own continuation, and does whatever it takes to ensure a steady stream of victims. Not out of any malice, mind you, but simply because it can't exist otherwise.
And it's not like it takes heroin to kill people painlessly. Nitrogen is a major industrual hazard precisely because it's a stealthy, quick killer. But it's too quick - there's no complex ritual involved, which would again threaten to delegitimaze the institution by showing it as what it is: a state murdering its own citizens.
tl;dr you can't expect rational behaviour from a fundamentally irrational institution.
Slashdot Mirror
Did most people notice a difference?
Yes, King George lost the colonies. No, the new rulers weren't any better.
They replaced an incompetent tool with Robespierre, who's rule earned the endearing nickname The Reign of Terror. Then he was replaced with Napoleon.
So did French Resistance oust the Nazis? Of course not. How could it? The Nazis were experts in violence, and far stronger. Confronting them with violence was attacking a superior enemy at its strongest point. You can't out-evil the devil. You have to hit the weak point for maximum damage - in other words, don't blow up the tracks, but tell everyone in the train industry to get a cold simultaneously. Which is how you'd fight a civil war succesfully, BTW.
Tzar's government in Russia fell to armed revolution. Would you say Comrade Stalin was an improvement? Because that's my point: it doesn't matter who's wearing the jackboot, it only matters that it's stomping on your face. Armed revolutions tend to favour people who aren't shy on using violence, thus the end result is almost always some form of military dictatorship that'll murder people en masse.
And for all that, Snowden and Manning have actually done something towards overturning those, both through nonviolent means, while the militias have done nothing but posture.
Indeed. The British government knows full well that unarmed people can't overcome it.
Armed resistance is a godsent (devilsent?) for oppressive regimes, since it justifies tightening the "security" measures ever more. The US milking the War on Terror (and the War on Drugs, and the War on Whatever) for all its worth is a good example. Nonviolent resistance, on the other hand, is impossible to deal with. Sure, you can kill the protesters, but you'll also kill your own legitimacy. That's why every regime ever tries to pain its victims as violent extremists. And even if you win a violent revolution, chances are that you're replacing a Tzar with a Stalin.
The people who dream of taking down an oppressive regime with a violent uprising are in reality legitimazing that very regime by justifying its oppression as a sad necessity to ensure "security", rather than an inexcusible intrusion upon people's personal and collective rights. Stop being a tool to the system. Even if you don't have the guts to fight effectively, at the very least you can stop giving it excuses.
Alternatively, of course, you aren't being oppressed and are simply role-playing Red Dawn or something. In that case, could you please switch to D&D, just in case we ever do get an oppressive regime? Old habits die hard, after all, so why pick some that actually do leave you helpless.
The problem is that this can lead to comparing only edge cases, rather than typical cases. This can lead to situations like Germany choosing coal over nuclear in the name of environment: they compared wind power in optimal conditions to nuclear meltdown, then when real world was less than optimal defaulted to coal. Similarly, 3D printers could end up being banned due to the possibility of printing (crappy) guns with no regard to the typical case of printing artworks, spare parts or rapid prototypes.
No, they aren't. The root cause of all abuse is thinking other people are less important than your self, and as such can be treated worse than you. Once that step has been taken, the rest is just filling in the blanks.
So tell me, how does shit-talking on the Internet reduce violence? What particular form of abuse is it efficient at solving?
Please give specific examples where insults worked. We wouldn't want anyone to mistake the awesome concrete power of verbal diarrhea for a mere myth like the proverbial fairy godmother, after all.
Some form of continuously variable transmission in the steering shaft, most likely. And it's still a bad idea, since more moving parts means a bigger chance of failure. I'd much rather take a simple straight shaft and just move my arms more, thank you very much.
Nobody's stopping you from unplugging your computer, or are they? But this isn't about "we" can do. It's about other people doing things you don't like them to do, such as leaving their computers running performing work you deem unworthy.
A dollar derives its value from the cmbination of a scarcity of dollars and the ability to give them to other people. Both scarcity and transferability require resources to maintain. In the case of dollars these amount to elaborate manufacturing process, armored deposit boxes, armored vehicles, guards, police, bank central computers, mailed checks, etc. In the case of Bitcoins they amount to the energy costs of Bitcoin mining, which is a lot cheaper.
Bitcoin monetary base has a fixed point where all the coins have been mined, it isn't going to expand forever. The real purpose of the mining process is to determine which log of transactions is the "official" version. Doing this algorithmically is far less destructive - enviromentally or otherwise - than doing it through physical force, as is done for the US dollar.
This is true for all currencies, and for all systems for that matter. Entropy is merciless mistress, or alternatively a very efficient cleanup process.
True, you also have to add the energy consumed by anti-counterfeiting and anti-theft operations.
We need bank branches because our current economy is based on debt, and someone has to manage it. But the really fancy banks are simply investment firms that want public to cover their potential losses. The inability to tell those from actual banks is what ultimately caused the current economic crisis.
You are incorrect. The guarantees backing dollar ultimately depend on the US government being able to expend more energy - or work - than an attacker. This is inherent in fiat currencies, altough still a better deal than the idea of mining and then guarding gold.
Bitcoin is also based on the network being able to outpower an attacker. The difference is that with Bitcoin, every attack must take on the network as a whole. With dollars, you can find a bank or a store that is lax with enforceme
The fastest current supercomputer, according to Wikipedia, has a bit over 55 petaFLOPS. The Bitcoin network, on the other hand, has around 980,000 petaFLOPS, accordgint to Bitcoin charts. So that's a pretty big "if".
If this is public knowledge, then what has Snowden disclosed? And if it isn't, what is your source? Are you simply projecting?
The US more and more resembles an alcoholic who gets all annoyed when someone doesn't keep up the charade. Man up, admit you have a problem and go to rehab or go the way all empires have before you. You might not get another chance, with various agencies tightening their internal security.
Your soul contains recordings of copyrighted works. Also, it's possible its subroutines may contain patented algorithms.
Don't copy that ghostly.
Or you can just mill it to specification. That process is already in use today. And even traditional assembly lines could be designed to switch the mold without stopping. With modern computer simulation capabilities to design them, you could potentially have unique assembly instructions accompany every part on the line.
Every single person faces some form of abuse in their lives. Unless you're fantastically lucky, at least some of that abuse is violent. If you want to stop abuse against any particular group, such as women, you need to stop abuse in general. So how do you do that? Well, the iceberg model works here too: every small insult normalizes aggression towards other humans, which lowers the barrier against threats, which lower the barrier against actual violence and dehumanization, which lowers the barrier against institutionalized violence.
Talk like an adult, then. You're part of the problem; your "go fuck yourself" and the attitude of condescending superiority is the fertile soil from which the rotten fruit grows.
The specific fact chosen seems to be that you get better at things you practice. That's not exactly an outlandish proposal.
Please explain why this idea is "shit"?
Please explain why this shouldn't be normal?
Please explain why you find this notion disgusting?
Beliefs are memetic, not genetic. Having children is irrelevant to your ability to influence culture.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. That doesn't mean you can't be judged by those opinions. Also, "The majority of parents who have children do so because" is not an opinion but a claim, an assertion about the factual state of affairs, for which the grandparent presented no evidence. And no, everyone is not entitled to their own facts.
So... does that mean we'll be seeing an Conservative Atlas Shrugged Rewrite Project soon?
I think it's about time we stop pretending mega-corporations are "private". I propose a threefold model: there's the "official" sector, composed of the institutions that are officially the part of the government structure, the "public" sector, composed of various non-governmental institutions (corporations, nonprofits, religious organizations, etc), and the "private" sector, composed of individuals.
Among other things, this would let us cleanly separate individuals controlling the official sector (good) and corporations controlling the official sector (bad). It would also let us have separate sets of rights for institutions and individuals, thus avoiding concepts like "corporate personhood" in its current, defective form.
Most people have things they don't want to have freely available (child porn, for example) and prioritize suppressing them over free availability of other things, thus they shy away from free, anonymous file exchanges.
That's the problem with anarchy in general: everyone's free to do what they want, including things I don't want them to do.
Which, in practice, means checking the actually is a road where the map says it is, and there's enough fuel in the tank. The latter is trivial, and the first one is an absolute requirement for any kind of self-driving car.
You haven't given any compelling reason why they would need to.
Which is irrelevant, since most people live in the city.
Presumably because humans suck at situational awareness and planning ahead.
So are humans. Every single workplace safety program starts and ends with "stop and think what you're about to do before doing it". Our higher functions operate at the timespan of minutes, not fractions of a second. This is also the reason we have traffick laws: they turn driving from an activity requiring judgement into a mechanical exercise. When that fails, accidents follow.
Apart from negating the entire reason one might want to get an automated vehicle in the first place, it's also not physically possible to stay alert and pay attention to a system - in this case traffick - that you aren't actively participating in. This means that you have no idea when the computer is about to do something wrong, much less what to do about it.
Humans have next to no intellectual contextual awareness in realtime situations. Various levels of automation drive your body, most social situations, and even activities usually considered intellectual, like math or programming. "Intellectual contextual awareness" is what you use to pick a career, and often not even then.
Is there a rock beneath the bag? You can't know. You can, however, guess there isn't and adjust your estimates about any future bags containing rocks should this one be harmless. That happens all the time, and is one of the numerous ways in which human rationality tends to break down.
No, it doesn't. Your survival instinct manifests as a bunch of reflexes, which do little to help (shielding yourself with your arms) or even need to be worked around (ABS brakes). It doesn't stop people from speeding or ignoring the road in favour of their cellphone, whereas a computer that's told to obey the speed limit will obey the speed limit.
This being a good example of a gross, heuristic assumption. Your "safe" accelerator can be defeated by a cable jam, metal fatigue in the spring, or even a simple bit of sticky dirt on the cabin floor.
And this calling for something that doesn't exist.
And how would you go about "fixing" humans?
Atlas Shrugged doesn't "show" anything except its author's personal beliefs any more than Mein Kampft does.
His own money? By all means, keep any colourful rectangles you might have designed for your home-brewed version of Monopoly.
Oh, you meant US dollars? Even the gold-backed variant depend on both anti-counterfeiting features and active enforcement of anti-counterfeiting laws for any value. So how did you come by them? Oh my, they were the profits from a factory you own? Meaning your claim of ownership was dependent on real estate registry.
This being the same welfare state that provided the elementary education for your work force? And built the roads that let them, raw materials and products to move in and out? Negotiated right-of-ways that allowed utilities to reach it? Enforced the contracts between you and the people who built it? Enforced your ownership rights when you were sleeping? Kept any foreign governments from invading and claiming it as spoils of war?
Tell me, honestly: do you simply want all the benefits of civilization while shouldering none of the cost? Or are you simply so short-sighted that you think you can remove everything that doesn't benefit you directly yet suffer no consequences in the long term?
No, it rules because it lets me buy things over the Internet without having to give my credit card number to people I don't know, and sell things over the Internet without requiring the approval or cooperation of credit card companies. It solves the "cash over Internet" problem; that it also helps stop any government that oversteps its bounds from cutting funding to Wikileaks or other watchdog organizations is a happy coincidence..
The same volcano that today provides you with fertile land to farm can burn down your home tomorrow; the same cells that make your blood may turn cancerous tomorrow; and the same government that fought the Nazis yesterday might wiretap your phone today yet still hunt a thief tomorrow. There's nothing buffoonish in praising the good and condemning the evil of any given entity. Indeed, any other approach would be at odds with reality itself to the point of being insane.
Well, you get to choose: help me pay for a new car, or pay to send your kids to be shot at in order to secure fuel for the old, or pay for my upkeep since I need a car to get to work, or pay for an army of guards to protect you since I'm not going to just die quietly.
Life's full of hard choices, isn't it?
Ask a Republican whether you should be allowed to ingest LSD or whether two men should be able to marry and you'll see how much he dislikes regulations.
No, right wing loves regulations that affect their neighbour and hates regulations that affect them. Just like all other human beings.
We're talking about CEOs, not clerks. If things go south, they'll just bail out on their golden parachutes and have their friends hire them somewhere else. Status quo serves them well, so they have every incentive to avoid rocking the boat.
It's a cutthroat world only for the expendables, not those doing the expending.
Because the association with drugs might serve to bring the legitimacy of the institution of death penalty into question. Like all institutions, it too is primarily concerned with its own continuation, and does whatever it takes to ensure a steady stream of victims. Not out of any malice, mind you, but simply because it can't exist otherwise.
And it's not like it takes heroin to kill people painlessly. Nitrogen is a major industrual hazard precisely because it's a stealthy, quick killer. But it's too quick - there's no complex ritual involved, which would again threaten to delegitimaze the institution by showing it as what it is: a state murdering its own citizens.
tl;dr you can't expect rational behaviour from a fundamentally irrational institution.