What has NASA ever gotten us? I always see huge lists like more comfortable chairs (memory foam) and shoes, but industry would have invented those anyway. Satellites? Legit; nobody sane was ever going to build space launch shit on private money. Other than that, piles and piles of junk, and some history.
Skip NASA. Move their funding over to something like a National Institute of Health, and take up researching new medical treatments and drugs. Release all that shit to the public. If you're into social democracy, issue a $1 tax per prescription filled or treatment carried out to give the government revenue; if not, release them to the public domain so we can have new $4 generics.
We need to take that kind of thing out of the hands of Pfeizer. The US got it wrong: we don't need public healthcare; we need public health research. Let the private sector handle healthcare; we can revisit the issue when our healthcare system isn't a weedy mess of overpriced, ineffective bullshit. I do support regulations to force hospitals to provide free clinical care, with staffed clinician hours based on their size, and distribution based on the saturation of healthcare facilities in their area (i.e. more hospitals, wider spread of clinics); but the immediate economic issues of healthcare aren't "how do patients pay for cancer treatment?", but rather "how do we get the best, least expensive cancer treatment to the people?"
I think it's more a matter of that the phone was in a particular cell than that the call was made.
I would like to see cell-tracking technology whereby a phone never reports its ID when idle and pinging tower. I'd like to see the tower push three bloom filters on ping, one of all predicted to be in the cell, one of all predicted to be in the area (surrounding cells), and one of all in the system.
For a flat assumption of 10^12 phone numbers CC-AAA-RRR-XXXX including country codes, assume nearly 100% of all numbers are being dialed at the exact same time. You can gain a 1% probability of error on if a number is being dialed in about 116GB. In any situation of over 50% saturation, you'd invert: list what numbers aren't being dialed, hence the size of the worldwide packet is 58GB. That's the theoretical bound in an insane situation. (Besides, you can only dial half the phones in the world at once...)
In reality, we don't have 100 country codes, and not all countries have 10 digit phone numbers. In America, there are only really 800 possible area codes, 269 in service in the USA, and 26 in Canada. Not all areas saturate the exchange; most exchanges aren't saturated. The number of phone numbers world-wide isn't 142 times the size of the number of people.
So let's assume 10 billion numbers instead, not all of which are cell phones. You're looking at 580MB for the packet to express near 50% saturation of numbers being dialed *right now* for the whole world. That's much better.
Phones ring for approximately 10 seconds. They're answered or taken to voice mail by then. In addition, most phones aren't being dialed at any given time. If we assume 1 in 7000 cell phones is currently ringing, the worldwide packet is 174kB for a 1% margin of error.
So let's call the regional a 10 million phone coverage area, and the local a 1 million phone coverage area. Assuming 1 in 7000 phones is currently ringing, the packet sizes are 174kB worldwide, 178 bytes regional, and 17.8 bytes local, for a 1% margin of error. That is: you have a 1 in 100 chance of the phone deciding it's probably in the bloom filter when it's not. If we double the sizes here, then the false positive rate is 0.01%, or 1 in 10,000--almost never.
We can further reduce these by scaling them dynamically, and by delaying the ring if you're out of known area. I'll use the double-size numbers for a 0.01% false positive chance.
Let's say somebody calls your phone. The cell system predicts, based on prior data (i.e. you're usually in this city, your home address on file is here, whatever), that you're in the 1 million person coverage area contained by some cells. In Baltimore City, we have 660,000 people; 1 million coverage is bigger than my city. So the system adds you only to the 35.6 byte local dialing filter for a 1 second cycle.
If your phone fails to respond to the tower, the system leaves your number in the 36 byte local dialing filter. It begins including it in the regional dialing area. The regional dialing area excludes any phone dialed for less than 1 second, any phone found in a local dialing area, or any phone included in the local dialing area filter. More than 95% of phones should be excluded: there's better than a 95% chance that you're currently in your local area. The filter is about 89 bytes on average, assuming 1 in 7000 phones in the 5,000,000 phone region is ringing.
The worldwide filter is different. If in 1 more second you don't answer, the cell system adds you to the bloom list for the whole world. Assuming a 95% chance of someone being in the region if not in the local area, that's 95% of 5%, or 0.25%. Assuming 10 billion phones, the worldwide list of numbers currently being dialed is 9 bytes.
For a 1 in 10,000 false positive rate, you'd have to push 134 bytes of dialing filters. If you're outside of your normal region, there's a 2 second delay. We can further step this with a 100 million phone region to net whole countries in the last
Your long winded tirade didn't say anything about why 100 hours is required to learn how to drive
The current 60 hours is a median statistic for how many driving hours are required to develop adequate skill at driving. 100 hours is longer, and develops further skill. My "long-winded tirade" explained that, AS PER SCIENCE, PARTICULARLY NEUROSCIENCE, the brain has a physical structure that stores and refines these skills until they take little to no energy to access. Once you've done it a while, your brain automatically recalls those skills without your conscious effort and without the expenditure of much energy at all; new, complex situations draw up similar situations and adjust them with minimal additional energy.
As I said, we have these mandatory hours and waits in Australia, they haven't helped one bit as new drivers do their hours quickly and sit around or just fabricate them.
"It won't work because people won't do it."
This is the same argument as "eating healthy doesn't help because people won't eat healthy," or "Laws against murder don't help because people still kill people".
I gave you the solution. Don't tell me it's not a solution because people will cheat. It works. Vaccinations work, too; but if you forge documents saying your kid is vaccinated, well... don't bitch at me when he gets smallpox.
Like most people, you're basing your opinion on bad ideas.
I'm basing my opinions on the current scientific state-of-the-art. It's the same thing brain surgeons and top-level researchers and all that kind of brass use.
You dont have a low reaction time, like most bad drivers you've convinced yourself that you have a low reaction time when you really do not
"I don't like this, so I'm going to pretend it's not a thing, and claim that as fact."
You can bring all the statistics you want on how people react TO NEW STIMULUS, but we already know that you can beat those times if you practice for several hours. In sports, consistent reaction times of nearly 150mS are common, and trained athletes hit close to 100mS when they get lucky.
My reactions don't rely on me consciously acknowledging what's in front of me. I've done this so much, so my brain bypasses all those slow processes that make your basic reaction time so fucking long, and just kicks in the correct action. When an obstacle moves in front of me, I judge how it's moving and take appropriate action. For anything I can't get a good pattern for immediately, I'm on the brakes before I realize shit's in my way. For mainly-stationary objects that come into my driving path, I'm in the next lane if there's nothing next to me.
The reaction's as quick as the one you have when you prick your finger while sewing, or knick yourself shaving--you know, that immediate removal of the sharp object so you don't shove a needle a half inch into your finger, or peel your face like a potato.
I actually understand that when I'm tired, it's dark or I'm distracted my reaction time will not be as good as it could be
Do you also understand that you can drive just as well mildly drunk as you can on 2-4 hours of sleep? Because most people miss that. Lack of sleep will quickly degrade your reflexes.
Uh, attaching fees is a funding strategy. You know, like how it costs $120 every 2 years for vehicle registration? That's a funding strategy. My strategy exchanges time for money--it delays driver's licensing by a small amount of time in which a licensed driver would incur costs equal to the costs of additional training. That makes it zero-cost.
Better traffic engineering will fix problems. Better driver's education will fix a lot. Did you know in Germany you have traffic signs at borders of zones, but not within? Germans have lane control laws. Germans have all kinds of shit that requires drivers to be alert; Americans have signs everywhere, and antilock brakes. Guess who has better drivers?
I want some import from Germany. The zipper traffic law needs to be a thing: all merge lanes should alternate right-of-way at the end of the merge, not this bullshit where we try to race to the front and fight people for their spot in traffic. But I don't want their full system here (it'd be expensive to change over), and I don't want $6000 of driver's ed before licensing.
If people were trained to identify hazards and consider road conditions as part of their conditioning for driving, they would identify other cars near and in the intersection, as well as pedestrians both in the road and on the sidewalk. They would consider the possible and likely actions these individuals may take. Instead of trying to beat the light and ramming the car in front of them--who stops--they would consider the hazard of ramming the car in front of them. It's an independent hazard: a pedestrian might appear out of nowhere and jump in front of that car, causing it to immediately stop in reaction.
The conservative talk radio stuff was yammering about that when it happened. G. Gordon Liddy was praising one of the victims, a man who had predicted hijacked airplanes hitting the World Trade center and insisted on either leaving or training for evacuation without the aid of useless first-responders. This is a man who got all of his people out of Tower 2, then went back in to find anyone else that might be in there. The damn thing collapsed with him in it.
Then, conservative politicians pop up talking about how nobody ever thought of that shit.
So, conservative talk show host praises conservative office manager for predicting 9/11 as the most likely form of terrorist attack in 1995. Conservative politicians scream that nobody ever thought of that form of terrorist attack before. Face palms all around.
I agree that licensing and learning needs to be improved and more involved but I disagree with mandatory waits and hours. All that does is forces people to do pointless busywork or in most cases, fabricate evidence.
No, I based that on science.
In the brain, the prefrontal cortex processes all analytic thought. It takes a shitload of energy, and will make you tired. A new driver can only drive for about half an hour before becoming exhausted because the brain consumes its balance of available acetylcholine, glucose, and so on: it wears itself and your body down.
The basal ganglia stores well-understood facts. As you encounter new facts--up to and including motor skills, reflexes, and procedural reactions to template situations--the basal ganglia builds a library of information. The basal ganglia is incredibly cheap to operate: an experienced driver can drive for 12 hours, although he'll be tired afterwards. The brain will consume much less energy than a new driver's, as it's not doing much of any strong analytic computation in the prefrontal cortex.
Template situations on the road will cause the prefrontal cortex to engage proportional to how different they are from commonly encountered situations. Known previous strategies will be selected and adjusted with minimal energy expenditure, the lower limit of which is determined by how many similar situations have been encountered. To minimize the time and energy required, exposure to common road situations should exist.
This is why you drive for many hours across many months: to build a wide array of varying experiences that your brain can rapidly validate against all likely road situations. Skidpad and hazard training hammers the less-common, more-critical situations into your brain, because you're going to encounter them rarely and thus will probably totally fail. For example: a kid walks out in front of your car, the natural reaction is to brake hard; but a hard brake may not stop you fast enough, whereas steering into the open space beside your car and going around the kid will. The situation could be inverted if he's moving quickly: hit the brake to give him time to move out of the way, because steering will just keep you on collision trajectory. You don't have time to compute this shit.
Are you counting reaction time or just stopping time?
My reaction time is low. The physical time required to activate the brakes is actually higher, and the move from throttle to brake is immense. This is why I remove my foot from the accelerator and place it on the brake when in a high-risk situation, like passing a bunch of kids playing by the street: my reactions are going to be several times faster than my physical movement onto the brake, so I'm cutting off a massive delay between recognizing a hazard and reacting to it.
As for actual reaction time, the typical quote is 200mS; I have a clock resolution of 20mS, and a reaction time of 2-5 clock (40-100). Musicians can get down lower, but only can hit 5mS windows by anticipation: they're actually reacting 30-50mS earlier than required. It amazes me that people can actually judge time down to a 5mS clock.
In this situation, I have autonomous reactions to the distance in front of my car shrinking, and to the speed at which it shrinks: if my following distance drops, signals from my spine and brainstem kick in before I'm aware of what's happening, and I'm already braking hard before I know what's going on. That's without anticipation, i.e. if I completely fail my hazard checks. In this case, the hazard was out of sight: several cars ahead, someone braked hard (possibly because they were trying to exit the expressway, and nearly missed it; just a guess). The reaction time was isometric to the reaction to pain.
Unfunded? Driver's Education is a commercial business, not a state affair. We have schools here, now, that teach all this stuff. If you have AAA, you get a discount; they advertise advanced driving courses and driver improvement courses on their members portal!
As for testing, people have salaries. You're applying more human time. Make people pay more for a license. It's a month or two of car insurance; you don't need a license when you're 16 years and 180 days old, you can wait two months to save up the extra cost. They want to push the licensing age back to 18 years here.
Writing an income statement is procedural, and requires juggling a lot of information. I've done income statements for extremely small businesses with only one client and found the complexity quite a bit higher than most programming I've done. It's like implementing a buddy allocator from reference documentation: Sure it's straight and procedural, but it's easy to get lost and forget how you're making sure the code you're writing actually does what you want it to do, even when you understand fully the system you're implementing.
People always seem to think their skills are simple, and other people are dumb for not getting it. IT people always seem to be the worst at this, because computers are everywhere and it's unfathomable for anyone to not interact with a computer enough to have figured all this shit out by now. Most people haven't had experience with corporate accounting, so you don't see them struggling every day with things that are easy for you. Same for HR, management in various forms, and so on.
No, we don't have to do shit. There's no public transportation at 2am, but the bars are open that late; since people can't walk home 5 miles at night, we have to allow them to drive drunk, right? That's the actual situation here: public transit closes at 11pm.
It's not as hard as you think. I could convince the general public easily enough; it'd take a few weeks to structure a speech to push all the right buttons, but I can do it.
By law, your designated polling location is within a mile of your residence. I can walk to mine. I can bicycle to mine. Maybe I could buy a skateboard. Are you people this helpless and stupid? I am surrounded by the poor, the downtrodden, the broken, and even they can do better than this.
One problem I've faced repeatedly is everyone thinking everyone else is stupid. I work in IT, and IT people think *everyone*'s stupid. Accounting people are fucking useless and retarded. Yeah, okay, here's a clue: I've written an income statement before. You want to try? I'll get the camera; it'll be funny when you start crying. HR? You have no fucking clue. General management is not my thing; project management is my thing, and you would never make it. Hey, instead of complaining about your job as a tech support rep, why don't you try working it effectively and efficiently? Oh it can be done, and you'll soon realize this is not just doable, but insanely hard.
I guarantee you, more people die from bad drivers every day than folks who wouldn't make it if we fixed the rules. Know how I know? First, because Germany does it, the Netherlands do it, England does it, and we've done it in the US before. Second, because the class of people who are actually that fucking retarded ARE RETARDS AND NEED SERVICE DOGS AND CONSTANT SUPERVISION, AND AREN'T ALLOWED TO DRIVE A CAR NOW ANYWAY!!! Look around you for a minute; people are idiots, but they're not *that* retarded.
No, my counter-argument was correct. If you can't acquire baseline driving skills, you are too dangerous to let on the road.
There is no excuse for putting unsafe people in control of dangerous machinery and throwing them into complex situations they can't handle.
If I attempted to teach someone to drive and, after months of training and practice, they could not identify hazards or react to complex situations, I would put them in a car and send them out into the city. Why? Because they're too stupid and genetically weak to be allowed to breed, and I'm certain they'll die soon in a vehicular collision.
We give epileptic people licenses here. Outside my apartment in 2011, a black man crashed straight into a hydrant, traffic pole, and parked car after running a red light at an odd angle. He had a seizure, blacked out, and just cruised. He didn't know he was going to hit anything; he didn't even know he was driving.
Your complaint about it being "inhuman" to ban people to drive cars is a bigger stretch than calling out the state for removing children from parents for so-called "child abuse" because the parents are swingers and have taught the child that sexual activity is fine as long as it's handled safely, and now the state is mad their 13 year old has been showing her new titties to 17 year old boys and sucking college guys' cocks. You would think it ludicrous for the state to not intervene on parents who raised their kids in such ways, I'm sure; but where is their right to parent as they see fit? Don't the parents have a right to decide that modern culture is actively harmful and abusive with its enforced puritan values?
You see, sometimes, we have to decide that everyone can't be allowed to do things everyone else does. Felons can't have guns; child rapists can't be home schooling educators; and people who are wholly incapable of reacting to dangerous and complex hazards on the road can't have drivers' licenses.
I've met people like you. You're exactly the people I've fought against in real life, the people I've threatened with the total destruction of their careers and livelihoods to stop. It took eight years of argument on the floor of the general assembly and finally a massive protest just outside to elevate vehicular manslaughter from a non-pointed moving violation (i.e. can't suspend your license) and a $50 fine to a crime carrying a maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment and $5000 fine.
The law says we can lock your ass up if you are driving in a way in which a reasonable person would perceive would increase risk of injury or death to those around you *and* you manage to kill someone--and they choked on it for eight years because, well, sometimes drivers accidentally kill people while driving 40mph in a school zone with children at play, and we can't really punish them for that. But every politician has a name, a face, and an election term; and I can see Fox News from my house. Guess who's terms we're playing on?
A white board that records (electronic whiteboards) would be very useful, but individual paper notes are also good. The focus should be enhancement, not elimination.
By the same token, you could teach your employees Teeline.
Someone pulled out into 70mph traffic at a crawl. The people in front of me hit their brakes pretty hard. I did the same.
You always travel with traffic. People driving at the exact speed limit in high-speed traffic that isn't following the posted limit are actually creating many more points of contention, causing great increases in the risk of collision. Insurance companies and police departments both have run statistics on this and figured this out already: the proper speed to drive is the speed at which traffic is flowing, not the speed at which you can disrupt the flow of traffic.
And you obviously don't know how long one second is. Losing 50mph is not hard when you have large-diameter 90% silicone compound tires and four-wheel disc brakes with 18% copper impregnated ceramic pads. The distance traveled under ideal conditions with an initial velocity of 70mph is 42 meters or roughly 10 car lengths, which is 3 car lengths in excess of the recommended full stopping distance at 70mph.
In other words: I lost 50mph over a longer distance than a full stop from 70mph is assumed to require under typical conditions. The time that this occurred over was much shorter than the time you'll be distracted by toying with a cell phone, fiddling with a radio, or, potentially, checking your mirrors--which is precisely why you should pre-scan for hazards: in the time you take to glance in your mirror before changing lanes, someone could step out in front of your car and become a speed bump.
Proper testing and education standards aren't about weeding out bad drivers. These stringent measures push the necessary skills onto people who will be drivers, ensuring that they can handle the conditions of the road. People go into it with a lesser amount of skill than with which they emerge.
Your argument is nonsense. You argue that most people are too retarded to drive safely, and so should be allowed to drive. This is akin to the argument that many people like to drink beer, and so we should allow people to drive drunk.
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What has NASA ever gotten us? I always see huge lists like more comfortable chairs (memory foam) and shoes, but industry would have invented those anyway. Satellites? Legit; nobody sane was ever going to build space launch shit on private money. Other than that, piles and piles of junk, and some history.
Skip NASA. Move their funding over to something like a National Institute of Health, and take up researching new medical treatments and drugs. Release all that shit to the public. If you're into social democracy, issue a $1 tax per prescription filled or treatment carried out to give the government revenue; if not, release them to the public domain so we can have new $4 generics.
We need to take that kind of thing out of the hands of Pfeizer. The US got it wrong: we don't need public healthcare; we need public health research. Let the private sector handle healthcare; we can revisit the issue when our healthcare system isn't a weedy mess of overpriced, ineffective bullshit. I do support regulations to force hospitals to provide free clinical care, with staffed clinician hours based on their size, and distribution based on the saturation of healthcare facilities in their area (i.e. more hospitals, wider spread of clinics); but the immediate economic issues of healthcare aren't "how do patients pay for cancer treatment?", but rather "how do we get the best, least expensive cancer treatment to the people?"
I think it's more a matter of that the phone was in a particular cell than that the call was made.
I would like to see cell-tracking technology whereby a phone never reports its ID when idle and pinging tower. I'd like to see the tower push three bloom filters on ping, one of all predicted to be in the cell, one of all predicted to be in the area (surrounding cells), and one of all in the system.
For a flat assumption of 10^12 phone numbers CC-AAA-RRR-XXXX including country codes, assume nearly 100% of all numbers are being dialed at the exact same time. You can gain a 1% probability of error on if a number is being dialed in about 116GB. In any situation of over 50% saturation, you'd invert: list what numbers aren't being dialed, hence the size of the worldwide packet is 58GB. That's the theoretical bound in an insane situation. (Besides, you can only dial half the phones in the world at once...)
In reality, we don't have 100 country codes, and not all countries have 10 digit phone numbers. In America, there are only really 800 possible area codes, 269 in service in the USA, and 26 in Canada. Not all areas saturate the exchange; most exchanges aren't saturated. The number of phone numbers world-wide isn't 142 times the size of the number of people.
So let's assume 10 billion numbers instead, not all of which are cell phones. You're looking at 580MB for the packet to express near 50% saturation of numbers being dialed *right now* for the whole world. That's much better.
Phones ring for approximately 10 seconds. They're answered or taken to voice mail by then. In addition, most phones aren't being dialed at any given time. If we assume 1 in 7000 cell phones is currently ringing, the worldwide packet is 174kB for a 1% margin of error.
So let's call the regional a 10 million phone coverage area, and the local a 1 million phone coverage area. Assuming 1 in 7000 phones is currently ringing, the packet sizes are 174kB worldwide, 178 bytes regional, and 17.8 bytes local, for a 1% margin of error. That is: you have a 1 in 100 chance of the phone deciding it's probably in the bloom filter when it's not. If we double the sizes here, then the false positive rate is 0.01%, or 1 in 10,000--almost never.
We can further reduce these by scaling them dynamically, and by delaying the ring if you're out of known area. I'll use the double-size numbers for a 0.01% false positive chance.
Let's say somebody calls your phone. The cell system predicts, based on prior data (i.e. you're usually in this city, your home address on file is here, whatever), that you're in the 1 million person coverage area contained by some cells. In Baltimore City, we have 660,000 people; 1 million coverage is bigger than my city. So the system adds you only to the 35.6 byte local dialing filter for a 1 second cycle.
If your phone fails to respond to the tower, the system leaves your number in the 36 byte local dialing filter. It begins including it in the regional dialing area. The regional dialing area excludes any phone dialed for less than 1 second, any phone found in a local dialing area, or any phone included in the local dialing area filter. More than 95% of phones should be excluded: there's better than a 95% chance that you're currently in your local area. The filter is about 89 bytes on average, assuming 1 in 7000 phones in the 5,000,000 phone region is ringing.
The worldwide filter is different. If in 1 more second you don't answer, the cell system adds you to the bloom list for the whole world. Assuming a 95% chance of someone being in the region if not in the local area, that's 95% of 5%, or 0.25%. Assuming 10 billion phones, the worldwide list of numbers currently being dialed is 9 bytes.
For a 1 in 10,000 false positive rate, you'd have to push 134 bytes of dialing filters. If you're outside of your normal region, there's a 2 second delay. We can further step this with a 100 million phone region to net whole countries in the last
Your long winded tirade didn't say anything about why 100 hours is required to learn how to drive
The current 60 hours is a median statistic for how many driving hours are required to develop adequate skill at driving. 100 hours is longer, and develops further skill. My "long-winded tirade" explained that, AS PER SCIENCE, PARTICULARLY NEUROSCIENCE, the brain has a physical structure that stores and refines these skills until they take little to no energy to access. Once you've done it a while, your brain automatically recalls those skills without your conscious effort and without the expenditure of much energy at all; new, complex situations draw up similar situations and adjust them with minimal additional energy.
As I said, we have these mandatory hours and waits in Australia, they haven't helped one bit as new drivers do their hours quickly and sit around or just fabricate them.
"It won't work because people won't do it."
This is the same argument as "eating healthy doesn't help because people won't eat healthy," or "Laws against murder don't help because people still kill people".
I gave you the solution. Don't tell me it's not a solution because people will cheat. It works. Vaccinations work, too; but if you forge documents saying your kid is vaccinated, well... don't bitch at me when he gets smallpox.
Like most people, you're basing your opinion on bad ideas.
I'm basing my opinions on the current scientific state-of-the-art. It's the same thing brain surgeons and top-level researchers and all that kind of brass use.
You dont have a low reaction time, like most bad drivers you've convinced yourself that you have a low reaction time when you really do not
"I don't like this, so I'm going to pretend it's not a thing, and claim that as fact."
You can bring all the statistics you want on how people react TO NEW STIMULUS, but we already know that you can beat those times if you practice for several hours. In sports, consistent reaction times of nearly 150mS are common, and trained athletes hit close to 100mS when they get lucky.
My reactions don't rely on me consciously acknowledging what's in front of me. I've done this so much, so my brain bypasses all those slow processes that make your basic reaction time so fucking long, and just kicks in the correct action. When an obstacle moves in front of me, I judge how it's moving and take appropriate action. For anything I can't get a good pattern for immediately, I'm on the brakes before I realize shit's in my way. For mainly-stationary objects that come into my driving path, I'm in the next lane if there's nothing next to me.
The reaction's as quick as the one you have when you prick your finger while sewing, or knick yourself shaving--you know, that immediate removal of the sharp object so you don't shove a needle a half inch into your finger, or peel your face like a potato.
I actually understand that when I'm tired, it's dark or I'm distracted my reaction time will not be as good as it could be
Do you also understand that you can drive just as well mildly drunk as you can on 2-4 hours of sleep? Because most people miss that. Lack of sleep will quickly degrade your reflexes.
I looked at the petition, but all it says is:
Dear Federal Communications Commission:
Stop governmenting, you motherfuckers!
I could imagine that. Clancey: "Didn't I tell you this was gonna happen? What are you retarded? Is your head full of rice instead of brains?"
Uh, attaching fees is a funding strategy. You know, like how it costs $120 every 2 years for vehicle registration? That's a funding strategy. My strategy exchanges time for money--it delays driver's licensing by a small amount of time in which a licensed driver would incur costs equal to the costs of additional training. That makes it zero-cost.
Better traffic engineering will fix problems. Better driver's education will fix a lot. Did you know in Germany you have traffic signs at borders of zones, but not within? Germans have lane control laws. Germans have all kinds of shit that requires drivers to be alert; Americans have signs everywhere, and antilock brakes. Guess who has better drivers?
I want some import from Germany. The zipper traffic law needs to be a thing: all merge lanes should alternate right-of-way at the end of the merge, not this bullshit where we try to race to the front and fight people for their spot in traffic. But I don't want their full system here (it'd be expensive to change over), and I don't want $6000 of driver's ed before licensing.
If people were trained to identify hazards and consider road conditions as part of their conditioning for driving, they would identify other cars near and in the intersection, as well as pedestrians both in the road and on the sidewalk. They would consider the possible and likely actions these individuals may take. Instead of trying to beat the light and ramming the car in front of them--who stops--they would consider the hazard of ramming the car in front of them. It's an independent hazard: a pedestrian might appear out of nowhere and jump in front of that car, causing it to immediately stop in reaction.
The conservative talk radio stuff was yammering about that when it happened. G. Gordon Liddy was praising one of the victims, a man who had predicted hijacked airplanes hitting the World Trade center and insisted on either leaving or training for evacuation without the aid of useless first-responders. This is a man who got all of his people out of Tower 2, then went back in to find anyone else that might be in there. The damn thing collapsed with him in it.
Then, conservative politicians pop up talking about how nobody ever thought of that shit.
So, conservative talk show host praises conservative office manager for predicting 9/11 as the most likely form of terrorist attack in 1995. Conservative politicians scream that nobody ever thought of that form of terrorist attack before. Face palms all around.
Hitchcock should have been hanged.
Not really.
You could make pancakes? What?
Chemical plant?
Oh, you mean like Hollywood?
No, he means like a chemical plant.
I agree that licensing and learning needs to be improved and more involved but I disagree with mandatory waits and hours. All that does is forces people to do pointless busywork or in most cases, fabricate evidence.
No, I based that on science.
In the brain, the prefrontal cortex processes all analytic thought. It takes a shitload of energy, and will make you tired. A new driver can only drive for about half an hour before becoming exhausted because the brain consumes its balance of available acetylcholine, glucose, and so on: it wears itself and your body down.
The basal ganglia stores well-understood facts. As you encounter new facts--up to and including motor skills, reflexes, and procedural reactions to template situations--the basal ganglia builds a library of information. The basal ganglia is incredibly cheap to operate: an experienced driver can drive for 12 hours, although he'll be tired afterwards. The brain will consume much less energy than a new driver's, as it's not doing much of any strong analytic computation in the prefrontal cortex.
Template situations on the road will cause the prefrontal cortex to engage proportional to how different they are from commonly encountered situations. Known previous strategies will be selected and adjusted with minimal energy expenditure, the lower limit of which is determined by how many similar situations have been encountered. To minimize the time and energy required, exposure to common road situations should exist.
This is why you drive for many hours across many months: to build a wide array of varying experiences that your brain can rapidly validate against all likely road situations. Skidpad and hazard training hammers the less-common, more-critical situations into your brain, because you're going to encounter them rarely and thus will probably totally fail. For example: a kid walks out in front of your car, the natural reaction is to brake hard; but a hard brake may not stop you fast enough, whereas steering into the open space beside your car and going around the kid will. The situation could be inverted if he's moving quickly: hit the brake to give him time to move out of the way, because steering will just keep you on collision trajectory. You don't have time to compute this shit.
Are you counting reaction time or just stopping time?
My reaction time is low. The physical time required to activate the brakes is actually higher, and the move from throttle to brake is immense. This is why I remove my foot from the accelerator and place it on the brake when in a high-risk situation, like passing a bunch of kids playing by the street: my reactions are going to be several times faster than my physical movement onto the brake, so I'm cutting off a massive delay between recognizing a hazard and reacting to it.
As for actual reaction time, the typical quote is 200mS; I have a clock resolution of 20mS, and a reaction time of 2-5 clock (40-100). Musicians can get down lower, but only can hit 5mS windows by anticipation: they're actually reacting 30-50mS earlier than required. It amazes me that people can actually judge time down to a 5mS clock.
In this situation, I have autonomous reactions to the distance in front of my car shrinking, and to the speed at which it shrinks: if my following distance drops, signals from my spine and brainstem kick in before I'm aware of what's happening, and I'm already braking hard before I know what's going on. That's without anticipation, i.e. if I completely fail my hazard checks. In this case, the hazard was out of sight: several cars ahead, someone braked hard (possibly because they were trying to exit the expressway, and nearly missed it; just a guess). The reaction time was isometric to the reaction to pain.
Unfunded? Driver's Education is a commercial business, not a state affair. We have schools here, now, that teach all this stuff. If you have AAA, you get a discount; they advertise advanced driving courses and driver improvement courses on their members portal!
As for testing, people have salaries. You're applying more human time. Make people pay more for a license. It's a month or two of car insurance; you don't need a license when you're 16 years and 180 days old, you can wait two months to save up the extra cost. They want to push the licensing age back to 18 years here.
Driving is not a human right.
Writing an income statement is procedural, and requires juggling a lot of information. I've done income statements for extremely small businesses with only one client and found the complexity quite a bit higher than most programming I've done. It's like implementing a buddy allocator from reference documentation: Sure it's straight and procedural, but it's easy to get lost and forget how you're making sure the code you're writing actually does what you want it to do, even when you understand fully the system you're implementing.
People always seem to think their skills are simple, and other people are dumb for not getting it. IT people always seem to be the worst at this, because computers are everywhere and it's unfathomable for anyone to not interact with a computer enough to have figured all this shit out by now. Most people haven't had experience with corporate accounting, so you don't see them struggling every day with things that are easy for you. Same for HR, management in various forms, and so on.
Most people can accept new skills readily.
Wikipedia:List of Persons who have Exercised their Right to be Forgotten
No, we don't have to do shit. There's no public transportation at 2am, but the bars are open that late; since people can't walk home 5 miles at night, we have to allow them to drive drunk, right? That's the actual situation here: public transit closes at 11pm.
You are aware that cars and pedestrians can enter the roadway basically wherever there isn't solid matter already?
It's not as hard as you think. I could convince the general public easily enough; it'd take a few weeks to structure a speech to push all the right buttons, but I can do it.
By law, your designated polling location is within a mile of your residence. I can walk to mine. I can bicycle to mine. Maybe I could buy a skateboard. Are you people this helpless and stupid? I am surrounded by the poor, the downtrodden, the broken, and even they can do better than this.
One problem I've faced repeatedly is everyone thinking everyone else is stupid. I work in IT, and IT people think *everyone*'s stupid. Accounting people are fucking useless and retarded. Yeah, okay, here's a clue: I've written an income statement before. You want to try? I'll get the camera; it'll be funny when you start crying. HR? You have no fucking clue. General management is not my thing; project management is my thing, and you would never make it. Hey, instead of complaining about your job as a tech support rep, why don't you try working it effectively and efficiently? Oh it can be done, and you'll soon realize this is not just doable, but insanely hard.
I guarantee you, more people die from bad drivers every day than folks who wouldn't make it if we fixed the rules. Know how I know? First, because Germany does it, the Netherlands do it, England does it, and we've done it in the US before. Second, because the class of people who are actually that fucking retarded ARE RETARDS AND NEED SERVICE DOGS AND CONSTANT SUPERVISION, AND AREN'T ALLOWED TO DRIVE A CAR NOW ANYWAY!!! Look around you for a minute; people are idiots, but they're not *that* retarded.
No, my counter-argument was correct. If you can't acquire baseline driving skills, you are too dangerous to let on the road. There is no excuse for putting unsafe people in control of dangerous machinery and throwing them into complex situations they can't handle.
If I attempted to teach someone to drive and, after months of training and practice, they could not identify hazards or react to complex situations, I would put them in a car and send them out into the city. Why? Because they're too stupid and genetically weak to be allowed to breed, and I'm certain they'll die soon in a vehicular collision.
We give epileptic people licenses here. Outside my apartment in 2011, a black man crashed straight into a hydrant, traffic pole, and parked car after running a red light at an odd angle. He had a seizure, blacked out, and just cruised. He didn't know he was going to hit anything; he didn't even know he was driving.
Your complaint about it being "inhuman" to ban people to drive cars is a bigger stretch than calling out the state for removing children from parents for so-called "child abuse" because the parents are swingers and have taught the child that sexual activity is fine as long as it's handled safely, and now the state is mad their 13 year old has been showing her new titties to 17 year old boys and sucking college guys' cocks. You would think it ludicrous for the state to not intervene on parents who raised their kids in such ways, I'm sure; but where is their right to parent as they see fit? Don't the parents have a right to decide that modern culture is actively harmful and abusive with its enforced puritan values?
You see, sometimes, we have to decide that everyone can't be allowed to do things everyone else does. Felons can't have guns; child rapists can't be home schooling educators; and people who are wholly incapable of reacting to dangerous and complex hazards on the road can't have drivers' licenses.
I've met people like you. You're exactly the people I've fought against in real life, the people I've threatened with the total destruction of their careers and livelihoods to stop. It took eight years of argument on the floor of the general assembly and finally a massive protest just outside to elevate vehicular manslaughter from a non-pointed moving violation (i.e. can't suspend your license) and a $50 fine to a crime carrying a maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment and $5000 fine.
The law says we can lock your ass up if you are driving in a way in which a reasonable person would perceive would increase risk of injury or death to those around you *and* you manage to kill someone--and they choked on it for eight years because, well, sometimes drivers accidentally kill people while driving 40mph in a school zone with children at play, and we can't really punish them for that. But every politician has a name, a face, and an election term; and I can see Fox News from my house. Guess who's terms we're playing on?
I ditched the Livescribe in favor of a Nemosine Fission. Awaiting the Neutrino.
A white board that records (electronic whiteboards) would be very useful, but individual paper notes are also good. The focus should be enhancement, not elimination.
By the same token, you could teach your employees Teeline.
Someone pulled out into 70mph traffic at a crawl. The people in front of me hit their brakes pretty hard. I did the same.
You always travel with traffic. People driving at the exact speed limit in high-speed traffic that isn't following the posted limit are actually creating many more points of contention, causing great increases in the risk of collision. Insurance companies and police departments both have run statistics on this and figured this out already: the proper speed to drive is the speed at which traffic is flowing, not the speed at which you can disrupt the flow of traffic.
And you obviously don't know how long one second is. Losing 50mph is not hard when you have large-diameter 90% silicone compound tires and four-wheel disc brakes with 18% copper impregnated ceramic pads. The distance traveled under ideal conditions with an initial velocity of 70mph is 42 meters or roughly 10 car lengths, which is 3 car lengths in excess of the recommended full stopping distance at 70mph.
In other words: I lost 50mph over a longer distance than a full stop from 70mph is assumed to require under typical conditions. The time that this occurred over was much shorter than the time you'll be distracted by toying with a cell phone, fiddling with a radio, or, potentially, checking your mirrors--which is precisely why you should pre-scan for hazards: in the time you take to glance in your mirror before changing lanes, someone could step out in front of your car and become a speed bump.
Science, bitch: I has it.
I failed 4 times, and just looped back around and re-took until the attendant got tired of seeing me and passed me anyway.
Proper testing and education standards aren't about weeding out bad drivers. These stringent measures push the necessary skills onto people who will be drivers, ensuring that they can handle the conditions of the road. People go into it with a lesser amount of skill than with which they emerge.
Your argument is nonsense. You argue that most people are too retarded to drive safely, and so should be allowed to drive. This is akin to the argument that many people like to drink beer, and so we should allow people to drive drunk.