Just how much money does it take to buy a senator anyway?
With rampant favoritism toward lobbyists and campaign contributors such a figure might be useful to know. For example, people with like beliefs and similar needs (e.g. a geographic region) might band together and produce an adequate amount to buy a legislator to represent their interests. Hopefully the 'donations' to the cause would be tax deductible...
Obviously, I jest, but this might actually be a good idea. Raise senator/representative salaries to fair market value and make the taxes that go to said salary optional. I'd guess that most people would be willing to spare $2 a month for someone to fight for their interests. $2 per month * 4.3 million people in my state / 8 legislators = ~$1 million per month in salary dependent on keeping constituents happy. There's no need for the 1700s model of sending a respected member of the community off for months at a time to fight for their community's interests essentially autonomously, it's 2011 and we now have trivial realtime mass communication.
It sounds like browser version numbers are designed to be a poor proxy for plugin API version. Therefore, I have to wonder, why not version the API instead (i.e. Firefox Plugin API 2.1 in Firefox 5.0)? Plus, you even get backwards compatibility since it becomes trivial to have multiple APIs and use the highest one the plugin is compatible with.
The appeal is that, for the average American, pennies aren't worth the time to fool with them because the average worker earns one cent in about two seconds IIRC. If retailers inflated their de facto prices $0.04 per transaction then so what? Plenty of people use credit cards which (IIRC) have much higher fees, or buy checks from their bank.
Personally, I'd probably drop anything worth less than about a minute of time, so pennies, nickles, and dimes, and bring the silver dollar back into common use. The problem is that inflation has made the smaller value currencies worthless, and nowadays the pointlessly high price resolution is used for psychological pricing. Perhaps if one didn't have to fool with so much change then cash would be the payment option of choice rather than checks or credit cards. (No wonder the penny won't die, people using credit cards tend to overspend, as do those who read $4.99 as $4, so vendors must love them.)
What would truly suck would be if Ebola had an incubation-period of 3-6 months like some other vira, seeing as it has a mortality-rate of over 50%, and no effective treatment has yet been developed.
That's rabies. Mortality rate is barely a rounding error from 100% if symptoms appear. Thankfully, it's easily curable during the incubation period (can last up to two years, although I can't for the life of me figure out why most people get lazy and skip the last treatment), although if you're one of the unfortunate souls who get scratched by a rabid bat in your sleep... Heck, if it didn't have such a long incubation period I'd expect we'd have the zombie apocalypse on our hands.
There are three main reasons why kids ought to be taught some simple programming. First, computers are part of everyday life and one should have a rough idea of how everyday tools work. Second, it teaches a person how to think in an exceedingly logical and literal manner, which can be useful outside of the computer. Third, it teaches people that computers are very good at doing mindless, repetitive work very quickly (e.g. learning to use mail merge VS spending three weeks writing 1,700 letters).
IMHO, the best way to ensure better privacy practices and data security is to make it a legal liability to lose data. Just fine the company that lost the data a fixed amount (IMHO: $50) per piece of information lost. If someone loses your name, e-mail address, phone number, mailing address, and billing address, that'd be $250 per customer record lost, and maybe triple the fine if customers suffer consequences (e.g. like in the Sony hack). Such a system makes people collect as little information as possible, and the fines give the government incentive to enforce it. Non-commercials are arguably hit disproportionately hard, but I'm personally fine with not giving my e-mail address out to every website I want to use.
Why are people so incessant about the apocalypse? I'm only 25 and have already grown weary of Malthusian predictions, and that's just one subtype! It's also rather odd that Mr. Gilding suggests that we have merely two options, and omits the one that has continuously disproven such predictions for the past 200+ years.
We didn't collapse or (really) become more sustainable over the past two centuries, what happened was resource gathering increased in proportion with population. If one believes that current technology is end-game, i.e. that any further advances will have diminishing returns, then one lacks imaginative foresight and any perspective of history. A mere pawn of the present, which can only see the square in front of him.
That might be of interest to Al Qaeda, which considered attacking US nuclear facilities after 9/11, a new study says.
In other words, "That is unlikely to be of interest to Al Qaeda, who decided before 9/11 that attacking even the least secure US nuclear facility was impractical and unlikely to succeed." I seriously doubt they didn't attack nuclear faculties merely out of the goodness of their hearts, or because they somehow forgot they exist. Perhaps this failure mode raises the stakes, but *any* attack on a nuclear facility by terrorists will generate terror if it has even the least degree of success. I.e. stepping foot inside the reactor facility would be their victory.
Personally, I seriously doubt that Watson will ever advance to being able to replace a doctor for non-trivial complaints. First of all, humans are better at image processing, so if a patient looks like death then they aren't going to ask questions to rule out minor complaints. Second, patients usually don't know how to describe their symptoms, and it's up to the doctor to make sense of what they're describing (keeping in mind that some exaggerate, some understate, and others outright lie). Third, clinical references are written for humans, so they often omit various "obvious" things (e.g. to get Lyme you have to have been bitten by a tick, which may not be very likely in Barrow, Alaska).
OTOH, I can see Watson being immensely useful on the back end. For example, which second-line blood pressure medications have been show to be highly effective with few side effects in 65 year old male caucasians who also have diabetes, and, of those, which has the best interaction profile with the other drugs this patient is taking? Clinical guidelines help, but they're obviously simplified and generalized. It'd take a human ages to research the literature to figure that out, but an AI like Watson could potentially do it in a few seconds. Such a tool could take a lot of the guesswork out of medicine.
Are there 128 bits of entropy in the image produced by fingerprint readers? With only ~100 million fingerprints on record, there are a handful of known false positive identifications. Wikipedia knows of four cases of misidentification, so a low estimate would be an "identical" (for current technology) rate of 4/100,000,000, or 2^-24. So you get 24 bits, that's a four character mixed-case alphanumeric password. (IOW, 2345 is a 13 bit password, and twothreefourfive is a 13 bit password with some security by obscurity, not a 128 bit password.)
I think that a two year old browser just recently trickling down to Linux distros is a flaw in the whole 'repackage every application for every distro' approach that most package managers encourage. OTOH, I'm probably biased since package managers have caused about half of my Linux headaches over the past decade or so I've played with it.
Nah, the 195 apps that are preinstalled (hence cannot be removed by design) on the Droid X couldn't possibly be impacting performance. For comparison, a plain AOSP Gingerbread system image has 45 apps. IIRC, the average android user installs fewer than 10 apps, so obviously 150 extra should come with the phone.
To be fair, I'm counting '.apk' files in the/system/app folder. Many of these are blur_facebook, blur_twitter, etc., and not standalone applications. These aren't all listed in the app launcher (only ~50 are), but they do generally autostart via hooks into specific system calls, such as an incoming phone call or entering text into a field. So they do impact performance, and certainly more so than your average game would.
A while back I was looking at reviews for a mechanic. There was one very highly rated, with uniformly positive reviews... all non-specifically praised him, were written in similar styles, and there tended to be 2-3 reviews on the same day followed by weeks of inactivity...
Needless to say, my BS-meter caused me to take my business elsewhere. As online reviews become increasingly important, a white-washed list of reviews is more likely to deter business than anything. Scams are a part of everyday life, so the people with money to spend tend not to fall for them.
This feature sounds like what LBE Privacy Guard does. Essentially it's UAC with most of the permissions you may want to deny. A big plus is that it runs on any rooted device, and not just a custom Cyanogen nightly.
Requirements
**NEEDS ROOT**
Works on Android 2.0 and above.
Tested on various devices and firmwares, but not tested on Android 3.0 and 3.1 devices.
Current Features
1. Block unwanted send SMS / call phone operation
2. Block unwanted access to phone location, contacts, SMS/MMS conversation database, IMEI/IMSI/ICCID/phone number.
3. Integrated low-level firewall, no netfilter/iptables required, works on pre-froyo devices
Definition 2a is the one I used, the context made that clear, and it's easily contrastable with Webster's definition of 'group' in the way I previously discussed. I had thought the fact that different words mean different things was self evident, and am sorry that this concept is offensive to you. 'Group' and 'collective' are not absolute synonyms, if such things even exist.
You're right in that it's annoying. One has three options: change the master password for just that site, change it for all sites ahead of schedule, or, for my algorithm, change the initialization vector. That's a shortcoming of the algorithmic approach, so a hybrid approach with non-encrypted site-specific settings might be useful.
IMHO, it's better to never write them down and just generate them algorithmically based on the site's domain or a memorable keyword. Several years ago I just kept a tabula recta in my wallet. Nowadays, you can use something like SuperGenPass.
Personally, I wrote my own equivalent of SuperGenPass that addresses some of the security concerns. That said, I use PassPack with a tediously strong password to keep a backup in case I inadvertantly break compatibility, and a copy of the generator on my website.
A group is a unit, implying a unity that Anonymous lacks. A cooperative enterprise is essentially working towards a common objective, which is a bit more accurate (not completely, but the closest term that came to mind). The 'vastly different' quality is that a group is more intrinsically defined, whereas a collective is more extrinsically defined (a 'collection' of people with a common trait, i.e. their objective). Generally these are congruent and it's easy to conflate them. That is the aforementioned folly, as the conflation causes people to ascribe things to Anonymous that have no basis in reality.
While they have transient organization, there is nothing permanent or overarching like a traditional group. People will act based on their own motivations and initiative, sometimes forming into like-minded groups to do so.
There wouldn't be any difference then since you've said Anonymous isn't a group and anyone acting in the name of Anonymous is Anonymous.
You make a good point and may be right, depending on how you delineate Anonymous. I would liken this to someone who loots a store during a revolution. If they do so to further the revolution, then they're a revolutionary. If they're merely taking advantage of the chaos, they're just a thief, even if they try to credit their crime to the revolution.
S: (n) collective (members of a cooperative enterprise)
S: (n) group, grouping (any number of entities (members) considered as a unit)
The two terms are not identical, although they may be synonymous in most contexts. I was referring to their specific discordance, albeit I was a bit laconic when I forwent the explanation of this concept, and instead relied on a pair of examples to illustrate it. Clearly I was insufficient in conveying that point.
Anonymous is not a group, it's a collective of individuals. Kinda like a Stand Alone Complex if you've seen that show. It's also similar to the Lone Wolf Terrorists that I've heard discussed on the news of late. Assuming homogeneity, cohesion, or group-type structure is folly.
IOW - while the majority of 'Anonymous' might be random/b/-tards, this is just an observation. No single individual is a/b/-tard in every aspect, many are quite professional in other contexts. And some obviously have very advance technical skills. IMHO, Sony learned the danger of stirring the waters when you don't know what lurks in the depths. (Obviously assuming this was someone doing this in the name of Anonymous rather than a thief who wants to misdirect the investigation.)
Re:The theory is nothing new, but it's cool to see
on
Robots 'Evolve' Altruism
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Altruism has a functional definition when referring to evolution, since it's more philosophy if you want to think about animals or bacteria acting morally. I can't recall the precise definition off the top of my head, but it's something along the lines of helping another at personal cost. As I recall, there are three major theories as to why organisms do this.
First is Kin Selection, which is what the article seems fixated upon. Bees and naked mole rats are the classic example. Essentially, it means you'd take a 10% risk of removing yourself from the gene pool to save an individual who shares 15% of your genetic material.
The second is reciprocity. Vampire bats may give a starving individual a blood meal to save their life, and it's a lot more likely if the starving individual offered a blood meal in the past.
The third, and most difficult for people who don't understand math to wrap their head around, is trait group selection. Natural selection has a mathematical model. This is a corollary of that model. In nature, animals form large numbers of groups, either transiently or permanently. Within a group, a non-altruist will always out-compete the altruists and reproduce at a higher relative rate. However, groups with more altruists will reproduce at a greater rate relative to groups with more non-altruists. Overall, you often can have altruists increasing in absolute number despite falling in relative concentration within each group. This process is iterated over generations or within multiple (perhaps infinitesimal) groups that the individual forms within it's life. Being a purely mathematical phenomenal, I would suspect this would emerge within any appropriately complex computer model (it did for the one I wrote for my final project in my Evolution elective back in college).
OTOH, the entire concept of altruism seems offensive to some people. I'm not trying to say any of these are "true altruism", since they happen all the way down to bacteria secreting proteins that deactivate antibiotics, subsequently protecting nearby unrelated bacteria. It's an explanation for observable animal behavior that humans also demonstrate. Plus, "true altruism" isn't a falsifiable hypothesis, so there's little sense in arguing about the moral proclivities of humans, bacteria, chemicals, cultures, or ideas.
I made that error as well on my initial reading. It saddens me that one can confuse a terrorist leader with our president and the statement still makes perfect sense.
You could also carry a gun and shoot the driver of the other vehicle, which would presumably cause it to drive off the road. Why would any non-sociopath wish to do so?
IOW, in using the common road system you place yourself at the mercy of your fellow man, and making this system 100% impenetrable to external attack is kind of a waste of time. There are a great many easier ways to inflict harm upon another driver, and many of them are equally clandestine.
IMHO, such statements tend to be projections. Within any social species there exists individuals who are more altruistic and individuals who are more selfish. For humans, who need to rationalize their behavior, you can only really justify it by believing that the majority of people are of your type (unless you're a self-actualized selfish).
It's hard to objectify the data, since it's a gradient and highly situational. Being totally selfish gets you caught and exiled, and being completely altruistic makes a martyr out of you and your genetic/parenting lineage.
Slashdot Mirror
Just how much money does it take to buy a senator anyway?
With rampant favoritism toward lobbyists and campaign contributors such a figure might be useful to know. For example, people with like beliefs and similar needs (e.g. a geographic region) might band together and produce an adequate amount to buy a legislator to represent their interests. Hopefully the 'donations' to the cause would be tax deductible...
Obviously, I jest, but this might actually be a good idea. Raise senator/representative salaries to fair market value and make the taxes that go to said salary optional. I'd guess that most people would be willing to spare $2 a month for someone to fight for their interests. $2 per month * 4.3 million people in my state / 8 legislators = ~$1 million per month in salary dependent on keeping constituents happy. There's no need for the 1700s model of sending a respected member of the community off for months at a time to fight for their community's interests essentially autonomously, it's 2011 and we now have trivial realtime mass communication.
It sounds like browser version numbers are designed to be a poor proxy for plugin API version. Therefore, I have to wonder, why not version the API instead (i.e. Firefox Plugin API 2.1 in Firefox 5.0)? Plus, you even get backwards compatibility since it becomes trivial to have multiple APIs and use the highest one the plugin is compatible with.
The appeal is that, for the average American, pennies aren't worth the time to fool with them because the average worker earns one cent in about two seconds IIRC. If retailers inflated their de facto prices $0.04 per transaction then so what? Plenty of people use credit cards which (IIRC) have much higher fees, or buy checks from their bank.
Personally, I'd probably drop anything worth less than about a minute of time, so pennies, nickles, and dimes, and bring the silver dollar back into common use. The problem is that inflation has made the smaller value currencies worthless, and nowadays the pointlessly high price resolution is used for psychological pricing. Perhaps if one didn't have to fool with so much change then cash would be the payment option of choice rather than checks or credit cards. (No wonder the penny won't die, people using credit cards tend to overspend, as do those who read $4.99 as $4, so vendors must love them.)
What would truly suck would be if Ebola had an incubation-period of 3-6 months like some other vira, seeing as it has a mortality-rate of over 50%, and no effective treatment has yet been developed.
That's rabies. Mortality rate is barely a rounding error from 100% if symptoms appear. Thankfully, it's easily curable during the incubation period (can last up to two years, although I can't for the life of me figure out why most people get lazy and skip the last treatment), although if you're one of the unfortunate souls who get scratched by a rabid bat in your sleep... Heck, if it didn't have such a long incubation period I'd expect we'd have the zombie apocalypse on our hands.
There are three main reasons why kids ought to be taught some simple programming. First, computers are part of everyday life and one should have a rough idea of how everyday tools work. Second, it teaches a person how to think in an exceedingly logical and literal manner, which can be useful outside of the computer. Third, it teaches people that computers are very good at doing mindless, repetitive work very quickly (e.g. learning to use mail merge VS spending three weeks writing 1,700 letters).
IMHO, the best way to ensure better privacy practices and data security is to make it a legal liability to lose data. Just fine the company that lost the data a fixed amount (IMHO: $50) per piece of information lost. If someone loses your name, e-mail address, phone number, mailing address, and billing address, that'd be $250 per customer record lost, and maybe triple the fine if customers suffer consequences (e.g. like in the Sony hack). Such a system makes people collect as little information as possible, and the fines give the government incentive to enforce it. Non-commercials are arguably hit disproportionately hard, but I'm personally fine with not giving my e-mail address out to every website I want to use.
Why are people so incessant about the apocalypse? I'm only 25 and have already grown weary of Malthusian predictions, and that's just one subtype! It's also rather odd that Mr. Gilding suggests that we have merely two options, and omits the one that has continuously disproven such predictions for the past 200+ years.
We didn't collapse or (really) become more sustainable over the past two centuries, what happened was resource gathering increased in proportion with population. If one believes that current technology is end-game, i.e. that any further advances will have diminishing returns, then one lacks imaginative foresight and any perspective of history. A mere pawn of the present, which can only see the square in front of him.
That might be of interest to Al Qaeda, which considered attacking US nuclear facilities after 9/11, a new study says.
In other words, "That is unlikely to be of interest to Al Qaeda, who decided before 9/11 that attacking even the least secure US nuclear facility was impractical and unlikely to succeed." I seriously doubt they didn't attack nuclear faculties merely out of the goodness of their hearts, or because they somehow forgot they exist. Perhaps this failure mode raises the stakes, but *any* attack on a nuclear facility by terrorists will generate terror if it has even the least degree of success. I.e. stepping foot inside the reactor facility would be their victory.
Personally, I seriously doubt that Watson will ever advance to being able to replace a doctor for non-trivial complaints. First of all, humans are better at image processing, so if a patient looks like death then they aren't going to ask questions to rule out minor complaints. Second, patients usually don't know how to describe their symptoms, and it's up to the doctor to make sense of what they're describing (keeping in mind that some exaggerate, some understate, and others outright lie). Third, clinical references are written for humans, so they often omit various "obvious" things (e.g. to get Lyme you have to have been bitten by a tick, which may not be very likely in Barrow, Alaska).
OTOH, I can see Watson being immensely useful on the back end. For example, which second-line blood pressure medications have been show to be highly effective with few side effects in 65 year old male caucasians who also have diabetes, and, of those, which has the best interaction profile with the other drugs this patient is taking? Clinical guidelines help, but they're obviously simplified and generalized. It'd take a human ages to research the literature to figure that out, but an AI like Watson could potentially do it in a few seconds. Such a tool could take a lot of the guesswork out of medicine.
Are there 128 bits of entropy in the image produced by fingerprint readers? With only ~100 million fingerprints on record, there are a handful of known false positive identifications. Wikipedia knows of four cases of misidentification, so a low estimate would be an "identical" (for current technology) rate of 4/100,000,000, or 2^-24. So you get 24 bits, that's a four character mixed-case alphanumeric password. (IOW, 2345 is a 13 bit password, and twothreefourfive is a 13 bit password with some security by obscurity, not a 128 bit password.)
I think that a two year old browser just recently trickling down to Linux distros is a flaw in the whole 'repackage every application for every distro' approach that most package managers encourage. OTOH, I'm probably biased since package managers have caused about half of my Linux headaches over the past decade or so I've played with it.
Nah, the 195 apps that are preinstalled (hence cannot be removed by design) on the Droid X couldn't possibly be impacting performance. For comparison, a plain AOSP Gingerbread system image has 45 apps. IIRC, the average android user installs fewer than 10 apps, so obviously 150 extra should come with the phone.
/system/app folder. Many of these are blur_facebook, blur_twitter, etc., and not standalone applications. These aren't all listed in the app launcher (only ~50 are), but they do generally autostart via hooks into specific system calls, such as an incoming phone call or entering text into a field. So they do impact performance, and certainly more so than your average game would.
To be fair, I'm counting '.apk' files in the
A while back I was looking at reviews for a mechanic. There was one very highly rated, with uniformly positive reviews... all non-specifically praised him, were written in similar styles, and there tended to be 2-3 reviews on the same day followed by weeks of inactivity...
Needless to say, my BS-meter caused me to take my business elsewhere. As online reviews become increasingly important, a white-washed list of reviews is more likely to deter business than anything. Scams are a part of everyday life, so the people with money to spend tend not to fall for them.
Requirements
**NEEDS ROOT**
Works on Android 2.0 and above.
Tested on various devices and firmwares, but not tested on Android 3.0 and 3.1 devices.
Current Features
1. Block unwanted send SMS / call phone operation
2. Block unwanted access to phone location, contacts, SMS/MMS conversation database, IMEI/IMSI/ICCID/phone number.
3. Integrated low-level firewall, no netfilter/iptables required, works on pre-froyo devices
Market Link
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.lbe.security
Definition 2a is the one I used, the context made that clear, and it's easily contrastable with Webster's definition of 'group' in the way I previously discussed. I had thought the fact that different words mean different things was self evident, and am sorry that this concept is offensive to you. 'Group' and 'collective' are not absolute synonyms, if such things even exist.
You're right in that it's annoying. One has three options: change the master password for just that site, change it for all sites ahead of schedule, or, for my algorithm, change the initialization vector. That's a shortcoming of the algorithmic approach, so a hybrid approach with non-encrypted site-specific settings might be useful.
IMHO, it's better to never write them down and just generate them algorithmically based on the site's domain or a memorable keyword. Several years ago I just kept a tabula recta in my wallet. Nowadays, you can use something like SuperGenPass.
Personally, I wrote my own equivalent of SuperGenPass that addresses some of the security concerns. That said, I use PassPack with a tediously strong password to keep a backup in case I inadvertantly break compatibility, and a copy of the generator on my website.
A group is a unit, implying a unity that Anonymous lacks. A cooperative enterprise is essentially working towards a common objective, which is a bit more accurate (not completely, but the closest term that came to mind). The 'vastly different' quality is that a group is more intrinsically defined, whereas a collective is more extrinsically defined (a 'collection' of people with a common trait, i.e. their objective). Generally these are congruent and it's easy to conflate them. That is the aforementioned folly, as the conflation causes people to ascribe things to Anonymous that have no basis in reality.
There wouldn't be any difference then since you've said Anonymous isn't a group and anyone acting in the name of Anonymous is Anonymous.
You make a good point and may be right, depending on how you delineate Anonymous. I would liken this to someone who loots a store during a revolution. If they do so to further the revolution, then they're a revolutionary. If they're merely taking advantage of the chaos, they're just a thief, even if they try to credit their crime to the revolution.
S: (n) collective (members of a cooperative enterprise)
S: (n) group, grouping (any number of entities (members) considered as a unit)
The two terms are not identical, although they may be synonymous in most contexts. I was referring to their specific discordance, albeit I was a bit laconic when I forwent the explanation of this concept, and instead relied on a pair of examples to illustrate it. Clearly I was insufficient in conveying that point.
Anonymous is not a group, it's a collective of individuals. Kinda like a Stand Alone Complex if you've seen that show. It's also similar to the Lone Wolf Terrorists that I've heard discussed on the news of late. Assuming homogeneity, cohesion, or group-type structure is folly.
/b/-tards, this is just an observation. No single individual is a /b/-tard in every aspect, many are quite professional in other contexts. And some obviously have very advance technical skills. IMHO, Sony learned the danger of stirring the waters when you don't know what lurks in the depths. (Obviously assuming this was someone doing this in the name of Anonymous rather than a thief who wants to misdirect the investigation.)
IOW - while the majority of 'Anonymous' might be random
Altruism has a functional definition when referring to evolution, since it's more philosophy if you want to think about animals or bacteria acting morally. I can't recall the precise definition off the top of my head, but it's something along the lines of helping another at personal cost. As I recall, there are three major theories as to why organisms do this.
First is Kin Selection, which is what the article seems fixated upon. Bees and naked mole rats are the classic example. Essentially, it means you'd take a 10% risk of removing yourself from the gene pool to save an individual who shares 15% of your genetic material.
The second is reciprocity. Vampire bats may give a starving individual a blood meal to save their life, and it's a lot more likely if the starving individual offered a blood meal in the past.
The third, and most difficult for people who don't understand math to wrap their head around, is trait group selection. Natural selection has a mathematical model. This is a corollary of that model. In nature, animals form large numbers of groups, either transiently or permanently. Within a group, a non-altruist will always out-compete the altruists and reproduce at a higher relative rate. However, groups with more altruists will reproduce at a greater rate relative to groups with more non-altruists. Overall, you often can have altruists increasing in absolute number despite falling in relative concentration within each group. This process is iterated over generations or within multiple (perhaps infinitesimal) groups that the individual forms within it's life. Being a purely mathematical phenomenal, I would suspect this would emerge within any appropriately complex computer model (it did for the one I wrote for my final project in my Evolution elective back in college).
OTOH, the entire concept of altruism seems offensive to some people. I'm not trying to say any of these are "true altruism", since they happen all the way down to bacteria secreting proteins that deactivate antibiotics, subsequently protecting nearby unrelated bacteria. It's an explanation for observable animal behavior that humans also demonstrate. Plus, "true altruism" isn't a falsifiable hypothesis, so there's little sense in arguing about the moral proclivities of humans, bacteria, chemicals, cultures, or ideas.
I made that error as well on my initial reading. It saddens me that one can confuse a terrorist leader with our president and the statement still makes perfect sense.
You could also carry a gun and shoot the driver of the other vehicle, which would presumably cause it to drive off the road. Why would any non-sociopath wish to do so?
IOW, in using the common road system you place yourself at the mercy of your fellow man, and making this system 100% impenetrable to external attack is kind of a waste of time. There are a great many easier ways to inflict harm upon another driver, and many of them are equally clandestine.
IMHO, such statements tend to be projections. Within any social species there exists individuals who are more altruistic and individuals who are more selfish. For humans, who need to rationalize their behavior, you can only really justify it by believing that the majority of people are of your type (unless you're a self-actualized selfish).
It's hard to objectify the data, since it's a gradient and highly situational. Being totally selfish gets you caught and exiled, and being completely altruistic makes a martyr out of you and your genetic/parenting lineage.