Nobody has contradicted it. Someone posted a link to a webpage that talks about a *rule*, as the treasury cannot make laws. I assure you that if I receive a bill for $100.00 and I offer a $100.00 bill as payment, and the creditor goes to court and says I refused to pay because they wanted AmEx the Judge will inform them that I offered to pay and they refused payment.
That seems fairly clear, but can you come up with a legal decision in a court that actually follows that, in a situation such as one of these businesses that are currently operating? If my restaurant has a clear sign stating "no cash", has anyone successfully got away without paying after being sued? Absent such court decisions, we don't REALLY know what the courts think the laws and rules mean and which ones, and parts of ones, are enforceable.
Bullshit. Tips, as reported to the IRS, are higher when CCs were used (and there is a paper trail). What a surprise.
Even when paying with a CC, I tip in cash. Assuming it's value is stretched by the servers marginal tax rate.
It's everybody's job to 'starve the beast'. Cash is king.
I don't know, facilitating tax fraud isn't something I am particularly comfortable with. I would prefer that the tax base be as large as possible, so making it more difficult for people to avoid their legal tax burden (or making it easier for people to track their legal tax burden if that framing is more pleasant) is a good thing in my opinion.
I am sympathetic to the reality that restaurant staff are not particularly well paid, and that making it harder for the wealthy to avoid taxes is probably a better thing to focus my attention on, but paying everything with plastic is also more convenient for me personally, so I have little inclination to deal with cash for a portion of the transaction.
We could use some spackle for the cracks but "be like Canada" is a really stupid approach.
Yeah, except that Canada seems to have better health outcomes than the USA does. With some exceptions, waiting times are not unreasonable across the country, and patient satisfaction rates are significantly higher than in the US. Sure, they aren't perfect, and there are many areas that could be improved, but to paint it as an unmitigated disaster is disingenuous.
Of course the US already spends about twice the per-capita rate for healthcare as Canada, so maybe the US could just do the Canadian system and spend an extra 50% to "fill-in-the-cracks" and still come out at 25% lower than current costs.
What makes you think you should have a right to what others have earned? Seriously, you guys need to get off of Slashdot and go create something for yourself. And then come back and talk about how the government should have the right to take it from you and give it to someone who hasn't worked for it.
Exactly! That's why I refuse to use any of the systems (highways, legal frameworks, education, social security, etc. ) that others have created. It's just me and my strong back, that's how I made my millions!
Nobody in this world operates alone. Supporting the system that allows us to succeed is a necessary condition for future success.
That's a different proposition. The question is how do the people actually that good rate themselves.
If you "know" your skills are better than average and 80% of drivers think they are better than average, how can you be sure that you are not one of those people who think you are better than average, but are in fact not better than average?
I suppose that, depending on the distribution and how one defines "average" in this context, one could have 80% of the population being slightly better than average, with the 20% who are below average being way below average (80 people scoring 51, and 20 people scoring 46 gives an average of 50, so 80% are above average).
I just posted the following to all of the comment sections of each of the creators I was supporting. Maybe I'll be back but I want to send Patreon.com a strong message by cancelling everything.
I just got a note from Patreon.com about the new fee changes. I'm so sorry that you are going to get hurt by this. I have sent a note to Patreon.com that I won't be able to justify paying so much for all of my large number of $1 pledges, where they will tack on a 37.9% charge for each pledge, so I'm going to cancel all of my pledges right after posting this note. I'll be back if they move the $0.35 fee to be per-credit-card-charge, but per-pledge is just a money-grab.
Maybe in the future I will pick one creator at random to give them all of my money rather than spread it around in small amounts like I currently do, but if I don't cancel things, Patreon won't see that I am seriously pissed. I'll keep "following" your patreon page.
I will use the following line as my reason for cancelling my pledge:
The changed fee structure makes many small donations too expensive, so I am cancelling everything. Patreon.com's greed and/or stupidity has pissed me off.
Most 'health food' stores stock plain peanut butter (often in bulk), with a single ingredient: peanuts. I have even seem places that have a grinder with a hopper you can fill with the peanuts yourself and freshly grind it.
You dismissed someone's argument as being crap and disparaged it by comparing them to Pascal.
Yes, I did. They were trying to gin up hysteria over perceived overaccomplishment of Jews by trying to portray it as a result of a highly-probable neferious plot and likening such plot to highly-probable AGW.
My error - I failed to recognize the start of this. Now that I look at the thread I have less interest in exploring the philosophy of existential threats. Congrats on speaking up for reason against racial hysteria - I seldom have the patience.
For example, a 20% chance of AGW being accurate might be large enough to take action, due to the large negative consequences, whereas for lesser stakes one might not feel taking action is worthwhile.
Really? What if there is a 20% chance of 20% of civilization getting destroyed? And what if the only measure to combat the potential 20% destruction is to sacrifice 80% of the advances of the modern civilization? Will the turmoil which results be worth it? You are guilty of exactly what I said you would be guilty of if you were to buy into Pascal's-Wager-type argument. You fail to consider the significant cost of action.
In general there are 4 weights to consider and 2 probabilities. And then there will be 2 "expected values" of the outcomes based on whether the event occurs or not. The fallacy is to consider one of the 4 weights to be significantly larger than the other 3. When, in fact, 2 out of 4 weights are large. And the result skews the expected outcome significantly.
I fail to consider the significant cost of action? The very next sentence that you failed to quote read "Of course if one feels that the costs of action are similar in magnitude to the costs of AGW being accurate, then the calculations would be different."
I don't think you and I are really disagreeing on how one can rationally look at these types of arguments. There are a variety of costs to consider and a variety of probabilities. You dismissed someone's argument as being crap and disparaged it by comparing them to Pascal. I was merely pointing out that not all such arguments can not be so easily dismissed, for the very reasons you site above. In my mind, a better critique of someone making these types of arguments is to explicitly address the perceived inaccuracies of their "4 weights".
I did not explain the 4 weights as clearly as I should have (or as you did), or what I might think are reasonable values for them - I could have been clearer.
There are some interesting questions of how to deal with existential threats with various likelihoods. If we get away from the complications of things like AGW, pollution, population, and other "self-harm" issues and just think about something external that has less emotional baggage like a huge asteroid strike (60 miles should wipe out everything). If the asteroid had a +99% chance of hitting, I think most would agree that we should probably do a lot to try to mitigate it, and that if the odds were one in a billion it probably is not worthwhile to "spend" a lot of resources on it compared to other problems to be addressed. Figuring out rational responses for values between those extremes is not very easy.
Neil Stephenson explored some of these things in Seveneves which has the destruction of the moon causing the world to confront some of these issues. I thought it was a worthwhile read.
My analogy is one of refusing to apply the brakes until obtaining a degree of proof only available after actually driving over the upcoming edge of the proverbial cliff.
That's a Pascal's wager argument and it's only applicable in justifying faith.
Not entirely. Making any decision usually involves assigning some probability to the two sides and also assigning a magnitude to the importance of the outcomes. Pascal's wager assumes an infinite (or at least really-really-big) importance to the outcome (eternal damnation/eternal bliss) that basically overwhelms any non-zero probability of the bet "paying out".
Once can certainly rationally decide that the magnitude of the negative for AGW is large enough to justify responses while still feeling that AGW was "unlikely", without being in the "Pascal wager" regime where the "infinite good"/"infinite bad" render the actual odds moot. For example, a 20% chance of AGW being accurate might be large enough to take action, due to the large negative consequences, whereas for lesser stakes one might not feel taking action is worthwhile. Of course if one feels that the costs of action are similar in magnitude to the costs of AGW being accurate, then the calculations would be different.
It's doesn't levy a tax. It stops pretending that when a large business (a university) gives you something valuable that other people have to pay for, that it isn't compensation.
As long as they can declare the cost of tuition as a deductible employee expense, as a requirement of their employment, then I suppose it ends up not being an issue.
From a tax-simplification point of view, it certainly makes sense to count it as compensation. From a do-we-want-to-encourage-graduate-studies point of view, the consequences of increasing the costs of grad-student labor are probably something we want to avoid or mitigate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... The Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction, known informally as the Ottawa Treaty, the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention, or often simply the Mine Ban Treaty....
To date, there are 162 state parties to the treaty.
The United States has not signed, being one of 35 non-signatories.
I heat with electric, so I'm burning the electrons anyway - might as well make them do some productive work before they return to ground potential.
Switching to a heat-pump would give you three or four (or more?) times as much heat energy as the electrical energy used, which might be a better long term investment of capital than bigger computing rigs - the electrical savings would continue long after the mining becomes non-cost efficient.
If a large truck is making a right turn and has moved into the left lane so he could accomplish that without running over the curb or other cars, it is an asshole who pulls up as far as he can go in the right lane to prevent the truck from completing the turn and causing a traffic jam, even if the car in the right lane technically has the right of way over the truck. Unfortunately, "asshole" is not a ticketable offense.
A human would have identified the situation and remained clear. The AI assumed it had the right of way and did not. It doesn't matter in the end if the AI did or did not have the right of way, proper defensive driving would have prevent the accident altogether. "Being right" isn't always better than "being safe".
I'm not so sure that most drivers I have observed would consistently even identify the truck turning right from the left lane as being something to be aware of. Heck, I'm not confident that I would catch this 100% of the time. I'm not doing a lot of driving in areas of town with big rigs - and I'm getting old and stupid....
For purposes of initially deciding whether this might make any sense for you, there is one big question: do you have to use electric heating? Pretty much any other common type of heating is better.
This is why if you are heating with electrical resistive heaters, your lightbulb choice doesn't really matter - the inefficiency in your lighting just contributes heat to the room that doesn't need to be added by your heating system.
There are heat pump systems that can give higher than 100% efficiency in that they can move more heat energy from the outside to the inside than they use in electrical energy. Window mounted air-to-air units do exist but are not as efficient as ones that extract heat from underground, and those ones are pretty involved to install. Heat pumps can usually be run in reverse to provide interior cooling when desired.
For every joule of electrical energy used, resistive heaters provide one joule of heat engery, while an air-to-air heat pump can provide range from 3.2 to 4.5 joules of heat energy for air source heat pumps and 4.2 to 5.2 joules for ground source heat pumps.
Depending on the costs of the equipment and the expected useful lifespan, "miniming" might not be as good of an investment as buying a heat pump.
Another option might be to invest in solar panels.
[46] If Google has evidence that complying with such an injunction would require it to violate the laws of another jurisdiction, including interfering with freedom of expression, it is always free to apply to the British Columbia courts to vary the interlocutory order accordingly. To date, Google has made no such application.
[47] In the absence of an evidentiary foundation, and given Googleâ(TM)s right to seek a rectifying order, it hardly seems equitable to deny Equustek the extraterritorial scope it needs to make the remedy effective, or even to put the onus on it to demonstrate, country by country, where such an order is legally permissible. We are dealing with the Internet after all, and the balance of convenience test has to take full account of its inevitable extraterritorial reach when injunctive relief is being sought against an entity like Google.
Granted, IANAL, but I can't really see any other interpretation than "get a decision from another country saying this is a problem and get back to us".
Thanks, that is informative. Does the US decision indicate that following the ban would "require it [Google] to violate the laws of another jurisdiction"? The US law that is cited in the article (the First Amendment as well as "Section 230") do not "require" Google to publish things, so it could be argued that following the ban doesn't violate those laws in the US, even if imposing the ban does.
That is probably a silly reading of the Canadian decision - even [47] references the idea of the order being "legally permissible" and that is what the US decision seems to have spoken to.
My understanding is that in their ruling, the Canadian Supreme Court basically pointed out that while it was possible that their decision would violate laws in other countries, nobody hadn't presented any arguments or evidence to that effect.
In other words, they specifically left it open as an "out" for Google: prove that the ruling violated US law and they'd be able to walk it back.
I had not seen that. The Fortune article that is linked through the last Slashdot discussion doesn't mention that in my reading. I would be interested in a reference if you have one.
I did notice this, which doesn't seem too unreasonable:
“This is not an order to remove speech that, on its face, engages freedom of expression values, it is an order to de-index websites that are in violation of several court orders. We have not, to date, accepted that freedom of expression requires the facilitation of the unlawful sale of goods,” wrote Judge Rosalie Abella.
Does anyone know how Google's regional de-indexing work? If I use a computer located in Canada to search for "illegal" stuff that has been de-indexed in Canada on google.ca I presume I won't find it, but will I get the result when using google.com (due to Google knowing my geo-location and thus presenting me with particular results)? What about using a US based computer to search on google.ca?
That was a good condensation of man of the issues. Thanks.
But a treaty that would violate the Constitution would not be a valid treaty.
Of course that makes sense, but some have argued that the “Supremacy Clause” gives treaties supreme authority. Fortunately for sanity, that is mostly garbage. See for example
The American court is simply stating that Google LLC's operations in the US are not subject to Canadian law
But the American court has absolutely no say on what is subject to the Canadian laws. The ultimate body that has any say over what Canadian law applies to is the Canadian Supreme Court, and in this case they already made a ruling. It might be the "wrong" ruling, but almost by definition it is legally "right" in the context of Canadian law.
Sure, when a national court does something stupid or foolish or whatever, there are lots of pundits who say "they can't do that!", but one country's courts can't really override another country's court decisions.
Of course, when we get right down to it, the important part comes to play only when it comes to inforcement. If Country A rules that Company B is required to or prohibited from doing something, unless Country A has some mechanism for enforcement, it doesn't really matter, regardless where Company B is located. Similarly, the US court decision has little impact on Canadian court decisions unless the US court has some way to enforce it. Possibly the US and Canada could exchange trade war blows, but it seems unlikely the US would "go to the mat" over Google at this point in the current political landscape.
Directly from the article: "It’s unclear, however, what exactly what will happen now since Google, if it restores the search results in the United States, could be acting in contempt of the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision. Currently, there are over 300 search results Google has had to suppress."
While the original Canadian decision seems like overreach, the US result doesn't really sheild Google if they restore the results in the US. In some sense it is an overreach too.
Meh, I don't see it. Who is this "everyone" who has adopted the surface form factor? Best buy don't seem to be carrying a whole lot of them. If the Surface is "wildly successful" then the Apple Watch is "wildly successful" squared, and I don't really see many claiming that.
There is a small but significant number of users who have been creating content with stylus devices on Wacom hardware (and others) since forever on both the Mac and Windows platform. Adding a stylus option for a monster iPad might be infleuenced by the success of the Surface, but it also seems like a reasonable decision even without MS's products.
Note that I am not saying the Surface or the stylus thereof is a failure, by any means - I am just pointing out that does not seem to be taking the world by storm. Maybe it will, but there is not much data to suggest that it will in the next few years.
They have been incredibly successful at creating markets for new devices, enough to make every manufacturer add another form factor to their lineup and enough to scare Apple into giving up on one of the original core premises of the iPad (a tablet should not need a stylus).
It does seem that the Surface and similar products do have a future, but the narrative that they are wildly successful and overshadowing Apple's products seems a bit overstated. This highly fanboyish article from appleinsider.com indicates that Surface revenues seem to be about one third of Applewatch/TV/other revenues, and about one quarter to one fifth of iPad or Macintosh revenues. Maybe more recent quarters are substantially different, but it doesnt look like Apple should be panicing. It seems as though the Apple Watch business all by itself is about twice the size of the MS Surface business - and none of the sales trends seem to indicate immediate changes in these types of relationships.
With that said, who knows what the future will hold? Currently however, most of Apple's sales seem to be solidly ahead of the Surface sales, and the projections are not hugely different.
Stop wasting this stuff (it might be useful for something more important in the future) on consumable car batteries and go straight for hydrogen. There's a massive supply of it in the wet stuff.
Car batteries are hardly "consumables", you know. The recycling costs of these elements is certainly lower than the cost to dig them out of the ground and refine them. If their price increases enough to make a hydrogen system financially viable, the batteries already being used will be fairly "mined" for the valuable materials.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody has contradicted it. Someone posted a link to a webpage that talks about a *rule*, as the treasury cannot make laws. I assure you that if I receive a bill for $100.00 and I offer a $100.00 bill as payment, and the creditor goes to court and says I refused to pay because they wanted AmEx the Judge will inform them that I offered to pay and they refused payment.
That seems fairly clear, but can you come up with a legal decision in a court that actually follows that, in a situation such as one of these businesses that are currently operating? If my restaurant has a clear sign stating "no cash", has anyone successfully got away without paying after being sued? Absent such court decisions, we don't REALLY know what the courts think the laws and rules mean and which ones, and parts of ones, are enforceable.
Bullshit. Tips, as reported to the IRS, are higher when CCs were used (and there is a paper trail). What a surprise.
Even when paying with a CC, I tip in cash. Assuming it's value is stretched by the servers marginal tax rate.
It's everybody's job to 'starve the beast'. Cash is king.
I don't know, facilitating tax fraud isn't something I am particularly comfortable with. I would prefer that the tax base be as large as possible, so making it more difficult for people to avoid their legal tax burden (or making it easier for people to track their legal tax burden if that framing is more pleasant) is a good thing in my opinion.
I am sympathetic to the reality that restaurant staff are not particularly well paid, and that making it harder for the wealthy to avoid taxes is probably a better thing to focus my attention on, but paying everything with plastic is also more convenient for me personally, so I have little inclination to deal with cash for a portion of the transaction.
We could use some spackle for the cracks but "be like Canada" is a really stupid approach.
Yeah, except that Canada seems to have better health outcomes than the USA does. With some exceptions, waiting times are not unreasonable across the country, and patient satisfaction rates are significantly higher than in the US. Sure, they aren't perfect, and there are many areas that could be improved, but to paint it as an unmitigated disaster is disingenuous.
Of course the US already spends about twice the per-capita rate for healthcare as Canada, so maybe the US could just do the Canadian system and spend an extra 50% to "fill-in-the-cracks" and still come out at 25% lower than current costs.
What makes you think you should have a right to what others have earned? Seriously, you guys need to get off of Slashdot and go create something for yourself. And then come back and talk about how the government should have the right to take it from you and give it to someone who hasn't worked for it.
Exactly! That's why I refuse to use any of the systems (highways, legal frameworks, education, social security, etc. ) that others have created. It's just me and my strong back, that's how I made my millions!
Nobody in this world operates alone. Supporting the system that allows us to succeed is a necessary condition for future success.
That's a different proposition. The question is how do the people actually that good rate themselves.
If you "know" your skills are better than average and 80% of drivers think they are better than average, how can you be sure that you are not one of those people who think you are better than average, but are in fact not better than average?
I suppose that, depending on the distribution and how one defines "average" in this context, one could have 80% of the population being slightly better than average, with the 20% who are below average being way below average (80 people scoring 51, and 20 people scoring 46 gives an average of 50, so 80% are above average).
I just posted the following to all of the comment sections of each of the creators I was supporting. Maybe I'll be back but I want to send Patreon.com a strong message by cancelling everything.
I just got a note from Patreon.com about the new fee changes. I'm so sorry that you are going to get hurt by this. I have sent a note to Patreon.com that I won't be able to justify paying so much for all of my large number of $1 pledges, where they will tack on a 37.9% charge for each pledge, so I'm going to cancel all of my pledges right after posting this note. I'll be back if they move the $0.35 fee to be per-credit-card-charge, but per-pledge is just a money-grab.
Maybe in the future I will pick one creator at random to give them all of my money rather than spread it around in small amounts like I currently do, but if I don't cancel things, Patreon won't see that I am seriously pissed. I'll keep "following" your patreon page.
Here is some coverage of the announcement - https://www.engadget.com/2017/... and https://techcrunch.com/2017/12... and https://www.pretty-terrible.co...
I will use the following line as my reason for cancelling my pledge:
The changed fee structure makes many small donations too expensive, so I am cancelling everything. Patreon.com's greed and/or stupidity has pissed me off.
Most 'health food' stores stock plain peanut butter (often in bulk), with a single ingredient: peanuts. I have even seem places that have a grinder with a hopper you can fill with the peanuts yourself and freshly grind it.
You dismissed someone's argument as being crap and disparaged it by comparing them to Pascal.
Yes, I did. They were trying to gin up hysteria over perceived overaccomplishment of Jews by trying to portray it as a result of a highly-probable neferious plot and likening such plot to highly-probable AGW.
My error - I failed to recognize the start of this. Now that I look at the thread I have less interest in exploring the philosophy of existential threats. Congrats on speaking up for reason against racial hysteria - I seldom have the patience.
For example, a 20% chance of AGW being accurate might be large enough to take action, due to the large negative consequences, whereas for lesser stakes one might not feel taking action is worthwhile.
Really? What if there is a 20% chance of 20% of civilization getting destroyed? And what if the only measure to combat the potential 20% destruction is to sacrifice 80% of the advances of the modern civilization? Will the turmoil which results be worth it? You are guilty of exactly what I said you would be guilty of if you were to buy into Pascal's-Wager-type argument. You fail to consider the significant cost of action.
In general there are 4 weights to consider and 2 probabilities. And then there will be 2 "expected values" of the outcomes based on whether the event occurs or not. The fallacy is to consider one of the 4 weights to be significantly larger than the other 3. When, in fact, 2 out of 4 weights are large. And the result skews the expected outcome significantly.
I fail to consider the significant cost of action? The very next sentence that you failed to quote read "Of course if one feels that the costs of action are similar in magnitude to the costs of AGW being accurate, then the calculations would be different."
I don't think you and I are really disagreeing on how one can rationally look at these types of arguments. There are a variety of costs to consider and a variety of probabilities. You dismissed someone's argument as being crap and disparaged it by comparing them to Pascal. I was merely pointing out that not all such arguments can not be so easily dismissed, for the very reasons you site above. In my mind, a better critique of someone making these types of arguments is to explicitly address the perceived inaccuracies of their "4 weights".
I did not explain the 4 weights as clearly as I should have (or as you did), or what I might think are reasonable values for them - I could have been clearer.
There are some interesting questions of how to deal with existential threats with various likelihoods. If we get away from the complications of things like AGW, pollution, population, and other "self-harm" issues and just think about something external that has less emotional baggage like a huge asteroid strike (60 miles should wipe out everything). If the asteroid had a +99% chance of hitting, I think most would agree that we should probably do a lot to try to mitigate it, and that if the odds were one in a billion it probably is not worthwhile to "spend" a lot of resources on it compared to other problems to be addressed. Figuring out rational responses for values between those extremes is not very easy.
Neil Stephenson explored some of these things in Seveneves which has the destruction of the moon causing the world to confront some of these issues. I thought it was a worthwhile read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
My analogy is one of refusing to apply the brakes until obtaining a degree of proof only available after actually driving over the upcoming edge of the proverbial cliff.
That's a Pascal's wager argument and it's only applicable in justifying faith.
Not entirely. Making any decision usually involves assigning some probability to the two sides and also assigning a magnitude to the importance of the outcomes. Pascal's wager assumes an infinite (or at least really-really-big) importance to the outcome (eternal damnation/eternal bliss) that basically overwhelms any non-zero probability of the bet "paying out".
Once can certainly rationally decide that the magnitude of the negative for AGW is large enough to justify responses while still feeling that AGW was "unlikely", without being in the "Pascal wager" regime where the "infinite good"/"infinite bad" render the actual odds moot. For example, a 20% chance of AGW being accurate might be large enough to take action, due to the large negative consequences, whereas for lesser stakes one might not feel taking action is worthwhile. Of course if one feels that the costs of action are similar in magnitude to the costs of AGW being accurate, then the calculations would be different.
It's doesn't levy a tax. It stops pretending that when a large business (a university) gives you something valuable that other people have to pay for, that it isn't compensation.
As long as they can declare the cost of tuition as a deductible employee expense, as a requirement of their employment, then I suppose it ends up not being an issue.
From a tax-simplification point of view, it certainly makes sense to count it as compensation. From a do-we-want-to-encourage-graduate-studies point of view, the consequences of increasing the costs of grad-student labor are probably something we want to avoid or mitigate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction, known informally as the Ottawa Treaty, the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention, or often simply the Mine Ban Treaty....
To date, there are 162 state parties to the treaty.
The United States has not signed, being one of 35 non-signatories.
I heat with electric, so I'm burning the electrons anyway - might as well make them do some productive work before they return to ground potential.
Switching to a heat-pump would give you three or four (or more?) times as much heat energy as the electrical energy used, which might be a better long term investment of capital than bigger computing rigs - the electrical savings would continue long after the mining becomes non-cost efficient.
If a large truck is making a right turn and has moved into the left lane so he could accomplish that without running over the curb or other cars, it is an asshole who pulls up as far as he can go in the right lane to prevent the truck from completing the turn and causing a traffic jam, even if the car in the right lane technically has the right of way over the truck. Unfortunately, "asshole" is not a ticketable offense.
A human would have identified the situation and remained clear. The AI assumed it had the right of way and did not. It doesn't matter in the end if the AI did or did not have the right of way, proper defensive driving would have prevent the accident altogether. "Being right" isn't always better than "being safe".
I'm not so sure that most drivers I have observed would consistently even identify the truck turning right from the left lane as being something to be aware of. Heck, I'm not confident that I would catch this 100% of the time. I'm not doing a lot of driving in areas of town with big rigs - and I'm getting old and stupid....
For purposes of initially deciding whether this might make any sense for you, there is one big question: do you have to use electric heating? Pretty much any other common type of heating is better.
This is why if you are heating with electrical resistive heaters, your lightbulb choice doesn't really matter - the inefficiency in your lighting just contributes heat to the room that doesn't need to be added by your heating system.
There are heat pump systems that can give higher than 100% efficiency in that they can move more heat energy from the outside to the inside than they use in electrical energy. Window mounted air-to-air units do exist but are not as efficient as ones that extract heat from underground, and those ones are pretty involved to install. Heat pumps can usually be run in reverse to provide interior cooling when desired.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
For every joule of electrical energy used, resistive heaters provide one joule of heat engery, while an air-to-air heat pump can provide range from 3.2 to 4.5 joules of heat energy for air source heat pumps and 4.2 to 5.2 joules for ground source heat pumps.
Depending on the costs of the equipment and the expected useful lifespan, "miniming" might not be as good of an investment as buying a heat pump.
Another option might be to invest in solar panels.
It's right there in the decision itself...
Granted, IANAL, but I can't really see any other interpretation than "get a decision from another country saying this is a problem and get back to us".
Thanks, that is informative. Does the US decision indicate that following the ban would "require it [Google] to violate the laws of another jurisdiction"? The US law that is cited in the article (the First Amendment as well as "Section 230") do not "require" Google to publish things, so it could be argued that following the ban doesn't violate those laws in the US, even if imposing the ban does.
That is probably a silly reading of the Canadian decision - even [47] references the idea of the order being "legally permissible" and that is what the US decision seems to have spoken to.
My understanding is that in their ruling, the Canadian Supreme Court basically pointed out that while it was possible that their decision would violate laws in other countries, nobody hadn't presented any arguments or evidence to that effect.
In other words, they specifically left it open as an "out" for Google: prove that the ruling violated US law and they'd be able to walk it back.
I had not seen that. The Fortune article that is linked through the last Slashdot discussion doesn't mention that in my reading. I would be interested in a reference if you have one.
http://fortune.com/2017/06/28/...
I did notice this, which doesn't seem too unreasonable:
“This is not an order to remove speech that, on its face, engages freedom of expression values, it is an order to de-index websites that are in violation of several court orders. We have not, to date, accepted that freedom of expression requires the facilitation of the unlawful sale of goods,” wrote Judge Rosalie Abella.
Does anyone know how Google's regional de-indexing work? If I use a computer located in Canada to search for "illegal" stuff that has been de-indexed in Canada on google.ca I presume I won't find it, but will I get the result when using google.com (due to Google knowing my geo-location and thus presenting me with particular results)? What about using a US based computer to search on google.ca?
That was a good condensation of man of the issues. Thanks.
"Many" is what I meant, man.
That was a good condensation of man of the issues. Thanks.
But a treaty that would violate the Constitution would not be a valid treaty.
Of course that makes sense, but some have argued that the “Supremacy Clause” gives treaties supreme authority. Fortunately for sanity, that is mostly garbage. See for example
http://tenthamendmentcenter.co...
The American court is simply stating that Google LLC's operations in the US are not subject to Canadian law
But the American court has absolutely no say on what is subject to the Canadian laws. The ultimate body that has any say over what Canadian law applies to is the Canadian Supreme Court, and in this case they already made a ruling. It might be the "wrong" ruling, but almost by definition it is legally "right" in the context of Canadian law.
Sure, when a national court does something stupid or foolish or whatever, there are lots of pundits who say "they can't do that!", but one country's courts can't really override another country's court decisions.
Of course, when we get right down to it, the important part comes to play only when it comes to inforcement. If Country A rules that Company B is required to or prohibited from doing something, unless Country A has some mechanism for enforcement, it doesn't really matter, regardless where Company B is located. Similarly, the US court decision has little impact on Canadian court decisions unless the US court has some way to enforce it. Possibly the US and Canada could exchange trade war blows, but it seems unlikely the US would "go to the mat" over Google at this point in the current political landscape.
Directly from the article:
"It’s unclear, however, what exactly what will happen now since Google, if it restores the search results in the United States, could be acting in contempt of the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision. Currently, there are over 300 search results Google has had to suppress."
While the original Canadian decision seems like overreach, the US result doesn't really sheild Google if they restore the results in the US. In some sense it is an overreach too.
Meh, I don't see it. Who is this "everyone" who has adopted the surface form factor? Best buy don't seem to be carrying a whole lot of them. If the Surface is "wildly successful" then the Apple Watch is "wildly successful" squared, and I don't really see many claiming that.
There is a small but significant number of users who have been creating content with stylus devices on Wacom hardware (and others) since forever on both the Mac and Windows platform. Adding a stylus option for a monster iPad might be infleuenced by the success of the Surface, but it also seems like a reasonable decision even without MS's products.
Note that I am not saying the Surface or the stylus thereof is a failure, by any means - I am just pointing out that does not seem to be taking the world by storm. Maybe it will, but there is not much data to suggest that it will in the next few years.
Please MS, please stick to what you know
They have been incredibly successful at creating markets for new devices, enough to make every manufacturer add another form factor to their lineup and enough to scare Apple into giving up on one of the original core premises of the iPad (a tablet should not need a stylus).
It does seem that the Surface and similar products do have a future, but the narrative that they are wildly successful and overshadowing Apple's products seems a bit overstated. This highly fanboyish article from appleinsider.com indicates that Surface revenues seem to be about one third of Applewatch/TV/other revenues, and about one quarter to one fifth of iPad or Macintosh revenues. Maybe more recent quarters are substantially different, but it doesnt look like Apple should be panicing. It seems as though the Apple Watch business all by itself is about twice the size of the MS Surface business - and none of the sales trends seem to indicate immediate changes in these types of relationships.
http://appleinsider.com/articl...
With that said, who knows what the future will hold? Currently however, most of Apple's sales seem to be solidly ahead of the Surface sales, and the projections are not hugely different.
Stop being reasonable. I was looking for an argument!
Stop wasting this stuff (it might be useful for something more important in the future) on consumable car batteries and go straight for hydrogen. There's a massive supply of it in the wet stuff.
Car batteries are hardly "consumables", you know. The recycling costs of these elements is certainly lower than the cost to dig them out of the ground and refine them. If their price increases enough to make a hydrogen system financially viable, the batteries already being used will be fairly "mined" for the valuable materials.