You make an excellent argument, fully backed with references. I don't think you needed the word "Nitwit" on top of that. Your argument stands on its own. Just sayin'
Taken out of context I could easily use this to show that the Christian god has told me to invade other cities and only leave them alive if they become my slaves
Umm - no. Your quote is from the Old Testament. That is not about Christianity. Christianity is based on one thing - the teachings of Christ. He was a radical who's fundamental message was Love.
Calling them an asshole is much more likely to be accurate. Calling them a terrorist gives them more credit than all but a tiny fraction of such scum remotely deserve.
I've often had that same thought. Calling them "terrorists" is really glorifying them, at least in the eyes of the impressionable. They are thinking "hey - I want to be a brave terrorist just like him!" All news headlines should refer to them literally as "assholes" or "losers". Then watch how many people now are going to say "hey - I want to be an asshole and a loser just like him!".I don't think quite so many would want to emulate that behaviour.
He is not speaking for the "adherents of other religions", nor is he "blindly throwing the mentally ill label around". Rather, he is speaking about two individuals known to be mentally unstable drug addicts.
"The pre-printed cardboard probably fits only one phone type"
- not necessarily. As far as I could tell it handles a range of sizes, though the info was less than clear about that.
"the response on most phones is not good enough to do head tracking very well"
- ah - but it does! It has a novel and innovative strapless design that forces you to hold this thing up to your head with booth hands. Then you cannot move your head around quickly, because you are now limited to trunk movements.
No matter what they do, they won't do anything that will save us anyhow. Our generation will be Ok, but the upcoming generations will have a challenge. Coastal areas as they are now will be uninhabitable, and a lot of people will suffer from a wide variety of things like droughts and inundations and cold or hot. A lot of people will suffer, because we won't do anything to change the situation, but they will get over it eventually. One door closes and another door opens. Places that are considered too cold today will have a moderate climate tomorrow. However, the world's standard of living may drop in the process. This in itself will reduce carbon emissions.
Meanwhile, San Francisco will get the Big One one day not too long from now, and Mount Pinatubo will become a super volcano and cover a third of the USA with magma. Nothing much we can do about that, but USA was headed down hill anyhow.
You were right. I found the reference, but I don't understand why you were modded down to oblivion. Perhaps it was Bing shills, who objected to your use of the "Google is your friend" meme.
Also in my search, I found this reference to a video that went viral in China poking fun at Kim Jong Un, and I found it entertaining: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetw...
"The rights holders also expect the ISPs to foot all or part of the bill". From the FA "Cost of the scheme should be divided "fairly" between ISPs and rights holders." WTF - "fairly"??? Why is this the ISP's problem? What does it have to do with them? Why should they foot any part of the bill?
I read the entire paper, thinking OMG, how much effort they went to building those toys! There is no way that would produce useful results, especially in just 10 generations. The model is simply too crude, and 10 generations is absurdly brief to expect useful results with this set up.
I have spent years playing with genetic algorithms, and I have learned a great deal from them. You can never underestimate the effects of chance, and I found it takes thousands of generations to continuously break out of local maxima and move forward to achieve some substantial and interesting result.
For example, for a long time I was obsessed with breading some "super being". I would run some population over tens of thousands of generations until one of my organsims achieved the highest score ever seen, and imagine I had achieved my dream of a super hero. Then later, the colony would start "de-evolving" (they always do, in the end), I would drop that organism back into the game with the same genes that scored so high, and find that its performance now was just mediocre. The problem is, that it seems half the time I am breeding for Luck, and that turns out not to be an inheritable trait:)
Let me clarify that a bit: My experiments always involved organisms that wander around my computer screen looking for bits of food. There may be predators in some experiments, but mostly not because predators add so much turbulence. The organisms are in competition with each other, and those who score best go on to bread the next generation. I always employed small populations of 20 to 60 organisms, and a great variety of schemes in the design of their world and for dropping food into their world. During any given generation, some will score highly, and some will score poorly. Turns out, quite often this is just as much due to chance as it is to skill, and evolution goes sideways. Certainly over time I have had many "successes", however you might describe that, where organisms have developed certain traits exactly as you would expect or even exceeding expectation. However, in none of my experiments did I ever expect or observe some result in just 10 generations.
I would suggest that an experiment in software could be developed that would shed more light on the evolution of vertebrate then your toys could ever show, and I suggest that it doesn't have to have a complex physics engine that takes many months to develop. Compared to how crude you little toy fish were, I would bet I could develop a useful simulation in a matter of days. It doesn't have to model the physics of water. In fact, the effectiveness of different numbers of vertebrae in your model could be measured empirically and the resulting data transferred to the program, etc... The feeding and prey avoidance can be far more simply and effectively modeled in software. In short, I just don't think building little toy fish is at all practical to answer the questions about evolution that you pose. However, it seems you have been well taught and have conducted very good work that will serve you well when you go on to research something more practical.
If you are interested here is one of my neural network simulations that evolves via a genetic algorithm. They develop
social behaviour - specifically, they learn to take turns: http://www.tropicalcoder.com/N...
Experiments like this make me believe that "survival of the fittest" is an overly simplistic statement about the mechanisms of natural selection, and that you cannot isolate the individual from the group. More and more, I forget about my original dreams of creating super beings and think about evolution at the level of the species, rather than the individual.
The Tissint meteorite fell in Tata Province, in the Guelmim-Es Semara region of Morocoo, on 18 July 2011.
It broke apart in the atmosphere and rained material on to Earth, with several pieces being recovered and some being sold.
It is also only the fifth Martian meteorite to be seen falling to Earth by eyewitnesses - the last being in 1962.
Tissint had been ejected from the surface of Mars 700,000 years ago when an asteroid struct the surface.
Of most interest is the sign of certain elements being carried into cracks in the rocks by water fluid, which has never been seen in a Martian meteorite before. Dr Philippe Gillet, director of EPFL's Earth and Planetary Sciences Laboratory, and colleagues from China, Japan and Germany performed a detailed analysis of organic carbon found in the meteorite.
They concluded that it very likely had a biological origin.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...
I think I can defeat my own speculation even better...
What I was first thinking when all this began, was this: Imagine launching a space ship made of "unobtainium" from Earth towards our sun, such that it is intended to come so close it almost grazes the sun's corona. Then it will build up tremendous velocity during its journey and shoot off at an astonishing speed as it rounds the sun.
However, imagining that same space ship as it approaches a rogue star travelling at relativistic velocity does not mean my space ship will accelerate to relativistic velocity as it approaches the star, because I was missing a key ingredient - Time. Acceleration due to gravity involves a constant times T squared, ie: totally depends on how long a body is subjected to the influence of gravity. As my ship approaches that rogue start, the star has passed by in the blink of an eye, and my ship will have, in the end, experienced acceleration due to the star's gravity for only a brief moment - not long enough result in any appreciable acceleration.
As to my second conjecture, there is no doubt that the collision of two stars traveling at tremendous speeds would easily result at least in the formation of a Black Hole, but beyond that, and depending on their mass, who knows what else?
As far as capture goes, I think it depends how close to the star you come. Remember, a start has a massive gravity, independent of its speed. Its mass is also increased in some proportion to its velocity. Not sure how much that would contribute to its gravity.
"Two stars moving 0.3c in opposite directions relative to us are going to collide at about 0.6C. Again, we're not getting major relativistic effects"
The products of the collision do not depend on "relativistic effects", rather, they depend on temperate/energy produced by the collision. I am sure that temperature would be high enough to produce many exotic particles.
In short, it wouldn't dismiss either of my conjectures, except to say my stated results of a collision are fanciful, but it think it would be far more dramatic than a normal collision. Think of all the energy that would be released!.
Seriously, what if one of these stars smashed into another similar one headed right for it at relativistic speed? It would be like the Large Hadron Collider at astronomical scale. Maybe it would create a star made of Higg's Bosons or who knows what. Maybe the resulting collision would create a Black Hole so dense it would suck in the entire Universe.
Then I had another, totally different thought. Suppose one of these happened to be passing by... You could send a space ship at normal velocity up to meet it in such a way it gets captured by the gravity of the star and gets pulled along with it. Of course, you might experience some pretty wicked acceleration that could leave you a puddle of red goo on the deck, but that's the chance you might take.. Alternatively, get it to fling you in whatever direction you want to go via the slingshot effect. You should be able to pick up a relativistic velocity from it for free. Maybe that was what the author meant when he suggest it could seed life in other galaxies.
I didn't like it either. It left me flat, like I had wasted my time watching it. It somehow reminded me of Contact, and after reading the comments, I now understand there was some cross-fertilization from people involved in that. I didn't like the way Contact turned out either. Been a SciFi fan all my life. We had two great topics with these films - first contact, and time travel. I have read many great stories that employed these themes, but the movies had to turn them into some kind of supernatural, quasi-religious experience - something like Ghost, I suppose. I was very disappointed in these movies.
"Gravity waves travel faster than light." Interesting - hadn't heard of that. If they do, it must be by cheating - warping SpaceTime, to do it. As far as entangled particles communicating with each other faster than the speed of light goes, we cannot take advantage of that phenomenon, so we are safe from violating Causality.
I visited your fair state back early in the year. Drove from the Grand Canyon to Flagstaff then down the mountains to Phoenix - speed limit: 80 mph, just a-flying down those mountains! Had to keep up or would have gotten run over by trucks and vehicles behind. What a wild ride! Visited Phoenix, where it seems nobody works. Instead they all come down from the mountains to party there, best I could understand. Visited South Mountain and saw the stately Saguaro Cactus standing guard over that sacred mountain. They are so cool! Though you see them in every cowboy movie filmed anywhere, they only grow there in AZ, mainly there on South Mountain on the southern outskirts of Phoenix. After a night partying in the city, next morning took Highway 8 towards Yuma, then down for a brief visit across the border at Mexicali before heading back to California. Will never forget that trip, and hope to return some day. I think I like your state.
btw: You forgot to mention - there is no fucking daylight savings in Arizona.
The story at Ars has a video of an candid interview Kim Dotcom did with the press a couple of days ago...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
I listened to the whole thing, and found it very interesting. Kim Dotcom gave fairly straight forward responses, and came off for me as an intelligent, not so bad guy. For sure it would be easy for us to envy his wealth, but IMHO he came about it by exploiting loopholes in the law, not by breaking the law.
Instead of pursuing Kim Dotcom to the ends of the earth (Sorry, NZers), why doesn't the US DOJ expend their effort prosecuting the crooks on Wall Street whole defrauded the whole world of a trillion dollars selling those bogus Credit Default Swaps that led up to the crash of 2008? Not one has been prosecuted, nor will they ever be.
I'm sure I'll get flamed for writing this as a driver
I won't flame you, but I would suggest being a taxi driver might motivate you to write a little FUD. Obviously, the existence of Uber is a serious threat to the status quo with taxi drivers. In fact this whole article is about how much owners of these medallions have to lose. Please bare with me a moment while I question something here...
You say...
Uber has succeeded in remaking the cab market and externalizing all equipment costs and liability to the drivers, all while actually even paying them (unbelievably) less than the chicken-scratch cab drivers already make, and all the while pretending they do something different than charge money for a ride somewhere. Many drivers are making 3-4 dollars an hour after vehicle maintenance, depreciation, taxes, water and snacks for passengers, and Uber's 20% and assorted fees.
.
If it was as bad as you say, nobody would drive for Uber. Yes, their fare is going to be lower than a typical taxi, and Uber gets their cut, but on the other hand, they don't have to pay a hefty "Medallion Rent". See this paragraph I lifted from a comment by LGW below...
.
You do realize many/most taxi drivers are part time, right? The normal system in most places means only the most successful drivers actually own a taxi. The rest rent by car by the calendar day, and pay a hefty sum for that. The result is it's normal to try to stay awake for as much of that 48 hours as possible, as it takes many hours of driving just to cover the fixed daily cost of the taxi, then sleep for a day or two, then repeat. This is not a system geared towards safety!
.
Does an Uber driver have to suffer like that? I doubt it.
How do they even know it was "Cox subscriber having IP address 24.252.149.211", as opposed to his neighbour who tapped into his WiFi?
Lest someone think this is a lame excuse, let me tell you my own experience...
The first month after I got the internet connection set up in my new place, my ISP noted my 64 gb data cap was exceeded, and they made a courtesy call to see if they could up sell me on more bandwidth. I was totally shocked, because I know my normal data usage would never come close to that limit. Somebody obviously cracked my relatively simple password and hacked into my modem. I immediately changed that to the longest password it would accept, and there has been no more data overages since. What do you suppose my WiFi was being used for? Could well have been for downloading copyrighted material, which certainly I hadn't been doing. What if the copyright police came after me for this? I would be pretty pissed off!
Agreed, except - this isn't even about people who download copyrighted material without permission. This is about allegations that people are downloading copyrighted material without permission. That's all - allegations. There was nothing proven in a court of law - just some scum bag outfit like John Steele & Co. called "Rightscorp" pointing their fingers at IP addresses that may or may not connect with people they are accusing of downloading.
Slashdot Mirror
You make an excellent argument, fully backed with references. I don't think you needed the word "Nitwit" on top of that. Your argument stands on its own. Just sayin'
That was a long time ago, wasn't it?
Taken out of context I could easily use this to show that the Christian god has told me to invade other cities and only leave them alive if they become my slaves
Umm - no. Your quote is from the Old Testament. That is not about Christianity. Christianity is based on one thing - the teachings of Christ. He was a radical who's fundamental message was Love.
Calling them an asshole is much more likely to be accurate. Calling them a terrorist gives them more credit than all but a tiny fraction of such scum remotely deserve.
I've often had that same thought. Calling them "terrorists" is really glorifying them, at least in the eyes of the impressionable. They are thinking "hey - I want to be a brave terrorist just like him!" All news headlines should refer to them literally as "assholes" or "losers". Then watch how many people now are going to say "hey - I want to be an asshole and a loser just like him!".I don't think quite so many would want to emulate that behaviour.
He is not speaking for the "adherents of other religions", nor is he "blindly throwing the mentally ill label around". Rather, he is speaking about two individuals known to be mentally unstable drug addicts.
Umm,,, He said "3D" printer. These don't use card stock
"The pre-printed cardboard probably fits only one phone type"
- not necessarily. As far as I could tell it handles a range of sizes, though the info was less than clear about that.
"the response on most phones is not good enough to do head tracking very well"
- ah - but it does! It has a novel and innovative strapless design that forces you to hold this thing up to your head with booth hands. Then you cannot move your head around quickly, because you are now limited to trunk movements.
No matter what they do, they won't do anything that will save us anyhow. Our generation will be Ok, but the upcoming generations will have a challenge. Coastal areas as they are now will be uninhabitable, and a lot of people will suffer from a wide variety of things like droughts and inundations and cold or hot. A lot of people will suffer, because we won't do anything to change the situation, but they will get over it eventually. One door closes and another door opens. Places that are considered too cold today will have a moderate climate tomorrow. However, the world's standard of living may drop in the process. This in itself will reduce carbon emissions.
Meanwhile, San Francisco will get the Big One one day not too long from now, and Mount Pinatubo will become a super volcano and cover a third of the USA with magma. Nothing much we can do about that, but USA was headed down hill anyhow.
I read TFA, and it broke me up! I laughed so hard I almost pissed myself. Seriously...
You were right. I found the reference, but I don't understand why you were modded down to oblivion. Perhaps it was Bing shills, who objected to your use of the "Google is your friend" meme.
Also in my search, I found this reference to a video that went viral in China poking fun at Kim Jong Un, and I found it entertaining: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetw...
"The rights holders also expect the ISPs to foot all or part of the bill". From the FA "Cost of the scheme should be divided "fairly" between ISPs and rights holders." WTF - "fairly"??? Why is this the ISP's problem? What does it have to do with them? Why should they foot any part of the bill?
I read the entire paper, thinking OMG, how much effort they went to building those toys! There is no way that would produce useful results, especially in just 10 generations. The model is simply too crude, and 10 generations is absurdly brief to expect useful results with this set up.
I have spent years playing with genetic algorithms, and I have learned a great deal from them. You can never underestimate the effects of chance, and I found it takes thousands of generations to continuously break out of local maxima and move forward to achieve some substantial and interesting result.
For example, for a long time I was obsessed with breading some "super being". I would run some population over tens of thousands of generations until one of my organsims achieved the highest score ever seen, and imagine I had achieved my dream of a super hero. Then later, the colony would start "de-evolving" (they always do, in the end), I would drop that organism back into the game with the same genes that scored so high, and find that its performance now was just mediocre. The problem is, that it seems half the time I am breeding for Luck, and that turns out not to be an inheritable trait :)
Let me clarify that a bit: My experiments always involved organisms that wander around my computer screen looking for bits of food. There may be predators in some experiments, but mostly not because predators add so much turbulence. The organisms are in competition with each other, and those who score best go on to bread the next generation. I always employed small populations of 20 to 60 organisms, and a great variety of schemes in the design of their world and for dropping food into their world. During any given generation, some will score highly, and some will score poorly. Turns out, quite often this is just as much due to chance as it is to skill, and evolution goes sideways. Certainly over time I have had many "successes", however you might describe that, where organisms have developed certain traits exactly as you would expect or even exceeding expectation. However, in none of my experiments did I ever expect or observe some result in just 10 generations.
I would suggest that an experiment in software could be developed that would shed more light on the evolution of vertebrate then your toys could ever show, and I suggest that it doesn't have to have a complex physics engine that takes many months to develop. Compared to how crude you little toy fish were, I would bet I could develop a useful simulation in a matter of days. It doesn't have to model the physics of water. In fact, the effectiveness of different numbers of vertebrae in your model could be measured empirically and the resulting data transferred to the program, etc... The feeding and prey avoidance can be far more simply and effectively modeled in software. In short, I just don't think building little toy fish is at all practical to answer the questions about evolution that you pose. However, it seems you have been well taught and have conducted very good work that will serve you well when you go on to research something more practical.
If you are interested here is one of my neural network simulations that evolves via a genetic algorithm. They develop social behaviour - specifically, they learn to take turns: http://www.tropicalcoder.com/N...
Experiments like this make me believe that "survival of the fittest" is an overly simplistic statement about the mechanisms of natural selection, and that you cannot isolate the individual from the group. More and more, I forget about my original dreams of creating super beings and think about evolution at the level of the species, rather than the individual.
The Tissint meteorite fell in Tata Province, in the Guelmim-Es Semara region of Morocoo, on 18 July 2011. It broke apart in the atmosphere and rained material on to Earth, with several pieces being recovered and some being sold. It is also only the fifth Martian meteorite to be seen falling to Earth by eyewitnesses - the last being in 1962. Tissint had been ejected from the surface of Mars 700,000 years ago when an asteroid struct the surface. Of most interest is the sign of certain elements being carried into cracks in the rocks by water fluid, which has never been seen in a Martian meteorite before. Dr Philippe Gillet, director of EPFL's Earth and Planetary Sciences Laboratory, and colleagues from China, Japan and Germany performed a detailed analysis of organic carbon found in the meteorite. They concluded that it very likely had a biological origin. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...
I think I can defeat my own speculation even better...
What I was first thinking when all this began, was this: Imagine launching a space ship made of "unobtainium" from Earth towards our sun, such that it is intended to come so close it almost grazes the sun's corona. Then it will build up tremendous velocity during its journey and shoot off at an astonishing speed as it rounds the sun.
However, imagining that same space ship as it approaches a rogue star travelling at relativistic velocity does not mean my space ship will accelerate to relativistic velocity as it approaches the star, because I was missing a key ingredient - Time. Acceleration due to gravity involves a constant times T squared, ie: totally depends on how long a body is subjected to the influence of gravity. As my ship approaches that rogue start, the star has passed by in the blink of an eye, and my ship will have, in the end, experienced acceleration due to the star's gravity for only a brief moment - not long enough result in any appreciable acceleration.
As to my second conjecture, there is no doubt that the collision of two stars traveling at tremendous speeds would easily result at least in the formation of a Black Hole, but beyond that, and depending on their mass, who knows what else?
There is no "vendor lock-in" with Google products.
As far as capture goes, I think it depends how close to the star you come. Remember, a start has a massive gravity, independent of its speed. Its mass is also increased in some proportion to its velocity. Not sure how much that would contribute to its gravity.
"Two stars moving 0.3c in opposite directions relative to us are going to collide at about 0.6C. Again, we're not getting major relativistic effects" The products of the collision do not depend on "relativistic effects", rather, they depend on temperate/energy produced by the collision. I am sure that temperature would be high enough to produce many exotic particles.
In short, it wouldn't dismiss either of my conjectures, except to say my stated results of a collision are fanciful, but it think it would be far more dramatic than a normal collision. Think of all the energy that would be released!.
Seriously, what if one of these stars smashed into another similar one headed right for it at relativistic speed? It would be like the Large Hadron Collider at astronomical scale. Maybe it would create a star made of Higg's Bosons or who knows what. Maybe the resulting collision would create a Black Hole so dense it would suck in the entire Universe.
Then I had another, totally different thought. Suppose one of these happened to be passing by... You could send a space ship at normal velocity up to meet it in such a way it gets captured by the gravity of the star and gets pulled along with it. Of course, you might experience some pretty wicked acceleration that could leave you a puddle of red goo on the deck, but that's the chance you might take.. Alternatively, get it to fling you in whatever direction you want to go via the slingshot effect. You should be able to pick up a relativistic velocity from it for free. Maybe that was what the author meant when he suggest it could seed life in other galaxies.
I didn't like it either. It left me flat, like I had wasted my time watching it. It somehow reminded me of Contact, and after reading the comments, I now understand there was some cross-fertilization from people involved in that. I didn't like the way Contact turned out either. Been a SciFi fan all my life. We had two great topics with these films - first contact, and time travel. I have read many great stories that employed these themes, but the movies had to turn them into some kind of supernatural, quasi-religious experience - something like Ghost, I suppose. I was very disappointed in these movies.
I kept thinking about all those corn stalks they were trampling - such a waste.
"Gravity waves travel faster than light." Interesting - hadn't heard of that. If they do, it must be by cheating - warping SpaceTime, to do it. As far as entangled particles communicating with each other faster than the speed of light goes, we cannot take advantage of that phenomenon, so we are safe from violating Causality.
I visited your fair state back early in the year. Drove from the Grand Canyon to Flagstaff then down the mountains to Phoenix - speed limit: 80 mph, just a-flying down those mountains! Had to keep up or would have gotten run over by trucks and vehicles behind. What a wild ride! Visited Phoenix, where it seems nobody works. Instead they all come down from the mountains to party there, best I could understand. Visited South Mountain and saw the stately Saguaro Cactus standing guard over that sacred mountain. They are so cool! Though you see them in every cowboy movie filmed anywhere, they only grow there in AZ, mainly there on South Mountain on the southern outskirts of Phoenix. After a night partying in the city, next morning took Highway 8 towards Yuma, then down for a brief visit across the border at Mexicali before heading back to California. Will never forget that trip, and hope to return some day. I think I like your state.
btw: You forgot to mention - there is no fucking daylight savings in Arizona.
The story at Ars has a video of an candid interview Kim Dotcom did with the press a couple of days ago... http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
I listened to the whole thing, and found it very interesting. Kim Dotcom gave fairly straight forward responses, and came off for me as an intelligent, not so bad guy. For sure it would be easy for us to envy his wealth, but IMHO he came about it by exploiting loopholes in the law, not by breaking the law.
Instead of pursuing Kim Dotcom to the ends of the earth (Sorry, NZers), why doesn't the US DOJ expend their effort prosecuting the crooks on Wall Street whole defrauded the whole world of a trillion dollars selling those bogus Credit Default Swaps that led up to the crash of 2008? Not one has been prosecuted, nor will they ever be.
I'm sure I'll get flamed for writing this as a driver
I won't flame you, but I would suggest being a taxi driver might motivate you to write a little FUD. Obviously, the existence of Uber is a serious threat to the status quo with taxi drivers. In fact this whole article is about how much owners of these medallions have to lose. Please bare with me a moment while I question something here...
You say...
Uber has succeeded in remaking the cab market and externalizing all equipment costs and liability to the drivers, all while actually even paying them (unbelievably) less than the chicken-scratch cab drivers already make, and all the while pretending they do something different than charge money for a ride somewhere. Many drivers are making 3-4 dollars an hour after vehicle maintenance, depreciation, taxes, water and snacks for passengers, and Uber's 20% and assorted fees.
.
If it was as bad as you say, nobody would drive for Uber. Yes, their fare is going to be lower than a typical taxi, and Uber gets their cut, but on the other hand, they don't have to pay a hefty "Medallion Rent". See this paragraph I lifted from a comment by LGW below...
.
You do realize many/most taxi drivers are part time, right? The normal system in most places means only the most successful drivers actually own a taxi. The rest rent by car by the calendar day, and pay a hefty sum for that. The result is it's normal to try to stay awake for as much of that 48 hours as possible, as it takes many hours of driving just to cover the fixed daily cost of the taxi, then sleep for a day or two, then repeat. This is not a system geared towards safety!
.
Does an Uber driver have to suffer like that? I doubt it.
How do they even know it was "Cox subscriber having IP address 24.252.149.211", as opposed to his neighbour who tapped into his WiFi?
Lest someone think this is a lame excuse, let me tell you my own experience...
The first month after I got the internet connection set up in my new place, my ISP noted my 64 gb data cap was exceeded, and they made a courtesy call to see if they could up sell me on more bandwidth. I was totally shocked, because I know my normal data usage would never come close to that limit. Somebody obviously cracked my relatively simple password and hacked into my modem. I immediately changed that to the longest password it would accept, and there has been no more data overages since. What do you suppose my WiFi was being used for? Could well have been for downloading copyrighted material, which certainly I hadn't been doing. What if the copyright police came after me for this? I would be pretty pissed off!
Agreed, except - this isn't even about people who download copyrighted material without permission. This is about allegations that people are downloading copyrighted material without permission. That's all - allegations. There was nothing proven in a court of law - just some scum bag outfit like John Steele & Co. called "Rightscorp" pointing their fingers at IP addresses that may or may not connect with people they are accusing of downloading.