You completely fail to take into account the degree of suffering. 100 guilty persons going free and each shoplifting $20 items totals $2000 in "suffering". An innocent person spending even a single night in jail far outweighs this.
"Technically "meltdown" simply means failure of the primary cooling system"
You are 100% wrong. "A nuclear meltdown is an informal term for a severe nuclear reactor accident that results in core damage from overheating. The term is not officially defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency[1] or by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.[2] However, it has been defined to mean the accidental melting of the core of a nuclear reactor,[3] and is in common usage a reference to the core's either complete or partial collapse. "Core melt accident" and "partial core melt"[4] are the analogous technical terms."
And although nuclear reactors might be safe while they're operating, they still produce a lot of radioactive waste. This is waste that has to be stored for over 10,000 years. No one on this planet has done anything that could possibly qualify them to design a vessel to store radioactive waste for a period of 10,000 years. Our knowledge of everything from how materials degrade to geological events that could happen simply is not accurate out to 10,000 years. Sure, I guess we could try to maintain the storage site for 10,000 years, but consider that no civilization on this planet has lasted even half that long. (China comes close at 4000 years).
Generating large amounts of nuclear waste is simply reckless given the problems it can cause and how qualified we are to deal with it.
It's entrenched because it's fucking useful. A mechanical engineer needs to get some data from a few sensors during an experiment. They can have a program whipped up in 2 minutes. Is it the most efficient thing ever? No. Does it run on the cheapest possible micro controller? No. Is it the job of the mechanical engineer to write code that's efficient and maintainable for an experiment that's going to run once? No.
Labview (I don't care if it's called "G", the only program capable of generating it is labview) isn't geared towards the CS or EE. It's geared towards people whose job is not to write DAQ or control software that for some reason have been tasked with writing DAQ or control software. Often this occurs because these people are asked to do something which requires a small amount of DAQ and control software that doesn't exist but is unique to each application (e.g. mechanical test data).
Not necessarily. If it ever gets to the point that a majority of the populous can't afford to buy food then prices are going to be the least of your problems. There will be riots the likes of which you can't even imagine until something is done to fix the problem. I don't know what the solution would be, but when your entire country cannot buy food then literally nothing is off-limits in terms of fixing the problem. The government might even go so far as to annex every inch of farm land and have the national guard start growing food. No, this obviously isn't constitutional, but do you think ANYONE will give a damn what the constitution says when they can't afford to buy bread?
The other thing that you're completely forgetting is that we're talking about an increase in the cost of gas over several years. If gas were to hit $20/gal tomorrow then yeah, we'd have some fucking problems. But when gas increases buy a few dollars per gallon per year, people adapt. For example, a few years back when gas went up to $4/gal, people started carpooling, people stopped buying gas guzzling vehicles, people started demanding that local governments invest in public transportation, etc. Every automaker (in America, the rest of the world figured this shit out years ago) had to design engines which were [gasp] somewhat efficient because all of a sudden people weren't buying vehicles that got 2 miles to the gallon. If gas were to increase by this rate over the next 3-5 years then we'd see one hell of a lot of alternative fuel research and production and things wouldn't actually be that bad. Yes, prices would increase, but not very much and not for very long.
"1. Throwing out the students that are not learning will not help them learn."
Explain to me how on earth confiscating property will help them learn. Confiscating their cell phone, mp3 player, etc. doesn't help the student to learn, it just removes whatever distraction they were using. Once that's gone they'll either find something else to distract them or they'll start bothering other students because they're bored. I would much prefer that a student sits in class and listens to their ipod or reads a book or text messages on their cell phone rather than try to talk to other students in the middle of a lecture because they're bored. Another pastime for bored students that have nothing to distract them at their desk is to disrupt the lecture by asking intentionally stupid questions or making a ruckus.
"questions remain whether such a move would give teachers too much power and infringe on student rights."
That's like saying "questions remain whether Hitler was a bad guy" or "questions remain whether giving the police the authority to search houses without a warrant would give the police too much power". There's isn't any question here. Of course allowing teachers to search and delete whatever they want from a student's cell phone is an abuse of power. Just like allowing teachers to search and erase content from a student's notebook or to take a student's books and burn them.
"Mandate that...the ebook be available without DRM"
It doesn't matter how much pull the school has, this will never happen for two reasons: 1) The school isn't going to spend their time fighting for the students. The DRM will not cause students to take their tuition money elsewhere, ergo there's no incentive for the administration to do anything about this. 2) The school administration probably doesn't know what DRM is. I mean, these are the same morons that think distributing an ipad to every student (you know, they thing you can't type on or print from but still costs $600) is a brilliant use of funds. 3) A single college might be worth a lot of money to the publisher, but not enough for them to risk setting the precedent of offering DRM free textbooks. They aren't going to risk giving other colleges the idea that they can get DRM free textbooks too. If textbook DRM goes away then it's suddenly a lot harder for the publisher to crank out a new version every year and actually have anyone buy it.
"At any given time, 25-50% of the student population shouldn't have a vote, because they won't be affected by the outcome. And no student should reasonably have a vote on anything which is going to take more than 4 years of planning."
That's great, except that the money is being added to the tuition NOW in order to pay for the building in 5 years. The students are most certainly affected by the outcome when their tuition bill increases and they have to drop out for an extra semester to work and pay for it.
The system was very clearly designed to get through the course in the shortest amount of time possible. A professional driver attempting to get through that same course as fast as possible would have the tires making the exact same noise. Something tells me they also have it set up like that to scare the bejesus out of people that they take on demo rides. The "driver" has a high degree of confidence in the car because he's obviously done this multiple times before.
Pedestrian crossings aren't EVER going to disappear. Doesn't matter if 100% of cars are automated, it's going to cause hell if someone tries to jump in front of a stream of cars barreling down an interstate at 50-100 MPH.
Well, the good news is that you'll probably have all the telemetry data from the sensors, including the visible spectrum imaging system. This should give you enough evidence to prove that the car did the best possible thing... or to prove that it failed and that it's the fault of the company that sold you the car.* Once this happens once or twice every manufacturer will be required to provide a system that can take the sensor data and generate a 3d simulation of the situation for use in court. Hopefully that will help stop nonsense lawsuits.
*(Not that I agree with holding the manufacturer liable for a pedestrian jumping out in front of a car. I just think it's better that the family frivolously sue a car company with plenty of lawyers than an average citizen with no money for extended legal shenanigans.)
Your country apparently has a tradition of buying tiny amounts of food every single day. My country has a tradition of not wasting ridiculous amounts of time transporting small amounts of stuff a large number of times.
It's also not that our communities are laid out poorly, is that yours were laid out before America even came into existence and you haven't had the good sense to update your communities since then.
You fail to account for the scenario where the driver in the right lane is driving UNDER the speed limit and the left car matches the reduced speed. In this case, the driver in the right lane is a law-abiding citizen (perhaps his car is incapable of going the speed limit, he's towing something, etc.) and the driver in the left lane is impeding traffic.
Absolutely false. The car is completely capable of detecting pedestrians, deer, stopped cars, etc. This thing knows how to stop in the event that some shit goes down (see link below). You're just making up a lot of bullshit based on literally no research.
SOURCE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Atmk07Otu9U Skip to 2:10 to see where the ABC reporter makes a move like she's going to run out in front of the car. The thing slams on the brakes.
"No emergency backup lights." You're aware this is illegal, yes? "My boss is cheap and doesn't care" isn't an excuse. Call the fire marshal and tell them about it. They'll come down and write the owner up a ticket and force him to install the safety equipment.
Always surprises me the number of idiots that have the motivation and intelligence to bitch about the unsafe working conditions on the internet, but not to the fire marshal or OSHA.
"Thus, if something is not in the Constitution, the government can do it."
The STATE government can, NOT the federal government. You apparently missed the 10th amendment "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
This saves a great deal of packaging... unless someone wants to use the mobo outside of the ridiculously huge box that it ships in, in which case it's wasting huge amounts of paper.
No, but it means that there should be some verification of the results. For example, take every study ever conducted by the RIAA about file sharing. Those studies have been shown repeatedly to be bullshit.
Of course, everything we've heard seems to support this study about bandwidth, which probably means that it's valid.
"I make $X and the government too $Y, as far as I'm concerned, that's half of it." Yeah, it's really easy to say that the government takes half of your money when you just make shit up.
"Kudos to whomever figured out the patch, though, and those who designed the system such that the patch was still able to be uploaded in its current condition."
It was actually a coincidence that they were able to do it in the first place. According to TFA it wasn't some clever people down here that fixed it.
"On Dec. 23, the battery on Galaxy 15 — which relied on solar panels pointed at the sun to generate power — became completely drained, Intelsat officials said. Once that happened, the satellite reset itself as designed and began accepting commands from Intelsat's control center."
The satellite basically fixed itself. The uploaded patch didn't fix the problem, but will prevent it from occurring in the future. Although you can bet that future satellites will most definitely have some kind of watchdog to kill the payload in the event that the position control systems experience a critical failure.
"But it is good to remember that, like everybody, they're only human."
Then why are they given powers that are not given to average humans? This is the same thing that goes on with police officers. When they're doing their job well they're touted as "Brave heroes better than most of the population" but when they're making mistakes they're "only human".
The solution is more oversight of people with more power.
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You completely fail to take into account the degree of suffering. 100 guilty persons going free and each shoplifting $20 items totals $2000 in "suffering". An innocent person spending even a single night in jail far outweighs this.
"Technically "meltdown" simply means failure of the primary cooling system"
You are 100% wrong.
"A nuclear meltdown is an informal term for a severe nuclear reactor accident that results in core damage from overheating. The term is not officially defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency[1] or by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.[2] However, it has been defined to mean the accidental melting of the core of a nuclear reactor,[3] and is in common usage a reference to the core's either complete or partial collapse. "Core melt accident" and "partial core melt"[4] are the analogous technical terms."
And although nuclear reactors might be safe while they're operating, they still produce a lot of radioactive waste. This is waste that has to be stored for over 10,000 years. No one on this planet has done anything that could possibly qualify them to design a vessel to store radioactive waste for a period of 10,000 years. Our knowledge of everything from how materials degrade to geological events that could happen simply is not accurate out to 10,000 years. Sure, I guess we could try to maintain the storage site for 10,000 years, but consider that no civilization on this planet has lasted even half that long. (China comes close at 4000 years).
Generating large amounts of nuclear waste is simply reckless given the problems it can cause and how qualified we are to deal with it.
It's entrenched because it's fucking useful. A mechanical engineer needs to get some data from a few sensors during an experiment. They can have a program whipped up in 2 minutes. Is it the most efficient thing ever? No. Does it run on the cheapest possible micro controller? No. Is it the job of the mechanical engineer to write code that's efficient and maintainable for an experiment that's going to run once? No.
Labview (I don't care if it's called "G", the only program capable of generating it is labview) isn't geared towards the CS or EE. It's geared towards people whose job is not to write DAQ or control software that for some reason have been tasked with writing DAQ or control software. Often this occurs because these people are asked to do something which requires a small amount of DAQ and control software that doesn't exist but is unique to each application (e.g. mechanical test data).
"You won't be able to afford food anymore!!"
Not necessarily. If it ever gets to the point that a majority of the populous can't afford to buy food then prices are going to be the least of your problems. There will be riots the likes of which you can't even imagine until something is done to fix the problem. I don't know what the solution would be, but when your entire country cannot buy food then literally nothing is off-limits in terms of fixing the problem. The government might even go so far as to annex every inch of farm land and have the national guard start growing food. No, this obviously isn't constitutional, but do you think ANYONE will give a damn what the constitution says when they can't afford to buy bread?
The other thing that you're completely forgetting is that we're talking about an increase in the cost of gas over several years. If gas were to hit $20/gal tomorrow then yeah, we'd have some fucking problems. But when gas increases buy a few dollars per gallon per year, people adapt. For example, a few years back when gas went up to $4/gal, people started carpooling, people stopped buying gas guzzling vehicles, people started demanding that local governments invest in public transportation, etc. Every automaker (in America, the rest of the world figured this shit out years ago) had to design engines which were [gasp] somewhat efficient because all of a sudden people weren't buying vehicles that got 2 miles to the gallon. If gas were to increase by this rate over the next 3-5 years then we'd see one hell of a lot of alternative fuel research and production and things wouldn't actually be that bad. Yes, prices would increase, but not very much and not for very long.
Separate but equal, right? You know, I seem to remember the supreme court having something to say about this. (Brown V. board of education)
"those in countries where education is completely free"
It's only free with the tax you pay.
"1. Throwing out the students that are not learning will not help them learn."
Explain to me how on earth confiscating property will help them learn. Confiscating their cell phone, mp3 player, etc. doesn't help the student to learn, it just removes whatever distraction they were using. Once that's gone they'll either find something else to distract them or they'll start bothering other students because they're bored. I would much prefer that a student sits in class and listens to their ipod or reads a book or text messages on their cell phone rather than try to talk to other students in the middle of a lecture because they're bored. Another pastime for bored students that have nothing to distract them at their desk is to disrupt the lecture by asking intentionally stupid questions or making a ruckus.
"questions remain whether such a move would give teachers too much power and infringe on student rights."
That's like saying "questions remain whether Hitler was a bad guy" or "questions remain whether giving the police the authority to search houses without a warrant would give the police too much power".
There's isn't any question here. Of course allowing teachers to search and delete whatever they want from a student's cell phone is an abuse of power. Just like allowing teachers to search and erase content from a student's notebook or to take a student's books and burn them.
"Mandate that...the ebook be available without DRM"
It doesn't matter how much pull the school has, this will never happen for two reasons:
1) The school isn't going to spend their time fighting for the students. The DRM will not cause students to take their tuition money elsewhere, ergo there's no incentive for the administration to do anything about this.
2) The school administration probably doesn't know what DRM is. I mean, these are the same morons that think distributing an ipad to every student (you know, they thing you can't type on or print from but still costs $600) is a brilliant use of funds.
3) A single college might be worth a lot of money to the publisher, but not enough for them to risk setting the precedent of offering DRM free textbooks. They aren't going to risk giving other colleges the idea that they can get DRM free textbooks too. If textbook DRM goes away then it's suddenly a lot harder for the publisher to crank out a new version every year and actually have anyone buy it.
"At any given time, 25-50% of the student population shouldn't have a vote, because they won't be affected by the outcome. And no student should reasonably have a vote on anything which is going to take more than 4 years of planning."
That's great, except that the money is being added to the tuition NOW in order to pay for the building in 5 years. The students are most certainly affected by the outcome when their tuition bill increases and they have to drop out for an extra semester to work and pay for it.
The system was very clearly designed to get through the course in the shortest amount of time possible. A professional driver attempting to get through that same course as fast as possible would have the tires making the exact same noise. Something tells me they also have it set up like that to scare the bejesus out of people that they take on demo rides. The "driver" has a high degree of confidence in the car because he's obviously done this multiple times before.
Pedestrian crossings aren't EVER going to disappear. Doesn't matter if 100% of cars are automated, it's going to cause hell if someone tries to jump in front of a stream of cars barreling down an interstate at 50-100 MPH.
Well, the good news is that you'll probably have all the telemetry data from the sensors, including the visible spectrum imaging system. This should give you enough evidence to prove that the car did the best possible thing... or to prove that it failed and that it's the fault of the company that sold you the car.* Once this happens once or twice every manufacturer will be required to provide a system that can take the sensor data and generate a 3d simulation of the situation for use in court. Hopefully that will help stop nonsense lawsuits.
*(Not that I agree with holding the manufacturer liable for a pedestrian jumping out in front of a car. I just think it's better that the family frivolously sue a car company with plenty of lawyers than an average citizen with no money for extended legal shenanigans.)
"would an autopilot have safely landed that US Air flight in the middle of the Hudson river?"
I have to question the safety of ANYTHING landing a plane in the middle of the Hudson river.
Your country apparently has a tradition of buying tiny amounts of food every single day. My country has a tradition of not wasting ridiculous amounts of time transporting small amounts of stuff a large number of times.
It's also not that our communities are laid out poorly, is that yours were laid out before America even came into existence and you haven't had the good sense to update your communities since then.
You fail to account for the scenario where the driver in the right lane is driving UNDER the speed limit and the left car matches the reduced speed. In this case, the driver in the right lane is a law-abiding citizen (perhaps his car is incapable of going the speed limit, he's towing something, etc.) and the driver in the left lane is impeding traffic.
Absolutely false. The car is completely capable of detecting pedestrians, deer, stopped cars, etc. This thing knows how to stop in the event that some shit goes down (see link below). You're just making up a lot of bullshit based on literally no research.
SOURCE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Atmk07Otu9U Skip to 2:10 to see where the ABC reporter makes a move like she's going to run out in front of the car. The thing slams on the brakes.
"No emergency backup lights."
You're aware this is illegal, yes? "My boss is cheap and doesn't care" isn't an excuse. Call the fire marshal and tell them about it. They'll come down and write the owner up a ticket and force him to install the safety equipment.
Always surprises me the number of idiots that have the motivation and intelligence to bitch about the unsafe working conditions on the internet, but not to the fire marshal or OSHA.
"Thus, if something is not in the Constitution, the government can do it."
The STATE government can, NOT the federal government. You apparently missed the 10th amendment "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
This saves a great deal of packaging... unless someone wants to use the mobo outside of the ridiculously huge box that it ships in, in which case it's wasting huge amounts of paper.
No, but it means that there should be some verification of the results. For example, take every study ever conducted by the RIAA about file sharing. Those studies have been shown repeatedly to be bullshit.
Of course, everything we've heard seems to support this study about bandwidth, which probably means that it's valid.
"I make $X and the government too $Y, as far as I'm concerned, that's half of it." Yeah, it's really easy to say that the government takes half of your money when you just make shit up.
"Kudos to whomever figured out the patch, though, and those who designed the system such that the patch was still able to be uploaded in its current condition."
It was actually a coincidence that they were able to do it in the first place. According to TFA it wasn't some clever people down here that fixed it.
"On Dec. 23, the battery on Galaxy 15 — which relied on solar panels pointed at the sun to generate power — became completely drained, Intelsat officials said. Once that happened, the satellite reset itself as designed and began accepting commands from Intelsat's control center."
The satellite basically fixed itself. The uploaded patch didn't fix the problem, but will prevent it from occurring in the future. Although you can bet that future satellites will most definitely have some kind of watchdog to kill the payload in the event that the position control systems experience a critical failure.
"But it is good to remember that, like everybody, they're only human."
Then why are they given powers that are not given to average humans? This is the same thing that goes on with police officers. When they're doing their job well they're touted as "Brave heroes better than most of the population" but when they're making mistakes they're "only human".
The solution is more oversight of people with more power.
This might come as a surprise to you but you give up a lot of privacy to your spouse when you get married.