Look, we all know everyone speeds. 5-10 MPH over the speed limit is socially acceptable and tacitly condoned (it's rare to get pulled over by the cops for that, unless they want to bust you for some unrelated reason). But this is entirely different – it seems to be a clear case of reckless driving. On most interstates, you can do 75 MPH no problem, and on the better ones, 85 MPH is reasonable during the daytime if there is no inclement weather. There are a few interstates where you can safely do 90-100 MPH, but these are not all that common, and even then, extreme caution is required. I don't see any possible way that someone could safely average nearly 100 MPH on a cross-country road trip. Safety comes by going with the flow of traffic, and this driver must have been blowing past the majority of other cars during most of his trip. It's amazing that he made it there in one piece.
I know, right? What we really need is to be impressed by how safely someone drives across country. Like if he never failed to use his signal blinker a single time, never ran a yellow light, and stopped at every single stop sign no matter what. He could video the whole thing and make a two-hundred hour documentary that people could watch in lieu of getting their license revoked after their third speeding ticket.
This. Not only that, this is a clear case where he SHOULD be, if not arrested, at least fined heavily. This is clear cut reckless driving; speed limits are posted to keep the public safe. Stunts like this should not be pulled at the potential expense of other drivers on the road. We're all beholden to the same laws, whether you're trying to break a record or not.
Unless he posts GPS data (maybe he did), how can he be arrested? Theoretically, he could have been traveling the speed limit through any given state that might want to arrest him.
Amazon opting to be flat, effectively at 0% margin, is a game other businesses don't have the will to do
This is baffling to me. Why doesn't Walmart compete with Amazon? Walmart has the cash to fight it out with them, and they certainly have the incentive, but it seems like they're getting beaten badly. Their site sucks relative to Amazon's. If it were just a question of a relentless desire to expand and dominate, it seems like there would be more competition between them. Is it really just a question of taxation? Does Walmart compete effectually in states where Amazon gets taxed?
so long as the record of it and the location of the car is not used for any other purpose beyond the immediate -- checking registration, reports of it being stolen, or involved in an active crime.
IIRC, they're already storing the data in some places, and there have been fights about how long they can hold it.
This is why I said "if a government employee were to limit himself strictly to criticizing government policy," since the present fellow did not do this. Yet still there are people who disagree with this proposition.
As a GPS tracker is simply a proxy for a person hiding in the car and tagging along for the ride, writing down everyplace you go, the answer to this question has always been pretty self-evident to me. You need a warrant.
It's not that simple, because you could achieve almost exactly the same result as a GPS with a helicopter and a large enough fleet of undercover cars. It seems the argument needs to be made on the grounds that it is not in the interests of the public if the police's job becomes too easy. This argument is necessary if one also wants to argue against the prevalence of electronic means of reading license plates. Reading a single plate with an electronic device is not substantively different from a cop reading it manually, but once he can read thousands a day and record the time and place of each, and search these data indefinitely, he has a tool of a different kind (and one that could in many cases make GPS tracking unnecessary).
Clearly it's not a conflict of interest. A conflict of interest would be if someone were paying him to criticize the government while the government itself is paying him to support its interests. He appears to be offering his criticism free of charge. While you can profess that a public employer, like a private employer, should be able to fire an employee for this reason, for the reason stated above, I do no think the case is so simple. (The guy in question was, however, doing more than just criticizing the government, so his particular case is more muddled.)
The other difference is that the ability to criticize one's government is different in kind from the ability to criticize a soft drink. It might not be unreasonable for Pepsi to attempt to keep its employees from undermining the company's success on their own time, given that someone who hates Pepsi can choose to work at another company. Contrarily, given that government is a monopoly, expecting an employee to give up his right to criticize it seems far more dubious, since, aside from voting (or emigrating), such criticism is his only means to effect changes in it. If a government employee were to limit himself strictly to criticizing government policy, and did so from an anonymous account, so not to lend to his comments the authority of his office, it seems questionable to punish him for it.
It seems to me that this is purely just a very rich person having a fun side project. He's not planning on a fleet of submersible Tesla's or anything like that. He just wants a toy from his childhood fantasy.
we should start to worry when he buys the death star prop and is disappointed to find it doesn't actually work.
'I'm just talking now as a parent. Do not wreck yourself about your 5-year-old getting Alzheimer's. Worry more about the fact that when she's a teenager she might be driving around in cars with drunk boys.'
Yeah, that's much more comforting. Thanks, Professor!
well on the plus side, driving around in a car with drunk boys is clinically proven to reduce one's risk of acquiring Alzheimer's.
I'm 6'4" tall (190cm) and I'm in pain if I don't get up from those seats at least every two hours and walk to the bathroom.
I find it puzzling that feminists don't take up this issue. Surely the principle of equality between the sexes would support seats with more legroom for people 5'10" and above. After all, equalizing bathroom sizes based on need gets quite a bit of press. What better way than to promote the issue of space parity for feminists to demonstrate they are interested in promoting equal rights for all, and to disarm critics who profess otherwise?
Should we really be celebrating a group that supports the weaponization of anti-chemicals? I've seen enough Star Trek to know the dangers that anti-matter poses to us all.
Torture scenes are ugly, so they're rarely included in most media
Jack Bauer tortured people constantly over 9 seasons of 24, which was one of the most popular shows on television. Homeland has psychological torture in it, as do films like Zero Dark Thirty, to say nothing of popular torture-porn series like the Saw franchise.
What would you have thought if he came in with an RC transmitter and drove the cat around the dorm a few times pushing the meow button rhythmically for fun?
How would you feel when you realized the cat was still conscious?
Given that the intent of controlling a cockroach is not amusement but education, the fact that similar technology could be abused to harm a different organism doesn't appear to inform upon the ethicality of the former exercise.
This is the statement I find difficult to defend. Negative compared to what? Let's take veal as an example. Many people who eat other meat don't eat veal on account of the fact that producing it requires treating an animal cruelly. On the other hand, not producing it doesn't mean those animals get to live in a field of clover somewhere. They wouldn't exist at all. I consider the suggestion that a brief life replete with miseries is worse than no life at all to be the product not of any logical argument but rather of a desire to rationalize one's behavior, in this case, the eating of meat other than veal. (I don't make any claims about whether eating meat is ethical, but only use this issue to illustrate the point that such ethical distinction between an easy death and a hard life appears to be self serving.)
It depended on the purpose of such a remote-control cat. For example, such an animal might be used to develop technology by which a quadriplegic could occasionally command a helper monkey's brain directly, so to perform complex tasks that the animal normally wouldn't be able to do (like, say, opening a safe, or changing the time on a clock). Or say you could train someone to play the violin by actually moving his fingers for him (assuming he allowed it). If they started selling the relevant equipment at pet stores as a novelty item, that might provide some cause for reflection.
I'm suspicious of arguments that employ a clear divide between the ethical acceptability of killing an animal humanely, and the unacceptability of harming the animal while keeping it alive, even if the harm is limited to what is necessary to achieve some specific beneficial purpose. I don't think it's possible to make a clear comparison between the relative undesirabilities of suffering versus non-existence, given that no one has ever been able to sample the latter and then return to weigh its relative merits.
You can't do a dissection without harming a living creature. Whether the frog suffers more than the cockroach seems like the topic for a breakout session in some sort of woolly philosophical symposium. As for creepy, I know a fellow who earned beer money in medical school by killing cats with an icepick for purposes of dissection, so creepy is rather the nature of the beast.
What's the point of dissecting a frog? We already know what's in the frog. We're not going to find anything new. It just seems like you cut the frog open and look at the organs. What is to be learned from going through the motions?
Slashdot Mirror
He doesn't need to deny anything. He just needs to withhold any evidence that he broke the speed limit in a particular state.
Look, we all know everyone speeds. 5-10 MPH over the speed limit is socially acceptable and tacitly condoned (it's rare to get pulled over by the cops for that, unless they want to bust you for some unrelated reason). But this is entirely different – it seems to be a clear case of reckless driving. On most interstates, you can do 75 MPH no problem, and on the better ones, 85 MPH is reasonable during the daytime if there is no inclement weather. There are a few interstates where you can safely do 90-100 MPH, but these are not all that common, and even then, extreme caution is required. I don't see any possible way that someone could safely average nearly 100 MPH on a cross-country road trip. Safety comes by going with the flow of traffic, and this driver must have been blowing past the majority of other cars during most of his trip. It's amazing that he made it there in one piece.
I know, right? What we really need is to be impressed by how safely someone drives across country. Like if he never failed to use his signal blinker a single time, never ran a yellow light, and stopped at every single stop sign no matter what. He could video the whole thing and make a two-hundred hour documentary that people could watch in lieu of getting their license revoked after their third speeding ticket.
This. Not only that, this is a clear case where he SHOULD be, if not arrested, at least fined heavily. This is clear cut reckless driving; speed limits are posted to keep the public safe. Stunts like this should not be pulled at the potential expense of other drivers on the road. We're all beholden to the same laws, whether you're trying to break a record or not.
Unless he posts GPS data (maybe he did), how can he be arrested? Theoretically, he could have been traveling the speed limit through any given state that might want to arrest him.
Amazon opting to be flat, effectively at 0% margin, is a game other businesses don't have the will to do
This is baffling to me. Why doesn't Walmart compete with Amazon? Walmart has the cash to fight it out with them, and they certainly have the incentive, but it seems like they're getting beaten badly. Their site sucks relative to Amazon's. If it were just a question of a relentless desire to expand and dominate, it seems like there would be more competition between them. Is it really just a question of taxation? Does Walmart compete effectually in states where Amazon gets taxed?
(and yes, I also think that every non-vegetarian should be willing to butcher an animal)
But what if there are extenuating circumstances? Like let's say the animal came from a broken home.
I wouldn't mind tapping one of my friends...
so long as the record of it and the location of the car is not used for any other purpose beyond the immediate -- checking registration, reports of it being stolen, or involved in an active crime.
IIRC, they're already storing the data in some places, and there have been fights about how long they can hold it.
This is why I said "if a government employee were to limit himself strictly to criticizing government policy," since the present fellow did not do this. Yet still there are people who disagree with this proposition.
As a GPS tracker is simply a proxy for a person hiding in the car and tagging along for the ride, writing down everyplace you go, the answer to this question has always been pretty self-evident to me. You need a warrant.
It's not that simple, because you could achieve almost exactly the same result as a GPS with a helicopter and a large enough fleet of undercover cars. It seems the argument needs to be made on the grounds that it is not in the interests of the public if the police's job becomes too easy. This argument is necessary if one also wants to argue against the prevalence of electronic means of reading license plates. Reading a single plate with an electronic device is not substantively different from a cop reading it manually, but once he can read thousands a day and record the time and place of each, and search these data indefinitely, he has a tool of a different kind (and one that could in many cases make GPS tracking unnecessary).
Was he tweeting from work?
I finally figured out what this "twerking" thing is all the kids talk about these days!
Clearly it's not a conflict of interest. A conflict of interest would be if someone were paying him to criticize the government while the government itself is paying him to support its interests. He appears to be offering his criticism free of charge. While you can profess that a public employer, like a private employer, should be able to fire an employee for this reason, for the reason stated above, I do no think the case is so simple. (The guy in question was, however, doing more than just criticizing the government, so his particular case is more muddled.)
The other difference is that the ability to criticize one's government is different in kind from the ability to criticize a soft drink. It might not be unreasonable for Pepsi to attempt to keep its employees from undermining the company's success on their own time, given that someone who hates Pepsi can choose to work at another company. Contrarily, given that government is a monopoly, expecting an employee to give up his right to criticize it seems far more dubious, since, aside from voting (or emigrating), such criticism is his only means to effect changes in it. If a government employee were to limit himself strictly to criticizing government policy, and did so from an anonymous account, so not to lend to his comments the authority of his office, it seems questionable to punish him for it.
It seems to me that this is purely just a very rich person having a fun side project. He's not planning on a fleet of submersible Tesla's or anything like that. He just wants a toy from his childhood fantasy.
we should start to worry when he buys the death star prop and is disappointed to find it doesn't actually work.
Do you really need to know your child is at risk of Alzheimer's before you decide to teach them healthy habits and encourage brain activity?
For me it's kind of the opposite. Why bother teaching the kid that stuff if he's just going to forget it anyway?
It's stupid to scare your kid for 65 years.
If she's that much at risk for Alzheimer's, you're probably only scaring her for about 15 minutes.
'I'm just talking now as a parent. Do not wreck yourself about your 5-year-old getting Alzheimer's. Worry more about the fact that when she's a teenager she might be driving around in cars with drunk boys.'
Yeah, that's much more comforting. Thanks, Professor!
well on the plus side, driving around in a car with drunk boys is clinically proven to reduce one's risk of acquiring Alzheimer's.
I'm 6'4" tall (190cm) and I'm in pain if I don't get up from those seats at least every two hours and walk to the bathroom.
I find it puzzling that feminists don't take up this issue. Surely the principle of equality between the sexes would support seats with more legroom for people 5'10" and above. After all, equalizing bathroom sizes based on need gets quite a bit of press. What better way than to promote the issue of space parity for feminists to demonstrate they are interested in promoting equal rights for all, and to disarm critics who profess otherwise?
Should we really be celebrating a group that supports the weaponization of anti-chemicals? I've seen enough Star Trek to know the dangers that anti-matter poses to us all.
The proverb among pilots is "Any landing you walk away from is a good landing".
wow paraplegics must make terrible pilots
Torture scenes are ugly, so they're rarely included in most media
Jack Bauer tortured people constantly over 9 seasons of 24, which was one of the most popular shows on television. Homeland has psychological torture in it, as do films like Zero Dark Thirty, to say nothing of popular torture-porn series like the Saw franchise.
What would you have thought if he came in with an RC transmitter and drove the cat around the dorm a few times pushing the meow button rhythmically for fun?
How would you feel when you realized the cat was still conscious?
Given that the intent of controlling a cockroach is not amusement but education, the fact that similar technology could be abused to harm a different organism doesn't appear to inform upon the ethicality of the former exercise.
at some point quality of life is negative
This is the statement I find difficult to defend. Negative compared to what? Let's take veal as an example. Many people who eat other meat don't eat veal on account of the fact that producing it requires treating an animal cruelly. On the other hand, not producing it doesn't mean those animals get to live in a field of clover somewhere. They wouldn't exist at all. I consider the suggestion that a brief life replete with miseries is worse than no life at all to be the product not of any logical argument but rather of a desire to rationalize one's behavior, in this case, the eating of meat other than veal. (I don't make any claims about whether eating meat is ethical, but only use this issue to illustrate the point that such ethical distinction between an easy death and a hard life appears to be self serving.)
It depended on the purpose of such a remote-control cat. For example, such an animal might be used to develop technology by which a quadriplegic could occasionally command a helper monkey's brain directly, so to perform complex tasks that the animal normally wouldn't be able to do (like, say, opening a safe, or changing the time on a clock). Or say you could train someone to play the violin by actually moving his fingers for him (assuming he allowed it). If they started selling the relevant equipment at pet stores as a novelty item, that might provide some cause for reflection.
I'm suspicious of arguments that employ a clear divide between the ethical acceptability of killing an animal humanely, and the unacceptability of harming the animal while keeping it alive, even if the harm is limited to what is necessary to achieve some specific beneficial purpose. I don't think it's possible to make a clear comparison between the relative undesirabilities of suffering versus non-existence, given that no one has ever been able to sample the latter and then return to weigh its relative merits.
You can't do a dissection without harming a living creature. Whether the frog suffers more than the cockroach seems like the topic for a breakout session in some sort of woolly philosophical symposium. As for creepy, I know a fellow who earned beer money in medical school by killing cats with an icepick for purposes of dissection, so creepy is rather the nature of the beast.
What's the point of dissecting a frog? We already know what's in the frog. We're not going to find anything new. It just seems like you cut the frog open and look at the organs. What is to be learned from going through the motions?