Learning to code at school isn't just about gaining employability, any more than physical education is about becoming a professional athlete.
An understanding of how to write software will teach skills around how to approach complex problems (decomposition, logical thinking, planning, separation of responsibilities, etc), how to troubleshoot systems (not just IT systems but other workflows), how to identify opportunities for optimisation and automation, and so on.
Which is why it doesn't necessarily apply to the workplace. Whilst it may be beneficial for a sysadmin to learn a bit of code (DevOps jobs are going for stupid money here in London) for an accountant not so much. In fact it may be counter productive in some professions that aren't based solely on computing/mathematical logic, like marketing, medicine or law.
I honestly dont expect most kids to come out of school with any coding skills what so every. Definately not if they haven't done any extra curricular coding study. Schools here in England are looking at using IDE's like Ardublock, which is not a bad way to teach kids about coding in a fun way and will help build problem solving abilities which I think is a very good thing, we cant expect most kids to leave high school with any practical coding abilities.
My last PC was over 6 years old before it keeled over, and I hope this one lasts about the same.
Same with my gaming PC, only had two upgrades in six years, an SSD and a NVidia 660GT. Still ran all the latest games acceptably well. It hadn't keeled over when I gave it away... in fact the only reason I gave it away was because I was leaving the country and it was way too big and heavy to bring with me. Currently doing everything I need on a 2011 Asus U46SV although that is starting to show signs of wear and tear, mostly cosmetic though and even that can drive Starcraft II at 1080p at 40+ FPS (usually above 60).
This article would be infinity more informative if we were told what Amazon's allotment was. Selling 100 units of VR equipment on a major console in a short amount of time would be completely unimpressive. Selling 100k would be very impressive. Without the numbers the only thing this tells us is we can't buy the VR gear from Amazon.
This,
I'm thinking that Sony did it's old trick of only releasing 20 units then claiming "sold out in record time".
If you advocate for more surveillance and the erosion of civil liberties in response to these attacks, you are cooperating with the terrorists in their attempt to undermine the fundamental values of our society.
You insensitive clod, we need phone decryption to spy on law-abiding citizen, not terrorists!
And lets just stop being PC about all this...and get serious.
The time for profiling has come. Let's face it, this attack has all the markings of another horrible, malicious attack by those damned radical Baptist terrorists.
It has all the signs....open your eyes people, we KNOW where and who the real threat is.
Erm. I dont think that word means what you think it means.
We already use profiling, profiling is just matching a set of parameters and looking for pasterns. What we dont do is instantly lock up and surveil anyone with the wrong skin colour or might believe in the wrong sky faerie.. Aside with being incredibly wasteful in resources, it only leads down a dark path to the point where everyone is surveiled and watched for any activity the authorities do not like.
The problem with profiling is, we're always looking for the parameters of the last attack. Also the problem authorities currently face is the hostility of certain neighbourhoods. Anyone who grew up in the bad part of town knows that everyone knows who's doing bad stuff but you keep your mouth shut because that's how you survived there. If you tell the cops about the local drug dealer, he finds out and pays you a visit. No-one likes tattle-tales. Now if you put every brown person under an authoritarian microscope, this situation gets worse. Informants are the only real way to stop the next attack because they'll hit anywhere. Lock down all the airports and train stations, they'll just hit a bus or a ferry... or the theatre or a fucking Tesco.
Do you really want a world where you need to be interrogated to the nth degree to buy a litre of milk... and have it cost $14 because of the cost of securing us so you can feel safe from the brown people. If anything, we need to be less racist and xenophobic to allow people to come forward because dollars to doughnuts someone knew about these people and didn't come forward because they have to fucking come home at night.
It has all the signs....open your eyes people, we KNOW where and who the real threat is.
Yes, the racists and ultra nationalists who would love to turn our respective nations into a police state.
The big winner out of terrorism has always been authoritarians. 80 years ago, it was a fire at the Reichstag. Now it's the media driven spectre of terrorism.
The crux of your argument is "when the car detects".
This is also the fatal flaw of your argument as computers aren't actually very good at this. In order to process a lot of data in near real time (these milliseconds you keep mentioning) then you need a lot of computing power. Right now the car operates mostly on LIDAR which is good because it limits the scope of input making it easy to process but it also means that a lot of data is missed.
You haven't asked "how a car will detect a blowout" you've said "when a car detects a blowout". That is why your argument is bunk. You've started off on a false assumption. The assumption that makes the rest of your lengthy post pointless.
Now I have thought about it, the way a human detects a blowout in another car is visually. Sound is useless on highways, so we detect it by cars that lurch in a particular direction. I dont think you quite understand just how difficult it is to do this in real time with modern computers. It will take a fast server (such as an IBM X series, feel free to swap for your favourite brand, this is just an example) at least several seconds to find a specific landmark in an image and here we are talking about software that knows exactly what it is looking for, with a blowout you're looking for a set of conditions that will change as the degree and direction of a car lurching will be different each time. You're asking a computer to do this within a number of milliseconds at a minimum of 24 times a second.
We're not Luddites for questioning this, it just demonstrates we have some idea of the complexity of the problem.
The solution actually is that an autonomous car will keep a distance large enough that it can detect a change in velocity, which will piss off most drivers causing them to take manual control because the car is too slow. Yes, humans are selfish creatures. It also means that the pipe dream of hundreds of autonomous cars riding bumper to bumper is nothing but a pipe dream. In fact due to the inefficiency of sensors, reaction times of on-board computers (which will be made to a budget) and understandably cautious engineers they'll be keeping far larger gaps than will be needed for human drivers.
Finally, Google's track record comes in no small part to the fact that a human driver has been in the car at all times. One thing they dont like publishing is the number of times that the human has had to intervene in traffic situations. The at fault crash by an autonomous car in February demonstrates this. The car made a bad decision by pulling out in front of a bus, the human driver also made a bad call by assuming the bus would let them in. When autonomous cars are finally put into the hands of the average car buyer, we'll see accident rates increase significantly.
There are plenty of computers in use (a lot of the better ones are running Linux or an RTOS and hell, even Windows NT/CE/XP) that people trust their lives to implicitly on a daily basis in a lot more delicate situations than driving a car. Commercial planes do most of the flying fully autonomous, most of both your debt and savings is being invested fully automated, any machine in a hospital parses a lot more data than a few dozen sensor and requires much more precision.
Have you ever seen the types and numbers of computers used for commercial aircraft? An Airbus has 4 flight computers, 3 primary and one backup. If it cant get a consensus on all three computers it goes back to the pilot for input.
You also know that the reason we keep two pilots in the cockpit is because sometimes these systems fail when given bad input. It may be rare, but it's not unheard of for a plane to start increasing the AoA (Angle of Attack) when it receives bad data. Generally a pilot picks up on this before it becomes an issue. AF447 is an example of both the autopilot failing (Pitot tube iced over provided bad input) and then the pilots failing (switching off the stall alarm, inconsistent input from the pilot and co-pilot).
Software that has the potential to take lives not only has thousands of hours of testing put into it, humans who interact with these devices are given intense training. How long does it take to become a pilot or a nurse who uses the machines you spoke of (and how often does someone's savings get wiped away because of incompetent traders). You're pretty quick to put your life in the hands of incredibly complex software when engineers aren't.
Lets face it, auto manufacturers cant even get the software for an automatic transmission right and that has one job (moving cogs about at the right time). Would you really trust it to make all the driving decisions for you?
Not in the UK. Maybe Google should try having one of their cars pass the test over here.
Yep, this will be the ultimate test for a self driving car, to follow turn by turn instructions from a driving assessor. I'm pretty sure calling Jeff when being asked to take the first left is going to be an instant fail.
This is the key advantage humans still have in the drivers seat. We understand fuzzy logic better than computers. We're also better at picking up vocal instructions and making decisions based on limited data. What Google doesn't like to advertise is that the reason it has had only one at fault crash is because a human driver is always there to intervene. The most recent case in February where the car was at fault, the driver also made a bad call (he thought a bus would stop for his SUV... most SUV drivers think like this). The autonomous car is safer because it has a human doing the decisions that computers aren't good at.
It is not the test's deficiencies but the complete lack of tests...for old people. Really old people. People in their 80s and 90s.
I saw an old guy at a red light suddenly bolt into the intersection where traffic moves at 50mph. No reason, lots of witnesses, he hit someone of course. Just too old to be driving.
In Canada my grandmother had to retake her test every so many years once she reached 65. The US doesn't seem to have that standard. I'm not sure why.
What would be the comparative advantage with respect to a roundabout?
I know they are not very popular in the US, but they can be very efficient, and prevent the frustration of waiting at busy intersection (especially if going in the non-popular direction).
Roundabouts are excellent with light to medium traffic, but when there is heavy traffic things tend to get backed up as one pair of entrances start to monopolise the roundabout. You really need traffic lights then.
What MIT are talking about are replacing traffic lights with computers in cars, which in reality will never work as you've got to ensure that every single car has the same technology and that no humans are taking control (or have modified the software). The last assumption is a stupid one as humans are selfish and if they can be faster by doing something dodgy, they will.
I'm sympathetic to the argument, but without simpler liability rules (as in, if you step out of a moving bus and break your leg, your insurer, not the bus company's, should cover the costs), and universal healthcare (to ensure that the medical bill can get paid), I don't think it can go anywhere, in the US at any rate.
Not to mention passenger comfort. When you cram 60 people you cant rapidly accelerate and decelerate without jostling them about. It's bad enough currently.
Also a single decker full length bus weighs 20 tons empty, you will never be able to accelerate and brake as fast as a fully loaded Renault Espace. a Mercedes OC 500 LE has 180-220 KW to move it's 19.1 ton bulk, the laws of physics prevent it from changing velocity or direction quickly.
Support for minimum wage laws illustrates the economic and historical illiteracy that is so widespread in this country
Actually you've got that backwards, fighting against minimum wage laws illistrates economic and historical ignorance at the highest level.
Historically they were associated in a huge increase in the middle class. What you're arguing for is the creation and maintenance of an underclass to keep the wealth centralised in the current upper classes.
But you said it best
but I guess some superstitions just take a long time to die out.
Your superstitions need to die out, sadly this is taking a long time.
Your assumptions are based on conditions that dont exist in the real world because of a little economic principle called "externalities". Keynesian and Libertarian economists love to ignore externalities because they 1) Aren't immediately apparent on a balance sheet and 2) completely screw up their chosen economic dogma. OK, so lets allow businesses to decide what is the minimum wage, the first thing they're going to find out is that fewer people can afford to buy they're product. This alone will reduce the available workforce because unlike companies, workers can pick up and leave when they cant make a liveable wage. As a result, anyone with any skill, talent or worth will move to a place with wage laws so all that CEO Stingy-pants will be left with are the most uneducated employees, literally the people who cant get. a job anywhere else.
A good historical example was Henry Ford. Instead of paying the lowest wages possible, he paid the highest and what he saw was a huge uptick in sales because his own workers could now afford to buy his cars. It wasn't just Ford that benefited from this, his workers could now afford other luxuries like a refrigerator.
Because...well, because it's the DC Metro and it's run by horrible people.
The only thing they seem to actually care about is how much money they can make, while pushing things to the absolute limit in terms of customer service and equipment.
I spent 6 years using the system to get back and forth from NoVA to downtown DC every day for work....and if I had to move back there now, I would be driving and paying for parking, absolutely no hesitation, even though it'd probably be at least twice the cost.
DC's metro system isn't that bad. You should try coming to Perth, Western Australia where not only does Transperth take 3 times as long as driving but they also claim that weather shut down one of their lines on a perfectly clear spring day... That is if you're lucky enough to be in an area serviced by Transperth.
After a month or two on Perth's public transport system you'll go back singing the praises of the DC Metro.
NM not to be confused with Nm or Newton Metres which is the metric unit for the measurement of torque.
You know, you should just give up and start using the metric system, that way everything is consistent and there's no difference between a Kilometre on land and Kilometre at sea.
Please cite as I am unaware that any county has figured out how to go fully cashless.
Sweden is almost cashless now, and plans to be fully cashless in the next few years. There are others on the way, too.
So they'll serve as a warning to the rest. If Sweden truly becomes cashless (which is something I highly doubt) then you'll see another form of currency replace it, probably from one of it's neighbours.
Also Canada is a complete misnomer. They recently switched to polymer banknotes and didn't anticipate the extended life expectancy of the new notes. Australia did the same thing and had to cut back on production in the late 90's after fully switching over to polymer notes.
Only buy routine items online. For anything that requires a bit of discretion, buy it at a physical store with cash.
I wouldn't be surprised if the FBI and NSA start requiring retailers to log cash purchases on their systems.
Fortunately very illegal in my countries (Plural, both the one I came from and the one I'm living in). A merchant is not allowed to tie purchasing data to payment data. One of the secondary purposes of store cards is to tie purchase data to a person (the primary purpose is to keep you going back to that store).
DC – 183 Murders (31 per 100,000 residents)
New York – 494 Murders (6 per 100,000 residents)
Baltimore – 281 Murders (45 per 100,000 residents)
Newark – 104 Murders (37 per 100,000 residents)
London 118, (1.5 murders per 100,000 pop).
And London's murder rate spiked significantly in 2015, up from 83 in 2014.
The irony is, its safer here in London than it was in Perth (about 4 murders per 100,00) and there are more guns in Perth. Sorry gun nuts.
while others, such as the stand-your-ground law that allows individuals to use deadly force in self-defense, actually increase gun-related deaths significantly
I'm pretty sure that part is a designed feature, where a homeowner can kill a rapist or a burglar.
OTOH, if guns are easy to get, you've got a situation where the rapist or burglar can kill the home owner. Works both ways.
Here in London, if someone wants to break in they'll have no advantages over me. If some crack head wants to steal my wallet, he has to lure me into some dark alley with 3 of his mates instead of just brandishing a gun. This is why a pick pocket is your biggest threat (aside from Chavs with ASBO's who think you've spilled their pint).
Hey, but enjoy your "freedom" to get mugged easily. I'm doing fine without it.
It was (and IMHO is) the duty of all citizens to be trained and equipped to join a militia if needed. This is the final backstop against the government. Hence the government must not have a list of who owns what nor should they be able to restrict ownership.
Actually it was more a defence against invasion. Many countries has similar ordinances to ensure an army could be raised at short notice. It dates back quite a way too, in the 1300's Edward I banned all other sports except Archery on a Sunday so he would have a ready supply of trained archers if England went to war. Hence it was a well regulated militia, with military discipline and training.
In the day and age of large professional armies, civilian militias are not effective in the slightest. This is why people need to get their hand off it. A bunch of perpetually drunk rednecks armed with AR15's are going to do jack shit against A trained armoured unit with Bradleys and Linebackers... let alone fighters armed with precision munitions. That bunch of rednecks depends on someone in the chain saying "no" to the order to fire on civilians.
This is assuming the rednecks dont start fighting amongst each other... Like what that last lot did... that lot that took over that bird aviary in Oregon. Great advertisement for your civilian militia there.
Because you haven't mentioned Christian or Buddhist terrorists who do the same thing. Islam's beliefs are old fashioned and in my opinion not very well adapted to the modern world, but there are many perfectly normal and sane muslims who don't support terrorists. Islam is not the cause of terrorism, or else all muslims would be violent and psychopathic individuals: the cause of terrorism is hundreds of years of violence and some very horrible leaders
This.
Religion is the excuse, not the cause.
It doesn't matter if someone blows up a bus in the name of god or the name of the teletubbies. People who are misguided enough to think that it's the religion that is inherently flawed are making the situation worse. Much much worse than it has to be.
Every religion has been used to justify horrible acts in the past. Normally they were just used as an excuse to motivate the peasantry into fighting a war far from home that they really didn't want to. Would farmers and labourers really have picked up sticks and invaded the middle east seven times because their leaders wanted to control the trade there (making themselves even richer in the process). Fuck no, as Napoleon said "a man does not get himself killed for a half pence a day or a petty distinction, you must speak to the soul to electrify him". By the same token I have no doubt that those who are pushing terrorism are only using religion as a motivational force and have have something personal to gain (the usual I'd bet, money, land and power).
Maybe use Uber or Lyft instead of renting a Hertz car?
Nah. You rent a car rather than hire a taxi because you are going to making many stops along the along while putting some serious mileage on the thing.
Plenty of alternatives to Hertz though.
I've never used them because they were always the most expensive option. Keeping all your good deals for "members only" means that non members go to your competition. Last time I was in LA, I got upgraded from a base model compact to a 4 series for $22 just by asking nicely.
That being said, I find it hilarious that people would suggest using Uber because Hertz is scummy. Uber has pretty much become the king of scummy companies.
"Android trojan.. disguises itself as Flash Player and spreads via unofficial app stores"
It would be a real story if this Android 'banking trojan silently installed itself without the end user taking action. This kind of non-story belongs over on the Microsoft Register.
This is the Iphone defence.
Yep, this is exactly the excuse that Iphone users use to dismiss security issues bought on by jail breaking and Cydia.
Getting the user to install malicious software has always been and will always remain the most effective way of spreading it. Doesn't matter what the platform is and in the end, there is only so much you can do to protect stupid people from themselves.
Then have the stones to politely ask that single annoying person to lower their voice.
Fuck off you cunt, I'll talk as loudly as I like.
That is the kind of response you'll get... and at that point with the kind of person who drinks on a train you'll end up with a shouting match of obscenities. Probably wont culminate in a fist fight as most people are actually cowards, but a lot of angry cunts will be exchanged.
dangerous tactics
Ignoring the fact that the GP's tactics wont actually work (mobile signal jamming isn't an instant on/off effect) what is actually dangerous about it?
And dont bring up that they cant call 999/000/911 because if someone is in that kind of imminent danger that it a minute to dissipate a jamming feild will kill them, calling emergency services would have been pointless anyway. So there is nothing dangerous about it what so ever.
Sounds like you're just another arrogant tosser who thinks it's their right, nay, their duty to bombard everyone with your banal, vapid phone conversations.
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Learning to code at school isn't just about gaining employability, any more than physical education is about becoming a professional athlete.
An understanding of how to write software will teach skills around how to approach complex problems (decomposition, logical thinking, planning, separation of responsibilities, etc), how to troubleshoot systems (not just IT systems but other workflows), how to identify opportunities for optimisation and automation, and so on.
Which is why it doesn't necessarily apply to the workplace. Whilst it may be beneficial for a sysadmin to learn a bit of code (DevOps jobs are going for stupid money here in London) for an accountant not so much. In fact it may be counter productive in some professions that aren't based solely on computing/mathematical logic, like marketing, medicine or law.
I honestly dont expect most kids to come out of school with any coding skills what so every. Definately not if they haven't done any extra curricular coding study. Schools here in England are looking at using IDE's like Ardublock, which is not a bad way to teach kids about coding in a fun way and will help build problem solving abilities which I think is a very good thing, we cant expect most kids to leave high school with any practical coding abilities.
My last PC was over 6 years old before it keeled over, and I hope this one lasts about the same.
Same with my gaming PC, only had two upgrades in six years, an SSD and a NVidia 660GT. Still ran all the latest games acceptably well. It hadn't keeled over when I gave it away... in fact the only reason I gave it away was because I was leaving the country and it was way too big and heavy to bring with me. Currently doing everything I need on a 2011 Asus U46SV although that is starting to show signs of wear and tear, mostly cosmetic though and even that can drive Starcraft II at 1080p at 40+ FPS (usually above 60).
It's tough to show off your new Porsche to the Marketing chippies around the watercooler, so your new Apple-thing will have to suffice...
Marketing carpenters? That seems like a bit of a niche market... or an ideal hipster breeding ground.
This article would be infinity more informative if we were told what Amazon's allotment was. Selling 100 units of VR equipment on a major console in a short amount of time would be completely unimpressive. Selling 100k would be very impressive. Without the numbers the only thing this tells us is we can't buy the VR gear from Amazon.
This,
I'm thinking that Sony did it's old trick of only releasing 20 units then claiming "sold out in record time".
Um, Irish Republican Army ring any bells?
Or Lockerbie.
Or Baader-Meinhof.
Or Anders Breivik,
Seems Europe has quite a long history with terror.
And lets just stop being PC about all this...and get serious.
The time for profiling has come. Let's face it, this attack has all the markings of another horrible, malicious attack by those damned radical Baptist terrorists.
It has all the signs....open your eyes people, we KNOW where and who the real threat is.
Erm. I dont think that word means what you think it means.
We already use profiling, profiling is just matching a set of parameters and looking for pasterns. What we dont do is instantly lock up and surveil anyone with the wrong skin colour or might believe in the wrong sky faerie.. Aside with being incredibly wasteful in resources, it only leads down a dark path to the point where everyone is surveiled and watched for any activity the authorities do not like.
The problem with profiling is, we're always looking for the parameters of the last attack. Also the problem authorities currently face is the hostility of certain neighbourhoods. Anyone who grew up in the bad part of town knows that everyone knows who's doing bad stuff but you keep your mouth shut because that's how you survived there. If you tell the cops about the local drug dealer, he finds out and pays you a visit. No-one likes tattle-tales. Now if you put every brown person under an authoritarian microscope, this situation gets worse. Informants are the only real way to stop the next attack because they'll hit anywhere. Lock down all the airports and train stations, they'll just hit a bus or a ferry... or the theatre or a fucking Tesco.
Do you really want a world where you need to be interrogated to the nth degree to buy a litre of milk... and have it cost $14 because of the cost of securing us so you can feel safe from the brown people. If anything, we need to be less racist and xenophobic to allow people to come forward because dollars to doughnuts someone knew about these people and didn't come forward because they have to fucking come home at night.
It has all the signs....open your eyes people, we KNOW where and who the real threat is.
Yes, the racists and ultra nationalists who would love to turn our respective nations into a police state.
The big winner out of terrorism has always been authoritarians. 80 years ago, it was a fire at the Reichstag. Now it's the media driven spectre of terrorism.
The crux of your argument is "when the car detects".
This is also the fatal flaw of your argument as computers aren't actually very good at this. In order to process a lot of data in near real time (these milliseconds you keep mentioning) then you need a lot of computing power. Right now the car operates mostly on LIDAR which is good because it limits the scope of input making it easy to process but it also means that a lot of data is missed.
You haven't asked "how a car will detect a blowout" you've said "when a car detects a blowout". That is why your argument is bunk. You've started off on a false assumption. The assumption that makes the rest of your lengthy post pointless.
Now I have thought about it, the way a human detects a blowout in another car is visually. Sound is useless on highways, so we detect it by cars that lurch in a particular direction. I dont think you quite understand just how difficult it is to do this in real time with modern computers. It will take a fast server (such as an IBM X series, feel free to swap for your favourite brand, this is just an example) at least several seconds to find a specific landmark in an image and here we are talking about software that knows exactly what it is looking for, with a blowout you're looking for a set of conditions that will change as the degree and direction of a car lurching will be different each time. You're asking a computer to do this within a number of milliseconds at a minimum of 24 times a second.
We're not Luddites for questioning this, it just demonstrates we have some idea of the complexity of the problem.
The solution actually is that an autonomous car will keep a distance large enough that it can detect a change in velocity, which will piss off most drivers causing them to take manual control because the car is too slow. Yes, humans are selfish creatures. It also means that the pipe dream of hundreds of autonomous cars riding bumper to bumper is nothing but a pipe dream. In fact due to the inefficiency of sensors, reaction times of on-board computers (which will be made to a budget) and understandably cautious engineers they'll be keeping far larger gaps than will be needed for human drivers.
Finally, Google's track record comes in no small part to the fact that a human driver has been in the car at all times. One thing they dont like publishing is the number of times that the human has had to intervene in traffic situations. The at fault crash by an autonomous car in February demonstrates this. The car made a bad decision by pulling out in front of a bus, the human driver also made a bad call by assuming the bus would let them in. When autonomous cars are finally put into the hands of the average car buyer, we'll see accident rates increase significantly.
There are plenty of computers in use (a lot of the better ones are running Linux or an RTOS and hell, even Windows NT/CE/XP) that people trust their lives to implicitly on a daily basis in a lot more delicate situations than driving a car. Commercial planes do most of the flying fully autonomous, most of both your debt and savings is being invested fully automated, any machine in a hospital parses a lot more data than a few dozen sensor and requires much more precision.
Have you ever seen the types and numbers of computers used for commercial aircraft? An Airbus has 4 flight computers, 3 primary and one backup. If it cant get a consensus on all three computers it goes back to the pilot for input.
You also know that the reason we keep two pilots in the cockpit is because sometimes these systems fail when given bad input. It may be rare, but it's not unheard of for a plane to start increasing the AoA (Angle of Attack) when it receives bad data. Generally a pilot picks up on this before it becomes an issue. AF447 is an example of both the autopilot failing (Pitot tube iced over provided bad input) and then the pilots failing (switching off the stall alarm, inconsistent input from the pilot and co-pilot).
Software that has the potential to take lives not only has thousands of hours of testing put into it, humans who interact with these devices are given intense training. How long does it take to become a pilot or a nurse who uses the machines you spoke of (and how often does someone's savings get wiped away because of incompetent traders). You're pretty quick to put your life in the hands of incredibly complex software when engineers aren't.
Lets face it, auto manufacturers cant even get the software for an automatic transmission right and that has one job (moving cogs about at the right time). Would you really trust it to make all the driving decisions for you?
Not in the UK. Maybe Google should try having one of their cars pass the test over here.
Yep, this will be the ultimate test for a self driving car, to follow turn by turn instructions from a driving assessor. I'm pretty sure calling Jeff when being asked to take the first left is going to be an instant fail.
This is the key advantage humans still have in the drivers seat. We understand fuzzy logic better than computers. We're also better at picking up vocal instructions and making decisions based on limited data. What Google doesn't like to advertise is that the reason it has had only one at fault crash is because a human driver is always there to intervene. The most recent case in February where the car was at fault, the driver also made a bad call (he thought a bus would stop for his SUV... most SUV drivers think like this). The autonomous car is safer because it has a human doing the decisions that computers aren't good at.
It is not the test's deficiencies but the complete lack of tests...for old people. Really old people. People in their 80s and 90s.
I saw an old guy at a red light suddenly bolt into the intersection where traffic moves at 50mph. No reason, lots of witnesses, he hit someone of course. Just too old to be driving.
In Canada my grandmother had to retake her test every so many years once she reached 65. The US doesn't seem to have that standard. I'm not sure why.
Because old people vote and complain more.
What would be the comparative advantage with respect to a roundabout?
I know they are not very popular in the US, but they can be very efficient, and prevent the frustration of waiting at busy intersection (especially if going in the non-popular direction).
Roundabouts are excellent with light to medium traffic, but when there is heavy traffic things tend to get backed up as one pair of entrances start to monopolise the roundabout. You really need traffic lights then.
What MIT are talking about are replacing traffic lights with computers in cars, which in reality will never work as you've got to ensure that every single car has the same technology and that no humans are taking control (or have modified the software). The last assumption is a stupid one as humans are selfish and if they can be faster by doing something dodgy, they will.
I'm sympathetic to the argument, but without simpler liability rules (as in, if you step out of a moving bus and break your leg, your insurer, not the bus company's, should cover the costs), and universal healthcare (to ensure that the medical bill can get paid), I don't think it can go anywhere, in the US at any rate.
Not to mention passenger comfort. When you cram 60 people you cant rapidly accelerate and decelerate without jostling them about. It's bad enough currently.
Also a single decker full length bus weighs 20 tons empty, you will never be able to accelerate and brake as fast as a fully loaded Renault Espace. a Mercedes OC 500 LE has 180-220 KW to move it's 19.1 ton bulk, the laws of physics prevent it from changing velocity or direction quickly.
Actually you've got that backwards, fighting against minimum wage laws illistrates economic and historical ignorance at the highest level.
Historically they were associated in a huge increase in the middle class. What you're arguing for is the creation and maintenance of an underclass to keep the wealth centralised in the current upper classes.
But you said it best
Your superstitions need to die out, sadly this is taking a long time.
Your assumptions are based on conditions that dont exist in the real world because of a little economic principle called "externalities". Keynesian and Libertarian economists love to ignore externalities because they 1) Aren't immediately apparent on a balance sheet and 2) completely screw up their chosen economic dogma. OK, so lets allow businesses to decide what is the minimum wage, the first thing they're going to find out is that fewer people can afford to buy they're product. This alone will reduce the available workforce because unlike companies, workers can pick up and leave when they cant make a liveable wage. As a result, anyone with any skill, talent or worth will move to a place with wage laws so all that CEO Stingy-pants will be left with are the most uneducated employees, literally the people who cant get. a job anywhere else.
A good historical example was Henry Ford. Instead of paying the lowest wages possible, he paid the highest and what he saw was a huge uptick in sales because his own workers could now afford to buy his cars. It wasn't just Ford that benefited from this, his workers could now afford other luxuries like a refrigerator.
Because...well, because it's the DC Metro and it's run by horrible people.
The only thing they seem to actually care about is how much money they can make, while pushing things to the absolute limit in terms of customer service and equipment.
I spent 6 years using the system to get back and forth from NoVA to downtown DC every day for work....and if I had to move back there now, I would be driving and paying for parking, absolutely no hesitation, even though it'd probably be at least twice the cost.
See https://twitter.com/unsuckdcme... for many, many examples.
DC's metro system isn't that bad. You should try coming to Perth, Western Australia where not only does Transperth take 3 times as long as driving but they also claim that weather shut down one of their lines on a perfectly clear spring day... That is if you're lucky enough to be in an area serviced by Transperth.
After a month or two on Perth's public transport system you'll go back singing the praises of the DC Metro.
Also come to England and experience the wide open spaces of London's tube stations.
NM not to be confused with Nm or Newton Metres which is the metric unit for the measurement of torque.
You know, you should just give up and start using the metric system, that way everything is consistent and there's no difference between a Kilometre on land and Kilometre at sea.
Please cite as I am unaware that any county has figured out how to go fully cashless.
Sweden is almost cashless now, and plans to be fully cashless in the next few years. There are others on the way, too.
So they'll serve as a warning to the rest. If Sweden truly becomes cashless (which is something I highly doubt) then you'll see another form of currency replace it, probably from one of it's neighbours.
Also Canada is a complete misnomer. They recently switched to polymer banknotes and didn't anticipate the extended life expectancy of the new notes. Australia did the same thing and had to cut back on production in the late 90's after fully switching over to polymer notes.
Only buy routine items online. For anything that requires a bit of discretion, buy it at a physical store with cash.
I wouldn't be surprised if the FBI and NSA start requiring retailers to log cash purchases on their systems.
Fortunately very illegal in my countries (Plural, both the one I came from and the one I'm living in). A merchant is not allowed to tie purchasing data to payment data. One of the secondary purposes of store cards is to tie purchase data to a person (the primary purpose is to keep you going back to that store).
A vehicle can go from 30 mph to 0 in 14 meters (46 feet).
That's braking distance, add the other 9 metres for the full stopping distance.
Besides that, A cyclist will never be going 30 MPH, they're almost always doing under 10 MPH, often closer to 5. To see one doing 15 is a rare sight.
DC – 183 Murders (31 per 100,000 residents)
New York – 494 Murders (6 per 100,000 residents)
Baltimore – 281 Murders (45 per 100,000 residents)
Newark – 104 Murders (37 per 100,000 residents)
London 118, (1.5 murders per 100,000 pop).
And London's murder rate spiked significantly in 2015, up from 83 in 2014.
The irony is, its safer here in London than it was in Perth (about 4 murders per 100,00) and there are more guns in Perth. Sorry gun nuts.
while others, such as the stand-your-ground law that allows individuals to use deadly force in self-defense, actually increase gun-related deaths significantly
I'm pretty sure that part is a designed feature, where a homeowner can kill a rapist or a burglar.
OTOH, if guns are easy to get, you've got a situation where the rapist or burglar can kill the home owner. Works both ways.
Here in London, if someone wants to break in they'll have no advantages over me. If some crack head wants to steal my wallet, he has to lure me into some dark alley with 3 of his mates instead of just brandishing a gun. This is why a pick pocket is your biggest threat (aside from Chavs with ASBO's who think you've spilled their pint).
Hey, but enjoy your "freedom" to get mugged easily. I'm doing fine without it.
It was (and IMHO is) the duty of all citizens to be trained and equipped to join a militia if needed. This is the final backstop against the government. Hence the government must not have a list of who owns what nor should they be able to restrict ownership.
Actually it was more a defence against invasion. Many countries has similar ordinances to ensure an army could be raised at short notice. It dates back quite a way too, in the 1300's Edward I banned all other sports except Archery on a Sunday so he would have a ready supply of trained archers if England went to war. Hence it was a well regulated militia, with military discipline and training.
In the day and age of large professional armies, civilian militias are not effective in the slightest. This is why people need to get their hand off it. A bunch of perpetually drunk rednecks armed with AR15's are going to do jack shit against A trained armoured unit with Bradleys and Linebackers... let alone fighters armed with precision munitions. That bunch of rednecks depends on someone in the chain saying "no" to the order to fire on civilians.
This is assuming the rednecks dont start fighting amongst each other... Like what that last lot did... that lot that took over that bird aviary in Oregon. Great advertisement for your civilian militia there.
This.
Religion is the excuse, not the cause.
It doesn't matter if someone blows up a bus in the name of god or the name of the teletubbies. People who are misguided enough to think that it's the religion that is inherently flawed are making the situation worse. Much much worse than it has to be.
Every religion has been used to justify horrible acts in the past. Normally they were just used as an excuse to motivate the peasantry into fighting a war far from home that they really didn't want to. Would farmers and labourers really have picked up sticks and invaded the middle east seven times because their leaders wanted to control the trade there (making themselves even richer in the process). Fuck no, as Napoleon said "a man does not get himself killed for a half pence a day or a petty distinction, you must speak to the soul to electrify him". By the same token I have no doubt that those who are pushing terrorism are only using religion as a motivational force and have have something personal to gain (the usual I'd bet, money, land and power).
Maybe use Uber or Lyft instead of renting a Hertz car?
Nah. You rent a car rather than hire a taxi because you are going to making many stops along the along while putting some serious mileage on the thing.
Plenty of alternatives to Hertz though.
I've never used them because they were always the most expensive option. Keeping all your good deals for "members only" means that non members go to your competition. Last time I was in LA, I got upgraded from a base model compact to a 4 series for $22 just by asking nicely.
That being said, I find it hilarious that people would suggest using Uber because Hertz is scummy. Uber has pretty much become the king of scummy companies.
"Android trojan .. disguises itself as Flash Player and spreads via unofficial app stores"
It would be a real story if this Android 'banking trojan silently installed itself without the end user taking action. This kind of non-story belongs over on the Microsoft Register.
This is the Iphone defence.
Yep, this is exactly the excuse that Iphone users use to dismiss security issues bought on by jail breaking and Cydia.
Getting the user to install malicious software has always been and will always remain the most effective way of spreading it. Doesn't matter what the platform is and in the end, there is only so much you can do to protect stupid people from themselves.
Fuck off you cunt, I'll talk as loudly as I like.
That is the kind of response you'll get... and at that point with the kind of person who drinks on a train you'll end up with a shouting match of obscenities. Probably wont culminate in a fist fight as most people are actually cowards, but a lot of angry cunts will be exchanged.
Ignoring the fact that the GP's tactics wont actually work (mobile signal jamming isn't an instant on/off effect) what is actually dangerous about it?
And dont bring up that they cant call 999/000/911 because if someone is in that kind of imminent danger that it a minute to dissipate a jamming feild will kill them, calling emergency services would have been pointless anyway. So there is nothing dangerous about it what so ever.
Sounds like you're just another arrogant tosser who thinks it's their right, nay, their duty to bombard everyone with your banal, vapid phone conversations.