No political agenda here I see.
That final line isn't shoe-horned in on the most vague link possible, no no no.
409 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2007
Leaving aside the insanity of automating a door lock in a house - that if you actually need it unlocked you're going to be standing right there to go through it and thus manual mode seems pretty reasonable - does this mean that I'll be able to unlock someone's front door remotely? That'll make burglary a lot easier, thanks.
Understanding how the universe actually works allows us to change it from how it is to how we want it. The more we know how it works, the better we can manipulate it in our favour.
I point you towards Newton's laws, thermodynamics, lasers, electricity, x-rays, MRIs, CAT and PET scans and everything else about which someone has wondered how it will make life better.
If it is your money, then essentially what you're talking about is simply paying for sex (or rather, indulging your fantasy that being jacked off by a pair of hired labia is somehow better than just doing it yourself).
If it's not your money, but you have a responsibilty and a duty to spend it in the most effective manner for the benefit of the company/group/whatever, and you then choose to spend it less effectively in order to buy yourself sex, it's a roundabaout way of skimming from the till to pay for hookers.
"So what happens if a car pulls into that 6m gap? i've seen cars pull into smaller gaps..."
That gives a metre ahead and a metre behind, at 60 mph. That's a ridiculously small gap to pull into. The driver doing that deserves to be shot (and is definitely guilty of motoring offences). At that speed, one metre is covered in about 0.03 seconds. Three HUNDRETHS of a second. Being one metre behind the car in front at that speed (which is almost touching distance) is effectively suicide, and if people choose to commit suicide by doing that, it won't make a difference if it's meatbags or HAL behind the wheel.
I picked a Ford Focus as the first standard-type car I could think of; on investigation, they look to be about four metres long.
http://www.parkers.co.uk/cars/reviews/facts-and-figures/ford/focus/hatchback-1998/dimensions/
If slipping between two cars with a single metre of slack ahead (about the distance from your left shoulder to your horizantally extended right hand - almost touching distance!) and a single metre of slack behind at 60 mph is the kind of thing meatbags get up to, the sooner they're removed from the driving process the better :)
"All well and good until something goes wrong."
The exact same thing can be said about the current meat-bag controlled version of driving.
"The lady reading at the wheel will notice something has gone wrong, and by the time she reassumes a ready position, it is too late."
If only there was some way we could anticipate in advance the possibility that things might go wrong, and have some kind of automated safety system that will give the driver the time needed to take over. Perhaps simply slowing down whilst remaining within the lines, or some other such crazytech.
Automated cars are not perfect, but safer than meatbags.
So, let's imagine a hypothetical problem; say, in a given industry, black employees are routinely discriminated against. Some employees want to set up a group to counter this, and you insist that another group be set up as well to do the same thing for white employees, despite the fact that those white employees aren't actually suffering the problem?
I need to repair my roof - should I also repair the flooring, which is not in need of repair? I might open a tin of beans tonight. Should I open all the other tins as well?
I disagree. I think that humanity is smart enough to be able to have the population the size it is AND do all these things. Yes, our current system of government and our current economy is bloody awful at managing it, but it's possible. Yes, we'll have to improve the collection and distribution networks, but water just goes round and round endlessly.
Why? Why should I, given the choice between using 167 litres per day and using a quarter of that, choose to go with the smaller option? I _like_ power showers. I _like_ being clean. I _like_ washing my clothes regularly. I _like_ all the other things I do with water. Why on earth would I choose _not_ to do these things?
They could do what everyone else (UK forces included) do; have your teeth checked out before you go, and preventative maintenance undertaken to ensure they're not a problem. 15 minutes with the dentist seems a better move than binning a (presumably highly-trained and expensive to make) Taikonaut; perhaps the dental budget is empty but the Taikonaut training courses have money to burn.
"First of all, I trust electronics more than I trust people."
If there was some way of designing, making and using electronics without using people, this would make sense. As it is, there isn't, so your choice is untrustworthy people with electronics, or untrustworthy people with bits of paper.
Maybe The Man might, but unless you're an international terrorist or an independent MP, you need only worry about people who would be foiled by the most elementary precautions that you choose not to take.
Do you wear your seatbelt? Why's that? If you ran into a tanker an 100MPH which then exploded, you'd still die, right? So why do you take that precaution? Do you look before crossing the road? Why bother? If you got hit by an asteroid the size of Poland looking wouldn't have helped.
Because that would be expensive, difficult and dangerous.
The following courtesy of the gorgeous RobotRollCall of Reddit fame.
"The Earth is in orbit around the sun. That means the Earth, and everything on it, is moving through space at about seventy thousand miles an hour. In order to drop something into the sun, you'd have to bring it to what is effectively a dead stop in space, which means accelerating it from rest to seventy thousand miles an hour going in the direction opposite the Earth's orbital motion.
That's twice the velocity necessary to fling something out of the solar system entirely. Now, we have launched a rocket to solar escape velocity before, about 35,000 miles an hour … but only once in all of human history, and doing so required a custom-assembled rocket and more than two hundred million US dollars, and the total payload was still only about a thousand pounds. And that's half of what we'd have to do, in terms of total velocity, to fire a payload of the same size into the sun … and rockets don't scale linearly with final velocity but rather exponentially, meaning the cost of putting a thousand-pound payload into the sun would probably be on the order of a billion US dollars, not counting the up-front R&D costs.
And did I mention that spent nuclear fuel is among the densest stuff on our planet? A cubic foot of the stuff weights more than a thousand pounds — 1,189 pounds, to be precise.
"Purely financial" doesn't even begin to cover it. To put any useful amount of the stuff into the sun would literally cost more than the total amount of money in the whole world."
"Really? Do they cite ANY proof of this, the most central point of the argument?
Didn't think so.."
I went to read the actual paper and look at their data, and the answer is yes. It's arguable, yes, but they do present data.
You've clearly already decided and you didn't have the integrity to actually go and check. You're an embarrassment to your education system and ironically clearly ready to be replaced by a foreigner.
"While garbage collection in C++ is bound to be contentious, the reality is it's absolutely necessary before it can claim to be as safe to program as higher level languages."
Is there some special bonus for being as safe as some other language? Use the right tool for the job. If you need that level of safety provided by some other language, use that other language. If you don't, then don't. I do not want the extra overhead of such things, and am prepared to pay the extra time and care in coding to ensure I don't need them. Other people have different needs and should use a different tool.
National service may well keep the kids off the streets and maybe even benefit a couple of them. It would, however, be a bad move for the forces. The UK operates a small, highly-trained, motivated professional volunteer force. Everyone there chose to be there.
If we were to dump tens of thousands of angry youths on the forces, they would have to come up with a lot of extra money and resources to deal with them. For many of them it would effectively be a prison camp. Good people would be taken from their real duties and forced to babysit people who don't want to be there. The days of needing cannon fodder in the UK forces are behind us and many of the conscripts would be totally unusuable for important duties; I wouldn't trust them with anything that needed doing well, not paperwork, not maintenance, not supply, certainly not combat - I can't think of a single role in the forces that I'd feel comfortable assigning an angry, surly conscript to; they'd be passed from pillar to post, nothing more than an extra burden on the forces. The UK armed forces are not prison wardens, teachers or babysitters for tens of thousands of people with no interest in it. It would sap resources and morale and at the end of it they'd just be dumped back onto the streets.