Yes, but at that time, we still had a shortage of labor over all. In western society, we very recently doubled the eligible workforce through equal rights. Then with a bit of development in the 3rd world, we have multiplied it many times (but haven't given those workers a chance to become consumers). Now automation is cheap enough that even those very cheap workers are threatened with unemployment.

There is a significant correlation between installing the cameras and shortening the yellow. At the same time, even if the yellow was too short even before the cameras were installed, they increase the risk of accidents since people will no longer be willing to run the very beginning of the red (before traffic the other way starts moving).

It should be, but there are too many wealthy people who firmly believe that they were born with virtue but the working class gain virtue only by working. Therefor, no job = no work = deserve to starve.

There are two classes of people. Those who feel wealthy if they have no need to worry about money and those who can only feel wealthy if they have significantly more than others. The latter just can't be happy until you're not happy.

Because until very recently, the MECHANIZATION always required a human operator AND because until recently, the limiting factor on economic expansion was labor.

We now have quite enough labor and we can make machines that require very little supervision.

What makes you think nobody will use and appreciate?

Back in the early 90s I had the opportunity of participating on a paleontological expedition to the badlands of Montana. The soil was built up over hundreds of millions of years and flooding cut through the soft soil leaving a stratigraphy that is dramatic and easy to read. You can even see the Chicxulub ejecta, a chocolate brown horizontal line about the width of your hand.

Now whole dinosaur skeletons are a rare find. You can spend a whole season tramping through the badlands and never find two bones that go together. But individual bones are more common, and bone fragments are more common still, and experts can often identify the group of dinosaurs or even the species of dinosaur a bone fragment came from, often a surprisingly small fragment of bone.

What we were doing was assembling a database of species found by layer, which in turn maps to era. What the PI was finding was a shift towards species with anatomical adaptations to deal with heat. His opinion was that there was already a climate driven adaptive stress on the dinosaur population, which turned the aftermath of the Chicxulub impact into a knock-out blow.

So the idea that there was more going on than an asteroid impact is hardly new. People were thinking that way twenty years ago.

One thing every thoughtful fan of the mystery story knows is that in real life, motivation tells you very little about who done what. That's because *most* people, when faced with a problem, don't even consider murder. Murderers are not typical people.

The same goes for hackers. When companies first started putting Internet connections back in the 90s in I would explain that they need to start taking steps to secure their networks, and almost without exception the response was "Why? Why would anyone be interested in hacking *us*?" And I had to explain that the Internet was accessible to *everyone*, including people whose motivations and ways of thinking would make no sense to them.

Motivation may have limited use in perhaps identifying some possible suspects, but it's not probative of anything. You can't rule anyone out or in based on what you think their motivations are or should be. The only way to know that somebody has done something is by following the chain of evidence that leads to some concrete action they've taken.

But now that they denied involvement, I suspect they may be.

And the state does not have the right to demand that any individual accept any particular medical treatment. That's why the pressure is applied in a more round about manner.

So that just leaves us with the choice. Do we want the kids to be un-educated or do we want to find a way to educate them? Certainly making the vaccines free will address the financial askect, leaving only philosophical and religious objections. We can certainly provide education fopefully convince parents of the value and even necessity of vaccination. However, at the end of the day some will still object. Since we don't want a society where someone from the government can show up at any time and inject whatever gunk they care to into anyone they care to, we must deal with the cases where the parent will not be swayed.

Note that excluding their children from school just makes sure that they will make the same decision when they have kids. If they go to school, perhaps they will make a better decision when they become parents.

It should also be noted that not all of the required vaccines actually make sense. The main ones we are all familiar with certainly do. MMR, DPT and polio certainly. But I remain more skeptical of chicken pox. That was never one of those scourge diseases. Evidence suggests that the immunity from the vaccine is less complete that you get from having the disease and that it wanes in adulthood, exactly the time when the disease becomes more dangerous and the vaccine is contraindicated.

Well, there's two reasons why 3D printing makes sense. One is prototyping. You might need to make a half dozen different prototypes that are pretty similar to each other before you find one that really works. The second is replacement. You may need to replace these things on a regular basis. Replacing them is just a matter of sending a file to a printer -- no craft skill needed at all.

Hand crafting something like this falls within the scope of my tinkering abilities. I've worked with fiberglass and epoxy and wood. But it's not for everyone and if someone had to *pay* me to make something like this it would probably cost a thousand dollars a pair.

Something like this would seem to fall into the sweet spot for 3D printing: something you need more than one of, but not *thousands* of identical copies.

That was a dozen years ago. He can't self-publish *now* because he has a contract with Springer.

I agree that vaccines are a good idea but that doesn't justify removing the right to control what goes into their and their children's bodies based on their inability to homeschool.

I didn't say it was a collection of particular matter and energy. "Pattern" sounds all cool and science fictiony, but it's not really particularly necessary to the definition. A chocolate bar is also constantly swapping it's matter and energy with its surroundings, yet most of us remain comfortable with calling it a hunk of matter called a "chocolate bar."

People, including ones who study these things, disagree on whether a virus is alive or not. You're clearly from the former camp. I'm from the latter. A virus requires a living host to perform *any* of the functions normally associated with life, including both active entropy reduction, energy use, and replication. Classifying viruses as non-life also neatly deals with the question of whether prions are alive. By your reasoning, based on the information contained in DNA, if I wrote down the genetic sequence of a virus then that book (or the computer I stored it in), plus some appropriate host (or another book containing the bits of that hosts's DNA necessary to encode ribosomes and whatever else the virus needed to replicate), would be alive. Also computer viruses. And my note to the secretary asking her to photocopy my note.

Your reasoning about fire is just my definition with a lot more words.

I have a friend who was a medical entomologist and journal editor before he retired. I ran into him while I was browsing a book table at a conference, and mentioned that I'd like to buy one of the medical entomology textbooks but the $250 price tag was a bit steep.

"Just wait," he said. "I'm about to change that. I'm writing a new textbook that will be a lot cheaper. I want students and public health departments to be able to afford a solid medical entomology reference."

When his book came out the publisher set the priced at $500. It was twice as expensive any of its competitors. Now something like this is never going to sell like a basic calculus book, but it has a considerably larger market than you'd think. His idea was that it would find its way into the syllabus in medical, veterinary and public health schools; and that hospitals and public health agencies would buy copies for their libraries. But his strategy to make that happen by making the book affordable and sell in (relatively) high numbers; the publisher had other plans.

So don't blame authors for high textbook prices. It's publishers who set the price.

I'm curious what the reaction in the US would be if someone made a major motion picture about the sitting American president being assassinated. Not a film about actual events, or about a fictional president, but the actual one.

Making terrorist threats is certainly wrong, but I strongly suspect there's more than a little hypocrisy in the current "free speech, free speech!" reaction.