The findings are reported in the journal Current Biology.

Awesome pun.

If you think this is bad, just wait until you hear what happened next with an inadvertent combination of autocomplete and "I'm feeling lucky". There were no survivors.

In related news, it was discovered that AI researchers thought sentient robots were friendly.

So that means that 31% have received a pay raise in the last six months? I don't know about anyone else, but quite a few places that I've been do performance/salary reviews annually, so assuming (yes, it's a false assumption, but illustrative) that everyone gets an annual review, and half of everyone deserves a raise, then it looks like 12% more employees are getting raises than deserve them. If everyone in the 40th percentile of performance is getting a raise, that sounds sort of like good news... Especially with relatively low inflation (which I think we have now, purely looking at interest rates as an indicator... but don't take my word for it, I don't keep close track of these things.)

Are you saying you're un-lazy enough to walk a few feet outside and read your meter? And write down the reading? Every five minutes? For a month?

Yes, it's very easy to track your average monthly power usage, it's right there on your bill. It's also easy to check your instantaneous usage by looking at the meter. What the OP wanted to know wasn't just a point measurement, but a running graph to see how it varied from hour to hour throughout the day.

Which brings up the really important question here... what jurisdiction would a malpractice suit be brought in?

So I'm guessing in this case, the cure for a hangover would be the hair of the squirrel that bit you?

That still doesn't make any sense. The thing that I do that causes me to be fined is to make money. If I somehow managed to avoid using roads (which I mostly do), or deriving any benefit from their existence (which is pretty much impossible), I'd still pay the fine.

Strange, I could have sworn that property taxes mostly went to schools, but I could be entirely wrong. It's also entirely possible that property taxes, while going primarily to local services, only pay a fraction of their cost.

I never said that I resented taxes. I said that they were a fine. Speeding tickets are a fine as well, and I don't resent those (at least, not much). It's also easy to think of taxes as just something to pay for infrastructure, and forget that they also serve to discourage the taxed activity. I do however resent it when tax revenues are spent poorly, because that hurts everyone (even the ones who don't pay taxes, who suffer the lost opportunity for those funds to be spent well)

Entirely agreed. Schools and roads are the quintessential public services, and I don't think there's a reasonable way to handle them otherwise (I have had some speculative conversations about what could have been if, early on, the US had embraced aviation as a replacement for other forms of transport, and given that, it would be entirely possible to avoid the existence of roads for the most part. I don't see any way to make schools anything other than public that wouldn't suck, though it would be nice to replace the perverse incentives that exist in the current system with something that more efficiently utilizes the market forces that are generally more prevalent in the private sector)

No doubt. And when you show up at the dentist's office and he pulls out a jackhammer, it doesn't mean that you should stop going to the dentist. Just that maybe you should stop going to that dentist.

Nope, pretty sure it's a fine for making money. As proof, note that people who have access to roads, military protection, schools, fire departments, social security, the FDA, etc, but who don't make money don't pay that particular fine. (actually as I understand it, fire departments, schools, and some roads often come from a fine on owning property or buying things, but those aren't relevant to what I was talking about, as those fines aren't the ones that show up in April)

Going with the other hypothesis, I'd posit that a speeding ticket isn't actually a fine for the crime of speeding, it's a fine for the crime of having a police department. And that doesn't make any sense at all.

But of course. Or perhaps simplify even more and call it "school" "town" and "highway"

wholeheartedly agreed.

It's my understanding that this capability is actually in production. For instance, at http://www.bmw.com/com/en/insights/technology/technology_guide/articles/active_cruise_control.html, the setup sounds much like you describe. Actually, it sounds a lot like what I describe as well, in that it says you can have up to 4 preset speeds. That's pretty awesome. And it calculates distance in time as opposed to a distance measurement. The only gotcha is that last caveat:

Which works out to 18.6 MPH, so it won't do you any good in a 15 MPH school zone.

But that makes me really curious... what does the active cruise control do if the car in front of you is going 15 MPH? Does it just give up and let you ram them? I mean, yeah, the driver should be watching what's going on and able to stop once the cruise control gives up, but if they've got the capability built in anyhow, why not let it keep a sleeping/distracted/unconscious/stupid driver from hitting someone? Or maybe that 30 kmph limit is the limit of what it will accelerate from once there's no obstruction.... if you get down below 30 kmph, it'll just bring the car to a stop until the cruise control is disengaged.

Still, it sounds like a system that's got it almost right.

I'm pretty sure they were all max 60/min 45. I recall being somewhat surprised the first time I drove that road, as previously I'd only ever seen minimum speed limits on Interstates, where you generally don't have this issue (it seems an entirely reasonable assumption that when you turn off onto an offramp, the highway minimum speed limit no longer applies)

The other thing that's always really bugged me is school zones. Plenty of times I've seen signs saying that there's a school zone with a very low (15-20 mph) speed limit when flashing, or during x-y time of day, or what-have-you. Then, a ways down the road, there's a sign saying the school zone is ended. Whenever they neglect to put up that "end school zone" sign, it annoys me. Sometimes it's not entirely clear where the school in question is, and whether I've passed it and can resume a normal speed or not.

And then there's the other related annoyance of mine: I have never seen a car that had a cruise control that would engage at 15 MPH. So at a time when I should be giving every possible shred of my attention to what's in or near the road, I'm tempted to instead watch my speedometer. A sane design would let me set the cruise control at any speed in excess of idling in the lowest gear, so that I could set it at 15 MPH and then hover my foot over the brake while watching to make sure no one wanders into the road. A really nice system would have a switch with presets at 15, 35, and 55 MPH.

Are you being deliberately obtuse, or do you not know the meaning of the word "minimum"? Or did you just not read my post? Of course, if all you have to deal with are maximum speed limits, then you can slow down before you get to a decrease and speed up after you get to an increase. But if you slow down to 35 MPH while you are still in an area where the minimum (not maximum, which is 60 MPH) permissible speed is 45 MPH, you are violating the law. Which is exactly what I, in fact, did. I violated the minimum posted speed limit, which was the right thing to do, the safe thing to do, and fit with the spirit of the law, if not the letter.

I've never actually personally seen a minimum speed limit enforced, and I'm not entirely sure why they exist. There's certainly an implicit exception for situations where keeping above the minimum speed would cause a collision, and there's probably an implicit exception for anticipating an upcoming speed limit change. But they went to all the trouble and bother of printing up the signs, so someone must think it's important to make sure everyone's going over 45 MPH outside of town. It's possible that it was just a slightly subtle way of them saying "don't drive your tractor or moped or whatever on this road. If you can't go over 45, stay off the road." Or maybe it's just to keep people going at or near the max limit from getting surprised when coming up on someone ambling along at 10 MPH.

I just think it's interesting when the letter of the law requires a violation of the laws of physics.

There's a road I used to drive on that I always thought was very interesting with respect to speed limits. It was probably around 100 miles of straight flat road going through sparsely populated rural farmland, and the occasional small town. Outside of towns, the posted speed limit was 60 MPH, with a posted minimum speed of 45 MPH. In the towns, the speed limit was usually either 35 or 25 MPH. Note that there's at least a 10 MPH difference between the minimum speed limit outside of town and the maximum speed limit in town, thus requiring an instantaneous velocity change. From physics, we know that an instantaneous velocity change would require infinite acceleration, which in turn would require infinite power. Thus, you are faced with a choice: Obey the posted speed limits, or obey the laws of physics. For myself, I always chose to obey the laws of physics in blatant defiance of the local authorities. I even decelerated and accelerated near those points of discontinuity at what I considered a safe and prudent rate, as opposed to slamming on the brakes and shedding velocity as fast as my vehicle could manage in a vain attempt to satisfy the letter of the law.

Note that I never actually got a ticket, nor even saw someone get a ticket near one of those singularities, but I always thought that the "I was only obeying the laws of physics" defense would be interesting to try if I had gotten one.

As for the poll, I have gotten speeding tickets in the past, though it's been quite a while. But to this day, I still get fined every April for the crime of having a job.

I didn't mean to imply that it might actually be legal to walk home drunk from a bar, just that it's the right thing to do. (and whenever "the right thing to do" and "the legal thing to do" are at odds, society is pretty screwy)

I haven't paid much attention to MADD, but if they are in favor of laws against walking under the influence, then it's long past time for them to change their name.

Makes me just want to go up to one of them and say "You should be ASHAMED of yourself! Do you know how many children are killed every year by LAWS! See if they respond with something along the lines of "but my laws don't kill any children" before or after noting the hypocrisy thus illustrated.

I like what I call the "AT&T solution" to drunk driving: More bars in more places.

I mean really, there's no excuse for driving drunk, but if the bar is within walking distance of your house, then there's both no excuse and no reason.

For reasons unbeknown to me, MADD doesn't seem to agree.