This thing with Elliot Rodgers has been on my mind for days now, eating away at me. He's that "nice guy" who went and shot four men and two women, because the women wouldn't have sex with him, and the men took what he believed to be rightly his. I've read a lot of discussion about him and his actions, lots of related peripheral discussion, and read and read and read.

I'm reading because it's personal to me. More personal than I thought possible. It's personal because it's delving into geek culture. It's personal because of the deep conflicts I feel about what happened.

It's personal because every other factor is, in my mind, a distraction. This isn't really about gun control, for example. The problem wasn't his guns. It’s about him.

It's personal because, just like the Columbine shooting, it's morally reprehensible. Utterly inexcusable. This is the product of a deranged man, a narcissist and deluded person, taking his anger out on a world he thought owed him everything simply for him being who he was. He was the ultimate "nice guy", a concept which is something of a berserk button for me; entitled, selfish, in love with himself, bitter, jaded, hateful. Indefensible. Repugnant. Evil.

It's personal because, on some level, I sympathise with him.

Feels dirty to even type that. In case I haven't already been perfectly clear, I really, really hate the so-called "nice guys". I make them villains in my stories. I council anyone I see displaying "nice guy"-ism against the folly of their ways. I speak out about it as often as I can. My philosophy is this:

If you believe that you are owed romantic or sexual favours because you do things for them, you are not a nice guy. If you misrepresent your intentions towards women, in the belief that this makes you "deserve" their affection, you are not a nice guy. If you think that treating a woman well means she owes you something, treating basic human interaction as an exchange of goods and services, you're not a nice guy.

You're *supposed* to be nice. To everyone. You don't get credit for that. You're *supposed* to be good to people. You're *supposed* to do kindnesses for people without expectation of reward. You're supposed to have the courage to do the right thing without holding your hand out for payment. You're supposed to treat women and men of all ages and backgrounds with the same level of respect, friendship, kindness, loyalty, strength, compassion, dignity, autonomy, charity, gratitude and love. If you can't do that, you're not a nice guy and you never will be.

So why do I sympathise with someone I despise?

We've all felt helpless at some time. Especially so when it comes to romance. Male, female, straight, gay, or something in between. We've all felt attracted to someone who didn't return our affections. It hurts. I don't know anyone who'll say that being rejected doesn't cut them. Frankly, I'd be worried about someone who *didn't* care. It's painful, and in that pain, we can think stupid things. Pry open the diary of any 15 year old kid and you will find some messed up stuff in there. Peel back their skin, cut open their skull, read their minds and you'll find much darker and hurtful things. Being rejected is painful. It's frustrating. It hurts. It can be hurtful to look at those who have what you want.

But you know what?

Tough.

Yep, tough.

Australians have a saying: "Tough bikkies". Hard luck. You're not owed anything because you're in pain. You're going to have to find some way of dealing with it -- introspection, self-improvement, even physical relocation. This is YOUR problem. Not anyone elses. Nobody owes you resolution. I can sympathise, empathise, and relate -- but it's your problem to deal with. Go hiking in Tibet. Join a gym. Eat a bucket of icecream and watch Pacific Rim. Go do whatever it is that you do to cope with things.

You don't get to take it out on the world. You don't get to do things like grope women at conventions because you can't control yourself, and then blame them for “provoking it”. You don't get to fall all over women with similar interests, coming on like a raging bull, then get offended when they run away. You don't get to make women feel unsafe around you, because you're "that guy" who everyone doesn't really like but puts up with because it's the right thing to do. You don't get to bottle up your anger, releasing it in explosions of self-righteous distemper. You don’t get to do much worse things.

You don't get to spread your pain. Inflict your inability to cope on others.

Let me be clear about something. There are injustices against straight, white men. Some of those are more profound than most understand, and there are much weaker support networks for men looking for relief from those injustices. Fewer options for them to turn to. The advocacy groups for men are usually just responses to the radicalised factions of other advocacy groups, and every bit as radicalised themselves. This limits their usefulness. I can understand the frustration of men who look at radical feminism or radical LGBT groups and face down hateful, extremist views that paint men dark colours with a broad brush. "Not all men do that," you might say. And you're right. They don't. It’s wrong for anyone to accuse you, directly or implicitly, of heinous acts just because of your sex, or the colour of your skin, or any other factor beyond your control.

I've met people who do this. Those who demonise men. Caucasians. Hetrosexuals. These are people, in the flesh, not ghosts over the Internet. Not constructs woven out of fantasy but whole cloth. Real people with real faces and real identities who proudly proclaim so-called "reverse discrimination" is justified. Or those who believe it is acceptable to openly discriminate against hetrosexuals to repay past injustices to LGBT-folk. And those that hope -- sincerely and genuinely hope -- that one day it will be "open season" against men.

In the light of what's just happened, that last one should be particularly chilling.

Many advocacy groups, communities, and religious organisations have extremist elements. Those organisations do not do enough to denounce their radical parts, and hide behind the paper-thin curtain of "No True Scotsman". This is a cowardly way of dealing with extremism and if you're affected by that extremism, the apathy of the moderates can cause anger. I get that. Truly. I don't like it either.

But the moment you start down the path of thinking that, for whatever reason, the world owes you for injustices against you, that you can take out your anger for the wrongs of others, that you can hate a group for the actions of a few... you are wrong. Plainly, simply, elegantly wrong.

The problem isn't them. Or “the system”. Or radical feminists. Or MRAs. Or women, or men, or Democrats or Republicans or Liberals or Labour or anyone.

It's you.

And it always will be.

10/10, would buy.

Automated cars are already better than people. The trains in Canada have been automated for decades and they're fine. The Google fleet drove across the US several times, something most human drivers would probably screw up at some point.

The only thing I dislike is the fact that I love my car and I can't think of a way to convert it economically. Otherwise I would, without hesitation. Including removing the steering wheel and pedals.

I don't want to drive it. I want auto-driving cars and I want them now.

A few years ago, my ex had a miscarriage at three months. By that point I was already accepting that there was going to be a kid and planning accordingly (adding another room to the house, telling friends and co-workers, etc). We dated for five years and the stress that caused ended an already fragile relationship.

Since then, I've noticed a distinct change in my personality. It's subtle and hard to quantify in absolute terms, but it's definitely there and I'm not the only one who noticed. I'm a lot less interested in women than I was before. I'm a lot more interested in stability, especially financial, and I'm finding myself doting on my cat a lot more (she's the bestest). While I'm still in many ways "an overgrown college kid" I've noticed that I'm also assuming a lot more responsibilities with my life, especially cleaning, cooking, and being a lot more timely and responsible* in my behaviour.

It's hard to assign causation to something like this -- I'm nearly 30 now. Did I just get older and is that adequate enough to explain it? Was it because I was exposed to a lot of new things, such as The Atheist Experience which I started watching just after the breakup? Or maybe it was just a change in the social and political climate locally, here in Australia? Or possibly the change in friend circles (I moved across the country afterward) that did it? I lost a lot of weight, maybe that's it too? Or the change in career (IT to full time writer)?

It's hard to pin down, but something changed and although a lot of factors I can think of were environmental I'd find it quite plausible that there is a distinct bio-chemical trigger at play here too. Probably 75% environmental, 25% chemical?

The whole thing is very interesting at any rate.

*I bought a Pikachu onesie a week ago so maybe not too responsible.

The reimagined Battlestar Galactica copped a lot of (somewhat) deserved flak for its filler episodes, but my favourite episode of the entire series is also one of the more blatant filler episodes ("Scar").

In particular, I loved the scene where it is revealed that Cylon raider-ships also reincarnate, just as their fleshy biological counterparts do. Sharon even spells it out for the characters.

Starbuck: Raiders reincarnate?
Sharon: Makes sense, doesn't it? It takes months for you to train a nugget into an effective Viper pilot. And then they get killed and then you lose your experience, their knowledge, their skill sets. It's gone forever. So, if you could bring them back and put them in a brand new body, wouldn't you do it? 'Cause death then becomes a learning experience.

This is why, I believe, the future will eventually belong to automated drivers. The initial ones are already very good, but there will be holes. There will be headlines like "automated car drives headlong into school, killing 10 of the world's cutest orphans". Human drivers have similar issues and events like that are almost everyday occurrences all around the world. The problem is, as Sharon pointed out, when those drivers die their experience is lost. With an automated system, the skill set improves. Someone discovers that, for example, hey, if a drunk passenger opens the door to a self-driving car at low speed and falls out the system doesn't realise they're gone and blindly drives away.

So the system improves. The car's internal systems track passengers, and if one exits the car, the vehicle will double back and pick them up. Or contact emergency services if the speed is high enough, and form a roadblock so that this person isn't hit again. Or simply lock the doors to begin with. Or any number of more sane actions. The point is: the accident becomes a learning experience. With a human driver, we spend months training people to become drivers. Then one day they make a stupid mistake -- one other drivers have learnt to avoid, but not this driver -- and become a red smear. Their skill set, their experience and training, is lost.

With automated systems, every mistake is an opportunity to grow. I personally believe that automated driving systems are already better than humans, but this massive evolutionary benefit (directly learning from the mistakes of others drivers as though they were that other) ensures that they will continue to improve, whereas human lifespans are finite and so ours will not.

Snipers are cowardly? What the actual fuck.

Here's the thing. War isn't very nice. In war the objective is to stop the enemy from resisting your movements. There are lots of ways of doing this, but the best way is by killing them. In order to do this, you want to kill as many of them as necessary, while getting your own guys killed the least. This is, distilled down to its purist essence, war.

So it's not cowardly to snipe from a rooftop, drop bombs from 50,000 feet, or launch Hellfires from a continent away. It's smart.

I dislike this kind of thinking--discouraging "cowardly" tactics--because it romanticizes war. It suggests that there is a civilized, warm, friendly way of blowing people in half and letting them die screaming in the desert. There isn't.

The only thing worse than fighting a war is losing a war. The best you can hope for is that your side fights as few wars as possible, that when you do fight your cause is righteous, that you win every single fight you get into, and that your victories are overwhelming, absolute, and you beat your enemies so laughably that nobody ever fucks with you ever again. You want to fight stupidly unfairly. Boots crushing bugs if you can. You want artillery, bombs, laser guided ICBMs. You want to win as cheaply and sneakily as humanly possible. You want to kill your enemies in such a way that they never, ever had the slightest chance of even seeing you coming, let alone fighting back. You want them to have bow and arrow, while you have lightning bolts.

"Cowardly". Phht. You can go march in the front lines, bravely facing the guns, down in the dirt, the mud, the bodies. Me, I'll push back my reclining chair, adjust the AC, order another hot hazelnut mocca because my last one's a bit chilly, angle a camera a thousand kilometers away a little to the left, press "shoot" and waste one hundred and fifty dudes armed to the teeth in a symphony of fire and destruction, collect my medals, then catch the subway home for tea and sex with my hot wife.

If that makes me a coward, fine. I can live with that.

Disclaimer: I don't have a hot wife.

In Australia this would never fly, ever.

The ACCC a few years back put in a new law (which Apple fought tooth and nail, source: http://www.afr.com/p/technolog...) which required every piece of electronics sold in Australia to have a two year "warranty". I put that in sarcasm quotes not because it's invalid (the ACCC has some *serious* bite here, enough to scare Apple into compliance), but because it's not technically a warranty. It's simply: "a reasonable expectation that an electronic product will be fit for purpose for two years from purchase".

Legally, that's not a warranty, but in some ways it's a lot more powerful.

However, Apple continues to fight it, usually by simply redefining their terms. For example, I had a 1.5 year old iPhone 5's battery die recently. I took it in to get replaced, they said that batteries are considered consumable items and, based on its charge/discharge cycles, it had been "consumed", rather than "broken" or "worn out".

I went home, printed out the relevant law, returned and showed it to them and the manager replaced it for free, all the while warning me that this wasn't something they were expected to cover. The girl helping me was very sympathetic and helpful, though, and I felt as though both the manager and the genius-bar chick both resented Apple dodging the law a little bit.

If your RevoDrive failed in any way for two years after purchase here, in Oz, it would get fixed for free. Not even Apple can dodge that.

> I actively like people who are gullible enough to believe devoutly, devoutly believing they will burn in hell for harming or stealing from me.

Except that priests still rape little boys. Faith doesn't seem to stop the believer from committing evil, and like they say. If the only thing stopping you from running around murdering people is the fear of divine retribution, then you are a piece of shit.

I'm a self-employed fiction writer, and an Australian, my answer to this is:

No. Fuck off.

My longer answer is:

Why copyright infringement, and why Hollywood? Why do they deserve protection?

I'm David Adams. I've written and published 30+ books across various pen names and platforms, including compendiums, omnibuses, etc. I self-publish and it's been my livelihood for 17 months. I'm no Hugh Howey but I do okay.

Every single time that copyright infringement comes up, it's always in the context of Hollywood. Indie writers, singers, artists, producers... we never get a single mention. It's always all about Hollywood. Every time a tariff is discussed, a new law is proposed, it's always protecting a US industry explicitly. I would never see any money from any of the protection schemes suggested by my elected representatives, and if there's not direct funding involved, the suggested courses of action would only ever hurt me.

My questions for Mr. Brandis, not that he gives a flying fuck about me, are:

- Why Hollywood? Why are you not helping out our local artists? Is it because we don't donate flaming dump-trucks full of money to your re-election campaigns, and if so, don't you feel that you're actively selling out your local entertainment industries? Shouldn't you be representing *my* interests?
- Why are you focusing on copyright infringement, something I give zero fucks about and even actively encourage? if you don't buy my book, I'd rather you got it from The Pirate Bay than passed on it, and I make lots of books free to encourage their proliferation anyway. Why fix something that's not broken?
- As TFS and TFA indicate, this power is sweeping and applies to a lot more than just copyright. The last time the Federal Government tried this, under the banner of child pornography, it was shown (when the list was inevitably leaked) that many more websites were being blocked than simply child fiddling. Innocuous, offensive (but legal), personal grudges... the works. I struggle to believe that this time would be any different, and such blocks are trivial to bypass anyway. Why would you support a system that's fundamentally broken?

I'm David Adams. I write fiction for a living (http://www.amazon.com/David-Adams/e/B006S1GSXI/?tag=wwwlacunavers-20 is me). So where's my money?

Sure, I'm Australian and not Canadian, but where's my tax dollars handout? I could really use that. After all, I'm a publisher too and not just a writer, so I should surely qualify for some money. My books get pirated after all, they appear on heaps of pirating sites, so where's my share of the tax on blank media?

Again, let's just pretend that I'm Canadian for a second. It shouldn't be too hard; the RIAA already doesn't recognise international borders when it comes to copyright infringement, so surely they'll be eager to give me my share of that money any day now.

Any day now.

Maybe I'll send them another email just to be sure. They seem to have lost the last few.

I'm sure it's just a mistake. They care about the artists. They said so. It couldn't possibly just be a selfish money grab at the expense of regular Canadians, supporting an outdated business model that just needs to shrink or go away entirely. Surely not.

Went to register www.ubuntusucks.com to see if Mark Shuttleworth would sue me.

Turns out it redirects to their bugtracker.

Well played, sir.

Well played.

I've long maintained that the progression will go something vaguely like this:

- Fully manual cars.
- Electronic fuel injection, spark plug control, etc.
- Power windows that stop when something's caught in them, digital dashboard that beeps at you when you're low on fuel, bluetooth integration that mutes the audio when you have an incoming call, etc.
- OnStar and equivalent systems.
- Safety and navigation systems like airbags, electronic stability control, GPS, blind spot indicators that can be manually overridden and just sound alarms, anti rear-end sensors, reverse sensors, etc.

This is where we are right now.

- Automatic park systems (some cars have them but they're still very rare).
- Blind spot indicators that physically stop you from merging when a collision is detected.
- "Smart" emergency systems that detect when a car's upside down, had its airbags activated, or is in distress.
- Optional automatic "highway mode" driving.
- Optional "long distance" haul.
- Optional automatic "door to door" driving.

At this point, the requirements for getting a licence become much harder, much like getting a gun licence in Australia. Must show genuine need, must do yearly tests, must have a much higher skill level than our current drivers and demonstrate a need to be able to operate a vehicle manually.

- Mandatory "highway mode" driving, with emergency override.
- Mandatory "long distance" haul, with emergency override.
- Mandatory "door to door" driving, with emergency override.

Our attitude towards manual drivers slowly changes. Back in the day wearing seatbelts was uncool and unpopular, now everyone does it (and is horrified by those who don't). By now I imagine the same attitude is held towards manual operators, especially by young people.

- Total redesign of the personal car, making them more like the back seat of a limo, open and even with things like fold out beds for long trips, etc.
- Total redesign of our transport infrastructure. Cars are now electric, and can now auto-drive to and dock with large trains that shuttle them long distances such as between suburbs or different "sides" of larger cities, charging on the way. Huge trains compliment or replace highways in this way, simply due to efficiencies of scale.

And probably a million things I haven't even thought of yet.

Well, that was the problem that was presented. Let's tackle this one instead.

You're driving at 65mph (104.607km/h, which I'll round to 105km/h just to be easier, and since the previous example was done using metric), in the middle lane of a freeway. Tanker to your right, redneck to your left.

Your car is autodriving, cruising along in conditions that are basically ideal for it; this isn't some trecherous mountain road, it's a highway. Ideal conditions. The LIDAR on top is working away, and you're checking MyFace+ and looking at pictures of cats.

Plastic bag gets kicked up in front of you. The LIDAR probably can't even see it because it's not dense enough, but let's assume it can. This is actually a very well chosen problem: the fact that the bag's off the ground might confuse the system, and let's assume that the system has no way of determining the density of an object and hasn't been programmed for bird strikes (a fairly common occurrence really, but let's just assume).

So the LIDAR and onboard computers examine the object, determines that it's not moving very fast, but there's going to be a collision. There's no way the car can go left, there's no way the car can go right. There's a potential collision object in front of it and cars behind.

Its course of action is to do the following:

- Performs a complex risk analysis. If I'm completely boxed in, how safe is it to collide with the object behind me (or emergency break and risk a collision) vs just striking the thing? In this case, we assume it can't tell the difference between "brick flying off the back of a truck" and "plastic bag", so it assumes the former and reacts accordingly.
- Break as much as possible, keeping in mind that it has full 360 degree vision and won't allow the car behind it to rear-end and will ease up the breaking if a collision is going to occur.
- Attempts, if possible, to go into "harm minimization mode", where it realises that a collision is imminent. Airbags are primed and charged, seatbelts are tightened, the horn is sounded and the system sends an SMS to the local emergency responders, informing them that a collision may be taking place (it later transmits either a 'false alarm', a 'non-critical impact, we'll be okay' or a 'critical impact, send help', with nothing being assumed to be the later).
- The trajectory of the potential collision object is analysed, far quicker than a human can. The computerised system is aware of where its occupants are (even my car has alarms that whine if you aren't wearing your seatbelt). It knows that this object, which we've assumed it can't tell the density of, is going to strike the vehicle, and therefore positions the vehicle within its lane so that the object strikes an unattended area, if possible, such as the passenger seat (assuming only a "driver").
- Other systems can potentially activate, things that just won't work on driver-controlled cars, such as external airbags. Since the car knows it's going into the shit, it can prepare accordingly, and do multiple concurrent things at once (simultaneously prepare for, and try to avoid, an accident) in a way no human can.
- The system begins to record what's happening on a black box. This does nothing to help the people in the car, but helps people across the country and the world, when the data is analysed by the car's engineers. Now, the autodrive system can be tweaked so that this kind of error doesn't happen any more. We've learnt that the density of a potential collision object matters. The accident, even if it somehow kills the people onboard, becomes a learning experience for every "driver" in the entire world, rather than just a statistic on a chalkboard in a police station.

So yes. Assuming that the car mistakenly identifies a non-harmful object as a harmful object, which as I pointed out may not be a realistic scenario (LIDIR may not be able to see a plastic bag due to it being largely opaque and not very dense, and the car's systems may be programmed for things like bird-strikes, where light, flying objects are an acceptable risk to collide with), then the car will perform in error.

That's, in my mind, no greater a risk than the driving panicking and hard-overing the wheel, causing the car to flip and roll, smash into either one of the large trucks on either side, or slam on the brakes themselves and cause a pile up too.

There are edge cases where having a human in control of a car is better. What if the object to be struck was, say, a spray of water from a fire truck? Or a car's on a bridge that's collapsing? Or the car is being "driven" by a criminal who wants to avoid road spikes? Some kind of car with active camoflague? Is it better to rear-end the Prius or the M1A4 Abrams tank? What if there's a crazed nutter on the highway sniping at passing cars? Etc etc.

The thing is... for the majority of cases, where people are commuting to and from work, or picking their kids up from school, or doing any number of daily, mundane tasks, a computer can manage this much better, much more safely, more reliably, and with a greater level of care for passengers, other road users, and third parties than a human can. A human will win in the edge cases -- our ability to do that is what makes us the dominant species on this planet -- but for every day things, a robo-driver is better.

Be like a casino. Support the laws of probability. Eventually you'll win out.

Which would YOU pick? Bearing in mind the car is travelling at 150km/h, and you probably have less time to decide than you do reading this sentence.

So you see something on the road at 50m, which takes your brain 200ms to identify it. You identify it as a baby, which takes, let's say, 500ms (humans are surprisingly good at that). You really quickly check your mirrors and scan the upcoming road to make sure you're not driving into something dangerous (500ms), and see that you are. You identify it as an immobile pillar, highly dangerous.

Now let's throw in some time to moralise this decision. It doesn't matter how long, but let's say 500ms.

You turn the wheel to avoid the crash, which takes 200ms, and the car begins to turn, and in say 200ms, neatly avoids the baby. Right?

Uhh, not quite. You haven't even finished checking your surroundings yet, and that baby is currently underneath your front left wheel (150km/hr * 1200 miliseconds = 50.00000004 metres). Note: 150km/h is 0.0416666667 metres a milisecond.

Your autodriving car, however, sees the baby at 50m. It doesn't care that it's a baby, because it's a solid lump in the middle of the road, and it should be avoided. If it were a wombat, it would wreck your shit at 150km/hr, and honestly a concrete pillar is probably not that much worse.

Let's see how the auto driving car fares.

So your car sees something on the road at 50m, which it takes 200ms to identify. It doesn't spend any further time on this because objects on the road must be avoided. It begins slowing the car while it decides, and a coprocessor tightens the seat belts, primes the air bags, and potentially sounds the horn (or notifies other self-driving cars by wireless that, hey, shit's about to go down yo).

It doesn't need to check its surroundings because, as an automated system, it has full 360 vision at all times and doesn't slack off, get distracted, get tired, have a fight with the ex over the kids or get an SMS or any number of factors that could distract a driver. And before you say "But I constantly pay attention at all times on the road and never, ever slack off ever", firstly bullshit, and secondly you can't do it as well as it does anyway.

There's no moralising in this equation. It just wants to avoid hitting things.

It begins turning the wheel to avoid the crash, which takes 200ms, and the car begins to turn, and in say 200ms, neatly avoids the baby.

What other things can it do?

Let's see: how about talk to other cars wirelessly, informing them that there's a hazard and steering around it. So only this car needs to dodge, all the others are aware of it and react accordingly -- and even get out of the way of the dodger, so that it doesn't have to slam into the concrete. How about the car can (at the speed of a computer, faster a human brain) calculate its current speed, distance to target, potential impact threat of a solid object that size, and just decide to break instead. How about the car (for whatever reason) gets into an accident and automatically informs the first responders, possibly even transmitting things like: "Three passengers. Caucasian female, African male, Asian female. African male is allergic to penicillin." If you want to go truly sci-fi, then it gives real-time status feeds. "Asian female is hemmoraging, heart rate is high, possibly tachycardia. Caucasian female was thrown from the vehicle and cannot be monitored."

The advent of self-driving cars is like the invention of the internet. We don't even KNOW what it'll do to our society, but I'm really excited about it and I want one now now now now now now now now now, and not JUST so I don't get stuck being the designated drivers simply because I also own a car.

>ask where forum members don't give a shit about PC.

So you're telling him to go ask 4chan?

>dat signature
>mfw