You may have read the report of the USS Srark. This was a US naval ship fired on by an Iraqi F1. The facts of the case are that it was fired on and hit by two missiles and never fired a shot in defense or revenge. The captain was indicted and several officers were drummed out of the Navy. The official inquiry essentially blamed the ships officers. I looked more deeply into the matter a few months ago when I wanted to find out about possible reasons these guys weren't blown out of the water. Back to that later.

My research on the Stark indicated that most of the ship's defensive systems including two kinds of fire control radar and the PHALANX CIWS were offline awaiting parts or maintenance that needed to be done by a contractor in port.. The real cause of the ship's poor performance under fire was accounting procedures designed to provide an 80% readiness/50% cost solution. Instead of acknowledging the cause the Navy chose to blame the closest people to the incident and call it done.

Now the piracy incident. First, one of the comments says the pirates were in the big boat and the rafts were US Navy attacking it. I don't believe this to be true. I looked up comments on several forums found a consensus agreeing with a Youtube comment:

This happened in 2006, the ship in the video is the USS Cape St George and then video was shot from the USS Gonzalez. They didn't try to attack or board anything, we sent a boarding team to talk to them and they pointed an RPG at us. All of the mounts kept jamming because they had old shitty ammo sitting on them exposed to the weather for months and there are no sights on those weapons (you're supposed to walk fire onto targets, difficult to do when your weapon jams every 3 rounds). Source: I was there

The consensus was that the ammunition on the firing ship hadn't been properly kept dry, and was old. This causes jams. And they didn't do enough live-fire exercises to be able to reliably prevent this problem. Again, an 80%/50% solution. This isn't to say it's easy to hit small rafts in the dark with a jamming weapon but that's not the point. The Navy has all the latest whizbangery and night vision gear. Those rafts should have been shot up by the third burst.

A third happenstance, part of the Stark incident IIRC: The ship was carrying old missiles and had to dump them into the sea ASAP. This prevented returning fire on the attacking jet. My conclusion is that the US Navy has a firmly entrenched culture of saving money at the cost of readiness.

incomplete source: http://www.jag.navy.mil/librar...

All that said: Why should we believe that if general military readiness is flagging to save costs in official government programs the government would do any better than these contractors? A choice has to be made and stuck to: budget or safety. The half assing, ass grabbing, and ass covering needs to stop.

The question of anthropomorphic global warming and evolution can be studied and understood on a factual basis as can whether vaccines help. Whether vaccines should be required is not a question for science to answer. The summary conflates matters of fact and matters of judgement.

The development money is gone. Who you blame the loss on is irrelevant to that. Emotional attachment to lost money is one of the biggest problems plaguing any large organization. The question isn't whether we should add money to a very expensive (but not a trillion dollars, that includes projected maintenance) project.

The question is, given the platform available right now is it worth it to spend money correcting deficiencies, or would it be more cost-effective to take another option, from re-engineering the F-15 to starting all over again. I don't know the answer to this question but by bringing up past cost as if it were relevant and by adding future costs the writer of this article showed a bias that makes me disregard the whole thing. This isn't a policy piece, it's a hit piece.

That's an interesting point, but surely since cutting off peripheral vision eliminates a source of information those without will be more accident prone despite being able to make up for much of it by looking back and forth and making better guesses about what's there.

Restaurant and taxi regulation are mature and have a long history of fixing people getting around them. Uber:taxi regulations=first railroad company:car regulations

If the state doesn't have a monopoly on violence the most violent in the state will come to control it, at which point there will be a new state with a monopoly on violence.

All regulation isn't bad, and ignoring regulation (breaking the law) generally is bad. But some regulation, especially that brought on by corporate-government alliances, can be harmful. I'm torn.

Have you heard of keiretsu? In post World War II Japan they had an era of robber-barons much like that the US experienced, at the same time they were industrializing. Which makes me think some of what we're seeing in China is just what happens during and immediately after any industrial revolution, but that's a different topic.

Part of Japanese culture, the idea that a business owner is responsible for the welfare of the families of his employees, allowed massive business conglomerates to form and ally with the Japanese government without taking too much advantage of workers. In the US unions had the same balancing effect. But what I'm getting at is that in both countries there was significant regulatory capture and the building of infrastructure was funded by government-corporate alliances. New technologies: railroads, the telegraph, and port systems were erected for mutual benefit by companies that were allowed free reign.

I'm not going full fascist here, but it's undeniable there were some mutual benefits from these forms of cooperation, making up for some to all of the problems the same entities caused, depending on your political point of view. What does this have to do with Uber?

This amount of lobbying in the present corrupt US congressional state of existence is sure to lead to regulatory capture, which is sure to lead to something I'm going to call infrastructure.

Rapid ad-hoc commercialization of immediately available resources is an immensely powerful technology. It's not recognized yet, but Uber is at the front of a wave of change. Cars are just the beginning. You can rent driveways now, for a single day. Collaborative reputation-based commerce and ubiquitous internet access is allowing the closest thing that fits a consumer's need to be provided. It's oil for the capitalist machine.

How many people have a bicycle they haven't used for years? A lawn mower they use only every two weeks? Computer cables? Rent out your CPU to a Bitcoin mining group? Need to rent a generator for the weekend? Need a cup of sugar? People don't know their immediate neighbors anymore but they'll soon have a reputation on their mesh network.

As a tool of commerce this is every bit as powerful as the railroad was in its day. And it needs just as much support, recognition, and regulation. The government just doesn't have the tools yet to cope. But Uber's regulatory capture will create the framework. It's going to be corrupt, wasteful, and poorly written but that will change over time in the same way regulations written for railroads changed over time.

Government always gets worse, fnar fnar. No, it doesn't. Do you see Chinese chain gangs building railroads today? Do you see corporate-owned towns with single all-powerful individuals built to service trains? Do you see a single company wholly controlling access to one rail line? No. Government doesn't always get worse and over time as technologies mature and knowledge disseminates regulation of an infrastructure improves.

This doesn't need to be regulated.Yes it does. I believe in free enterprise. I really do. I've read enough history to see the power free association and free ownership brings. I believe anonymity should be a protected right. I believe in all-but-absolutely free speech. But I've also read enough history to see the harm unfettered capitalism brings. If the government doesn't regulate this new form of commerce networks will form into net-negative predatory entities. They'll lie, cheat, and steal from the naive, even from their own members. Just as a traditional company is forbidden from false advertising, cheating their customers, and breaking contracts this new type of entity must be forbidden to do these things. Just as a traditional employee can call the FTC if she didn't get her paycheck there needs to be someone to call when rapidwidgets.com didn't return someone's lawnmower.

Unintentionally and for its own aims, Uber is building a governmental framework to regulate and support ad-hoc commerce. And while I hate to see regulatory capture that's a good thing.

Actually, I want to ask a slightly better question too. Given all you know about AI, this particular AI, and Google's efforts: if hardware keeps improving at its present rate for another 20 years will that alone probably suffice to turn Google's program into strong AI?

You seem like someone informed. Can you tell me where to look to find out that actual likely abilities of the program the article is about?

You're right! Some coral will survive, and its progeny will be able to better survive.

But I don't care about that, because that's going to take thousands of years. What I'm worried about NOW is whether the ecosystem in 20 years will be able to support another 500 million people. You didn't address that at all. And stop thinking your opinions make you better than others. It's arrogant and creates ignorance.

That's what I'm reading. That AMD is willing to go the extra mile to offer what its customers are looking for.

I don't think the problem is people letting themselves be manipulated by advertising. I think the real problem is news networks letting themselves be pressured into bias in the 'news" by the threat of removing advertising. So you have news networks pushing whatever agenda anyway, but with even more pressure to maximize shareholder value by essentially lying to the masses. THAT'S the problem with advertising dollars in elections.

Disclamer: I will not research how well they keep their promises, or acts they voted for and against or sponsored. I do not endorse or oppose any of these candidates.

I looked at their website, mayday.us It referred me to a different site, repswith.us describing five proposals they support. The plan of Democrat Mr. Sarbanes was first. His site seems to directly address various issues, with little double-speak. The Government By the People Act is its own section of his site, listed under "issues", but in its own section. The plan hinges on a tax credit for political donations to encourage small donors. Also this:

"Allow candidates to earn additional public matching funds within 60 days of the election so that citizen-funded candidates can combat Super PAC"

which doesn't explain how superpac donations won't apply to the matching funds. To be fair I didn't look into it.

Next is Democrat David Price. His site isn't as straight-forward, but does present mostly solid stances on the issues. I couldn't find the Empowering Citizens Act(pdf warning) without using the search function, which tells me he's not staking his reputation on it. This one is more complicated but the main theme seems to be limiting per-donor donations. Obviously loopholes that allow present donors to give more than they need to declare (such as giving bonuses to employees who promise to donate most of the bonus) remain. It also limits total public funds available to candidates, which my intuition tells me will have the opposite effect. This plan looks pretty slimy to me. Your opinion may vary.

Republican Jim Rubens plan, Political Money Reform Proposal" isn't on his site at all, so the link is back to repswith.us. It involves a larger tax rebate for donations and "Require searchable, realtime online reporting of contributions above $200" and removes all political spending and contribution limits.

Republican Richard Painter literally wrote the bookon ethics reform. His site is his university's site, so wouldn't naturally have details on supported initiatives. According to repswith.us the Taxation Only With Representation Act involves a $200 tax rebait for private donations and nothing else.

Because doing it right involves a full fail-over test including transferring loads or test loads, DNS auto-reconfiguration, and possibly even paying extra to bring up extra capacity elsewhere. You need to make sure it happens right when it's needed. Extra paperwork, overtime, it's all in there.

Crystal meth is widely given out (especilly in the bad years) to starving people in North Korea, often enough as a curte-all. It helps keep the hunger pangs at bay if nothing else.