Well, if you recall there was a HUGE issue about JFK being catholic, after which the whole idea of "OMG a CATHOLIC PRESIDENT" simply went away.

The fact that Barack Obama won election, and then REelection (not even really being close) should likewise dispense with racist folly about people's melanin levels and qualification for the presidency.

" And "brown people" (as you so elegantly put it) are stopped, searched and incarcerated statistically higher on average and for longer durations for the many of the same crimes that white people commit. "

Are you therefore just as outraged by the sexism which is even MORE egregious in the criminal justice system?

If you believe that black incarceration rates (being so much higher than their population) as "proof" of an injustice, then the fact that incarcerated felons are 92% male must be taken as equal "proof" of gross sexism, right? I mean, shouldn't prison populations be more like 50/50 men/women?

Unless you're ok with asserting that men are "just naturally more likely to be criminals than women"?*

*and doesn't that then just put you in the same place as sexists and racists, claiming that gender or skin color predisposes people to/away from criminality?

Genuine question:
If you are truly about "equality" of treatment, then what's your endpoint?

When have we "won" the civil rights movement? I truly want to know, because as far as I can tell, the 'movement' is a self-perpetuating game of shift-the-goalposts. If there's never a victory condition, then people can just keep complaining forever.

Do we feel women have gotten "enough" help educationally, because the majority of college students are now female? Can we stop with women-preferential programs?

Or what about that black president? Anyone notice that?

*retributive racism OR retributive sexism.
Someday /. will develop an 'edit post' feature....

Choosing someone for 'best author' because they're white and male is ridiculous.
What doesn't ever seem to sink into the discussion is that choosing a 'best author' because they're NOT white and male is equally ridiculous.

Then again, to accept that latter proposition would then logically bankrupt the entire concept of 'retributive' racism - ie preferentially picking brown or ovaried-people today, to correct the mistakes of previous generations - so I guess I understand that there's a whole dogma there that would have to be disassembled first.

First, let me be clear that I'm not disputing that she's merely strewing birdseed for the conservative election pigeons. Of COURSE she is doing that. However, your response is full of logical inconsistencies:

the CEO's personal morality on an issue matters very little regarding where the company does businesses

Did you have the same response when he was righteously sermonizing on how the people of Indiana and Arkansas choose to run their lives? It seems that his personal morality matters very MUCH on where Apple will choose to do business (and fwiw, the predictable chain of other "conscientious" attention-whores who likewise lined up to promptly jump on the bandwagon criticizing those states).

Did HP stop doing business in China because of Fiorina's personal sense of morality?

I don't recall her leaping to the public pulpit to lecture anyone on their choices, either?

Anyone who has actually dealt with foreign countries would (or should) know that progress in human rights sometimes comes in slow, painful, incremental steps.

Yet in the US social progress needs to come IMMEDIATELY, as soon as someone stamps their precious little foot?

she's just pandering to idiots who lack the ability to grasp nuance

As opposed to deeply tendentious people who cheerfully support (rationalizing where necessary) a presidential candidate who has - illegally - received campaign donations from foreign governments despite their heinous civil rights records. Hey, the ends justify the means, right?

What long haul truck drivers?

The industry has been suffering a critical (and largely unreported) sub-replacement level of new drivers for a half decade, only getting worse with the administration's new rules in 2014 & 2015 that took roughly 20% of the drivable hours per week (i.e.pay) out of a driver's pocket. Something like 3000+ trucking companies have closed per quarter for the last 10 quarters, largely because they simply cannot find drivers.

The long term drivers have largely hung up their spurs; most of the drivers you see on the road are relatively new immigrants, don't speak a lot of English, and average about 30-50 hours or road experience. Yeah, about a week.

...that both sides adhere to it without cheating?

For example, I'd offer the 'historic' agreements with N Korea as an example of moronic pollyannas making agreements that actually allowed one partner to basically continue unhindered in any meaningful way, while the other got to 'claim' a successful negotiation.

Yeah, that's probably a good example.

First, if you believe /. would be embarrassed by the vapidity of this article, you haven't been paying attention to slashdot for a decade.

Second, while I feel the pressure for autonomous vehicles is mounting, I'm still wondering how we as a US society are going to resolve the unstoppable force vs immovable object issue of lawyers and liability. FWIW I fully agree with you that the *huge* bulk of accidents are human error and likely already the software error-rate (which isn't zero) is better than humans, collectively, for average-simple situations.

The *FIRST* time one of these autonomous cars kills someone, there are going to be a string of lawsuits up the chain of indemnity from the carmaker, to the design engineers, to the software companies. All these big-pockets will have lawyers schooling like tuna, and - likely - there WILL be recognized liability* for the implementation systems, meaning big dollars, meaning more incentive for the next wave of suits.
*my guess will be that the legal system will punt it down to the individual, claiming that as the operator of a vehicle, the decision to use an autonomous driver agent is YOUR choice involving you willingly (carelessly/irresponsibly, depending on how bloody and gruesome the death(s)) giving up control of the car. So if you take that house in the exurbs, and decide to snooze for an hour on your way in, when your car runs someone over it's not Google or the carmaker's fault, but yours.

Thirdly, there are some other follow-on effects that I've considered.
- Traffic tickets - annual tickets issued for moving violations in the US are something around $6 billion that usually funds local cop shops. Now, granted, that will ostensibly/eventually be offset with fewer cops needed to 'watch' highways, sure, but the fact is that all those cops sitting with their radar guns whiling away the hours making dollars are STILL AVAILABLE for more pressing law enforcement emergencies. As a society, we have to understand that taking away the 'idle hours' of cop services gunning speeders takes away some alert-response capabilities too.
- gasoline - electric cars are NOT ready for prime time, and taking away the opportunity cost of long car trips pretty much removes the only real barrier constraining gas usage (which, let's face it, is cheaper than milk per gallon in most places). So now everyone doesn't care that their commute is 80 miles instead of 10? I bet the environment still cares? I've seen essays that talk about the 'end of the personal car', meaning these autonomous units just toodle around like a non-rapey uber driver waiting for a call for use. Which uses more gas: driving to something, parking for 8 hours turning the car off, and driving home, or a car running all over and sitting idling the whole time? I genuinely don't know.
- intoxication: the fear of drunk-driving, and the relative complexity of going out drinking in a car culture is likely acting as a brake on some people's drinking.

I don't know, there are TONS of implications. This could have been a masters-thesis level article, but yeah, it was vapid.

Nonsense rationalization.
Part of what makes a sport a sport is the consistency of competition.
Do you see Germany playing with different-sized soccer goals than Brazil? Do you see Finnish hockey played with golf clubs? To use your example, do you change the number of pins based on the bowler?

Of course not. The idea would be absurd.

To then put the rules and standards at the whim of the populace is crass and ridiculous, tantamount to making a motor-race more like a racing version America's Got Talent where 'viewer votes' materially affect the outcome.

Let's say Danica Patrick joins the ePrix. She promises to drive topless if she wins the vote, and does, beating the next-best driver by 0.05 seconds. Did she win because she was a better driver, then? Or because she had tits and was willing to show them? Maybe Kim Kardashian could join the next race and really make it competitive?

I don't know about you, but I'm frankly uninterested in any 'sporting' contest in which the victor is decided by who prompts more slavering fans to call in. That's no longer a "sport" but merely "celebrity".

Any crime perpetrated by someone held responsible for the victim or subject by reasonable judgement shall be tried and sentenced as escalated one step more severe than the normal context of the crime, according to the following list:
infraction -> misdemeanor -> gross misdemeanor -> felony -> capital crime.

Therefore, while "beating someone up" might be a gross misdemeanor assault in the eyes of the law, when performed by a custodial parent on their child, or a nursing attendant on one of their wards, it would be considered a felony.
Petty theft of $100 might be a misdemeanor, but when it's done by someone in custody of the cash drawer, it's a gross misdemeanor.
By this standard, however, sitting members of Congress and the President could be considered to be "responsible" for the entire country, and thus automatically always escalated.

Yeah, I just *hate* haters, don't you? /irony.

You might want to review http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-...

But here's the key: When a Scientologist (or Muslim, or Christian, or yoga enthusiast) says it works for them, this is what they're talking about. The mythology isn't important -- if these rituals have saved your life and later on a teacher says, "Yeah, this technique works because of the ancient thetans that live in your *******," you're going to shrug and say, "Sure, sounds good." If you tell the lady in yoga class that the reason she feels better afterward is because negative spiritual energies tend to pool in the hip joints, you'll get the same reaction.

Then if you, as a cool, rational person, butt in and say, "Actually, yoga is just engaging the endonomic nervous system and reducing cortisol levels," all they're going to hear is you replacing a very easy-to-understand explanation with a very complicated one that sounds like gibberish. If you smirk and roll your eyes at these gullible lemmings, then go grab a mirror and smirk at yourself, partner, because you do it too.

You physically don't have room in your brain to keep track of how everything in your world works (****, you don't even really know how your brain works) so you can feel all superior to a Christian who doesn't believe in evolution, but somewhere there's an engineer who feels superior to you for not knowing how your iPhone works (and you know "endonomic nervous system" is just a nonsense phrase I made up, right?). The reality is that you don't know how your iPhone works because knowing that wouldn't change your day-to-day use of it at all. Likewise, thinking the Earth is only 6,000 years old doesn't make it any harder to have, say, a career-repairing air conditioner. But believing that self-discipline, patience, and hard work are sacred virtues from God definitely makes it easier.

And if you look hard enough, you'll see that this flaw -- favoring what works to the exclusion of everything else -- encompasses everybody. The compulsive liar got to be that way because it works. So did the bully, the racist, and the greedy bastard. And every single cult, hate group, or political party has figured out that you can ensnare people by gluing the weird parts onto a bunch of common sense axioms that nobody can disagree with.

At some point your freedoms will clash with my freedoms. Who wins then, Tim?

For every person demanding that kids be taught that homosexuality is normal and natural and thus should be accepted by all (as proved by its persistence throughout history despite brutal efforts to suppress it), I'd like to submit that we - using the same criteria - teach that murder, rape, and war are LIKEWISE "normal" and "natural".

Oh wait, one is obviously "good", the other obviously "bad"? Some people might assert that homosexuality is biologically deviant and phylogenically a waste of resources, while war culls the weak.

(I'll just point out that even composing this post and the examples above was an intellectually challenging exercise, but the moment we don't TRY to understand the viewpoint of our ideological opposite - who likely has the same moral stance, just a different set of facts/priorities/filters - our arguments are bankrupt.)

Personally, I believe that racists, and homophobes, and sexists should be allowed to just do what they want, and be who they are, as long as they don't actually harm anyone. If they want to refuse service in their business, that's a commercial decision they can make, and can cheerfully live with the consequences of that choice - I mean, it's not like the internet would make it simple for the world to be informed of these choices, and the marketplace - the true democracy, with people casting votes they actually care about with their $ - can vote on whether it's anathema or ok.

If the racing guys can't figure out how to give electric cars a reasonable range with their budgets and top-end engineering skills, then no, electric cars are NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME.

Besides, WTF is this:
"...Although power is limited to 150 kW during the race, three drivers are actually able to use 180 kW for up to five seconds. This is called the FanBoost, as fans vote online for their favorite drivers in the hours before the race. This extra slug of energy can come in handy to overtake or defend against a rival, although obviously it will drain the battery even faster than normal...."
This is absolutely idiotic. It would be like fans voting which batter can take an extra strike, or if a team gets an extra down in (American) football. Who comes up with this crap?

Of COURSE it isn't sufficient.

When - ever - has an activist said "yeah, well, what's being done is pretty much good, yeah. I'm happy. I guess I don't have much to be upset about any more"?

Here's a hint: if there's one thing I can guarantee the climate won't do, is be static.