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Comment Re:Do pilots still need licenses? (Score 2) 362

Do pilots still need licenses in the age of autopilot? Well yes because machines aren't infallible.

Not quite. It's "yes" because most people would be unable to get over their fear of flying in an entirely autonomous plane, not because we need heroic pilots to override the computer when things go wrong.

Consider that about half of all aviation accidents are traced to pilot error. The percentage of crashes caused by autopilot error is zero.

Transportation

Would You Need a License To Drive a Self-Driving Car? 362

agent elevator writes Not as strange a question as it seems, writes Mark Harris at IEEE Spectrum : "Self-driving cars promise a future where you can watch television, sip cocktails, or snooze all the way home. But what happens when something goes wrong? Today's drivers have not been taught how to cope with runaway acceleration, unexpected braking, or a car that wants to steer into a wall." The California DMV is considering something that would be similar to requirements for robocar test-driver training." Hallie Siegel points out this article arguing that we need to be careful about how many rules we make for self-driving cars before they become common. Governments and lawmakers across the world are debating how to best regulate autonomous cars, both for testing, and for operation. Robocar expert Brad Templeton argues that that there is a danger that regulations might be drafted long before the shape of the first commercial deployments of the technology take place.

Comment Re:Hmmmm! (Score 0, Troll) 517

The G.O.P. is the party of stupid

The G.O.P. even introduced the term

http://thehill.com/video/in-th...

But among Jindal's most provocative suggestions was the demand that the GOP needed to "stop insulting the intelligence of voters" — and display more intelligence itself. Jindal's comments seemed targeted squarely at conservative candidates in Senate races whose comments on rape and abortion appeared to torpedo their electoral chances.

"We had a number of Republicans damage the brand this year with offensive and bizarre comments," Jindal said.

The Louisiana governor also warned that Republicans were too associated with "big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes."

"We must not be the party that simply protects the well-off so they can keep their toys," Jindal said. "We have to be the party that shows all Americans how they can thrive."

it's a good strategy: identify something rich people need and want, then wrangle the idiots with fearmongering into supporting that agenda, even if it hurts the poor idiots. they're idiots, they can't even understand they're hurting themselves. so you have people without adequate healthcare for example, screaming low iq fears about obamacare

this doesn't mean there are no intelligent conservative people, they do exist. stupid liberals also exist

but it's just that if you meet a stupid person, they are more likely to be a conservative, because their simplistic dimwitted way of thinking about the world matches conservative ideology more closely

http://www.livescience.com/181...

There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found.

Comment Re:Lots of weird crap coming out of Congress latel (Score 1, Insightful) 517

???
From this you get the Republicans are the good guys? If this were my only measure I'd count the Dems as the good guys. This bill is a weird combination of stupid and evil.

There are other convincing reasons to *not* count the Dems as good guys, but this isn't one of them. This is just more evidence that we've got two sets of bad guys with slightly different goals. Generally I find the Dems a hair less evil, but I consider them sufficiently evil that I rarely vote for them. I vote for some third party or other. There's usually one that's less evil in it's promises than the Dems and Repubs are in their actions.

Comment Re:Atlantis (Score 1) 114

1. putzing around in a top notch Yacht in paradise is its own reward. the search for the Musashi was just a side part time effort

2. allen is from the west coast, of a certain age. so the battle in the Pacific looms large in his upbringing, and he is likewise motivated. your agenda is not his agenda, nor is your agenda magically better than his. in fact, Atlantis is just a myth with a number of sort-of maybe leads. not something you can actually go look for in a specific small area like the Sibuyan Sea

3. now that he has found Musashi, i hopes he keeps playing around in Southeast Asia, screw the Mediterranean, i wouldn't go, boring. Sulawesi sounds fun, i hope he has security though from pirates. not that his proclivities are my proclivities but the simple point is they aren't yours either. he can do whatever the fuck he wants, and nobody needs some random asshole saying their agenda is superior and must be followed. who the fuck are you?

but along your line of interests, maybe he will head here, it's not far from the Philippines, i would:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

Comment Re:The Republicans are right (Score 1) 517

Depends on what you mean by 'reproducible'. Who's going to reproduce the discovery of the Higg's boson? Who's going to reproduce the big bang, biological evolution, climate change, or continental drift. Of if not actually reproduce those events, what counts as reproducing the science behind them.

The devil is in the details.

Comment Re:There might be hope for a decent adaptation (Score 1) 331

There might well be a way to do that, though I'm not quite certain what it would be. However, IIRC, Heinlein didn't discuss the ways that would be used to prevent corruption, so it's unfair to presume that they didn't exist as well as to presume that they did.

OTOH, our current system doesn't prevent the powerful from manuvering their progeny into positions of power, so it's reasonable to guess that another system wouldn't either, without strong built in protections. And I can't recall a historical civilization that both tried to do that and was successful. So perhaps that happening wouldn't prevent a culture from lasting, say a couple of hundred years.

Comment Re:Fascism largely a creation of director Verhoeve (Score 1) 331

I'm going to be picky, but that's not fascism. Fascism is the corporate state, i.e. the corporations and the state working hand in glove. In Mussolini's case he took a bit of time picking sides in WWII, and finally picked what he thought was the winning side BECAUSE he thought it was the winning side, not because he agreed with it. His fascism became militarist because of the environment that it developed in, it wasn't a part of his central ideas, merely a tool in making Italy strong. And though he was anti-intellectual, he wasn't racist, he was nationalist. There really *is* a big difference. His central goal was to make Italy strong, and his choice of how to do it was the corporate state. Everything else was derivative from that, if you include mistakes as being derivative.

Comment Re:There might be hope for a decent adaptation (Score 1) 331

Perhaps the movie was fascist propaganda. I never saw it and don't intend to. The book wasn't, though it was militarist. And the viewpoint character spent almost all his time in a military environment. (Fascist has more to do with the corporations and the government working hand in glove. Read Mussolini. You can properly call the US government fascist. And it's quite distinct from Nazi (which, frankly, is bug-fuck crazy rascism, with a few other loony twists).

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