I'm not disappointed at all. Drones are so much better than actually invading Pakistan, and reduces the number of kids that get killed in war.
I never got the hate for drones in the first place. Why would you want to launch a ground invasion instead, which means MORE kids getting killed?
Sure, if you want to kill someone, you're right. I think the argument against drones is that if you push a button and someone dies on the other side of the Earth and you didn't have to go to war to do that
And since Pakistan refuses to own their Al Queda problem, we have to take care of it for them.
No, no we don't. You might say "Al Queda hit us now we must hunt them to the ends of the Earth" but it doesn't mean that diplomacy and sovereignty just get flushed down the toilet. Those country borders will still persist despite all your shiny new self-appointed world police officer badges. Let me see if I can explain this to you: If David Koresh had set off bombs in a Beijing subway and then drones lit up Waco like the fourth of July and most of the deaths were Branch Davidians, how would you personally feel about that? Likewise, if Al Queda is our problem and we do that, we start to get more problems. Now, that said, it's completely true that Pakistan's leadership has privately condoned these strikes while publicly lambasting the US but that's a whole different problem.
Also, we must always assume that war = killing kids. The fact that people think kids shouldn't be killed in war basically gives people more of an incentive to go to war in the first place. When Bush invaded Iraq, the public should have asked "OK, how many kids are we expected to kill?" Because all war means killing kids. There has never been a war without killing kids.
The worst people are the ones that romanticize war, by saying war is clean and happy and everyone shakes hands at the end. War is the worst, most horrible thing, and we need to make sure people understand that, or they'll continue to promote war.
Yep, think of the children -- that's why we should use drone strikes, right? Look, war means death. Death doesn't discriminate and neither does war. If you're hung up on it being okay to take a life the second that male turns 18, you're pretty much morally helpless anyway. War is bad. Drone strikes are bad. There's enough bad in there for them both to be bad. This isn't some false dichotomy where it's one or the other. It's only one or the other if you're hellbent on killing people.
News flash: you can argue against drone strikes and also be opposed to war at the same time. It does not logically follow that since you're against drone strikes, you're pro war and pro killing children. That's the most unsound and absurd flow of logic I've seen in quite some time.
Wait. A person who made dubious claims that had no scientific backing to them was actually lying? What next? Water is wet?!!
I think pretty much everyone but the nutjob, true believers in psuedo-science knew all along that this woman was lying.
So you're saying everyone knew she was lying about her charity donations as well? Or was it only the charities that knew that? From the article:
The 26-year-old's popular recipe app, which costs $3.79, has been downloaded 300,000 times and is being developed as one of the first apps for the soon-to-be-released Apple Watch. Her debut cook book The Whole Pantry, published by Penguin in Australia last year, will soon hit shelves in the United States and Britain.
So you're saying the 300,000 downloads are by people that knew they were downloading the app architected by a liar? And they were paying $3.79 to Apple and this liar for a recipe app that contain recipes that someone lied about helping her cure cancer? And you're saying that everyone at Apple that featured her app on the Apple Watch knew they were showing a snake oil app on their brand new shiny device? And that the people at Penguin did all their fact checking on any additional information this cookbook might contain about Belle Gibson's alleged cancer survival? And that everybody involved in these events know society's been parading around a fucking liar and rewarding her with cash money while she basically capitalizes on a horrendous disease that afflicts millions of people worldwide
No, this is not the same as "water is wet" and it needs to be shown that holistic medicine is temporarily propped up on a bed of anecdotal lies
Close to where I live are large intertidal mudflats. Every other summer some tourist drives a brand new four by four out there and gets stuck. And then, of course, the tide comes in. When the vehicles are recovered two or three tides later, they are insurance write-offs - the electrics, interior, and engine are all beyond repair.
You do not want to immerse something complex and expensive in salt water unless you really, really have to.
Remember: seawater ruins everything.
One of those occasions where I wish I had mod points but don't. Mod the parent post up!
Seawater is extremely corrosive. Engineering the rocket engine to survive sudden immersion in seawater when very hot would add a great deal to the complexity and cost (and probably weight). And that's before you add the cost of engineering the rest of the vehicle to resist corrosion.
The reason English is is widely spoken around the world is not just that England had a long period of aggressive expansionism. It's also because English is an extremely flexible and expressive language, with a rich literature - literally millions of texts, many tens of thousands of which are fine works of art. Of course, this is true of many other well-established natural languages, from Farsi to Mandarin. But it isn't, and cannot be, true of any new artificial language.
I'd guess it would take any artificial language at least a thousand years of hard use by millions of people before it could become a contender to supplant a natural language, and by that time it would have mutated into a natural language.
I turn 60 this year. And your problem is?
Either you're good at your job (and if you've been doing it for twenty-five+ years you almost certainly are), or you're not. If you're good and experienced, you won't have any troubled getting an interesting job at a high salary. In my present employment, I was specifically recruited to mentor (and teach software engineering discipline to) a group of good but inexperienced junior developers.
When I was starting out in this game, thirty years ago, the person who fulfilled the role I now have in the team I was then working in was Chris Burton, who, as an apprentice, worked on the build of the Manchester Mark One, and who (after his retirement) led the rebuild of it. He was one of the best software people I've ever worked with, and he was already in his sixties when I met him.
Nothing breaks immersion so much as the player character being killed. Suddenly you're jerked out of your game world and you're just a sad individual sitting in front of a computer again. It is epic fail for anyone who's trying to build a world in which players are expected to become immersed to allow the player character to be killed.
This isn't to say I think there shouldn't be setbacks, and that they shouldn't be severe. Of course they should. You get beaten in a boss battle and you should expect to lose all your accumulated weapons, armour, loot. You should expect to be left for dead, and have to crawl until you can find herbs, salves, bandages or aid. It could even leave you with permanent scarring or disabilities which make future battles a bit harder to fight, or have an impact on what endgames are available to you. It should be an outcome which motivates you highly not to lose the next battle. If a non-player-character companion is killed in a battle, their death should be permanent, no matter how important they are to the plot. But you should not die.
If you die, it isn't you who have failed. It's the designer.
Pedestrians will have to learn new skills to avoid careening out of control cars that do not recognize the pedestrians....
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new jobs will open up for people who have to dig cars out of snowbanks
a new employment category autonomous assistants will "drive" the self-driving cars in poor weather conditions
Yep that's right because once the pattern recognition has mastered the easy stuff -- which it seems to be close to doing -- they'll shut down all development on tackling edge cases and anomalies. That's how it works, right? We're still driving cars with shoe brakes and using regular picture framing glass so our bodies are cut up in an accident, right?
I mean, some of these problems like icy roads and snow might make for unsolvable problems but we already have cars that can detect loss of traction and go into traction control mode. Have you ever heard of ABS? Developments like that will likely come along for the special cases of autonomous driving. If they don't, it's certainly not a death knell on the technology. At this point, I'll accept a 95% solution.
Bottom line: we probably cannot imagine all the implications and collateral effects driverless cars will cause beginning early in 2020 for top-end and early adopters and progressively more widespread year after year until mid 2030 when these cars will be our major form of transportation.
That's it? That's your substance? Hell, why not try? Here are my own guesses:
These are all, of course, many years off. But it is starting to look more and more inevitable.
New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you. - David Letterman