I don't have a link handy, but a group (from Stanford, IIRC) did it as a study, rather than to make a point. They found that by driving slow (perhaps even below the speed limit) in a line, they could fix traffic jams. Not because of anything to do with speed limits, but rather just the dynamics of heavy traffic which can cause self-perpetuating jams, even though there is actually plenty of road capacity, no obstructions, etc. By creating a moving roadblock for a few miles and creating a gap that allowed the jam to unjam, they could quickly get traffic flowing smoothly.

Perhaps. Assuming you're right, it leaves open the question of whether the restrictions actually affect the level of violence and in what direction. The assumption of the cities with high violence and tight restrictions is that the restrictions reduce violence. Though that assumption seems logical, history calls it into question. For example, both DC and Chicago saw massive increases in violence after they enacted their draconian restrictions. The rest of the country also saw rising violence at the same time, but nowhere near in the same degree. So perhaps the city leaders were prescient, saw the coming wave of violence and acted to mitigate it, or perhaps their action actually exacerbated it. Or maybe the restrictions made no difference at all.

My money is on restrictions increasing the violence, mainly because the restrictions only affect the law-abiding, which gives criminals an advantage, and eliminates their single biggest worry (per FBI studies, in which violent criminals overwhelmingly report that their biggest fear when committing a crime is that the target might be armed). We'll get a chance to see over the next few years, since DC and Chicago have been forced by the courts to loosen their restrictions dramatically.

"Regardless of the posted speed limit, your speed should depend on: - The number and speed of other vehicles on the road. - (...)" [California Drivers Handbook, page 33]

You can't be obstructing traffic if you're driving as fast as the law allows you to.

And it's also driving around lots of humans. Humans who will do unpredictable things, and who can't necessarily deal with such a high speed differential from other cars.

Yep, lorries, then delivery vans, then taxis, then busses, then private vehicles.

As I've been saying throughout this thread... Google have looked up limit - in the California drivers handbook. In the state in which they're driving, the law is explicit that you should keep up with other traffic, as it is more dangerous to have lots of cars doing different speeds than to exceed the speed limit a bit.

It's not safety vs law. This car is driving in California, where the law says that you should do this. I'm sure in areas where the law says you shouldn't do this, it will not.

Solution A is being considered because it's the law in California. The driver's handbook is explicit that you should keep up with traffic around you, rather than opt for a lower speed that is dramatically different from the cars around you. I'm sure in other states/countries, where this is not the law, this will not be the case.

Actually no. The reason Google's cars do this is because they (for now) drive in California. The driver's handbook in California explicitly states that you should at all times keep up with traffic, even if it means exceeding the speed limit a little bit, so that all cars are driving at roughly the same speed. You won't get a speeding ticket, because you are following the law. Presumably, in other areas, the car will be reprogrammed with knowledge of that area's driving rules, and will or won't do this as appropriate.

Well duh, that's because that's the rule in California. The driver's handbook says it's illegal not to do this. Presumably in areas where that's not the case it will not do that.

The misogyny arises from the implied assumption that the woman is just the object of men's desire, that she has no will of her own or ability to act, except to comply with the wishes of whichever man reaches her. The story doesn't actually say any of that, but it is pretty strongly implied. There's also the implication that the physicist and engineer are male, but that's the lesser issue.

It's interesting to note that merely reversing the gender roles in the story causes the perceived problem to disappear, but doesn't address the real issue. This is because it's not the story itself that implies the misogyny, but the cultural subtext, and since that subtext assumes that men are actors and initiators that the man has decided to go along with the game. You can truly eliminate the problem by modifying the story to make the woman the organizer of the little game, which puts all three on equal footing. She's acting by setting the scenario up, the men are acting by deciding whether or not they wish to participate and if so, how.

The difference is subtle, but such subtle, unconscious biases in many different areas can and do often combine into significant -- though often completely unintentional -- bias against women.

As an aside, when we speak of the "objectification" of women, the original use of that word in that context means not object as in "thing", but object as in "direct object", from grammatical structure. The objectified person is one who is always acted upon rather than acting upon others. This story clearly indicates both meanings of the word: The woman in the story is an object of desire, in this case sexual. That's actually perfectly fine. Men and women both can be objects of sexual desire, and as long as the desire doesn't translate into unwelcome advances or into other negative effects, everyone appreciates being thought desirable. But the woman is also and object upon which the physicist or engineer will get to enact their will, and her will isn't relevant. That is the way in which objectification is negative.

Revising the story to make the woman the initiator of the game, while not removing the ability of the physicist and engineer to choose, makes all of the participants actors and none of them pure objects.

If we can't figure out a way to reduce that probability to approximately zero sometime in the next 866 years, we deserve to get smashed.

He does have a point though, and I don't understand why people haven't seen it before.

If you create a currency that is backed by nothing but knowing a very large number, then you can back a infinitely large number of currencies by an infinitely large number of different large numbers (or even the same large numbers). That means that there are inherently infinitely many alt coins out there, and these things are inherently worthless.

It's not really that alt coins destroy bitcoin's credibility, it's that bitcoin itself has no credibility in the first place, and neither do these alt coins.