On the other hand, it might be that PR people realize that by inviting attack on Twitter Seaworld can say they addresed their critics openly while basically mooning the monkey cage for all the difference the hoots and cries generated on Twitter matter in the real world. Who goes to Twitter to find out anything important about SeaWorld? I saw their advertising, had a free day in San Diego and decided to go see the whales and dolphins. There's lot of other cool stuff there, too.

As for the abuse claims, I see these beasts as working for a living. A killer whale or a dolphin is fully capable of drowning and/or eating its tormentors if it has had enough foolishness that day. Some of the people coming out now against SeaWorld predictably enough have books to sell.

A massive heroin overdose seems equally humane. And as we've demonstrated for the past thirty years at least, despite our best efforts we cannot stop heroin from entering this country.

It's one thing to see smog out the window day after day, it's another to find out how widespread the pollution is, or to see green beaches, exploded trees, and river water so polluted that it doesn't look like water. The U.S. would be where China is right now were it not for the people who raised enough hell fifty years ago that we have the EPA today.

"I cut up a lemon and put it beside my pillow. When I returned to Beijing, I discovered I was pregnant."

Now that is serious pollution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I can accept this analogy but it is not airtight. We do have elections, so we can change out the parts of the government that we don't like. So it is almost like having competitors for government; instead we have competitive ideas. Government is slow to respond because we have a largely apathetic citizenry that does not drive it to respond more quickly.

Sometimes, when I'm in one of my nastier moods, I think a solution might be for those who do vote to approve by referendum a $1000 per capita excise tax on all eligible adults who don't vote.

Forget about sensors for a moment: We don't deal with malfunctioning PEOPLE right now. Drunks, old people, and visual impaired people routinely climb behind the wheel everyday. We are already running over darting children, cyclists and pretty much anything else with the temerity to set foot, hoof or paw on the road. Old people ramming cars into crowds because they can't tell the brake from the accelerator are just the cost of doing business in a free society.

A self-driving system doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than what we have now when we scale it up. Given that you can give a driving AI the equivalent of millions of miles road experience in all conditions, I doubt that AI's will drive worse than human beings for much longer.

The insurance companies will need to be convinced for sure, but they will be when self-driving systems demonstrate their superiority.

Give the information to Brian Krebs and have HIM call them. I guarantee you they will get off their asses and do something then.

I saw a suicide note posted on Flickr. Friends got to the individual in time. I don't know the stats but if Facebook can do something to help keep someone from dying, I would not dismiss it. They will be raking through the postings regardless, nice to see something good come of it that's not just good for Facebook.

Sigh.

http://imgur.com/4qZBEzw

I think they could have made it work if they framed the shots right. If you move from one star field to another star field, then yeah, the audience isn't going to see much difference. But if Saturn were in the foreground and dead ahead in one shot and they transitioned to Gargantua being dead ahead as they went through the wormhole, I think the transit would have been obvious enough. Particularly if they looked back and showed a distorted view of Saturn through the wormhole after they passed through.

The problem I had with the low tides is that you don't get a glowing accretion disk if the tides aren't strong enough to rip apart nuclei. Where was all the radiation supposed to be coming from, bremsstrahlung?

I knew the wormhole transit view was BS, having read Rudy Rucker's book about wormhole travel years ago. I forgave them for it because the different views of the black hole itself were just awesome, and they needed a heavy-hitter like Thorne to come up with those.

The annotations were probably more useful features such as distance to the subject, angle of head tilt, or principal lighting angle, lens focal length. Train a net to recognize the shape of heads tilted at various angles and you've gone a long way toward recognizing faces tilted at those angles. Now you can train separate networks to recognize faces at each specific angle or small range of angles. The same for dealing with varied distances and lens focal lengths.

It's a good thing because I appreciate knowing what kind of country I really live in. For most of my life I thought I lived in a country that wouldn't torture people. Later I learned that the CIA not only tortures people, they ship people to other countries so they can be tortured harder. That's one of many examples of the things they don't teach you in school that should nonetheless influence how you think and vote. I want to know the ugly truth about what's going on. It probably won't make me happy, but it might just keep me free.

I'd settle for a link to a Google Earth image that shows one of these civilizations "hiding in plain sight". The article only has some stock image of a desert that looks like it was shot form the back of a jeep.