IMHO, the important consideration here is that she wasn't just ticketed for checking her watch, but she failed to respond to the light turning green, while checking her watch. Seems like this is good use of police discretion, in that she first exhibited symptoms of distraction, and only then did the officer determine what the distraction was, and ticket her accordingly.

Having been given a ticket for looking at my phone when driving (when I absolutely had not been doing so), I appreciate the idea that the whole incident was a response to the driver's failure to drive appropriately, rather than simply an excuse for a ticket.

Two clarifications:

1) I'm assuming it's true that she was first acting distracted, as described by the police officer. Not that I believe officers never lie, just that is sounds like the driver didn't dispute getting a late start when the light turned green.

2) I'm not saying I've never checked my phone while driving. Just that the one time I actually got a ticket for it I had NOT been checking my phone. No surprise that it was the last day of the month, during the period back when the NYPD has been accused of having implicit ticket quotas for officers.

This depends on exactly how the law is written, doesn't it?

For example, in NYS, the law is written such that checking your phone while the vehicle is stopped (but still running) is OK if you're a non-commercial driver, but a violation if you're a commercial driver. In other words, it's legal for a non-commercial driver to check their phone at a stop light, but a commercial driver would have to not just be parked, but have the vehicle off in order to not be a violation. (I could be somewhat misremembering some detail, but I'm pretty sure that's all correct.)

I agree, however, that in the abstract case where we're not dealing with a specific legal definition (or the definition is vague), I would tend to consider being temporarily stopped at a stop light to still be "driving".

So what? Haven't we already observed this about people walking down the street while... looking at a map... reading some handout they were just handed... cramming in some last-minute studying for a test... reviewing the presentation they are about to give... or whatever? Is this really just news because we found out people do exactly the same thing while texting?

Except all he has to do is pay $500, and change his letter to read "I am a citizen" instead of "I am an engineer". And he has to pay the $500 either way, so what would stop him from resubmitting the letter?

The point being that there's nothing about this that would actually force him to shut up, so it's not clear how you are so certain that's the only reason they're doing it.

The question isn't whether you refer to someone as an engineer, the question is whether they put themselves out as an engineer. You can call yourself "doctor" all you want while you're hanging out at a bar with your buddies, and no one could or would fine you. But don't try to send a letter to the state health department claiming to be a medical doctor, if you're not one.

It's fraudulent to practice as a doctor, engineer, or whatever if you lack a license, regardless of if any one particular opinion you give someone happens to be correct or not. Are you really suggesting that in order to punish someone for pretending to be a medical doctor that you would have to track down a patient where he made a mistaken diagnosis, first? So someone has to be harmed, first, before you can stop a fraudulent doctor from practicing medicine?

Either you didn't think it through, or you're a libertarian. Oh, but I repeat myself.

I don't know whether it's illegal to claim to be a doctor if you're not offering a medical opinion. But it certainly is illegal to claim to be a doctor and then offer a medical opinion. Was this guy not claiming to be offering an opinion as an engineer?

What you would have to be suggesting, if this is meant as a defense of this guy, is that you can claim to be a doctor, offer an opinion about a medical topic, then say "well, I didn't directly say that the opinion about the medical topic was being made as a doctor. I was just giving that opinion as a layman, while also just happening to mention I was a doctor."

In essence, he was using his claim of being an engineer to elevate his opinion above that of a layman, and now is trying to claim that's not what he was doing. If he wasn't meaning to be giving the opinion as part of his expertise as an engineer, why mention it at all?

This is not how it actually works. Small states have outsized representation in the electoral college, as compared to their population. Wisconsin has a population of 5.8 million and 10 electoral votes. Texas has a population of 27.0 million and 38 electoral votes. If you won 5 states the same size as Wisconsin, it would represent a population of 29.0 million and you'd get 50 electoral votes. Texas has a population that is 7% smaller than 5 Wisconsins, but is allocated 24% fewer electoral votes than 5 Wisconsins would have.

The reason it works this way is because the number of electors is the number of Representatives that state gets in the house (which is allocated by population) plus the amount in the Senate (where every state gets the same number -- 2). It would be possible to adjust the system to make population differences have less impact. The simplest way would be to do it by just having the number of electors be the same as number of Representatives. But as it stands today you have a different impact in the Electoral College depending on the size state you are voting in.

Tesla doesn't HAVE to come out swinging. That's just Elon's way. He's a huge whiner. And it doesn't ever seem to matter if someone's criticism of his product is valid or not, just whines away like a little baby. Embarrassing, really.

Technically, I don't think you can be both pedantic and wrong. ;)

(Uh, oh. What if I'm wrong?)

As far as I can tell, the autonomous algorithms don't work this way and probably never will work this way. That is, they don't calculate potential fatalities for various scenarios and then pick the minimum one. The car's response in any particular situation will be effectively some combination of simpler heuristics -- simpler than trying to project casualty figures, while still being a rather complex set of rules.

Take one of these situations, and let's say the car ended up killing pedestrians and saving the occupants. The after-incident report for an accident like that is not going to read "the algorithm chose to save the occupants instead of the pedestrians". It's not going to read that way simply because that's not how the algorithm makes decisions. Instead the report is going to read something like "the algorithm gives extra weight to keeping the car on the road. In this situation, that resulted in putting the pedestrians in greater danger than the car's occupants. However, we still maintain that, on average, this results in a safer driving algorithm, even if it does not optimize the result of every possible accident."

And regarding the "every possible accident" part of that: it is simply impossible to imagine an algorithm so perfect that, in any situation, it can optimize the result based on some pre-determined moral outcome. So it's not just "well, let's change how the algorithms work, then". Such an algorithm that makes driving decisions in any possible weird decision based on predicting fatalities, rather than relying on heuristics (however complex they are) is simply not realistic.

Why is this insightful? Getting rid of small transactions only gets you so far. The hard limit of transactions in somewhere around three per second (or at least that order of magnitude). Getting rid of micro-transactions only buys a small amount of time, until transaction volume grows to where even macro-transactions are occurring at more than 3 per second, or at least trying to occur at more than 3 per second.

Think about it this way. This is a global currency that can't do more than 95 million transactions in a year. The Fed estimates that U.S. non-cash transactions totaled 122 billion in 2012. That's 10,000 as many transactions as the current Bitcoin hard limit, and that's just the U.S. And your argument is to lump everything into bigger transactions. OK... let's see how that might work. Most people lump cash transactions together into larger ATM withdrawals. How many ATM withdrawals were there in the U.S. in 2012? Approximately 6 billion.

Now, exactly how is a currency with a hard limit of 95 million transactions a year supposed to be useful in a global economy in which billions of people participate, executing trillions of transactions per year? There are something like 2.5 billion smartphones in use in the world right now. Pretty much every one of those people (1) has enough money for a smartphone (at least a cheap one on a cheap data plan) so has enough money to participate in at least a small way in the Bitcoin economy and (2) has a device capable of engaging in Bitcoin transactions. Each smartphone owner in the world, therefore, could engage in a Bitcoin transaction once every 25 years without overwhelming the system. That's how the problem would self correct, then. Everyone would get to make a Bitcoin transaction only once in every 25 years.

Yay for self-correction.

Pedantic comment: Gold Circle was not a predecessor of the Target chain. Target was founded before Gold Circle. The only relationship between the two is that Target took over some locations from Gold Circle when they were liquidated. But that was merely a real estate transaction, where Target bought the leases from the liquidating entity.

"Any teacher who strays from the "prep for the test" subject matter and uses inventive ways of helping their students learn is going to have students who might know more, but who will perform worse on the tests."

Teachers may think this, but is there any reason to believe it's actually true? Near as I can tell from following the coverage, this is mostly a concern that circulates among lower-quality teachers. Really good teachers have never had any issues with their students' test scores.

In spite of the setbacks felt by the lower economic classes in the U.S., where we are today is the richest country in the world with the highest standard of living, and (aside from our ghastly treatment of drug users/dealers, who are really the lions share of our incarceration problem), a country that places a high premium on freedom. It's not a perfect country. It no longer holds the the moral high ground it once held. But it's still quite a great place. And the way we'll keep it from slipping further is for people to stand up for what's right.