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Comment Re: Anyone who buys something like that and (Score 1) 71

The difference between a OneWheel and most other vehicles is that other vehicles will fail "safely," in that an electric bike, scooter or 4-wheeled skateboard will simply roll to a stop if the system fails abruptly. When a OneWheel fails the front end slams into the ground and the rider is forcefully ejected with no warning.

Comment Re:Cars provide clear benefits. Instagram does not (Score 1) 115

Except that in the case of Elaine Herzberg, the "shortcut" was Uber having disabled all object-detection stoppages altogether for a "smoother ride".. a huge oversight with obviously deadly implications. This particular instance was like a trolley problem with one person on one track and zero on the other, and Uber went ahead and let it hit her.

For the record, I'm in favor of the adoption of automated vehicles and believe they will be safer in the long run. In my view, Uber's neglect was the main cause of this death, not the technology.

Comment Re:No, the real third rail is... (Score 1) 160

Yes, voter ID is the bad idea there. While instances of voter fraud are statistically insignificant, the effects of requiring an ID to vote are measurable and significant enough to change the outcome of elections. About 11% of Americans who would otherwise be able to vote don't have the ID that's required.

A GAO study found that voter ID laws reduce turnout by about 2-3% which may not sound like a lot, but in a real world example this impacted over 100,000 votes across just two states. That's certainly enough to swing statewide elections which can sometimes be decided by hundreds of votes.

Comment Re:Video is real (Score 5, Informative) 143

After one Google image search, I believe the "metallic blimp" or "acorn-shaped object" is almost certainly one of these https://www.instaballoons.com/... In more detailed pictures you can count the number of points and they match exactly with this batman balloon. The idea that it could be a mylar balloon was even mentioned by the pilot who saw it.

Comment Re:Damn Trump (Score 2) 84

Note that the companies that are both media producers and internet service providers are still in the process of building their corporate data silos (exclusive streaming media collections). Once a company like AT&T actually has enough leverage to force you to watch HBO Max instead of Netflix or Hulu, and this law is completely obsolete, I suppose we can hope that they'll still be charitable. Free market advocates would tell you the solution is to "vote with your dollar" (in the absence of regulation, this is really the only option) but the majority of Americans find themselves without much choice when it comes to internet service, by design of the industry, which increasingly appears to reflect the values of a cartel.

Comment Re:No. (Score 3, Insightful) 583

Let's start with all of the figures in the summary being cherry-picked around only certain groups of the population such as those under 45. How about "The odds of dying to COVID-19 are roughly similar to the odds of dying in any given year" - if this is even true, this would mean you are still twice as likely to die thanks to the presence of the virus.

And how about: "To put things in perspective, the virus is now known to have an infection fatality rate for most people under 65 that is no more dangerous than driving 13 to 101 miles per day." - to put this in perspective, not everyone is under 65 and driving 100 miles a day is actually pretty damn dangerous. Think of those you've known who have died in car accidents - you are almost certain to have known someone - those deaths are real, just like the deaths from COVID-19.

We used to take outsize measures as a society to ensure the risk of death of any of us was beyond-the-pail. Now it seems the value of human life in our modern economy is being minimized.
Medicine

What It's Like To Smoke Salvia For Science (vice.com) 72

Slashdot reader and Motherboard writer dmoberhaus was the final participant in the world's first brain imaging study on salvinorin A, the psychoactive chemical in salvia divinorum. He wrote about what it's like to participate in a psychedelic drug trial, and why he volunteered to smoke the world's least favorite hallucinogen for science. Here's an excerpt from his report: I was first introduced to salvia when I was a freshman in high school, and by the time I graduated I had smoked it about a dozen times. In retrospect, I would not describe a single one of those experiences as "pleasant," "enjoyable," or "fun." The last time I used salvia was almost a decade ago, and during that trip I became convinced that I had been irreversibly transformed into a suspension bridge. Good times. Despite a history of bad experiences with the substance, I volunteered for the Johns Hopkins salvinorin A study out of a suspicion that salvia probably had more to offer than what I experienced in high school. As a teen, each of my salvia experiences was under less than ideal conditions -- usually at a party or in a park after curfew. These sorts of situations lend themselves to paranoia and anxiety, which don't mix well with a strong dissociative hallucinogen. I figured if the settings were changed to a relaxed environment where I was surrounded by medical professionals, perhaps the nature of the trip would as well.
[...]
For the first salvia session I laid on the couch and donned an eye mask while [Manoj Doss, a postdoctoral researcher who specializes in memory] sat at the far end of the room with the smoking apparatus. The simple device consisted of a small glass bulb with a plastic hose connected to the top and was described to me as an "FDA-approved crack pipe." Along the bottom of the bulb was a barely noticeable residue of a white crystalline substance, which I was informed was one dose of 99.9% pure salvinorin A. I was given one end of the hose and instructed to begin a 45-second long inhale as Doss vaporized the salvinorin A with a butane torch. At the same time, Clifton began to play a new age soundtrack through speakers and came to put his hand on my leg to ground me during the trip. When the 45 seconds were up, I exhaled and felt the effects of the salvia almost immediately.

The first thing I noticed was the feeling of my body dissolving. Shortly after I began feeling the physical effects, the hallucinations began. I felt as though my head had split in two and a patterned stream began flowing from both sides of my face. This stream was a "harlequin pattern" of large brown and white diamonds that flowed away from me and began to form the "boundary" of an infinite three-dimensional space. These diamonds continued to tessellate to an infinite point and I felt as though I were suspended above this expanse, hanging like a figure head hangs off the bow of a ship. Throughout the trip, I remember being overcome by the profound beauty of the scene I was witnessing. If I tried to focus, I could remember that in base reality I was in a room in Johns Hopkins, but that didn't alleviate the feeling of being in an entirely separate reality, as though I were sitting in a container that cordoned me off from the 'normal' world.
In summary, Oberhaus said "the experience was quite pleasant." He added: "I only had a brief moment of panic when it seemed like one of the notes in the new age soundtrack had been held for far too long. I began to worry that time was dilating and that I might be trapped in this space for eternity. When the music progressed to the next note, however, the panic quickly subsided and time resumed its normal cadence."

Oberhaus then took a higher dose the following day in an MRI machine. While the first dose of salvia in the machine didn't produce anything special, likely because it was a placebo, a very low dose, or that he had made some error during inhalation, the second dose in the machine resulted in a slightly less intense trip than the very first dose. "The reason, I think, was that the loud and persistent sounds of the MRI machine kept me tethered to the outside world and I was unable to fully immerse myself in the world that the salvia was generating," writes Oberhaus. "Still, I would describe it as a pleasant and visually striking experience."

Comment Re: OOps we're sorry (Score 5, Insightful) 122

They sure do, when the features are enabled that allow them to stop because an obstacle is present. This feature was disabled in Uber's test cars (because false positives cause frequent stoppage - thus the reference in the summary to them tuning to a "smooth ride," i.e. one without these AI-initiated stops), and the human driver was using a mobile app at the time of the incident.

Rather than do the hard work of improving their AI, they simply disabled obstacle detection for the appearance of progress. This was less of an accident and more of a completely avoidable mistake up the entire chain of responsibility. But why it surprises anyone that Uber, perhaps the most amoral company in the world, behaves this way is beyond me - and Arizona state leadership deserves some of the blame for inviting this company to test these products fully unregulated on its streets, knowing their corporate mentality.

Comment Re:I'm all for this (Score 3, Informative) 66

Fi uses Sprint and T-Mobile towers as well as wi-fi calling, with software covering seamless hand-offs between these (and providing a secure VPN to make use of Google's list of "trusted" public open wi-fi networks). Without the software you can use the network on T-Mobile (or probably Sprint) towers with any Android phone compatible with T-Mobile's bands, but you won't get wi-fi calling or the other benefits.

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