You have to read the next article (it's the link at the bottom), which then describes in detail how one driver can indeed remove traffic jams. The first article explains how traffic jams form, so you can understand in the second article why a certain behaviour fixes the problem.
A tactic particularly well-loved by those with small government tendencies for everything except the military. Not only do you get to hide exactly how that money you keep giving to the military is being spent, but you then get to use the same budget as an argument when claiming how inefficient government is...
Some dogs can be trained to herd sheep in a remarkably precise way, with just hand gestures and whistles to control them. There are plenty of people on this planet, born with mental defects, that would be incapable of learning to do this. Nevertheless, "People are smarter than dogs" is a usefully true statement, even whilst not being 100% correct. It certainly communicates the idea better than: "People, after having attained a certain level of mental development after birth, and not counting those born with mental defects or receiving cerebral injuries after birth, are smarter than most dogs, putting aside for the moment the possibility of a dog being born with a mutation allowing it to reason at a much higher level than is usually seen in the dog population".
One version of that sentence concisely articulates the core idea. The other, whilst more correct, hides the core idea under a large number of sub-clauses trying to deal with unusual corner cases.
To bring this back to the technical world, this debate is very similar to the way that programming language designers go to great lengths to try and help programmers right error handling code that doesn't get in the way of understanding the nominal case - it turns out that this is an exceptionally hard problem to solve though when dealing with computers because they are so precise. Thankfully human brains can be a lot more forgiving if we so desire (see the Principal of Charity mentioned previously in this thread).
Some dogs can be trained to herd sheep in a remarkably precise way, with just hand gestures and whistles to control them. There are plenty of people on this planet, born with mental defects, that would be incapable of learning to do this. Nevertheless, "People are smarter than dogs" is a usefully true statement, even whilst not being 100% correct. It certainly communicates the idea better than: "People, after having attained a certain level of mental development after birth, and not counting those born with mental defects or receiving cerebral injuries after birth, are smarter than most dogs, putting aside for the moment the possibility of a dog being born with a mutation allowing it to reason at a much higher level than is usually seen in the dog population".
One version of that sentence concisely articulates the core idea. The other, whilst more correct, hides the core idea under a large number of sub-clauses trying to deal with unusual corner cases.
To bring this back to the technical world, this debate is very similar to the way that programming language designers go to great lengths to try and help programmers right error handling code that doesn't get in the way of understanding the nominal case - it turns out that this is an exceptionally hard problem to solve though when dealing with computers because they are so precise. Thankfully human brains can be a lot more forgiving if we so desire (see the Principal of Charity mentioned previously in this thread).
Well, in investing there is the concept of the sophisticated investor, where you're supposed to be capable of determining all by yourself if you're being had, provided all of the relevant information is being provided. Caveat emptor and all of that, so typical consumer protection type laws don't apply. I believe the idea behind this is to allow investors to make risky decisions, because that's kind of what professional investors are supposed to do. Still sucks when your superannuation disappears because a so-called sophisticated investor proves to be anything but.
Rental demand is fairly inelastic though - everyone needs a roof over their head. The main force keeping prices down is competition, not the fact that landlords are being kind. If land taxes are increased, then all landlords will raise their prices, and the market will bear it - the other choice is to end up living in the street.
The advantage of the LVT is that in theory the market could bear the price increase because there will be a corresponding drop in the salary tax that most renters are paying. The idea is that the government effectively takes a large slice of the profit from rent, instead of it all going to landlords. The problem of course is that this creates a disincentive for landlords to invest in property, reducing supply, and now we go back to high prices because of market forces.
There is no simple solution to the high price of land, except by increasing supply or reducing demand. In other words, building more housing (which requires us to encourage landlords, not discourage them), or reduce the population. Just think, in a world with half the population of today, we would drastically reduce the percentage of salary devoted to housing. Not bad really.
So what, you're postulating that US citizens justly deserve to be killed by police 79 time more than their British counterparts? I mean the police is only supposed to kill to protect their, or a bystander's, life. We know from the few times that police-caused deaths have been caught on video in the US that this is often not at all the case. The guy shot down as he walks down the middle of the road. The guy who's neck gets broken in a police van, the young kid shot down in a park because he's playing with a toy gun. The guy that is choked to death because he's selling loose cigarettes in the street.
Those are all recent cases that I am personally aware of, as a non-US citizen, living in Europe. I'm sure there have been plenty of others.
So yes, not all police killings in the US are undeserved, but there sure are plenty that are, and that is what those statistics are showing.
Ahhh, a most timely article, from my perspective. I've recently being writing a computer game for my first computer, which was a contemporary of the trash-80 (http://www.compucolor.org/emu/ccemu.html). The guy that made the emulator was working for NVIDIA last time I talked to him, and he thoughtfully provided most of the programming manuals for Compucolor II on the site.
Why? Well I was mostly expired from a story in "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman" where he talks about being bored with physics, and he gets back into it by playing around with toy problems that he had to work out from first principles (the way that the wobble in a spinning plate precesses around the axis). So I've started programming in an emulator of this old 1980s computer. It seems to be working for me too - I'm finding myself to be much more engaged in my day job since I've started.
It's not about BASIC though - it really is about the fact that computers literally booted into a REPL. That REPL being a BASIC REPL was probably something that set people back - I remember having a really hard time grokking how the computer knew in what order Pascal programmes had to be executed.
The thing is, that's not really true. Developers made it possible for advertisers to insert their adverts into web resources. Advertisers decided to use that power to track users through cookies, tracking pixels, localStorage and various Javascript tricks. Yes, there were no doubt a few developers working for the ad companies, but they are far outweighed by the mass of developers that work for content sites.
So, you think your partner is cheating on you with their ex. You know they got a taxi from your apartment last Sunday at 6pm, you look up the data, and sure enough, the taxi went to the ex's address, and not home as your partner claimed.
Or, you arrive at work late, claiming that you stopped off at a client's before heading in to work, but your employer can now verify that you actually got the taxi from your home address.
I'm assuming in these examples that you just need to know pick-up OR drop-off - if you need both, then I agree with you that it's not much of a concern.
You're getting cause and effect back to front - Musk started Tesla because he wanted to play a real part in reducing emissions. He is on record as saying so. So arguing for a carbon tax is just another effort in that direction, not an attempt to bolster his business.
Which is fair enough. It does make me wonder though if you tried representing the duration in base 4 of pi, or something like that, whether you couldn't create something that sounded quite nice. Probably not, but I admit that if it was something I could whip up easily, I would do the experiment :)
Which is fair enough. It does make me wonder though if you tried representing the duration in base 4 of pi, or something like that, whether you couldn't create something that sounded quite nice. Probably not, but I admit that if it was something I could whip up easily, I would do the experiment :)
I downvoted you, but I thought I'd explain why - I don't think it's reasonable to characterise this as childish. Government surveillance is something which our industry is the best positioned to speak out against. This type of thing seems to be clearly political speech, and not a prank.
This type of arrangement does actually exist already. The BBC in the UK, and the ABC in Australia are both openly critical of governments - I know that the political right in Australia finds the ABC overly biased to the left, and the political left finds it overly biased to the right (although the right seems to be a bit more serious about this - they routinely try to hamstring the ABC when in power, whereas the left tends to increase funding).
Anyway, the point is that publicly funded broadcasters can and do criticise their governments.
The French default to "left-pondian" when speaking English, much to my Australian-living-in-Paris chagrin. Most aren't even aware that there is a difference between English English and American English. One step up from that are those that aware that there is a difference, to the point that they actually think that the two are very nearly distinct languages, and that people from England may have trouble understanding Americans. After that you have the people that actually understand the true difference between the two versions of the language, but even they rarely understand that the US is actually the exception, and that pretty much all other English-speaking countries use English spelling (well, there is Canada, which decided to sit on the fence between the two, I suppose).
That's not entirely true. Grasshopper is entirely capable of hovering, there are plenty of videos of it doing precisely that. The Falcon 9 landings that have been attempted are a different story because they actually weigh much less at the time of landing because they have burned off most of their fuel. This makes the thrust to weight ratio much higher, making hovering impossible.
The important difference between this New Shepherd flight and those Falcon 9 tests is that the Falcon 9s launched payload to orbit. They burned all their fuel, leaving them with the incredibly difficult slam-landing manoeuver to manage at the end. They have gone close, very close, but have not yet got things entirely right.
So, although this was an impressive technological demonstration, it's a long way from demonstrating a relaunch capability. I look forward to seeing new developments.
You see, this is the thing that kills me when thinking about the quantum world. The Many Worlds interpretation is so clean and obvious, except for one thing - it requires creating a new universe for each quantum entanglement event. Gah!
Of course that does make me think about forking processes and copy-on-write, and the idea that our reality is just a simulation in a computer and that maybe creating new universes is not as expensive as we might at first think...