hugh4

>You need to have a bigger barn for cows, you need to do all the hay thing, which is very time consuming and demands a lot of extra work just for feeding said cows, you need to pay someone to take care of the cows when they go out to eat in the summer on the communal field

Depends where you are, of course. Some places you just leave your cows out eating grass for years until it's time to slaughter them, then you hire some dudes with helicopters to round 'em all up.

And a barn? For 150,000 cows?

If you like, but it doesn't tell us anything about what was happening ten thousand years ago, just what has happened in the meantime.

Speeding (a) isn't a crime, and (b) is committed by just about everybody, making it a pretty bad example.

I'm not so sure about the "virtual reality goggles" idea, but inventoryless dealerships seems like a no-brainer. If I want to buy a Cadillac, I want to test-drive the same model, then pick the options and colours I want, and then have a car to my exact specifications delivered to my door.

The model where I need to scout around to find something vaguely resembling what I'm actually after is ridiculous, especially with something like a Cadillac that can be optioned up the wazoo.

It's not completely meaningless. Apart from the association with the radiation symbol due to the symmetry, it looks strikingly unfriendly, with sharp tentacles reaching out to grab you like a biohazard well might.

The only way in which something like this will be useful is if, for some reason, civilisation collapses but humans survive. (If humans don't survive then 10,000 years is far too soon to worry about another intelligent species arising.)

If that happens, some major catastrophe has undoubtedly already occurred which makes the possible death of a bunch of future-cavemen who happen to start digging in the wrong patch of desert pale in comparison.

If we're really worried about this scenario we should worry less about marking specific sites, and more about trying to come up with a way to store all our existing scientific and cultural knowledge in a non-perishable manner, in many places, that can be dug up and hopefully eventually decoded by people of the future. Purely from an avoid-human-suffering point of view, telling people "don't dig here" isn't nearly as valuable as telling them about infectious diseases, and vaccination, and...

>On a similar note, I can't find the study now but I've seen the pretty much all social stratas and races commit crimes at the same rate.

That sounds completely implausible. For instance:

For example:

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/...

Depends, of course, who you are and what you're doing.

Ryanair isn't going to get any value out of Big Data techniques, because Ryanair doesn't have big data. If you took every single piece of data that Ryanair has ever collected from every one of its millions of customers and flights in its thirty-year history... it'd probably all still fit on a laptop hard drive. Airlines as a rule just don't produce that much data -- I'd imagine it's in the kilobytes per passenger-flight.

It's silly to try to apply big-data techniques when your data isn't all that big, and even sillier to go around calling your modest-sized data science problems "Big Data" just because you think it sounds cool.

I dunno, I'd say that everyone prior to nineteen-ninety-something handled it the right way.

Oh, I'm sure that lawyers will be the last to go. They make the rules, after all.

Or is this a good thing? I mean, I know it's de rigeur in journalistic circles to assume that any new trend must be a terrible one, but... if people are happy, and able to find jobs, without needing to move, this is a pretty good thing, right?

> Well at this stage in the game, it seems like everyone right now who owns a house is someone who owned a house 30 years ago

That sounds like a perspective limited to a handful of major coastal cities. Go buy a house in Des Moines for $150K or something.

Way to deal calmly with the fact that not everybody in the world shares your political opinions, bro.

Incidentally, I bought a former rental and it's great! No problems at all.

People always say "But what if some idiot has thrashed it?" Well, probably some idiot did, but at least they only did it for a couple of days... much better than buying a car which was solely driven by some idiot.

Hey bro, wanna buy some bread?

>I think would much rather my leaders just sign some sort of an armistice agreement rather than annihilate "enemy" civilians.

Great idea! Now, how do we persuade the other side to sign that agreement?

>Everyone is trashing on this; and for the the most part I agree. However, there is a very large value in an English education for programmers.

>Learning to write well is learning to communicate effectively. And communication is a core goal of programming. The audience for our code is not the machine, but another developer, or maybe ourselves.

Indeed, and clear writing and communication is something that should be taught in K-12 school. You shouldn't have to go to university just to learn to write clearly.

To the extent that you do want to be learning that kind of skill in university, I'm not convinced that universities are very good at teaching it. I'm certainly not convinced that sitting around reading a whole lot of Virginia Woolf is a very good way of getting better at writing clearly, except in the same rather roundabout sense that waxing a car makes you better at karate.

I'm not sure what a program of study actually aimed towards clarity of writing would look like, but I imagine it would avoid the existing academic fetishisation of fiction over non-fiction. Few of us will ever write much fiction, most of us will have to write a lot of non-fiction, and yet our English classes are focused almost entirely on reading and analysing fiction, like a glorified version of tvtropes.

I'd like it to be able to suggest places for a rest stop every two hours along my route.

I dunno man, there's plenty of housing, and room to build it, once you get outside New York City.

The dumb part, I think, is the tendency for humans to huddle together in ever-greater masses in the corners of our vast continents, like Emperor Penguins.

Penguins, of course, do it so that they don't freeze to death. But many of the people who live in New York seem to just want to live in New York so they can live a New York lifestyle because that's what looks cool on TV.

I don't know about good TV shows, but I can easily imagine an AI that could spit out a passable soap opera.

The problem is that the new job titles we keep inventing require ever-greater degrees of intelligence, while the distribution of human intelligence has been remaining just about the same.

A hundred farm workers get replaced by one tractor, but that's okay, because those hundred workers become tractor repairmen, tractor factory workers, tractor designers, and we can farm far more land and produce wealth more efficiently. But not everyone who could plow a field can design a tractor. A thousand years ago, damn near every job was manual labour and could be done with a two-digit IQ, but we're reaching the point in first-world countries where less than half the work which needs to be done can actually be done by someone in the lower half of the population's intelligence distribution.

If we're not there yet, we will be soon. And I think it's fundamentally different to every previous automation revolution.

The BBC are the ones writing the damn article about the supposed trend, I'd say it's their responsibility to provide evidence.

Not really an "admission", he was guilty of the crime for which he was charged.

I think you'd be surprised by how many there are.

>The going joke is that Belgium is a nation of 5 million Flemish (Dutch speaking) people, 5 million Walloons (French speaking) people, and 1 Belgian - the King

Don't worry, it'll all be Arabic-speaking soon enough...

Because the drunk with the chainsaw knows whether or not he's slicing up someone at any given time.

> This is posing the question wrong. If some area has half as many fatalities per gunshot, they're clearly doing something right.

Not necessarily, I'd imagine easy availability of fully-automatic weapons would lower your fatalities-per-gunshot ratio but not be a good thing.

> Seeing as it can lead to fatalities to bystanders, I would be fine calling it "violent".

No, I would say "violence" requires a certain intent, whereas firing shots into the air is merely ridiculously stupid and reckless.

Judges typically get paid less than many of the lawyers who argue in front of them, but there's still plenty of lawyers who want to take a paycut to be judges, and not much action in the other direction. Why? Because judges have really high status.

> Seeds should be free and open source.

That's one idea. Another idea is that genetically modified seeds should be just as patentable as anything else.

I'm willing to consider arguments in favour of either position, but you haven't really put forth an argument in favour of yours.