171–180 of 191 posts
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Ok, so if I'm an engineer and I think the ethical thing to do is help build a better license plate scanning technology to protect everyone from terrorism, then what?
Then I guess you build better license plate scanning technology. That isn't obvious?
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You can buy car and keep it license plate free legally for sometime. I think this is what steve jobs was doing. New license plates wont help as it needs to get registered with the state.
California allowed a grace period to obtain a license plate for a newly-purchased car, and taking into account the allowed time to file for a plate, and time to issue and mail it to the car's owner, this could stretch out to a few months. However, California's laws are changing due to a case in which someone was hit and killed by a car that couldn't be identified for lack of plates. Beginning January 1, 2019, all car…
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> Yes, the guys who wrote the original rules for the country considered gun ownership so essential that they placed it second only to the freedom of expression. The Articles of Confederation were the original rules of the country. The base Constitution which replaced them as the rules for the country also didn't include anything about that. The package of 12 amendments to the Constitution formally proposed after the…
In George Mason's original onjections to the Constitution, from which the Bill of Rights was drawn, the right to bear arms was seventeenth! 17. That the People have a Right to keep and to bear Arms; that a well regulated Militia, composed of the Body of the People, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe Defence of a free State; that Standing Armies in Time of Peace are dangerous to Liberty, and therefore o…
To me, all this adds to the difficulty faced by those who want to disregard the opening clause of the Second Amendment ("A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, ..."). It's all about collective self-defense; there's nothing here about individual self-defense. While I agree that individuals have a right to defend themselves when necessary, I believe that defending citizens from one another is primarily the responsibility of the State; only when the State is clearly failing in this duty do citizens have the right to take that defense upon themselves. Allowing individuals to arm themselves in the absence of such necessity — for sporting purposes, for example — is a choice a community might make, but is not a right.
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Numbers 1, 2, and 3 can all be fixed, and fixing those fix number 4. For gerrymandering, there are plenty of proposals around requiring districts conform to some set of geometric rules. The electoral college issue gets a lot of attention, but the more fundamental problem is first-past-the-post voting. What we really need is approval-based voting (i.e. I approve of candidates A and B; whoever has the most approvals wi…
> Numbers 1, 2, and 3 can all be fixed, and fixing those fix number 4. How? There is no incentive for the entrenched party to change the rules.
Agreed. Open to ideas.
One of my clients does license plate reading and tracking. They have hundreds of tiny customers, and a handful of VERY LARGER customers, so I can say with 100% certainty, there are hundreds of agencies across the USA already doing this. For fun, I tracked my rental car from Georgia to Texas after a vacation a few months back to see how often I hit one of my client's customer's cameras. It was a lot. I saw myself hit…
I just contacted my us rep and senators about this. I would be surprised if we can stop this, but we should try.
Read David Brin's "Kiln People" for an interesting take, he foresaw this issue, also read "Transparency"
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I'm not sure which point you are trying to address, but where did you get your data? According to the data collected by the Washington Post [1], in each of the years since 2015, less than half of the victims (excluding 2018 the percentage varied between 49.9% and 46.3%) of fatal police shootings have been white. There is some uncertainty because for some cases the race is unknown. That data also only deals with shoot…
I got my data from The Guardian [1]. Their data only covers 2015 and 2016 but appears to be more comprehensive for those years, listing 1146 killings in 2015 and 1093 killings in 2016, vs 995 and 963 in the Post data, perhaps simply because they list all killings rather than only shootings. They list enough "white" victims that more than half were white even including victims of unknown race. But this is a minor poin…
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> Therefore if everyone fights back when "they" come for you, the outcome for society is positive, even if hopeless for individuals. The insane gun ownership in this country could be a benefit. Sure, you're not going to beat the army, but if every 10 people to be liquidated take out one secret police guy, then the civilian population as a whole will be safe. That argument only works if it were an all-out battle betwe…
More than half of all people killed by police are white.
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So being ethical doesn't really change anything?
No, that doesn't follow at all.
Problem: engineers working on things like license plate scanning
Your solution: engineers should be ethical
My comment: engineers can be ethical and still do things like license plate scanning
Your comment: you agree
From my vantage point it doesn't look like your recommendation changes anything.
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No, that doesn't follow at all.
Ok, maybe I'm misunderstanding. Problem: engineers working on things like license plate scanning Your solution: engineers should be ethical My comment: engineers can be ethical and still do things like license plate scanning Your comment: you agree From my vantage point it doesn't look like your recommendation changes anything.