The smokers seemed more amused than anything else really. Maybe they could make a better one that detects what brand you're smoking and makes pithy comments. Or one that detects weed and starts to get stoned.

That's not true either. Following their directions doesn't mean you won't be negligent. Not following their direction doesn't mean you are negligent. You're conflating things. Each situation needs to be judged on it's own merits.

Removing safety features is not negligence unless you make the firearm unsafe. None of my firearms have a firing pin block from the factory. They're all safe firearms. My triggers have been lightened - they're still safe firearms. I've seen triggers lightened so much that they are unsafe. As before, each instance is judged on it's own merits.

I'll soon finish my mechanical engineering degree (and don't you know it, I'm looking for a job in firearm designing), so I do know a little about this stuff. Whilst with the proper equipment you can detect crack propagation or premature wear, this is not done on consumer products like firearms. That's why I wrote "this sort of item". Unless you're going to spend more money than the firearm is worth trying to detect cracks, you won't know it has cracked until you visually identify it.

Sure proper cleaning and gun inspection is part of having a safe, well functioning firearm. But don't fool yourself into thinking it's an aeroplane or space shuttle in inspections. Go ask your local gunsmith - the best one you can find - how many times he's done x-ray diffraction on a firearm for preventative maintenance. Chances are he's going to say zero.

Spend 5 seconds on google and I know you will find multiple videos of factory condition firearms discharging unintentionally. You'll also find recall information affecting millions of firearms - firearms at risk of unintentional discharge.

I should have qualified "much". More or less than 2500 rounds a year?

Your video, The Absurdity of Detecting Gravitational Waves, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

I think the Tesla must've been watching the back-end of the SUV through the windows of the car behind and detected the distance between them was closing too quickly. And maybe it also took into account that the brake lights were firing.

In any case, freaking awesome safety technology. Wish I had it.

The only way I could see it working as described is if the Tesla really has that good of object-detection onboard, was already tracking all objects, and was just that accurate in determining the speed of the impacted SUV and the rate of decreasing distance between it and the car that hit it.
Even if that were the case, I suspect the sensors on these cars get exponentially fidgety at longer distances and with more extreme angles (like measuring changing distance between two 'overlapping' objects directly ahead), it's really unlikely it was predicting the collision.
All that to say: Yeah, I agree. You're most probably right.

re: Internet/totalitarianism/control of information, every single government tries to control information, the media, public opinion, and uses the internet as a tool for that goal (just like tv, radio, print, etc). The internet/access to information in and of itself does not guarantee greater accuracy/truth of that information, and unless the population is educated, respectful, and capable of critical thinking it can easily become little bubbles of echo chambers and a playground for griefers. What good did widespread internet availability do for the last US election? has the internet made americans more free, or more easily monitored and controlled? what good is it for cuba for cubans to have access to world of warcraft, so they can neglect their children who starve to death while they grind up to the next level? has the internet prevented mainstream media from fabricating news / pushing their agendas, or has it given more people a platform for fabricating news, anonymously? yeah, im not saying the internet is all bad, of course there are other very useful applications for it, but its not a magic "improve society" wand.

final thing i want to say, I have several friends who studied in cuba as exchange students in the late 90s, early 00s and yes, they had to make treks to specific places for access but they were able to send emails and such, so this piece is not factually accurate. If the cuban govt was so dead set on stopping people from communicating, im pretty sure they would identify network cables hanging in the middle of the street and easily follow them back to your apartment, not to mention detect wifi networks setup all over their tiny island.

It's not clear yet how many items are using RFID. They say they are using "computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning" akin to what is used in self-driving cars.

So there are some concerns if you pickup an item then put it back in the wrong place, will it detect it was still left in the store, or will it charge you? Putting it back in the right spot, refunds you, but it's not obvious otherwise.

We really need to know more from the Amazon employees that are using it.

It sounds a lot like Minority Report style stuff going on, and I think it is more a tech demo than a full concept they'll carry out in mass. The information on the path the customer takes, what they get and all that is probably worth a ton, and helps offset other costs with the system... though most of those costs are offset by having fewer employees... We are quickly reaching what CGP Grey noted in his video *relate=http://videosift.com/video/Humans-Need-Not-Apply where we need less and less people to do the lower end jobs... and those shelves look like they can be filled from the back, which is easier on robots.

That bit about the shrimp able to reflect a photon of light with rotating polarity is wrong I think. They were probably trying to say reflecting polarized light and also able to vary the angle of polarization. So for one photon, no matter how far away you are when you detect it, it will always have the same polarization. And the photon .1sec later will have a different angle.

Is it really that hard to detect 200 open sockets from the same IP addr?

Blah. Not impressed. The trickery is in what he's not showing. The software is treating the entire audio clip as a smart object, and it's referring to that for waveforms that it can use or manipulate to be close. Notice how he didn't show us the entire audio clip. I guarantee, he says "Jordan" and "three times" later in the audio. It's merely referencing that index where it detected those words before (speech recognition, in itself, an ancient technology, so not all that impressive), and simply copying them into the new clip. You can't just type in anything willy-nilly and expect results this good. If he typed "motherfucker caterpillar penis", it would have been nothing like this example, if it worked at all.

Well, to be fair, we don't have any real idea of the living conditions on planets in nearby systems that are roughly earth sized. We haven't been able to detect them until the last few years, and most of those are orbiting too close to the sun (because those are the easiest to detect), and getting any kind of real idea of their atmospheres is currently unavailable. There could be several systems with habitable planets within 30 ly, we just don't know yet. We are improving our capacity to detect these every year, so perhaps by the time we have colonized Mars, we should have a few viable extra-solar earthlike planetary candidates to send probes. Still would be another 50-100+ years after sending probes to receive back enough data to justify sending colonists. Hopefully by then our tech has matured enough to make it possible, and the war with Mars has settled down enough.

So, is this being detected by Netflix? Because the VPN service I've been using is getting geoblocked lately and I'm looking for a replacement...

You numbskull! Why did you not detect this?! *kill

Awesome comment. I wish I could upvote it twice. I threw up a little in my mouth watching the grandstanding going on here and how apparently most Sifters are eating it up.

Fraud? Cross-selling is perfectly legal and in fact practiced regularly in many industries besides banking (like when Best Buy tries to get you to purchase a protection plan for any electronics you buy at their store). If she has an issue with it, as a legislator she is free to bring a bill to the floor to do something about it. The problem is, she didn't give a shit about cross-selling until she realized she was going to have an opportunity to stump for future votes in these hearings and she apparently doesn't give a shit about it now because despite those strong-worded pleas for action she's done nothing personally to make anything she said happen.

Stumpf should give up his money? He isn't the one who opened fake Wells Fargo accounts nor is there any evidence he directed his employees to do so. And as he tried to explain before she cut him off to grandstand some more, those fake accounts only represent 1% of the total cross-selling that happened, which means the stock price was not unduly inflated--people were in fact opening of their own volition more accounts with Wells Fargo than any other bank and Wall Street loved them for it.

The real issue here is that there were not adequate controls in place to prevent the fake accounts from being created in the first place (or detected quickly after being created). And for that Stumpf probably does have some small amount of responsibility, although it sounds to me more like whoever was in charge of compliance is the person who likely should be the one left holding the bag.

But let's not let reality get in the way of a politician's dreams of future offices.

OK, assuming what you say is correct (I'm not taking the time now to check) you have a point, but the stats, even if only 1/2 as bad as it seems, still show there's absolutely no equivalence.

Well, if you ate like that, no wonder you think meat is deadly. Eating like that, it is. Eaten in moderation, meaning <50g of CURED meats, and probably less than 1/3 lb of non cured lean red meats, the conclusion I came to is reasonable....that it's in no way comparable to smoking in it's danger. it's not even comparable if you eat 5 times the studied portion of cured meats, although it is clearly not healthy to do so. I eat < 1/2 lb of steak, on the rare occasions I eat it. I eat 1/2 a chicken breast on a normal day, baked. Because I eat good meat, properly prepared, in moderation, there's little to no statistical increase in danger to my health over eating pure vegetarian.

No sir, your stats are wrong....here's direct from the WHO.....
http://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/
12. How many cancer cases every year can be attributed to consumption of processed meat and red meat?

According to the most recent estimates by the Global Burden of Disease Project, an independent academic research organization, about 34 000 cancer deaths per year worldwide are attributable to diets high in processed meat.
Eating red meat has not yet been established as a cause of cancer. However, if the reported associations were proven to be causal, the Global Burden of Disease Project has estimated that diets high in red meat could be responsible for 50 000 cancer deaths per year worldwide.
These numbers contrast with about 1 million cancer deaths per year globally due to tobacco smoking, 600 000 per year due to alcohol consumption, and more than 200 000 per year due to air pollution.

So, it's 34000 cancer deaths for cured meats (and IF the correlative results with red meat are in fact causative, another 50000 worldwide for red meat) VS 1000000 cancer tobacco deaths. So no, it's not 2/3 there, it's at best, IF red meat is the cause of cancers at the highest level possible (not at all proven) it's 1/12 of the way there....around 8.4%. Agreed, that's not good, but no where near what you (and he) claims.

Cholesterol and saturated fat only MAY cause heart disease and diabetes, not 'do without a doubt', and then usually only in high levels (in normal people). They raise the risk factor for those diseases, but do not automatically cause heart disease and/or diabetes, even in people with incredibly high levels.

Research indicates that you missed the mark with the 644000 number, it's more like 34000 (and maybe another 50000, unproven) according to the WHO, I'll take the stats of the organization whose study is being discussed.

So if you look at the real numbers, it's still not comparable at all. Cancer, and death rates are orders of magnitude different, far more than 10 times higher for smoking with every possible benefit of a doubt given to meats toxicity/effects, so not at all easily matched. Sorry.

(and you also appear to be 100% wrong about cancer survivability)
http://www.Cancer.org -Colon cancer-For stage IIB cancer, the survival rate is about 63%. The 5-year relative survival rate for stage IIIA colon cancers is about 89%. For stage IIIB cancers the survival rate is about 69%, and for stage IIIC cancers the survival rate is about 53%.
http://www.lung.org - Lung cancer-The five-year survival rate for lung cancer is 54 percent for cases detected when the disease is still localized (within the lungs). However, only 15 percent of lung cancer cases are diagnosed at an early stage. For distant tumors (spread to other organs) the five-year survival rate is only 4 percent.

So, to summarize, colon cancer 53%-89% survivability (depending largely on when it's caught) VS lung cancer 4% (for 85% of cases, and 54% for the 15% of lucky few with early detections)