Those look like eucalyptus not pine trees....but the same process applies.
The heat will not only desiccate leaves/needles, but it will also vaporize the oils in the leaves (needles in pine trees) making even the air in the canopy flammable. Eucalyptus trees are loaded with oils, maybe even more than pine trees. This is also called crowning, a crown fire, or a canopy fire. Once a fire crowns, it's nearly impossible to fight from the ground....or at all if the tree tops are close together.

Scary stuff. Where I live, in the Northern California redwood forests, that canopy can be hundreds of feet high and continuous in places.

Steak is definitely optional. I choose steak.

Killing only stops if there are no cows. If there are living cows they will die one day. In the wild pretty quickly if you apply your morals to wolves also.

A cow has no abstract concept of the fear of being eaten (only a general fear and instincts) so unless you purposefully go out of your way to hurt it there is nothing philosophically wrong with eating one, unless you get all emotional and make a complicated moral choice. Which is your choice to make.

Cavemen is a pretty wide term. I am probably smarter than most cavemen. But from the time they got organized and hunted large animals until now man has not really changed much - a couple of tens of thousands of years. We probably tend to remember less and be more depressed and weaker and use our senses less well. Can type faster though.

1) I question your sources, because some of the earliest writings ever found were business ledgers dealing with selling grains as I understand it. Capitalism has been a thing since before writing was a thing.

2) um...I think those kids in China would dispute that....THEY made the Iphones, which created a smart phone market by being useful and fun (for most people).

3) do you believe capitalism and the industrial revolution started at the same time, or that capitalism has something to do with surfs, civil rights, or secularism? Capitalism applied to people is indentured servitude, what we lazily call slavery. Unfettered capitalism created a situation where civil rights needed to be delineated and codified, it didn't create them any more than wildfires created firemen imo.

Some people do educate themselves before acting or making purchases, but it's not the norm.

Capitalism says your poor neighbors should die, because capitalism says there is no value to human life...I did a term paper on that. Value is derived from a supply/demand equation, and there's such a glut of humanity that human life has a negative value.

The government paid for around 75% of the technology development. "...it paid for some of the technology...." is incredibly misleading, if technically correct (the best kind of correct). Without a healthy dose of socialism, progress slows to a crawl and only the privileged few can afford it.

1 word....flip-phones. ;-) (I don't even have one of those)

Really? Can you offer a comparative American/Russian timeline of computer telecommunication innovations, or are you just assuming? Be sure to focus on pre '68 era, before American socialism was applied in large part (public funding/monopoly busting).

And for some unknown to you reason China is beating the ever loving pants off America lately....so what's your point? Certainly not that Capitalism always beats socialism, I hope you aren't that deluded. Both have strengths and weaknesses, both ebb and flow. Neither are the sole determining factor for inventiveness, neither has a monopoly on invention.

Russia beat America into space even with their near poverty level economy at the time, and despite the fact that their scientists definitely didn't personally profit from their myriad of inventions required to make it happen.
I'm not arguing which is better, that's like arguing over which color is better....better in what way? I'm arguing against your contention that ONLY personal profit drives invention or innovation. That's clearly a mistaken assumption imo.

Try again, and this time listen to the part about her period stopping. If you think that issue applies to men, you need help.

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Lol. Nice.

Don't forget, they stormed into closed door hearings live streaming the whole thing, even though electronic devices are 100% not allowed in such hearings by law to maintain state secrets, protect witnesses, and even to protect the president from baseless or unproven accusations becoming public. Closed door hearings are like classified information, and the Republicans just tried to broadcast them to the world.

Hilariously, hypocritically, the thing they're so faux outraged about today is the rules Republicans enacted so they could make it easier to impeach Clintons....

https://crooksandliars.com/2019/10/karma-republicans-clinton-rules-apply

Just a taste.....
Andrew Napolitano reminded Fox and Friends viewers...that Republicans wrote the rules on impeachment proceedings during the Bill Clinton years. Uh oh.

? Are you implying that famine and/or water shortages somehow preclude war and disease? I think they're major causes.

No, that's a myth. We have resources enough to do some amazing things if we properly apply them, not anything, and without the will to apply them, almost nothing. Having everything you need for success besides direction is a guarantee of failure.

Depends, if you remove the human factor and look only at total resources vs global need, there are still major logistic hurdles to just feeding everyone, not to mention resource problems if we want the biosphere to be healthy and not homogenized down to humans and our farm animals.

Odd, international law has been enforced since ww2 with only few exceptions with no WW3, only sanctions, bribes, and relatively minor skirmishes. I don't know where you get the idea that only a gun to the head might be coercive when a gun to the economy has worked so well for so long.

You should be hysterical. If you aren't shitting your pants over the state of the world, you aren't paying attention or you're absolutely delusional. Civilization and the habitatability of the planet are both on a clear path to collapse and people are busying themselves with arguments over will it be 50 years out or 100, or maybe 150 instead of making substantive changes to mitigate what's now unavoidable....or even prepare.
A hysterical voice is the only one I think indicates an understanding of the problem and total lack of a working solution.

I say it's both.
It's appeal on an emotional and moral level to get people to listen to the facts that she presents more clearly and honestly than the U.N. scientists or that other less political scientific organizations have published.

Not true. Using an emotional delivery to get people interested enough to listen to the factual science is basic psychology, and could be considered the science of selling science to humans....or applied behavioral science.

There's also what's known as psychology of science - The psychology of science is a branch of the studies of science that includes philosophy of science, history of science, and sociology of science or sociology of scientific knowledge. The psychology of science is defined most simply as the scientific study of scientific thought or behavior.

It is relatively easy to get a quite common pre 1986 machine gun.

The whole process is cheap. $200. Fill out a ATF form 4 and attach a passport sized photo. There are only a few questions to answer (that take up about 2.5 pages). This took about 30 seconds on google to find out. It is not more difficult to pass this background audit than that of a federal agent. I've looked into applying to be a federal agent and their process is an order of magnitude more stringent.

https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/form/form-4-application-tax-paid-transfer-and-registration-firearm-atf-form-53204/download

"What you, me, or others consider firearms means nothing."

You asked me what I considered a firearm. I answered both my personal opinion, and then specifically said that what the government considers a firearm to be is what it is. I'm surprised you seem to have missed this.

Registries are a step towards being able to confiscate guns en-masse. If you know who has what it is much easier to take it away from them. This sentiment is well documented on pro-gun forums.

"It doesn't take any money to ban certain firearms, certainly not a boatload"

Very true. I was tempted to point this out but I didn't. I believe that this is one of the core reasons they want to do it. It makes you think they are doing something when they aren't, and it costs sweet fuck all compared to say, spending money on anything else that will genuinely improve the average man's lot.

'your off hand assumption that, without your derisive "warning", he would be "dumb" enough to make an assumption'

Now that's the thing about warnings, you aren't assuming the behaviour of anyone. You only know it is a possibility that you don't want to happen. You don't know if it will happen or not. So you put up a warning. That's how warnings work.

But hey, this is your house right? Make no mistake, you've stamped yourself all over videosift like a dog marking its territory. Outsiders who don't comply with your way of thinking basically aren't welcome.

@harlequinn:

Putting the legal concerns (It is in the constitution, so we have to heed it) aside, what do you think about the Second Amendment?

Was it meant to enable the people to
a) defend against foreign incursion (in lieu of a standing army)?
b) defend against an oppressive government (as a militia)?
c) assume police duties?
d) defend themselves (in absence of police)?
e) none of the above? (Please state what you think its intended meaning was.)

For your selected reason/s given above, does it/do they still apply today?

What do you think is the reason for the staggering amount of gun violence/deaths in the USA when compared with other countries?

Is the reason for the Second Amendment worth the amount of gun violence in the USA?


Full disclosure:
I am genuinely interested in your answers since you seem to have given this some thought (an impression I frankly do not have about bobknight33) .
I am not from the USA and against any form of private gun ownership except under some very rare circumstances.

When it comes to guns, you MUST eat what you kill. NO exceptions.

Does not apply to suicide for obvious reasons.

This isn't really true though and greatly understates how amazing this demo, and current AI actually is.

Saying the agents are obeying a set of human defined rules / freedoms / constraints and objective functions would lead one to imagine something more like video game AI.

Typically video game AI works on a set of weighted decisions and actions, where the weights, decisions and actions are defined by the developer; a more complex variation of:

if my health is low, move towards the health pack,
otherwise, move towards the opponent

In this demo, no such rules exist. It's not given any weights (health), rules (if health is low), nor any instructions (move towards health pack). I guess you could apply neural networks to traditional game AI to determine the weights for decision making (which are typically hard coded by the developer); but that would be far less interesting than what's actually happening here.

Instead, the agent is given a set of inputs, a set of available outputs, and a goal.

4 Inputs:
- Position of the agent itself
- Position and type (other agent, box, ramp) of objects within a limited forward facing conical view
- Position (but not type) of objects within a small radius around the agent
- Reward: Whether they are doing a good job or not

Note the agent is given no information about each type of object, or what they mean, or how they behave. You may as well call them A, B, C rather than agent, box, ramp.

3 Outputs:
- Move
- Grab
- Lock

Again, the agent knows nothing about what these mean, only that they can enable and disable each at any time. A good analogy is someone giving you a game controller for a game you've never played. The controller has a stick and two buttons and you figure out what they do by using them. It'd be accurate to call the outputs: stick, A, B rather than move, grab, lock.

Goal:
- Do a good job.

The goal is simply for the reward input to be maximised. A good analogy is saying 'good girl' or giving a treat to a dog that you are training when they do the right thing. It's up to the dog to figure out what it is that they're doing that's good.

The reward is entirely separate from the agent, and agent behaviour can be completely changed just by changing when the reward is given. The demo is about hide and seek, where the agents are rewarded for not being seen / seeing their opponent (and not leaving the play area). The agents also succeeded at other games, where the only difference to the agent was when the reward was given.

It isn't really different from physically building the same play space, dropping some rats in it, and rewarding them with cheese when they are hidden from their opponents - except rats are unlikely to figure out how to maximise their reward in such a 'complex' game.

Given this description of how the AI actually works, the fact they came up with complex strategies like blocking doors, ramp surfing, taking the ramp to stop their opponents from ramp surfing, and just the general cooperation with other agents, without any code describing any of those things - is pretty amazing.

You can find out more about how the agents were trained, and other exercises they performed here:

https://openai.com/blog/emergent-tool-use/

Again, that law exists. 18 U.S. Code 2074
What he shows us is the danger of a sycophantic party unwilling to apply the law against their own tribe.

Oh....and the refusal to prosecute over the meeting with Russians to get dirt on Clinton was predicated on the theory that they were too incompetent to know it was illegal....so ignorance of the law IS an excuse...one that saved more than one Trump from prison already.

It seems the American Legal System is a farce and joke.
It's there only for the rich to control the poor.
It doesn't apply to any one else.