You are exactly right. I was so confused, as I was on my phone playing videos for my kids when it stopped working all of a sudden. "It can't be YouTube," I thought. "It MUST be my connection!" I assumed.

NOPE! It's YouTube!

@ChaosEngine

I fully agree with you that rape/sexual assault is a bigger problem (in magnitude and frequency) than false accusations. And that being an actual victim of sexual assault would be worse than being falsely accused of sexual assault, although it seems a bit pointless to debate the relative extent of how much these things could fuck up lives when they are both horrendous.

That being said, there's a reason that presumption of innocence and requiring proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt are the law of the land. And assuming that we follow through on those things (which I think we largely do), that's all well and good. BUT, that's all pretty strictly just in the legal realm.

False accusations of sexual assault don't need to get as far as the actual legal system to seriously fuck up a person's life. Employers, partners, friends ... these connections might choose to sever ties without requiring the same rigorous proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt that the legal system does.

As much as I personally tend to believe Ford as opposed to Kavanaugh, I think that given the span of time since the incident it is nigh on impossible to prove that her version of events is true beyond a reasonable doubt. On the other hand, the hearing put his current demeanor and partisan/biased attitude on blatant display in a way that seemed to me should be disqualifying with regards to the sort of standards we require for Supreme Court Justices. Apparently the GOP disagrees, and we can hold them to account for that at the ballot box.

That's rather cold comfort given that Justices serve for life. There'd be some constitutional crisis drama if Agent Orange gets removed from office as a result of some proof-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt of misdeeds. Robert Kennedy's quote about the ancient Chinese curse "may you live in interesting times" seems apropos. Things have been entirely too "interesting" for my taste for the past 2 years...

Fair points, but this is obviously a prototype.

Ultimately, the price of these will come down and even if you need to swap out the batteries, there's no reason that can't be automated too. Hell, a roomba basically does that now. The point is it doesn't need sleep or meal breaks and it doesn't care about working hours. Or you just leave it connected to a permanent power source (if you can teach it to drywall, you can teach it to avoid the cable).

And yeah, my numbers are obviously estimates, since this isn't commercially available yet, and you'd need to factor in capital investment, maintenance, etc. But you don't have to pay it a salary, it doesn't need medical and it doesn't have to comply with health and safety regs (at least, not for the robots H&S).

I find it difficult to believe that something like this could ever be less cost-effective than a human.

Of course, that's assuming a steady rate of improvement. Bipedal robots (like self-driving cars) have been "90% there" for many years now. It might be that the last 10% is REALLY, REALLY difficult.

My gut feeling is that we will see a tipping point. There will be some really challenging engineering/programming obstacle that stops these going mainstream, but eventually, someone will solve it and then the rate of progress will be exponential.

But you're right in that, that's certainly a few years away yet. I'm fascinated as to how we as a society/civilisation deal with mass automation.

He even lied about having no connections to Yale. The guy is pathological, just like Trump.

He was a legacy. His Grandfather got his degree there. Did he think nobody would figure that out?

I use a VPN connection to download & watch all BBC shows through the BBC iPlayer (https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer) app. It got HD & close caption for all shows but each episode is time limited. The Bodyguard is available for 6 months from broadcast day, the recently finished Versailles gave me about 2 weeks to watch, so I guess each show varies).

Your video, Stephen Colbert Connects Chance the Rapper with "Lord of the, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

FYI...#walkaway is a right wing campaign where they had republican actors (and stock photos) claim they were Democrats who were sick of the liberal nonsense and they, and millions like them, were walking away from the Democrats. It was for right wingers, not left, false verification that they are correct and lefties are finally coming around to their truth, and a counterpoint to the "blue wave" campaign. They were caught on day one, and it never caught on outside right wing websites, mostly because it was a horrible, stupid, poorly implemented, transparent ploy. No surprise that, even though he knows that, Bob still puts it out there hoping to convince someone.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/walkaway-campaign-stock-photos/

Looking into it, I've found that it's reportedly become a Russian ploy.....
#WalkAway has also now been connected to Kremlin-linked Russian bots, and it is now the seventh most popular Russia-influenced hashtag as of this writing (July 17), according to the website Hamilton 68, which tracks Russian influence on Twitter as part of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, an initiative of the nonpartisan German Marshall Fund. The purpose of this now-astroturf campaign is to manipulate public opinion by creating the illusion that this is a popular movement. In reality, #WalkAway has become pure propaganda, a psychological operation.

https://www-m.cnn.com/2018/07/17/opinions/russian-bots-2018-midterm-elections-opinion-love/index.html?r=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F

Just one more time Bob is spreading Russian propaganda.

Poorly said and dead wrong.

You accept Trump, a consummate liar with an agenda determining their message rather than the protesters. That's your main mistake.

They are not protesting against the flag, anthem, or nation.
They are using their access to their own audience to spread their message that police misconduct must be addressed. If that's unseemly somehow, tell Trump to stop it first, because he's using OUR platform. When he hasn't tweeted for a full year, and hasn't used his position to personally attack citizens for the same time period, come back and we'll discuss what private citizens are obligated to do in America.

It bears noting, taking a knee is how service men often respect fallen soldiers and is clearly designated appropriate flag behavior, but wearing the flag as clothing is insanely disrespectful and totally not allowed by national flag rules, yet you never hear draft dodging Trump froth at the mouth over the mouth breathers surrounding him draped in the flag like a toga.

Only when you wake up to reality and stop letting a bad liar with no connection to the truth determine reality for you will your problem of constantly being ridiculously wrong be solved.

This is the paradox of modern politics.

These people are fucking morons of the highest order. They're poorly educated idiots spouting complete nonsense that has zero basis in reality.

In a sane world, we'd ignore them as lunatic outliers. They're not new; they've been here forever, they just change the nonsense.

The problem is that we now live in a world where the most powerful man in the world actively encourages these people, if not explicitly, then at least implicitly with his own brand of deranged paranoia.

The fundamental issue is that internet is great at connecting people, and it doesn't discriminate between connecting Bronies, small-town homosexuals, fans of William Shatner's music, political dissidents in oppressed countries or people who indulge in insane conspiracy theories.

There's no putting that technological genie back in the bottle (and even if we could, the cost would be too great IMO).

So what to do about that?

If we ignore them, they thrive underground and if we give them "airtime" their ranks are bolstered.

I really don't have an answer for this.

I'm less familiar with American demographics, but I agree with the overall principal. Here in Canada we have IMO an even more severe segregation and unequal opportunity for Aboriginal peoples. It's severe enough up here though that not only are communities segregated by living on reserves with their own separate schools, but we have separate school divisions, and even their reporting and funding lines are different from all other schools.

That adds up to an enormous amount of differential treatment. Replacing that with equal opportunity though is much more desirable than 'waiting' till the school system has already failed kids and then 'lowering the bar' in one way or another to help them get into university.

In Canada I think our supreme court has done as at least 1 disservice greater than you guys though in making race a required consideration in sentencing. The appropriate section of sentencing:
"In sentencing an aboriginal offender, the judge must consider: (a) the unique systemic or background factors which may have played a part in bringing the particular aboriginal offender before the courts; and (b) the types of sentencing procedures and sanctions which may be appropriate in the circumstances for the offender because of his or her particular aboriginal heritage or connection."
The goal is to address the over-representation of aboriginal people in prisons. The effect however, is ultimately discriminatory as well. Before you dismiss the discrimination against whites as ok because it balances things out as is the 'goal', that's not the only affect. Another problem in Canada is the over-representation of Aboriginal peoples as the victims of crime, because most violent crime is between parties that are related. So on the whole crimes committed against Aboriginal people will on average be sentenced more leniently...

Failing to address the real underlying unequal opportunity can't corrected by more inequality later to balance the scales. In Canada, our attempt at it are too lesson the sentencing of people with unequal backgrounds, but the expense of victims that also faced those same unequal backgrounds...

And that 'corrective' inequality is also creating similar resentment amongst white people here too. People don't like their kids not getting into a school of choice potentially because of a race based distinction, but they like it even less to see a crime committed against them treated more leniently because of race.

I've seen Split, haven't seen Unbreakable. Is the connection obvious?

I take it then you haven't seen the movie? Mild spoilers then I guess, but they are all connected rather directly.

Same here. I had to allow all connections. https://content-mp4.newsinc.com/mp4/402/28101212/16796519.mp4 is the lame video.

So what is the connection with Trump?

Mueller has caught up some folks for past deeds, which is good. What connections are there with the election?