Neither one is a good option, and neither one would be acceptable to a robot. The robot should switch lanes away from the crate, if the other lane's clear. If there is no clear route ahead, the car should stop, as quickly as possible while maintaining safety. If the object entered the lane within the stopping distance, the robot should brake harder, sacrificing comfort of the occupants for safety. If braking hard enough would jeopardize the safety of the occupants, the robot should swerve to avoid the object if possible. Ideally, any cars in neighboring lanes would receive instant updates on the incident via a vehicle-to-vehicle network, and could maneuver to allow space to swerve.
Yes, even after all that, the robot could still hit a child, if the child jumped from hiding to in front of the car withing such a small distance that the car couldn't stop, and other lanes were blocked, and other cars couldn't respond to any alerts. Humans hit pedestrians daily, with fewer other options.
No. It comes to the door 20 feet away from my kitchen. I can go from my refrigerator to my car in, let's say, 10 seconds, if I walk slowly. We'll assume that picking up & dropping off bags takes no time. A typical grocery trip involves about 6 bags. I'll carry 3 or 4 bags from the car to the house, so simply getting everything inside takes 30 seconds.
The nearest grocery store is about two miles away. Assuming I go quickly, I could make that trip in about 30 minutes, accounting for load, crosswalks, and sidewalk damage. Assuming I can still take 3 bags with me, getting the same load to my kitchen now takes an hour and a half. I highly doubt that a train would be where I need every 30 minutes, so feet are still the best option.
Some quick math shows that the jogging option takes 540 times as long as using my car, and that's not including the initial trip to the store. Perhaps you have an egregious amount of spare time, but I'm afraid I do not.
Yes, it really is. That bed of rocks, without the strips of iron, is just as wide as a road, but thicker. Any hills have to be smoothed out, and construction itself involves more work to get those heavy strips of iron perfectly where they need to be.
Over the U.S. as a whole, excluding Seattle, new light rail construction costs average about $35 million per mile. By comparison, a freeway lane expansion typically costs $20 million per lane mile (a lane mile is a mile-long lane) for two directions.
I'd expect, based on seeing the trouble getting a rail route through my hometown, that acquiring land for a train is more difficult (therefore expensive), primarily because of noise. Nobody wants to sell half of their backyard to get a noisy train next to them. The government could force it, but that's political suicide.
I'd assume there will always be visible signs. It doesn't make much sense to equip every car with automated systems, because each one would likely require custom programming. Also, in the event of a computer malfunction, you don't want the human backup drivers, who are already not used to driving, trying to work without direction.
Speed limits are an interesting question. Assuming that cars actually did reach that point, I'd expect to see speed limits become raised or lowered to adjust traffic rates as needed. Higher-capacity routes get higher speed limits, to make them more appealing to the route-planning software. Areas where the government would like to simply avoid having cars could be slower, but have a faster route pointing away from them, so the shorter path takes longer. It's an interesting avenue of thought.
you go through the church parking lot so as to not be a rubbernecker.
...which may be illegal (depending on your jurisdiction), and doesn't account for the fact that a robot has no interest in staring at carnage. It can't be a rubbernecker, regardless of its lack of a neck.
The other situations you describe can be handled easily. When something goes wrong, the car says "oh shit" and alerts the person inside, who can assume manual control as needed. I'm a roboticist myself. We do this routinely. It's not hard for a sensor to notice a tire's missing. It's not hard to notice that the car's stopped moving in the direction is's supposed to be. It's not hard to notice that the road under the back bumper isn't the same as it was under the front. There's even sensors to verify that sensors are working properly.
Prediction isn't the idea. Instead, there are a set number of rules, including all of those pesky laws like "no cutting through private property". The AI just has to determine which rules are applicable to a given situation, and that's a pretty easy job. That deer looks a lot like a wolf, which looks a lot like a box, which looks a lot like a tire tread, which looks a lot like a child. Whatever it is, it's in the middle of the road, and I should change lanes.
Trains don't come to my front door, which is rather necessary when I'm carrying a load of groceries to feed my household. Trains don't go to my friend's front door, who's effectively wheelchair-bound. Trains don't go from my grandmother's house to the post office, where she has her mailbox. Trains require tracks, which require a bigger initial investment than roads, and simply can't reach withing reasonable walking distance of everywhere people need to go. Then there's the noise, the difficulty in meeting their schedules, the limited per-person carrying capacity, and they also can't stop fast enough to avoid all those hazards you mentioned, even with a human driver!
Buses are a bit better in most of these regards, but just not enough to make shared transit an effective alternative to personal cars. If your house and your job are close to a train station, then go ahead and use it. Don't expect your situation to apply to anyone else, though.
Do you hear that applause in the video every time someone says something hateful? That's the public, and it's who elected those people as representatives in the first place. You and I might detest the message, but they have the right to think and express what they want. That's free speech. That's the multiculturalism that's ironically spoken against in the video: respect for all ideas, no matter how absurd.
Likewise, if you publish an essay detailing the failings of the American government, and suggesting a revolution to instill yourself as Supreme Ruler Of Us, you're perfectly welcome to do that. That's certainly a form of sedition, but it's also protected by a higher legal power. Under other governments (e.g. North Korea), such an act would almost certainly end with your execution. The American justice system has, since the early 1900's, been consistently moving further toward protecting free speech regardless of circumstances. The only thing still restricted is the use of speech to cause disruption, rather that discourse. Walking into a bank with a handgun and shouting at tellers to put money in a bag would probably not be considered performance art.
Sorry for the late information, but more research shows that the last use of the Smith Act was 1961, but that case didn't involve free speech. I guess those hippies weren't really serious.
America also sent its own citizens to internment camps. What's your point? As far as I can tell, sedition hasn't been used against speech since the 1960's. Should we dwell on past actions from a wildly different legal framework, and assume they indicate the shape of things to come?
And it is. Encouragement does not cause action in itself. There's a gap in the logical chain of events between encouragement and action, where any number of factors could change the final outcome. Such speech would likely fail the "imminent" part of the "imminent lawless action" test. In fact, Brandenburg v. Ohio, which established that test, was about a KKK leader encouraging violent crimes. The Supreme Court ruled that such speech was protected.
If the crime is effectively "publishing seditious papers", then the defense is 'free speech'. Sedition in the United States is a rare charge, and unlikely to actually hold through a trial, especially if the offense is something peaceful, like distributing propaganda. If your speech isn't directly causing other crimes to be broken, it's probably protected.
The key is a test known as "imminent lawless action." Yelling "fire" in a theater is likely to directly cause those trampling deaths, and they'll happen quickly, before any . Even if you aren't the one directly stepping on the people, you still caused the panic, knowing that people were likely to be hurt or killed. That's not complicity. That's criminal intent.
Please define 'earnings'. Is that the income before expenses? After payroll, but before investments? After some investments, but before investing $50M in an Irish venture capital company, who's investing in a Dutch sandwich shop? After expenses, investments, and taxes, where the corporation conveniently only made a $20,000 profit this year?
Let's say I'm a lowly Google developer, with orders to write a SSID-sniffing program for the Street View vans. Let's say I decide it'd be easier just to sniff all wireless traffic, despite knowing it might contain sensitive information. Should my boss get in trouble because of my bad choice?
On the one hand, the boss did give the order, and should know what I'm doing. On the other hand, it's unreasonable to expect a manager to ask about every possible implication of a technical solution to a technical problem. Why shouldn't the blame be passed down to where the bad decision came from?
Except for the minor detail that it doesn't apply to most things folks complain about. There's a defined list of offenses RICO can be used with, but things like "sneaky use of contracts" and "changing opinions" are not in there. Sure, there's a few general items, like "wire fraud", which can be stretched to cover anything done online, but it's a pretty long stretch. RICO isn't designed to make prosecution of corporations easier. It's designed to target specific behavior patterns common to organized crime.
I don't either, and as such I don't vote in corporate elections. I also don't then complain when a company I partially own screws up, gets punished, and I lose some money.
For what it's worth, the R-series comes from IBM as well. Mine is a particularly interesting model: Lenovo software and labels, but an IBM logo molded into the case. It was manufactured right in the middle of the change, so it has both brands.
The lowest-quality, most easily-damaged electronic device I've had was a TV remote control that was shipped broken. Second place goes to a Lenovo Thinkpad R60, which had to have major repairs no less than 4 times before the warranty ran out. After that, it ran for another 2 years with a steadily-increasing number of problems and steadily-decreasing amount of mobility. Finally, the hard disk made a nice "KER-CHUNK" noise and the power cord split into two pieces within the same week. I now use an old Dell Latitude X300, which has a loose hinge and a small bit of cosmetic damage after a 6-month trip in Africa.
Now, the biggest difference between the two is the intent. The X300 was meant to be a business machine, and built to handle constant travel. The R60 was a budget model, meant to be a cheap computer that can sometimes move around. I've heard that the other Thinkpad series generally have better quality, but in my opinion, the quality has more to do with the design goals than the brand itself.
As I recall (though I haven't worked much on the business side of things), entering into a BAA with an obviously incompetent company doesn't necessarily remove the liability. It's still your patients being notified and your reputation on the line. If you are able to find someone willing and able to take on all of the responsibility for security, is it still going to be affordable for a small business?
The OP said that outsourcing was "very cheap", but the requirements for regulated industries (including, but certainly not limited to, healthcare) gets very messy, very fast. "Very cheap" simply might not do the job. The availability of such "very cheap" services is certainly not justification to remove mail service from business connections, just because a company's not in the mail-service business.
As I recall (though I haven't worked much on the business side of things), entering into a BAA doesn't necessarily remove the liability. Outsource to someone obviously incompetent, and it's still your patients getting notified and your reputation on the line. If you are able to find someone willing and able to take on all of the responsibility for security, is it still going to be affordable for a small company?
The OP says outsourcing mail service is "very cheap", but the required service gets messy for many industries besides just health care. "Very cheap" sometimes just doesn't cut it. It's certainly not a justification to cut off mail service to business customers, because they're not primarily in the mail-service business.
Not sending PHI in email is an internal policy issue. Of course, nobody should be doing it, but that's no excuse to leave the company open to liability. If anyone sends personal information to the company, it becomes the company's problem, and the company's responsible for keeping it secure. In the event of a breach, there's enough wiggle room that a big enough pile of lawyers can likely get the company out of any major penalties, but it's a death sentence for a small company, which is exactly what we're talking about here. The cheap & less-risky solution is to run your own mail server, with everything secured like any other data storage, and with IT crew that are fully aware of what they're handling.
I once worked at a company whose ISP blocked all incoming connections, period. That was on a mid-level business connection (which at the time was DSL, at something under 1 MB/s), on the only ISP in town. Getting a port unblocked required a few hours on the phone, trying to explain to the support monkeys that yes, we really did need to run our own server, it really was allowed in the contract, and our connection really was already fast enough for what we needed.
That was in the mid 90's, before every company had to have a presence on this new-fangled Internet thing. Back then, the only thing the Internet was typically used for by a business was sending and receiving "electronic mail" to or from other businesses. Running your own server was practically unheard of unless you were big enough to practically start up your own ISP. Heck, it took several months of complaining before the phone company even fixed up the phone lines enough to carry DSL, and the modem connections could be disposed of. Life in rural Indiana has its troubles...
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Neither one is a good option, and neither one would be acceptable to a robot. The robot should switch lanes away from the crate, if the other lane's clear. If there is no clear route ahead, the car should stop, as quickly as possible while maintaining safety. If the object entered the lane within the stopping distance, the robot should brake harder, sacrificing comfort of the occupants for safety. If braking hard enough would jeopardize the safety of the occupants, the robot should swerve to avoid the object if possible. Ideally, any cars in neighboring lanes would receive instant updates on the incident via a vehicle-to-vehicle network, and could maneuver to allow space to swerve.
Yes, even after all that, the robot could still hit a child, if the child jumped from hiding to in front of the car withing such a small distance that the car couldn't stop, and other lanes were blocked, and other cars couldn't respond to any alerts. Humans hit pedestrians daily, with fewer other options.
No. It comes to the door 20 feet away from my kitchen. I can go from my refrigerator to my car in, let's say, 10 seconds, if I walk slowly. We'll assume that picking up & dropping off bags takes no time. A typical grocery trip involves about 6 bags. I'll carry 3 or 4 bags from the car to the house, so simply getting everything inside takes 30 seconds.
The nearest grocery store is about two miles away. Assuming I go quickly, I could make that trip in about 30 minutes, accounting for load, crosswalks, and sidewalk damage. Assuming I can still take 3 bags with me, getting the same load to my kitchen now takes an hour and a half. I highly doubt that a train would be where I need every 30 minutes, so feet are still the best option.
Some quick math shows that the jogging option takes 540 times as long as using my car, and that's not including the initial trip to the store. Perhaps you have an egregious amount of spare time, but I'm afraid I do not.
Yes, it really is. That bed of rocks, without the strips of iron, is just as wide as a road, but thicker. Any hills have to be smoothed out, and construction itself involves more work to get those heavy strips of iron perfectly where they need to be.
Or, in other words,
Over the U.S. as a whole, excluding Seattle, new light rail construction costs average about $35 million per mile. By comparison, a freeway lane expansion typically costs $20 million per lane mile (a lane mile is a mile-long lane) for two directions.
I'd expect, based on seeing the trouble getting a rail route through my hometown, that acquiring land for a train is more difficult (therefore expensive), primarily because of noise. Nobody wants to sell half of their backyard to get a noisy train next to them. The government could force it, but that's political suicide.
I'd assume there will always be visible signs. It doesn't make much sense to equip every car with automated systems, because each one would likely require custom programming. Also, in the event of a computer malfunction, you don't want the human backup drivers, who are already not used to driving, trying to work without direction.
Speed limits are an interesting question. Assuming that cars actually did reach that point, I'd expect to see speed limits become raised or lowered to adjust traffic rates as needed. Higher-capacity routes get higher speed limits, to make them more appealing to the route-planning software. Areas where the government would like to simply avoid having cars could be slower, but have a faster route pointing away from them, so the shorter path takes longer. It's an interesting avenue of thought.
you go through the church parking lot so as to not be a rubbernecker.
...which may be illegal (depending on your jurisdiction), and doesn't account for the fact that a robot has no interest in staring at carnage. It can't be a rubbernecker, regardless of its lack of a neck.
The other situations you describe can be handled easily. When something goes wrong, the car says "oh shit" and alerts the person inside, who can assume manual control as needed. I'm a roboticist myself. We do this routinely. It's not hard for a sensor to notice a tire's missing. It's not hard to notice that the car's stopped moving in the direction is's supposed to be. It's not hard to notice that the road under the back bumper isn't the same as it was under the front. There's even sensors to verify that sensors are working properly.
Prediction isn't the idea. Instead, there are a set number of rules, including all of those pesky laws like "no cutting through private property". The AI just has to determine which rules are applicable to a given situation, and that's a pretty easy job. That deer looks a lot like a wolf, which looks a lot like a box, which looks a lot like a tire tread, which looks a lot like a child. Whatever it is, it's in the middle of the road, and I should change lanes.
the solution... is to build more trains
Trains don't come to my front door, which is rather necessary when I'm carrying a load of groceries to feed my household. Trains don't go to my friend's front door, who's effectively wheelchair-bound. Trains don't go from my grandmother's house to the post office, where she has her mailbox. Trains require tracks, which require a bigger initial investment than roads, and simply can't reach withing reasonable walking distance of everywhere people need to go. Then there's the noise, the difficulty in meeting their schedules, the limited per-person carrying capacity, and they also can't stop fast enough to avoid all those hazards you mentioned, even with a human driver!
Buses are a bit better in most of these regards, but just not enough to make shared transit an effective alternative to personal cars. If your house and your job are close to a train station, then go ahead and use it. Don't expect your situation to apply to anyone else, though.
Do you hear that applause in the video every time someone says something hateful? That's the public, and it's who elected those people as representatives in the first place. You and I might detest the message, but they have the right to think and express what they want. That's free speech. That's the multiculturalism that's ironically spoken against in the video: respect for all ideas, no matter how absurd.
Likewise, if you publish an essay detailing the failings of the American government, and suggesting a revolution to instill yourself as Supreme Ruler Of Us, you're perfectly welcome to do that. That's certainly a form of sedition, but it's also protected by a higher legal power. Under other governments (e.g. North Korea), such an act would almost certainly end with your execution. The American justice system has, since the early 1900's, been consistently moving further toward protecting free speech regardless of circumstances. The only thing still restricted is the use of speech to cause disruption, rather that discourse. Walking into a bank with a handgun and shouting at tellers to put money in a bag would probably not be considered performance art.
Sorry for the late information, but more research shows that the last use of the Smith Act was 1961, but that case didn't involve free speech. I guess those hippies weren't really serious.
America also sent its own citizens to internment camps. What's your point? As far as I can tell, sedition hasn't been used against speech since the 1960's. Should we dwell on past actions from a wildly different legal framework, and assume they indicate the shape of things to come?
And it is. Encouragement does not cause action in itself. There's a gap in the logical chain of events between encouragement and action, where any number of factors could change the final outcome. Such speech would likely fail the "imminent" part of the "imminent lawless action" test. In fact, Brandenburg v. Ohio, which established that test, was about a KKK leader encouraging violent crimes. The Supreme Court ruled that such speech was protected.
If the crime is effectively "publishing seditious papers", then the defense is 'free speech'. Sedition in the United States is a rare charge, and unlikely to actually hold through a trial, especially if the offense is something peaceful, like distributing propaganda. If your speech isn't directly causing other crimes to be broken, it's probably protected.
The key is a test known as "imminent lawless action." Yelling "fire" in a theater is likely to directly cause those trampling deaths, and they'll happen quickly, before any . Even if you aren't the one directly stepping on the people, you still caused the panic, knowing that people were likely to be hurt or killed. That's not complicity. That's criminal intent.
The U.S. Constitution limits government powers. It does not grant them. Thus, if something is not in the Constitution, the government can do it.
Please define 'earnings'. Is that the income before expenses? After payroll, but before investments? After some investments, but before investing $50M in an Irish venture capital company, who's investing in a Dutch sandwich shop? After expenses, investments, and taxes, where the corporation conveniently only made a $20,000 profit this year?
So why exactly is it the exec's fault, again?
Let's say I'm a lowly Google developer, with orders to write a SSID-sniffing program for the Street View vans. Let's say I decide it'd be easier just to sniff all wireless traffic, despite knowing it might contain sensitive information. Should my boss get in trouble because of my bad choice?
On the one hand, the boss did give the order, and should know what I'm doing. On the other hand, it's unreasonable to expect a manager to ask about every possible implication of a technical solution to a technical problem. Why shouldn't the blame be passed down to where the bad decision came from?
Except for the minor detail that it doesn't apply to most things folks complain about. There's a defined list of offenses RICO can be used with, but things like "sneaky use of contracts" and "changing opinions" are not in there. Sure, there's a few general items, like "wire fraud", which can be stretched to cover anything done online, but it's a pretty long stretch. RICO isn't designed to make prosecution of corporations easier. It's designed to target specific behavior patterns common to organized crime.
I don't either, and as such I don't vote in corporate elections. I also don't then complain when a company I partially own screws up, gets punished, and I lose some money.
For what it's worth, the R-series comes from IBM as well. Mine is a particularly interesting model: Lenovo software and labels, but an IBM logo molded into the case. It was manufactured right in the middle of the change, so it has both brands.
The lowest-quality, most easily-damaged electronic device I've had was a TV remote control that was shipped broken. Second place goes to a Lenovo Thinkpad R60, which had to have major repairs no less than 4 times before the warranty ran out. After that, it ran for another 2 years with a steadily-increasing number of problems and steadily-decreasing amount of mobility. Finally, the hard disk made a nice "KER-CHUNK" noise and the power cord split into two pieces within the same week. I now use an old Dell Latitude X300, which has a loose hinge and a small bit of cosmetic damage after a 6-month trip in Africa.
Now, the biggest difference between the two is the intent. The X300 was meant to be a business machine, and built to handle constant travel. The R60 was a budget model, meant to be a cheap computer that can sometimes move around. I've heard that the other Thinkpad series generally have better quality, but in my opinion, the quality has more to do with the design goals than the brand itself.
Insightful != redundant. Damned clicky buttons...
I apologize for the almost-double post. I posted at 1:55 AM, but it didn't show up until 11:30 AM... WTF, Slashdot?
As I recall (though I haven't worked much on the business side of things), entering into a BAA with an obviously incompetent company doesn't necessarily remove the liability. It's still your patients being notified and your reputation on the line. If you are able to find someone willing and able to take on all of the responsibility for security, is it still going to be affordable for a small business?
The OP said that outsourcing was "very cheap", but the requirements for regulated industries (including, but certainly not limited to, healthcare) gets very messy, very fast. "Very cheap" simply might not do the job. The availability of such "very cheap" services is certainly not justification to remove mail service from business connections, just because a company's not in the mail-service business.
As I recall (though I haven't worked much on the business side of things), entering into a BAA doesn't necessarily remove the liability. Outsource to someone obviously incompetent, and it's still your patients getting notified and your reputation on the line. If you are able to find someone willing and able to take on all of the responsibility for security, is it still going to be affordable for a small company?
The OP says outsourcing mail service is "very cheap", but the required service gets messy for many industries besides just health care. "Very cheap" sometimes just doesn't cut it. It's certainly not a justification to cut off mail service to business customers, because they're not primarily in the mail-service business.
Assuming you meant unencrypted...
Not sending PHI in email is an internal policy issue. Of course, nobody should be doing it, but that's no excuse to leave the company open to liability. If anyone sends personal information to the company, it becomes the company's problem, and the company's responsible for keeping it secure. In the event of a breach, there's enough wiggle room that a big enough pile of lawyers can likely get the company out of any major penalties, but it's a death sentence for a small company, which is exactly what we're talking about here. The cheap & less-risky solution is to run your own mail server, with everything secured like any other data storage, and with IT crew that are fully aware of what they're handling.
For only $9.99 per month, per port!
I once worked at a company whose ISP blocked all incoming connections, period. That was on a mid-level business connection (which at the time was DSL, at something under 1 MB/s), on the only ISP in town. Getting a port unblocked required a few hours on the phone, trying to explain to the support monkeys that yes, we really did need to run our own server, it really was allowed in the contract, and our connection really was already fast enough for what we needed.
That was in the mid 90's, before every company had to have a presence on this new-fangled Internet thing. Back then, the only thing the Internet was typically used for by a business was sending and receiving "electronic mail" to or from other businesses. Running your own server was practically unheard of unless you were big enough to practically start up your own ISP. Heck, it took several months of complaining before the phone company even fixed up the phone lines enough to carry DSL, and the modem connections could be disposed of. Life in rural Indiana has its troubles...