I think you skipped a few words there. Excessive bail paid by extortionate bail bonds firms give lazy and corrupt prosecutors a way to pressure poor people into pleading guilty to charges instead of contesting them in court. In theory, bail is a reasonable solution. It just doesn't always work out that way in practice, particularly in states that give bail bondsmen the right to arrest people for not paying minimum payments on those bonds.
That said, you're right that a debt doesn't compel someone, though it certainly gives them one more reason.:-)
Yeah, clearly, we need more than just one new consumer protection law. That said, this is already a problem even without hardware designed to prevent unauthorized use (e.g. Jibo). There's certainly reasonable grounds for demanding that any product selling for more than some trivial dollar amount should have a guaranteed period of support, with all of the cloud services, etc. prepaid in advance, and some reasonable surety bond that covers paying staff to continue operating that hardware, perform repairs, etc. for that guaranteed period.
It would also make sense for such a law to explicitly waive those requirements if the company agrees to maintain their server-side stack as fully open source software under a sufficiently consumer-friendly, OSI-approved license and if the company also provides a way for users to easily point their devices at an alternative server of their choosing.
That practice should already be prohibited under the right of first sale (though I will admit that there has been some erosion of that right, particularly with digital downloads). That said, it might still make sense to include some additional consumer protections in such a law, to prevent that sort of abuse.
This. I've been of the opinion for a while that any hardware costing more than $100 should be required by law to have a lock-out feature that prevents unauthorized use, in such a way that if the user locks himself/herself out, it can only be unlocked by the manufacturer after providing the original proof of purchase or some other plausible chain of custody from the original purchaser.
Therefore I support passive eugenics to reduce the dying.
You're saying you want to prevent kids who won't make it much past birth from being created? A better approach is to work towards gene therapy to correct those sorts of genetic defects — ideally, in one or both parents, to fix the recessive traits before they can combine to cause problems. Any strategy involving limiting reproduction is likely to inevitably degrade to the point where one group of people declares another group unfit to have kids, which I'm assuming is not your intent.
You can safely assume that anything I say publicly on the subject is mainly intended to encourage discussion, rather than to indicate any actual opinion on my part. I often argue positions that I don't hold, just to try to get people to explain *why* they feel a particular way, because I think that's the only way we can gain mutual understanding and appreciation between two political sides that seem to grow farther apart with every passing day.
It's actually possible you agree with me.
*shrugs* I don't really have a dog in the fight, so I don't have a strong opinion either way. Both sides have valid points (both morally and legally), which is why I think we need to take a step back and look for another option that would overcome both sides' objections.
Whether you support stricter abortion laws or oppose them, I think we can all agree that no matter which way the laws shift, everybody loses but the lawyers. There will always be people pushing for more interference and there will always be people pushing for less, and the matter will never be settled unless we can find a third option. Artificial wombs are already in animal testing, so that's not only possible, but likely to happen within our lifetimes. That's why I proposed that as a possible third option.
Contrary opinions are, of course welcome, as every new piece of information helps inform my worldview. If you know of a way to actually have a reversible abortion, I'd be curious to hear it, as at least in theory, the concept is fascinating.
Either way, I'd love to hear people's thoughts on the ethical implications of artificial incubation for non-viable fetuses, whether/when removal from that incubation is considered to be birth, abortion, or removal of end-of-life support, when/whether insurance should consider such intervention to be medically necessary, whether women should have the right to refuse such a transfer (on religious grounds, privacy grounds, or something else I haven't even thought of) if a doctor deems it medically necessary, or any of the myriad other complex ethical and moral issues involved.
However, the abortion "problem" is actually caused by raging ignorance. It's based on the delusion that a set of genes is somehow equivalent to a unique human being. This actually goes back to the ancient idea of a tiny homunculus contained within the sperm. In the more recent form of this delusion, they think the DNA of a fertilized egg is like a blueprint that completely describes a unique human being.
Actually, by your own argument, being able to "reverse" the abortion (presumably by recreating the DNA) would then not be a solution, because that would produce a different person than the aborted fetus would have. So I'm not entirely sure where you're going with that logic, but if it is an attempt at justifying abortion, it doesn't work very well. Or are you arguing that abortion should not be allowed, because even people whose genes are likely to create non-viable fetuses might turn out okay?
If everything goes well, the recipes may produce a human being (with all the associated inalienable rights), but not for a long time after fertilization produces the completed book of recipes. (Actually, about half of the recipe books aren't even sufficiently complete and 'good enough' to produce a human being.)
One part you're leaving out is that we aren't ever entirely sure which half. But either way, you're still killing something that has a 50/50 shot of eventually becoming a person, barring intervention, which is why a lot of people object to abortion. And either way, belittling people who disagree with abortion using phrases like "raging ignorance" does no one any good.
At this point, it is worth noting that significantly more Americans think abortion is morally wrong than think that it is morally acceptable. For most, arguments in favor of the right to choose are not based on moral acceptance of abortion, but rather stem predominantly from a strong desire to not force one's own morals and religious beliefs onto others, perhaps coupled with a recognition that in some cases, such as rape, incest, extreme fetal defects, etc., abortion is not morally cut-and-dried. And each of those arguments can, in turn, become a slippery slope in either direction. So you should be careful not to assume that a "right to choose" position reflects a belief in the morality of abortion, nor that a "right to life" position reflects a lack of understanding of science.
As I said earlier, IMO, at least among people who are aware of the relatively advanced state of artificial womb research, the only truly moral approach to the abortion debate is to focus on eliminating the false dichotomy between the right to choose and the right to live. Few would object to a ban on abortion if it were possible to trivially separate the fetus from the mother in a safe way that resulted in the mother no longer being in any way responsible for that fetus's well-being, because it would be almost inarguably morally wrong to abort a fetus, given such an alternative (with the possibility of debate about severe fetal defects, but even those problems can potentially be solved through careful gene splicing, making even that argument an entirely temporary one). And every bit of energy spent arguing over the current false dichotomy, every campaign dollar spent on it, etc. is time, energy, and money that could be spent towards an actual alternative to abortion that would make the entire argument moot.
Do you imagine that this principle shrinks or enlarges government as we presently know it?
Both, actually. Both sides are correct. The purpose of government is to serve the people by serving as a voice for those who have no power, protecting them from those who do, including protecting their rights when that second group happens to be the government itself. And that is a delicate balance at times.
On the one hand, there are entirely too many useless regulations in a lot of areas. And too many regulations are poorly thought out, resulting in unforeseen side effects, but never properly revisited and revised or rolled back. On the other hand, there are too many important things that the government should protect against, but doesn't. Of course, one reason government often fails to protect the powerless is that they are so busy chasing down minor things that shouldn't even be violations (e.g. the war on drugs), distracting their focus from things that actually do matter.
Large-scale deregulation is almost always harmful, in my experience. However, carefully eliminating regulations that no longer make sense can often create opportunities for new companies and services to come into existence that would not be practical under existing regulations. The main problem is not that deregulation is inherently bad, but rather that bad people tend to push for deregulation that is in their best interest. Government, therefore, needs to approach any discussion of deregulation carefully, objectively identifying who will benefit from the removal of each regulation, and ensuring that the public as a whole will actually benefit on the whole, eliminating only regulations that are impeding useful progress, and not regulations that are impeding progress towards harming the public.
The best way to ensure that deregulation happens in ways that are net-positive, in my opinion, is to change the way Congress operates entirely. I think that members of Congress should be required to live in their districts for a minimum of ten months out of the year while in office. They should meet to figure out committee assignments in person, and then go back to their district offices except on special occasions. All communication, all floor votes, all discussion of issues, etc. should be done electronically from within their districts. This has the benefit of making it easy for their constituents to lobby them and making it 535 times harder for people and companies who are not their constituents to lobby them in bulk. This approach also has the advantage of making it significantly harder for terrorists or foreign governments to significantly disrupt the government with a single attack.
As for the size of government, I think it needs to both shrink AND expand. I think government needs to be massively streamlined over the course of a couple of decades, using bonuses to push towards increased automation, and a combination of attrition and early retirement payouts to reduce unnecessary staffing — not in any specific areas, but rather globally, throughout the entire government, at literally every level.
By doing that, the government will have more resources to spend on more important things than B.S. administrative tasks, such as engaging in enforcement actions against individuals and businesses that violate the law egregiously, developing proposals for new laws that would prevent abuses that they become aware of, etc. Basically, we need fewer paper pushers and more public advocates (and I mean that in the loosest, most general use of the term, not in the sense of needing more government lawyers or ombudsmen, though perhaps we need more of those, too).
Regarding cleaning up our legal code, I think that new regulations should have sunset clauses, forcing every law to be revisited and updated based on current understanding of the nation's problems on an ongoing basis, possibly with a more lightweight means of making minor tweaks and re-passing the law without the
Here's one: "Why diversity of opinion is vital". Or a more sensationalist variant: "How the decline in tolerance of opposing viewpoints is killing us and our kittens"
I'd go the opposite direction. Rethinking the purpose of Government would start out by explaining that the sole purpose of government is to protect the powerless from the powerful, and how all legitimate government power stems from that singular purpose.
I would then touch briefly on how contrary political viewpoints are mainly caused by arguments over which powerless group to protect from which powerful group, would talk about how to tell the difference between situations where those disagreements are actually reasonable and where they are pure idiocy.
Finally, I would deep-dive into a couple of hot-button issues, and explain why the solution to disagreements is almost never "compromise", and almost always "throw out both viewpoints and start over".
For example, the issue of abortion is contentious solely because the two sides disagree about which powerless group to protect. One side wants to protect the fetus, which is powerless to protect itself against being aborted. The other side wants to protect the 11-year-old who got raped by a family member and will probably die giving birth. Any argument that either of those children shouldn't be protected should, in any sane universe, cause the politician to be defenestrated from a tenth-floor window, yet here we are, with politicians on both sides arguing exactly that.
So the solution, of course, is to throw away the entire framework for thinking about the problem. Start instead from the assumption that you can protect both, and then figure out how to design a system of laws that makes this possible.
The solution, of course, in case it isn't obvious, is to put our money where our mouths are. If we really care about stopping abortion, we should be spending more government research dollars on artificial womb research, with a goal of eliminating the false dichotomy between the right to life and the right to choose, and thus ending this useless, divisive, and generally hurtful debate once and for all.
Heck, just parachute it out of a plane at 30,000 feet. It will still be about as accurate as Amazon's van deliveries, at least if the giant pile of random free crap that I've gotten over the years is any indication. (BTW, anybody want a pair of women's exercise shorts?)
The only way to stop the MCAS from trimming down, is by cutting power to the electric trim. But now they still couldn't get the nose back up because the plane had been trimmed down and they couldn't trim it back up without the electric trim. Manual trim is too slow and possibly even blocked because of the high aerodynamic forces on the jack screw caused by combined down trim and up elevator.
Thanks. I read that detail a few minutes after I posted that comment. So it's more accurate to say that Boeing didn't make sure that the plane would actually be recoverable after following their shutdown procedure.
I find it absolutely appalling that Boeing never tested their procedure in a real aircraft under anything even approaching the trim state that the first doomed plane got into. Obviously they couldn't test a failing MCAS, but Boeing could have easily electrically commanded that much trim by hand and then tried to manually trim the aircraft back to a stable flight envelope. If they had tried that, they would have instantly recognized that it was not possible, reenabled the electric trim, landed the plane, and ordered the fleet to be grounded until the problem could be rectified. This effectively means Boeing didn't test the procedure at all; they did not even test things that would be relatively trivial and safe to test.
But even worse than the lack of testing is the realization that if there are still bugs in MCAS, the current hardware clearly does not provide any way to override MCAS safely. That would still be an unacceptable safety violation even if Boeing's hadn't already failed to adequately diagnose and provide workarounds for the MCAS problem, even if the design of MCAS weren't fundamentally flawed, etc.
IMO, no matter what changes Boeing makes to the software, the FAA should refuse to certify this aircraft until Boeing adds a separate MCAS Disable switch, and those of us in the flight path of major airports should use whatever legal avenues are at our disposal to ensure that these planes remain grounded until the problem is fixed in hardware. At this point, a software-only fix simply will not fly.
Airbus took corrective action by first adding a memorized procedure for the pilots (telling them to turn off two Air Data Computers), then correcting the software so it crosschecked the AOA probe data with airspeed, inertial reference and attitude (which is the fix that Boeing is implementing now).
It's beyond belief how Boeing could not only fail to learn from Airbus' mistakes, but actually do worse by relying on only a single sensor for something so critical (and making a crosscheck between the two available AOA probes an option for an extra price?!?!)
You and the GP still missed the critical difference, which was that Airbus at least made sure that shutting off the failing system actually shut it down. With this new info, I question whether the Max series will ever be flown again by U.S. carriers even if they somehow manage to get it re-certified.
If you want to cause self-driving carmageddon, attach a radio to a Raspberry Pi with four D cells, program it to transmit a signal that says "Speed limit 90 MPH", and toss it out on the side of the road right before a hairpin turn. Good freaking luck catching the person who does something like that.
Where do you get the key to sign the message ?
It's hard to answer that without knowing what the architecture would be. For any given architecture, there's a different answer. The most likely answer, though, is that someone borrows a device from an existing speed limit sign and copies the key out of it.
If we assume a nice architecture with each device having its own key with proper key signing from a root cert, that then becomes a trivial revocation problem, but only after they discover that it has been stolen, which doesn't happen until after the first car goes off the road and somebody analyzes the black box (or after the tenth car goes off the road and they do a really careful survey of the area near the road).
Unfortunately, the most realistic design for mass-manufactured devices like speed signs would be for the manufacturer to assign a single, standard key across all devices of a given model, which results in revoking all speed limit signs in the State of California and tens of thousands of man hours to physically remove all those transmitters (because they wouldn't be Internet-connected), rekey them, and replace them.
Or if we assume that the actual safety devices are connected to the Internet, then it becomes even more entertaining, because somebody could just crack one remotely and reprogram it, all while sitting safely in a non-extradition country.
And forging it will get you federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison time.
Only if they catch you.
I can take a radio out and start pretending to be an air traffic controller right now, but I don't and neither does anyone else, because to do so means going to prison. Are you going to propose that we remove radios from planes?
No, because if you tried that, they would trace the signal back to you and put you in jail. If you want to cause self-driving carmageddon, attach a radio to a Raspberry Pi with four D cells, program it to transmit a signal that says "Speed limit 90 MPH", and toss it out on the side of the road right before a hairpin turn. Good freaking luck catching the person who does something like that.
Also, UWB ranging can supposedly be made secure, so potentially the attacker would not be able to significantly forge his position.
You're still making the flawed assumption that the attacker is a "who" and not a "what". There's your first mistake. Start with the assumption that the cars are all connected to a cellular network, and can be hacked from anywhere on the globe. Now design a system in which cars are somehow supposed to make meaningful use of data sent by other similarly connected cars while ensuring that if one gets hacked and starts sending out a "Slow down here. There's a pothole" message every five seconds, it won't bring the entire traffic grid to its knees as the message gets passed on to car after car.
Any time you trust data from outside the vehicle, you run the risk of a malicious actor compromising the data provider and giving you garbage. That's why self-driving cars have to be able to handle nearly all driving without even so much as a map, or else they cannot ever be truly safe. This is not to say that they should be able to figure out where to go without a map, but they should not drive into buildings or drive off of cliffs or miss traffic lights or any of the other things that come from trusting outside data over what is immediately observed.
So if you have to rely on observation as your primary source of truth anyway, how much data can you realistically obtain from other cars that would be beneficial (I mean, of course, beyond what can already be determined from people's cell phones automatically checking in with Waze or whatever)? I can't think of anything, really.
It's a good start but we need communication protocols so cars can talk to one another and so traffic control devices can talk to them.
Actually, no, we really don't, despite the old guard car companies' near-constant insistence that it is somehow critical. There's no plausible design for an inter-car communication protocol that can't be forged, and if you can't trust the data coming in, you can't really do much useful with it, so what's the point of even sending it? It's not as if the difference between the few milliseconds it takes for a computer to recognize what's happening visually and the few nanoseconds it takes to decode the signal electronically is going to make any real difference anyway, in practice.
Also, traffic control devices had better be visually obvious enough that humans can recognize them, or else they won't work, and if they are, then computers don't need any additional electronic communication. It just introduces more opportunities for bugs and hacking.
We need uniform standards for road sensors, lane markers and broadcast obstruction warnings.
This, I agree with. Of course, making that happen around the world is about as likely as Tesla reaching level 5 autonomy in 2019.:-)
Toyota is handling the braking controls.
Ford is working on automatic rollover prevention.
GM is developing a new system to replace ignition controls.
What could go wrong?
Except doesn't Facebook already give you the option to pre-populate your friend list by simply letting it have access to your inbox?
There's a very big difference between making something an option and implying that it is the ONLY option, which is what this does. The fact that you can click a help button and only THEN be offered a non-invasive option for verifying your account is likely a violation of dozens of laws, both state and federal.
They're still mostly terrible compared with the greats. By far, the best-designed desktop I've seen has to be the PowerMac 7500/7600 series, and by a large margin. To access the motherboard, you press two latches up on the front and slide the top case forward. Then, you slide two small latches and the entire disk drive section folds outwards, and a flip-up plastic piece holds it up off the table so that it isn't unstable in that configuration. Then, you flip out another plastic cover above the PCI slots, and at that point basically the entire motherboard is exposed, with access to RAM, battery, slots, etc.
And removing the power supply is as simple as unplugging the cables, closing the hinged part, removing one easily accessed screw, sliding the power supply forward (IIRC) and lifting.
And the hard drives are on sleds that you can remove by... lifting, IIRC... and then sliding it forwards. And, of course, you can easily get to the cables with the drive section flipped up.
Add that all up, and it was the only non-laptop computer I've ever worked on regularly without getting a single cut from sharp-edged metal.
Don't get me wrong, later Macs were decent, and the G5 was almost at the same level design-wise, but if you've ever watched someone replace a G5 power supply, you understand why the 7500/7600 design wins hands down. And, of course, the twin turbojet engines.:-)
Can you actually read TFA? For France, "No of subjects with acknowledged burnout syndrome (yr)" and "No of compensated subjects (yr)" is just one single person for 2015.
France also gives you 11 public holidays per year plus a minimum of 25 additional vacation days per year, for a total of more than seven weeks off per year. So is it little wonder that they don't have the same burnout problems that we do here in the U.S., where the average high-tech worker gets only three weeks plus public holidays? Let me tell you, the difference between three weeks and five is night and day.
In the U.S., many of us use most of our days off just for Thanksgiving and Christmas through New Year's so that the flights don't cost a small fortune, and as a result, we don't get much of a vacation at all. Yet in spite of the overwhelming evidence that this is a problem, so many C*Os still wonder why employees burn out here. Truly, they have a dizzying intellect.
Not at all. It just requires you to stand up for yourself. The correct phrase is "Your failure to plan ahead is not my emergency." This is not a card you should pull out for minor stuff, like an extra hour here and there, because if you do, people will hate you. You'll just have to instinctively know the right time to pull out that card. And when you do, you'll be surprised how quickly others follow suit, because they will know that it is necessary.
The thing is, the worst they can do is fire you. And if they do, they just hasten the demise of the team, which will burn out even faster and more horribly with fewer people. So usually they won't do that. But if they do, then you should count yourself lucky, because it means you escaped from a toxic work environment relatively unscathed.
And if they don't, what will happen is that the manager who screwed up will be forced to stop lying to the person one level higher, and the right people will take the time to figure out a way to solve the problem without killing employee morale.
Either way, you win. The only way you lose is if you let an employer abuse you or those around you.
Also, the best way to prevent this is to nip it in the bud early. When you see others overworking themselves, don't be afraid to encourage them to relax and detach. Make sure they know that the world won't end if they take a vacation. After all, it only takes a couple of people doing that to make others feel guilty for not doing so, and over time, that can slowly grow into a situation where you or someone else might end up playing the "not my emergency" card.
But the most important thing of all is to be willing to say "no". When you realize that what you're being asked to do is infeasible in the time allotted, say so. Immediately. Don't let it go until the week before the deadline when everybody is panicking. And if you aren't sure, set a bunch of targets for when you think individual pieces will be ready, and the very first time you miss one of those deadlines, insist on a schedule review to pick what functionality to cut and/or to determine how many additional people to hire so that you can meet the final ship date.
If you do these things *consistently* and encourage other, newer, younger employees to do the same, you can cultivate an environment that doesn't have bulls**t schedule "crunches" and other artificial failed-management-induced nonsense. And you'll develop a reputation for getting things done reliably and on time, because you won't allow yourself to take on more than is possible. And as long as most workers are willing to do that, management will say, "You know what, we don't have the people to do this," and they'll hire more people.
It doesn't take unions. It just takes skilled people who know their own limits and encourage the next generation of workers to also know theirs. That, and recognizing when you've walked into a toxic nightmare and getting out, and telling others so that they don't make the same mistake.
I live in a no-disposable-plastic-bag city, and most people pay $1/ea for heavy duty plastic bags. Some I've used hundreds of times, and they're only showing minor wear. None have failed on me, ever.
I live in a no-disposable-bag state. And so far, I can count a single-digit number of times that I saw someone who brought his or her own bag. Single-digit. But I see people buying new reusable bags approximately every trip I take to any store. I'm sure there are a few people like you. But there are a lot more people who aren't. And now they're throwing away many times as much plastic.
People against this policy don't realize that they're fighting against having higher quality bags when shopping.
Oh, please, do tell me, someone who lives in a no-plastic-bag state, what I don't realize about the policy that I live with every day.
They're fighting against luxury, to defend the practice of putting one or two items in a cheap plastic bag.
Luxury is never having to worry about whether you brought enough bags with you, and whether those extra dollars you have to pay for bags mean that you don't have enough food to get you through the week. These policies are hardest on the working poor. Those people I see buying bags every day? They're not the software engineers. They're the people who clean the software engineers' houses. And for them, these policies are appalling. The left should have had an absolute coronary when the bag bans were proposed, but they were too busy drooling over a fictional belief that these bans will somehow save the planet to notice that their policies have basically turned into a poor tax.
Everything is packaged before it goes into the bag. There is no need for bags unless you have a quantity of items, in which case those disposable bags suck anyways! Are we really sure their primary purpose wasn't some sort of anti-turtle conspiracy? I mean, as bags, they suck.
So how many ply are the bags you use for trash? Do you reuse your non-disposable bags as trash bags? Because that's what we used to use for trash bags back before the ban. Now, we have to buy trash bags, and they're a LOT thicker. The people who support these laws simply have no clue how many secondary problems that these bans cause further down the line, particularly for the people who have the least ability to afford them. Thankfully, I don't fall into that category, but I'll still gladly fight for the people who are.
These days, it seems like all our governments are doing is solving artificial problems of their own creation. The government-paid garbage haulers cut down the number of people on garbage trucks down from two to one, and suddenly they litter more, and plastic bags start turning up in our streams. So how do they solve it? By properly staffing the garbage trucks? No. By fining the garbage haulers for not cleaning up after themselves? No. Instead of blaming the people who litter, they blame the litter itself, and ban the plastic bags.
So what happens as a result? Do people start bringing reusable bags? Maybe somebody does, but nearly every person I see in front of me at the grocery is buying bags, which suggests that we're really just using a LOT more oil for the same benefit. And although there are about half as many bags blowing around because of the heavier weight, the bags that are still blowing around are an order of magnitude thicker and take decades to photodegrade instead of disintegrating into tiny bits after a year, which means they create far more environmental contamination per bag.
So what's next? Obviously, they'll ban the reusable plastic bags and demand that everyone move to paper. And we'll be back to the 1970s, with bags tearing all the time, people complaining about cutting down too many trees for no reason, etc. And then they'll ban that, and folks will go back to the 1960s, and start getting things delivered to their houses. And when you add up how much oil gets consumed as a net result, well, to make a long story short, this is how the planet burns. All for want of a plastic bag.
No, these laws are just plain silly. They're a great example of environmentalism run amok, in which a bunch of people who don't have enough to do come up with hare-brained ideas and don't bother to do a proper cost-benefit analysis before ramming them down everybody's throats. Plastic bag bans are about as poorly thought out as laws can get. At least in theory, Tennessee has the right idea... but only if they also fix their garbage truck problem. I won't hold my breath on that last part.
I would argue that the Newton was pretty innovative.
A mere four years after GRiDPad, so innovative
As far as I can tell, the only thing they had in common was a stylus. But the stylus as a computing peripheral dates back to the late 1950s. It wasn't new when GRiDPad did it in 1989, much less two years earlier, when Apple's engineers came up with the idea for a stylus-driven tablet.
The GRiDPad was just a hardware platform — no operating system. It was essentially a 386 laptop without the keyboard, and with a stylus bolted on. It initially ran MS-DOS or Windows. A fairer comparison might have been GRiDPad with the PenPoint OS, but that didn't come out until 1991, and was developed by an entirely different company. It just happened to run on GRiDPad because it was a PC. So if anyone was really innovative there, IMO, it was AT&T.
That said, PenPoint seems like a very different user paradigm to me, with the whole "notebook" concept versus more of an app-like approach. (Mind you, I haven't spent significant time with either platform, so I could be wrong.) So arguing that Apple's design wasn't innovative seems odd to me, given that Apple's design is still in use almost three decades later, and PenPoint's isn't.
The other thing you're missing is that Newton was the first system in which a single company built an integrated solution that combined tablet hardware with an operating system that was actually designed for touchscreen devices from the ground up. It was also probably Apple's first foray into CPU design; Apple's engineering team worked with Acorn to tweak the design to meet their needs for the Newton, and shortly thereafter, ARM Holdings was spun off from the now-defunct Acorn as a joint venture involving Acorn, Apple, and VLSI. All those iOS and Android devices you're using now probably wouldn't be here if it weren't for Apple's work on the Newton, or at least would be running on very different hardware, because Acorn would have died, and ARM along with it.
So yeah, Apple Computer and Grid Systems Corporation were both trying to drive computing in roughly the same direction at about the same time. The difference is that the GRiDPad took a small incremental step towards the abyss, whereas Apple took a giant leap off the cliff. A lot of modern tablet and cell phone computing features made their first appearance way back then. And I'd say that Apple's role in that was pretty darn innovative.
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I think you skipped a few words there. Excessive bail paid by extortionate bail bonds firms give lazy and corrupt prosecutors a way to pressure poor people into pleading guilty to charges instead of contesting them in court. In theory, bail is a reasonable solution. It just doesn't always work out that way in practice, particularly in states that give bail bondsmen the right to arrest people for not paying minimum payments on those bonds.
That said, you're right that a debt doesn't compel someone, though it certainly gives them one more reason. :-)
Yeah, clearly, we need more than just one new consumer protection law. That said, this is already a problem even without hardware designed to prevent unauthorized use (e.g. Jibo). There's certainly reasonable grounds for demanding that any product selling for more than some trivial dollar amount should have a guaranteed period of support, with all of the cloud services, etc. prepaid in advance, and some reasonable surety bond that covers paying staff to continue operating that hardware, perform repairs, etc. for that guaranteed period.
It would also make sense for such a law to explicitly waive those requirements if the company agrees to maintain their server-side stack as fully open source software under a sufficiently consumer-friendly, OSI-approved license and if the company also provides a way for users to easily point their devices at an alternative server of their choosing.
That practice should already be prohibited under the right of first sale (though I will admit that there has been some erosion of that right, particularly with digital downloads). That said, it might still make sense to include some additional consumer protections in such a law, to prevent that sort of abuse.
This. I've been of the opinion for a while that any hardware costing more than $100 should be required by law to have a lock-out feature that prevents unauthorized use, in such a way that if the user locks himself/herself out, it can only be unlocked by the manufacturer after providing the original proof of purchase or some other plausible chain of custody from the original purchaser.
You're saying you want to prevent kids who won't make it much past birth from being created? A better approach is to work towards gene therapy to correct those sorts of genetic defects — ideally, in one or both parents, to fix the recessive traits before they can combine to cause problems. Any strategy involving limiting reproduction is likely to inevitably degrade to the point where one group of people declares another group unfit to have kids, which I'm assuming is not your intent.
FTFY.
You can safely assume that anything I say publicly on the subject is mainly intended to encourage discussion, rather than to indicate any actual opinion on my part. I often argue positions that I don't hold, just to try to get people to explain *why* they feel a particular way, because I think that's the only way we can gain mutual understanding and appreciation between two political sides that seem to grow farther apart with every passing day.
*shrugs* I don't really have a dog in the fight, so I don't have a strong opinion either way. Both sides have valid points (both morally and legally), which is why I think we need to take a step back and look for another option that would overcome both sides' objections.
Whether you support stricter abortion laws or oppose them, I think we can all agree that no matter which way the laws shift, everybody loses but the lawyers. There will always be people pushing for more interference and there will always be people pushing for less, and the matter will never be settled unless we can find a third option. Artificial wombs are already in animal testing, so that's not only possible, but likely to happen within our lifetimes. That's why I proposed that as a possible third option.
Contrary opinions are, of course welcome, as every new piece of information helps inform my worldview. If you know of a way to actually have a reversible abortion, I'd be curious to hear it, as at least in theory, the concept is fascinating.
Either way, I'd love to hear people's thoughts on the ethical implications of artificial incubation for non-viable fetuses, whether/when removal from that incubation is considered to be birth, abortion, or removal of end-of-life support, when/whether insurance should consider such intervention to be medically necessary, whether women should have the right to refuse such a transfer (on religious grounds, privacy grounds, or something else I haven't even thought of) if a doctor deems it medically necessary, or any of the myriad other complex ethical and moral issues involved.
Thoughts? Ideas?
If it is a glass door, you could arguably call it defenestration. :-)
Actually, by your own argument, being able to "reverse" the abortion (presumably by recreating the DNA) would then not be a solution, because that would produce a different person than the aborted fetus would have. So I'm not entirely sure where you're going with that logic, but if it is an attempt at justifying abortion, it doesn't work very well. Or are you arguing that abortion should not be allowed, because even people whose genes are likely to create non-viable fetuses might turn out okay?
One part you're leaving out is that we aren't ever entirely sure which half. But either way, you're still killing something that has a 50/50 shot of eventually becoming a person, barring intervention, which is why a lot of people object to abortion. And either way, belittling people who disagree with abortion using phrases like "raging ignorance" does no one any good.
At this point, it is worth noting that significantly more Americans think abortion is morally wrong than think that it is morally acceptable. For most, arguments in favor of the right to choose are not based on moral acceptance of abortion, but rather stem predominantly from a strong desire to not force one's own morals and religious beliefs onto others, perhaps coupled with a recognition that in some cases, such as rape, incest, extreme fetal defects, etc., abortion is not morally cut-and-dried. And each of those arguments can, in turn, become a slippery slope in either direction. So you should be careful not to assume that a "right to choose" position reflects a belief in the morality of abortion, nor that a "right to life" position reflects a lack of understanding of science.
As I said earlier, IMO, at least among people who are aware of the relatively advanced state of artificial womb research, the only truly moral approach to the abortion debate is to focus on eliminating the false dichotomy between the right to choose and the right to live. Few would object to a ban on abortion if it were possible to trivially separate the fetus from the mother in a safe way that resulted in the mother no longer being in any way responsible for that fetus's well-being, because it would be almost inarguably morally wrong to abort a fetus, given such an alternative (with the possibility of debate about severe fetal defects, but even those problems can potentially be solved through careful gene splicing, making even that argument an entirely temporary one). And every bit of energy spent arguing over the current false dichotomy, every campaign dollar spent on it, etc. is time, energy, and money that could be spent towards an actual alternative to abortion that would make the entire argument moot.
Both, actually. Both sides are correct. The purpose of government is to serve the people by serving as a voice for those who have no power, protecting them from those who do, including protecting their rights when that second group happens to be the government itself. And that is a delicate balance at times.
On the one hand, there are entirely too many useless regulations in a lot of areas. And too many regulations are poorly thought out, resulting in unforeseen side effects, but never properly revisited and revised or rolled back. On the other hand, there are too many important things that the government should protect against, but doesn't. Of course, one reason government often fails to protect the powerless is that they are so busy chasing down minor things that shouldn't even be violations (e.g. the war on drugs), distracting their focus from things that actually do matter.
Large-scale deregulation is almost always harmful, in my experience. However, carefully eliminating regulations that no longer make sense can often create opportunities for new companies and services to come into existence that would not be practical under existing regulations. The main problem is not that deregulation is inherently bad, but rather that bad people tend to push for deregulation that is in their best interest. Government, therefore, needs to approach any discussion of deregulation carefully, objectively identifying who will benefit from the removal of each regulation, and ensuring that the public as a whole will actually benefit on the whole, eliminating only regulations that are impeding useful progress, and not regulations that are impeding progress towards harming the public.
The best way to ensure that deregulation happens in ways that are net-positive, in my opinion, is to change the way Congress operates entirely. I think that members of Congress should be required to live in their districts for a minimum of ten months out of the year while in office. They should meet to figure out committee assignments in person, and then go back to their district offices except on special occasions. All communication, all floor votes, all discussion of issues, etc. should be done electronically from within their districts. This has the benefit of making it easy for their constituents to lobby them and making it 535 times harder for people and companies who are not their constituents to lobby them in bulk. This approach also has the advantage of making it significantly harder for terrorists or foreign governments to significantly disrupt the government with a single attack.
As for the size of government, I think it needs to both shrink AND expand. I think government needs to be massively streamlined over the course of a couple of decades, using bonuses to push towards increased automation, and a combination of attrition and early retirement payouts to reduce unnecessary staffing — not in any specific areas, but rather globally, throughout the entire government, at literally every level.
By doing that, the government will have more resources to spend on more important things than B.S. administrative tasks, such as engaging in enforcement actions against individuals and businesses that violate the law egregiously, developing proposals for new laws that would prevent abuses that they become aware of, etc. Basically, we need fewer paper pushers and more public advocates (and I mean that in the loosest, most general use of the term, not in the sense of needing more government lawyers or ombudsmen, though perhaps we need more of those, too).
Regarding cleaning up our legal code, I think that new regulations should have sunset clauses, forcing every law to be revisited and updated based on current understanding of the nation's problems on an ongoing basis, possibly with a more lightweight means of making minor tweaks and re-passing the law without the
I'd go the opposite direction. Rethinking the purpose of Government would start out by explaining that the sole purpose of government is to protect the powerless from the powerful, and how all legitimate government power stems from that singular purpose.
I would then touch briefly on how contrary political viewpoints are mainly caused by arguments over which powerless group to protect from which powerful group, would talk about how to tell the difference between situations where those disagreements are actually reasonable and where they are pure idiocy.
Finally, I would deep-dive into a couple of hot-button issues, and explain why the solution to disagreements is almost never "compromise", and almost always "throw out both viewpoints and start over".
For example, the issue of abortion is contentious solely because the two sides disagree about which powerless group to protect. One side wants to protect the fetus, which is powerless to protect itself against being aborted. The other side wants to protect the 11-year-old who got raped by a family member and will probably die giving birth. Any argument that either of those children shouldn't be protected should, in any sane universe, cause the politician to be defenestrated from a tenth-floor window, yet here we are, with politicians on both sides arguing exactly that.
So the solution, of course, is to throw away the entire framework for thinking about the problem. Start instead from the assumption that you can protect both, and then figure out how to design a system of laws that makes this possible.
The solution, of course, in case it isn't obvious, is to put our money where our mouths are. If we really care about stopping abortion, we should be spending more government research dollars on artificial womb research, with a goal of eliminating the false dichotomy between the right to life and the right to choose, and thus ending this useless, divisive, and generally hurtful debate once and for all.
Heck, just parachute it out of a plane at 30,000 feet. It will still be about as accurate as Amazon's van deliveries, at least if the giant pile of random free crap that I've gotten over the years is any indication. (BTW, anybody want a pair of women's exercise shorts?)
Thanks. I read that detail a few minutes after I posted that comment. So it's more accurate to say that Boeing didn't make sure that the plane would actually be recoverable after following their shutdown procedure.
I find it absolutely appalling that Boeing never tested their procedure in a real aircraft under anything even approaching the trim state that the first doomed plane got into. Obviously they couldn't test a failing MCAS, but Boeing could have easily electrically commanded that much trim by hand and then tried to manually trim the aircraft back to a stable flight envelope. If they had tried that, they would have instantly recognized that it was not possible, reenabled the electric trim, landed the plane, and ordered the fleet to be grounded until the problem could be rectified. This effectively means Boeing didn't test the procedure at all; they did not even test things that would be relatively trivial and safe to test.
But even worse than the lack of testing is the realization that if there are still bugs in MCAS, the current hardware clearly does not provide any way to override MCAS safely. That would still be an unacceptable safety violation even if Boeing's hadn't already failed to adequately diagnose and provide workarounds for the MCAS problem, even if the design of MCAS weren't fundamentally flawed, etc.
IMO, no matter what changes Boeing makes to the software, the FAA should refuse to certify this aircraft until Boeing adds a separate MCAS Disable switch, and those of us in the flight path of major airports should use whatever legal avenues are at our disposal to ensure that these planes remain grounded until the problem is fixed in hardware. At this point, a software-only fix simply will not fly.
You and the GP still missed the critical difference, which was that Airbus at least made sure that shutting off the failing system actually shut it down. With this new info, I question whether the Max series will ever be flown again by U.S. carriers even if they somehow manage to get it re-certified.
If you want to cause self-driving carmageddon, attach a radio to a Raspberry Pi with four D cells, program it to transmit a signal that says "Speed limit 90 MPH", and toss it out on the side of the road right before a hairpin turn. Good freaking luck catching the person who does something like that.
Where do you get the key to sign the message ?
It's hard to answer that without knowing what the architecture would be. For any given architecture, there's a different answer. The most likely answer, though, is that someone borrows a device from an existing speed limit sign and copies the key out of it.
If we assume a nice architecture with each device having its own key with proper key signing from a root cert, that then becomes a trivial revocation problem, but only after they discover that it has been stolen, which doesn't happen until after the first car goes off the road and somebody analyzes the black box (or after the tenth car goes off the road and they do a really careful survey of the area near the road).
Unfortunately, the most realistic design for mass-manufactured devices like speed signs would be for the manufacturer to assign a single, standard key across all devices of a given model, which results in revoking all speed limit signs in the State of California and tens of thousands of man hours to physically remove all those transmitters (because they wouldn't be Internet-connected), rekey them, and replace them.
Or if we assume that the actual safety devices are connected to the Internet, then it becomes even more entertaining, because somebody could just crack one remotely and reprogram it, all while sitting safely in a non-extradition country.
Only if they catch you.
No, because if you tried that, they would trace the signal back to you and put you in jail. If you want to cause self-driving carmageddon, attach a radio to a Raspberry Pi with four D cells, program it to transmit a signal that says "Speed limit 90 MPH", and toss it out on the side of the road right before a hairpin turn. Good freaking luck catching the person who does something like that.
You're still making the flawed assumption that the attacker is a "who" and not a "what". There's your first mistake. Start with the assumption that the cars are all connected to a cellular network, and can be hacked from anywhere on the globe. Now design a system in which cars are somehow supposed to make meaningful use of data sent by other similarly connected cars while ensuring that if one gets hacked and starts sending out a "Slow down here. There's a pothole" message every five seconds, it won't bring the entire traffic grid to its knees as the message gets passed on to car after car.
Any time you trust data from outside the vehicle, you run the risk of a malicious actor compromising the data provider and giving you garbage. That's why self-driving cars have to be able to handle nearly all driving without even so much as a map, or else they cannot ever be truly safe. This is not to say that they should be able to figure out where to go without a map, but they should not drive into buildings or drive off of cliffs or miss traffic lights or any of the other things that come from trusting outside data over what is immediately observed.
So if you have to rely on observation as your primary source of truth anyway, how much data can you realistically obtain from other cars that would be beneficial (I mean, of course, beyond what can already be determined from people's cell phones automatically checking in with Waze or whatever)? I can't think of anything, really.
Actually, no, we really don't, despite the old guard car companies' near-constant insistence that it is somehow critical. There's no plausible design for an inter-car communication protocol that can't be forged, and if you can't trust the data coming in, you can't really do much useful with it, so what's the point of even sending it? It's not as if the difference between the few milliseconds it takes for a computer to recognize what's happening visually and the few nanoseconds it takes to decode the signal electronically is going to make any real difference anyway, in practice.
Also, traffic control devices had better be visually obvious enough that humans can recognize them, or else they won't work, and if they are, then computers don't need any additional electronic communication. It just introduces more opportunities for bugs and hacking.
This, I agree with. Of course, making that happen around the world is about as likely as Tesla reaching level 5 autonomy in 2019. :-)
Toyota is handling the braking controls. Ford is working on automatic rollover prevention. GM is developing a new system to replace ignition controls. What could go wrong?
Also:
There's a very big difference between making something an option and implying that it is the ONLY option, which is what this does. The fact that you can click a help button and only THEN be offered a non-invasive option for verifying your account is likely a violation of dozens of laws, both state and federal.
Shut them down.
They're still mostly terrible compared with the greats. By far, the best-designed desktop I've seen has to be the PowerMac 7500/7600 series, and by a large margin. To access the motherboard, you press two latches up on the front and slide the top case forward. Then, you slide two small latches and the entire disk drive section folds outwards, and a flip-up plastic piece holds it up off the table so that it isn't unstable in that configuration. Then, you flip out another plastic cover above the PCI slots, and at that point basically the entire motherboard is exposed, with access to RAM, battery, slots, etc.
And removing the power supply is as simple as unplugging the cables, closing the hinged part, removing one easily accessed screw, sliding the power supply forward (IIRC) and lifting.
And the hard drives are on sleds that you can remove by... lifting, IIRC... and then sliding it forwards. And, of course, you can easily get to the cables with the drive section flipped up.
Add that all up, and it was the only non-laptop computer I've ever worked on regularly without getting a single cut from sharp-edged metal.
Don't get me wrong, later Macs were decent, and the G5 was almost at the same level design-wise, but if you've ever watched someone replace a G5 power supply, you understand why the 7500/7600 design wins hands down. And, of course, the twin turbojet engines. :-)
France also gives you 11 public holidays per year plus a minimum of 25 additional vacation days per year, for a total of more than seven weeks off per year. So is it little wonder that they don't have the same burnout problems that we do here in the U.S., where the average high-tech worker gets only three weeks plus public holidays? Let me tell you, the difference between three weeks and five is night and day.
In the U.S., many of us use most of our days off just for Thanksgiving and Christmas through New Year's so that the flights don't cost a small fortune, and as a result, we don't get much of a vacation at all. Yet in spite of the overwhelming evidence that this is a problem, so many C*Os still wonder why employees burn out here. Truly, they have a dizzying intellect.
Not at all. It just requires you to stand up for yourself. The correct phrase is "Your failure to plan ahead is not my emergency." This is not a card you should pull out for minor stuff, like an extra hour here and there, because if you do, people will hate you. You'll just have to instinctively know the right time to pull out that card. And when you do, you'll be surprised how quickly others follow suit, because they will know that it is necessary.
The thing is, the worst they can do is fire you. And if they do, they just hasten the demise of the team, which will burn out even faster and more horribly with fewer people. So usually they won't do that. But if they do, then you should count yourself lucky, because it means you escaped from a toxic work environment relatively unscathed.
And if they don't, what will happen is that the manager who screwed up will be forced to stop lying to the person one level higher, and the right people will take the time to figure out a way to solve the problem without killing employee morale.
Either way, you win. The only way you lose is if you let an employer abuse you or those around you.
Also, the best way to prevent this is to nip it in the bud early. When you see others overworking themselves, don't be afraid to encourage them to relax and detach. Make sure they know that the world won't end if they take a vacation. After all, it only takes a couple of people doing that to make others feel guilty for not doing so, and over time, that can slowly grow into a situation where you or someone else might end up playing the "not my emergency" card.
But the most important thing of all is to be willing to say "no". When you realize that what you're being asked to do is infeasible in the time allotted, say so. Immediately. Don't let it go until the week before the deadline when everybody is panicking. And if you aren't sure, set a bunch of targets for when you think individual pieces will be ready, and the very first time you miss one of those deadlines, insist on a schedule review to pick what functionality to cut and/or to determine how many additional people to hire so that you can meet the final ship date.
If you do these things *consistently* and encourage other, newer, younger employees to do the same, you can cultivate an environment that doesn't have bulls**t schedule "crunches" and other artificial failed-management-induced nonsense. And you'll develop a reputation for getting things done reliably and on time, because you won't allow yourself to take on more than is possible. And as long as most workers are willing to do that, management will say, "You know what, we don't have the people to do this," and they'll hire more people.
It doesn't take unions. It just takes skilled people who know their own limits and encourage the next generation of workers to also know theirs. That, and recognizing when you've walked into a toxic nightmare and getting out, and telling others so that they don't make the same mistake.
I live in a no-disposable-bag state. And so far, I can count a single-digit number of times that I saw someone who brought his or her own bag. Single-digit. But I see people buying new reusable bags approximately every trip I take to any store. I'm sure there are a few people like you. But there are a lot more people who aren't. And now they're throwing away many times as much plastic.
Oh, please, do tell me, someone who lives in a no-plastic-bag state, what I don't realize about the policy that I live with every day.
Luxury is never having to worry about whether you brought enough bags with you, and whether those extra dollars you have to pay for bags mean that you don't have enough food to get you through the week. These policies are hardest on the working poor. Those people I see buying bags every day? They're not the software engineers. They're the people who clean the software engineers' houses. And for them, these policies are appalling. The left should have had an absolute coronary when the bag bans were proposed, but they were too busy drooling over a fictional belief that these bans will somehow save the planet to notice that their policies have basically turned into a poor tax.
So how many ply are the bags you use for trash? Do you reuse your non-disposable bags as trash bags? Because that's what we used to use for trash bags back before the ban. Now, we have to buy trash bags, and they're a LOT thicker. The people who support these laws simply have no clue how many secondary problems that these bans cause further down the line, particularly for the people who have the least ability to afford them. Thankfully, I don't fall into that category, but I'll still gladly fight for the people who are.
These days, it seems like all our governments are doing is solving artificial problems of their own creation. The government-paid garbage haulers cut down the number of people on garbage trucks down from two to one, and suddenly they litter more, and plastic bags start turning up in our streams. So how do they solve it? By properly staffing the garbage trucks? No. By fining the garbage haulers for not cleaning up after themselves? No. Instead of blaming the people who litter, they blame the litter itself, and ban the plastic bags.
So what happens as a result? Do people start bringing reusable bags? Maybe somebody does, but nearly every person I see in front of me at the grocery is buying bags, which suggests that we're really just using a LOT more oil for the same benefit. And although there are about half as many bags blowing around because of the heavier weight, the bags that are still blowing around are an order of magnitude thicker and take decades to photodegrade instead of disintegrating into tiny bits after a year, which means they create far more environmental contamination per bag.
So what's next? Obviously, they'll ban the reusable plastic bags and demand that everyone move to paper. And we'll be back to the 1970s, with bags tearing all the time, people complaining about cutting down too many trees for no reason, etc. And then they'll ban that, and folks will go back to the 1960s, and start getting things delivered to their houses. And when you add up how much oil gets consumed as a net result, well, to make a long story short, this is how the planet burns. All for want of a plastic bag.
No, these laws are just plain silly. They're a great example of environmentalism run amok, in which a bunch of people who don't have enough to do come up with hare-brained ideas and don't bother to do a proper cost-benefit analysis before ramming them down everybody's throats. Plastic bag bans are about as poorly thought out as laws can get. At least in theory, Tennessee has the right idea... but only if they also fix their garbage truck problem. I won't hold my breath on that last part.
I would argue that the Newton was pretty innovative.
A mere four years after GRiDPad, so innovative
As far as I can tell, the only thing they had in common was a stylus. But the stylus as a computing peripheral dates back to the late 1950s. It wasn't new when GRiDPad did it in 1989, much less two years earlier, when Apple's engineers came up with the idea for a stylus-driven tablet.
The GRiDPad was just a hardware platform — no operating system. It was essentially a 386 laptop without the keyboard, and with a stylus bolted on. It initially ran MS-DOS or Windows. A fairer comparison might have been GRiDPad with the PenPoint OS, but that didn't come out until 1991, and was developed by an entirely different company. It just happened to run on GRiDPad because it was a PC. So if anyone was really innovative there, IMO, it was AT&T.
That said, PenPoint seems like a very different user paradigm to me, with the whole "notebook" concept versus more of an app-like approach. (Mind you, I haven't spent significant time with either platform, so I could be wrong.) So arguing that Apple's design wasn't innovative seems odd to me, given that Apple's design is still in use almost three decades later, and PenPoint's isn't.
The other thing you're missing is that Newton was the first system in which a single company built an integrated solution that combined tablet hardware with an operating system that was actually designed for touchscreen devices from the ground up. It was also probably Apple's first foray into CPU design; Apple's engineering team worked with Acorn to tweak the design to meet their needs for the Newton, and shortly thereafter, ARM Holdings was spun off from the now-defunct Acorn as a joint venture involving Acorn, Apple, and VLSI. All those iOS and Android devices you're using now probably wouldn't be here if it weren't for Apple's work on the Newton, or at least would be running on very different hardware, because Acorn would have died, and ARM along with it.
So yeah, Apple Computer and Grid Systems Corporation were both trying to drive computing in roughly the same direction at about the same time. The difference is that the GRiDPad took a small incremental step towards the abyss, whereas Apple took a giant leap off the cliff. A lot of modern tablet and cell phone computing features made their first appearance way back then. And I'd say that Apple's role in that was pretty darn innovative.