What do you think holding something for ransom is?
Holding "something" for ransom isn't blackmail if that something is tangible. Even holding "information" for ransom isn't blackmail. If I have the password and won't give it to you until you give me $1M that's still not blackmail. Blackmail is when you threaten to release information for a ransom. The biggest problem with blackmail (as opposed to holding a password or something tangible for ransom) is that once the other party has that information, giving them the money really doesn't resolve the situation as they can still release it at any time in the future and/or demand more money to maintain status quo. Promises to delete the data, give you the only copy, etc... are hard to enforce or verify.
The problem with this argument is Wittgenstein's beetle. I can't even be sure that you are sentient, aware, and able to understand; all I can do is observe your actions and if those actions seem to be consistent with you having what we typically label as a "mind," then I pretty much accept that you have a mind.
Just like you can ask someone questions about their beetle (how many eyes, how many legs, what color is it), you can ask people questions about their mind (how did you solve this problem, why do you consider this and this related, etc..) and thru introspection get a pretty good idea that things are similar. We also have things like MRIs now days that can also examine the inside of the minds and how it relates to thinking. By doing this we have discovered that we do all think similar in some areas but not all people do see the world exactly the same. People with autism and synesthesia are possible extreme examples of this but even introverts vs extroverts or other attributes of being human changes a person's perspective of the world.
We are currently very far away from having machines that can perform general actions consistent with having a mind
I think we would get there faster if we stopped trying to match human intelligence and instead started with less intelligent creatures like beetles or dogs. To match human intelligence, it's quicker in the short term to use expert systems and have machines do what they are good at which is memorization, search, and repetition, just like to get to the moon, it's quicker in the short term to climb a mountain. To match general intelligence, I think we need to figure out how an amoeba does it. A simple single cell has the intelligence to look for food and stay alive. If we figure that out then we can move on to simple multicellular organisms but we also might discover that our intelligence is an emergent property from our individual cells.
The Indian companies won't hire Americans. They only believe in Globalism when it benefits them.
Who says it wouldn't benefit them? If they can hire a convict cheaper than a local then they will likely do it. The only reason they wouldn't is because they are either more expensive or they don't work as hard or some other factor. If there was no such factor then the first company that did it is going to be able to underbid everyone else. This is the same failed logic that claims that companies pay women less. If you could pay women less across the board then someone would start a new company that hired only women and run everyone else out of business.
Which doesn't mean anything without a payload capacity. Many of those launches appear to be cubesats and other small payload launches. That being said, I did find that the ISS resupplies are about 2 ton so if the space elevator really did only have an equivalent fixed 2 ton capacity and a fixed 30 day roundtrip then it would be the equivalent of only 12 ISS resupply trips. Hopefully we could over time increase the number(frequency) of cars, the capacity of the cars, and the speed of the cars.
Space elevator can actually produce its own electricity (and a lot of surplus) from Earth's magnetic field, so the energy requirements are essentially null.
The problem is that any "crawler"/"lift" would be limited to maybe 300km/h speeds optimistically, and as result take a month to reach GEO. And due to tensile strength limitations, only one payload at a time could travel. So while yes, that would be extremely cheap in terms of $/ton to orbit, the throughput, tons/month to orbit would be extremely limited.
What is our current throughput? If you only count the cargo and not the rockets, I doubt all launches combined even average a single ton per month and at considerably higher cost per pound. I don't see this as a limiting factor as it's a lot better than we currently have. If it becomes a limiting factor then that means that it is constantly full and bringing in plenty of money so we need to just build a second or third one.
The bigger problem I see is the threat of damage and/or sabotage. Ideally you would have a system that could self-repair if it broke or at least safely descend and have a way to quickly be repaired and redeployed. If you had lightweight 1km segments that if disconnected could retract and safely float down that might be ideal. Even if you needed to use a rocket/shuttle to launch all the segments back to orbit and then lower them again with the space hook, this would be considerably cheaper than having to rebuild it from scratch if something happened to it. Not to mention the danger of a huge cable circling the globe.
"It's completely irresponsible to go into debt without any plan on how you're going to pay it back"
Maybe you are right but then, what would you call the one that lends money to somebody without a pay back plan?
Specially considering that most probably the lender knows to the petty detail what are the chances and income distributions for somebody majoring in hellenic studies while the 18 y.o. potential borrower does not.
I would agree completely except that a majority of student loans are funded by the federal government which doesn't differentiate between different majors. If student loans had actual real underwriters then they most likely would look at majors and have different risk profiles for different majors. Another gotcha is that because the federal government does not differentiate between majors, once you have a bachelor's degree, you are no longer eligible to get student loans to pursue a different bachelor's degree even if that second bachelor's degree would actually allow you to get a job.
You may hate liberal arts majors, who who do you think does the 3d modeling, scripting, and artwork for those games and movies you spend your spare time masturbating to?
Look around, that shit you buy, like your pants, wasn't designed by engineers; it was designed by liberal arts majors and implemented by engineers. Even your cheap-ass corelle plates.
You're talking about completely different worlds. Someone who goes into art and 3d modeling isn't the liberal arts majors that people are complaining about. Someone who loves to draw and comes up with a reasonable plan to make a living at it isn't the problem. Likewise for the person who wants to be a writer or a musician and has an actual plan. You can make a living as an artist, a musician, or a writer. The odds are probably much better that you can scrap by as a "starving artist" than it is that you can be a professional ball player. I have no problem with someone pursuing their dreams and either having a backup plan or knowing that they might not ever make a lot of money. The problem is when someone wracks up a huge amount of debt on a major without a clue what they are going to do with it after they graduate. If you have 80k dollars worth of debt and you either have no career plan or your only career plan is to paint what you want and hope people fall in love with your paintings then you have a problem. Likewise if you have 80k dollars worth of debt and you're planning on getting a job that pays only 20k per year. You should never go into debt for a degree that you have no idea how it will help you get a job and if you're going to go into debt on a long-shot major then you need to have a plan, a backup plan, and a backup to your backup plan on how you're actually going to pay your debt back. It's completely irresponsible to go into debt without any plan on how you're going to pay it back whether it is for a house, a car, or an education. And winning the lottery (or the virtual lottery) doesn't count.
They chose one of the more expensive commercially available battery technologies for their flow battery?
It's still a useful milestone. If you can up the theoretical limit with exotic materials then you can study it and try to replicate it with less exotic materials. Many of our advances in a variety of areas like semiconductors, batteries, superconductors, and a large host of other areas started out with exotics before figuring out how to replicate it with cheaper components. Granted your second argument is valid where with the exception of cars and mobile devices, energy density is usually not a huge concern, it's still nice to know what is possible and with a 10x density increase, the exotics have to be at least 10x more expensive for them not to be competitive.
Yeah, I think the tech community is mostly all in agreement with everyone else when they say "Wait...Yahoo is still around...and has email?"
I have a yahoo account. I use it for testing purposes when I want to send/receive from an "outside source" as all my other emails are with google. I also use yahoo as a backup in pidgin for IM because for some reason the great wall of china blocks google but doesn't block yahoo.
These days virtually no one from the janitor to the CEO expects to be at the same company long enough to care about the company itself.
At the company I work for, we have over 20 employees. We hire a couple new employees every year and very few have every left. Most have now been with us for 10-20 years and will most likely stay with us until they retire. Very few have worked for us for less than 5 years and the few that have left have generally left for things unrelated to the job like deciding to be a stay at home parent or moving their family out of state.
This is less tech and just the sorry state of physical and digital media. Why does amazon charge more for the physical than the digital on some movies and the reverse for other movies? While we're at it, how about a service that charges me $1/hour to watch movies and then gives me access to 100% of everything that was ever made. Yes, amazon prime and netflix are cheap but their selection is terrible. Amazon's paid side is better but some of the prices are completely out of line. Right now, the best selection would be netflix by mail but then you have the huge delay of actually mailing out the physical dvd. A good compromise would have been the "remote dvd player" services that loaded the dvd for you but they've unfortunately been killed.
YES, it is an issue and nobody even try to convince me otherwise!
I need (a) Steve back whole will kill these "compromises" immediately!
This was a ridiculous "compromise" to a problem that didn't need to exist. They should have just made the iphone slightly thicker and used that extra space to increase the battery size which would solve an ACTUAL problem of short battery life.
Seriously, touchpads are the worst pointing devices in the history of pointing devices. Every manufacturer claims to have a "better" touchpad, but they all just end up sucking in different ways. I typed my thesis on a 10+ year old IBM keyboard with a trackpoint on it, because I couldn't stand any other option that was on the market (and I paid dearly to acquire it!). My change would therefore be for more manufacturers to use trackpoint (or trackpoint-style) keyboards. Laptops, desktops, even foldable bluetooth keyboards for tablets. Give us something that works. We've seen other vendors (Dell, HP, Toshiba, and even Sony) use them in past years, it can be done again.
The problem with this comes down to personal preference. I can't stand trackpoints. I even prefer touchpads to mice. My current laptop actually has both a touchpad and a trackpoint and I never use the trackpoint because to me it's like trying to navigate with a joystick or controlling the mouse with arrow keys.
It shouldn't be if we're talking a US company selling to US consumers. Plenty of European countries have put restrictions on exporting of "lethal injection" drugs to other countries, it seems reasonable that we could similarly restrict the sell of off-label use of antibiotics by fining them or limiting their patent protection. Even though I wonder how many antibiotics are still under patent protection. Many of them should be generic by now. Doing something like fining them would actually hurt the real problem with antibiotics which is that there is no money in it. Once people start dying by the 10s or 100s of thousands per year then there will be plenty of money to develop new antibiotics. When only a handful of people both contract an antibiotic resistant strain AND live long enough to be able to buy your drug, there is not much incentive to develop new ones.
There is a rather simple way of unwinding this rather quickly. Currently health insurance is tax deductible if paid by the employer but many times is not tax deductible if paid by the employee. This needs to be immediately reversed. If employers had to pay taxes on health insurance and employees didn't then they would have a major incentive to switch this back around. This would help. The second thing that needs to happen is the "pool" shouldn't be tied to your employer at all. It makes no sense that switching from a job working for IBM to the equivalent job working for HP causes all your benefits, plans, deductibles, etc.. to change. It also makes no sense that my employer gets to pick my plan. The Affordable Care Act was supposed to get rid of preexisting conditions. If preexisting conditions go away then it should just be a matter of choosing a plan for your "risk class" based on age, etc... and get the employer completely out of it. The insurance companies aren't the real problem. If we can get the employer out of it then the government and insurance companies would both be much better behaved. Unfortunately, the biggest obstacle to this is perception as people are going to yell and scream that companies are just trying to save money if they drop their health insurance even if the companies give them a matching raise at the same time.
Last I checked Disney started putting light sabers into the hands and paws of their cartoon characters, bastardizing the whole crap. I sure as fuck don't want Lilo and Stitch running about spouting Jedi wisdom.
But I'm probably not the right kind of fan they're looking for. For example I'm not the kind that buys any and all merchandising rubbish they will near certainly crank out.
Exactly, you might go watch the movie and/or buy the dvd and then you are done. A family with kids will watch the movie, buy the dvd, buy a half dozen Disney Infinity characters, halloween costumes, toy lightsabers, themed lego sets, themed candy, etc... not to mention travel to Disney World, etc... The fans that Disney care about are the ones that they can get several hundred plus dollars from over the course of several years.
I think that's actually a fantastic idea, as long as the government agency responsible for truth in labeling actually has teeth. Otherwise we'll just continue living the situation where all companies lie 100% of the time, get caught 1% of the time, and in those cases get an actual punishment 0% of the time (other than a slap on the wrist).
If it's a third party certifying agency then the government agency wouldn't have to have teeth but rather the certifying agency could actually sue a company if they used their trademark without permission.
How are you going to throw the engineers in jail for manslaughter? Wouldn't they all just quit working on such projects?
FFS, the DRIVER IS RESPONSIBLE. This is the law already and it must always be the law if we value a free society.
Of course the driver is responsible. But the software is the driver, not the person who just happens to be seated in the front seat or do you want people to only be allowed to sit in the back seats to not be liable? For the most part, the driver is the one responsible not the owner of the car and that should be the way it stays. Passengers shouldn't be liable whether they are sitting in the back seat or whether they happen to be sitting in the seat location that traditionally was thought of as the "driver" seat.
Liability is the reason autonomous cars will not happen, at least in America.
Insurance companies have no problem taking on liability. Even if a customer has to buy their own insurance for their autonomous car they will have no problem doing it once the cars are deemed safer than humans. The insurance company will look at the number of miles driven and the number of accidents and plug it into their existing formulas just like they do when a new driver who has never driven buys insurance for the first time. There might be a slight premium at first but after a few years, each car manufacturer or even car model will have their own rates based on the number of accidents per year just like they do now for drivers.
Won't the issue then be: The FDA doesn't really give a crap about those who incorrectly label their food "Non-GMO"? What regulatory body enforces what "Non-GMO" means and what the punishment will be for mislabeling?
Both the FDA and the FTC should be able to regulate and prosecute deceptive labelling and "Truth in Advertising"
They still can't mark them "wild caught" unless they are. I wonder- do they still get labeled as "Atlantic Salmon"?
Not only can they not market them as "wild caught" but presumably they also can't market them as "GM free" unless it is true. Also, presumably, other companies are still allowed to market their product as "GM free" so from this point on if you care about this you should just assume that anything not explicitly labelled as "GM free" is probably not "GM free" or inversely, if you want GM fish then look for companies that do label their fish as such.
Does the food that you purchase identify the conglomerate which entirely owns the folksy subsidiary whos name appears on the product? Does it identify the wage scale of the workers who gathered, made, and/or packaged it? Do your canned foods even say "lined with BPA?"
You never had that impression. You're merely dragging out a trope of long-disproven economic theory in an attempt to require that a food product include a politically-driven disclosure that the producer does not wish to use.
You bring up a good point and it's impossible to include every thing that every person might want labelled. The best solution might be to just require truth in advertising. If a company thinks that it is good for sales to say that it is GM or is not GM then they should be able to label it as such so that if it matters to a consumer then they can look for the label. Then consumers can go after individual companies asking for labels like "GM free" or "BPA free" or "made in the USA". Don't require it but require it to be true if it's printed on the label. Something that I've considered for a while on the wage scale would be some sort of certifying agency that can certify companies to a certain depth. Something like "We only buy from companies paying more than $X and require everyone we purchase from to also only buy from companies paying more than $X" would give you a level 2 rating. If you only buy from companies with a level 2 rating then that would give you a level 3 rating, etc... Again, this shouldn't be something done by the government but something done by the manufacturer based on consumer demand.
When self driving cars are ubiquitous why would anyone buy and own them?
For the same reasons people currently buy and own non-self-driving cars even though taxis exist.
I own a car because it is cheaper and faster than a taxis. A self-driving car doesn't have to pay a driver to wait for a call, pick you up, wait on you to do your task, and take you home. With a self-driving car, I can page it as I'm getting dressed, it arrives as I walk out the front door, it drops me off at the front of the store, I page it again as I'm checking out, it picks me up at the front door again, and takes me home. Taxis are kindof like full service gas stations which have largely disappeared once people realized it was cheaper to fill up your own car. Take away the taxis driver and the cost of a taxis will be considerably less.
When cops hall your ass to jail after a cop see your car run over that kid and it keeps on going even trying bypass the cop road blocks as see that as some big that it must move out of the way of.
Why would the cop haul a person sitting in an automated car to jail for a hit and run? That's like sending the passengers of a bus to jail for a hit and run done by the bus driver. Sure, the passengers have an obligation to report it, but they aren't liable for anything themself. They are just the passenger.
To expand further. It is like if you are driving and you can safely avoid someone rear ending you. But you don't because they are liable.
Let's ignore the fact that you rarely are going to be able to see or respond to an accident that the computer doesn't also see and can respond to. Even ignoring this, this is no different than you sitting on a bus, a plane, or a subway and seeing an accident that can be avoided. As a passenger, even if you are in the 2nd row seat, are you really going to jump up and try to take the steering wheel from the bus driver? What are the odds that you can do this safely and prevent an accident where the bus driver who has driven thousands (or in the case of the eventual automated car millions) more miles that you can't.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that's exactly what it is.
What do you think holding something for ransom is?
Holding "something" for ransom isn't blackmail if that something is tangible. Even holding "information" for ransom isn't blackmail. If I have the password and won't give it to you until you give me $1M that's still not blackmail. Blackmail is when you threaten to release information for a ransom. The biggest problem with blackmail (as opposed to holding a password or something tangible for ransom) is that once the other party has that information, giving them the money really doesn't resolve the situation as they can still release it at any time in the future and/or demand more money to maintain status quo. Promises to delete the data, give you the only copy, etc... are hard to enforce or verify.
The problem with this argument is Wittgenstein's beetle. I can't even be sure that you are sentient, aware, and able to understand; all I can do is observe your actions and if those actions seem to be consistent with you having what we typically label as a "mind," then I pretty much accept that you have a mind.
Just like you can ask someone questions about their beetle (how many eyes, how many legs, what color is it), you can ask people questions about their mind (how did you solve this problem, why do you consider this and this related, etc..) and thru introspection get a pretty good idea that things are similar. We also have things like MRIs now days that can also examine the inside of the minds and how it relates to thinking. By doing this we have discovered that we do all think similar in some areas but not all people do see the world exactly the same. People with autism and synesthesia are possible extreme examples of this but even introverts vs extroverts or other attributes of being human changes a person's perspective of the world.
We are currently very far away from having machines that can perform general actions consistent with having a mind
I think we would get there faster if we stopped trying to match human intelligence and instead started with less intelligent creatures like beetles or dogs.
To match human intelligence, it's quicker in the short term to use expert systems and have machines do what they are good at which is memorization, search, and repetition, just like to get to the moon, it's quicker in the short term to climb a mountain.
To match general intelligence, I think we need to figure out how an amoeba does it. A simple single cell has the intelligence to look for food and stay alive. If we figure that out then we can move on to simple multicellular organisms but we also might discover that our intelligence is an emergent property from our individual cells.
The Indian companies won't hire Americans. They only believe in Globalism when it benefits them.
Who says it wouldn't benefit them? If they can hire a convict cheaper than a local then they will likely do it. The only reason they wouldn't is because they are either more expensive or they don't work as hard or some other factor. If there was no such factor then the first company that did it is going to be able to underbid everyone else. This is the same failed logic that claims that companies pay women less. If you could pay women less across the board then someone would start a new company that hired only women and run everyone else out of business.
There have been 69 successful launches this year:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Which doesn't mean anything without a payload capacity. Many of those launches appear to be cubesats and other small payload launches. That being said, I did find that the ISS resupplies are about 2 ton so if the space elevator really did only have an equivalent fixed 2 ton capacity and a fixed 30 day roundtrip then it would be the equivalent of only 12 ISS resupply trips. Hopefully we could over time increase the number(frequency) of cars, the capacity of the cars, and the speed of the cars.
Space elevator can actually produce its own electricity (and a lot of surplus) from Earth's magnetic field, so the energy requirements are essentially null.
The problem is that any "crawler"/"lift" would be limited to maybe 300km/h speeds optimistically, and as result take a month to reach GEO. And due to tensile strength limitations, only one payload at a time could travel. So while yes, that would be extremely cheap in terms of $/ton to orbit, the throughput, tons/month to orbit would be extremely limited.
What is our current throughput? If you only count the cargo and not the rockets, I doubt all launches combined even average a single ton per month and at considerably higher cost per pound. I don't see this as a limiting factor as it's a lot better than we currently have. If it becomes a limiting factor then that means that it is constantly full and bringing in plenty of money so we need to just build a second or third one.
The bigger problem I see is the threat of damage and/or sabotage. Ideally you would have a system that could self-repair if it broke or at least safely descend and have a way to quickly be repaired and redeployed. If you had lightweight 1km segments that if disconnected could retract and safely float down that might be ideal. Even if you needed to use a rocket/shuttle to launch all the segments back to orbit and then lower them again with the space hook, this would be considerably cheaper than having to rebuild it from scratch if something happened to it. Not to mention the danger of a huge cable circling the globe.
"It's completely irresponsible to go into debt without any plan on how you're going to pay it back"
Maybe you are right but then, what would you call the one that lends money to somebody without a pay back plan?
Specially considering that most probably the lender knows to the petty detail what are the chances and income distributions for somebody majoring in hellenic studies while the 18 y.o. potential borrower does not.
I would agree completely except that a majority of student loans are funded by the federal government which doesn't differentiate between different majors. If student loans had actual real underwriters then they most likely would look at majors and have different risk profiles for different majors. Another gotcha is that because the federal government does not differentiate between majors, once you have a bachelor's degree, you are no longer eligible to get student loans to pursue a different bachelor's degree even if that second bachelor's degree would actually allow you to get a job.
You may hate liberal arts majors, who who do you think does the 3d modeling, scripting, and artwork for those games and movies you spend your spare time masturbating to?
Look around, that shit you buy, like your pants, wasn't designed by engineers; it was designed by liberal arts majors and implemented by engineers. Even your cheap-ass corelle plates.
You're talking about completely different worlds. Someone who goes into art and 3d modeling isn't the liberal arts majors that people are complaining about. Someone who loves to draw and comes up with a reasonable plan to make a living at it isn't the problem. Likewise for the person who wants to be a writer or a musician and has an actual plan. You can make a living as an artist, a musician, or a writer. The odds are probably much better that you can scrap by as a "starving artist" than it is that you can be a professional ball player. I have no problem with someone pursuing their dreams and either having a backup plan or knowing that they might not ever make a lot of money. The problem is when someone wracks up a huge amount of debt on a major without a clue what they are going to do with it after they graduate. If you have 80k dollars worth of debt and you either have no career plan or your only career plan is to paint what you want and hope people fall in love with your paintings then you have a problem. Likewise if you have 80k dollars worth of debt and you're planning on getting a job that pays only 20k per year. You should never go into debt for a degree that you have no idea how it will help you get a job and if you're going to go into debt on a long-shot major then you need to have a plan, a backup plan, and a backup to your backup plan on how you're actually going to pay your debt back. It's completely irresponsible to go into debt without any plan on how you're going to pay it back whether it is for a house, a car, or an education. And winning the lottery (or the virtual lottery) doesn't count.
They chose one of the more expensive commercially available battery technologies for their flow battery?
It's still a useful milestone. If you can up the theoretical limit with exotic materials then you can study it and try to replicate it with less exotic materials. Many of our advances in a variety of areas like semiconductors, batteries, superconductors, and a large host of other areas started out with exotics before figuring out how to replicate it with cheaper components. Granted your second argument is valid where with the exception of cars and mobile devices, energy density is usually not a huge concern, it's still nice to know what is possible and with a 10x density increase, the exotics have to be at least 10x more expensive for them not to be competitive.
Yeah, I think the tech community is mostly all in agreement with everyone else when they say "Wait...Yahoo is still around...and has email?"
I have a yahoo account. I use it for testing purposes when I want to send/receive from an "outside source" as all my other emails are with google.
I also use yahoo as a backup in pidgin for IM because for some reason the great wall of china blocks google but doesn't block yahoo.
These days virtually no one from the janitor to the CEO expects to be at the same company long enough to care about the company itself.
At the company I work for, we have over 20 employees. We hire a couple new employees every year and very few have every left. Most have now been with us for 10-20 years and will most likely stay with us until they retire. Very few have worked for us for less than 5 years and the few that have left have generally left for things unrelated to the job like deciding to be a stay at home parent or moving their family out of state.
This is less tech and just the sorry state of physical and digital media.
Why does amazon charge more for the physical than the digital on some movies and the reverse for other movies?
While we're at it, how about a service that charges me $1/hour to watch movies and then gives me access to 100% of everything that was ever made.
Yes, amazon prime and netflix are cheap but their selection is terrible. Amazon's paid side is better but some of the prices are completely out of line.
Right now, the best selection would be netflix by mail but then you have the huge delay of actually mailing out the physical dvd.
A good compromise would have been the "remote dvd player" services that loaded the dvd for you but they've unfortunately been killed.
YES, it is an issue and nobody even try to convince me otherwise!
I need (a) Steve back whole will kill these "compromises" immediately!
This was a ridiculous "compromise" to a problem that didn't need to exist. They should have just made the iphone slightly thicker and used that extra space to increase the battery size which would solve an ACTUAL problem of short battery life.
Seriously, touchpads are the worst pointing devices in the history of pointing devices. Every manufacturer claims to have a "better" touchpad, but they all just end up sucking in different ways. I typed my thesis on a 10+ year old IBM keyboard with a trackpoint on it, because I couldn't stand any other option that was on the market (and I paid dearly to acquire it!).
My change would therefore be for more manufacturers to use trackpoint (or trackpoint-style) keyboards. Laptops, desktops, even foldable bluetooth keyboards for tablets. Give us something that works. We've seen other vendors (Dell, HP, Toshiba, and even Sony) use them in past years, it can be done again.
The problem with this comes down to personal preference. I can't stand trackpoints. I even prefer touchpads to mice. My current laptop actually has both a touchpad and a trackpoint and I never use the trackpoint because to me it's like trying to navigate with a joystick or controlling the mouse with arrow keys.
Wouldn't that be forbidden by the TPP?
It shouldn't be if we're talking a US company selling to US consumers. Plenty of European countries have put restrictions on exporting of "lethal injection" drugs to other countries, it seems reasonable that we could similarly restrict the sell of off-label use of antibiotics by fining them or limiting their patent protection. Even though I wonder how many antibiotics are still under patent protection. Many of them should be generic by now. Doing something like fining them would actually hurt the real problem with antibiotics which is that there is no money in it. Once people start dying by the 10s or 100s of thousands per year then there will be plenty of money to develop new antibiotics. When only a handful of people both contract an antibiotic resistant strain AND live long enough to be able to buy your drug, there is not much incentive to develop new ones.
There is a rather simple way of unwinding this rather quickly. Currently health insurance is tax deductible if paid by the employer but many times is not tax deductible if paid by the employee. This needs to be immediately reversed. If employers had to pay taxes on health insurance and employees didn't then they would have a major incentive to switch this back around. This would help. The second thing that needs to happen is the "pool" shouldn't be tied to your employer at all. It makes no sense that switching from a job working for IBM to the equivalent job working for HP causes all your benefits, plans, deductibles, etc.. to change. It also makes no sense that my employer gets to pick my plan. The Affordable Care Act was supposed to get rid of preexisting conditions. If preexisting conditions go away then it should just be a matter of choosing a plan for your "risk class" based on age, etc... and get the employer completely out of it. The insurance companies aren't the real problem. If we can get the employer out of it then the government and insurance companies would both be much better behaved. Unfortunately, the biggest obstacle to this is perception as people are going to yell and scream that companies are just trying to save money if they drop their health insurance even if the companies give them a matching raise at the same time.
Last I checked Disney started putting light sabers into the hands and paws of their cartoon characters, bastardizing the whole crap. I sure as fuck don't want Lilo and Stitch running about spouting Jedi wisdom.
But I'm probably not the right kind of fan they're looking for. For example I'm not the kind that buys any and all merchandising rubbish they will near certainly crank out.
Exactly, you might go watch the movie and/or buy the dvd and then you are done. A family with kids will watch the movie, buy the dvd, buy a half dozen Disney Infinity characters, halloween costumes, toy lightsabers, themed lego sets, themed candy, etc... not to mention travel to Disney World, etc... The fans that Disney care about are the ones that they can get several hundred plus dollars from over the course of several years.
I think that's actually a fantastic idea, as long as the government agency responsible for truth in labeling actually has teeth. Otherwise we'll just continue living the situation where all companies lie 100% of the time, get caught 1% of the time, and in those cases get an actual punishment 0% of the time (other than a slap on the wrist).
If it's a third party certifying agency then the government agency wouldn't have to have teeth but rather the certifying agency could actually sue a company if they used their trademark without permission.
How are you going to throw the engineers in jail for manslaughter? Wouldn't they all just quit working on such projects?
FFS, the DRIVER IS RESPONSIBLE. This is the law already and it must always be the law if we value a free society.
Of course the driver is responsible. But the software is the driver, not the person who just happens to be seated in the front seat or do you want people to only be allowed to sit in the back seats to not be liable? For the most part, the driver is the one responsible not the owner of the car and that should be the way it stays. Passengers shouldn't be liable whether they are sitting in the back seat or whether they happen to be sitting in the seat location that traditionally was thought of as the "driver" seat.
Liability is the reason autonomous cars will not happen, at least in America.
Insurance companies have no problem taking on liability. Even if a customer has to buy their own insurance for their autonomous car they will have no problem doing it once the cars are deemed safer than humans. The insurance company will look at the number of miles driven and the number of accidents and plug it into their existing formulas just like they do when a new driver who has never driven buys insurance for the first time. There might be a slight premium at first but after a few years, each car manufacturer or even car model will have their own rates based on the number of accidents per year just like they do now for drivers.
Won't the issue then be: The FDA doesn't really give a crap about those who incorrectly label their food "Non-GMO"? What regulatory body enforces what "Non-GMO" means and what the punishment will be for mislabeling?
Both the FDA and the FTC should be able to regulate and prosecute deceptive labelling and "Truth in Advertising"
They still can't mark them "wild caught" unless they are. I wonder- do they still get labeled as "Atlantic Salmon"?
Not only can they not market them as "wild caught" but presumably they also can't market them as "GM free" unless it is true. Also, presumably, other companies are still allowed to market their product as "GM free" so from this point on if you care about this you should just assume that anything not explicitly labelled as "GM free" is probably not "GM free" or inversely, if you want GM fish then look for companies that do label their fish as such.
Does the food that you purchase identify the conglomerate which entirely owns the folksy subsidiary whos name appears on the product? Does it identify the wage scale of the workers who gathered, made, and/or packaged it? Do your canned foods even say "lined with BPA?"
You never had that impression. You're merely dragging out a trope of long-disproven economic theory in an attempt to require that a food product include a politically-driven disclosure that the producer does not wish to use.
You bring up a good point and it's impossible to include every thing that every person might want labelled. The best solution might be to just require truth in advertising. If a company thinks that it is good for sales to say that it is GM or is not GM then they should be able to label it as such so that if it matters to a consumer then they can look for the label. Then consumers can go after individual companies asking for labels like "GM free" or "BPA free" or "made in the USA". Don't require it but require it to be true if it's printed on the label. Something that I've considered for a while on the wage scale would be some sort of certifying agency that can certify companies to a certain depth. Something like "We only buy from companies paying more than $X and require everyone we purchase from to also only buy from companies paying more than $X" would give you a level 2 rating. If you only buy from companies with a level 2 rating then that would give you a level 3 rating, etc... Again, this shouldn't be something done by the government but something done by the manufacturer based on consumer demand.
For the same reasons people currently buy and own non-self-driving cars even though taxis exist.
I own a car because it is cheaper and faster than a taxis. A self-driving car doesn't have to pay a driver to wait for a call, pick you up, wait on you to do your task, and take you home. With a self-driving car, I can page it as I'm getting dressed, it arrives as I walk out the front door, it drops me off at the front of the store, I page it again as I'm checking out, it picks me up at the front door again, and takes me home. Taxis are kindof like full service gas stations which have largely disappeared once people realized it was cheaper to fill up your own car. Take away the taxis driver and the cost of a taxis will be considerably less.
When cops hall your ass to jail after a cop see your car run over that kid and it keeps on going even trying bypass the cop road blocks as see that as some big that it must move out of the way of.
Why would the cop haul a person sitting in an automated car to jail for a hit and run? That's like sending the passengers of a bus to jail for a hit and run done by the bus driver. Sure, the passengers have an obligation to report it, but they aren't liable for anything themself. They are just the passenger.
To expand further. It is like if you are driving and you can safely avoid someone rear ending you. But you don't because they are liable.
Let's ignore the fact that you rarely are going to be able to see or respond to an accident that the computer doesn't also see and can respond to. Even ignoring this, this is no different than you sitting on a bus, a plane, or a subway and seeing an accident that can be avoided. As a passenger, even if you are in the 2nd row seat, are you really going to jump up and try to take the steering wheel from the bus driver? What are the odds that you can do this safely and prevent an accident where the bus driver who has driven thousands (or in the case of the eventual automated car millions) more miles that you can't.