Ironically, rather than leading to a utopia of leisure, improvements in robotics might actually lead to extinction(which, if so, we would richly deserve).
With every new advance toward human-replacement, the optimists would say "Well, the displaced can be retrained for the new careers opened up by this technology, and just look at the productivity!". Each time, this will be only partially true.
Humans will be replaced at different rates, of course: certain relatively unskilled workers were replaced by technology back when "computers" where some sort of steam engine that that crank Babbage was working on. It is only mildly sci-fi to suggest, though, that even fairly well compensated positions like lawyers, financial services types, and so on will eventually feel the squeeze as natural-language processing gets better.
The last to go might actually be the(by this time working for just-above-starvation wages) tradesmen: mechanics, plumbers, that sort of thing. Something like natural language processing is wildly expensive to solve; but, once solved, it's just software, you can spawn as many instances as you need. Human-dexterity robots, on the other hand, are highly complex mechanical devices, likely to remain somewhat expensive, per unit, even as technology improves. Unskilled humans being 'remote controlled' either by earpieces and VR overlays or by electrode implants, might actually remain cheaper for a long while...
It makes an extremely convenient threat to keep the tech department in line...
"Hey you, yeah, you with the blackberry and the bad attitude: I want enterprise-level uptime for public-sector prices or I'm going to roll out a one-laptop-per-pupil program whose success depends on 100% uptime. Oh, and because they are shiny and I hate you, we are going with the unibody macbooks whose keyboards are secured by 56 tiny little screws. You know how much kids like tearing keys off school keyboards, don't you?"
Quite likely so, given that the Xoom is even more expensive, and has no clearer relevance to the educational mission of the school(along with the general geek distaste for being ordered to buy a specific gadget, rather than the one they want...).
There is a long history of these "school decides to standardize all pupils on $TECH_TOY because it is The Future of Education(tm)" stories. They generally starkly underperform expectations.
It sure does beat lugging around those old textbooks. Unless you fancy being able to mark them up, re-sell them, or refer to them in 2020...
The professors will probably adore the levels of class participation and attention enabled by everyone having a school-approved internet browsing/PMP device...
My criticism of this scheme isn't iPad specific(though the education sector often does leap on Apple-related tech crazes); but more general:
We still don't have something that can replace a notepad and a mechanical pencil when it comes to ease and unobtrusiveness of taking notes(keyboards are faster for straight text, and produce better final copy; but are a bit clicky for class and, unless you are a LaTeX god, slower for equations, diagrams, and similar). Somewhat similarly, your basic dead tree actually works pretty well for textbook-style distribution. Durable, can be marked according to personal preference, can be held onto or resold at will, printing them doesn't actually cost all that much.
Ebooks have some compelling convenience advantages, particularly for light reading(casually pick up a novel over whispernet, etc.) or for technical reference(grep obscure_command_foo...); but they aren't going to do much about the central complaints with textbooks: Absurd prices and constant version churn(in fact, with DRM, they likely make those worse). Unless this "Hooray! Tablets!!!!" scheme is integrated into some way of actually re-making how the course is taught, I predict no savings, major distraction, and people accustomed to scribbling in marginal notes learning exactly why UI elements in capacitive touchscreen systems are as large as they are...
On the plus side, Melbourne College's Angry Birds team will be a Division 1 powerhouse....
Is the Turkish government merely twitchy about precious, precious "IP", or is this somewhat more like China, where external web services get blocked more or less at random in no small part because the government wishes to encourage use of some local competitor?
If the former, this seems like it could be counterproductive: beyond any considerations of "justice" or "proportionality", the (cynical, pragmatic) justification for targeted enforcement is that it keeps average-joe-on-the-street on your side, rather than making him side with whatever malefactors you are cracking down on. Upsetting 600,000 people(and encouraging them to learn about proxies and such) is a questionable move.
Unless MS is playing their classic "attempt to scuttle competitor's existing product with reports of what they will have Real Soon Now(tm)" game, or isn't going about this very cleverly(either is definitely possible); I would expect any push into non-x86 architecture to make heavy use of their.NET CLR stuff.
Virtualizing any classic win32 x86 binaries on ARM is going to suck so much, in terms of performance, that they might as well not bother. By the time Windows 8 actually makes it out the door, Intel will have something that may not beat ARM in the low-power game; but will curb-stomp ARM-emulating-x86. However, if Microsoft has an ARM CLR up and going, all the outfits that have been drinking the kool-aid for the past few years should need to do little more than drop their x86 installer packages in order to be fully compatible(and even if some x86 installshield package needs to be emulated long enough for it to copy over the.NET components, that won't be the end of the world)...
I strongly suspect that(in addition to the usual "people will tell annoying pollsters whatever they want to hear" effect), the OEM/ODM guys are not going to be taking any major risks on this one:
There is already a reasonably steady market for ARM-based android widgets, NAS devices, etc, etc. Microsoft will, presumably, have their own set of special requirements(as with tablet PCs needing a ctrl+alt+del key) and some sort of minimum spec floor; but the basic nature of the ARM SoC market means that they won't really have an option other than choosing one or more, likely the higher specced ones, as blessed platforms. At that point, producing a "Windows 8" variant will likely require nothing much more than a button layout and bootloader change...
"Social Networking" certainly, by design, involves some disclosure of certain information to certain people. That's the whole point. However, there are more and less privacy-hostile mechanisms for achieving the ends that users typically want.
When it comes to Facebook's arrangement of privacy-related options, settings, and design, they are either actively malicious or so incompetent that their handling is indistinguishable from malice.
Given that humans have been making assorted flavors of social noise since well before the invention of currency(the instruments are often made out of biological materials, so archeological evidence is a bit patchy; but 35,000-40,000 years has been confirmed) it isn't at all clear that society requires a music industry...
Now, if you want high production values superstar stuff, you can really only do that on an industry basis. If, however, you don't mind the work of people who are doing it recreationally, or for social standing, or in live gigs(freestanding, or paid by social establishments to add atmosphere and drive patronage) the supply of music is very likely to continue without any industry. It just seems to be something that humans do.
I'd be very careful to see how it treats "uploading". Unless it very specifically protects that as well, it essentially changes nothing for any user of common p2p setups. If it doesn't do that, it is basically a scam, because the right to download without legal threat is rather useless if nobody has the right to upload without legal threat. Everybody already has the right to purchase downloads from entities that have licensed the music in question, so paying more for that is absurd, and a p2p setup that consists entirely of leeches isn't all that useful.
As an Option, such an offer would be relatively attractive(the history of IP, particularly culture-related, contains a fair few instances of compulsory licensing along standardized lines). If, however, it isn't optional, it's just a screwjob, amounting to the assumption that 100% of internet lines are used for "piracy" and that musicians deserve the right to tax everybody.
(The slightly subtler thing to also watch out for, of course, is the downloading/uploading distinction: if this fee only protects you from copyright infringement suits for downloading, the labels are still entirely free to harry the uploaders, without which the right to download is rather useless. Long term, you could then end up paying $10/month by compulsion and paying another fee to some entity that pays yet more to serve as a download provider without legal harassment. Worst of both worlds. If you are going to establish a tax on the premise that "pirate" mode distribution is the inevitable future, that is one thing. If, however, uploading is unprotected, that basically still gives you enough leverage to stomp on bittorrent users and any distributors who aren't also paying you royalties, which would basically mean that everybody is paying an extra $10/month just to be able to use the existing legally licensed online stores. Wow, what a deal...)
If you enjoyed substantial popular support in said room, had recently captured a variety of arms caches, and were thus far holding the military of the existing regime at bay, while said regime takes a substantial battering in world opinion, it would in fact mean just as much...
Dirty little not-really-secret is, virtually all declarations of nationhood are legally risible. Some were legally risible and supported by armed force and resources. Others were just risible all around.
1. The basic design of wheeled vehicles is already sewn up, with continued incremental advances being made in response to private sector requirements. No need for DARPA to care about the field. If they want a wheeled chassis, they'll just send somebody down to the dealership(this is, in fact, pretty much how their autonomous navigation challenge goes: everybody plunks their novel sensor/navigation package on top of a commercial vehicle body).
2. Especially in small vehicles(where you don't have the option of just making the wheel so big that obstacles can be rolled over) wheels degrade rapidly in performance as the environment becomes more hostile. I'm assuming that they want something where little tasks like "traverse the field of unstable rubble and mangled rebar that is a concrete building after an airstrike at alarmingly high speed, jump through a first-floor window and kill everyone inside" are considered routine...
Jay Gould is said to have remarked "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half."(unclear if he actually did; but it is a punchy line...)
With today's advances in robotics, we are likely to see an even more efficient solution to the problems of displaced workers and productive capacity in excess of purchasing power: Humans who are replaced by robots can simply be massacred by robotic-ally manufactured robots. Sure, this will eventually result in the replacement of the human race by a densely packed sphere of computronium around the NYSE, and a bunch of relentless hunter-killer drones; but how else are we going to achieve an infinite per-capita GDP?
Why stop at the level of cores? Only grandmas and mutual funds let their algorithms languish in L3 cache, and Goldman has a 99 year lease on L1; but for just a little extra a few million gates of L2 can be yours...
That's the problem with a whole raft of modern technologies: They Just Don't Work without(entirely incidentally) generating a lot of potentially useful(or dangerous) data.
It would be pretty difficult to connect a call if you didn't know that handset A, in close vicinity of tower B, wants to talk to handset C in close vicinity of tower D. With non latency-critical applications you can add a lot of proxies(tor style) to make following the trail slightly more difficult; but that doesn't really work for cell service.
Credit cards and banking are analogous(though there, at least, there are some theoretically viable crypto-trick alternatives...).
functioning cell system "tracks" users at least to the granularity of "which tower is the handset talking to". That's the problem. Historically, surveillance was an active process, distinct from the productive systems of society, and often pretty expensive. Increasingly, it simply consists of gathering the data that must be generated just to get the packets from point A to point B. Still not free; but surveillance is, increasingly, not the act of Watching; but simply the act of Remembering.
I am, of course, totally unsurprised that China would adopt such a scheme broadly and unapologetically; but it is a matter of public record that cell tracking has been used, pursuant to warrants, even in the US, and that is only the stuff that becomes public record. Welcome to the new baseline, ladies and gentlemen...
If you have a datacenter large and serious enough that you've got a full hot/cold aisle setup, deafening fans, etc. rather than just a rack frame in a closet somewhere, people being in there is supposed to be unusual. Unless a piece of hardware is being swapped out, as fast as your screwdrivers will carry you, or somebody fucked up in a network-unrecoverable way, why are there humans inside at all?
In terms of argument, I think Anon is suffering from some category errors, so calling him on those is legitimate (ie. Any state, even a libertarian one, basically treats you as a piggy bank with some rights under law and potentially some entitlements to certain services, public rights-of-way, etc. There are very legitimate arguments about how much of the piggy bank a state may legimately access, and what those rights and/or entitlements are, and why; but expecting empathy from a state is erronious.)
That said, though, Anon sounds like he has had a rough time of it, in a way that sounds very similar to some things that I've had experience with, so I'm inclined to be sympathetic. For some people(definitely me, possibly him) it is very easy to measure slights, exactions, and cruelties, and enough of those exist; but very hard to see and feel their positive inverses, even when they do exist. In such a situation(particularly with the school background, presumably public, which is a fertile ground for good-hearted but somewhat feckless liberals) I can see why he would be angry.
That said, if he is anything like me, I think that (in a rather unfortunate irony) libertarianism is simultaneously highly attractive, with its precise and elegant calculus of rule-based interactions between rational agents; but likely to be really unhelpful hedonically.
As he says, he was wronged beyond the pail, and nobody helped. That was in an environment that(on paper), likely had a fairly strict regulatory apparatus to prevent such outcomes. Useless. Law can shape, and must punish crimes against, a just social order; but I'd be shocked to see the day when it could address Anon's case in a satisfactory way. Ah, well, I think that I may just be rambling at this point, it's a little hard to know.
But, but, "RICO" is only supposed to be for gangsters, ideally of the foreign persuasion! Not good upstanding American corporations, or popular organized religions! It would be unfair to apply a law like that equally!!!
The whole point of "shares", and limited liability companies in general, is to allow people to purchase a slice of the outcome of an enterprise the could not afford to undertake themselves; but without the risk of losing more than they put in.
The risk that shares will lose value is part and parcel with the whole concept of "share". In fact, shareholders are already coddled today much more than they were historically. At one time, getting an LLC was a major thing, not just some paperwork. People actually had to put their own assets on the line with "partnerships". Limited liability stock is a luxury by comparison.
Now, as a pragmatic matter, I strongly suspect that targeting individual corporate officers with criminal penalties when they do criminal things(ie. if somebody knowingly exposes workers to unreasonable hazard that proves fatal, don't dick around with corporate fines, treat that somebody the same way you would anybody else who subjects others to unreasonable hazard - put them up on manslaughter charges) would have a salubrious effect on corporate behavior, and would be a good public policy move. However, there is absolutely nothing unjust with punishing corporations in ways that damage the value of shares. That is sort of the whole point. (On a separate; but related, note: it sure would be nice if corporate charters were amended such that shareholders had much greater actual power, so they would have some chance of heading things off, rather than just voting with their feet once the clusterfuck started...)
There was a similarly embarrassing issue concerning some camera's inbuilt eye detection and the 2 billion or so people for whom "dude, just write an algorithm that finds the two round objects in the face so we can clock out and go drink" doesn't quite work... Given the representation of Asians of various flavors in software, hardware design, and OEM manufacturing, one can only wonder how that one stuck out...
I think that we should cut anon some slack. His experience(both that school is a march through hell, and that kindly, well-meaning authority figures are at best useless) sounds a lot like mine going through school with a dash of ye olde autism-spectrum disorder(yes. diagnosed by actual doctors. No, you don't want it).
The feel-gooders were totally feckless in the face of people as genuinely ruthless as bullies are. They "suck it up, pussy" set just didn't care. Only violence, strategically applied, made a difference. Ugly business.
Ultimately worse(making the admittedly risky assumption that Anon's experience is similar to mine), is that the help you want isn't easy to give, and it really really isn't easy to find.
I could be off base, in which case this is just Fuzzyfuzzyfungus' slightly inebriated TMA for the evening. However, Anon sounds strikingly like me in some of my darker moods. Unfortunately for him, if my experience is anything to go by, there does not exist an economic arrangement that will make you happier(barring, obviously, utter squalor or the freedom to never have to do anything again if you don't want to)... Rather, it is a difficult matter of the interpersonal.
I'm not sure that I understand your distinction between a "fair market" rather than a "absolutely free one". My understanding of libertarianism, as a theory, is that the state's (usually only) legitimate function is to protect its citizens and their property from violence. Arguably, a Libertarian state would want a "fair market", because it would want its people free to trade with on another, according to their percieved advantage, without force(or according to many theorists, fraud). Fewer, though not zero, are interested in the economist's abstraction of "free market" which implies additional assumptions. Beyond that, the state has no legitimate scope.
My complaint with today's American "Libertarians" is that they seem to have responded to the (quite questionable, in some cases) growth of the state by taking the "state bad, less state better" heuristic and taking it as an end in itself. (A further layer of sheer cynicism is added by the fact that it is much easier to get funded by hating on the EPA than on the DEA...) Because of how money drives political viability, Libertarians generally end up either being largely marginalized, or co-opted into a sort of regulatory booty call. Nobody wants to hear from them until some inconvenient regulation needs repealing, at which time they are allowed out.
My argument is that, a legal environment that does not protect citizens, and their property, from the ravages of involuntarily inflicted externalities is a government that is failing at its core libertarian responsibilities, no matter how many programs it is also undertaking that libertarians might like to cut.
Unfortunately, as mentioned, I find the theoretical literature of libertarianism a touch weak when it comes to handling externalities(especially if there is touchy stuff like statistical epidemiology and population toxicology complicating the matter). Simple "Neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg" tests are easy. So is "my right begins where your nose ends" type situations.
With externalities, though, you run into hairy situations where either you would have the state fail to protect its citizens and their property from being despoiled, or you, in protecting them, make it so that nobody can do anything that is detectable beyond the bounds of their property.(there is some empirical and experimental behavioral economics work that, unfortunately, suggests that you cannot contract your way out of this, even if transaction costs are zero. When N people have veto power over a project worth M, in absence of collusion, they almost always request well more than M/N each, and well more than M overall...)
I used to be a libertarian; but I eventually found that there were no terribly impressive answers with regards to externalities, and that most of real society consists of a bloody thicket of the things, positive and negative. That disenchanted me on theoretical grounds.
The fact that, over the past 5-10 years, as the southern-fried fundamentalists and overt police-statists have taken over the Republican party, it has been disheartening to see that the increase in "Libertarian" ranks has largely been plain old right wingers who don't love jesus enough to want to be "Republican"; but are basically not interested in freedom, except insofar as it means low taxes for them, and lax regulations for whatever business they are in.
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Ironically, rather than leading to a utopia of leisure, improvements in robotics might actually lead to extinction(which, if so, we would richly deserve).
With every new advance toward human-replacement, the optimists would say "Well, the displaced can be retrained for the new careers opened up by this technology, and just look at the productivity!". Each time, this will be only partially true.
Humans will be replaced at different rates, of course: certain relatively unskilled workers were replaced by technology back when "computers" where some sort of steam engine that that crank Babbage was working on. It is only mildly sci-fi to suggest, though, that even fairly well compensated positions like lawyers, financial services types, and so on will eventually feel the squeeze as natural-language processing gets better.
The last to go might actually be the(by this time working for just-above-starvation wages) tradesmen: mechanics, plumbers, that sort of thing. Something like natural language processing is wildly expensive to solve; but, once solved, it's just software, you can spawn as many instances as you need. Human-dexterity robots, on the other hand, are highly complex mechanical devices, likely to remain somewhat expensive, per unit, even as technology improves. Unskilled humans being 'remote controlled' either by earpieces and VR overlays or by electrode implants, might actually remain cheaper for a long while...
It makes an extremely convenient threat to keep the tech department in line...
"Hey you, yeah, you with the blackberry and the bad attitude: I want enterprise-level uptime for public-sector prices or I'm going to roll out a one-laptop-per-pupil program whose success depends on 100% uptime. Oh, and because they are shiny and I hate you, we are going with the unibody macbooks whose keyboards are secured by 56 tiny little screws. You know how much kids like tearing keys off school keyboards, don't you?"
Quite likely so, given that the Xoom is even more expensive, and has no clearer relevance to the educational mission of the school(along with the general geek distaste for being ordered to buy a specific gadget, rather than the one they want...).
There is a long history of these "school decides to standardize all pupils on $TECH_TOY because it is The Future of Education(tm)" stories. They generally starkly underperform expectations.
It sure does beat lugging around those old textbooks. Unless you fancy being able to mark them up, re-sell them, or refer to them in 2020...
The professors will probably adore the levels of class participation and attention enabled by everyone having a school-approved internet browsing/PMP device...
My criticism of this scheme isn't iPad specific(though the education sector often does leap on Apple-related tech crazes); but more general:
We still don't have something that can replace a notepad and a mechanical pencil when it comes to ease and unobtrusiveness of taking notes(keyboards are faster for straight text, and produce better final copy; but are a bit clicky for class and, unless you are a LaTeX god, slower for equations, diagrams, and similar). Somewhat similarly, your basic dead tree actually works pretty well for textbook-style distribution. Durable, can be marked according to personal preference, can be held onto or resold at will, printing them doesn't actually cost all that much.
Ebooks have some compelling convenience advantages, particularly for light reading(casually pick up a novel over whispernet, etc.) or for technical reference(grep obscure_command_foo...); but they aren't going to do much about the central complaints with textbooks: Absurd prices and constant version churn(in fact, with DRM, they likely make those worse). Unless this "Hooray! Tablets!!!!" scheme is integrated into some way of actually re-making how the course is taught, I predict no savings, major distraction, and people accustomed to scribbling in marginal notes learning exactly why UI elements in capacitive touchscreen systems are as large as they are...
On the plus side, Melbourne College's Angry Birds team will be a Division 1 powerhouse....
Some of the manufacturing shots are pretty disturbing, though.
this one, for instance feeds exclusively on human fear...
So, does anybody know:
Is the Turkish government merely twitchy about precious, precious "IP", or is this somewhat more like China, where external web services get blocked more or less at random in no small part because the government wishes to encourage use of some local competitor?
If the former, this seems like it could be counterproductive: beyond any considerations of "justice" or "proportionality", the (cynical, pragmatic) justification for targeted enforcement is that it keeps average-joe-on-the-street on your side, rather than making him side with whatever malefactors you are cracking down on. Upsetting 600,000 people(and encouraging them to learn about proxies and such) is a questionable move.
If the latter, the plot gets a bit thicker...
Unless MS is playing their classic "attempt to scuttle competitor's existing product with reports of what they will have Real Soon Now(tm)" game, or isn't going about this very cleverly(either is definitely possible); I would expect any push into non-x86 architecture to make heavy use of their .NET CLR stuff.
.NET components, that won't be the end of the world)...
Virtualizing any classic win32 x86 binaries on ARM is going to suck so much, in terms of performance, that they might as well not bother. By the time Windows 8 actually makes it out the door, Intel will have something that may not beat ARM in the low-power game; but will curb-stomp ARM-emulating-x86. However, if Microsoft has an ARM CLR up and going, all the outfits that have been drinking the kool-aid for the past few years should need to do little more than drop their x86 installer packages in order to be fully compatible(and even if some x86 installshield package needs to be emulated long enough for it to copy over the
I strongly suspect that(in addition to the usual "people will tell annoying pollsters whatever they want to hear" effect), the OEM/ODM guys are not going to be taking any major risks on this one:
There is already a reasonably steady market for ARM-based android widgets, NAS devices, etc, etc. Microsoft will, presumably, have their own set of special requirements(as with tablet PCs needing a ctrl+alt+del key) and some sort of minimum spec floor; but the basic nature of the ARM SoC market means that they won't really have an option other than choosing one or more, likely the higher specced ones, as blessed platforms. At that point, producing a "Windows 8" variant will likely require nothing much more than a button layout and bootloader change...
"Social Networking" certainly, by design, involves some disclosure of certain information to certain people. That's the whole point. However, there are more and less privacy-hostile mechanisms for achieving the ends that users typically want.
When it comes to Facebook's arrangement of privacy-related options, settings, and design, they are either actively malicious or so incompetent that their handling is indistinguishable from malice.
Given that humans have been making assorted flavors of social noise since well before the invention of currency(the instruments are often made out of biological materials, so archeological evidence is a bit patchy; but 35,000-40,000 years has been confirmed) it isn't at all clear that society requires a music industry...
Now, if you want high production values superstar stuff, you can really only do that on an industry basis. If, however, you don't mind the work of people who are doing it recreationally, or for social standing, or in live gigs(freestanding, or paid by social establishments to add atmosphere and drive patronage) the supply of music is very likely to continue without any industry. It just seems to be something that humans do.
I'd be very careful to see how it treats "uploading". Unless it very specifically protects that as well, it essentially changes nothing for any user of common p2p setups. If it doesn't do that, it is basically a scam, because the right to download without legal threat is rather useless if nobody has the right to upload without legal threat. Everybody already has the right to purchase downloads from entities that have licensed the music in question, so paying more for that is absurd, and a p2p setup that consists entirely of leeches isn't all that useful.
As an Option, such an offer would be relatively attractive(the history of IP, particularly culture-related, contains a fair few instances of compulsory licensing along standardized lines). If, however, it isn't optional, it's just a screwjob, amounting to the assumption that 100% of internet lines are used for "piracy" and that musicians deserve the right to tax everybody.
(The slightly subtler thing to also watch out for, of course, is the downloading/uploading distinction: if this fee only protects you from copyright infringement suits for downloading, the labels are still entirely free to harry the uploaders, without which the right to download is rather useless. Long term, you could then end up paying $10/month by compulsion and paying another fee to some entity that pays yet more to serve as a download provider without legal harassment. Worst of both worlds. If you are going to establish a tax on the premise that "pirate" mode distribution is the inevitable future, that is one thing. If, however, uploading is unprotected, that basically still gives you enough leverage to stomp on bittorrent users and any distributors who aren't also paying you royalties, which would basically mean that everybody is paying an extra $10/month just to be able to use the existing legally licensed online stores. Wow, what a deal...)
If you enjoyed substantial popular support in said room, had recently captured a variety of arms caches, and were thus far holding the military of the existing regime at bay, while said regime takes a substantial battering in world opinion, it would in fact mean just as much...
Dirty little not-really-secret is, virtually all declarations of nationhood are legally risible. Some were legally risible and supported by armed force and resources. Others were just risible all around.
Two reasons, I suspect:
1. The basic design of wheeled vehicles is already sewn up, with continued incremental advances being made in response to private sector requirements. No need for DARPA to care about the field. If they want a wheeled chassis, they'll just send somebody down to the dealership(this is, in fact, pretty much how their autonomous navigation challenge goes: everybody plunks their novel sensor/navigation package on top of a commercial vehicle body).
2. Especially in small vehicles(where you don't have the option of just making the wheel so big that obstacles can be rolled over) wheels degrade rapidly in performance as the environment becomes more hostile. I'm assuming that they want something where little tasks like "traverse the field of unstable rubble and mangled rebar that is a concrete building after an airstrike at alarmingly high speed, jump through a first-floor window and kill everyone inside" are considered routine...
Jay Gould is said to have remarked "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half."(unclear if he actually did; but it is a punchy line...)
With today's advances in robotics, we are likely to see an even more efficient solution to the problems of displaced workers and productive capacity in excess of purchasing power: Humans who are replaced by robots can simply be massacred by robotic-ally manufactured robots. Sure, this will eventually result in the replacement of the human race by a densely packed sphere of computronium around the NYSE, and a bunch of relentless hunter-killer drones; but how else are we going to achieve an infinite per-capita GDP?
Why stop at the level of cores? Only grandmas and mutual funds let their algorithms languish in L3 cache, and Goldman has a 99 year lease on L1; but for just a little extra a few million gates of L2 can be yours...
I blame the UN/Satanic New World Order/Illuminati population control conspiracy...
That's the problem with a whole raft of modern technologies: They Just Don't Work without(entirely incidentally) generating a lot of potentially useful(or dangerous) data.
It would be pretty difficult to connect a call if you didn't know that handset A, in close vicinity of tower B, wants to talk to handset C in close vicinity of tower D. With non latency-critical applications you can add a lot of proxies(tor style) to make following the trail slightly more difficult; but that doesn't really work for cell service.
Credit cards and banking are analogous(though there, at least, there are some theoretically viable crypto-trick alternatives...).
functioning cell system "tracks" users at least to the granularity of "which tower is the handset talking to". That's the problem. Historically, surveillance was an active process, distinct from the productive systems of society, and often pretty expensive. Increasingly, it simply consists of gathering the data that must be generated just to get the packets from point A to point B. Still not free; but surveillance is, increasingly, not the act of Watching; but simply the act of Remembering.
I am, of course, totally unsurprised that China would adopt such a scheme broadly and unapologetically; but it is a matter of public record that cell tracking has been used, pursuant to warrants, even in the US, and that is only the stuff that becomes public record. Welcome to the new baseline, ladies and gentlemen...
If you have a datacenter large and serious enough that you've got a full hot/cold aisle setup, deafening fans, etc. rather than just a rack frame in a closet somewhere, people being in there is supposed to be unusual. Unless a piece of hardware is being swapped out, as fast as your screwdrivers will carry you, or somebody fucked up in a network-unrecoverable way, why are there humans inside at all?
In terms of argument, I think Anon is suffering from some category errors, so calling him on those is legitimate (ie. Any state, even a libertarian one, basically treats you as a piggy bank with some rights under law and potentially some entitlements to certain services, public rights-of-way, etc. There are very legitimate arguments about how much of the piggy bank a state may legimately access, and what those rights and/or entitlements are, and why; but expecting empathy from a state is erronious.)
That said, though, Anon sounds like he has had a rough time of it, in a way that sounds very similar to some things that I've had experience with, so I'm inclined to be sympathetic. For some people(definitely me, possibly him) it is very easy to measure slights, exactions, and cruelties, and enough of those exist; but very hard to see and feel their positive inverses, even when they do exist. In such a situation(particularly with the school background, presumably public, which is a fertile ground for good-hearted but somewhat feckless liberals) I can see why he would be angry.
That said, if he is anything like me, I think that (in a rather unfortunate irony) libertarianism is simultaneously highly attractive, with its precise and elegant calculus of rule-based interactions between rational agents; but likely to be really unhelpful hedonically.
As he says, he was wronged beyond the pail, and nobody helped. That was in an environment that(on paper), likely had a fairly strict regulatory apparatus to prevent such outcomes. Useless. Law can shape, and must punish crimes against, a just social order; but I'd be shocked to see the day when it could address Anon's case in a satisfactory way. Ah, well, I think that I may just be rambling at this point, it's a little hard to know.
But, but, "RICO" is only supposed to be for gangsters, ideally of the foreign persuasion! Not good upstanding American corporations, or popular organized religions! It would be unfair to apply a law like that equally!!!
The whole point of "shares", and limited liability companies in general, is to allow people to purchase a slice of the outcome of an enterprise the could not afford to undertake themselves; but without the risk of losing more than they put in.
The risk that shares will lose value is part and parcel with the whole concept of "share". In fact, shareholders are already coddled today much more than they were historically. At one time, getting an LLC was a major thing, not just some paperwork. People actually had to put their own assets on the line with "partnerships". Limited liability stock is a luxury by comparison.
Now, as a pragmatic matter, I strongly suspect that targeting individual corporate officers with criminal penalties when they do criminal things(ie. if somebody knowingly exposes workers to unreasonable hazard that proves fatal, don't dick around with corporate fines, treat that somebody the same way you would anybody else who subjects others to unreasonable hazard - put them up on manslaughter charges) would have a salubrious effect on corporate behavior, and would be a good public policy move. However, there is absolutely nothing unjust with punishing corporations in ways that damage the value of shares. That is sort of the whole point. (On a separate; but related, note: it sure would be nice if corporate charters were amended such that shareholders had much greater actual power, so they would have some chance of heading things off, rather than just voting with their feet once the clusterfuck started...)
There was a similarly embarrassing issue concerning some camera's inbuilt eye detection and the 2 billion or so people for whom "dude, just write an algorithm that finds the two round objects in the face so we can clock out and go drink" doesn't quite work... Given the representation of Asians of various flavors in software, hardware design, and OEM manufacturing, one can only wonder how that one stuck out...
I think that we should cut anon some slack. His experience(both that school is a march through hell, and that kindly, well-meaning authority figures are at best useless) sounds a lot like mine going through school with a dash of ye olde autism-spectrum disorder(yes. diagnosed by actual doctors. No, you don't want it).
The feel-gooders were totally feckless in the face of people as genuinely ruthless as bullies are. They "suck it up, pussy" set just didn't care. Only violence, strategically applied, made a difference. Ugly business.
Ultimately worse(making the admittedly risky assumption that Anon's experience is similar to mine), is that the help you want isn't easy to give, and it really really isn't easy to find.
I could be off base, in which case this is just Fuzzyfuzzyfungus' slightly inebriated TMA for the evening. However, Anon sounds strikingly like me in some of my darker moods. Unfortunately for him, if my experience is anything to go by, there does not exist an economic arrangement that will make you happier(barring, obviously, utter squalor or the freedom to never have to do anything again if you don't want to)... Rather, it is a difficult matter of the interpersonal.
I'm not sure that I understand your distinction between a "fair market" rather than a "absolutely free one". My understanding of libertarianism, as a theory, is that the state's (usually only) legitimate function is to protect its citizens and their property from violence. Arguably, a Libertarian state would want a "fair market", because it would want its people free to trade with on another, according to their percieved advantage, without force(or according to many theorists, fraud). Fewer, though not zero, are interested in the economist's abstraction of "free market" which implies additional assumptions. Beyond that, the state has no legitimate scope.
My complaint with today's American "Libertarians" is that they seem to have responded to the (quite questionable, in some cases) growth of the state by taking the "state bad, less state better" heuristic and taking it as an end in itself. (A further layer of sheer cynicism is added by the fact that it is much easier to get funded by hating on the EPA than on the DEA...) Because of how money drives political viability, Libertarians generally end up either being largely marginalized, or co-opted into a sort of regulatory booty call. Nobody wants to hear from them until some inconvenient regulation needs repealing, at which time they are allowed out.
My argument is that, a legal environment that does not protect citizens, and their property, from the ravages of involuntarily inflicted externalities is a government that is failing at its core libertarian responsibilities, no matter how many programs it is also undertaking that libertarians might like to cut.
Unfortunately, as mentioned, I find the theoretical literature of libertarianism a touch weak when it comes to handling externalities(especially if there is touchy stuff like statistical epidemiology and population toxicology complicating the matter). Simple "Neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg" tests are easy. So is "my right begins where your nose ends" type situations.
With externalities, though, you run into hairy situations where either you would have the state fail to protect its citizens and their property from being despoiled, or you, in protecting them, make it so that nobody can do anything that is detectable beyond the bounds of their property.(there is some empirical and experimental behavioral economics work that, unfortunately, suggests that you cannot contract your way out of this, even if transaction costs are zero. When N people have veto power over a project worth M, in absence of collusion, they almost always request well more than M/N each, and well more than M overall...)
I used to be a libertarian; but I eventually found that there were no terribly impressive answers with regards to externalities, and that most of real society consists of a bloody thicket of the things, positive and negative. That disenchanted me on theoretical grounds.
The fact that, over the past 5-10 years, as the southern-fried fundamentalists and overt police-statists have taken over the Republican party, it has been disheartening to see that the increase in "Libertarian" ranks has largely been plain old right wingers who don't love jesus enough to want to be "Republican"; but are basically not interested in freedom, except insofar as it means low taxes for them, and lax regulations for whatever business they are in.