I think they want to take it all the way up to the Supreme Court, no half-measures.
So they want to lose big and take our Liberty with them? Thanks a lot?
Better to at least establish through practice the right to distribute these technical plans to Americans with the least possible amount of red tape (a EULA checkbox before download that says you are a US Citizen or Resident and will not export to citizens of other countries) and then fight for reasonable regulations on export. They should do this now, on their website, right now if they are at all serious about this issue.
The courts are not going to accept a prior restraint argument if there is not even the slightest care or check on whether the files are being requested by foreign sources.
Encryption was hard enough and technically web browsers and other software with encryption could still be export controlled, but actual weapon plans and schematics are going to be a bridge too far. And at least with encryption software there was a letter of the law attempt to comply export regulations. The court is going to have little appetite to go into the degree of lethality of the weapons in question to establish some higher threshold for exporting weapon plans abroad.
This case is overreach with all risk with the only hope being that the courts rule against this case more narrowly to allow them to fall back on the methods and procedures for export control that I suggest be applied.
Instead of establishing a file sharing community where amateur gunsmiths were actually sharing plans and making improvements to weapon designs and making some responsible efforts to make sure that people posing as foreign nationals at a time of ISIS weren't given weapon designs, this entire effort has been an immature attempt to put the cart before the horse that has been destructive of efforts to maintain 2nd amendment rights.
Somebody else please set up a marketplace for pistol, rifle and shotgun designs and schematics, put up the EULA to keep out foreign nationals and let's give them attention and praise for actually furthering the science, art and engineering of pistol, shotgun, and rifle design. And if that new website is sent some cease and desist letters threatening them, then let's support them, because then at least we can possibly win and protect the essence of the 2nd amendment which protects Americans right to keep and bear arms, not the rights of people in other countries.
Yes it is ridiculous, but it is also trivial to comply and legally make those plans available to 300 million Americans. Just label the files with the appropriate export control warnings and have down-loaders agree to the restrictions via the type of click through legal agreement that many software downloads have.
We went through this with encryption software and even web browsers that supported https... ITAR could have broken the Internet except people figured out how to comply and in their compliance show how silly the regulations actually were. The criminal act is in actually sending the files to a foreigner. So you just need to have someone state they are a US citizen and they agree not to export the files to a non-US citizen. Keep a log of downloads in case any downloader chooses to commit fraud and makes an unauthorized download.
Just comply with the bare requirements and then fight on the stronger grounds that the legal restrictions don't actually de facto prevent export, but that further restrictions on publication and distribution would indeed prevent the lawful distribution of the files to American citizens.
TWO constitutional rights. The first and second amendments are both violated by this ruling.
-jcr
Ya, but all Defense Distributed had to do was put a warning label on it that says it was export controlled and then to have people that downloaded the plans click yes that they are American citizens or green card holders and agree not to export it. Those agreements have been held to be legally binding.
Export control law covers a wide range of unclassified, but technical data regarding weapons or things that could have dual use even. The courts aren't going to put the entire export control regime in jeopardy because a guy doesn't want to label his files and have people agree to not redistribute the technical plans.
Defense Distributed took the most extreme legal stance and lost.
I recall very well when web browsers that supported encryption were export controlled. Maybe they still are, who knows and who cares? The point is that it is trivial to exclude foreign IP address ranges from downloading the material, to have someone click something that says they won't re-distribute the material internationally and have the files marked with a warning that says they are export controlled. Then you are in compliance with export control regulations and still making the material available to 300 million Americans.
Defense Distributed keeps going into these fights, picking these fights, choosing the most extremely unlikely legal defense and now obviously failing... if they are really serious then it is time to put the plans back online with the appropriate trivial safeguards against export.
Just like they did with web browsers and other commercial and open source software with encryption back when they were export controlled in the 1990s.
Blame North Carolina for passing a bad law. The courts did no more than affirm the states' right to regulate their municipalities.
While you're at it, blame Wilson for overreaching. They could have made a case for installing basic infrastructure (fiber optic cable, no different than roads) and then leasing it by the strand to individuals and businesses to connect to the Internet provider of their choice. And invited providers to enter the market and compete, now with the ease-of-entry facilitated by last-mile infrastructure. Instead they made the same bad decision most municipalities make: run a municipal Internet service with no direct access to the cable for other purposes.
Yes, this was a technical decision about the ability of states to tell municipalities what they could and could not do... Courts basically treat municipalities of a subdivision of the states, so state law and state regulations always take precedence. It is a legal no-brainer.
But for every bureaucratic decision there is usually some other bureaucratic way around it. For municipalities trying to promote local Internet Service there seem like a dozen different ways to do it. Just set up a non-profit, give it some grants to get started, loan guarantees, etc. Then it is no longer a municipal utility, but a private corporation with all the rights that have been won through the lobbying of the big private corporations.
No your just being obtuse for arguments sake. A driver isn't a driver if they aren't driving. Calling them a driver is to fulfill a current regulatory requirement to have a driver... so you are arguing a chicken and an egg. They had to have someone called a driver even if they weren't driving because they required a driver.
That Tesla driver I say reading a book at the wheel certainly wasn't "driving" in any meaningful sense of the word... he was merely at the wheel... ready, sort of. Yes, that is just highway driving, but it is fully autonomous highway driving from a technical standpoint... just not a legal one yet.
There is a big difference between computational power now and even just 5 years ago. With more computer power you get better image recognition in a variety of conditions. What took 8 seconds to identify a road sign on a laptop 5 or ten years ago takes 20 ms.
Sure you could autonomously drive decades ago with a truck full of computer hardware or do simple things with proximity sensors, but the envelope of capabilities is clearly getting a lot bigger and the affordability has come down well under the $100k range for a fully autonomous capable platform.
2004 Nobody won the DARPA grand challenge... no car completed the course.
2005 5 vehicles completed the course.
2007 they switched to an urban course having to obey the rules of the road and six teams finished the course.
That is rapid progress.
From 2007 to 2016 we have seen pretty steady progress with commercially available features for things like automatic parking, automated braking and collision avoidance, widespread use of GPS navigation (via smartphones and built-in) and more recently the fully autonomous highway driving from Tesla (yes I've seen the people reading books while "at the wheel").
And Google has been pretty open in their fully autonomous car project with two different cars one based on an off the shelf lexus and another custom built electric vehicle: 1.5 million miles driven and "currently out on the streets of Mountain View, CA, Austin, TX, Kirkland, WA and Metro Phoenix, AZ"
And we are seeing Uber's autonomous efforts play out in Pittsburgh. Multiple companies, multiple projects, multiple on-street implementations that are getting better and better.
Google wants to ditch the steering wheel altogether and it was California regulations that held them back a few years.
A few of your points are somewhat absurd. Having an observer in the car is irrelevant to whether the car is actually driving autonomously or not... if the car is driving from point A to point B without a human actually driving then it is autonomous. Having someone ready to take over if the car fails is a precaution. From everything I have read the Uber cars are autonomous. So are the Google cars and there are some articles about other companies testing cars on city streets around the world.
And this whole "perfect" conditions idea makes no sense. When are road conditions ever perfect? You mean sunny California? Still these are public roads and not closed tracks we are talking about. These vehicles are being driven for hundreds of thousands of miles on a variety of roads and a variety of conditions.
Heck, if I recall, the DARPA grand challenge was partially on a dirt road and that was ten years ago.
This is one of the things needed to get this technology legal and on the road.
Before getting this technology legal and on the road, perhaps we should focus on getting this technology? For the last five years I've been hearing that "Self-driving cars are here already", but sadly they aren't.
Okay now they are here.
Where? I see driver-assist cars, but no self-driving cars.
You mean available to purchase by consumers? Okay, not yet. But Uber is rolling out commercial service using self driving cars right now and multiple companies apparently have fully autonomous vehicles on the public roads now. And acedemic/research teams have had fully self driving cars for at least ten years.
At least the Uber example has to be considered as commercial availability since this is one of the ways companies will offer self driving cars to the public, on a per trip basis. They are here.
We absolutely do not need smart roads. No. Smart roads with sensors all over the place are the opposite of what we need and will delay the adoption of autonomous vehicles if they become the focus of adoption or some sort of prerequisite. Not now and maybe not ever.
We need autonomous cars that are good at driving on dumb roads because dumb and sometimes poorly maintained roads are what the majority of roads will always be. Only after we have a good portion of the cars autonomous should we even begin to explore the need for further efficiencies that could be gained by integrating other data sources or subscribing to centralized route planning and coordination. Let the companies offer their own route planning and construction/incident avoidance solutions rather than make it part of any "smart road" centralized initiative. It isn't a safety issue.
The government should be focused on traditional roles of fixing potholes, maintaining the roads and maintaining line markings and appropriate signage for the benefit of both human and computer drivers.
Congestion tolls and taxes are another thing, but the solution is to just offer that data to whichever vendors want to subscribe to updates so that their systems can have the information and make appropriate driving plans based on passenger cost/time preferences.
This is one of the things needed to get this technology legal and on the road.
Before getting this technology legal and on the road, perhaps we should focus on getting this technology? For the last five years I've been hearing that "Self-driving cars are here already", but sadly they aren't.
Why does shit like this get upvoted? The US only differs from a parliamentary system in that the President is elected by electors via a popular vote. Congress and Parliament are otherwise functionally equivalent.
The US constitution doesn't give the elite any particular power. Yes, read it. The elite get their power, influence and wealth from their power, influence and wealth. No document has ever been able to redistribute wealth, power or influence on a societal level and maintain any real equality. Certainly not communism which if anything further concentrates power and effective wealth into a smaller class of elites that control everything.. Redistribution of wealth is something that is done as a result of force and usually ends up with just a different set of people with wealth power and influence above others without really leveling the playing field.
If anything having power derived from the people in the broadest modern sense ensures that we can at least limit the power of the elite.
Frankly, whilst it's easy to dismiss based on an already high distrust in the US for the establishment I don't think this can rationally be dismissed out of hand as mere deflection. It's in the US national spirit to distrust authority, it was the basis of creation of your country and it's enshrined somewhat in your constitution - I get it, but what you can't do is let that national distrust of your own authority blind you to the threats caused by authorities from elsewhere.
There is a difference between spreading disinformation and spreading the truth.
So far what we have apparently gotten from Russian hackers (yet unverifiable it is actually them) is the truth that the DNC actually was working diligently to undermine Bernie Sanders and thwart any semblance of a democratic process for nominating a democratic party candidate... which was suspected all along, mostly because so few main stream democratic party candidates stepped forward during an open election year. But having that corruption confirmed means that maybe we can start to do something about it.
The Democratic Party is the governing party of the United States of America and we have a two party system that is based on the premise of two fundamentally democratically driven parties. These aren't elks clubs with private members who can nominate/endorse whomever they want. The two parties have ingrained themselves in the election process with partisan primaries that are part of the government funded election process. If the nomination processes of the two parties aren't at least mostly democratic then the United States isn't a democracy.
(As an aside, I don't think the two party election system is a good model, because it naturally leads to this sort of divide and conquer undemocratic politics, much better to have one ballot and you either have a ranked preference ballot or an approval ballot where you vote for all the candidates that are acceptable to you)
Liberty and Democracy are fundamental to the reason for the US to exist. If not for democracy and liberty then we are heading for either dictatorship and/or civil war and disintegration.
Sure the Russians are motivated for the wrong reasons and would cheer on a break up of the US as much as we cheered the break up of the Soviet Union... but we really do have failing democratic institutions that have been fatally undermined by some of our own people who would place themselves and their wealth and their petty interests above democracy and above Liberty for all.
If it takes the Russians to tell us our so-called democratic institutions are deeply corrupt and are controlled by a cabal of really bad people then so be it.
The takeaway should be that we have to fix American society and government and we need to start doing so now. The top down approach is probably not going to work so we really do need to look at reforms at the local and state levels to put us back on track for securing Liberty as the motivating purpose of government and more democratic elections.
The truth matters. I'd rather people do the right thing for the wrong reasons than the wrong thing for what they have deluded themselves to think are the right reasons.
Making Americans more vulnerable to foreign and domestic hackers does not make us safer.
Just because the FBI could also potentially use those same hacking tools against criminals and terrorists doesn't make it a good idea to make the rest of us vulnerable.
Like ordering people to leave their doors open at night in case the FBI needs to check on something.
It used to be the FBI's job to make it harder for foreign governments to spy in the US, now the FBI director wants to make it easier. Comey needs to go.
teaming up with with the company that drove a spike through the heart of their own "Don't be evil" motto. How appropriate...
If you had to take out the evil measuring stick I still think Google is less evil and more honest about when they are evil than other big companies. The ethos of the company is still driven by innovation and use of cutting edge technology to make people's lives easier.
Yes, they are still making boatloads of money on tracking people and targeting them with ads, but other companies are also tracking people and selling information about people and they aren't even telling you what they are collecting and how they are doing it.
From UNITED STATES v. CAUSBY, (1946): "We have said that the airspace is a public highway. Yet it is obvious that if the landowner is to have full enjoyment of the land, he must have exclusive control of the immediate reaches of the enveloping atmosphere. Otherwise buildings could not be erected, trees could not be planted, and even fences could not be run. The principle is recognized when the law gives a remedy in case overhanging structures are erected on adjoining land. 9 The landowner owns at least as much of the space above the ground as they can occupy or use in connection with the land."
Who is 83? The woman in TFA is 65. The only place I saw "83"mentioned was the distance....
I believe the 83 was just the reference to the Supreme Court case (UNITED STATES v. CAUSBY http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-...) that recognized property rights could extend at least 83 feet into the air. Because a landowner near a new airport successfully sued the government to claim that the flight path over their home constituted a "taking" that required compensation.
So the use of airspace over someone's home up to 83 feet could certainly be considered a trespass under state law at least up to 83 feet under Supreme Court precedent.
Voting is no longer safe, we are obviously going to have to suspend elections until we are 100% sure the computers are trustworthy!
Really though, people should suspend the secret ballot if there are legitimate widespread issues with vote tampering. The secret ballot is less important than the ability to maintain the integrity of the election itself. Sure that opens some people up to voter intimidation, but you have to trust that enough people are going to vote in their best interests to overwhelm any voter intimidation.
If you are trying to boot strap a civil society using democratically elected institutions then you have a chicken and egg problem of having a representative trustworthy government to manage a free and fair election in an ethical way in the first place. The answer is to ditch the secret ballot.
Paper based forms with optical scanners seems to work out best these days. Then you can get quick results on election night from the optical scanner results and you just need to have real people manually count the ballots later in order to confirm the automated results.
Easier said than done, but it is very important that elections have verifiable results based on the physical ballots and not just a computer spitting out some result.
To be fair the article summary above makes it sound like a computer glitch, so if you just went with the slashdot summary and quote I can understand the confusion. From the article it indicated that there was a sensor malfunction (not necessarily a computer malfunction) which means it couldn't autonomously point itself at the sun anymore. Leading to the solar panels not getting enough direct sunlight and thus draining the battery. The computer startup just means it will then consume power more quickly than the solar panels can produce it at the wrong angle to the sun and the battery will drain in a couple minutes again and the computer will automatically shutdown.
Really all we are talking about is whether the computer can boot up quickly enough and whether they can send something like:
1010 Fire thruster X for 23 milliseconds 1020 wait 500 milliseconds 1030 Fire thruster y for 22 milliseconds
(My BASIC is a little rusty though;)
Assuming they know a precise orientation of the craft when they send the commands they should be able to at least point the craft more towards the sun. Maybe not 100% optimally, but enough to get net power to the computer and maybe begin to charge up the battery. Of course without more information from the computer they probably don't know much about the state of the systems. It could just not work if there are more malfunctions, so there is substantial unknown risk mitigated by the fact that they have already lost the use of the probe so they have everything to gain from the success of a best attempt.
This is all about observation, timing, communication, making some educated guesses, keeping the execution simple to keep it within the estimated window of opportunity and a lot of triple checked math to come up with the correct numbers to send based on all the available information.
NASA lost contact with their STEREO-B satellite nearly twenty-two months ago when performing a routine test. NASA scientists are afraid to turn on the computer at this point because it may cause them to lose contact again.
What's the point of being able to talk to it if they can't turn it on and actually do stuff with it? If they thought they lost it 22 months ago, they have nothing further to lose if it goes away again now.
Reading the article helps determine what the point is...
Seems the point is that they want to try to see if there is something they can do to point the satellite at the Sun in the 1 to 2 minutes they think they might have before the startup of the computer drains the battery and they have to wait another 6 months until the battery randomly charges up as it gets sunlight on its solar panels at the wrong angles. The sensor that keeps the satellite pointed at the sun failed, but maybe they can keep it pointed at the sun by sending commands from Earth and then they can better assess the health of the systems with more time.
Based on the article its seems they might have just enough time to give it some commands to point toward the sun and then hopefully the battery starts charging up again so they have more time to work with before it powers down.
Slashdot Mirror
I think they want to take it all the way up to the Supreme Court, no half-measures.
So they want to lose big and take our Liberty with them? Thanks a lot?
Better to at least establish through practice the right to distribute these technical plans to Americans with the least possible amount of red tape (a EULA checkbox before download that says you are a US Citizen or Resident and will not export to citizens of other countries) and then fight for reasonable regulations on export. They should do this now, on their website, right now if they are at all serious about this issue.
The courts are not going to accept a prior restraint argument if there is not even the slightest care or check on whether the files are being requested by foreign sources.
Encryption was hard enough and technically web browsers and other software with encryption could still be export controlled, but actual weapon plans and schematics are going to be a bridge too far. And at least with encryption software there was a letter of the law attempt to comply export regulations. The court is going to have little appetite to go into the degree of lethality of the weapons in question to establish some higher threshold for exporting weapon plans abroad.
This case is overreach with all risk with the only hope being that the courts rule against this case more narrowly to allow them to fall back on the methods and procedures for export control that I suggest be applied.
Instead of establishing a file sharing community where amateur gunsmiths were actually sharing plans and making improvements to weapon designs and making some responsible efforts to make sure that people posing as foreign nationals at a time of ISIS weren't given weapon designs, this entire effort has been an immature attempt to put the cart before the horse that has been destructive of efforts to maintain 2nd amendment rights.
Somebody else please set up a marketplace for pistol, rifle and shotgun designs and schematics, put up the EULA to keep out foreign nationals and let's give them attention and praise for actually furthering the science, art and engineering of pistol, shotgun, and rifle design. And if that new website is sent some cease and desist letters threatening them, then let's support them, because then at least we can possibly win and protect the essence of the 2nd amendment which protects Americans right to keep and bear arms, not the rights of people in other countries.
Yes it is ridiculous, but it is also trivial to comply and legally make those plans available to 300 million Americans. Just label the files with the appropriate export control warnings and have down-loaders agree to the restrictions via the type of click through legal agreement that many software downloads have.
We went through this with encryption software and even web browsers that supported https... ITAR could have broken the Internet except people figured out how to comply and in their compliance show how silly the regulations actually were. The criminal act is in actually sending the files to a foreigner. So you just need to have someone state they are a US citizen and they agree not to export the files to a non-US citizen. Keep a log of downloads in case any downloader chooses to commit fraud and makes an unauthorized download.
Just comply with the bare requirements and then fight on the stronger grounds that the legal restrictions don't actually de facto prevent export, but that further restrictions on publication and distribution would indeed prevent the lawful distribution of the files to American citizens.
TWO constitutional rights. The first and second amendments are both violated by this ruling.
-jcr
Ya, but all Defense Distributed had to do was put a warning label on it that says it was export controlled and then to have people that downloaded the plans click yes that they are American citizens or green card holders and agree not to export it. Those agreements have been held to be legally binding.
Export control law covers a wide range of unclassified, but technical data regarding weapons or things that could have dual use even. The courts aren't going to put the entire export control regime in jeopardy because a guy doesn't want to label his files and have people agree to not redistribute the technical plans.
Defense Distributed took the most extreme legal stance and lost.
Mod up.
I recall very well when web browsers that supported encryption were export controlled. Maybe they still are, who knows and who cares? The point is that it is trivial to exclude foreign IP address ranges from downloading the material, to have someone click something that says they won't re-distribute the material internationally and have the files marked with a warning that says they are export controlled. Then you are in compliance with export control regulations and still making the material available to 300 million Americans.
Defense Distributed keeps going into these fights, picking these fights, choosing the most extremely unlikely legal defense and now obviously failing... if they are really serious then it is time to put the plans back online with the appropriate trivial safeguards against export.
Just like they did with web browsers and other commercial and open source software with encryption back when they were export controlled in the 1990s.
Blame North Carolina for passing a bad law. The courts did no more than affirm the states' right to regulate their municipalities.
While you're at it, blame Wilson for overreaching. They could have made a case for installing basic infrastructure (fiber optic cable, no different than roads) and then leasing it by the strand to individuals and businesses to connect to the Internet provider of their choice. And invited providers to enter the market and compete, now with the ease-of-entry facilitated by last-mile infrastructure. Instead they made the same bad decision most municipalities make: run a municipal Internet service with no direct access to the cable for other purposes.
Yes, this was a technical decision about the ability of states to tell municipalities what they could and could not do... Courts basically treat municipalities of a subdivision of the states, so state law and state regulations always take precedence. It is a legal no-brainer.
But for every bureaucratic decision there is usually some other bureaucratic way around it. For municipalities trying to promote local Internet Service there seem like a dozen different ways to do it. Just set up a non-profit, give it some grants to get started, loan guarantees, etc. Then it is no longer a municipal utility, but a private corporation with all the rights that have been won through the lobbying of the big private corporations.
No your just being obtuse for arguments sake. A driver isn't a driver if they aren't driving. Calling them a driver is to fulfill a current regulatory requirement to have a driver... so you are arguing a chicken and an egg. They had to have someone called a driver even if they weren't driving because they required a driver.
That Tesla driver I say reading a book at the wheel certainly wasn't "driving" in any meaningful sense of the word... he was merely at the wheel... ready, sort of. Yes, that is just highway driving, but it is fully autonomous highway driving from a technical standpoint... just not a legal one yet.
There is a big difference between computational power now and even just 5 years ago. With more computer power you get better image recognition in a variety of conditions. What took 8 seconds to identify a road sign on a laptop 5 or ten years ago takes 20 ms.
Sure you could autonomously drive decades ago with a truck full of computer hardware or do simple things with proximity sensors, but the envelope of capabilities is clearly getting a lot bigger and the affordability has come down well under the $100k range for a fully autonomous capable platform.
2004 Nobody won the DARPA grand challenge... no car completed the course.
2005 5 vehicles completed the course.
2007 they switched to an urban course having to obey the rules of the road and six teams finished the course.
That is rapid progress.
From 2007 to 2016 we have seen pretty steady progress with commercially available features for things like automatic parking, automated braking and collision avoidance, widespread use of GPS navigation (via smartphones and built-in) and more recently the fully autonomous highway driving from Tesla (yes I've seen the people reading books while "at the wheel").
And Google has been pretty open in their fully autonomous car project with two different cars one based on an off the shelf lexus and another custom built electric vehicle: 1.5 million miles driven and "currently out on the streets of Mountain View, CA, Austin, TX, Kirkland, WA and Metro Phoenix, AZ"
And we are seeing Uber's autonomous efforts play out in Pittsburgh. Multiple companies, multiple projects, multiple on-street implementations that are getting better and better.
Google wants to ditch the steering wheel altogether and it was California regulations that held them back a few years.
A few of your points are somewhat absurd. Having an observer in the car is irrelevant to whether the car is actually driving autonomously or not... if the car is driving from point A to point B without a human actually driving then it is autonomous. Having someone ready to take over if the car fails is a precaution. From everything I have read the Uber cars are autonomous. So are the Google cars and there are some articles about other companies testing cars on city streets around the world.
And this whole "perfect" conditions idea makes no sense. When are road conditions ever perfect? You mean sunny California? Still these are public roads and not closed tracks we are talking about. These vehicles are being driven for hundreds of thousands of miles on a variety of roads and a variety of conditions.
Heck, if I recall, the DARPA grand challenge was partially on a dirt road and that was ten years ago.
This is one of the things needed to get this technology legal and on the road.
Before getting this technology legal and on the road, perhaps we should focus on getting this technology? For the last five years I've been hearing that "Self-driving cars are here already", but sadly they aren't.
Okay now they are here.
Where? I see driver-assist cars, but no self-driving cars.
You mean available to purchase by consumers? Okay, not yet. But Uber is rolling out commercial service using self driving cars right now and multiple companies apparently have fully autonomous vehicles on the public roads now. And acedemic/research teams have had fully self driving cars for at least ten years.
At least the Uber example has to be considered as commercial availability since this is one of the ways companies will offer self driving cars to the public, on a per trip basis. They are here.
We absolutely do not need smart roads. No. Smart roads with sensors all over the place are the opposite of what we need and will delay the adoption of autonomous vehicles if they become the focus of adoption or some sort of prerequisite. Not now and maybe not ever.
We need autonomous cars that are good at driving on dumb roads because dumb and sometimes poorly maintained roads are what the majority of roads will always be. Only after we have a good portion of the cars autonomous should we even begin to explore the need for further efficiencies that could be gained by integrating other data sources or subscribing to centralized route planning and coordination. Let the companies offer their own route planning and construction/incident avoidance solutions rather than make it part of any "smart road" centralized initiative. It isn't a safety issue.
The government should be focused on traditional roles of fixing potholes, maintaining the roads and maintaining line markings and appropriate signage for the benefit of both human and computer drivers.
Congestion tolls and taxes are another thing, but the solution is to just offer that data to whichever vendors want to subscribe to updates so that their systems can have the information and make appropriate driving plans based on passenger cost/time preferences.
This is one of the things needed to get this technology legal and on the road.
Before getting this technology legal and on the road, perhaps we should focus on getting this technology? For the last five years I've been hearing that "Self-driving cars are here already", but sadly they aren't.
Okay now they are here.
Why does shit like this get upvoted? The US only differs from a parliamentary system in that the President is elected by electors via a popular vote. Congress and Parliament are otherwise functionally equivalent.
The US constitution doesn't give the elite any particular power. Yes, read it. The elite get their power, influence and wealth from their power, influence and wealth. No document has ever been able to redistribute wealth, power or influence on a societal level and maintain any real equality. Certainly not communism which if anything further concentrates power and effective wealth into a smaller class of elites that control everything.. Redistribution of wealth is something that is done as a result of force and usually ends up with just a different set of people with wealth power and influence above others without really leveling the playing field.
If anything having power derived from the people in the broadest modern sense ensures that we can at least limit the power of the elite.
"There's some sensible things you should be doing, and that's one of them,"
Another sensible thing you should be doing is using encryption.
And voting out anyone who thinks that the FBI's warrantless wiretapping is sensible.
+1
Gov. Johnson would certainly pardon Snowden. A vote for either Clinton or Trump is a vote against Liberty.
Frankly, whilst it's easy to dismiss based on an already high distrust in the US for the establishment I don't think this can rationally be dismissed out of hand as mere deflection. It's in the US national spirit to distrust authority, it was the basis of creation of your country and it's enshrined somewhat in your constitution - I get it, but what you can't do is let that national distrust of your own authority blind you to the threats caused by authorities from elsewhere.
There is a difference between spreading disinformation and spreading the truth.
So far what we have apparently gotten from Russian hackers (yet unverifiable it is actually them) is the truth that the DNC actually was working diligently to undermine Bernie Sanders and thwart any semblance of a democratic process for nominating a democratic party candidate... which was suspected all along, mostly because so few main stream democratic party candidates stepped forward during an open election year. But having that corruption confirmed means that maybe we can start to do something about it.
The Democratic Party is the governing party of the United States of America and we have a two party system that is based on the premise of two fundamentally democratically driven parties. These aren't elks clubs with private members who can nominate/endorse whomever they want. The two parties have ingrained themselves in the election process with partisan primaries that are part of the government funded election process. If the nomination processes of the two parties aren't at least mostly democratic then the United States isn't a democracy.
(As an aside, I don't think the two party election system is a good model, because it naturally leads to this sort of divide and conquer undemocratic politics, much better to have one ballot and you either have a ranked preference ballot or an approval ballot where you vote for all the candidates that are acceptable to you)
Liberty and Democracy are fundamental to the reason for the US to exist. If not for democracy and liberty then we are heading for either dictatorship and/or civil war and disintegration.
Sure the Russians are motivated for the wrong reasons and would cheer on a break up of the US as much as we cheered the break up of the Soviet Union... but we really do have failing democratic institutions that have been fatally undermined by some of our own people who would place themselves and their wealth and their petty interests above democracy and above Liberty for all.
If it takes the Russians to tell us our so-called democratic institutions are deeply corrupt and are controlled by a cabal of really bad people then so be it.
The takeaway should be that we have to fix American society and government and we need to start doing so now. The top down approach is probably not going to work so we really do need to look at reforms at the local and state levels to put us back on track for securing Liberty as the motivating purpose of government and more democratic elections.
The truth matters. I'd rather people do the right thing for the wrong reasons than the wrong thing for what they have deluded themselves to think are the right reasons.
Gov. Gary Johnson!
The only candidate on the ballot that isn't a corrupt jerk bent on fucking up pretty much everything.
Making Americans more vulnerable to foreign and domestic hackers does not make us safer.
Just because the FBI could also potentially use those same hacking tools against criminals and terrorists doesn't make it a good idea to make the rest of us vulnerable.
Like ordering people to leave their doors open at night in case the FBI needs to check on something.
It used to be the FBI's job to make it harder for foreign governments to spy in the US, now the FBI director wants to make it easier. Comey needs to go.
teaming up with with the company that drove a spike through the heart of their own "Don't be evil" motto. How appropriate...
If you had to take out the evil measuring stick I still think Google is less evil and more honest about when they are evil than other big companies. The ethos of the company is still driven by innovation and use of cutting edge technology to make people's lives easier.
Yes, they are still making boatloads of money on tracking people and targeting them with ads, but other companies are also tracking people and selling information about people and they aren't even telling you what they are collecting and how they are doing it.
From UNITED STATES v. CAUSBY, (1946):
"We have said that the airspace is a public highway. Yet it is obvious that if the landowner is to have full enjoyment of the land, he must have exclusive control of the immediate reaches of the enveloping atmosphere. Otherwise buildings could not be erected, trees could not be planted, and even fences could not be run. The principle is recognized when the law gives a remedy in case overhanging structures are erected on adjoining land. 9 The landowner owns at least as much of the space above the ground as they can occupy or use in connection with the land."
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-...
Who is 83? The woman in TFA is 65. The only place I saw "83"mentioned was the distance....
I believe the 83 was just the reference to the Supreme Court case (UNITED STATES v. CAUSBY http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-...) that recognized property rights could extend at least 83 feet into the air. Because a landowner near a new airport successfully sued the government to claim that the flight path over their home constituted a "taking" that required compensation.
So the use of airspace over someone's home up to 83 feet could certainly be considered a trespass under state law at least up to 83 feet under Supreme Court precedent.
Voting is no longer safe, we are obviously going to have to suspend elections until we are 100% sure the computers are trustworthy!
Really though, people should suspend the secret ballot if there are legitimate widespread issues with vote tampering. The secret ballot is less important than the ability to maintain the integrity of the election itself. Sure that opens some people up to voter intimidation, but you have to trust that enough people are going to vote in their best interests to overwhelm any voter intimidation.
If you are trying to boot strap a civil society using democratically elected institutions then you have a chicken and egg problem of having a representative trustworthy government to manage a free and fair election in an ethical way in the first place. The answer is to ditch the secret ballot.
Paper based forms with optical scanners seems to work out best these days. Then you can get quick results on election night from the optical scanner results and you just need to have real people manually count the ballots later in order to confirm the automated results.
Easier said than done, but it is very important that elections have verifiable results based on the physical ballots and not just a computer spitting out some result.
To be fair the article summary above makes it sound like a computer glitch, so if you just went with the slashdot summary and quote I can understand the confusion. From the article it indicated that there was a sensor malfunction (not necessarily a computer malfunction) which means it couldn't autonomously point itself at the sun anymore. Leading to the solar panels not getting enough direct sunlight and thus draining the battery. The computer startup just means it will then consume power more quickly than the solar panels can produce it at the wrong angle to the sun and the battery will drain in a couple minutes again and the computer will automatically shutdown.
Really all we are talking about is whether the computer can boot up quickly enough and whether they can send something like:
1010 Fire thruster X for 23 milliseconds
1020 wait 500 milliseconds
1030 Fire thruster y for 22 milliseconds
(My BASIC is a little rusty though ;)
Assuming they know a precise orientation of the craft when they send the commands they should be able to at least point the craft more towards the sun. Maybe not 100% optimally, but enough to get net power to the computer and maybe begin to charge up the battery. Of course without more information from the computer they probably don't know much about the state of the systems. It could just not work if there are more malfunctions, so there is substantial unknown risk mitigated by the fact that they have already lost the use of the probe so they have everything to gain from the success of a best attempt.
This is all about observation, timing, communication, making some educated guesses, keeping the execution simple to keep it within the estimated window of opportunity and a lot of triple checked math to come up with the correct numbers to send based on all the available information.
NASA lost contact with their STEREO-B satellite nearly twenty-two months ago when performing a routine test. NASA scientists are afraid to turn on the computer at this point because it may cause them to lose contact again.
What's the point of being able to talk to it if they can't turn it on and actually do stuff with it?
If they thought they lost it 22 months ago, they have nothing further to lose if it goes away again now.
Reading the article helps determine what the point is...
Seems the point is that they want to try to see if there is something they can do to point the satellite at the Sun in the 1 to 2 minutes they think they might have before the startup of the computer drains the battery and they have to wait another 6 months until the battery randomly charges up as it gets sunlight on its solar panels at the wrong angles. The sensor that keeps the satellite pointed at the sun failed, but maybe they can keep it pointed at the sun by sending commands from Earth and then they can better assess the health of the systems with more time.
Based on the article its seems they might have just enough time to give it some commands to point toward the sun and then hopefully the battery starts charging up again so they have more time to work with before it powers down.