It's very easy to come up with pat simple scenarios and make a program that simply executes little when A do B routines, but combinations of conditions do not always result in a combination of responses. Humans can intuit their way through layered conditions in a dynamic environment in a way that makes up for the time it takes to come up with the solution.
It's also very easy to ramble on with hypotheses without knowing anything about the AI in question. How do you know it's simply a collection of if A then B routines? Intuition is not magic: it is simply the ability to run an accurate predictive simulation of your environment. This is entirely within the scope of an AI, and in question is only the relative accuracy of the predictions.
An AI can identify objects and classify them into cars, people, animals, unknowns, etc. Each class of objects will have a different behavior profile--a person moving quickly can turn sharper and stop quicker than a car moving quickly, for example. Unknowns would be treated with caution, obviously. For each object it could calculate a range of possible trajectories and account for them in its driving patterns--the kid running on the truck would have a large uncertainty, while a car on a cross street would maintain roughly the same path.
Basically, the only way a vehicle AI could work is as a stochastic simulation constantly being updated with radar and camera data. Within that simulation the car can plan its own behavior just like a human would. When we have systems like this, then we will have viable vehicle AIs. We have all the pieces already, they just need to be perfected and integrated, which is precisely what these researchers are doing.
True. But how many humans could actually do that when pressed? Not all of them, that's for sure. Yet they are still allowed to drive as much as they want, since they are willing to take the risk or avoid the situation. The same could be true of an AI. It could simply refuse to drive on what it knew to be prohibitively dangerous icy mountain passes. Or your perfectly cognizant human would recognize the situation and take over from the AI, which prior to this had done a perfect job of avoiding walls, cliffs, and skidding.
Sure, there is infinite room for improvement of AI, but that is hardly a reason to oppose its adoption as long as we understand its limitations.
Also your assertion that the AI problem would not require a groundbreaking solution is founded on what knowledge? I think you vastly underestimate the problem. Example scenario: a vehicle is traveling on a rural road in the winter around a tight, blind turn on a mountain road. Suddenly, another vehicle appears heading toward the first in the middle of the road. Does the AI in the first vehicle know it's winter and black ice may interfere with braking? Does the AI know that turning out of the other vehicle's path toward the mountainside may result in the vehicle flipping? Does the AI know that if it turns away from the mountain to avoid the other vehicle that it could cause it to plummet to its doom?
There are many different types of driving situations, some more difficult than others. Why must an AI be able to cope with all of them for it to used at all? I would hope that the operator of such a vehicle would understand the limits of its AI and revert to manual control in situations like you describe. If it were able to out-perform humans in the most common settings--interstate and city during fair to somewhat severe weather--then I see no reason to ban its use outright. Heck, in severe weather the computer may have an advantage--it has radar that can see through fog and rain in all directions, it has the actual data from traction sensors, and yes, it knows where the walls and cliffs are and not to hit them.
Humans might make slower decisions, but they have a much broader and more integrated matrix of perceptions and conceptions to draw from. Until AIs are strong enough to understand environments intelligently and intuitively as a whole rather than programmed to respond to a few set objects in a few set ways, a human decision and action will be necessarily more complete even if it is slower.
But sometimes a complete solution is useless if it is too slow, and the limited perception of humans leads to suboptimal solutions. If the AI can sense more accurately react faster than a human, it doesn't need as much predictive capability. Why do you need to anticipate a pedestrian running into the road if you can stop as soon as they actually do? And I think you underestimate the quality of AI these days. But in any case, AI and human drivers have different strengths, and I believe the best solution will take advantage of both of them. I for one would love a car that can both drive itself if I let it, and watch out for my mistakes when I am in control. I don't think I would ever be reading the paper behind the wheel even if it was driving itself, though.
You'd think that, but there could be other factors. For example, maybe electricity can make the furnace hotter than (efficient) direct combustion, or maybe they need to heat up and cool down quickly--something you can't to do with a raging inferno. Your average coal-fired power plant produces 500 MW, so a 100MW furnace would at least have a dedicated contract and transmission lines to a nearby power plant.
Don't those furnaces usually have their own power plants?
740kW is still 17 times more than a typical 200 amp residential service. Dropping a 3 MW power substation at a gas station would be doable, though. The quick chargers would probably run straight from a 6,000 volt supply.
Actually, what's more correct is that 74kWH supercapacitors are damned expensive now, because they're not being produced on a huge scale for deployment in every home garage. Maybe they'd be a lot cheaper, if they were.
Isn't it likely that once something becomes a commodity product, the cost is going to be engineered out?
While this is true for some technologies, things like supercapacitors and lithium batteries contain large amounts of precious metals and rare earth elements--and the supply of those elements can play a bigger role in price than the manufacturing process itself. Maybe they will invent some new super cheap polymer that will do the job, but the sheer amount of power required means that either a ton of copper or room-temperature superconductors will be needed to carry power out of the capacitor. Neither of those will cheap for a rather long time.
74kwh in 6 minutes is 740 kilowatts. They said specifically that this could be achieved with a "DC current source", so they clearly aren't talking about a standard 220V outlet. More likely, to actually achieve this you'd need a large capacitor as suggested by a post above. 74kwh supercapacitors are damned expensive, so I doubt if anyone would put one in their house.
What would be practical, though, is for a bank of supercapacitors to be located at a gas station. There could be six, eight, or however many different capacitors, and when you pull up to the "electricity pump" it would connect you to one of the charged ones. Then the capacitor would go back to charging from a ~30kw mains circuit (for about 3 hours). If all the capacitors were drained, a big red light would turn on at the pump and you would have to wait for one of them to finish charging (or get a partial charge).
Even if the gas station *did* have a 1 megawatt feed line, this kind of huge instantaneous load spike would not be nice to the electrical grid, so capacitors would be the preferred method of implementation. The gas stations could even wire them up to feed power back to the grid if it needed stabilization, or it would be the one place you could charge your phone when a storm knocks out the neighborhood.
Nonsense, you say? If you could shove people in box cars at warehouses and deliver them to the other side of the country a month later without providing food, water or sanitation, then you would be right. The freight rail infrastructure operates this way, is profitable to maintain and doesn't need government subsidies for anything but the occasional major expansion.
If, however, you concede the fact that people are not dry goods, you will realize that "passenger rail" is an entirely different beast. A functioning network of well-maintained train stations, modern passenger cars, competent passenger-handling crew, and the necessary dedicated tracks will not spring up overnight as soon as they are needed.
Do note, also, that part of the problem with Amtrak is that it must use the tracks of freight railroads on the owners' terms, meaning they do not always get priority, and the only routes with any true record of on-time performance are on Amtrak-owned tracks in the Northeast Corridor. If Amtrak were able to own and maintain more of their own infrastructure, their viability as a service would drastically improve.
Oops, I should have read farther. What the report actually says that the HFT algorithms caused increase market volume and started a positive-feedback loop with the sell-order script. This caused a "liquidity crisis" (all the algorithms were trying to sell and nobody was buying) so the price crashed. As the price went down, the various HFTs were swapping shorts back and forth to take advantage of the falling prices, but couldn't offload the total amount of sell orders, so the exchange circuit breaker kicked in. After trading resumed, the prices went back to normal, but the stupid sell script kept going and there was a second liquidity crisis as the humans in the loop said WTF and stopped trading.
So their official conclusion was that HFT both helped cause and helped solve the crisis and it was the stupid sell script that started the whole thing.
Not -1000 troll, just 0 Anonymous Coward. According to the final SEC report (read pages 5-6), you are right, it was a poorly written automated sell-order script that caused the crash, and high frequency trading algorithms helped the market *recover* as fast as it did.
No mass-transit system I can think of survive solely on fares.
Hear hear. This is the truth.
Amtrak has the added curse that many routes and stops were added during its inception purely for political pork; a legislator's vote for initial and continued Amtrak funding could be best assured by giving the train a stop in their district. If you've ever taken Amtrak, you'd know that many of the stops are in the middle of nowhere - some trains carry more than the town population.
While this is true as well, it's worth noting that at some of those stops in the middle of nowhere, the train is the only way to civilization without driving for four hours or more. In those places it is a lifeline for the community, and towns still suffer when stops get canceled.
My intended point was that all millionaires are conservatives because only conservatives want to be millionaires (pardon the generalization), not because they are somehow "better" than liberals. I won't argue that getting a bullshit degree is stupid, but what numbers are you talking about? Do you have a source that shows the median income of all liberals vs. all conservatives? How about the average "happiness" (yes it can be measured) of liberals vs. conservatives? If liberals can be happy with less money, don't they automatically win? *tongue-in-cheek*
There are so many interacting parameters in this discussion that we can go on for hours saying "X causes Y", "no Y causes Z", "no Z causes X", etc etc. At some point we have to give up and admit that we don't know what the f*** is going on.
So, believing that happiness can be bought for a billion dollars earned by stepping all over the people below you, causing environmental disasters, etc, is correlated with conservative tendencies? I think that proves our point. Everybody who reads the liberal research papers knows you don't need to earn more than $150k/yr to have true happiness in life, and you'll make a lot more people happy by not hoarding all the wealth for yourself.
intelligence correlates strongly with liberal tendencies
Based on the quality of (supporting) comments I've seen in liberal blogs, I'd say that it's a darned low correlation.
Those people are either world class Trolls or (no matter how much education they been through) have the analytical capacity of jello but the blind fervor of a Holy Roller.
Dunno if that's really an anti-correlation between liberal tendencies and intelligence, or an anti-correlation between bloggers and intelligence. There are plenty of us who are smart enough to know that writing our every whim on the Internet is not necessary to achieve our (non-narcissistic) goals.
>>>Most political differences are a result of disagreement of premises, not conclusions.
What do you mean? It seems like logic would work. You create a program (say Amtrak), look at the results (near-bankruptcy), and then decide whether or not it worked (it didn't unfortunately - not enough customers).
Case in point: Your premise is that the purpose of Amtrak was to make a profit. In fact, the purpose of Amtrak was to preserve valuable infrastructure that the private sector was no longer able to maintain due to heavily-subsidized air and road competition. In that regard it was mildly successful, in spite of funding problems, and has proven its worth many times (including the post-9/11 grounding and the Katrina evacuation, to name a few).
The Amateur Radio Relay League has a legal team whose sole purpose is to represent amateur radio operators in policy and legal issues. Their newsletter details a few of the ongoing regulatory situations, including recently suggested encroachments on the 2.3Ghz and 430Mhz amateur frequencies, which can be used for both short- and long-distance communication. The traditional HF frequencies (160m through 10m) are generally left untouched by the FCC, and sometimes expanded.
http://www.arrl.org/files/file/Spectrum%20Defense%20Matters%20Newsletter/Spectrum%20Defense%20Newsletter%20Number%20TWO%20for%20the%20WEB_indd.pdf
You'd be surprised how many people are "closet hams"--I just got my license this summer and when I mention it in conversation I am frequently surprised when my acquaintance fires back with their own call sign. You probably know a few people who have licenses or were licensed in the past, even if they never talk about it. Granted, only a fraction of licensees maintain functional HF stations, but they all know the technology exists and where to find it.
There are 694,429 licensed hams in the U.S., 2.26% of the population of 307 million, and that percentage has been steady over the last decade of population growth. Worldwide, there are 2.77 million licensees, or 0.04% of the world population of 6.7 billion, but ham radio is getting very popular in developing nations like China and Indonesia and not every operator has a license.
No, I think he was making a legitimate point. It is truly ironic, as you point out, that governments around the world have tried to vilify freedom-loving Wikileaks as some sort of anti-establishment vigilante group that threatens the stability of the free world--not unlike al Qaeda. The bottom line is any organization that threatens to undermine the authority of enough governments will be labeled a "terrorist threat" and dealt with accordingly. That the Pirate Party is starting to fall in that category says a lot about how much of an impact they are making.
Oh, sorry, I didn't realize that your local airport had a decommissioned DC-10 lying around for the taking. Sounds like that could work out pretty nicely for you.
One, it's already pre-gutted, unless 50K also buys you expensive avionics, the black box and a shit ton of life vests.
and
I could get a DC-10 carted from my local airport to the property I'm thinking of for $500 and a case of beer. Probably less if I'm in the mood to haggle.
are contradictory. Either it's gutted and has to be shipped in, or it's not gutted and can be flown into your local airport. Unless they fly it to your airport before gutting it, I don't see how you're getting it bought and delivered for $50k + $500 and a case of beer.
Slashdot Mirror
It's very easy to come up with pat simple scenarios and make a program that simply executes little when A do B routines, but combinations of conditions do not always result in a combination of responses. Humans can intuit their way through layered conditions in a dynamic environment in a way that makes up for the time it takes to come up with the solution.
It's also very easy to ramble on with hypotheses without knowing anything about the AI in question. How do you know it's simply a collection of if A then B routines? Intuition is not magic: it is simply the ability to run an accurate predictive simulation of your environment. This is entirely within the scope of an AI, and in question is only the relative accuracy of the predictions.
An AI can identify objects and classify them into cars, people, animals, unknowns, etc. Each class of objects will have a different behavior profile--a person moving quickly can turn sharper and stop quicker than a car moving quickly, for example. Unknowns would be treated with caution, obviously. For each object it could calculate a range of possible trajectories and account for them in its driving patterns--the kid running on the truck would have a large uncertainty, while a car on a cross street would maintain roughly the same path.
Basically, the only way a vehicle AI could work is as a stochastic simulation constantly being updated with radar and camera data. Within that simulation the car can plan its own behavior just like a human would. When we have systems like this, then we will have viable vehicle AIs. We have all the pieces already, they just need to be perfected and integrated, which is precisely what these researchers are doing.
True. But how many humans could actually do that when pressed? Not all of them, that's for sure. Yet they are still allowed to drive as much as they want, since they are willing to take the risk or avoid the situation. The same could be true of an AI. It could simply refuse to drive on what it knew to be prohibitively dangerous icy mountain passes. Or your perfectly cognizant human would recognize the situation and take over from the AI, which prior to this had done a perfect job of avoiding walls, cliffs, and skidding.
Sure, there is infinite room for improvement of AI, but that is hardly a reason to oppose its adoption as long as we understand its limitations.
Also your assertion that the AI problem would not require a groundbreaking solution is founded on what knowledge? I think you vastly underestimate the problem. Example scenario: a vehicle is traveling on a rural road in the winter around a tight, blind turn on a mountain road. Suddenly, another vehicle appears heading toward the first in the middle of the road. Does the AI in the first vehicle know it's winter and black ice may interfere with braking? Does the AI know that turning out of the other vehicle's path toward the mountainside may result in the vehicle flipping? Does the AI know that if it turns away from the mountain to avoid the other vehicle that it could cause it to plummet to its doom?
There are many different types of driving situations, some more difficult than others. Why must an AI be able to cope with all of them for it to used at all? I would hope that the operator of such a vehicle would understand the limits of its AI and revert to manual control in situations like you describe. If it were able to out-perform humans in the most common settings--interstate and city during fair to somewhat severe weather--then I see no reason to ban its use outright. Heck, in severe weather the computer may have an advantage--it has radar that can see through fog and rain in all directions, it has the actual data from traction sensors, and yes, it knows where the walls and cliffs are and not to hit them.
Humans might make slower decisions, but they have a much broader and more integrated matrix of perceptions and conceptions to draw from. Until AIs are strong enough to understand environments intelligently and intuitively as a whole rather than programmed to respond to a few set objects in a few set ways, a human decision and action will be necessarily more complete even if it is slower.
But sometimes a complete solution is useless if it is too slow, and the limited perception of humans leads to suboptimal solutions. If the AI can sense more accurately react faster than a human, it doesn't need as much predictive capability. Why do you need to anticipate a pedestrian running into the road if you can stop as soon as they actually do? And I think you underestimate the quality of AI these days. But in any case, AI and human drivers have different strengths, and I believe the best solution will take advantage of both of them. I for one would love a car that can both drive itself if I let it, and watch out for my mistakes when I am in control. I don't think I would ever be reading the paper behind the wheel even if it was driving itself, though.
You'd think that, but there could be other factors. For example, maybe electricity can make the furnace hotter than (efficient) direct combustion, or maybe they need to heat up and cool down quickly--something you can't to do with a raging inferno. Your average coal-fired power plant produces 500 MW, so a 100MW furnace would at least have a dedicated contract and transmission lines to a nearby power plant.
Don't those furnaces usually have their own power plants?
740kW is still 17 times more than a typical 200 amp residential service. Dropping a 3 MW power substation at a gas station would be doable, though. The quick chargers would probably run straight from a 6,000 volt supply.
Actually, what's more correct is that 74kWH supercapacitors are damned expensive now, because they're not being produced on a huge scale for deployment in every home garage. Maybe they'd be a lot cheaper, if they were.
Isn't it likely that once something becomes a commodity product, the cost is going to be engineered out?
While this is true for some technologies, things like supercapacitors and lithium batteries contain large amounts of precious metals and rare earth elements--and the supply of those elements can play a bigger role in price than the manufacturing process itself. Maybe they will invent some new super cheap polymer that will do the job, but the sheer amount of power required means that either a ton of copper or room-temperature superconductors will be needed to carry power out of the capacitor. Neither of those will cheap for a rather long time.
74kwh in 6 minutes is 740 kilowatts. They said specifically that this could be achieved with a "DC current source", so they clearly aren't talking about a standard 220V outlet. More likely, to actually achieve this you'd need a large capacitor as suggested by a post above. 74kwh supercapacitors are damned expensive, so I doubt if anyone would put one in their house.
What would be practical, though, is for a bank of supercapacitors to be located at a gas station. There could be six, eight, or however many different capacitors, and when you pull up to the "electricity pump" it would connect you to one of the charged ones. Then the capacitor would go back to charging from a ~30kw mains circuit (for about 3 hours). If all the capacitors were drained, a big red light would turn on at the pump and you would have to wait for one of them to finish charging (or get a partial charge).
Even if the gas station *did* have a 1 megawatt feed line, this kind of huge instantaneous load spike would not be nice to the electrical grid, so capacitors would be the preferred method of implementation. The gas stations could even wire them up to feed power back to the grid if it needed stabilization, or it would be the one place you could charge your phone when a storm knocks out the neighborhood.
Nonsense, you say? If you could shove people in box cars at warehouses and deliver them to the other side of the country a month later without providing food, water or sanitation, then you would be right. The freight rail infrastructure operates this way, is profitable to maintain and doesn't need government subsidies for anything but the occasional major expansion.
If, however, you concede the fact that people are not dry goods, you will realize that "passenger rail" is an entirely different beast. A functioning network of well-maintained train stations, modern passenger cars, competent passenger-handling crew, and the necessary dedicated tracks will not spring up overnight as soon as they are needed.
Do note, also, that part of the problem with Amtrak is that it must use the tracks of freight railroads on the owners' terms, meaning they do not always get priority, and the only routes with any true record of on-time performance are on Amtrak-owned tracks in the Northeast Corridor. If Amtrak were able to own and maintain more of their own infrastructure, their viability as a service would drastically improve.
Oops, I should have read farther. What the report actually says that the HFT algorithms caused increase market volume and started a positive-feedback loop with the sell-order script. This caused a "liquidity crisis" (all the algorithms were trying to sell and nobody was buying) so the price crashed. As the price went down, the various HFTs were swapping shorts back and forth to take advantage of the falling prices, but couldn't offload the total amount of sell orders, so the exchange circuit breaker kicked in. After trading resumed, the prices went back to normal, but the stupid sell script kept going and there was a second liquidity crisis as the humans in the loop said WTF and stopped trading.
So their official conclusion was that HFT both helped cause and helped solve the crisis and it was the stupid sell script that started the whole thing.
Not -1000 troll, just 0 Anonymous Coward. According to the final SEC report (read pages 5-6), you are right, it was a poorly written automated sell-order script that caused the crash, and high frequency trading algorithms helped the market *recover* as fast as it did.
No mass-transit system I can think of survive solely on fares.
Hear hear. This is the truth.
Amtrak has the added curse that many routes and stops were added during its inception purely for political pork; a legislator's vote for initial and continued Amtrak funding could be best assured by giving the train a stop in their district. If you've ever taken Amtrak, you'd know that many of the stops are in the middle of nowhere - some trains carry more than the town population.
While this is true as well, it's worth noting that at some of those stops in the middle of nowhere, the train is the only way to civilization without driving for four hours or more. In those places it is a lifeline for the community, and towns still suffer when stops get canceled.
My intended point was that all millionaires are conservatives because only conservatives want to be millionaires (pardon the generalization), not because they are somehow "better" than liberals. I won't argue that getting a bullshit degree is stupid, but what numbers are you talking about? Do you have a source that shows the median income of all liberals vs. all conservatives? How about the average "happiness" (yes it can be measured) of liberals vs. conservatives? If liberals can be happy with less money, don't they automatically win? *tongue-in-cheek*
There are so many interacting parameters in this discussion that we can go on for hours saying "X causes Y", "no Y causes Z", "no Z causes X", etc etc. At some point we have to give up and admit that we don't know what the f*** is going on.
NOW vote to CHANGE the CHANGE back to the first CHANGE because that CHANGE was the good CHANGE. Until I CHANGE my mind.
Really? I thought they were all being run out of town on a rail by the media so the news will be more inflammatory and sell better.
So, believing that happiness can be bought for a billion dollars earned by stepping all over the people below you, causing environmental disasters, etc, is correlated with conservative tendencies? I think that proves our point. Everybody who reads the liberal research papers knows you don't need to earn more than $150k/yr to have true happiness in life, and you'll make a lot more people happy by not hoarding all the wealth for yourself.
intelligence correlates strongly with liberal tendencies
Based on the quality of (supporting) comments I've seen in liberal blogs, I'd say that it's a darned low correlation.
Those people are either world class Trolls or (no matter how much education they been through) have the analytical capacity of jello but the blind fervor of a Holy Roller.
Dunno if that's really an anti-correlation between liberal tendencies and intelligence, or an anti-correlation between bloggers and intelligence. There are plenty of us who are smart enough to know that writing our every whim on the Internet is not necessary to achieve our (non-narcissistic) goals.
>>>Most political differences are a result of disagreement of premises, not conclusions.
What do you mean? It seems like logic would work. You create a program (say Amtrak), look at the results (near-bankruptcy), and then decide whether or not it worked (it didn't unfortunately - not enough customers).
Case in point: Your premise is that the purpose of Amtrak was to make a profit. In fact, the purpose of Amtrak was to preserve valuable infrastructure that the private sector was no longer able to maintain due to heavily-subsidized air and road competition. In that regard it was mildly successful, in spite of funding problems, and has proven its worth many times (including the post-9/11 grounding and the Katrina evacuation, to name a few).
you forgot peace
sorry, we're still on version 0.51.29 beta of "world peace", stay tuned for the next bugfix patch.
The Amateur Radio Relay League has a legal team whose sole purpose is to represent amateur radio operators in policy and legal issues. Their newsletter details a few of the ongoing regulatory situations, including recently suggested encroachments on the 2.3Ghz and 430Mhz amateur frequencies, which can be used for both short- and long-distance communication. The traditional HF frequencies (160m through 10m) are generally left untouched by the FCC, and sometimes expanded. http://www.arrl.org/files/file/Spectrum%20Defense%20Matters%20Newsletter/Spectrum%20Defense%20Newsletter%20Number%20TWO%20for%20the%20WEB_indd.pdf
You'd be surprised how many people are "closet hams"--I just got my license this summer and when I mention it in conversation I am frequently surprised when my acquaintance fires back with their own call sign. You probably know a few people who have licenses or were licensed in the past, even if they never talk about it. Granted, only a fraction of licensees maintain functional HF stations, but they all know the technology exists and where to find it.
There are 694,429 licensed hams in the U.S., 2.26% of the population of 307 million, and that percentage has been steady over the last decade of population growth. Worldwide, there are 2.77 million licensees, or 0.04% of the world population of 6.7 billion, but ham radio is getting very popular in developing nations like China and Indonesia and not every operator has a license.
No, I think he was making a legitimate point. It is truly ironic, as you point out, that governments around the world have tried to vilify freedom-loving Wikileaks as some sort of anti-establishment vigilante group that threatens the stability of the free world--not unlike al Qaeda. The bottom line is any organization that threatens to undermine the authority of enough governments will be labeled a "terrorist threat" and dealt with accordingly. That the Pirate Party is starting to fall in that category says a lot about how much of an impact they are making.
Oh, sorry, I didn't realize that your local airport had a decommissioned DC-10 lying around for the taking. Sounds like that could work out pretty nicely for you.
The statements
One, it's already pre-gutted, unless 50K also buys you expensive avionics, the black box and a shit ton of life vests.
and
I could get a DC-10 carted from my local airport to the property I'm thinking of for $500 and a case of beer. Probably less if I'm in the mood to haggle.
are contradictory. Either it's gutted and has to be shipped in, or it's not gutted and can be flown into your local airport. Unless they fly it to your airport before gutting it, I don't see how you're getting it bought and delivered for $50k + $500 and a case of beer.
In other news, the government is making credit card companies notify you when they invoke the fine print in the contract you signed, forcing people to pay for health insurance even if they think they "never get sick", and charging a fine for leaving your own car unlocked.