That's not what this case is about though. The "name" the developer had taken was a handle - substack. I don't in this case think this is much to get worked up about.
> Can you imagine the fallout if Ford or Chevy had to recall an entire line because of a deadly programming error? The lawsuits would be endless...
Are you serious? Chevy has had shitloads of dangerous/fatal recall problems. And how in the world can you even bring up Ford without bringing up the specter of the infamous rolling land mine a.k.a. the Pinto?
"For seven years the Ford Motor Company sold cars in which it knew hundreds of people would needlessly burn to death."
Too bad a gas tank placement can't be fixed in OTA updates. Ford knew the design was dangerous and would kill, and did nothing because of money:
"Because assembly-line machinery was already tooled when engineers found this defect, top Ford officials decided to manufacture the car anyway—exploding gas tank and all—even though Ford owned the patent on a much safer gas tank."
That's an excellent plan. I can't see anything wrong with an entire segment of a generation growing up functioning at an mid-elementary grade level, can you? Surely that couldn't possibly cause massive problems years later....
> The simple fact is that they can either get on board with learning to work with automation
How exactly does someone "work with" automation that is designed to replace you?
> Your only defense against this is to have a skill set that is difficult to automate.
Boy it sure is easy to get those isn't it, especially in the education utopia that is the USA. They're already starting to replace "high skill" white collar workers with software, and as general purpose automation gets better and better there will be very few "difficult to automate" jobs. And the few that fall into that category will be quickly flooded, which will also have the knock-on effect of driving the going rate for those services through the floor as there are many hungry mouths offering to do that work. The US doesn't need 30 million plumbers for example.
Also, the robots can take their jobs one day, not *today*. If they are able to hammer out a legally binding contract that guarantees the casinos won't replace existing workers with robots under heavy financial penalty, then it's a win for them.
If they wait 10 years till those robots are ready to go and then strike they're screwed, so they have to play their hand now. I don't fault them in the least. Other workers in other sectors should be doing the same but too many people just consider themselves fortunate to be employed today and don't think about 10, 5 or even 1 year in the future and how their bosses are already planning their replacement.
Eh, I've played with Raspian on a Pi as a desktop. It's *okay* but not great. Packages and software are quite limited compared to a regular distro due to the architecture porting, and I found the responsiveness (on a Pi 2, but the 3 hasn't had a ton of additional horses added) in the desktop to be a poor experience compared to a regular PC with Windows or another Linux distro on it. Pi's are great for dedicated tasks, but general purpose PC isn't one of them IMO. It's something you can use in a pinch, or maybe set up a kiosk on the cheap with, but I wouldn't be happy using it as my daily driver.
You must be 12 and not remember that 8 years ago the idea of screwing with Net Neutrality wasn't even on anyone's radar as it was considered by the FCC to be settled. So are you saying it's important to now pass additional laws to protect supposedly closed policy by government agencies on everything? Cool. I think Weyerhauser just had an orgasm from the thought of all the cubic miles of paper Washington will be running through over the next decade to accomplish that.
> There's no real provision in the constitution for an act of congress that can't be veto'd,
Actually, there is:
"Congress can override a veto by passing the act by a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate. (Usually an act is passed with a simple majority.)"
Yes, but all the House seats are up for re-election in November. It could very well be by January they no longer need any Republican support if the Dems take the House.
>you'd still have the problem that the other aspect of the black market is that it's controlled by violent gangs who would then just threaten someones kid
Risk/reward is out of balance there. Right now there's little risk to the gang member for making said threat but spend more $$$ to ramp up security to near Secret Service levels for investigating threats to family members of corrections officers coupled with classifying those threats as some sort of terrorist activity that gives you a 20 year sentence at ADX and you'll find few gang members willing to make that contact.
>Or someone or their family gets indebted to a gang and they won't just take cash. Or a guard is actually a member of the gang.
Or you know, you could take that extra funding to do background checks, increase wages and overall just demand a much better class of candidate than the current batch of employees. As the old adage says "You get what you pay for". And right now US corrections doesn't want to pay much. Hence the problem.
> it's one of those useless things to say like 'It's not they can't eliminate traffic fatalities, it's that they can't eliminate them for the speed limits they're willing to set'.
Apples to oranges. Traffic is nothing like a prison, prisons are supposed to be controlled top to bottom. There are LOTS of organizations that don't have black market smuggling in them because they take security seriously. For example there doesn't seem to be a problem with illegal drugs at Gitmo.
> Well we've also got this problem where we can't keep drugs out of maximum security prisons
Let's be real here. It's not that they can't. It's that they can't *for the money they are willing to expend into the prison system*. Of course things get smuggled in when you have a prison that's understaffed and the staff that is there is paid peanuts so bringing in a little recreational substance or looking the other way while someone else does for a nice little wad of cash is rampant.
> Why weren't these used to test the car with individuals who consented to be stand-ins for cyclist, pedestrians and other drivers.
For the same reason "consented" individuals weren't used in a fake city during the transition from horse and buggy to car. Because it'd be insanely expensive to the point no company would bother, AND it still wouldn't replicate reality.
At some point you have to test tech like this in the real world.
>If this were a new drug or treatment or medical procedure they would be shut down.
Would it? If this "new drug" had the potential even with a couple of side effects to replace or supplant a known drug that was already killing 40,000 people and maiming hundreds of thousands in the US alone per year?
> Probably the person playing on their phone as it was their job to override decisions made by buggy software.
I dunno, looking at the video of the crash, the victim crossed the road outside of a crosswalk and wasn't even LOOKING in the direction of potential traffic. I'd assign the lion's share of the blame to the person who literally walked into the path of a brightly lit car without noticing.
I remember plugging quarters in and having to save/beg for games all too well from the late 70s on. The thing with quarter powered arcade games though was that if you were good enough you could make a quarter last for hours (unlikely but could be done, saw a guy play Defender for over 2 hours), so at first game makers tried to give players increasing challenge to keep the money flowing. Eventually Atari brought us the OG Pay-To-Win game in the arcade, Gauntlet. Fun to play, exciting and a good social game when it came out, and absolutely ate quarters. No matter how good you were, there was no way you were staying alive in that game without a pocket full of quarters or tokens to keep your health up.
> The lower half can all have salaries of 27.9k and the upper half can have salaries in the billions, and the median stays the same
Mathematically that is correct but do you seriously believe that's the case? Especially in light of the multiple articles published on the minimum wage pressure cookers that are Amazon Fulfillment Sites?
> they think "well I had better offer at least 100k to get someone like that!"
No, they think "get a load of this guy, who the hell does he think we are? Google?" The reason a lot of tech people don't move elsewhere to live cheaper is that the salaries are also smaller. Live in Silicon Valley and put away even 5% of your salary for retirement will set you up for success more than a job in the midwest and setting aside 15% of that salary. Plus the relative ease of job mobility, if that's your thing.
> and we're supposed to feel bad that Amazon's tens of thousands of warehouse workers don't earn a quarter-million dollars/year like top-talent programmers and technology specialists?
No, but maybe you should feel bad that whatever their salary is it dragged the median down to $28,000 so they're making much less than that, all the while not being able to take a break long enough to use the can so they're pissing in bottles and working in cold in winter, boiling hot in the summer. All so you can save an extra 10 cents on that bauble you ordered through prime same day shipping for free.
North America needs to have a serious conversation about what a living wage means.
Do you want Psycho Pass? Because this is how you get Psycho Pass...
"The story takes place in an authoritarian future dystopia, where omnipresent public sensors continuously scan the mental states of every passing citizen. Collected data on both present mentality and aggregated personality data is used to gauge the probability of that citizen committing a crime, the rating referred to as that citizen's Psycho-Pass. Authorities are alerted whenever excessive ratings are detected, and officers of the Public Safety Bureau are dispatched with weapons called "Dominators", energy pistols that modulate their power in response to the target's Psycho Pass"
> The OP said " turning off a previously free application or feature until the customer pays for it.. Solitaire was given as an example of that, which indeed it is whether you think it is important or not.
Actually OP said turning off a previously free application **in an update**. Windows 10's version of Solitaire, which is an updated version and different from Windows 7's and previous, has never been free. That is the difference. Personally I think they should have just dropped it rather than try a sneaky cash grab like this, but they also were looking to drive more people to the Xbox gametag ecosystem by offering a free version of that tied into XBL:
Slashdot Mirror
That's not what this case is about though. The "name" the developer had taken was a handle - substack. I don't in this case think this is much to get worked up about.
> Can you imagine the fallout if Ford or Chevy had to recall an entire line because of a deadly programming error? The lawsuits would be endless...
Are you serious? Chevy has had shitloads of dangerous/fatal recall problems. And how in the world can you even bring up Ford without bringing up the specter of the infamous rolling land mine a.k.a. the Pinto?
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1977/09/pinto-madness/
"For seven years the Ford Motor Company sold cars in which it knew hundreds of people would needlessly burn to death."
Too bad a gas tank placement can't be fixed in OTA updates. Ford knew the design was dangerous and would kill, and did nothing because of money:
"Because assembly-line machinery was already tooled when engineers found this defect, top Ford officials decided to manufacture the car anyway—exploding gas tank and all—even though Ford owned the patent on a much safer gas tank."
That's an excellent plan. I can't see anything wrong with an entire segment of a generation growing up functioning at an mid-elementary grade level, can you? Surely that couldn't possibly cause massive problems years later....
You've uh, never been to Vegas have you? Many of the people who work at those casinos are lifers.
That sounds like an easy lateral career move for a line cook or a bartender...
> The simple fact is that they can either get on board with learning to work with automation
How exactly does someone "work with" automation that is designed to replace you?
> Your only defense against this is to have a skill set that is difficult to automate.
Boy it sure is easy to get those isn't it, especially in the education utopia that is the USA. They're already starting to replace "high skill" white collar workers with software, and as general purpose automation gets better and better there will be very few "difficult to automate" jobs. And the few that fall into that category will be quickly flooded, which will also have the knock-on effect of driving the going rate for those services through the floor as there are many hungry mouths offering to do that work. The US doesn't need 30 million plumbers for example.
What else do you suggest they do?
Also, the robots can take their jobs one day, not *today*. If they are able to hammer out a legally binding contract that guarantees the casinos won't replace existing workers with robots under heavy financial penalty, then it's a win for them.
If they wait 10 years till those robots are ready to go and then strike they're screwed, so they have to play their hand now. I don't fault them in the least. Other workers in other sectors should be doing the same but too many people just consider themselves fortunate to be employed today and don't think about 10, 5 or even 1 year in the future and how their bosses are already planning their replacement.
Eh, I've played with Raspian on a Pi as a desktop. It's *okay* but not great. Packages and software are quite limited compared to a regular distro due to the architecture porting, and I found the responsiveness (on a Pi 2, but the 3 hasn't had a ton of additional horses added) in the desktop to be a poor experience compared to a regular PC with Windows or another Linux distro on it. Pi's are great for dedicated tasks, but general purpose PC isn't one of them IMO. It's something you can use in a pinch, or maybe set up a kiosk on the cheap with, but I wouldn't be happy using it as my daily driver.
You must be 12 and not remember that 8 years ago the idea of screwing with Net Neutrality wasn't even on anyone's radar as it was considered by the FCC to be settled. So are you saying it's important to now pass additional laws to protect supposedly closed policy by government agencies on everything? Cool. I think Weyerhauser just had an orgasm from the thought of all the cubic miles of paper Washington will be running through over the next decade to accomplish that.
> There's no real provision in the constitution for an act of congress that can't be veto'd,
Actually, there is:
"Congress can override a veto by passing the act by a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate. (Usually an act is passed with a simple majority.)"
https://www.archives.gov/files/legislative/resources/education/veto/background.pdf
Yes, but all the House seats are up for re-election in November. It could very well be by January they no longer need any Republican support if the Dems take the House.
>you'd still have the problem that the other aspect of the black market is that it's controlled by violent gangs who would then just threaten someones kid
Risk/reward is out of balance there. Right now there's little risk to the gang member for making said threat but spend more $$$ to ramp up security to near Secret Service levels for investigating threats to family members of corrections officers coupled with classifying those threats as some sort of terrorist activity that gives you a 20 year sentence at ADX and you'll find few gang members willing to make that contact.
>Or someone or their family gets indebted to a gang and they won't just take cash. Or a guard is actually a member of the gang.
Or you know, you could take that extra funding to do background checks, increase wages and overall just demand a much better class of candidate than the current batch of employees. As the old adage says "You get what you pay for". And right now US corrections doesn't want to pay much. Hence the problem.
> it's one of those useless things to say like 'It's not they can't eliminate traffic fatalities, it's that they can't eliminate them for the speed limits they're willing to set'.
Apples to oranges. Traffic is nothing like a prison, prisons are supposed to be controlled top to bottom. There are LOTS of organizations that don't have black market smuggling in them because they take security seriously. For example there doesn't seem to be a problem with illegal drugs at Gitmo.
> Well we've also got this problem where we can't keep drugs out of maximum security prisons
Let's be real here. It's not that they can't. It's that they can't *for the money they are willing to expend into the prison system*. Of course things get smuggled in when you have a prison that's understaffed and the staff that is there is paid peanuts so bringing in a little recreational substance or looking the other way while someone else does for a nice little wad of cash is rampant.
> Why weren't these used to test the car with individuals who consented to be stand-ins for cyclist, pedestrians and other drivers.
For the same reason "consented" individuals weren't used in a fake city during the transition from horse and buggy to car. Because it'd be insanely expensive to the point no company would bother, AND it still wouldn't replicate reality.
> This is testing on people that have not be forewarned and have given zero consent
Have you given your consent to the guy down the street having his first epileptic seizure while driving past your kids playing?
Framing self driving car tests in drug trial language is useless.
>Uber is conducting experiments on the public.
At some point you have to test tech like this in the real world.
>If this were a new drug or treatment or medical procedure they would be shut down.
Would it? If this "new drug" had the potential even with a couple of side effects to replace or supplant a known drug that was already killing 40,000 people and maiming hundreds of thousands in the US alone per year?
> Probably the person playing on their phone as it was their job to override decisions made by buggy software.
I dunno, looking at the video of the crash, the victim crossed the road outside of a crosswalk and wasn't even LOOKING in the direction of potential traffic. I'd assign the lion's share of the blame to the person who literally walked into the path of a brightly lit car without noticing.
I remember plugging quarters in and having to save/beg for games all too well from the late 70s on. The thing with quarter powered arcade games though was that if you were good enough you could make a quarter last for hours (unlikely but could be done, saw a guy play Defender for over 2 hours), so at first game makers tried to give players increasing challenge to keep the money flowing. Eventually Atari brought us the OG Pay-To-Win game in the arcade, Gauntlet. Fun to play, exciting and a good social game when it came out, and absolutely ate quarters. No matter how good you were, there was no way you were staying alive in that game without a pocket full of quarters or tokens to keep your health up.
> "why do we need a code of conduct that says be nice to people?"
The simple reply to this is "have you spent 20 minutes on the Internet in the last few years? There's your answer"
> The lower half can all have salaries of 27.9k and the upper half can have salaries in the billions, and the median stays the same
Mathematically that is correct but do you seriously believe that's the case? Especially in light of the multiple articles published on the minimum wage pressure cookers that are Amazon Fulfillment Sites?
> they think "well I had better offer at least 100k to get someone like that!"
No, they think "get a load of this guy, who the hell does he think we are? Google?" The reason a lot of tech people don't move elsewhere to live cheaper is that the salaries are also smaller. Live in Silicon Valley and put away even 5% of your salary for retirement will set you up for success more than a job in the midwest and setting aside 15% of that salary. Plus the relative ease of job mobility, if that's your thing.
> and we're supposed to feel bad that Amazon's tens of thousands of warehouse workers don't earn a quarter-million dollars/year like top-talent programmers and technology specialists?
No, but maybe you should feel bad that whatever their salary is it dragged the median down to $28,000 so they're making much less than that, all the while not being able to take a break long enough to use the can so they're pissing in bottles and working in cold in winter, boiling hot in the summer. All so you can save an extra 10 cents on that bauble you ordered through prime same day shipping for free.
North America needs to have a serious conversation about what a living wage means.
Do you want Psycho Pass? Because this is how you get Psycho Pass...
"The story takes place in an authoritarian future dystopia, where omnipresent public sensors continuously scan the mental states of every passing citizen. Collected data on both present mentality and aggregated personality data is used to gauge the probability of that citizen committing a crime, the rating referred to as that citizen's Psycho-Pass. Authorities are alerted whenever excessive ratings are detected, and officers of the Public Safety Bureau are dispatched with weapons called "Dominators", energy pistols that modulate their power in response to the target's Psycho Pass"
How about possibility 6: Make a free XBL version for use with Windows 10 and offer that for free?
Like, uh... this:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/store/p/microsoft-solitaire-collection/9wzdncrfhwd2?activetab=pivot%3aoverviewtab
> The OP said " turning off a previously free application or feature until the customer pays for it.. Solitaire was given as an example of that, which indeed it is whether you think it is important or not.
Actually OP said turning off a previously free application **in an update**. Windows 10's version of Solitaire, which is an updated version and different from Windows 7's and previous, has never been free. That is the difference. Personally I think they should have just dropped it rather than try a sneaky cash grab like this, but they also were looking to drive more people to the Xbox gametag ecosystem by offering a free version of that tied into XBL:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/store/p/microsoft-solitaire-collection/9wzdncrfhwd2?activetab=pivot%3aoverviewtab
So if you have Windows 10, go hit that link and get your "free" solitaire on.