Why should the state be allowed to put such restrictions on permits???
To ensure that the performance doesn't become a public nuisance or a danger to others. The first amendment rights of the people seeking the permit are important but they are not the only rights in play here. The people who live in that local community also have rights. Its not unreasonable to require the organizers to provide reasonable assurances that the activity will be safe, that they will have adequate security, adequate parking or other infrastructure, that it will be peaceful, that it will not disturb the local residents unnecessarily, that public health issues (sanitation, food, water, etc) are addressed, etc. Free speech is a super important right but you don't get the right to endanger others in the process and it isn't the only right involved. So we often require permits for public performances and demonstration (a kind of performance) when they involved public property. The permitting process is typically fairly reasonable and we have courts for when it becomes unreasonable.
This is the state restricting speech on public property.
And? The Supreme Court has long upheld reasonable restrictions on speech in public places. Even big civil rights marches have needed to show that they are not endangering others. They shouldn't be denied because they don't like the message but there are a host of practical consideration and other rights that need to be seriously dealt with.
Would the police also have shut them down if they started playing clips of Roman Polanski (wanted in the US for raping a 13 year old girl) movies?
If that was prohibited in the terms for the permit then yes. Not arguing if that is right or wrong but they could probably legally do it as long as they weren't stupidly clumsy about the whole thing.
That'll be the FIAT that owns Ferrari and Maserati, which are quite well thought of.
They are well thought of because they are cool looking and very fast cars. Their reputation has NOTHING to do with their reliability or longevity. Most Ferrari's and Maseratis spend the majority of their life sitting in a garage somewhere not being driven. Nobody buys a Ferrari because they think it is going to have amazing reliability.
I was going to buy one, but after looking at owner forums and discovering the problems and horrible service that most people are getting I ran away.
My brother-in-law owned an Abarth for a few years just recently. It was fine and fun to drive. To my knowledge he had no substantial problems with it. One data point of course but a positive one.
Except the pain recalls. Honda has the crappiest paint in the entire automotive industry, and the recalls are repainting with the same low grade crap that will fail in another 5 years.
My daily driver right now is a Honda which I've had since 2009 and I've owned several over the years. Never had a problem with the paint. Again one data point but I'm not aware of any systemic problem with Honda's paint worse than any other major brand.
The Ecodiesel engine in the current model Ram pickups and the Jeep Grand Cherokee was designed and built by VM Motori. They also have made engines for the Jeep Wrangler and Jeep Cherokee.
Chrysler didn't manage to get Daimler bankrupt, perhaps it can destroy another europan company?
You are aware that Chrysler's profits are actually propping up Fiat at the moment right? Fiat got control of Chrysler in a sweetheart deal. If they screw it up then the fault is on Fiat.
Oh, and Daimler's problems were because Daimler bungled the acquisition and completely disregarded the importance of culture. They never seriously tried to make it a unified company and basically drove Chrysler into the ground. The German management completely screwed up the Chrysler brand. That was a European company failing to understand the US market and US corporate culture. Fiat seems to be doing a better job of it but only time will tell for certain.
Yes. Aside from Facebook and maybe Twitter it's probably the most relevant social networking site out there right now and it is top of the heap for business networking. I have no relationship with LinkedIn aside from being a periodic user but it is demonstrably pretty useful and very relevant in business networking.
but I'd never consider using them to find people to hire
Why not? I have and it works pretty well. I've found people I needed to talk to for technical problems, found job opportunities, found people to hire and had others find me for those same purposes. It's a great tool for a job seeker. It helps me get warm introductions for sales leads (I run a small company), find people I need to talk to, find experts in particular topics, find suppliers for products, etc. It's not the only way to do these things but its pretty helpful if you do it right. I'm not saying you should use it but I think just blanket dismissal of it is kind of silly. I don't have a Facebook account myself but I get why people use it and why they find it valuable.
I have yet to meet ANYONE that has found linked in to be useful in any way.
I don't mean to be snide but if you think this then you are Doing It Wrong. LinkedIn can be absurdly useful and not just for recruiters. Speaking for myself, I've started and run a number of businesses. It's given me a great way to find specific people I need to talk to in companies I don't deal with every day or in large companies where finding specific people is difficult. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find the right engineer in a specific part of a company as large as GM to get a technical questions answered? For anything relating to business networking LinkedIn is incredibly useful and focused on business unlike Facebook.
If you aren't doing much business networking then no, LinkedIn will probably not be very useful to you. On the other hand not doing much business networking can be a career limiting move. LinkedIn certainly isn't required to do this but it can help. A lot.
99% of the "employers" are headhunters that are doing shotgun requests.
And most of what is on twitter and facebook is pointless nonsense. Still very useful to a lot of people.
See, in theory, over time the cost of a good goes down.
Which specific good(s) and under what circumstances are you referring to? What specific economic theory are you referencing? There are times when costs go down and times when they go up. Or are you just spouting empty rhetoric?
In practice, companies keep adding doo-dads and wanting to amortize their development costs, so the amount they charge goes up even when the economies make it cheaper to make.
Companies "add doo-dads" because their customers want to buy them. They also add them because if they don't those customers (including you) will buy them from someone else. If they add a "doo-dad" that customers don't want then they will lose money. For products that don't involve "adding doo-dads" (which are called commodities btw) prices tend to rise or fall according to supply and demand. More supply = lower prices. Less supply = higher prices.
There isn't a CEO on the planet who would allow the costs to go down over time, because it's bad for business.
Really? I think the folks over at Walmart will be very surprised to hear that since that is pretty much their entire business model. Seriously, you can absolutely make a business model out of selling stuff for lower margins as long as your own costs are lower as well. Usually this involves either large economies of scale or a technology advantage. Plenty of companies compete on price and in some industries it can be really hard to make a profit of any size.
But autonomous car expert Brad Templeton thinks it could be that the overall cost of autonomous vehicles per mile driven will lower than traditional cars.
Never say never but it won't be anytime soon. The sensor package and other hardware to make it work are going to be very expensive for quite a while yet. Not only because there is a lot of R&D and hardware costs to recoup but also because of economies of scale which will not happen overnight. I could see autonomous vehicles being cheaper in specific situations but for general purpose driving it won't be cheaper anytime soon if ever.
Not only because features of traditional cars, like dashboards and steering columns, will not be necessary in robocars,
That's something of an assumption that manual controls will be removed but let's presume it is true. You lose some control surfaces which saves some money but you claw much/all of that back with fancy sensors, driving controls, computers and other hardware. The cost difference in hardware is very likely to be a push and at worst it is an add on to traditional controls if they remain in the car.
In reality I think manual controls will remain a necessity because it is REALLY difficult to explain to even another human exactly where you want to go. I cannot see a robot figuring it out anytime soon. I seriously doubt there is an easy way to explain to a robotic car exactly how you want to park especially when there is no road.
but also because autonomous cars are more likely to be shared and constantly in use, rather than sitting in your driveway 90% of the time.
I'm not convinced of this one either. Possible but hardly a certainty. A lot of people don't really like to share cars and nobody rides the bus because they like it. I can see automated cars getting abused rather badly. Trash, bodily fluids, etc. People don't tend to respect property that isn't theirs. I really don't look forward to the prospect of taxing an automated taxi that smells of urine or worse.
We also support a free (as in beer) version of the software with a smaller feature set (production and enterprise elements that individual users don't need are removed). We'd like that version to use the same model as well to give users that don't need the full commercial version the ability to extend the software and submit patches back to us for inclusion in future releases.
Explain to me how this isn't a fairly transparent effort to recruit developers to contribute for private gain without having to pay anyone for their work.
In our space, the "give the product away but pay for support" model has never really worked. The market is too small and, importantly, most customers understand our value proposition and have no problem with our annual license model.
So why the need for open source? What does the community get out of it? If you want to go open source then do it but it sounds like you don't. It sounds like you want the advantages of open source without having to reciprocate with the community fully.
We've looked at traditional dual licensing approaches, but don't think they're really right fit, either. A single license that gives users access to the code but limits the ability to redistribute the code and distribute patches to the "core" is what we'd prefer.
I have trouble imagining why any developer would want get involved with an arrangement like that. Being able to see the code is pointless unless you can distribute it yourself without unreasonable restrictions. Sounds to me like you want to have your cake and eat it too.
A variety of reasons. In places nearly half the population refuses to sleep under them. Sleeping under one is hotter than without and in some places this can matter. The nets sometimes get mis-used (like as fishing nets). Some people don't believe that the mosquito is the cause or the only cause. They are (rightly) seen as uncomfortable to use and provide only partial protection at best. Sometimes people don't trust the folks handing them out. They also eventually wear out.
I know we're talking about very poor people but that sounds like somewhere where'd I'd expect a local industry to pop up.
The problem is less getting the people the bed nets, it is getting people to use them. Think about it this way. Here in the US we have a flu vaccine available very inexpensively (often free) each year which provides partial protection against influenza viruses. Thousands of young and elderly people die from this disease each year. And yet many refuse to get the vaccine for a variety of mostly social reasons. It's basically the same phenomena.
While research into a vaccine is great, why haven't we focused efforts on supplying bed nets for everyone?
Because bed nets merely mitigate the problem, not solve it. Bed nets are a good thing but they are merely a stopgap and nobody can live inside them at all times. Mosquitoes don't just bite at night when you are in bed. Anyway there are groups (including the CDC and WHO) who have spent considerable effort and money distributing bed nets.
I'm assuming that they'll cost less than the vaccine per unit and they also have the advantage of being reused.
Would you rather sleep under a bed net for your entire life or would you rather be vaccinated and not have to worry so much about the disease?
Even a vaccine that just reduces the devastation this disease causes is a huge win. The impact of this disease on affected areas is almost impossible to over state. Cutting the number of cases by a third is still hundreds of thousands of lives saved.
Incompetence is ignorance when you can hire someone competent and aware.
That is an argument from hindsight. It's easy to see the problem in the rear view mirror. How do you propose they go about hiring someone "competent and aware" when they don't know about the existence problem in the first place? It's REALLY easy to armchair quarterback this and it's pretty unfair. The real question is what they will do going forward because the leadership damn well ought to be aware of it now. If they continue with business as usual THEN it is fair to say they are incompetent.
They hired incompetent, ignorant idiots.
Untrue and unfair. The problem is that they hired good people people to do the wrong task because they didn't know any better. I assure you that the people they hired were by and large competent at what they were hired for. I work with many of these engineers. They aren't stupid. They aren't incompetent. They ARE naive about computer security and how to design systems with that in mind.
It's a problem they will likely deal with effectively in due time but there are going to be some painful lessons learned along the way. Companies that have made their money cutting metal don't become advanced IT operations overnight.
Nope. I'm both an engineer and an accountant and I'm in the industry. I can assure you that the beancounters had close to zero input on these design decisions and that is pretty much routine. Most of the beancounters aren't engineers and aren't really in a position to challenge the engineers on design decisions. These systems were designed by engineers and I can tell you with near 100% certainty that the design engineers had no background in security because I deal with engineers like this routinely in my day job. Basically the beancounters don't get involved much beyond helping to set the budget and keeping people to it but they rarely get involved in the mundane design decisions of exactly how the product will be built.
Let me give you an example from my own company about how little input the beancounters have. My company makes wire harnesses and one of our products goes into a series of SUVs from GM and is used across several brands. We make two versions that are identical except for one part. The reason we use two parts instead of one is because the engineers at Chevy couldn't be bothered to talk to the engineers at Buick to make a common hole size. This raised cost and added a part number for no reason at all. The beancounters didn't get involved and never said a word.
But it gets worse. The same product uses connectors on each end. The engineers could have used common, off-the-shelf, already-in-production connectors but instead they decided to custom design the connectors on both ends. As a result they more than doubled the unit cost of each connector and instead of having a part that could be purchased with zero lead time from any distributor, we have a 16 week lead time, continual part shortages and have to buy over 50,000 units at a time (we use about 1,000/day) to get the pricing we get. So we end up selling them the product for probably 30% more than was necessary because of stupid design decisions. The beancounters never said a word about any of this foolishness either.
Why exactly is the entertainment system of a vehicle, devoloped by design to display "unknown" content, tied into critical systems? First airplanes and now cars. What the actual fuck are these people thinking?
I work in the auto industry running a company that manufactures electronic wiring products. I can tell you exactly what they were thinking.
Nothing. They weren't thinking about it at all.
Auto makers have never had to deal with security much beyond ignition and door locks and car alarms. The concept of hardening the internal system of a car against malicious hackers is really something they've never really had to deal. The fact that there are asshats out there who will do malicious things simply hasn't been an issue for them until now. It's more ignorance than incompetence. Their electronics experience is more embedded systems than consumer electronics and they've built their companies accordingly.
I do think it is dawning on them but its going to take some years before they get their house in order. It will require some significant organizational restructuring and changes in development and engineering. I think you'll likely see some hacking incidents and some sizable lawsuits along the way. They will almost certainly have to get handed some very expensive lessons before they get religion about doing security properly.
Actually, there is a material strong enough for a space elevator. Actually, there is a material strong enough for a space elevator.
You mean the same carbon nano-tubes that we cannot so far grow to more than a handful of centimeters when they would need to be something like 4000km long? Even a theoretically perfect carbon nano-tube would be barely strong enough and we cannot make those with sufficient length. And we have never used them in a structural product even remotely like this so we have only a poor idea how they would behave.
So, no we don't have any materials strong enough to make a space elevator. That's not to say it is impossible to develop one but currently it remains rather firmly in the realm of science fiction.
do not see any reason to build a space elevator on Earth, Luna, Mars or anywhere else, because I believe (hope) we will soon see the emergence of antigravity a.k.a. gravity propulsion technology.
Seriously? Based on what known physics? Why not go straight for a Star Trek teleporter while he's at it? Perhaps he plans to get to Mars using a warp drive.
While a space elevator is pure science fiction right now since there is no known material strong enough to build one, at least that is based on physics we actually know and understand. Invoking anti-gravity is basically saying he believes in magic.
What if the students were in virtual classrooms (using VR headsets)? Each student would "jack into" the classroom with the teaching style that works best for them.
Who is doing the teaching? The fundamental limitation is the amount of time that a teacher has to spend with each student is finite and I can assure you that most students are not highly motivated to learn. If you have heaping gobs of money you can improve this limitation to a point but sooner or later you'll hit a ceiling. Technology can extend the effectiveness of a teacher sometimes but not by much. This is not a technology problem. It is an economic problem - specifically a resource optimization problem. (money, brains and time) Technology can help in some cases but it isn't a cure all and it tends to get used poorly. You are trying to get the best outcome with finite resources so the question is how best to spend those resources.
And your VR headset idea is a solution in search of a problem like most things relating to VR. I used to work with VR technologies as my primary job a few years back so I have a ton of experience here. The use cases for VR are incredibly narrow despite what the folks at Occulus would have you believe. It's cool but not nearly as useful as many hope. I really don't see much use for it for educating children. The bang for the buck would be absurdly poor.
If a warrant allowed the police to enter your property when you weren't present then in theory you'd only if you could see something had changed when you got back. If that is acceptable, then I really don't see why digital records should be any different.
Your analogy is poorly chosen I think. Facebook in this case would be something akin to a landlord for the property. The fact that you are not home does not mean the caretaker should not be allowed to challenge the search if they feel the challenge is justified since it involves their property too. There are necessarily two parties involved here and the rights of both need to be considered for any search. The challenge can be denied after due process but it doesn't logically follow that the parties involved who are not the ultimate target of the search shouldn't be allowed to contest whether the search is legal or justified.
I just think there should be consistency between warrants for physical and digital access.
When possible but we also have to recognize that physical and digital assets are NOT the same and the laws for them cannot always be identical.
It would be the defendant/accused (i.e. the user) who could raise an issue of constitutionality of the search warrant. For an internet service provider to raise the issue is just wrong-headed. They're required to respond to warrants; they're not being charged under the warrants.
The warrant isn't being executed on the defendant. It is being executed on Facebook. It involves Facebook's property, resources and creates non-trivial problems for them. If Facebook doesn't have standing to challenge then effectively nobody does because the defendant isn't in a position to challenge or possibly even know about the existence of the warrant.
Facebook shouldn't be required to challenge the warrant but they absolutely ought to have standing to do so. Otherwise this is an end run around the Fourth Amendment and possibly the Sixth Amendment as well.
It is no more "bullshit" than a bank being required to open a safety deposit box when a warrant is presented against whoever is leasing the safety deposit box. That search is happening on bank property, but the bank does not have legal standing to challenge the warrant.
The bank absolutely should have standing to challenge the warrant if they feel the need. Their challenge can be denied AFTER due process but any party that is involved should by default have standing regardless of whether they are the target of the investigation.
We do NOT need internet-enabled corporations running rampant over the law as if they had no legal responsibilities nor limitations on the scope on what they're allowed to do.
Facebook is a company I don't especially trust but in this case they very much appear to be doing the right thing in standing up for their right to challenge a warrant. They are being asked to hand over information about their users which is the core of their business. This necessarily creates both legal and financial and moral problems for them. They have to protect their property. They have to deal with the potential loss of trust from their users and the fallout from that. Saying they don't have standing to challenge a warrant that very clearly requires actions by them and use of their property by government officials is ludicrous.
I'm not saying the search shouldn't be allowed to proceed after due course. But saying they lack standing doesn't make sense.
There are often CLEAR examples of similar situations with physical property, but the weasels in the "new" digital world would like to claim that they're above those precedents.
And in many cases those "clear" precedents are in reality anything but clear. Online data is NOT the same thing as a tangible good. The rules should be consistent whenever practical but at some point you have to make allowances for the fact that there are legitimate differences that matter. Many of these are still being sorted out as we see here and sometimes it is going to take a while and some wrong turns to get to the right answer.
One of the biggest problems in American education is that teachers have to teach 30 students with different learning styles at the same time.
At some point that is pretty much an irreducible problem. You have finite (and too often shrinking) resources to spend on each pupil and teaching isn't something that generally scales very well, especially with young people and even more especially when you want to customize it per pupil. Furthermore it's not as if each of the 30 students "learning styles" have no overlap or that a non-optimized teaching method cannot still be effective. I think that it is great that people are working hard to try to improve education but I think the notion that we're going to somehow leverage some online system to make magical improvements is a bit naive. None of that is unique to the American education system - any teacher anywhere would have the same problems.
Developers at Facebook, however, have built an online system that gives teachers the information and tools they need to design individualized lessons.
Great they built an online system. They're hardly the first. Why should we believe this system will be any better than the innumerable past attempts? I read the article and it provides no real insight into what is different nor any data regarding how effective it is.
The result is that teachers can spend their time doing what they're best at: inspiring kids.
I am pretty involved in my local school (I have a part time staff position there) and work closely with many teachers throughout the school year. The notion that what most teachers do best is "inspiring kids" is nonsense, and as far as I can tell meaningless too. Some do "inspire" but it certainly isn't "what they're best at" for most of them. Furthermore you can inspire people all you want but that isn't the same thing as teaching them. Effective teaching requires more than getting students excited about a topic. And most teachers I've ever had weren't especially good at "inspiring kids". Many teachers have a pretty negative and cynical attitude unfortunately and more than a few don't exactly have a passion for teaching much less inspiring. Maybe this tool is great but my guess is that it really probably doesn't improve things much and likely only will work well in fairly specific circumstances.
I deal with kids who have FAR bigger issues than worrying about tailoring a lesson plan. Getting food on the table, dealing with a disfunctional or abusive home life, parents who are simply not involved, etc. That's not to say tailored lesson plans aren't an important problem but it's no where near the top of the heap of serious problems facing our schools.
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Why should the state be allowed to put such restrictions on permits???
To ensure that the performance doesn't become a public nuisance or a danger to others. The first amendment rights of the people seeking the permit are important but they are not the only rights in play here. The people who live in that local community also have rights. Its not unreasonable to require the organizers to provide reasonable assurances that the activity will be safe, that they will have adequate security, adequate parking or other infrastructure, that it will be peaceful, that it will not disturb the local residents unnecessarily, that public health issues (sanitation, food, water, etc) are addressed, etc. Free speech is a super important right but you don't get the right to endanger others in the process and it isn't the only right involved. So we often require permits for public performances and demonstration (a kind of performance) when they involved public property. The permitting process is typically fairly reasonable and we have courts for when it becomes unreasonable.
This is the state restricting speech on public property.
And? The Supreme Court has long upheld reasonable restrictions on speech in public places. Even big civil rights marches have needed to show that they are not endangering others. They shouldn't be denied because they don't like the message but there are a host of practical consideration and other rights that need to be seriously dealt with.
Would the police also have shut them down if they started playing clips of Roman Polanski (wanted in the US for raping a 13 year old girl) movies?
If that was prohibited in the terms for the permit then yes. Not arguing if that is right or wrong but they could probably legally do it as long as they weren't stupidly clumsy about the whole thing.
That'll be the FIAT that owns Ferrari and Maserati, which are quite well thought of.
They are well thought of because they are cool looking and very fast cars. Their reputation has NOTHING to do with their reliability or longevity. Most Ferrari's and Maseratis spend the majority of their life sitting in a garage somewhere not being driven. Nobody buys a Ferrari because they think it is going to have amazing reliability.
I was going to buy one, but after looking at owner forums and discovering the problems and horrible service that most people are getting I ran away.
My brother-in-law owned an Abarth for a few years just recently. It was fine and fun to drive. To my knowledge he had no substantial problems with it. One data point of course but a positive one.
Except the pain recalls. Honda has the crappiest paint in the entire automotive industry, and the recalls are repainting with the same low grade crap that will fail in another 5 years.
My daily driver right now is a Honda which I've had since 2009 and I've owned several over the years. Never had a problem with the paint. Again one data point but I'm not aware of any systemic problem with Honda's paint worse than any other major brand.
I'm Italian (near Turin, too). Jeep and RAM models where never designed here. Other (even worse) cars, yes, but not those.
Not true. The Jeep Renegade is built entirely in Melfi, Italy and is based on the GM Fiat Small platform.
The Ecodiesel engine in the current model Ram pickups and the Jeep Grand Cherokee was designed and built by VM Motori. They also have made engines for the Jeep Wrangler and Jeep Cherokee.
Chrysler didn't manage to get Daimler bankrupt, perhaps it can destroy another europan company?
You are aware that Chrysler's profits are actually propping up Fiat at the moment right? Fiat got control of Chrysler in a sweetheart deal. If they screw it up then the fault is on Fiat.
Oh, and Daimler's problems were because Daimler bungled the acquisition and completely disregarded the importance of culture. They never seriously tried to make it a unified company and basically drove Chrysler into the ground. The German management completely screwed up the Chrysler brand. That was a European company failing to understand the US market and US corporate culture. Fiat seems to be doing a better job of it but only time will tell for certain.
LinkedIn was ever relevant?
Yes. Aside from Facebook and maybe Twitter it's probably the most relevant social networking site out there right now and it is top of the heap for business networking. I have no relationship with LinkedIn aside from being a periodic user but it is demonstrably pretty useful and very relevant in business networking.
but I'd never consider using them to find people to hire
Why not? I have and it works pretty well. I've found people I needed to talk to for technical problems, found job opportunities, found people to hire and had others find me for those same purposes. It's a great tool for a job seeker. It helps me get warm introductions for sales leads (I run a small company), find people I need to talk to, find experts in particular topics, find suppliers for products, etc. It's not the only way to do these things but its pretty helpful if you do it right. I'm not saying you should use it but I think just blanket dismissal of it is kind of silly. I don't have a Facebook account myself but I get why people use it and why they find it valuable.
I have yet to meet ANYONE that has found linked in to be useful in any way.
I don't mean to be snide but if you think this then you are Doing It Wrong. LinkedIn can be absurdly useful and not just for recruiters. Speaking for myself, I've started and run a number of businesses. It's given me a great way to find specific people I need to talk to in companies I don't deal with every day or in large companies where finding specific people is difficult. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find the right engineer in a specific part of a company as large as GM to get a technical questions answered? For anything relating to business networking LinkedIn is incredibly useful and focused on business unlike Facebook.
If you aren't doing much business networking then no, LinkedIn will probably not be very useful to you. On the other hand not doing much business networking can be a career limiting move. LinkedIn certainly isn't required to do this but it can help. A lot.
99% of the "employers" are headhunters that are doing shotgun requests.
And most of what is on twitter and facebook is pointless nonsense. Still very useful to a lot of people.
See, in theory, over time the cost of a good goes down.
Which specific good(s) and under what circumstances are you referring to? What specific economic theory are you referencing? There are times when costs go down and times when they go up. Or are you just spouting empty rhetoric?
In practice, companies keep adding doo-dads and wanting to amortize their development costs, so the amount they charge goes up even when the economies make it cheaper to make.
Companies "add doo-dads" because their customers want to buy them. They also add them because if they don't those customers (including you) will buy them from someone else. If they add a "doo-dad" that customers don't want then they will lose money. For products that don't involve "adding doo-dads" (which are called commodities btw) prices tend to rise or fall according to supply and demand. More supply = lower prices. Less supply = higher prices.
There isn't a CEO on the planet who would allow the costs to go down over time, because it's bad for business.
Really? I think the folks over at Walmart will be very surprised to hear that since that is pretty much their entire business model. Seriously, you can absolutely make a business model out of selling stuff for lower margins as long as your own costs are lower as well. Usually this involves either large economies of scale or a technology advantage. Plenty of companies compete on price and in some industries it can be really hard to make a profit of any size.
But autonomous car expert Brad Templeton thinks it could be that the overall cost of autonomous vehicles per mile driven will lower than traditional cars.
Never say never but it won't be anytime soon. The sensor package and other hardware to make it work are going to be very expensive for quite a while yet. Not only because there is a lot of R&D and hardware costs to recoup but also because of economies of scale which will not happen overnight. I could see autonomous vehicles being cheaper in specific situations but for general purpose driving it won't be cheaper anytime soon if ever.
Not only because features of traditional cars, like dashboards and steering columns, will not be necessary in robocars,
That's something of an assumption that manual controls will be removed but let's presume it is true. You lose some control surfaces which saves some money but you claw much/all of that back with fancy sensors, driving controls, computers and other hardware. The cost difference in hardware is very likely to be a push and at worst it is an add on to traditional controls if they remain in the car.
In reality I think manual controls will remain a necessity because it is REALLY difficult to explain to even another human exactly where you want to go. I cannot see a robot figuring it out anytime soon. I seriously doubt there is an easy way to explain to a robotic car exactly how you want to park especially when there is no road.
but also because autonomous cars are more likely to be shared and constantly in use, rather than sitting in your driveway 90% of the time.
I'm not convinced of this one either. Possible but hardly a certainty. A lot of people don't really like to share cars and nobody rides the bus because they like it. I can see automated cars getting abused rather badly. Trash, bodily fluids, etc. People don't tend to respect property that isn't theirs. I really don't look forward to the prospect of taxing an automated taxi that smells of urine or worse.
We also support a free (as in beer) version of the software with a smaller feature set (production and enterprise elements that individual users don't need are removed). We'd like that version to use the same model as well to give users that don't need the full commercial version the ability to extend the software and submit patches back to us for inclusion in future releases.
Explain to me how this isn't a fairly transparent effort to recruit developers to contribute for private gain without having to pay anyone for their work.
In our space, the "give the product away but pay for support" model has never really worked. The market is too small and, importantly, most customers understand our value proposition and have no problem with our annual license model.
So why the need for open source? What does the community get out of it? If you want to go open source then do it but it sounds like you don't. It sounds like you want the advantages of open source without having to reciprocate with the community fully.
We've looked at traditional dual licensing approaches, but don't think they're really right fit, either. A single license that gives users access to the code but limits the ability to redistribute the code and distribute patches to the "core" is what we'd prefer.
I have trouble imagining why any developer would want get involved with an arrangement like that. Being able to see the code is pointless unless you can distribute it yourself without unreasonable restrictions. Sounds to me like you want to have your cake and eat it too.
At least "umami" doesn't sound disgusting.
But it does sound like the start of a "yo mama's" joke...
Why aren't the locals buying bed nets themselves?
A variety of reasons. In places nearly half the population refuses to sleep under them. Sleeping under one is hotter than without and in some places this can matter. The nets sometimes get mis-used (like as fishing nets). Some people don't believe that the mosquito is the cause or the only cause. They are (rightly) seen as uncomfortable to use and provide only partial protection at best. Sometimes people don't trust the folks handing them out. They also eventually wear out.
I know we're talking about very poor people but that sounds like somewhere where'd I'd expect a local industry to pop up.
The problem is less getting the people the bed nets, it is getting people to use them. Think about it this way. Here in the US we have a flu vaccine available very inexpensively (often free) each year which provides partial protection against influenza viruses. Thousands of young and elderly people die from this disease each year. And yet many refuse to get the vaccine for a variety of mostly social reasons. It's basically the same phenomena.
While research into a vaccine is great, why haven't we focused efforts on supplying bed nets for everyone?
Because bed nets merely mitigate the problem, not solve it. Bed nets are a good thing but they are merely a stopgap and nobody can live inside them at all times. Mosquitoes don't just bite at night when you are in bed. Anyway there are groups (including the CDC and WHO) who have spent considerable effort and money distributing bed nets.
I'm assuming that they'll cost less than the vaccine per unit and they also have the advantage of being reused.
Would you rather sleep under a bed net for your entire life or would you rather be vaccinated and not have to worry so much about the disease?
Even a vaccine that just reduces the devastation this disease causes is a huge win. The impact of this disease on affected areas is almost impossible to over state. Cutting the number of cases by a third is still hundreds of thousands of lives saved.
Incompetence is ignorance when you can hire someone competent and aware.
That is an argument from hindsight. It's easy to see the problem in the rear view mirror. How do you propose they go about hiring someone "competent and aware" when they don't know about the existence problem in the first place? It's REALLY easy to armchair quarterback this and it's pretty unfair. The real question is what they will do going forward because the leadership damn well ought to be aware of it now. If they continue with business as usual THEN it is fair to say they are incompetent.
They hired incompetent, ignorant idiots.
Untrue and unfair. The problem is that they hired good people people to do the wrong task because they didn't know any better. I assure you that the people they hired were by and large competent at what they were hired for. I work with many of these engineers. They aren't stupid. They aren't incompetent. They ARE naive about computer security and how to design systems with that in mind.
It's a problem they will likely deal with effectively in due time but there are going to be some painful lessons learned along the way. Companies that have made their money cutting metal don't become advanced IT operations overnight.
Beancounters.
Nope. I'm both an engineer and an accountant and I'm in the industry. I can assure you that the beancounters had close to zero input on these design decisions and that is pretty much routine. Most of the beancounters aren't engineers and aren't really in a position to challenge the engineers on design decisions. These systems were designed by engineers and I can tell you with near 100% certainty that the design engineers had no background in security because I deal with engineers like this routinely in my day job. Basically the beancounters don't get involved much beyond helping to set the budget and keeping people to it but they rarely get involved in the mundane design decisions of exactly how the product will be built.
Let me give you an example from my own company about how little input the beancounters have. My company makes wire harnesses and one of our products goes into a series of SUVs from GM and is used across several brands. We make two versions that are identical except for one part. The reason we use two parts instead of one is because the engineers at Chevy couldn't be bothered to talk to the engineers at Buick to make a common hole size. This raised cost and added a part number for no reason at all. The beancounters didn't get involved and never said a word.
But it gets worse. The same product uses connectors on each end. The engineers could have used common, off-the-shelf, already-in-production connectors but instead they decided to custom design the connectors on both ends. As a result they more than doubled the unit cost of each connector and instead of having a part that could be purchased with zero lead time from any distributor, we have a 16 week lead time, continual part shortages and have to buy over 50,000 units at a time (we use about 1,000/day) to get the pricing we get. So we end up selling them the product for probably 30% more than was necessary because of stupid design decisions. The beancounters never said a word about any of this foolishness either.
Why exactly is the entertainment system of a vehicle, devoloped by design to display "unknown" content, tied into critical systems? First airplanes and now cars. What the actual fuck are these people thinking?
I work in the auto industry running a company that manufactures electronic wiring products. I can tell you exactly what they were thinking.
Nothing. They weren't thinking about it at all.
Auto makers have never had to deal with security much beyond ignition and door locks and car alarms. The concept of hardening the internal system of a car against malicious hackers is really something they've never really had to deal. The fact that there are asshats out there who will do malicious things simply hasn't been an issue for them until now. It's more ignorance than incompetence. Their electronics experience is more embedded systems than consumer electronics and they've built their companies accordingly.
I do think it is dawning on them but its going to take some years before they get their house in order. It will require some significant organizational restructuring and changes in development and engineering. I think you'll likely see some hacking incidents and some sizable lawsuits along the way. They will almost certainly have to get handed some very expensive lessons before they get religion about doing security properly.
Actually, there is a material strong enough for a space elevator. Actually, there is a material strong enough for a space elevator.
You mean the same carbon nano-tubes that we cannot so far grow to more than a handful of centimeters when they would need to be something like 4000km long? Even a theoretically perfect carbon nano-tube would be barely strong enough and we cannot make those with sufficient length. And we have never used them in a structural product even remotely like this so we have only a poor idea how they would behave.
So, no we don't have any materials strong enough to make a space elevator. That's not to say it is impossible to develop one but currently it remains rather firmly in the realm of science fiction.
do not see any reason to build a space elevator on Earth, Luna, Mars or anywhere else, because I believe (hope) we will soon see the emergence of antigravity a.k.a. gravity propulsion technology.
Seriously? Based on what known physics? Why not go straight for a Star Trek teleporter while he's at it? Perhaps he plans to get to Mars using a warp drive.
While a space elevator is pure science fiction right now since there is no known material strong enough to build one, at least that is based on physics we actually know and understand. Invoking anti-gravity is basically saying he believes in magic.
What if the students were in virtual classrooms (using VR headsets)? Each student would "jack into" the classroom with the teaching style that works best for them.
Who is doing the teaching? The fundamental limitation is the amount of time that a teacher has to spend with each student is finite and I can assure you that most students are not highly motivated to learn. If you have heaping gobs of money you can improve this limitation to a point but sooner or later you'll hit a ceiling. Technology can extend the effectiveness of a teacher sometimes but not by much. This is not a technology problem. It is an economic problem - specifically a resource optimization problem. (money, brains and time) Technology can help in some cases but it isn't a cure all and it tends to get used poorly. You are trying to get the best outcome with finite resources so the question is how best to spend those resources.
And your VR headset idea is a solution in search of a problem like most things relating to VR. I used to work with VR technologies as my primary job a few years back so I have a ton of experience here. The use cases for VR are incredibly narrow despite what the folks at Occulus would have you believe. It's cool but not nearly as useful as many hope. I really don't see much use for it for educating children. The bang for the buck would be absurdly poor.
If a warrant allowed the police to enter your property when you weren't present then in theory you'd only if you could see something had changed when you got back. If that is acceptable, then I really don't see why digital records should be any different.
Your analogy is poorly chosen I think. Facebook in this case would be something akin to a landlord for the property. The fact that you are not home does not mean the caretaker should not be allowed to challenge the search if they feel the challenge is justified since it involves their property too. There are necessarily two parties involved here and the rights of both need to be considered for any search. The challenge can be denied after due process but it doesn't logically follow that the parties involved who are not the ultimate target of the search shouldn't be allowed to contest whether the search is legal or justified.
I just think there should be consistency between warrants for physical and digital access.
When possible but we also have to recognize that physical and digital assets are NOT the same and the laws for them cannot always be identical.
It would be the defendant/accused (i.e. the user) who could raise an issue of constitutionality of the search warrant. For an internet service provider to raise the issue is just wrong-headed. They're required to respond to warrants; they're not being charged under the warrants.
The warrant isn't being executed on the defendant. It is being executed on Facebook. It involves Facebook's property, resources and creates non-trivial problems for them. If Facebook doesn't have standing to challenge then effectively nobody does because the defendant isn't in a position to challenge or possibly even know about the existence of the warrant.
Facebook shouldn't be required to challenge the warrant but they absolutely ought to have standing to do so. Otherwise this is an end run around the Fourth Amendment and possibly the Sixth Amendment as well.
It is no more "bullshit" than a bank being required to open a safety deposit box when a warrant is presented against whoever is leasing the safety deposit box. That search is happening on bank property, but the bank does not have legal standing to challenge the warrant.
The bank absolutely should have standing to challenge the warrant if they feel the need. Their challenge can be denied AFTER due process but any party that is involved should by default have standing regardless of whether they are the target of the investigation.
We do NOT need internet-enabled corporations running rampant over the law as if they had no legal responsibilities nor limitations on the scope on what they're allowed to do.
Facebook is a company I don't especially trust but in this case they very much appear to be doing the right thing in standing up for their right to challenge a warrant. They are being asked to hand over information about their users which is the core of their business. This necessarily creates both legal and financial and moral problems for them. They have to protect their property. They have to deal with the potential loss of trust from their users and the fallout from that. Saying they don't have standing to challenge a warrant that very clearly requires actions by them and use of their property by government officials is ludicrous.
I'm not saying the search shouldn't be allowed to proceed after due course. But saying they lack standing doesn't make sense.
There are often CLEAR examples of similar situations with physical property, but the weasels in the "new" digital world would like to claim that they're above those precedents.
And in many cases those "clear" precedents are in reality anything but clear. Online data is NOT the same thing as a tangible good. The rules should be consistent whenever practical but at some point you have to make allowances for the fact that there are legitimate differences that matter. Many of these are still being sorted out as we see here and sometimes it is going to take a while and some wrong turns to get to the right answer.
One of the biggest problems in American education is that teachers have to teach 30 students with different learning styles at the same time.
At some point that is pretty much an irreducible problem. You have finite (and too often shrinking) resources to spend on each pupil and teaching isn't something that generally scales very well, especially with young people and even more especially when you want to customize it per pupil. Furthermore it's not as if each of the 30 students "learning styles" have no overlap or that a non-optimized teaching method cannot still be effective. I think that it is great that people are working hard to try to improve education but I think the notion that we're going to somehow leverage some online system to make magical improvements is a bit naive. None of that is unique to the American education system - any teacher anywhere would have the same problems.
Developers at Facebook, however, have built an online system that gives teachers the information and tools they need to design individualized lessons.
Great they built an online system. They're hardly the first. Why should we believe this system will be any better than the innumerable past attempts? I read the article and it provides no real insight into what is different nor any data regarding how effective it is.
The result is that teachers can spend their time doing what they're best at: inspiring kids.
I am pretty involved in my local school (I have a part time staff position there) and work closely with many teachers throughout the school year. The notion that what most teachers do best is "inspiring kids" is nonsense, and as far as I can tell meaningless too. Some do "inspire" but it certainly isn't "what they're best at" for most of them. Furthermore you can inspire people all you want but that isn't the same thing as teaching them. Effective teaching requires more than getting students excited about a topic. And most teachers I've ever had weren't especially good at "inspiring kids". Many teachers have a pretty negative and cynical attitude unfortunately and more than a few don't exactly have a passion for teaching much less inspiring. Maybe this tool is great but my guess is that it really probably doesn't improve things much and likely only will work well in fairly specific circumstances.
I deal with kids who have FAR bigger issues than worrying about tailoring a lesson plan. Getting food on the table, dealing with a disfunctional or abusive home life, parents who are simply not involved, etc. That's not to say tailored lesson plans aren't an important problem but it's no where near the top of the heap of serious problems facing our schools.