A simple solution would be to have license plate scanners which check the legality of the license. If it's valid, they don't log it. If it's fake or duplicated, they tag it / photograph the car & driver / alert the cop waiting down the road. Similar to what automated speed traps already do: they ignore you if you drive below the speed limit.
That solution only works if the goal of gathering license plates is to find outdated registrations. Since that is not the (primary) goal, the solution won't work for the government's needs.
Anybody who thinks they really decided not to pursue this program is naive. Because of the public outcry, they pulled the public proposal but they will simply have to find the contractor and hire him in secret now. They are not going to abandon this program, they are just going to hide it better.
There is a huge black market that uses Cash. And I am not talking about drugs, but rather a whole sub-economic system that is run on cash. People buying and selling with cash as a means to barter. All of these transactions avoid the drain of taxes and therefore, are much more profitable. No sales tax, no income tax, no social security tax, no unemployment insurance (tax)...
These people live and work "off the grid" economically. Imagine doing work and making an extra 25% WHILE charging less. I told one of my customers that if they file a 1099 for my side work, I'll have to double my rates simply because I can't afford to do work that is reported to the IRS for less than double my normal rates.
People in government don't realize how much taxes impact commerce. ALL taxes are regressive. Avoid them by doing "cash only" business.
That's fine, those of us who don't work for cash are glad to pay your taxes. Freeloaders are always a welcome addition to any system.
Oh, that's a recipe for disaster... Competing with such a network will be like fighting city hall. It may be great now, but wait until the towns start enacting laws mandating censorship over anything that passes the city-owned network, for example.
Why don't we stick to what happens in reality instead of imagining what might happen. There has never been such a thing proposed. It would be much harder legally for a government to implement such censorship since the government is bound by many laws that a private company is not. Since private companies and the existing government-owned networks are not doing this now, why do you fear it happening?
I don't know about you, but I dread the thought of my Internet service being anything like what the electric utility provides around here.
I don't have to imagine what the internet service on this network would be like because I have been using it for years. It has been much faster, much more reliable and much cheaper than what I was getting from Comcast. The levels of service have continually increased (there is nothing like being told "We kicked you up to 50MB/50MB! Nope, no increase it is still $36 - have a nice day!").
Provider lock-in is why networks should stay the property of the people and not the corporations
Occupy Wall Street much? The choice is not between corporations and "people" (government). The choice is between monopoly (corporate or governmental) and competing corporations. And I'll take the latter over the former any day.
I don't need competing networks in the same way that I don't need competing road systems. The network is like a road system, maintained for the good of all, and both FedEx and UPS are free to use it to compete. There is robust competition on the network because more companies are able to provide services they could never provide before because other companies had been granted the monopoly. Before the network was built we had two monopoly providers (Qwest for phone and Comcast for cable). Service on both were atrocious and prices were high. Since they had monopoly positions there was no incentive to provide quality service.
Back when dial-up internet was the norm there were a lot of local and regional ISPs. If you didn't like your ISP you could switch to a different one. The advent of broadband killed off most of these ISPs since the existing monopoly providers of phone and cable had the only route to the customer. Municipal networks bring back the ability for the small guys to compete with the big guys. It increases competition and diversifies the marketplace. How can someone who sees the value of competition and can see the current state of phone and cable monopolies be against it?
I can't tell you the number of times I've ruined a great post with an embarrassing typo or grammar fuck-up, only to have my entire argument ignored as a million grammar Nazi's jump in to inform me of the difference between your and you're (as if I DON'T FUCKING KNOW THAT ALREADY).
Do we really feel, Google should own networks? With taxpayers' help?
Sure, it is fun and games, while they are still growing — the lucky users can't shut up about it. What happens, when Google becomes a regional (or nationwide) monopoly, however? What if they decide to "boycott" a site — either because it is run by "haters" of one kind or another, or is spreading malware?
The UTOPIA network is owned by the member cities. If Google would like to provide ISP services to people on that network they are free to do so, the same as any other ISP. Provider lock-in is why networks should stay the property of the people and not the corporations, hopefully UTOPIA won't go the way of iProvo and get gifted to Google.
Because there is no true competition when a government decides to compete with a private company. The government "company" has the benefit of mandatory "customers" (taxpayers), which means people who don't want to be customers are forced to help pay for those who do, and those who are customers of the private company are actually paying twice.
If you want competition, don't create an artificial market run at sub-market pricing supported by taxpayers. Let the competitors fight it out on even ground.
In my market, Comcast pays the city a franchise fee for every subscriber they have, which results in net income for the city over and above the payroll and property taxes they pay. This money gets dumped into the general fund to pay for... anything the city council wants to use it for.
Nothing is stopping another cable company from entering the market but none has. If someone could come undercut Comcast honestly, and not sell services for less because the deficit is made up from the general tax fund, they would. Why not? Because they look at the market and see that it won't support two companies. The government, with essentially bottomless pockets, pays no attention to markets and doesn't care about operating at a loss. If they lose money from that service, they'll just plead for more money at the next election and hold other services hostage. Our city does it on a regular basis, threatening to close the library and the public pool and the senior center unless they get more money, but never do they threaten to eliminate the unnecessary things they do.
That's why it is bad.
But the problem with the current situation is since there is a natural barrier to competition because not every provider can be allowed to use easements to run their lines. The way cities handled this in the past was granting a single company a monopoly on providing a certain service. This doesn't work well in practice, particularly in industries that are not heavily regulated by the franchise authority like cable TV.
The solution to this problem is for the city to own a fiber network and any company that wants to provide IP services (TV, phone, internet) over this network is free to do so. This gives a level playing field for all competitors who want to provide this kind of service. The existing monopoly system does not work for anyone but the monopoly holder, it certainly does not work for the consumer.
Full disclosure, I am a subscriber of one of the fiber networks mentioned in the summary and so I might be biased.
Yet, most of the money doesn't get to stay in pocket. The tower-tester thing actually has to be built. So most of that money is going to wages of construction workers, a good many of whom are black, if that helps. The few crappy low paying jobs they quit to take these 2 year construction gigs now have to raise wages to get decent replacements. Eventually, somebody who couldn't find work before, is now working.
So it does somewhat help the plight of the poor; a good amount while while under construction, some small amount ongoing (assuming they can rent-sell-use it). Real jobs are better than welfare, are they not? At least this federal spending is about 1:1, as far as putting money back into the economy (or as close as you'll get). And injecting the majority of it this way, as wages at the working man's level, well; Democrats should love that.
I've been a deficit hawk for years, and am as conservative as they come. And yet, if given the King's power to axe this one pork program out of thousands, I would hesitate. In just about the poorest part of the country, these are good paying jobs, and they are building something of value, even if NASA doesn't want it anymore. And they did already start it, didn't they?
I'm just saying, that in the sea of wasteful federal spending, this is far from the worst thing going on. But yeah, it's a small part of the overall problem. The only way to get all the pork in line is with leadership, which we haven't had for many years.
This is an example of the broken window fallacy. Just because breaking a window stimulates trade and provides jobs does not necessarily mean it is good for the economy as a whole. There are many places that money could be spent that would provide greater economic benefit.
Hell... they can have a huge map database in the car.
All the car needs to do is use its last known position plus data from sensors and dead-reckoning based navigation to identify its current position.
Most Inertial sensors are only good for a short time before they become too inaccurate to use. Manufacturers could have the car use pattern mapping to match its surroundings with onboard maps, but when GPS available "all the time", why bother implementing something that will rarely be used.
Not really - inertial sensors can be quite accurate. The gyros in my RC autopilot are able to track the plane's position quite accurately even if the GPS is malfunctioning, in normal operation it integrates the GPS and inertial sensors. This is in a cheap off the shelf chip, I would imagine a purpose-built sensor for an automobile would be even more accurate. But all that is beside the point, if you are in a car you have tires that are rolling on the ground that tell you exactly how far you have traveled. Combine that with a compass and you have a fairly accurate way to localize the car. Add a vision system and you have more redundancy and an ability to correct for drift. My home-built robot can keep track of itself on a map using just wheel and IR sensors, why couldn't a car with much more sophisticated sensors be able to do the same thing?
yes.. under carefully controlled circumstances monitored by the engineers who designed the hardware and software.. and with overrides that the end consumer won't get or will lose eventually, like google does with every other product they make. There have been just too many circumstances where people have trusted computers (and the programmers who programmed them) to get it right when they didn't... and these were far simpler situations with far better defined inputs than what a typical driver has to deal with.
I guess we'll find out when these start hitting the roads, but the probability they won't tracked and hacked is virtually zero.
I don't think California streets are "carefully controlled circumstances" and Google's cars have shown the ability to successfully drive on them. It seems like you think that these cars must drive perfectly to replace existing drivers - they only need to be marginally better than humans to be a benefit which isn't a very high bar to top. Humans are terrible drivers and kill or injure millions of people each year through their poor driving. Even if the computer driver screws up once in a while it will still be better than what we have now.
This is why every mission after Columbia had an 'Abort to ISS' option that would allow the shuttle to dock with ISS and wait for the relief shuttle (which was sitting at a 48 hour to launch stage IIRC) to return them home.
Every mission except STS-125, the last Hubble servicing mission. Since the orbit of the ISS has a large inclination relative to the Hubble they planned an in-space rescue mission if TPS damage made it necessary.
I think you'll find that 99% of the populace see work as the only way they have to get the stuff they need to live (and the stuff they want to make life enjoyable).
At the moment. One of the primary topics of this discussion is what happens when that's no longer strictly necessary.
The problem is that this issue is occurring NOW and it certainly isn't coming out in favor of the worker. We have had massive productivity gains in the last 50 years and nearly all of the gains have gone to the management and owner classes, rather than the working class (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/18/wages-productivity-report_n_837814.html). Increased automation may make for more idle time for the average worker, but that idle time comes at a cost - that worker isn't getting paid more just because the factory is churning out more widgets. When automation is added either the workers produce more with the same amount of work (giving more profits for the owners) or the workforce is reduced to produce the same amount (also giving more profit to the owners). The workers will NEVER gain anything from these productivity increases without societal/government intervention, there is simply no incentive for the owners to share the wealth from the gains. In fact, since productivity gains generally increase unemployment it creates a downward pressure on wages, more people competing for the same jobs.
If you're only 'alerting yourself' there's no fee involved. The 'alarm fee' my township imposes on me is, apparently, to cover false calls. (naturally my wife had one of these once...). They have a yearly false call allowance of.. once. After that they start charging you.
I agree with 'what's the point' though. If I get burgled, I want the police to be notified, and either come shoot someone for me, or turn up with flashing lights if I'm away - not me sitting on a cellphone describing what they're removing from my house to a 911 representative.
While automatic notifications are nice, the latter scenario is more likely to get action from the police. They receive false alarms from the automated systems constantly. If you are on the phone with the 911 operator and you tell them "I am looking at the burglars on my security cameras RIGHT NOW!" it will get a faster response than if your computer calls them.
Hope you're looking forward to being stopped at the checkpoint on your way to work and asked, "Your papers please, comrade." That's where this goes if we give the alphabet soup of intel agencies free rein.
What do you mean "That's where this goes"? Between suspicionless "DUI" police checkpoints and customs setting up random checkpoints in non-border locations the police state is already a reality. The sad thing is, the majority of Americans either support such intrusions or are too apathetic to care.
"laws that treated certain people as less than human"
Wow so in America it's no longer even allowed to have an opinion that gay marriage is wrong. Anyone holding that opinion is automatically seen as some horrible nazi or something. You know, there's a difference between disapproval and cross burning and hate speech on posterboards.
Yes, there is a difference and Card has crossed the line to the cross-burning side of that difference. When you advocate jail time for homosexuals or overthrowing the government if they pass laws that enable gay marriage it is certainly beyond "having an opinion"
Just like Orson Scott Card found a way to advocate against gay marriage without being a total dick
You mean advocating jail time for the "crime" of being gay or advocating the overthrow of the government if they pass gay marriage laws is NOT being a total dick? How could he possibly get MORE dickish without growing a foreskin on his head?
If we didn't have cars, we would be knee deep in horse crap.
Being serious for a moment... no, we wouldn't. And that would be a good thing in spite of its effect on public health, insect control, and having to constantly clean it all up. There would only be localized agriculture, much lower crop yields, no processed and junk food, drastically lower human population, less opportunities for concentration of wealth... you get the picture I expect.
You realize there were cities before there were cars, right? And in those cities, there was a LARGE manure problem? According to this page it was 3,000,000 pounds PER DAY in New York City. FTA:
"even when it had been removed from the streets the manure piled up faster than it could be disposed ofearly in the century farmers were happy to pay good money for the manure, by the end of the 1800s stable owners had to pay to have it carted off. As a result of this glutvacant lots in cities across America became piled high with manure; in New York these sometimes rose to forty and even sixty feet"
I agree that national defense is valid expense for the Federal Government, but the US seems to take it too far. Why can every other country in the world manage to spend less on their defense than the US? The US spends many times more than other countries, sometimes an order of magnitude more. The military-industrial complex has grown much too large and has become a large drain on our resources.
Yes, the figure for war spending I quoted is over several decades, but we have already spent at least 1.5 trillion on the wars, all of it deficit spending. I am unable to find a corraborating source for your 2.6 trillion figure, the only other article I found referenced the Senate Budget Committee (republican members) http://www.budget.senate.gov/republican but I could find no reference to this material on their site. I would be more inclined to believe the CBO than a partisan committee, and the CBO says its projections have not changed very much in the years since the passage of the legislation (http://www.cbo.gov/publication/43104). Notice the net budgetary impact graph at the bottom of the page, It is projecting the effect of the legislation is a reduction of the deficit in contrast to the war spending which only added to the deficit. Not only are we paying for the wars now, we will be paying for them far into the future. At least when we pay for health care each year we get something back for our money, any benefits from the wars will be long gone by the time we pay for them.
National defense is a necessary part of a nation-state, but how did attacking a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and didn't pose an immediate threat (false claims of WMD notwithstanding) promote the security of the US? A major impetus behind the 9/11 attacks was the previous foray into Iraq and our backing of the House of Saud, our current foray into Iraq will no doubt have similar consequences in the future. You're welcome kids!
In the world in which we live, giving up defense to provide healthcare is likely to mean eventually you are likely to have neither unless you have a strong benefactor to protect you. The US has played the role of benefactor to Europe since the end of WW2. Who will protect America if it gives up its own defense?
Nobody is saying the US should give up its defense, but maybe it should just defend itself rather than providing defense for foreign countries. Also, calling pre-emptive attacks "defense" is massively stretching the meaning of the word.
Analysis: Obamacare to cost $2.6 trillion over first full decade [dailycaller.com]... Total spending under the Affordable Care Act will reach $2.6 trillion over its first full decade, according to a Senate Budget Committee analysis, which was based on Congressional Budget Office estimates and growth rates.
The Affordable Care Act will cost at least twice what the war is costing. If the road to ruin is the incremental cost of the war over the baseline defense budget, then we need to stop implementation of the Affordable Care Act now.
If the ACA costs 2.6 trillion then it is still less than the estimated cost for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. A recent Harvard study estimated the cost of the two wars at between 4 and 6 trillion dollars: http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-03-28/world/38097452_1_iraq-price-tag-first-gulf-war-veterans. One could certainly make the case that the ACA provides more benefit to the American people than the wars have.
That link does little to refute what the parent posted. The article refutes Elizabeth Warren's claim that GE paid "nothing – zero – in taxes", not the parents assertion that they paid no corporate income taxes. The article does have a quote from a GE spokesman that says they paid a small amount of corporate income tax, but there is no data to back that up. FTFA: 'GE chief spokesman Gary Sheffer told Pro Publica: “We expect to have a small U.S. income tax liability for 2010.” How much? The company wouldn’t say.' When pressed on how much they paid in taxes to the US they refused to break down the numbers, only giving worldwide tax numbers. I don't necessarily believe that GE dodges all tax liability in the US but I don't think they are paying their fair share. The article says they paid 7% total worldwide taxes in 2010, that's a lower rate than I pay in sales taxes alone. Their total tax for property, income, excise taxes and a bundle of other things is at a lower rate than pretty much any single tax that I pay. This problem is certainly not confined to GE, most corporations pay a much lower rate than their nominal corporate tax rate. The article says "Again, the company has clearly been aggressive in reducing its tax burden through various tax credits and deductions created by the federal government" but what it doesn't mention is that those various tax credits are a result of lobbying by these corporations (and in some cases, the lobbyists wrote the bill). It's just another example of how the powerful are able to game the system while the less powerful end up footing the bill for the system. The powerful receive benefits from this system that is incommensurate to the amount they pay.
I postulate that they would have come about in another manner then. The closest we have to a proper experimental control is industries that lack any IP protection, the fashion industry springs to mind, yet every year designers come up with new designs -and make a fortune out of them. They simply found OTHER ways to make money out of invention and fund the process. Removing the patent protection does't mean removing the financial incentive from those that want (or need) it, it simply means the methodology by which that incentive is satisfied gets changed.
The fashion industry has IP protection and there are regularly lawsuits regarding fake merchandise. For example, here is a story about Coach being awarded $8 million for trademark infrigement and unfair competition. I think your point is valid but your example isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
A simple solution would be to have license plate scanners which check the legality of the license. If it's valid, they don't log it. If it's fake or duplicated, they tag it / photograph the car & driver / alert the cop waiting down the road. Similar to what automated speed traps already do: they ignore you if you drive below the speed limit.
That solution only works if the goal of gathering license plates is to find outdated registrations. Since that is not the (primary) goal, the solution won't work for the government's needs.
Anybody who thinks they really decided not to pursue this program is naive. Because of the public outcry, they pulled the public proposal but they will simply have to find the contractor and hire him in secret now. They are not going to abandon this program, they are just going to hide it better.
There is a huge black market that uses Cash. And I am not talking about drugs, but rather a whole sub-economic system that is run on cash. People buying and selling with cash as a means to barter. All of these transactions avoid the drain of taxes and therefore, are much more profitable. No sales tax, no income tax, no social security tax, no unemployment insurance (tax) ...
These people live and work "off the grid" economically. Imagine doing work and making an extra 25% WHILE charging less. I told one of my customers that if they file a 1099 for my side work, I'll have to double my rates simply because I can't afford to do work that is reported to the IRS for less than double my normal rates.
People in government don't realize how much taxes impact commerce. ALL taxes are regressive. Avoid them by doing "cash only" business.
That's fine, those of us who don't work for cash are glad to pay your taxes. Freeloaders are always a welcome addition to any system.
Oh, that's a recipe for disaster... Competing with such a network will be like fighting city hall. It may be great now, but wait until the towns start enacting laws mandating censorship over anything that passes the city-owned network, for example.
Why don't we stick to what happens in reality instead of imagining what might happen. There has never been such a thing proposed. It would be much harder legally for a government to implement such censorship since the government is bound by many laws that a private company is not. Since private companies and the existing government-owned networks are not doing this now, why do you fear it happening?
I don't know about you, but I dread the thought of my Internet service being anything like what the electric utility provides around here.
I don't have to imagine what the internet service on this network would be like because I have been using it for years. It has been much faster, much more reliable and much cheaper than what I was getting from Comcast. The levels of service have continually increased (there is nothing like being told "We kicked you up to 50MB/50MB! Nope, no increase it is still $36 - have a nice day!").
Occupy Wall Street much? The choice is not between corporations and "people" (government). The choice is between monopoly (corporate or governmental) and competing corporations. And I'll take the latter over the former any day.
I don't need competing networks in the same way that I don't need competing road systems. The network is like a road system, maintained for the good of all, and both FedEx and UPS are free to use it to compete. There is robust competition on the network because more companies are able to provide services they could never provide before because other companies had been granted the monopoly. Before the network was built we had two monopoly providers (Qwest for phone and Comcast for cable). Service on both were atrocious and prices were high. Since they had monopoly positions there was no incentive to provide quality service.
Back when dial-up internet was the norm there were a lot of local and regional ISPs. If you didn't like your ISP you could switch to a different one. The advent of broadband killed off most of these ISPs since the existing monopoly providers of phone and cable had the only route to the customer. Municipal networks bring back the ability for the small guys to compete with the big guys. It increases competition and diversifies the marketplace. How can someone who sees the value of competition and can see the current state of phone and cable monopolies be against it?
Nazis. ;-)
Your welcome
You're welcome.
You're welcome.
Whoooosh
I can't tell you the number of times I've ruined a great post with an embarrassing typo or grammar fuck-up, only to have my entire argument ignored as a million grammar Nazi's jump in to inform me of the difference between your and you're (as if I DON'T FUCKING KNOW THAT ALREADY).
So there you go. Your welcome.
Nazis. ;-)
Your welcome
Do we really feel, Google should own networks? With taxpayers' help?
Sure, it is fun and games, while they are still growing — the lucky users can't shut up about it. What happens, when Google becomes a regional (or nationwide) monopoly, however? What if they decide to "boycott" a site — either because it is run by "haters" of one kind or another, or is spreading malware?
The UTOPIA network is owned by the member cities. If Google would like to provide ISP services to people on that network they are free to do so, the same as any other ISP. Provider lock-in is why networks should stay the property of the people and not the corporations, hopefully UTOPIA won't go the way of iProvo and get gifted to Google.
Because there is no true competition when a government decides to compete with a private company. The government "company" has the benefit of mandatory "customers" (taxpayers), which means people who don't want to be customers are forced to help pay for those who do, and those who are customers of the private company are actually paying twice.
If you want competition, don't create an artificial market run at sub-market pricing supported by taxpayers. Let the competitors fight it out on even ground.
In my market, Comcast pays the city a franchise fee for every subscriber they have, which results in net income for the city over and above the payroll and property taxes they pay. This money gets dumped into the general fund to pay for ... anything the city council wants to use it for.
Nothing is stopping another cable company from entering the market but none has. If someone could come undercut Comcast honestly, and not sell services for less because the deficit is made up from the general tax fund, they would. Why not? Because they look at the market and see that it won't support two companies. The government, with essentially bottomless pockets, pays no attention to markets and doesn't care about operating at a loss. If they lose money from that service, they'll just plead for more money at the next election and hold other services hostage. Our city does it on a regular basis, threatening to close the library and the public pool and the senior center unless they get more money, but never do they threaten to eliminate the unnecessary things they do.
That's why it is bad.
But the problem with the current situation is since there is a natural barrier to competition because not every provider can be allowed to use easements to run their lines. The way cities handled this in the past was granting a single company a monopoly on providing a certain service. This doesn't work well in practice, particularly in industries that are not heavily regulated by the franchise authority like cable TV.
The solution to this problem is for the city to own a fiber network and any company that wants to provide IP services (TV, phone, internet) over this network is free to do so. This gives a level playing field for all competitors who want to provide this kind of service. The existing monopoly system does not work for anyone but the monopoly holder, it certainly does not work for the consumer.
Full disclosure, I am a subscriber of one of the fiber networks mentioned in the summary and so I might be biased.
Should we prevent the spread of headlines that end in a question mark?
Yet, most of the money doesn't get to stay in pocket. The tower-tester thing actually has to be built. So most of that money is going to wages of construction workers, a good many of whom are black, if that helps. The few crappy low paying jobs they quit to take these 2 year construction gigs now have to raise wages to get decent replacements. Eventually, somebody who couldn't find work before, is now working.
So it does somewhat help the plight of the poor; a good amount while while under construction, some small amount ongoing (assuming they can rent-sell-use it). Real jobs are better than welfare, are they not? At least this federal spending is about 1:1, as far as putting money back into the economy (or as close as you'll get). And injecting the majority of it this way, as wages at the working man's level, well; Democrats should love that.
I've been a deficit hawk for years, and am as conservative as they come. And yet, if given the King's power to axe this one pork program out of thousands, I would hesitate. In just about the poorest part of the country, these are good paying jobs, and they are building something of value, even if NASA doesn't want it anymore. And they did already start it, didn't they?
I'm just saying, that in the sea of wasteful federal spending, this is far from the worst thing going on. But yeah, it's a small part of the overall problem. The only way to get all the pork in line is with leadership, which we haven't had for many years.
This is an example of the broken window fallacy. Just because breaking a window stimulates trade and provides jobs does not necessarily mean it is good for the economy as a whole. There are many places that money could be spent that would provide greater economic benefit.
Hell... they can have a huge map database in the car.
All the car needs to do is use its last known position plus data from sensors and dead-reckoning based navigation to identify its current position.
Most Inertial sensors are only good for a short time before they become too inaccurate to use. Manufacturers could have the car use pattern mapping to match its surroundings with onboard maps, but when GPS available "all the time", why bother implementing something that will rarely be used.
Not really - inertial sensors can be quite accurate. The gyros in my RC autopilot are able to track the plane's position quite accurately even if the GPS is malfunctioning, in normal operation it integrates the GPS and inertial sensors. This is in a cheap off the shelf chip, I would imagine a purpose-built sensor for an automobile would be even more accurate. But all that is beside the point, if you are in a car you have tires that are rolling on the ground that tell you exactly how far you have traveled. Combine that with a compass and you have a fairly accurate way to localize the car. Add a vision system and you have more redundancy and an ability to correct for drift. My home-built robot can keep track of itself on a map using just wheel and IR sensors, why couldn't a car with much more sophisticated sensors be able to do the same thing?
yes.. under carefully controlled circumstances monitored by the engineers who designed the hardware and software.. and with overrides that the end consumer won't get or will lose eventually, like google does with every other product they make. There have been just too many circumstances where people have trusted computers (and the programmers who programmed them) to get it right when they didn't... and these were far simpler situations with far better defined inputs than what a typical driver has to deal with.
I guess we'll find out when these start hitting the roads, but the probability they won't tracked and hacked is virtually zero.
I don't think California streets are "carefully controlled circumstances" and Google's cars have shown the ability to successfully drive on them. It seems like you think that these cars must drive perfectly to replace existing drivers - they only need to be marginally better than humans to be a benefit which isn't a very high bar to top. Humans are terrible drivers and kill or injure millions of people each year through their poor driving. Even if the computer driver screws up once in a while it will still be better than what we have now.
So are there the actual impressions of the submitter or just another contentless story?
This is why every mission after Columbia had an 'Abort to ISS' option that would allow the shuttle to dock with ISS and wait for the relief shuttle (which was sitting at a 48 hour to launch stage IIRC) to return them home.
Every mission except STS-125, the last Hubble servicing mission. Since the orbit of the ISS has a large inclination relative to the Hubble they planned an in-space rescue mission if TPS damage made it necessary.
I think you'll find that 99% of the populace see work as the only way they have to get the stuff they need to live (and the stuff they want to make life enjoyable).
At the moment. One of the primary topics of this discussion is what happens when that's no longer strictly necessary.
The problem is that this issue is occurring NOW and it certainly isn't coming out in favor of the worker. We have had massive productivity gains in the last 50 years and nearly all of the gains have gone to the management and owner classes, rather than the working class (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/18/wages-productivity-report_n_837814.html). Increased automation may make for more idle time for the average worker, but that idle time comes at a cost - that worker isn't getting paid more just because the factory is churning out more widgets. When automation is added either the workers produce more with the same amount of work (giving more profits for the owners) or the workforce is reduced to produce the same amount (also giving more profit to the owners). The workers will NEVER gain anything from these productivity increases without societal/government intervention, there is simply no incentive for the owners to share the wealth from the gains. In fact, since productivity gains generally increase unemployment it creates a downward pressure on wages, more people competing for the same jobs.
If you're only 'alerting yourself' there's no fee involved. The 'alarm fee' my township imposes on me is, apparently, to cover false calls. (naturally my wife had one of these once...). They have a yearly false call allowance of.. once. After that they start charging you.
I agree with 'what's the point' though. If I get burgled, I want the police to be notified, and either come shoot someone for me, or turn up with flashing lights if I'm away - not me sitting on a cellphone describing what they're removing from my house to a 911 representative.
While automatic notifications are nice, the latter scenario is more likely to get action from the police. They receive false alarms from the automated systems constantly. If you are on the phone with the 911 operator and you tell them "I am looking at the burglars on my security cameras RIGHT NOW!" it will get a faster response than if your computer calls them.
Hope you're looking forward to being stopped at the checkpoint on your way to work and asked, "Your papers please, comrade." That's where this goes if we give the alphabet soup of intel agencies free rein.
What do you mean "That's where this goes"? Between suspicionless "DUI" police checkpoints and customs setting up random checkpoints in non-border locations the police state is already a reality. The sad thing is, the majority of Americans either support such intrusions or are too apathetic to care.
This is the USA we used to know! At last, leading from behind is over. At last, American engineers are back at work again.
You mean the solar plant built by Abengoa, a Spanish company? How many American engineers work for them?
This technology could be miniaturized, automated, computerized, and finally placed on all roofs.
Solar-thermal technology doesn't really scale like that, you need a large heat mass to make it efficient.
"laws that treated certain people as less than human"
Wow so in America it's no longer even allowed to have an opinion that gay marriage is wrong. Anyone holding that opinion is automatically seen as some horrible nazi or something. You know, there's a difference between disapproval and cross burning and hate speech on posterboards.
Yes, there is a difference and Card has crossed the line to the cross-burning side of that difference. When you advocate jail time for homosexuals or overthrowing the government if they pass laws that enable gay marriage it is certainly beyond "having an opinion"
Just like Orson Scott Card found a way to advocate against gay marriage without being a total dick
You mean advocating jail time for the "crime" of being gay or advocating the overthrow of the government if they pass gay marriage laws is NOT being a total dick? How could he possibly get MORE dickish without growing a foreskin on his head?
If we didn't have cars, we would be knee deep in horse crap.
Being serious for a moment... no, we wouldn't. And that would be a good thing in spite of its effect on public health, insect control, and having to constantly clean it all up. There would only be localized agriculture, much lower crop yields, no processed and junk food, drastically lower human population, less opportunities for concentration of wealth... you get the picture I expect.
You realize there were cities before there were cars, right? And in those cities, there was a LARGE manure problem? According to this page it was 3,000,000 pounds PER DAY in New York City. FTA:
"even when it had been removed from the streets the manure piled up faster than it could be disposed ofearly in the century farmers were happy to pay good money for the manure, by the end of the 1800s stable owners had to pay to have it carted off. As a result of this glutvacant lots in cities across America became piled high with manure; in New York these sometimes rose to forty and even sixty feet"
Yeah, sounds like a real utopia!
I agree that national defense is valid expense for the Federal Government, but the US seems to take it too far. Why can every other country in the world manage to spend less on their defense than the US? The US spends many times more than other countries, sometimes an order of magnitude more. The military-industrial complex has grown much too large and has become a large drain on our resources.
Yes, the figure for war spending I quoted is over several decades, but we have already spent at least 1.5 trillion on the wars, all of it deficit spending. I am unable to find a corraborating source for your 2.6 trillion figure, the only other article I found referenced the Senate Budget Committee (republican members) http://www.budget.senate.gov/republican but I could find no reference to this material on their site. I would be more inclined to believe the CBO than a partisan committee, and the CBO says its projections have not changed very much in the years since the passage of the legislation (http://www.cbo.gov/publication/43104). Notice the net budgetary impact graph at the bottom of the page, It is projecting the effect of the legislation is a reduction of the deficit in contrast to the war spending which only added to the deficit. Not only are we paying for the wars now, we will be paying for them far into the future. At least when we pay for health care each year we get something back for our money, any benefits from the wars will be long gone by the time we pay for them.
National defense is a necessary part of a nation-state, but how did attacking a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and didn't pose an immediate threat (false claims of WMD notwithstanding) promote the security of the US? A major impetus behind the 9/11 attacks was the previous foray into Iraq and our backing of the House of Saud, our current foray into Iraq will no doubt have similar consequences in the future. You're welcome kids!
In the world in which we live, giving up defense to provide healthcare is likely to mean eventually you are likely to have neither unless you have a strong benefactor to protect you. The US has played the role of benefactor to Europe since the end of WW2. Who will protect America if it gives up its own defense?
Nobody is saying the US should give up its defense, but maybe it should just defend itself rather than providing defense for foreign countries. Also, calling pre-emptive attacks "defense" is massively stretching the meaning of the word.
Analysis: Obamacare to cost $2.6 trillion over first full decade [dailycaller.com] ... Total spending under the Affordable Care Act will reach $2.6 trillion over its first full decade, according to a Senate Budget Committee analysis, which was based on Congressional Budget Office estimates and growth rates.
The Affordable Care Act will cost at least twice what the war is costing. If the road to ruin is the incremental cost of the war over the baseline defense budget, then we need to stop implementation of the Affordable Care Act now.
If the ACA costs 2.6 trillion then it is still less than the estimated cost for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. A recent Harvard study estimated the cost of the two wars at between 4 and 6 trillion dollars: http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-03-28/world/38097452_1_iraq-price-tag-first-gulf-war-veterans. One could certainly make the case that the ACA provides more benefit to the American people than the wars have.
GE did not pay zero taxes. That's just bad reporting from the NY Times.
http://www.factcheck.org/2012/04/warren-ge-pays-no-taxes/
That link does little to refute what the parent posted. The article refutes Elizabeth Warren's claim that GE paid "nothing – zero – in taxes", not the parents assertion that they paid no corporate income taxes. The article does have a quote from a GE spokesman that says they paid a small amount of corporate income tax, but there is no data to back that up. FTFA: 'GE chief spokesman Gary Sheffer told Pro Publica: “We expect to have a small U.S. income tax liability for 2010.” How much? The company wouldn’t say.' When pressed on how much they paid in taxes to the US they refused to break down the numbers, only giving worldwide tax numbers. I don't necessarily believe that GE dodges all tax liability in the US but I don't think they are paying their fair share. The article says they paid 7% total worldwide taxes in 2010, that's a lower rate than I pay in sales taxes alone. Their total tax for property, income, excise taxes and a bundle of other things is at a lower rate than pretty much any single tax that I pay. This problem is certainly not confined to GE, most corporations pay a much lower rate than their nominal corporate tax rate. The article says "Again, the company has clearly been aggressive in reducing its tax burden through various tax credits and deductions created by the federal government" but what it doesn't mention is that those various tax credits are a result of lobbying by these corporations (and in some cases, the lobbyists wrote the bill). It's just another example of how the powerful are able to game the system while the less powerful end up footing the bill for the system. The powerful receive benefits from this system that is incommensurate to the amount they pay.
"The other does about $7M a year, profits about $900k" WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY DOING WHERE THEY ARE LOSING SO MUCH MONEY POST SALE? GOLD TOILETS?
Your consulting must be either shitty or expensive.
It's nearly a 13% margin. That's not stellar, but it's not peanuts either.
I postulate that they would have come about in another manner then. The closest we have to a proper experimental control is industries that lack any IP protection, the fashion industry springs to mind, yet every year designers come up with new designs -and make a fortune out of them.
They simply found OTHER ways to make money out of invention and fund the process. Removing the patent protection does't mean removing the financial incentive from those that want (or need) it, it simply means the methodology by which that incentive is satisfied gets changed.
The fashion industry has IP protection and there are regularly lawsuits regarding fake merchandise. For example, here is a story about Coach being awarded $8 million for trademark infrigement and unfair competition. I think your point is valid but your example isn't.