You're granted the privilege of driving your car despite the chance you'll seriously injure someone else. Its not a right and can be taken away at any time (by revoking your drivers license) if there's reason to believe you are unfit to retain that privilege.
Assuming self driving cars continue improving at the rate they have been, in 50 years you may not be able to get the privilege of driving anymore outside of special circumstances (race car driver or something maybe?)
OK wait. So you're suggesting undereducated parents should be responsible for educating their children? There seems to be a flaw in your logic there.
Not to mention uneducated people tend to be on the lower end of the pay scale so a large portion of those parents will be working stupid hours for little pay in order to keep their kids fed already.. finding time to educate them as well is likely not going to be plausible.
So in 10 years you've got 25% of your youth population being uneducated, unsupervised and hitting the streets with all of the great judgement skills your average teenager brings with them at the best of times.
A better solution would be to designate 25% of the schools for kids of anti-vaxxers. Sooner or later the problem will solve itself, one way or another. And those who don't have idiots for parents can happily continue on their way in a disease-free (or at least disease-minimized) environment.
There's a big difference between impossible in practice (which lots of things are) and impossible even in theory. The latter is a much much stricter rule and can be used as a basis for other related theories to build upon since we can say for sure that its not just us failing to be clever enough.
Sort of. Under QM, we may already know the theory is incomplete but at the same time, the parts we know well are far more constrained than anything classical physicists could have dreamed of prior to the introduction to QM.
For example, it would be extremely unlikely for any new or competing theory to work around the uncertainty principle and have any hope of being correct. Classical physicists thought they knew it all because they were only thinking about the things they could see. In modern QM, we have not just physical evidence but strong mathematical reasons to know where our limits are and which ones are likely to be broken and which ones aren't.
That's why you usually hear about quantizing gravity rather than smoothing QM -- for all that general relativity seems to work, its still a much weaker theory than QM. GR relies on things like the equivalence principle that are so strongly self-evident that they're generally accepted as fact but actually have no physical basis beyond noticing that gravity happens to act like a standard acceleration if you view it in the correct light. That's a whole level of "hmm" above the fine-tuning issues in QM.
Sort of, but you've described it in a bit of a misleading way. Anything that moves at c is indeed massless, and we can usually take "matter" to mean any particles that have rest mass >0.
The tricky part is that word "transformed." You can't transform matter into energy just by increasing its speed. You have to annihilate it somehow and some of the products of that annihilation will be in the form of light-speed photons (and for a very very brief time if you do it right, gluon jets, which I believe also move at c until they get constrained by color confinement as gluons are massless.) Similarly, adding more and more energy to a system doesn't necessarily force it to "slow down" and coalesce into matter.
Also, there's another difference between these two "absolutes." Stuff can move at c -- namely, light can do so. Whereas nothing can be at 0K as far as we know.
You youngun's and your persistent state worlds. Go try an original Megaman and see how many enemies are "gone forever." Or basically any other game of that era.
Energy states are quantized, yes. And there is a lowest state for any particular particle which, as far as anybody knows, you cannot drop below while still remaining that particle. For example if an electron gets dropped into energy state "0", its effectively joined the nucleus and one of your protons becomes a neutron -- its a gross oversimplification but basically that's what happens to form neutron stars.
Free energy on the other hand is not quantized (or at least our best models don't show it to be such.)
As for temperature having meaning in the context of single atoms uhh.. sort of but not really? What we measure as "temperature" is the average energy of the system. So in the context of a single atom you'd kind of be "averaging" across one thing. And digging in much deeper than that ends up at questions like "what is energy?" which nobody can answer. You get lots of descriptions of what energy does or what we can use it for but nobody knows or even has a theory about what it is, on a fundamental level. At least not a scientific one (I'm sure there's lots of philosophical and religious answers..) Its just there.
I'm pretty sure Zeno's paradox applies regardless of measurement precision. The problem is that, since you're assuming constant velocity, moving the first 50% takes 50% of the total time.. moving the next 25% takes 25% of the time and so forth. Basically you have two infinities "cancelling" each other out (which happens surprisingly/scarily often in physics!)
With the freezing, as I understand (and its well possible that I don't,) you remove 50% in one unit of time, then the next 25% in another equal unit of time and so on. The difference being that you only have one infinity to deal with (the number of temperature halvings) and therefore an impossibility.
Reaching light speed has similar issues. Every unit of additional energy you put toward your acceleration results in an ever-decreasing boost to velocity as you get closer and closer to c. Which makes you wonder if there's could be some temperature equivalent to Lorentz' transformations. (If there was, I assume smarter people than me would have noticed it by now of course.. but its fun to consider!)
Even that dispute is stupid. Say that someone discovered that global warming was 100% natural and humans were completely innocent. That doesn't change the fact that mass extinctions and suffering will be the result. We should still consider trying to do something about it (though in that case it would necessarily be something more extreme than "switch to renewable energy.")
For a similar example, if we saw a texas-sized meteor hurtling toward earth.. by your logic we should just watch as it kills us all because hey, its a natural phenomena and its happened before in earth's history!
I mean there really isn't any "dispute" that its man made either -- the dispute is about how many rich people would have to be very slightly less rich in order to start reversing the effects. But its a dumb argument no matter what the result because at the end of the day, its bad for life as we know it regardless of any hundred-million-year-past history of the planet.
Trouble with a nuclear winter, beyond the obvious, is that it would almost certainly be a temporary event. Within a decade or so a much of the particulates that were blasted into the air will have fallen back down to earth and things would get back to normal fairly quickly after that, temperature-wise. There's been a handful of recorded volcano blasts that were large enough to have this sort of effect (look up Year without a Summer) and even the biggest such events renormalized within a couple of years.
Of course a global nuclear war would probably protect against climate change in the sense that killing off large portions of the human population would reduce our emissions significantly. So there's that.
You and an irrelevantly small number of other people.
The vast, vast, vast majority aren't in that category unfortunately, including myself. Nobody's got time for that shit, and the people who write that shit are counting on such.
And we won't do anything about it because we're all trained to trust the company and besides if you get suckered its your own fault for not taking several hours to read through every 50+ page EULA and other piece of intentionally-difficult-to-read, one-sided crap that gets thrown your way, never mind the many years of legal training needed to fully understand it.
but it's a fact of life, so we all better get used to it.
Essentially, yes. If you can't propose a large-scale solution, then you're not really proposing a solution. Its like trying to stay dry by holding a pencil over your head in the rain. It might do something but its not really going to be noticeable.
If you want to hate on MS then good for you. You're welcome to hate them as much as you want and avoid their products as much as you want. You may even have valid points somewhere. But reducing the amount of ads in your life just isn't a terribly significant one.
Refusing to use Microsoft products is a good start.
Refusing to use MS products is a drop in the ocean. Yes its a "start" but I'd hardly call it a good one.
Until Microsoft issues an update that doesn't respect your choice.
And when that happens, I'll consider changing my opinion. For now I'll deal with the product as it currently stands.
Like I said, don't use Microsoft.
OK, so lets use Safari on OSX. Hmm. There's still ads on Youtube. OK lets try Firefox on Linux. That's all open source so.. hey wait there's still ads on Youtube! Its almost as if Microsoft only controls their own products and not all commercial software and services. What kind of a crazy world is this?
So you install an adblocker. And don't use sites that block adblocker. And don't use software that includes ads. And don't watch TV channels that have commercials. And don't get on buses that have ad placards. And don't drive on streets that have billboards. And don't read newspapers and and and. Oh and by the way what are you doing on Slashdot? They have ads here!
Get a Chromebook.
I'm sorry, did you just tell me to stop using MS to reduce the ad problem and then suggest Google as a better alternative? AKA one of if not the biggest online ad company in the world? Like I said you're welcome to hate MS if you want, but using "I don't like that specific company" as your sole argument is showing some glaring holes against the backdrop of just so much other shit that's out there.
Maybe not. But if you handed the average person an 8-digit sum of money for acknowledging that a 78 page document full of legal ramblings that you don't understand and probably won't actually matter to you personally anyway exists (whether you read it or not).. the question becomes a little murkier.
A) I never said it did. In fact I said exactly the opposite.
B/C) What you want seems to be pretty irrelevant. Your options are being careful or getting plastered with ads. You don't have a choice of middle ground (or at least not much of one.)
D) Yes it will. In that very specific instance of such. No turning off the Windows start menu ad ticker won't stop ads on Skype or Youtube or your television. But it will stop the ad ticker in Win10's start menu, which is what I was talking about specifically.
E) We should. But they need to be large-scale solutions if you want them to have any effect. Which probably means legal solutions since convincing a significant number of companies to forego one of their primary revenue streams for no reason than "I don't like it" is probably not going to get you very far.
In the case of Microsoft, I avoid using them whenever possible
Great. In terms of ads, that means you've managed to avoid a couple small (and easy-to-disable) ads in Windows and a handful of less-easy-to-disable ads in Skype and a few other places. Now you just have television, newspapers, buses and much of the internet to avoid! There are many reasons you may dislike MS products, but this is probably not the most significant one given how pervasive the problem is everywhere else -- one more instance isn't really going to make or break you.
WTF are you talking about? I'm not sure what's deluded about "they were there, I hit the option to turn them off, and now they aren't there"..?
Or are you under the impression that I somehow think turning off the ad ticker in the Windows Start menu should magically make all ads everywhere disappear? Because that's definitely not what I wrote. And would be a flat out stupid claim. I have no "delusions" about that.
And there's ads on the internet.. and on TV.. and at the bus stop. Its almost as if advertisers want you to see their ads all the time!
Meh. Sure its a bit annoying to get ads in software you pay for but that's hardly a new phenomena -- pay $20 for a movie and enjoy 15 minutes of ads for future movies, cars etc. Buy the dvd for $40 and get the same treatment. Yadayada.
I'm not saying its a good thing. Or even something we shouldn't complain about. I'm just saying its systematic everywhere. To the point that its more surprising that they waited this long to toss advertising hooks into Windows.
That said, I never see ads. Its not that hard to find the option to turn them off in the start menu (though I don't recall where off hand.) And I turned Cortana off after the first time it took 10+ seconds to find a program in my start menu (ie: the first time I tried using it) since it feels like it needs to search the entire interwebs first Using Bing no less. And I do many if not most things through the start menu (though I imagine I'm in a small crowd on that one) so I didn't even get to the point of considering the privacy implications -- the sheer inconvenience of the "improved" search function had me running for the "off" slider on day 1.
Disable Cortana. Disable the "suggested content" in the start menu. Disable a few of the "notifications" that spam you to buy Office or whatever every other day, and install Spybot's Anti-Beacon. Its certainly more steps than necessary but once done, you have a reasonably decent and usable OS again.
Libertarians tend to have a bit of trouble when it comes to shared resources of any sort.
Lets say we're neighbors. There's a river a mile away that we both have to walk to in order to get water (because we live in pre-industrial time or whatever.)
You get sick of walking and since you happen to be rich, you hire a bunch of yokels to dig a tributary down to your property (and being a good libertarian, you're careful to ensure you have the right of ways for the necessary strip of land.)
So now I need a bucket of water. I have the option of a) Walking a mile to the river or b) walking a hundred feet to your pond. Lets further assume that your pond is close enough to my property that I can reach over and grab a bucket of water without damaging even a single blade of grass on your side of the line, just to make the example completely pure.
In the libertarian view, I should always be walking that mile because the tributary is not "mine." I didn't build it or pay for it. That much makes sense. Where it kind of falls apart is that the bucket of water is the exact same whether I take it from the head of the tributary (ie: the river) or the base. It does no harm to you at all for me to take it from your pool. And yet you refuse to let me for no reason other than ideology.
From what I've seen this is the general mindset of libertarians -- its not so much about "I worked for it so its mine" as much as it is denying anyone else from enjoying your labors, even if it costs you absolutely nothing to allow it. And in that mindset, copyright makes perfect sense since they're interpreting it not so much as granting you a monopoly as much as they are interpreting it as denying me things I didn't directly earn -- the "if I can't have it, no one can!" attitude.
Now of course a flamebait claim like this will draw all the self-proclaimed libertarians that will either try to say the same thing in nicer words (which doesn't really change the claims..) or say that their personal form of libertarianism makes exceptions for these situations (which is fine.. they're welcome to believe whatever they want. But that also doesn't change my claims which aren't tailored to any one person's specific beliefs beyond my own, which are based on my own observations.)
PS: Can any of you libertarians point out where even my carefully tailored example fails to meet the pure libertarian ideal? Lets assume I'm honest and that the failure isn't something sideangled like preventing me from taking my bucket in the middle of the night when you aren't watching, but an actual failure in the layout of the example.
Because the cartels have millions if not billions of times more money than any individual. Maybe Elon Musk could do so, but he's got more important uses for his money.
elect legislators less vulnerable to such buying
For the same reason we don't ride unicorns. Such things don't exist. You're usually given a choice between two or maybe three legislators who are both bought by various anti-consumer organizations. And the occasional time an honest politician comes around, they're quickly removed in one manner or another -- either sweetening the deal until they join the ranks of the bought, or if that doesn't work just drown them out with huge amounts of character assassination ads that they can't afford to fight because you know.. no significant brib^W"campaign contribution" money behind them.
This is of course subject to scaling -- there's less interest in buying laws that only affect a couple thousand people (though local interests still try to bribe local politicians..) So its somewhat easier to find an honest politician in smallish towns and cities. But the bigger the politics, the closer to one the probability of corporate influence.
Yes and no. There's going to be a question of intent. Especially if there's any substance to the claim that energy saving devices affected the readings ("well they can't possibly test with every load device ever made.")
Its almost certain that some lawyers will be getting paid due to this, but it may not be as cut and dry as it sounds on the surface and there will be a lot of wrangling over whether the utility companies or the manufacturers should receive the blame, or if they just call it an unfortunate accident.
At the very least, there will likely be some sort of refund for affected customers since there's no question that they're innocent.. especially given that in a lot of jurisdictions, they weren't even given the choice of being switched to smart meters never mind having detailed knowledge of how they work (and how they might fail.)
Not entirely sure that is sufficient. "Implied" and "satisfactory" leave open a hell of a lot of leeway. Though its certainly a lot stronger than a simple "buyer beware" mantra.
Not much to investigate. There's no law against selling shitty products.. at least as long as nobody can prove you were being intentionally malicious.
Its supposed to be the consumers deciding whether a product is good or bad, by choosing to buy it or not.
Unfortunately we're in a time where consumers not only don't make purchases with full information but often times full information simply isn't available.
We're in a screwy situation where we use models of theoretically perfect capitalism to justify not changing or even attempting to correct the many real-world deviations from those same theories. Of course the old "follow the money" adage applies as it usually does -- the people best in position make change are the same people who benefit most from keeping the status quo.
Slashdot Mirror
You're granted the privilege of driving your car despite the chance you'll seriously injure someone else. Its not a right and can be taken away at any time (by revoking your drivers license) if there's reason to believe you are unfit to retain that privilege.
Assuming self driving cars continue improving at the rate they have been, in 50 years you may not be able to get the privilege of driving anymore outside of special circumstances (race car driver or something maybe?)
OK wait. So you're suggesting undereducated parents should be responsible for educating their children? There seems to be a flaw in your logic there.
Not to mention uneducated people tend to be on the lower end of the pay scale so a large portion of those parents will be working stupid hours for little pay in order to keep their kids fed already.. finding time to educate them as well is likely not going to be plausible.
So in 10 years you've got 25% of your youth population being uneducated, unsupervised and hitting the streets with all of the great judgement skills your average teenager brings with them at the best of times.
A better solution would be to designate 25% of the schools for kids of anti-vaxxers. Sooner or later the problem will solve itself, one way or another. And those who don't have idiots for parents can happily continue on their way in a disease-free (or at least disease-minimized) environment.
You oldun's and your technicalities ;).
There are. But simply counting 1,2,3,... is not one such series.
There's a big difference between impossible in practice (which lots of things are) and impossible even in theory. The latter is a much much stricter rule and can be used as a basis for other related theories to build upon since we can say for sure that its not just us failing to be clever enough.
Sort of. Under QM, we may already know the theory is incomplete but at the same time, the parts we know well are far more constrained than anything classical physicists could have dreamed of prior to the introduction to QM.
For example, it would be extremely unlikely for any new or competing theory to work around the uncertainty principle and have any hope of being correct. Classical physicists thought they knew it all because they were only thinking about the things they could see. In modern QM, we have not just physical evidence but strong mathematical reasons to know where our limits are and which ones are likely to be broken and which ones aren't.
That's why you usually hear about quantizing gravity rather than smoothing QM -- for all that general relativity seems to work, its still a much weaker theory than QM. GR relies on things like the equivalence principle that are so strongly self-evident that they're generally accepted as fact but actually have no physical basis beyond noticing that gravity happens to act like a standard acceleration if you view it in the correct light. That's a whole level of "hmm" above the fine-tuning issues in QM.
Sort of, but you've described it in a bit of a misleading way. Anything that moves at c is indeed massless, and we can usually take "matter" to mean any particles that have rest mass >0.
The tricky part is that word "transformed." You can't transform matter into energy just by increasing its speed. You have to annihilate it somehow and some of the products of that annihilation will be in the form of light-speed photons (and for a very very brief time if you do it right, gluon jets, which I believe also move at c until they get constrained by color confinement as gluons are massless.) Similarly, adding more and more energy to a system doesn't necessarily force it to "slow down" and coalesce into matter.
Also, there's another difference between these two "absolutes." Stuff can move at c -- namely, light can do so. Whereas nothing can be at 0K as far as we know.
Kill an enemy in a game its gone forever.
You youngun's and your persistent state worlds. Go try an original Megaman and see how many enemies are "gone forever." Or basically any other game of that era.
Energy states are quantized, yes. And there is a lowest state for any particular particle which, as far as anybody knows, you cannot drop below while still remaining that particle. For example if an electron gets dropped into energy state "0", its effectively joined the nucleus and one of your protons becomes a neutron -- its a gross oversimplification but basically that's what happens to form neutron stars.
Free energy on the other hand is not quantized (or at least our best models don't show it to be such.)
As for temperature having meaning in the context of single atoms uhh.. sort of but not really? What we measure as "temperature" is the average energy of the system. So in the context of a single atom you'd kind of be "averaging" across one thing. And digging in much deeper than that ends up at questions like "what is energy?" which nobody can answer. You get lots of descriptions of what energy does or what we can use it for but nobody knows or even has a theory about what it is, on a fundamental level. At least not a scientific one (I'm sure there's lots of philosophical and religious answers..) Its just there.
Not always.
Though you need to get into some pretty advanced math before you'd care about number systems where 0.999... != 1.
I'm pretty sure Zeno's paradox applies regardless of measurement precision. The problem is that, since you're assuming constant velocity, moving the first 50% takes 50% of the total time.. moving the next 25% takes 25% of the time and so forth. Basically you have two infinities "cancelling" each other out (which happens surprisingly/scarily often in physics!)
With the freezing, as I understand (and its well possible that I don't,) you remove 50% in one unit of time, then the next 25% in another equal unit of time and so on. The difference being that you only have one infinity to deal with (the number of temperature halvings) and therefore an impossibility.
Reaching light speed has similar issues. Every unit of additional energy you put toward your acceleration results in an ever-decreasing boost to velocity as you get closer and closer to c. Which makes you wonder if there's could be some temperature equivalent to Lorentz' transformations. (If there was, I assume smarter people than me would have noticed it by now of course.. but its fun to consider!)
Even that dispute is stupid. Say that someone discovered that global warming was 100% natural and humans were completely innocent. That doesn't change the fact that mass extinctions and suffering will be the result. We should still consider trying to do something about it (though in that case it would necessarily be something more extreme than "switch to renewable energy.")
For a similar example, if we saw a texas-sized meteor hurtling toward earth.. by your logic we should just watch as it kills us all because hey, its a natural phenomena and its happened before in earth's history!
I mean there really isn't any "dispute" that its man made either -- the dispute is about how many rich people would have to be very slightly less rich in order to start reversing the effects. But its a dumb argument no matter what the result because at the end of the day, its bad for life as we know it regardless of any hundred-million-year-past history of the planet.
Trouble with a nuclear winter, beyond the obvious, is that it would almost certainly be a temporary event. Within a decade or so a much of the particulates that were blasted into the air will have fallen back down to earth and things would get back to normal fairly quickly after that, temperature-wise. There's been a handful of recorded volcano blasts that were large enough to have this sort of effect (look up Year without a Summer) and even the biggest such events renormalized within a couple of years.
Of course a global nuclear war would probably protect against climate change in the sense that killing off large portions of the human population would reduce our emissions significantly. So there's that.
You and an irrelevantly small number of other people.
The vast, vast, vast majority aren't in that category unfortunately, including myself. Nobody's got time for that shit, and the people who write that shit are counting on such.
And we won't do anything about it because we're all trained to trust the company and besides if you get suckered its your own fault for not taking several hours to read through every 50+ page EULA and other piece of intentionally-difficult-to-read, one-sided crap that gets thrown your way, never mind the many years of legal training needed to fully understand it.
but it's a fact of life, so we all better get used to it.
Essentially, yes. If you can't propose a large-scale solution, then you're not really proposing a solution. Its like trying to stay dry by holding a pencil over your head in the rain. It might do something but its not really going to be noticeable.
If you want to hate on MS then good for you. You're welcome to hate them as much as you want and avoid their products as much as you want. You may even have valid points somewhere. But reducing the amount of ads in your life just isn't a terribly significant one.
Refusing to use Microsoft products is a good start.
Refusing to use MS products is a drop in the ocean. Yes its a "start" but I'd hardly call it a good one.
Until Microsoft issues an update that doesn't respect your choice.
And when that happens, I'll consider changing my opinion. For now I'll deal with the product as it currently stands.
Like I said, don't use Microsoft.
OK, so lets use Safari on OSX. Hmm. There's still ads on Youtube. OK lets try Firefox on Linux. That's all open source so.. hey wait there's still ads on Youtube! Its almost as if Microsoft only controls their own products and not all commercial software and services. What kind of a crazy world is this?
So you install an adblocker. And don't use sites that block adblocker. And don't use software that includes ads. And don't watch TV channels that have commercials. And don't get on buses that have ad placards. And don't drive on streets that have billboards. And don't read newspapers and and and. Oh and by the way what are you doing on Slashdot? They have ads here!
Get a Chromebook.
I'm sorry, did you just tell me to stop using MS to reduce the ad problem and then suggest Google as a better alternative? AKA one of if not the biggest online ad company in the world? Like I said you're welcome to hate MS if you want, but using "I don't like that specific company" as your sole argument is showing some glaring holes against the backdrop of just so much other shit that's out there.
I definitely let my pronouns there get away from me there. Hopefully my point comes through though.
Maybe not. But if you handed the average person an 8-digit sum of money for acknowledging that a 78 page document full of legal ramblings that you don't understand and probably won't actually matter to you personally anyway exists (whether you read it or not).. the question becomes a little murkier.
A) I never said it did. In fact I said exactly the opposite.
B/C) What you want seems to be pretty irrelevant. Your options are being careful or getting plastered with ads. You don't have a choice of middle ground (or at least not much of one.)
D) Yes it will. In that very specific instance of such. No turning off the Windows start menu ad ticker won't stop ads on Skype or Youtube or your television. But it will stop the ad ticker in Win10's start menu, which is what I was talking about specifically.
E) We should. But they need to be large-scale solutions if you want them to have any effect. Which probably means legal solutions since convincing a significant number of companies to forego one of their primary revenue streams for no reason than "I don't like it" is probably not going to get you very far.
In the case of Microsoft, I avoid using them whenever possible
Great. In terms of ads, that means you've managed to avoid a couple small (and easy-to-disable) ads in Windows and a handful of less-easy-to-disable ads in Skype and a few other places. Now you just have television, newspapers, buses and much of the internet to avoid! There are many reasons you may dislike MS products, but this is probably not the most significant one given how pervasive the problem is everywhere else -- one more instance isn't really going to make or break you.
WTF are you talking about? I'm not sure what's deluded about "they were there, I hit the option to turn them off, and now they aren't there"..?
Or are you under the impression that I somehow think turning off the ad ticker in the Windows Start menu should magically make all ads everywhere disappear? Because that's definitely not what I wrote. And would be a flat out stupid claim. I have no "delusions" about that.
And there's ads on the internet.. and on TV.. and at the bus stop. Its almost as if advertisers want you to see their ads all the time!
Meh. Sure its a bit annoying to get ads in software you pay for but that's hardly a new phenomena -- pay $20 for a movie and enjoy 15 minutes of ads for future movies, cars etc. Buy the dvd for $40 and get the same treatment. Yadayada.
I'm not saying its a good thing. Or even something we shouldn't complain about. I'm just saying its systematic everywhere. To the point that its more surprising that they waited this long to toss advertising hooks into Windows.
That said, I never see ads. Its not that hard to find the option to turn them off in the start menu (though I don't recall where off hand.) And I turned Cortana off after the first time it took 10+ seconds to find a program in my start menu (ie: the first time I tried using it) since it feels like it needs to search the entire interwebs first Using Bing no less. And I do many if not most things through the start menu (though I imagine I'm in a small crowd on that one) so I didn't even get to the point of considering the privacy implications -- the sheer inconvenience of the "improved" search function had me running for the "off" slider on day 1.
Disable Cortana. Disable the "suggested content" in the start menu. Disable a few of the "notifications" that spam you to buy Office or whatever every other day, and install Spybot's Anti-Beacon. Its certainly more steps than necessary but once done, you have a reasonably decent and usable OS again.
Libertarians tend to have a bit of trouble when it comes to shared resources of any sort.
Lets say we're neighbors. There's a river a mile away that we both have to walk to in order to get water (because we live in pre-industrial time or whatever.)
You get sick of walking and since you happen to be rich, you hire a bunch of yokels to dig a tributary down to your property (and being a good libertarian, you're careful to ensure you have the right of ways for the necessary strip of land.)
So now I need a bucket of water. I have the option of a) Walking a mile to the river or b) walking a hundred feet to your pond. Lets further assume that your pond is close enough to my property that I can reach over and grab a bucket of water without damaging even a single blade of grass on your side of the line, just to make the example completely pure.
In the libertarian view, I should always be walking that mile because the tributary is not "mine." I didn't build it or pay for it. That much makes sense. Where it kind of falls apart is that the bucket of water is the exact same whether I take it from the head of the tributary (ie: the river) or the base. It does no harm to you at all for me to take it from your pool. And yet you refuse to let me for no reason other than ideology.
From what I've seen this is the general mindset of libertarians -- its not so much about "I worked for it so its mine" as much as it is denying anyone else from enjoying your labors, even if it costs you absolutely nothing to allow it. And in that mindset, copyright makes perfect sense since they're interpreting it not so much as granting you a monopoly as much as they are interpreting it as denying me things I didn't directly earn -- the "if I can't have it, no one can!" attitude.
Now of course a flamebait claim like this will draw all the self-proclaimed libertarians that will either try to say the same thing in nicer words (which doesn't really change the claims..) or say that their personal form of libertarianism makes exceptions for these situations (which is fine.. they're welcome to believe whatever they want. But that also doesn't change my claims which aren't tailored to any one person's specific beliefs beyond my own, which are based on my own observations.)
PS: Can any of you libertarians point out where even my carefully tailored example fails to meet the pure libertarian ideal? Lets assume I'm honest and that the failure isn't something sideangled like preventing me from taking my bucket in the middle of the night when you aren't watching, but an actual failure in the layout of the example.
outbuy the cartels
Because the cartels have millions if not billions of times more money than any individual. Maybe Elon Musk could do so, but he's got more important uses for his money.
elect legislators less vulnerable to such buying
For the same reason we don't ride unicorns. Such things don't exist. You're usually given a choice between two or maybe three legislators who are both bought by various anti-consumer organizations. And the occasional time an honest politician comes around, they're quickly removed in one manner or another -- either sweetening the deal until they join the ranks of the bought, or if that doesn't work just drown them out with huge amounts of character assassination ads that they can't afford to fight because you know.. no significant brib^W"campaign contribution" money behind them.
This is of course subject to scaling -- there's less interest in buying laws that only affect a couple thousand people (though local interests still try to bribe local politicians..) So its somewhat easier to find an honest politician in smallish towns and cities. But the bigger the politics, the closer to one the probability of corporate influence.
Yes and no. There's going to be a question of intent. Especially if there's any substance to the claim that energy saving devices affected the readings ("well they can't possibly test with every load device ever made.")
Its almost certain that some lawyers will be getting paid due to this, but it may not be as cut and dry as it sounds on the surface and there will be a lot of wrangling over whether the utility companies or the manufacturers should receive the blame, or if they just call it an unfortunate accident.
At the very least, there will likely be some sort of refund for affected customers since there's no question that they're innocent.. especially given that in a lot of jurisdictions, they weren't even given the choice of being switched to smart meters never mind having detailed knowledge of how they work (and how they might fail.)
Not entirely sure that is sufficient. "Implied" and "satisfactory" leave open a hell of a lot of leeway. Though its certainly a lot stronger than a simple "buyer beware" mantra.
But yes, I was assuming US.
Not much to investigate. There's no law against selling shitty products.. at least as long as nobody can prove you were being intentionally malicious.
Its supposed to be the consumers deciding whether a product is good or bad, by choosing to buy it or not.
Unfortunately we're in a time where consumers not only don't make purchases with full information but often times full information simply isn't available.
We're in a screwy situation where we use models of theoretically perfect capitalism to justify not changing or even attempting to correct the many real-world deviations from those same theories. Of course the old "follow the money" adage applies as it usually does -- the people best in position make change are the same people who benefit most from keeping the status quo.