That's a smart-sounding way of putting it because it's very abstract. If you're an activists (and the Guardian are proud to be activists) you use that type of language all the time because it makes you sound several hundred times smarter and it's also extremely hard to disprove. However in this case it's trivial to disprove.
Apple computer did not "build itself on the public dime." They did sell a lot of Apple IIs to schools, but they did so at a huge discount because they figured that dominance in education would lead to major market-share in the home market. They weren't funding themselves with "the public dime," they were subsidizing the public with their own private dimes. They still have a lot of market and mind share in the education market, but since the appearance of the Chromebook that's an extremely low margin market and they stopped working for it. That means no education specific R&D. That means no R&D paid for by the education sector. That means no government-funded R&D.
As for "global race to the bottom" that's an extremely NATO-centric way to put it. Several hundred million Chinese have been brought into the global middle class in recent decades, African living standards have increased greatly, etc. You're convinced that the period from roughly 1950-1985, when a High School educated white man from a NATO country could support an entire family on one salary is normal? No, it's not. It's just not.
before they started hiring High School kids with no home improvement experience.
I don't know who you are working for, but the big orange box by me used to be staffed with retired trade professionals who could actually give you solid advice about installation, troubleshooting, codes, etc. Now, it's mostly young kids who if you ask for a GFI breaker look at you like you are speaking a foreign language.
I'm in Cleveland. pretty much the only big box home improvement store where you could go and not have that experience is Menard's, because they just showed up a few years ago and they've just left newbie-trying-to-impress mode.
At my store anyone who has been there more then six months could tell you where the breakers are. If they have the time/coverage in their department they could probably read the labels and find the one that says GFI. However a) hiring 18-year-old-kids just out of HS means you get a lot of turnover and a good 10-25% of the store has not been there six months, b) management hates having multiple people in a department so if Alanah leaves hardware to read labels with you there's gonna be a line of pissed off people at the key machine, c) those of us not in departments are very carefully timed (because 18-year-olds just out of high school will spend all day bullshitting with each-other if you let them), etc. So if someone offers to call Robyn for you and asks you to stay in the aisle where he can find you, it probably behooves you to whip out your smartphone and play solitaire until Robyn shows up.
I've found Apple's customer service and tech support to be real good. They don't bug you if you are just looking and when I've had to get tech support they took their time, diagnose the issue and fixed it. The added cost of their products is worth it to me, if only to avoid Dell Hell.
I use em too. It's so nice that you can go to a store, meet someone who who knows the issue.
And, much as Rossman bitches about them, I have never had an experience where they've been less then helpful or charged me $800 for a trivial repair. Most of the time it's free. It's still tech support, and they're still a big company with a complicated internal tracking system that has to say exactly the right thing, but it's way better then phone support+FedEx.
Sometimes the Guardian is a great source, but other times they're just delusional.
But it also complains that Apple's wealth "flows from the privatization of publicly funded research, mixed with the ability to command the low-wage labor of our Chinese peers, sold by empathetic retailers forbidden from saying 'crash'."
"Privatization of publicly funded research"? That's mind-bogglingly stupid. Show me a PhD economist who claims to prove otherwise, and I'll show you extremely strong evidence that motivated reasoning is a thing. By that standard we should run all airlines as public utilities because none of our current plane designs would be possible without WW1-era-government-funded R&D.
The claim that Apple retail employees are "low-paid" is slightly less stupid, so I'll bother to refute: as someone who is roughly 19 years into a retail career, I have never made the same hourly Apple employees do. I know, I have repeatedly applied to their stores, because even the shelf-stocking guy makes 30% more then I currently do. To get their wages in a non-Apple setting you need to be at least a department supervisor. It's also an amazing place to work precisely because they don't have commission. You can sell someone a $400 iPad or $799 Mac Mini instead of selling them a $3k laptop or $6k Mac Pro because you make the same either way.
In terms of Chinese wages being low, that's a bit of left-wing lore that was true ten years ago, but is quite exaggerated today. Chinese factory workers would not put up with the Communist Party if they hadn't been given some very nice raises in recent years. They make less then US factory workers, particularly factory workers on old Union contracts, but not that much less. It's also somewhat silly to damn Apple for doing something literally every other company in the world does.
The rest of the article it doesn't improve. No shit Apple tries to control every aspect of the customer experience, so does literally every other company on the planet. At my retail company there are actually tasks that I am supposed to perform in 90 seconds, and the computer adds all these tasks up, plus all the time I have devoted to said tasks, and if I was taking an average of 2 minutes per task I would in huge trouble. No shit Apple wages (which start at $14.50 an hour and go up fairly rapidly from there) can't support a family of four, but if it couldn't support a family of three half my coworkers would have literally starved to death years ago. The only guys who make $14.50 an hour are management and the handful of guys who got hired in back before they started hiring High School kids with no home improvement experience.
It's possible that someone is gaming the market unethically, but this is an example of how you game the market ethically.
The dude sold a bunch of BTC around $20k to lock in the gains, and then because he did not want to be out-of-luck if it kept going up he bought the option to buy back in at $20k. If the price is less then $20k the option is worthless, so the person who is on the other side of the contract got a free $50k. If BTC continued to increase that person could be in trouble.
It's called "hedging," and it is clearly gaming the system, but the only people who can be screwed are the people involved in the actual contract. Pretty much the only way it could affect the market is if the price went above that $20k strike price and the dude called the option by forcing the other side to sell BTC to him at $20k, because they'd have to get those BTC somewhere.
The only people who care that someone has an Apple product seems to be those who use Android.
People who drive around with Apple stickers on the back of their car would seem to offer a counterpoint to that argument. I've seen cars with 3 or 4 Apple stickers on the back in a neat row, apparently they want to make their car as attractive a target as possible for a smash-n-grab.
Pics or it didn't happen.
I use it because I've used one for years and don't see any reason to change.
There are better products for the same price or less, which is a reason to change. There ARE reasons to change, but once you get deeply enough into the Apple ecosystem then it becomes a burden to move to a different platform. Which goes back to the headline about how Apple gets away with making their products more expensive.
Correction: There are products with better price/performance in specs Android and Windows fanbois care about then Apple's.
In particular, they have better price/performance because the hardware is independent of the software. Which means you can get the cheapest hardware that will still work and still run the software. This leads to issues like Windows updates that destroy certain pieces of hardware because it's humanly impossible for them to test on every single config, Windows driver hell, people paying hundred$ for Android phones that don't receive software updates, etc.
With Apple you're either going ridiculous lengths to hackintosh, or you're buying from Apple. That means they know which graphics card you have, they know which SSD you have, etc. and if that machine supports the next version it just happens.
If you like that trade-off more power to you. Tinker away at your most cost-effective hardware+glitchier software combo. I actually have a homebuilt PC sitting right under my MacPro tower so I see the appeal.
But please stop whining that other people dare choose a different trade-off.
Like many things the auto industry does this is smart short-term, but likely disastrous long-term. If gas prices stay low nobody wants cars because trucks have lower gas mileage requirements. The second gas gets into the $3-4 range? Everybody will want to trade in that 19 MPG F-150 for a Volt, and they have no Volts to sell.
They have a very long tradition of this. Frequently they're actually make this exact mistake. In the late 70s gas prices went up and everyone wanted Accords, but they had no Accord competitor. Everyone survived survived, after it got some givebacks from the UAW, but Chrysler has not been the same since. Then in the '08 period gas prices went up (again), they had no Accord equivalent (again) and everyone except Ford went bankrupt.
So Wall Street will love this because it will result in short-term profits, and the short-term profits wil be used to buy back shares, but everyone else should fucking hate this.
I didn't actually bring up cost. I brought up the scale of he whitelist, and the difficulty of administering it, but not the cost. This is the Federal government, there are literally millions of users, so any costs would be trivial on a per-user basis. The problem is creating some system that will actually whitelist the right websites for the right offices. A single small business does like one thing, for one segment of the market. The government does almost everything.
Knowing the Feds, what you'd end up with is some interestingly-acronymed government department to do all the work. Other government agencies would spend a significant amount of time arguing with interestingly-acronymed-ones about what's on the whitelist. For example, just think of the sites required if a DEA Agent in Reno has to figure out whether a shipment of garden gnomes is cover for cocaine.
A government-wide black-list would make more sense, because it's much less likely some rando Federal employew\e will have a need for a porn site or something,
And while no operating system is completely secure, most everything is more secure than Windows (which has very little to do with its market dominance; its security is like Swiss cheese) or MacOS (which sacrifices a lot of security to make it shiny).
Yes, Linux is WAY more security than both of them combined, but Javascript and Intel-based CPU's are the major vectors for concern nowadays. Both of them significantly negate all operating system security, and should be relegated to the shitcan of history.
You're exaggerating. Back in the days of the "I'm a Mac"/"I'm a PC" commercials Apple was absolutely right to mock the fuck out of Windows security. It sucked. But these days almost all the holes are gone, and with Windows Defender you don't even really need Windows Anti-Virus software anymore. Which is just like OS X.
As for the rest of "most everything," I respectfully a couple of clusters of Unixen used primarily by Sysadmin/High Geek types better be more secure then the shit us hoi polloi use.
At a business. Where everyone works in the same industry, and needs the same sites. My emplyers (Home Depot and H and R Block) would generate very different whitelists.
If you're talking about the government the scale of required sites goes up exponentially. A single IRS office will probably need access to most of the finance sites H and R Block uses, plus all the sites Home Depot uses (might be auditing a contractor and need to find out how many boxes of nails are needed for a $50k expense to be justified), etc.
In theory, the computer should be able to figure out whether it's driving residential streets or not from GPS (to tell you the state), and traffic signs like speed limits. Generally the residential zones will have different speed limit then commercial.
But yes, you can also blame the map provider. Depending on the local libility laws and your contract with Google, it might even stick in Court.
If it's a kid in the road you're probably on a residential street. It's probable that if you're driving one of those streets, rather then trying to park on them using an assisted park feature, the AI will actually require you stay in control of the car.
For later versions that actually work in residential driving, the car will be going 20-25 MPH rather then 50+MPH, and will probably have specific programming to not run over anything because anything might be a puppy/ball/etc. being chased by a four-year-old.
We all know that whether the car decides to hit a jaywalker or not will depend on several variables:
1) Who is more likely to win a multi-million verdict in a Civil Suit: a jay-walker or the passenger?
2) Will drivers buy the AI software if it will decide to kill their entire families?
3) How well the engineers work on a feature (deciding whether to hit jaywalker or kill passenger by driving off cliff?) that is much less likely to be used in the real world then every other feature of the AI?
And variable 4) Moral philosophers have written a paper on this based on millions of data points from an online quiz, is not on the list.
Detroit's value-add is that they can make the same car, the exact same way, thousands of times a day. Millions of welds will al have exactly predictable performance in weather conditions ranging from Arizona to Alaska. Getting that right? It literally caused silicon valley-dude Elon Musk to have a breakdown.
There will be a period where SV companies with self-driving tech have enough negotiating clout to suck up most of the profit from the relationship, but 5-10 years in everybody will have the same tech, and it'll cost $500, and that's not much of the price of a $35k car.
Detroit's problem has never been that they don't make new cars. They're absolutely obsessed with new cars. The Japanese have been making Accords and Camrys since before I was born, the only Detroit-mark that's been around the whole time is the Corvette.
They have been quite slow on adopting electrics, but that's changing mighty fast.
In states with party registration your registration is also in the public voter file. If they've got voter history they also generally get which years you voted in the primaries, which will give anyone who knows the state's politics a very good way to figure out which way you lean.
"Voting history" does not mean who you voted for, it means which elections you voted in. It is public in every state, altho they generally charge for the records. That's how school board candidates know whether to bother you or not.
Wh you voted for is not retained in any electoral file anywhere.
In some states it's public info for free. Others charge. This is partly so political parties know who votes, and partly because it's much easier for third parties to confirm there's no banana republic stuff with the voter rolls.
My current state makes it public record. Here's a link to my city's entire electoral role, including who voted when.
I believe we have vastly different goals on economic policy
If you are Mozambique or China increased investment is a good thing because they need a lot more houses and trains and cars to get your population to be middle class.
State-side investments just aren't that useful. We have less investment then Germany, and if you cut out the billionaire out-liers, a lower standard of living. To fix that means we need their money from investment in themselves into consumption by everyone else. Which sounds like precisely the goal we should have.
Note that a deficit-financed UBI would also be helpful, but less so. It would decrease income inequality, which is a goal worth achieving IMO, but it would also increase inflation, and that screws everything up in extremely unpredictable ways.
People always threaten to do this, and then the guys who could al chose to move to Texas and pay no income taxes flock to Cali with it's 17% income tax.
Other Wikipedia articles are not on Wiki's list of "reliable sources." To use them you have to do stuff like click through to their sources, verify those sources support the tex ton Wikipedia, and then cite them. You don't actually ever cite the wikipedia article itself.
I didn't say they were unhackable. However, the nature of those hacks makes seizing control fo a combat drone from a human operator and shooting at it's troops much harder then most hacks.
The drone is loitering above the combat zone for a limited period of time before it runs out of fuel/weapons/etc. and has to return to base. It has multiple systems you'd need to crack. You'd probably need access to it's cameras to aim it's weapons properly, which means you have to hack the drone's transmission hardware. To send the commands you also have to hack either the receiving hardware or spoof the signal. The weapons, engine, flaps, etc. may or may not be on the same system so it's entirely possible you could steer the drone but not fire the weapons or control the speed. And if the operator notices he can just get on his radio and tell the troops to shoot their drone down. So you have to hack multiple systems, in roughly a 24-hour-period, and not be noticed. Possible, but more then a little tricky if the drone-wielders don't suck.
That does not mean they're perfect. The Army and/or Air Force should be spending a fairly significant amount of money figuring out a way to make jamming harder, because a jammed drone is useless. The Iranians clearly had something interesting going on or they couldn't have forced that landing. But hacking a US drone and using it to bomb US marines is a lot harder then you are implying.
Like most ideas about revolutionizing warfare, this is something that's very old. Many many cultures would have champions fight to the death so the army did not have to.
For that to work couple things have to be true: 1) Both sides have to have a roughly equal chance of success. That is the champions have to have comparable combat power. Back then, nobody's going to agree to wager their war on a naked guy with a pointy stick vs. a Knight in full plate. With robots, many countries won't have a robot capable of going toe-to-toe against us. 2) Both sides have to want whatever they're fighting enough to raise an army to fight for it, but not so much that they'll actually die for it. If they're gonna die for it regardless of the outcome of the fight, the fight is pointless. If the result of losing a robo-war is that the President gets executed, his top guys imprisoned, and everyone else gets fired, your worst enemies get to run the country, etc. then when the champion loses you fight anyway. 3) Both asides have to trust that the other side will abide by the deal. You're not spending $1 Billion on robo-champion if you think those bastards will fight even if their robot loses.
Just go through recent US-involved wars in your head. how many are all three things true of both sides?
The Nazis and Japanese could have made some pretty cool robots, but we'd have fought the actual war regardless of who won the robo-battle. The Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Taliban wouldn't have robots anywhere near our league, so they'll lose the war and then fight anyway.
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That's a smart-sounding way of putting it because it's very abstract. If you're an activists (and the Guardian are proud to be activists) you use that type of language all the time because it makes you sound several hundred times smarter and it's also extremely hard to disprove. However in this case it's trivial to disprove.
Apple computer did not "build itself on the public dime." They did sell a lot of Apple IIs to schools, but they did so at a huge discount because they figured that dominance in education would lead to major market-share in the home market. They weren't funding themselves with "the public dime," they were subsidizing the public with their own private dimes. They still have a lot of market and mind share in the education market, but since the appearance of the Chromebook that's an extremely low margin market and they stopped working for it. That means no education specific R&D. That means no R&D paid for by the education sector. That means no government-funded R&D.
As for "global race to the bottom" that's an extremely NATO-centric way to put it. Several hundred million Chinese have been brought into the global middle class in recent decades, African living standards have increased greatly, etc. You're convinced that the period from roughly 1950-1985, when a High School educated white man from a NATO country could support an entire family on one salary is normal? No, it's not. It's just not.
before they started hiring High School kids with no home improvement experience.
I don't know who you are working for, but the big orange box by me used to be staffed with retired trade professionals who could actually give you solid advice about installation, troubleshooting, codes, etc. Now, it's mostly young kids who if you ask for a GFI breaker look at you like you are speaking a foreign language.
I'm in Cleveland. pretty much the only big box home improvement store where you could go and not have that experience is Menard's, because they just showed up a few years ago and they've just left newbie-trying-to-impress mode.
At my store anyone who has been there more then six months could tell you where the breakers are. If they have the time/coverage in their department they could probably read the labels and find the one that says GFI. However a) hiring 18-year-old-kids just out of HS means you get a lot of turnover and a good 10-25% of the store has not been there six months, b) management hates having multiple people in a department so if Alanah leaves hardware to read labels with you there's gonna be a line of pissed off people at the key machine, c) those of us not in departments are very carefully timed (because 18-year-olds just out of high school will spend all day bullshitting with each-other if you let them), etc. So if someone offers to call Robyn for you and asks you to stay in the aisle where he can find you, it probably behooves you to whip out your smartphone and play solitaire until Robyn shows up.
I've found Apple's customer service and tech support to be real good. They don't bug you if you are just looking and when I've had to get tech support they took their time, diagnose the issue and fixed it. The added cost of their products is worth it to me, if only to avoid Dell Hell.
I use em too. It's so nice that you can go to a store, meet someone who who knows the issue.
And, much as Rossman bitches about them, I have never had an experience where they've been less then helpful or charged me $800 for a trivial repair. Most of the time it's free. It's still tech support, and they're still a big company with a complicated internal tracking system that has to say exactly the right thing, but it's way better then phone support+FedEx.
Sometimes the Guardian is a great source, but other times they're just delusional.
But it also complains that Apple's wealth "flows from the privatization of publicly funded research, mixed with the ability to command the low-wage labor of our Chinese peers, sold by empathetic retailers forbidden from saying 'crash'."
"Privatization of publicly funded research"? That's mind-bogglingly stupid. Show me a PhD economist who claims to prove otherwise, and I'll show you extremely strong evidence that motivated reasoning is a thing. By that standard we should run all airlines as public utilities because none of our current plane designs would be possible without WW1-era-government-funded R&D.
The claim that Apple retail employees are "low-paid" is slightly less stupid, so I'll bother to refute: as someone who is roughly 19 years into a retail career, I have never made the same hourly Apple employees do. I know, I have repeatedly applied to their stores, because even the shelf-stocking guy makes 30% more then I currently do. To get their wages in a non-Apple setting you need to be at least a department supervisor. It's also an amazing place to work precisely because they don't have commission. You can sell someone a $400 iPad or $799 Mac Mini instead of selling them a $3k laptop or $6k Mac Pro because you make the same either way.
In terms of Chinese wages being low, that's a bit of left-wing lore that was true ten years ago, but is quite exaggerated today. Chinese factory workers would not put up with the Communist Party if they hadn't been given some very nice raises in recent years. They make less then US factory workers, particularly factory workers on old Union contracts, but not that much less. It's also somewhat silly to damn Apple for doing something literally every other company in the world does.
The rest of the article it doesn't improve. No shit Apple tries to control every aspect of the customer experience, so does literally every other company on the planet. At my retail company there are actually tasks that I am supposed to perform in 90 seconds, and the computer adds all these tasks up, plus all the time I have devoted to said tasks, and if I was taking an average of 2 minutes per task I would in huge trouble. No shit Apple wages (which start at $14.50 an hour and go up fairly rapidly from there) can't support a family of four, but if it couldn't support a family of three half my coworkers would have literally starved to death years ago. The only guys who make $14.50 an hour are management and the handful of guys who got hired in back before they started hiring High School kids with no home improvement experience.
It's possible that someone is gaming the market unethically, but this is an example of how you game the market ethically.
The dude sold a bunch of BTC around $20k to lock in the gains, and then because he did not want to be out-of-luck if it kept going up he bought the option to buy back in at $20k. If the price is less then $20k the option is worthless, so the person who is on the other side of the contract got a free $50k. If BTC continued to increase that person could be in trouble.
It's called "hedging," and it is clearly gaming the system, but the only people who can be screwed are the people involved in the actual contract. Pretty much the only way it could affect the market is if the price went above that $20k strike price and the dude called the option by forcing the other side to sell BTC to him at $20k, because they'd have to get those BTC somewhere.
The only people who care that someone has an Apple product seems to be those who use Android.
People who drive around with Apple stickers on the back of their car would seem to offer a counterpoint to that argument. I've seen cars with 3 or 4 Apple stickers on the back in a neat row, apparently they want to make their car as attractive a target as possible for a smash-n-grab.
Pics or it didn't happen.
I use it because I've used one for years and don't see any reason to change.
There are better products for the same price or less, which is a reason to change. There ARE reasons to change, but once you get deeply enough into the Apple ecosystem then it becomes a burden to move to a different platform. Which goes back to the headline about how Apple gets away with making their products more expensive.
Correction:
There are products with better price/performance in specs Android and Windows fanbois care about then Apple's.
In particular, they have better price/performance because the hardware is independent of the software. Which means you can get the cheapest hardware that will still work and still run the software. This leads to issues like Windows updates that destroy certain pieces of hardware because it's humanly impossible for them to test on every single config, Windows driver hell, people paying hundred$ for Android phones that don't receive software updates, etc.
With Apple you're either going ridiculous lengths to hackintosh, or you're buying from Apple. That means they know which graphics card you have, they know which SSD you have, etc. and if that machine supports the next version it just happens.
If you like that trade-off more power to you. Tinker away at your most cost-effective hardware+glitchier software combo. I actually have a homebuilt PC sitting right under my MacPro tower so I see the appeal.
But please stop whining that other people dare choose a different trade-off.
Like many things the auto industry does this is smart short-term, but likely disastrous long-term. If gas prices stay low nobody wants cars because trucks have lower gas mileage requirements. The second gas gets into the $3-4 range? Everybody will want to trade in that 19 MPG F-150 for a Volt, and they have no Volts to sell.
They have a very long tradition of this. Frequently they're actually make this exact mistake. In the late 70s gas prices went up and everyone wanted Accords, but they had no Accord competitor. Everyone survived survived, after it got some givebacks from the UAW, but Chrysler has not been the same since. Then in the '08 period gas prices went up (again), they had no Accord equivalent (again) and everyone except Ford went bankrupt.
So Wall Street will love this because it will result in short-term profits, and the short-term profits wil be used to buy back shares, but everyone else should fucking hate this.
I didn't actually bring up cost. I brought up the scale of he whitelist, and the difficulty of administering it, but not the cost. This is the Federal government, there are literally millions of users, so any costs would be trivial on a per-user basis. The problem is creating some system that will actually whitelist the right websites for the right offices. A single small business does like one thing, for one segment of the market. The government does almost everything.
Knowing the Feds, what you'd end up with is some interestingly-acronymed government department to do all the work. Other government agencies would spend a significant amount of time arguing with interestingly-acronymed-ones about what's on the whitelist. For example, just think of the sites required if a DEA Agent in Reno has to figure out whether a shipment of garden gnomes is cover for cocaine.
A government-wide black-list would make more sense, because it's much less likely some rando Federal employew\e will have a need for a porn site or something,
And while no operating system is completely secure, most everything is more secure than Windows (which has very little to do with its market dominance; its security is like Swiss cheese) or MacOS (which sacrifices a lot of security to make it shiny).
Yes, Linux is WAY more security than both of them combined, but Javascript and Intel-based CPU's are the major vectors for concern nowadays. Both of them significantly negate all operating system security, and should be relegated to the shitcan of history.
You're exaggerating. Back in the days of the "I'm a Mac"/"I'm a PC" commercials Apple was absolutely right to mock the fuck out of Windows security. It sucked. But these days almost all the holes are gone, and with Windows Defender you don't even really need Windows Anti-Virus software anymore. Which is just like OS X.
As for the rest of "most everything," I respectfully a couple of clusters of Unixen used primarily by Sysadmin/High Geek types better be more secure then the shit us hoi polloi use.
At a business. Where everyone works in the same industry, and needs the same sites. My emplyers (Home Depot and H and R Block) would generate very different whitelists.
If you're talking about the government the scale of required sites goes up exponentially. A single IRS office will probably need access to most of the finance sites H and R Block uses, plus all the sites Home Depot uses (might be auditing a contractor and need to find out how many boxes of nails are needed for a $50k expense to be justified), etc.
Presumably he got an Android virus doing stupid shit on his Android phone, and got a Windows virus because he was doing stupid shit on his desktop.
In theory, the computer should be able to figure out whether it's driving residential streets or not from GPS (to tell you the state), and traffic signs like speed limits. Generally the residential zones will have different speed limit then commercial.
But yes, you can also blame the map provider. Depending on the local libility laws and your contract with Google, it might even stick in Court.
If it's a kid in the road you're probably on a residential street. It's probable that if you're driving one of those streets, rather then trying to park on them using an assisted park feature, the AI will actually require you stay in control of the car.
For later versions that actually work in residential driving, the car will be going 20-25 MPH rather then 50+MPH, and will probably have specific programming to not run over anything because anything might be a puppy/ball/etc. being chased by a four-year-old.
We all know that whether the car decides to hit a jaywalker or not will depend on several variables:
1) Who is more likely to win a multi-million verdict in a Civil Suit: a jay-walker or the passenger?
2) Will drivers buy the AI software if it will decide to kill their entire families?
3) How well the engineers work on a feature (deciding whether to hit jaywalker or kill passenger by driving off cliff?) that is much less likely to be used in the real world then every other feature of the AI?
And variable 4) Moral philosophers have written a paper on this based on millions of data points from an online quiz, is not on the list.
Detroit's value-add is that they can make the same car, the exact same way, thousands of times a day. Millions of welds will al have exactly predictable performance in weather conditions ranging from Arizona to Alaska. Getting that right? It literally caused silicon valley-dude Elon Musk to have a breakdown.
There will be a period where SV companies with self-driving tech have enough negotiating clout to suck up most of the profit from the relationship, but 5-10 years in everybody will have the same tech, and it'll cost $500, and that's not much of the price of a $35k car.
Detroit's problem has never been that they don't make new cars. They're absolutely obsessed with new cars. The Japanese have been making Accords and Camrys since before I was born, the only Detroit-mark that's been around the whole time is the Corvette.
They have been quite slow on adopting electrics, but that's changing mighty fast.
In states with party registration your registration is also in the public voter file. If they've got voter history they also generally get which years you voted in the primaries, which will give anyone who knows the state's politics a very good way to figure out which way you lean.
"Voting history" does not mean who you voted for, it means which elections you voted in. It is public in every state, altho they generally charge for the records. That's how school board candidates know whether to bother you or not.
Wh you voted for is not retained in any electoral file anywhere.
In some states it's public info for free. Others charge. This is partly so political parties know who votes, and partly because it's much easier for third parties to confirm there's no banana republic stuff with the voter rolls.
My current state makes it public record. Here's a link to my city's entire electoral role, including who voted when.
I believe we have vastly different goals on economic policy
If you are Mozambique or China increased investment is a good thing because they need a lot more houses and trains and cars to get your population to be middle class.
State-side investments just aren't that useful. We have less investment then Germany, and if you cut out the billionaire out-liers, a lower standard of living. To fix that means we need their money from investment in themselves into consumption by everyone else. Which sounds like precisely the goal we should have.
Note that a deficit-financed UBI would also be helpful, but less so. It would decrease income inequality, which is a goal worth achieving IMO, but it would also increase inflation, and that screws everything up in extremely unpredictable ways.
People always threaten to do this, and then the guys who could al chose to move to Texas and pay no income taxes flock to Cali with it's 17% income tax.
Other Wikipedia articles are not on Wiki's list of "reliable sources." To use them you have to do stuff like click through to their sources, verify those sources support the tex ton Wikipedia, and then cite them. You don't actually ever cite the wikipedia article itself.
Central computer?
Pretty sure the technical name for that is "the pilot's head."
Hacking the central computers of Creech airbase you'd be able to play hell with the contracting system, but that's about it.
I didn't say they were unhackable. However, the nature of those hacks makes seizing control fo a combat drone from a human operator and shooting at it's troops much harder then most hacks.
The drone is loitering above the combat zone for a limited period of time before it runs out of fuel/weapons/etc. and has to return to base. It has multiple systems you'd need to crack. You'd probably need access to it's cameras to aim it's weapons properly, which means you have to hack the drone's transmission hardware. To send the commands you also have to hack either the receiving hardware or spoof the signal. The weapons, engine, flaps, etc. may or may not be on the same system so it's entirely possible you could steer the drone but not fire the weapons or control the speed. And if the operator notices he can just get on his radio and tell the troops to shoot their drone down. So you have to hack multiple systems, in roughly a 24-hour-period, and not be noticed. Possible, but more then a little tricky if the drone-wielders don't suck.
That does not mean they're perfect. The Army and/or Air Force should be spending a fairly significant amount of money figuring out a way to make jamming harder, because a jammed drone is useless. The Iranians clearly had something interesting going on or they couldn't have forced that landing. But hacking a US drone and using it to bomb US marines is a lot harder then you are implying.
Keep in mind that 14-year-old girls have gotten in legal trouble for sending nudes of themselves.
Se yes, if he's gotten pictures of people under 18 naked, he's gonna be charged with child porn.
Like most ideas about revolutionizing warfare, this is something that's very old. Many many cultures would have champions fight to the death so the army did not have to.
For that to work couple things have to be true:
1) Both sides have to have a roughly equal chance of success. That is the champions have to have comparable combat power. Back then, nobody's going to agree to wager their war on a naked guy with a pointy stick vs. a Knight in full plate. With robots, many countries won't have a robot capable of going toe-to-toe against us.
2) Both sides have to want whatever they're fighting enough to raise an army to fight for it, but not so much that they'll actually die for it. If they're gonna die for it regardless of the outcome of the fight, the fight is pointless. If the result of losing a robo-war is that the President gets executed, his top guys imprisoned, and everyone else gets fired, your worst enemies get to run the country, etc. then when the champion loses you fight anyway.
3) Both asides have to trust that the other side will abide by the deal. You're not spending $1 Billion on robo-champion if you think those bastards will fight even if their robot loses.
Just go through recent US-involved wars in your head. how many are all three things true of both sides?
The Nazis and Japanese could have made some pretty cool robots, but we'd have fought the actual war regardless of who won the robo-battle. The Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Taliban wouldn't have robots anywhere near our league, so they'll lose the war and then fight anyway.