If it wasn't public information how could we trust the election results? Seriously.
If the media can get the entire voter list, and a list of the people who showed up, and compare that to the list of total ballots cast, it's much harder for local elected officials (And in the US almost everyone involved in running an election is not only an elected official, they're partisan. No Republican will ever win the Detroit City Clerkship.) to simply make up vote totals.
It's public information. The local city clerk has records of everyone who voted in every election, and records of who is registered. Both lists are available to anyone who asks for a nominal fee. This is how political campaigns build their databases.
If you were actually rational about this issue at all you wouldn't have included the ObamaCare bit. The site was a few months late, but has since been a key part of providing health insurance to millions of Americans. Anyone who has actually worked in the private sector for more then a week can list at least three IT roll-outs that were more bungled then that.
Most of your reasoning falls apart with one simple change: if the Federal government is the only entity issuing certificates, then objections 1 and 2 simply do not exist. Objection 3 still could, but OTOH a massive security breach at the Social Security Administration or IRS would turn almost any hacker into a billionaire, and yet it just doesn't happen.
And there are people who buy cars specifically so they can replace major components (ie: a new engine). The Italian Court system explicitly ruled that those guys don't have a right to get a refund for the engine.
A Mac is closer to a PC then a car, but since most of the reason people buy Macs is they're the only legal way to run MacOS it's not exactly the same.
Which means you need another decision in the Courts to get your money back, and if they decide in your favor it will probably only be for the $19.99 Apple charges for Mac OS X retail.
You're definitely over-reacting. They're not talking about collecting new data, turning data over to law enforcement, or anything like that. This is actualy the opposite of that. It's an attempt to make it easier for you to see what the government has on you.
Right now you can access your tax records (it's called a tax transcript) online for free, but it's a multi-step process and it's a huge pain in the ass when they start asking trick questions about whether you lived at 3205 Green Rd, or 3105 Green Rd for six months back in '95. Obviously they absolutely have to do that, because the IRS has to know it's sending the records to the right guy.
What the Feds're trying to do with the Executive order is figure out a) whether there's a way for other government departments to put more records online, and b) if there's a less painful way to identify people before sending them the right data. It's not likely they'll actually succeed, because identity thieves are clever mother-fuckers, but it's nice to see them try.
It would be great if you could more easily and securely access more of your tax records, or your Social Security benefits statement. This would also greatly improve things like government contracting.
OTOH, if the system is hackable then you could easily lose all your data to some guy on another continent.
Keep in mind that a) this number is not expected to be a truly accurate number, it's just expected to give Apple some idea of whether they'll break even on a given model, and b) there's a difference between the cost to Apple and the price to you.
Let's look at a). Apple has their total OS cost, the number of computers they sell, the cost of making those computers, etc. These are hard numbers that won't really be worked around. You could calculate cost per mac pretty easily this way, and get a rough idea of how much you need to make per unit or you go broke; but you could also do a percentage of the total revenue from computers they sell (the reasoning would be "Mac OS X is X% of our costs of producing hardware, so we need a X% margin on this model to make money") and you also get a rough idea of how much Apple needs to charge to avoid going broke. Then you have to factor in the copies of 10.6.8 they sell at retail stores, where the $19.99 is presumably a loss leader, etc.
Now once you have whatever number that is, you have to turn it into a price you pay. Is Apple expecting to make a profit on the OS? I doubt it. You don't make money on a $19.99 OS. In that case the price is going to be below the cost, and your refund is going to be well below Apple's cost.
The thing about falsifiability in scientific theories is that it doesn't appear until somebody comes up with an alternate theory. And there just aren't a lot of good alternative theories to Evolution.
As far as I can tell there've been three theories as to why species exist/change/etc.
1) God made them that way. This was proven inadequate by the demise of the Dodo bird (after all, if God specifically made Dodo birds because he liked Dodo birds, why would he let us kill them all?), and was really on it's last legs when Darwin and Wallace published. The fact we've seen new species appear since then, and other species change their physical traits and behavior quite dramatically, are just more nails in the coffin.
2) Animals change themselves to be better adapted to their environment, and pass those traits onto their offspring. This is called Lamarckism, or Lamarckian evolution, and it fell out of favor because nobody could get lab animals to exercise themselves in such a way that their offspring changed. ie: his classic example was a giraffe striving to reach the highest branches, and exercising it's neck until it stretched, then it's little giraffe babies started out with longer necks, and they exercised their necks, etc. Geneticists are actually bringing some elements of this back because they have proven that some behavioral changes change the epigenetics of an organism, but even that's a lot more limited then Lemarck's original proposal.
3) Darwinian Evolution. This could be falsified if you found a bunch of fossils in the wrong layer and there wasn't some other explanation -- the classic "rabbits in the Devonian" scenario. It could be falsified if you could find some population of animals under selective pressure that wasn't changing. Say you have a colony of lab mice, 20% of them are white, and you selectively kill those white ones. Every generation should have fewer and fewer white mice.
Again you're talking about totally different engineering challenges.
The software running a plane is very specific to that aircraft. The Dreamliner's took 5-8 years partly because it had to be perfect, but also partly because the Dreamliner's design wasn't finished, and whenever the design changed the airframe's behavior the autopilot and all the software would have to be changed to fit.
If your argument is that it will take 10-15 years minimum before we're cruising down the highway at 85 with a computer driving, then I'll agree with you.
But you're also implying that once Google has done it for a single model of car, it will take another five years to solve it for the Rice Rocket version of that car. A single spoiler would completely change the aerodynamic characteristics of an aircraft, and require the Autopilot be extensively reworked. That's just doesn't apply to Google drive. Once Google has a version of Drive that works on one rear-wheel drive car it will be roughly a week from adapting it to any other rear wheel drive vehicle. Most of that week will be figuring out where to hook up the sensors on a different vehicle's body. Much of the work that an Autopilot has to know 100% all the time could actually be learned by the car as it was driving the vehicle.
For example, it's not a tragedy if your GoogleDrive car screws up the gas consumption calculations because you forgot to tell it you're a Coal Roller; and you have to walk to the nearest station. So Google includes a simple AI to figure out your vehicle's gas consumption from experience. If you did that with a jetliner everyone would die.
I think you're mistaking the compiler's ability to do an awful lot of work on your behalf, for a lack of work happening.
For example, "speed = stallSpeed then throttle++" is a formula. As for "thousands," keep in mind that a commercial jet like the Dreamliner has several flaps settings, for each wing, multiple rudder settings, operates at multiple different speeds, has to keep track of three fuel tanks, altitude, etc. If there are four possible numbers entered for each of those variables into the compiler that's 4^5 potential situations the Autopilot has to deal with. As a slashdotter, you probably know that adds up (2^2)^5 or 1,024 discrete sets of numbers.
With a commercial-level autopilot they probably did a lot of the work the compiler does for you themselves, because once you reach a certain level of expertise errors the compiler adds to your program are a bigger problem then errors you would have made if you'd done it yourself.
It's very hard to find a photo of Abe Lincoln where he isn't at least a head (including his beard) above everyone else. But today several countries have an average height within a 10 cm of him. The Dutch are 184 cm (about 6' 1"), but Abe was only 193 cm (just under 6' 4"). Partly that's due to nutrition, which has an incredibly complicated relationship to height (the Dutch, for example, are dragged down by the descendents of people born during a famine after WW2. Their grandchildren are unexpectedly short and nobody knows why.).
If you could figure out how much it cost you, you might have a case. There are two problems: 1) buying a Mac is inherently different then buying a PC in that Mac-buyers have actively chosen to buy an operating system, and 2) it's really hard to figure out how much Mac OS the software cost you.
1) is important because the basis of the ruling is that when you buy a Dell you're buying two things: computer hardware and access to a separate software package. There are tens of millions of geeks around the world who buy Dell boxes, get rid of the entire software package, and live happily ever-after. Apple simply doesn't work that way. They are a one-stop shop. The heart of this ruling was an analogy with cars. Cars are sold as complete units (note: I'm not kidding. Don't blame me for using the car analogy on Slashdot, it's all the Italian Justices fault) , so you can't ask for a refund on the engine or the wheels; but the Court ruled PCs aren't. Macs are in the middle, so it's not clear which way the Courts'd rule.
2) is important because Mac OS X does not have a price tag. It's quite simple to figure out the non-MS price for a Dell or HP, because you can simply ask the licensing department how much the licenses cost and deduct them from the retail price; and then (assuming you can prove you didn't check any of the "agree" buttons on the software) you can ask for that much back. It's not simple figuring out the Mac OS X-free price of a Mac Pro.
In the US the price of 10.6.8 is $19.99 retail, and the way you get later versions is by paying for 10.6.8 and then using the free upgrades. What's that say about the OEM price of OS X 10.10? It's OEM, so it should be cheaper then retail, but it's a higher version then retail so it should be more, but you get 10.10 for free if you get the lower version so maybe it should be the same, etc.
If your point is that lots of people have done autopilots, and none of them have done self-driving cars; then yes autopilots are by definition easier then self-driving cars.
I'm curious: why do you think that's at all relevant to any other part of this thread?
So it has to know the answers to thousands of physics calculations, and it has to know what to do when the answer is wrong (ie: speed is too low for flaps at 15 degrees), but that doesn't constitute "knowing physics"? That's a mighty fine distinction you're drawing there.
And, like I said, they're completely different engineering problems. With aircraft you're entering a lot of precise mathematical formulas that have to do with the current state of the aircraft. With automatic driving it's all processing visual information.
My point is they're completely different engineering problems.
An autopilot needs to know physics, and the state of the aircraft. A self-driving car needs to be able to see and understand complex visual information.
Air travel is very simple in terms of dealing with traffic. The sky is big, so you simply point the direction you want to go and you go.
But there's a whole host of things an aerial autopilot needs to be able to do that GoogleDrive doesn't.
For example, for a plane to fly it has to have an Airspeed above it's stall-speed. Airspeed refers to the speed of the air going over the wings. If your aircraft is x lbs, you need x lbs of air under your wings at all times or you lose lift and instead of going up you're going down. The way you get more air under the wings is go through the air faster. So your computer needs to know how fast you are moving relative to the wind. This is related to the speed the aircraft is going relative to the ground, because if you add 150 MPH to airspeed you've generally added 150 MPH to groundspeed as well, but that really depends on things like the exact geometry of your vector related to the vector of the prevailing winds.
Then there's fuel management. Commercial aircraft generally have fuel tanks in their wings because if you put the tanks in the fuselage there's less room for passengers. They also have fuel tanks bigger them most cars. Seriously. The Dreamliner package your talking about is available on an aircraft with 33k gallon fuel tanks in the small fuel tank model. That's more then 200k pounds of fuel. And if you burn all the fuel in the left fuel tank before you burn any in the right fuel tank your carefully calculated center of gravity moves to some spot on your right wing, which makes things very difficult. In routine flights this isn't an issue, because there's an engine on each wing, but if a goose runs into the right engine the computer has to know to start transferring fuel from the right tank to the left with a crossfeed pump or things get to be problematic.
Ice is another issue. Ice on a wing changes the wings shape, which means the physics of how the wing interacts with the air changes, which in turn means how the pilot uses the wing to stay in the air has to change. The ice also adds weight, which changes both fuel consumption and flight characteristics. Ice is one of the leading causes of passenger plane crashes in the US. And it's something an autopilot has to deal with.
There's a reason it's much harder to become a licensed pilot then a licensed driver.
That should be easier then identifying a stoplight, because the signs are very standard, are in easily predictable places, and don't look like anything else. You simply program the car to recognize that a sign with this format means this speed limit under these circumstances.
Stoplights can be multiple colors (most are yellow, but some are black), look like quite a few things you drive by every day (ie: a police car with lights on, or a street sign warning there's a light ahead), may be strung across the road or on a poll above the road, etc.
Appointing a political hack as "Ebola Czar" to shut the GOP up is the real world version of telling everyone to calm the fuck down and go the fuck home.
That's an interesting strategy.
1. Prove you're incompetent by appointing an unqualified person to an important leadership role during a crisis.
2. ???
3. Stay calm and PROFIT!
Dude, apparently I was quite unclear.
The Czar's job is to do nothing that requires brains.
To beat Ebola you need three things:
1) A strong medical system. Ebola death rates are 10% in countries where every hospital is on the lookout for symptomatic patients, and has the budget to properly treat their symptoms.
2) Enforced quarantine of patients.
3) Some smart guys working on the problem medically. Your vaccine researchers are in this bit..
We have 1) and 2) in the US. The problem in Texas Presbyterian is that nobody took Ebola seriously. African states are fucked by Ebola because they can;t afford 1), and the people they'd need to enforce the quarantine (ie: cops) are always amenable to being bribed.
A political hack is actually the only person who could solve the Texas Presbyterian problem, because he is best-placed to bully any CDC employee of hospital that balks at implementing the strict protocols required for dealing with Ebola. "What! You are seriously thinking of authorizing a potentially infected nurse to go on vacation within the 21-day period! No. And if you ever bother me with such a stupid question again I'll have a press conference declaring that you are a fucking moron, and my good friend the President will be there."
A political hack can't do 3), but unless Congress passes a whole bunch of money to actually research the disease the Ebola Czar couldn't contribute much to that anyway.
The President can't unilaterally increase CDC funding. He has extremely broad discretion in moving funds around (the check on his power to cut one program's budget and use it for his pet priorities is not that he can't do that shit; it's that Congress would freak out and zero out said pet priorities budget next year), but he can't just add a bunch of money to the CDC.
The Republican House almost certainly claims that if they'd gotten Romney the CDC would have been adequately funded, but the tend to define "adequate funding" vaguely because every voter will assume their Congressman shares their interpretation of "adequate." But that claim isn't really relevant.
What's relevant is that Obama won; he and the House GOP agreed on the budget after much extreme BS; but now a) everyone wishes they'd added a little juice to the CDC's Ebola numbers and b) nobody actually believes there's a chance in hell that the two parties will agree on a new (higher) CDC budget anytime in the foreseeable future.
That why, even as an 'infectious disease response coordinator,' it's a lawyer and politician who got the call. If they had just stated the truth, that Ebola is hard to spread with proper controls, and can be contained, there would be no panic, there would be little media attention, and there would be no need for a czar. But as you said, there would be no need to concentrate power, so no dice.
Dude,
I see what you're saying, but you're missing something: Nina Pham is pretty. She's 26. She's got a college degree. She reminds everyone who makes decisions in the media of their daughter/girlfriend/best friend/etc. And she's got a very high risk of death because she caught a deadly disease on her job. Then her boss tried to blame her for it by saying she fucked up the protocol.
The media could be convinced to ignore thousands of poor Liberians dying. It could be convinced to treat the missionaries and Doctors airlifted back to the US. That shit is supposed to happen in Africa. But Nina Pham has a really interesting story, great visuals, and a compelling main character.
Appointing a political hack as "Ebola Czar" to shut the GOP up is the real world version of telling everyone to calm the fuck down and go the fuck home.
I find a lot of opponents of the security state have extremely high IQs, but virtually no common sense. They're a very smart combination of hopelessly naive, and ridiculously cynical.
For example, this is one case. The NSA does not have to reveal any tactic not used against Ulbricht. This means that that unless you have personally hacked their servers, and know this exact hack was done by them with one of the techniques they have disowned, and that there's no plausible BS explanation; your plan is legal suicide.
Moreover if they've lied to Congress, what's to stop them from lying on the stand? "Well, we hacked this Taliban computer, and it was talking to this IP address in Iceland, so we hacked the IP address, and then we turned your terrorist-aiding drug lord scumbag client over to the FBI; and incidentally we can't give you any more details without risking current operations." Works perfectly.
I'm not arguing your point on Constitutional theory right now, because arguments on Constitutional theory are designed to be a waste of everyone's time. I;m arguing legal tactics.
Let's say you;re right. The hack was done by the NSA, and they are the only ones who can explain how the server links to Ulbricht. In that case even saying the words "National Security Agency" within 50 miles of the court room is legal malpractice because it increases the odds the NSA guy who knows this shit cold will be called to testify. And if he does Ulbricht is totally fucked. His lawyer might as well have put the fucking needle in his fucking arm personally. And don't bother claiming that the NSA won't show up. If they show up they get credit for bringing down evil Silk Road empire, justify all their operations, etc.
Let's say you're wrong. The FBI did the hack. Then the Prosecution can prove it, and all Ulbricht's legal team has done is convince the Judge their client must desperate or his lawyers wouldn't be trying something that's obviously going to fucking backfire.
Slashdot Mirror
If it wasn't public information how could we trust the election results? Seriously.
If the media can get the entire voter list, and a list of the people who showed up, and compare that to the list of total ballots cast, it's much harder for local elected officials (And in the US almost everyone involved in running an election is not only an elected official, they're partisan. No Republican will ever win the Detroit City Clerkship.) to simply make up vote totals.
It's public information. The local city clerk has records of everyone who voted in every election, and records of who is registered. Both lists are available to anyone who asks for a nominal fee. This is how political campaigns build their databases.
If you were actually rational about this issue at all you wouldn't have included the ObamaCare bit. The site was a few months late, but has since been a key part of providing health insurance to millions of Americans. Anyone who has actually worked in the private sector for more then a week can list at least three IT roll-outs that were more bungled then that.
Most of your reasoning falls apart with one simple change: if the Federal government is the only entity issuing certificates, then objections 1 and 2 simply do not exist. Objection 3 still could, but OTOH a massive security breach at the Social Security Administration or IRS would turn almost any hacker into a billionaire, and yet it just doesn't happen.
And there are people who buy cars specifically so they can replace major components (ie: a new engine). The Italian Court system explicitly ruled that those guys don't have a right to get a refund for the engine.
A Mac is closer to a PC then a car, but since most of the reason people buy Macs is they're the only legal way to run MacOS it's not exactly the same.
Which means you need another decision in the Courts to get your money back, and if they decide in your favor it will probably only be for the $19.99 Apple charges for Mac OS X retail.
You're definitely over-reacting. They're not talking about collecting new data, turning data over to law enforcement, or anything like that. This is actualy the opposite of that. It's an attempt to make it easier for you to see what the government has on you.
Right now you can access your tax records (it's called a tax transcript) online for free, but it's a multi-step process and it's a huge pain in the ass when they start asking trick questions about whether you lived at 3205 Green Rd, or 3105 Green Rd for six months back in '95. Obviously they absolutely have to do that, because the IRS has to know it's sending the records to the right guy.
What the Feds're trying to do with the Executive order is figure out a) whether there's a way for other government departments to put more records online, and b) if there's a less painful way to identify people before sending them the right data. It's not likely they'll actually succeed, because identity thieves are clever mother-fuckers, but it's nice to see them try.
It would be great if you could more easily and securely access more of your tax records, or your Social Security benefits statement. This would also greatly improve things like government contracting.
OTOH, if the system is hackable then you could easily lose all your data to some guy on another continent.
Which would be a bad thing.
So CA chose to stay at a Bed and Breakfast, and is freaking out because part of the bill pays for the Breakfast?
I just believed you just demonstrated why, in the real world, only very silly people equate logical and smart.
Those damn Europeans and their economic rights. Always making life complicated for the God-Fearing American Technology businessman.
For the record, that was a joke. I suspect there will be many more court rulings on various aspects of this case over the next few years.
Keep in mind that a) this number is not expected to be a truly accurate number, it's just expected to give Apple some idea of whether they'll break even on a given model, and b) there's a difference between the cost to Apple and the price to you.
Let's look at a). Apple has their total OS cost, the number of computers they sell, the cost of making those computers, etc. These are hard numbers that won't really be worked around. You could calculate cost per mac pretty easily this way, and get a rough idea of how much you need to make per unit or you go broke; but you could also do a percentage of the total revenue from computers they sell (the reasoning would be "Mac OS X is X% of our costs of producing hardware, so we need a X% margin on this model to make money") and you also get a rough idea of how much Apple needs to charge to avoid going broke. Then you have to factor in the copies of 10.6.8 they sell at retail stores, where the $19.99 is presumably a loss leader, etc.
Now once you have whatever number that is, you have to turn it into a price you pay. Is Apple expecting to make a profit on the OS? I doubt it. You don't make money on a $19.99 OS. In that case the price is going to be below the cost, and your refund is going to be well below Apple's cost.
Probably just an urban legend. They were growing steadily before then, and aren;t that far off the Danes, Swedes, Austrians and French.
The thing about falsifiability in scientific theories is that it doesn't appear until somebody comes up with an alternate theory. And there just aren't a lot of good alternative theories to Evolution.
As far as I can tell there've been three theories as to why species exist/change/etc.
1) God made them that way. This was proven inadequate by the demise of the Dodo bird (after all, if God specifically made Dodo birds because he liked Dodo birds, why would he let us kill them all?), and was really on it's last legs when Darwin and Wallace published. The fact we've seen new species appear since then, and other species change their physical traits and behavior quite dramatically, are just more nails in the coffin.
2) Animals change themselves to be better adapted to their environment, and pass those traits onto their offspring. This is called Lamarckism, or Lamarckian evolution, and it fell out of favor because nobody could get lab animals to exercise themselves in such a way that their offspring changed. ie: his classic example was a giraffe striving to reach the highest branches, and exercising it's neck until it stretched, then it's little giraffe babies started out with longer necks, and they exercised their necks, etc. Geneticists are actually bringing some elements of this back because they have proven that some behavioral changes change the epigenetics of an organism, but even that's a lot more limited then Lemarck's original proposal.
3) Darwinian Evolution. This could be falsified if you found a bunch of fossils in the wrong layer and there wasn't some other explanation -- the classic "rabbits in the Devonian" scenario. It could be falsified if you could find some population of animals under selective pressure that wasn't changing. Say you have a colony of lab mice, 20% of them are white, and you selectively kill those white ones. Every generation should have fewer and fewer white mice.
Again you're talking about totally different engineering challenges.
The software running a plane is very specific to that aircraft. The Dreamliner's took 5-8 years partly because it had to be perfect, but also partly because the Dreamliner's design wasn't finished, and whenever the design changed the airframe's behavior the autopilot and all the software would have to be changed to fit.
If your argument is that it will take 10-15 years minimum before we're cruising down the highway at 85 with a computer driving, then I'll agree with you.
But you're also implying that once Google has done it for a single model of car, it will take another five years to solve it for the Rice Rocket version of that car. A single spoiler would completely change the aerodynamic characteristics of an aircraft, and require the Autopilot be extensively reworked. That's just doesn't apply to Google drive. Once Google has a version of Drive that works on one rear-wheel drive car it will be roughly a week from adapting it to any other rear wheel drive vehicle. Most of that week will be figuring out where to hook up the sensors on a different vehicle's body. Much of the work that an Autopilot has to know 100% all the time could actually be learned by the car as it was driving the vehicle.
For example, it's not a tragedy if your GoogleDrive car screws up the gas consumption calculations because you forgot to tell it you're a Coal Roller; and you have to walk to the nearest station. So Google includes a simple AI to figure out your vehicle's gas consumption from experience. If you did that with a jetliner everyone would die.
I think you're mistaking the compiler's ability to do an awful lot of work on your behalf, for a lack of work happening.
For example, "speed = stallSpeed then throttle++" is a formula. As for "thousands," keep in mind that a commercial jet like the Dreamliner has several flaps settings, for each wing, multiple rudder settings, operates at multiple different speeds, has to keep track of three fuel tanks, altitude, etc. If there are four possible numbers entered for each of those variables into the compiler that's 4^5 potential situations the Autopilot has to deal with. As a slashdotter, you probably know that adds up (2^2)^5 or 1,024 discrete sets of numbers.
With a commercial-level autopilot they probably did a lot of the work the compiler does for you themselves, because once you reach a certain level of expertise errors the compiler adds to your program are a bigger problem then errors you would have made if you'd done it yourself.
The analogy really sucks.
It's very hard to find a photo of Abe Lincoln where he isn't at least a head (including his beard) above everyone else. But today several countries have an average height within a 10 cm of him. The Dutch are 184 cm (about 6' 1"), but Abe was only 193 cm (just under 6' 4"). Partly that's due to nutrition, which has an incredibly complicated relationship to height (the Dutch, for example, are dragged down by the descendents of people born during a famine after WW2. Their grandchildren are unexpectedly short and nobody knows why.).
If you could figure out how much it cost you, you might have a case. There are two problems: 1) buying a Mac is inherently different then buying a PC in that Mac-buyers have actively chosen to buy an operating system, and 2) it's really hard to figure out how much Mac OS the software cost you.
1) is important because the basis of the ruling is that when you buy a Dell you're buying two things: computer hardware and access to a separate software package. There are tens of millions of geeks around the world who buy Dell boxes, get rid of the entire software package, and live happily ever-after. Apple simply doesn't work that way. They are a one-stop shop. The heart of this ruling was an analogy with cars. Cars are sold as complete units (note: I'm not kidding. Don't blame me for using the car analogy on Slashdot, it's all the Italian Justices fault) , so you can't ask for a refund on the engine or the wheels; but the Court ruled PCs aren't. Macs are in the middle, so it's not clear which way the Courts'd rule.
2) is important because Mac OS X does not have a price tag. It's quite simple to figure out the non-MS price for a Dell or HP, because you can simply ask the licensing department how much the licenses cost and deduct them from the retail price; and then (assuming you can prove you didn't check any of the "agree" buttons on the software) you can ask for that much back. It's not simple figuring out the Mac OS X-free price of a Mac Pro.
In the US the price of 10.6.8 is $19.99 retail, and the way you get later versions is by paying for 10.6.8 and then using the free upgrades. What's that say about the OEM price of OS X 10.10? It's OEM, so it should be cheaper then retail, but it's a higher version then retail so it should be more, but you get 10.10 for free if you get the lower version so maybe it should be the same, etc.
If your point is that lots of people have done autopilots, and none of them have done self-driving cars; then yes autopilots are by definition easier then self-driving cars.
I'm curious: why do you think that's at all relevant to any other part of this thread?
So it has to know the answers to thousands of physics calculations, and it has to know what to do when the answer is wrong (ie: speed is too low for flaps at 15 degrees), but that doesn't constitute "knowing physics"? That's a mighty fine distinction you're drawing there.
And, like I said, they're completely different engineering problems. With aircraft you're entering a lot of precise mathematical formulas that have to do with the current state of the aircraft. With automatic driving it's all processing visual information.
My point is they're completely different engineering problems.
An autopilot needs to know physics, and the state of the aircraft. A self-driving car needs to be able to see and understand complex visual information.
You can't compare the two.
Air travel is very simple in terms of dealing with traffic. The sky is big, so you simply point the direction you want to go and you go.
But there's a whole host of things an aerial autopilot needs to be able to do that GoogleDrive doesn't.
For example, for a plane to fly it has to have an Airspeed above it's stall-speed. Airspeed refers to the speed of the air going over the wings. If your aircraft is x lbs, you need x lbs of air under your wings at all times or you lose lift and instead of going up you're going down. The way you get more air under the wings is go through the air faster. So your computer needs to know how fast you are moving relative to the wind. This is related to the speed the aircraft is going relative to the ground, because if you add 150 MPH to airspeed you've generally added 150 MPH to groundspeed as well, but that really depends on things like the exact geometry of your vector related to the vector of the prevailing winds.
Then there's fuel management. Commercial aircraft generally have fuel tanks in their wings because if you put the tanks in the fuselage there's less room for passengers. They also have fuel tanks bigger them most cars. Seriously. The Dreamliner package your talking about is available on an aircraft with 33k gallon fuel tanks in the small fuel tank model. That's more then 200k pounds of fuel. And if you burn all the fuel in the left fuel tank before you burn any in the right fuel tank your carefully calculated center of gravity moves to some spot on your right wing, which makes things very difficult. In routine flights this isn't an issue, because there's an engine on each wing, but if a goose runs into the right engine the computer has to know to start transferring fuel from the right tank to the left with a crossfeed pump or things get to be problematic.
Ice is another issue. Ice on a wing changes the wings shape, which means the physics of how the wing interacts with the air changes, which in turn means how the pilot uses the wing to stay in the air has to change. The ice also adds weight, which changes both fuel consumption and flight characteristics. Ice is one of the leading causes of passenger plane crashes in the US. And it's something an autopilot has to deal with.
There's a reason it's much harder to become a licensed pilot then a licensed driver.
That should be easier then identifying a stoplight, because the signs are very standard, are in easily predictable places, and don't look like anything else. You simply program the car to recognize that a sign with this format means this speed limit under these circumstances.
Stoplights can be multiple colors (most are yellow, but some are black), look like quite a few things you drive by every day (ie: a police car with lights on, or a street sign warning there's a light ahead), may be strung across the road or on a poll above the road, etc.
That's an interesting strategy.
1. Prove you're incompetent by appointing an unqualified person to an important leadership role during a crisis.
2. ???
3. Stay calm and PROFIT!
Dude, apparently I was quite unclear.
The Czar's job is to do nothing that requires brains.
To beat Ebola you need three things:
1) A strong medical system. Ebola death rates are 10% in countries where every hospital is on the lookout for symptomatic patients, and has the budget to properly treat their symptoms.
2) Enforced quarantine of patients.
3) Some smart guys working on the problem medically. Your vaccine researchers are in this bit..
We have 1) and 2) in the US. The problem in Texas Presbyterian is that nobody took Ebola seriously. African states are fucked by Ebola because they can;t afford 1), and the people they'd need to enforce the quarantine (ie: cops) are always amenable to being bribed.
A political hack is actually the only person who could solve the Texas Presbyterian problem, because he is best-placed to bully any CDC employee of hospital that balks at implementing the strict protocols required for dealing with Ebola. "What! You are seriously thinking of authorizing a potentially infected nurse to go on vacation within the 21-day period! No. And if you ever bother me with such a stupid question again I'll have a press conference declaring that you are a fucking moron, and my good friend the President will be there."
A political hack can't do 3), but unless Congress passes a whole bunch of money to actually research the disease the Ebola Czar couldn't contribute much to that anyway.
The President can't unilaterally increase CDC funding. He has extremely broad discretion in moving funds around (the check on his power to cut one program's budget and use it for his pet priorities is not that he can't do that shit; it's that Congress would freak out and zero out said pet priorities budget next year), but he can't just add a bunch of money to the CDC.
The Republican House almost certainly claims that if they'd gotten Romney the CDC would have been adequately funded, but the tend to define "adequate funding" vaguely because every voter will assume their Congressman shares their interpretation of "adequate." But that claim isn't really relevant.
What's relevant is that Obama won; he and the House GOP agreed on the budget after much extreme BS; but now a) everyone wishes they'd added a little juice to the CDC's Ebola numbers and b) nobody actually believes there's a chance in hell that the two parties will agree on a new (higher) CDC budget anytime in the foreseeable future.
That why, even as an 'infectious disease response coordinator,' it's a lawyer and politician who got the call.
If they had just stated the truth, that Ebola is hard to spread with proper controls, and can be contained, there would be no panic, there would be little media attention, and there would be no need for a czar. But as you said, there would be no need to concentrate power, so no dice.
Dude,
I see what you're saying, but you're missing something: Nina Pham is pretty. She's 26. She's got a college degree. She reminds everyone who makes decisions in the media of their daughter/girlfriend/best friend/etc. And she's got a very high risk of death because she caught a deadly disease on her job. Then her boss tried to blame her for it by saying she fucked up the protocol.
The media could be convinced to ignore thousands of poor Liberians dying. It could be convinced to treat the missionaries and Doctors airlifted back to the US. That shit is supposed to happen in Africa. But Nina Pham has a really interesting story, great visuals, and a compelling main character.
Appointing a political hack as "Ebola Czar" to shut the GOP up is the real world version of telling everyone to calm the fuck down and go the fuck home.
I find a lot of opponents of the security state have extremely high IQs, but virtually no common sense. They're a very smart combination of hopelessly naive, and ridiculously cynical.
For example, this is one case. The NSA does not have to reveal any tactic not used against Ulbricht. This means that that unless you have personally hacked their servers, and know this exact hack was done by them with one of the techniques they have disowned, and that there's no plausible BS explanation; your plan is legal suicide.
Moreover if they've lied to Congress, what's to stop them from lying on the stand? "Well, we hacked this Taliban computer, and it was talking to this IP address in Iceland, so we hacked the IP address, and then we turned your terrorist-aiding drug lord scumbag client over to the FBI; and incidentally we can't give you any more details without risking current operations." Works perfectly.
Goddamn lawyers can be ridiculously stupid.
I'm not arguing your point on Constitutional theory right now, because arguments on Constitutional theory are designed to be a waste of everyone's time. I;m arguing legal tactics.
Let's say you;re right. The hack was done by the NSA, and they are the only ones who can explain how the server links to Ulbricht. In that case even saying the words "National Security Agency" within 50 miles of the court room is legal malpractice because it increases the odds the NSA guy who knows this shit cold will be called to testify. And if he does Ulbricht is totally fucked. His lawyer might as well have put the fucking needle in his fucking arm personally. And don't bother claiming that the NSA won't show up. If they show up they get credit for bringing down evil Silk Road empire, justify all their operations, etc.
Let's say you're wrong. The FBI did the hack. Then the Prosecution can prove it, and all Ulbricht's legal team has done is convince the Judge their client must desperate or his lawyers wouldn't be trying something that's obviously going to fucking backfire.
Really, how much do you hate this Ulbricxht guy?