It's supposed to work by choosing a good candidate, that's how.
The voters in 2008 were naive and stupid. They elected a guy with no track record at all, and blindly believed all his lies about hope and change.
This time around, we have two Democratic candidates with very long political records, so you absolutely can make an informed choice. Hillary has been in politics for several decades now, and has a strong record of supporting Wall Street, being personally involved in and profiting from arms deals, being against same-sex marriage, helping install a militarized regime in Honduras based on repression, I could go on and on. Bernie has been in politics since the 60s, and has a strong record of supporting regular people and supporting progressive social causes like equal rights for blacks (he was present at MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech) and not working for any corrupt special interests.
I guess we'll see pretty soon which one of these the Democratic voters prefer. But they absolutely do have a choice, and you can't claim that you don't really know these candidates based on their prior histories.
Yep, that's a very apt word to describe Obama. It started right after he got elected, when his Administration adopted the attitude "thanks for the help, we'll take it from here" towards all his supporters and those who elected him, and promptly did a 180 and adopted almost all the Bush Administration policies.
And we see it again now with Hillary and her supporters: they're completely condescending towards Bernie supporters, with the attitude "ok, you've had your say, now you need to get behind Hillary so we can beat the Republicans, and all your concerns about her are silly".
The modern Democratic Party seems to be simply full of condescension; no wonder Bernie supporters hate Hillary so much and standard Democratic politics. The party stands for corruption and condescension, and Bernie is about the only hope they have to turn it around.
Oh well, I guess we can look forward to President Trump next year. Obama and Hillary seem to be doing everything they can to piss off everyone on the left or center who isn't a believer of elitist corporatist authoritarianism.
The problem is that the public isn't getting that much out of it. The cellular companies get to use the spectrum, and then charge us ridiculous prices for their services. Over in Europe, prices are far lower and service quality is far, far better, even in rural northern Finland.
There's supposed to be an equitable exchange: the corporations get to use the spectrum, and in return we have strong regulation giving us good prices on service for using that spectrum. And given that there's multiple cellular companies, it should be even better, but it's not: our prices and service our miserable compared to other nations.
Public utilities are subject to forms of public control and regulation
This is why I object to calling cellular services "utilities". If there were any real regulation, we wouldn't have the ridiculous prices we have now, compared to what the Europeans enjoy.
Yes, it's the case in Japan too. In case you didn't know, Japan has very rural areas too. Very few people live there because there's no jobs there, just like here.
It has nothing to do with knowing the different between electrical cords, it's a basic concept about freedom. It's the exact same principle governing access to service manuals and diagnostic information for your car: do you want to be forced to go to the stealership, or do you want to be able to take your car to any qualified mechanic?
It's pretty sad that I have to explain this to someone on Slashdot of all places. I guess this really isn't a nerd site any more.
This has nothing to do with "someone else" committing a crime, it has to do with the cops and government themselves committing crimes. And no, the cop driving 80mph to catch you is not in any way, shape, or form comparable to Stingray, and you're an idiot if you think it is.
Those population density numbers are basically BS and not useful for comparison. Much of the US is uninhabited space, especially if you count Alaska. How much does that number change if you leave out Alaska? How much does it change if you restrict it to states east of the Mississippi? This happened in Chicago, one of the largest cities in the US; a fair comparison would show the top 5 cities in the US and their density and the top 5 in Japan. Japan's still probably denser, but not 10 times as much.
He denied access, but I posit that this isn't anywhere near as bad as intercepting and listening in on peoples' private communications.
Since the government happily does this all the time with devices like Stingray, I don't think they have any right to charge him with a crime. They should let him go, drop all charges, and allow people to use jammers all they want. Otherwise, they're being hypocritical.
The one quibble I have with this case is the charge they levied against him: "interfering with a public utility". Cellular service isn't much of a utility if you ask me, because they don't treat it like one. For one thing, there's multiple providers (utilities are usually monopolies), and for another, there's almost no regulation, or else we'd have inexpensive cell service like they have over in Europe where supposedly the cost of living is so much higher.
Personally, I think they should let the guy off and allow jamming devices like this until the stupid government can get its shit together and start regulating cell services properly like they do in Europe.
The way it is now, it just reeks of the government doing the corporations' bidding, with we the people getting nothing out of it in return.
well, to get us to use the cloud for that, they would need to have their cloud-editing tools not suck.
No, they don't. They just have to eliminate the desktop tools. After a while, you'll forget all about how much better the desktop tools were and you'll think the cloud tools are just fine.
Otherwise, you can do more editing on your phone/tablet than you can on your desktop, and that is one gigantic bit of what-the-f round two. The idea that mobile should be *better* than desktop is an attitude I will simply never ever understand.
You're obviously "stuck in the past"... The Cloud is the future!! It's new, and newer is always better!
How about if Google open-sourced the Picasa desktop program? Then it could continue rather than being discarded completely
Why would they want to do that? They want you to use Google cloud services to do that stuff, not an offline standalone program.
As far as it being fast, a cloud-based photo editing service will be faster at operating on data that's on Google Drive. You say that your photos aren't on Google Drive? Well then you need to put them all on there. You're not supposed to be storing your personal information on your own local machine, you're supposed to be storing everything in the Cloud.
It makes perfect sense that Google is killing off Picasa and not making the source code available.
Trivia for people here: how many vacuum-sealed samples of lunar regolith do you think we have left over from the Apollo days? Answer: none. The regolith abraded the seals over time, creating pinpoint leaks; every last sample is now partially oxidized by Earth air.
Why couldn't they just put it in vacuum-sealed glass jars, and not turned them upside-down? The regolith isn't going to abrade the glass away, especially if you leave the jars sitting on a shelf (and you can use a harder, higher grade of glass too, like sapphire glass that's used for watch faces).
The problem with web browsers is primarily bad webpage coding and we can all fix that easily by just not going to website that load slow or use too much ads. That's really the better solution. We the people train the marketand coders to work how we want it instead of just being sheep spending their lives running from once fence to another because they heard it was better over there. Sites likes slashdot and reddit aren't slow. If you can't make a site without too much trash I just don't go there. We shouldn't have to engineer around the problem.
Yes, you should. While sometimes you can tell that a site is taking too long to load and that's the site's fault, it might also be some other tabs that are chewing up your CPU and causing everything else to be slow too. What I want to see is a browser that actually shows per-tab resource usage statistics, so I can see quantitatively what each site is consuming and if some site has some screwy JS which is gobbling the CPU.
The other big problem is just bad handling of multiple open tabs. They should be able to drop resources on tabs that aren't being used with minimal overhead. You may have 20 tabs open, but only one needs to be fully rendered and using any real resource, yet that is not how any browser works.
This is an excellent idea.
Finally, we should all disable flash and leave it off until they get the fucking message. It's complete and total crap and flash has caused BILLIONS of dollars in damages due to being massively insecure and massively bloated and inefficient. Flash is basically a virus that can run some cool games.
I disagree. These companies have abused copyright too much and for too long, and because of that, I don't think they should have any copyright protection at all.
Apples and oranges. People who suck at driving and drive 15 under the speed limit and are generally inattentive aren't assholes the way that aggressive drivers are. They both suck, to be sure, but it's two totally different types of suckage. The OP posted what he observed to be the common behavior of BMW drivers, which is totally different than what you have observed to be the common behavior of Subaru and Prius drivers; you're likely both right.
Some of this is probably geographical, however. Where I am, I haven't seen such annoying behavior from Subaru or Prius drivers at all. However, I do see a *lot* of people driving 10 under the already ridiculously low speed limits we have here in Virginia, but not in those cars. I think they're usually in some crappy American car.
maybe you shouldn't be driving.
Unfortunately, this applies to the majority of the driving population. That's why we desperately need autonomous cars.
The Civic is not a poor person's car. If you're on a budget and want a Honda, the Fit is the car for you: it's smaller and cheaper and crappier than the Civic.
Just because the Civic carries the same name as the low-end car Honda sold in the 70s doesn't mean it's aimed at the same market.
And if you're really poor, new cars probably aren't a good choice for you anyway. That's why we have used cars. The average age of a car on the road now is over 11 years. Poor people are driving the cars middle-class people used to drive 10 years ago. If you can't afford $18k for a new car, then you should be driving a used car that you can get for $3-8k. There's plenty of great cars in that price range.
I completely disagree. Human drivers are already so horrible that it's hard to do worse with autonomous vehicles, even if they have errors sometimes.
However, peoples' fear of autonomous vehicles and lack of understanding about death rates (it's better to have 1000 deaths/year because of software errors than 30,000 deaths/year because of stupid human errors) will delay the deployment of fully-autonomous vehicles, I'm sure.
But what I do believe will happen is that we'll see partially autonomous vehicles, namely on freeways. Freeway driving is far simpler than driving on surface streets anyway since the traffic flows in one direction and there's no stop lights. The only things you really have to worry about is traffic jams and unexpected obstacles (like retreads and other debris, or wild animals). So what we'll probably see before too long is cars which take control from you when you enter a freeway, and then let you resume control when you exit the freeway. You won't be expected to take over at a moment's notice (that would be stupid, as you said), and they'll come up with algorithms for dealing with the problems it's possible you'll see on a freeway. You'll be warned ahead of time that you need to be ready to take over on the exit ramp, and if you're unconscious then it'll default to just pulling over in a safe spot.
But going from that to fully autonomous on all roads will probably take a while.
Other times you have slow people in the fast lane, yapping on their phones without even as much as handsfree. Just removing those people from driving responsibilities would do wonders for traffic, as well as aggressive driving and road rage. And if you took the road ragers out of the loop and put their cars on full auto, their overblown reactions to similar scenarios would also improve safety.
You'd improve safety on both ends. The nincompoops wouldn't be holding up traffic or causing wrecks through their carelessness or idiocy, but also the road ragers would be mostly eliminated because all the things which make them rage (the behaviors of the nincompoop drivers mainly) would be eliminated. After all, the road ragers are usually set off by something, whether it's a slow driver in the fast lane, being cut off, another aggressive driver flipping them the bird, etc. Automated driving would eliminate all that stuff, so people wouldn't have much of a reason to get mad in the car any more.
As for the "thrill of the open road", good riddance. That was a fun thing back in the old days when there weren't many cars, and sometimes it's still a fun thing if you can find the rare place/time when there's no other cars on the road (3AM in a rural area?), but it's pretty much gone. Heck, even 3AM isn't fun to drive because there's always a bunch of cops out there looking for an excuse to pull you over.
The biggest obstacle I see to automated driving is actually the police. How are local police departments going to handle it when people aren't even driving their own cars any more, and they aren't committing actual infractions? How are they going to finance largesse in small towns with excessive ticket revenue? How are the police going to be able to pull people over for Driving While Black? We might even see automakers suing local governments left and right (and winning) for harassing their customers when the customers weren't in control of the vehicles but got pulled over anyway for some falsified infraction, which the vehicle is easily able to disprove by its logs and recorded video.
The problem is that drivers **cannot** take control, unless it's pre-planned. You can't expect drivers to have their hands on the wheel, ready to take over at a moment's notice. It's simply impossible; if you require that, humans will fail nearly every single time it happens. Humans just can't do that.
What *can* work is the car acting autonomously in certain places (like on highways), and then requiring the driver to take over outside of those situations, *as long as* the driver is given ample warning to be ready to take over. So if you're taking a 1-hour drive with 45 minutes on the freeway, you could have the car take over on the on-ramp and drive autonomously on the freeway, and then require the driver to take over on the off-ramp, giving plenty of auditory warning ("Arriving at off-ramp in 3 minutes, please be prepared to resume manual driving"), and then falling back to pulling over on the off-ramp if the driver has fallen asleep or something.
But any rules requiring drivers to be able to take over at a moment's notice **will** be a failure and cause catastrophic results. If autonomous vehicles are not ready to act autonomously without the need for manual takeover, then they don't belong on the road, or they need to be set up to be restricted to certain places or situations (like freeways, that really should be pretty easy to automate).
I'm not a gamer; my last game system was the NES. I don't have a horse in this race, I'm just pointing out what I see.
Back in the 80s, Nintendo and Sega had no trouble getting regular people to buy all kinds of original (for then) games: Castlevania, Metroid, Zelda, Metal Gear, Sonic, etc. But now, apparently they can't do it any more. It seems to me they just can't come up with good, original concepts any more, so they resort to mining the past.
Apart from a very small handful of notable indie titles that have sold like gangbusters, almost any game company that tries to make a big-budget title that's completely original finds itself pretty quickly in the red.
Maybe they stop making big-budget titles then. All the most successful franchises started out with small, simple games written by a handful of programmers (or even just one). And those successful indie titles you mention prove that you don't need a big budget to make a successful game. Big companies generally suck at creativity and originality anyway, so maybe they should just close shop and give up.
Trump is obviously not a religious person. There's very little record of him being much of a church-goer, and what little religious background he has is non-evangelical (Presbyterian in particular).
His biggest opponent, Ted Cruz, is very religious and is an evangelical. If evangelicals really cared about supporting their own, they'd be voting for Cruz in the primaries.
However, Trump is getting a surprising amount of support from the evangelicals (though a lot are voting for Cruz). There's various theories about this. A lot of people don't trust Cruz at all, think he's a big liar, etc. Some could be bad blood because of how Cruz's campaign fucked over Carson's campaign (and Carson was a favorite with the religious set for a while, since Carson is super-religious too).
But the biggest factor in Trump's popularity overall is that his base is working-class white people, of all stripes. They don't feel the Democrats represent them (and they're right, if they look at ones like Hillary who are in the pocket of Wall Street and push free-trade deals and more immigration), and they've finally figured out the mainstream GOP politicians are working against their best interests too. So Trump is basically the best choice they have, in their perspective, because he appears to be working in their best interests.
Right-wing Christians are frequently working-class, so it makes perfect sense that they support the one candidate who appeals to that group.
In case you really don't understand, it's pretty simple (esp. for the "Recommended Sites" feature): advertising.
Firefox is a free download, and it's open-source, so obviously they're not extracting money from their users. But they need money to run the Mozilla Foundation and pay the developers and executives and everyone else that works there and pay the rent. They were(/are?) getting a pile of money from Google, in exchange for making Google the preferred/default search engine. (I think they've shifted to Yahoo now, not sure.) But that's probably not enough so they're pursuing other methods of getting money, and every other feature that looks like crap from a user's perspective is most likely for this exact reason: to make money. Recommended Sites is an obvious one: some sites pay Mozilla to stick them on the new-tab page so users see them and hopefully click on them. Pocket I'm not sure about but I'm sure there's some angle there.
Of course, all this depends on Firefox having as many users as possible: the more users they have, the more eyeballs, and the more money they can get from these other parties. So if they push a bunch of crap on users (and ignore desired features and performance and reliability) and piss them off so they switch to other browsers, that's going to result in less money for them.
Slashdot Mirror
It's supposed to work by choosing a good candidate, that's how.
The voters in 2008 were naive and stupid. They elected a guy with no track record at all, and blindly believed all his lies about hope and change.
This time around, we have two Democratic candidates with very long political records, so you absolutely can make an informed choice. Hillary has been in politics for several decades now, and has a strong record of supporting Wall Street, being personally involved in and profiting from arms deals, being against same-sex marriage, helping install a militarized regime in Honduras based on repression, I could go on and on. Bernie has been in politics since the 60s, and has a strong record of supporting regular people and supporting progressive social causes like equal rights for blacks (he was present at MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech) and not working for any corrupt special interests.
I guess we'll see pretty soon which one of these the Democratic voters prefer. But they absolutely do have a choice, and you can't claim that you don't really know these candidates based on their prior histories.
Yep, that's a very apt word to describe Obama. It started right after he got elected, when his Administration adopted the attitude "thanks for the help, we'll take it from here" towards all his supporters and those who elected him, and promptly did a 180 and adopted almost all the Bush Administration policies.
And we see it again now with Hillary and her supporters: they're completely condescending towards Bernie supporters, with the attitude "ok, you've had your say, now you need to get behind Hillary so we can beat the Republicans, and all your concerns about her are silly".
The modern Democratic Party seems to be simply full of condescension; no wonder Bernie supporters hate Hillary so much and standard Democratic politics. The party stands for corruption and condescension, and Bernie is about the only hope they have to turn it around.
Oh well, I guess we can look forward to President Trump next year. Obama and Hillary seem to be doing everything they can to piss off everyone on the left or center who isn't a believer of elitist corporatist authoritarianism.
The problem is that the public isn't getting that much out of it. The cellular companies get to use the spectrum, and then charge us ridiculous prices for their services. Over in Europe, prices are far lower and service quality is far, far better, even in rural northern Finland.
There's supposed to be an equitable exchange: the corporations get to use the spectrum, and in return we have strong regulation giving us good prices on service for using that spectrum. And given that there's multiple cellular companies, it should be even better, but it's not: our prices and service our miserable compared to other nations.
Public utilities are subject to forms of public control and regulation
This is why I object to calling cellular services "utilities". If there were any real regulation, we wouldn't have the ridiculous prices we have now, compared to what the Europeans enjoy.
Yes, it's the case in Japan too. In case you didn't know, Japan has very rural areas too. Very few people live there because there's no jobs there, just like here.
First, the government is not "just another actor", and your tit-for-tat ideas are this nonsense, as are the claims of hypocrisy. They're allowed.
The Fourth Amendment disagrees with you.
It has nothing to do with knowing the different between electrical cords, it's a basic concept about freedom. It's the exact same principle governing access to service manuals and diagnostic information for your car: do you want to be forced to go to the stealership, or do you want to be able to take your car to any qualified mechanic?
It's pretty sad that I have to explain this to someone on Slashdot of all places. I guess this really isn't a nerd site any more.
This has nothing to do with "someone else" committing a crime, it has to do with the cops and government themselves committing crimes. And no, the cop driving 80mph to catch you is not in any way, shape, or form comparable to Stingray, and you're an idiot if you think it is.
Those population density numbers are basically BS and not useful for comparison. Much of the US is uninhabited space, especially if you count Alaska. How much does that number change if you leave out Alaska? How much does it change if you restrict it to states east of the Mississippi? This happened in Chicago, one of the largest cities in the US; a fair comparison would show the top 5 cities in the US and their density and the top 5 in Japan. Japan's still probably denser, but not 10 times as much.
He denied access, but I posit that this isn't anywhere near as bad as intercepting and listening in on peoples' private communications.
Since the government happily does this all the time with devices like Stingray, I don't think they have any right to charge him with a crime. They should let him go, drop all charges, and allow people to use jammers all they want. Otherwise, they're being hypocritical.
The one quibble I have with this case is the charge they levied against him: "interfering with a public utility". Cellular service isn't much of a utility if you ask me, because they don't treat it like one. For one thing, there's multiple providers (utilities are usually monopolies), and for another, there's almost no regulation, or else we'd have inexpensive cell service like they have over in Europe where supposedly the cost of living is so much higher.
Personally, I think they should let the guy off and allow jamming devices like this until the stupid government can get its shit together and start regulating cell services properly like they do in Europe.
The way it is now, it just reeks of the government doing the corporations' bidding, with we the people getting nothing out of it in return.
The problem is that regular people, especially those on juries, are just too stupid to adopt and use Free Software.
well, to get us to use the cloud for that, they would need to have their cloud-editing tools not suck.
No, they don't. They just have to eliminate the desktop tools. After a while, you'll forget all about how much better the desktop tools were and you'll think the cloud tools are just fine.
Otherwise, you can do more editing on your phone/tablet than you can on your desktop, and that is one gigantic bit of what-the-f round two. The idea that mobile should be *better* than desktop is an attitude I will simply never ever understand.
You're obviously "stuck in the past"... The Cloud is the future!! It's new, and newer is always better!
How about if Google open-sourced the Picasa desktop program? Then it could continue rather than being discarded completely
Why would they want to do that? They want you to use Google cloud services to do that stuff, not an offline standalone program.
As far as it being fast, a cloud-based photo editing service will be faster at operating on data that's on Google Drive. You say that your photos aren't on Google Drive? Well then you need to put them all on there. You're not supposed to be storing your personal information on your own local machine, you're supposed to be storing everything in the Cloud.
It makes perfect sense that Google is killing off Picasa and not making the source code available.
Trivia for people here: how many vacuum-sealed samples of lunar regolith do you think we have left over from the Apollo days? Answer: none. The regolith abraded the seals over time, creating pinpoint leaks; every last sample is now partially oxidized by Earth air.
Why couldn't they just put it in vacuum-sealed glass jars, and not turned them upside-down? The regolith isn't going to abrade the glass away, especially if you leave the jars sitting on a shelf (and you can use a harder, higher grade of glass too, like sapphire glass that's used for watch faces).
The problem with web browsers is primarily bad webpage coding and we can all fix that easily by just not going to website that load slow or use too much ads. That's really the better solution. We the people train the marketand coders to work how we want it instead of just being sheep spending their lives running from once fence to another because they heard it was better over there. Sites likes slashdot and reddit aren't slow. If you can't make a site without too much trash I just don't go there. We shouldn't have to engineer around the problem.
Yes, you should. While sometimes you can tell that a site is taking too long to load and that's the site's fault, it might also be some other tabs that are chewing up your CPU and causing everything else to be slow too. What I want to see is a browser that actually shows per-tab resource usage statistics, so I can see quantitatively what each site is consuming and if some site has some screwy JS which is gobbling the CPU.
The other big problem is just bad handling of multiple open tabs. They should be able to drop resources on tabs that aren't being used with minimal overhead. You may have 20 tabs open, but only one needs to be fully rendered and using any real resource, yet that is not how any browser works.
This is an excellent idea.
Finally, we should all disable flash and leave it off until they get the fucking message. It's complete and total crap and flash has caused BILLIONS of dollars in damages due to being massively insecure and massively bloated and inefficient. Flash is basically a virus that can run some cool games.
Flash can simply be uninstalled.
I disagree. These companies have abused copyright too much and for too long, and because of that, I don't think they should have any copyright protection at all.
Apples and oranges. People who suck at driving and drive 15 under the speed limit and are generally inattentive aren't assholes the way that aggressive drivers are. They both suck, to be sure, but it's two totally different types of suckage. The OP posted what he observed to be the common behavior of BMW drivers, which is totally different than what you have observed to be the common behavior of Subaru and Prius drivers; you're likely both right.
Some of this is probably geographical, however. Where I am, I haven't seen such annoying behavior from Subaru or Prius drivers at all. However, I do see a *lot* of people driving 10 under the already ridiculously low speed limits we have here in Virginia, but not in those cars. I think they're usually in some crappy American car.
maybe you shouldn't be driving.
Unfortunately, this applies to the majority of the driving population. That's why we desperately need autonomous cars.
The Civic is not a poor person's car. If you're on a budget and want a Honda, the Fit is the car for you: it's smaller and cheaper and crappier than the Civic.
Just because the Civic carries the same name as the low-end car Honda sold in the 70s doesn't mean it's aimed at the same market.
And if you're really poor, new cars probably aren't a good choice for you anyway. That's why we have used cars. The average age of a car on the road now is over 11 years. Poor people are driving the cars middle-class people used to drive 10 years ago. If you can't afford $18k for a new car, then you should be driving a used car that you can get for $3-8k. There's plenty of great cars in that price range.
I completely disagree. Human drivers are already so horrible that it's hard to do worse with autonomous vehicles, even if they have errors sometimes.
However, peoples' fear of autonomous vehicles and lack of understanding about death rates (it's better to have 1000 deaths/year because of software errors than 30,000 deaths/year because of stupid human errors) will delay the deployment of fully-autonomous vehicles, I'm sure.
But what I do believe will happen is that we'll see partially autonomous vehicles, namely on freeways. Freeway driving is far simpler than driving on surface streets anyway since the traffic flows in one direction and there's no stop lights. The only things you really have to worry about is traffic jams and unexpected obstacles (like retreads and other debris, or wild animals). So what we'll probably see before too long is cars which take control from you when you enter a freeway, and then let you resume control when you exit the freeway. You won't be expected to take over at a moment's notice (that would be stupid, as you said), and they'll come up with algorithms for dealing with the problems it's possible you'll see on a freeway. You'll be warned ahead of time that you need to be ready to take over on the exit ramp, and if you're unconscious then it'll default to just pulling over in a safe spot.
But going from that to fully autonomous on all roads will probably take a while.
Other times you have slow people in the fast lane, yapping on their phones without even as much as handsfree. Just removing those people from driving responsibilities would do wonders for traffic, as well as aggressive driving and road rage. And if you took the road ragers out of the loop and put their cars on full auto, their overblown reactions to similar scenarios would also improve safety.
You'd improve safety on both ends. The nincompoops wouldn't be holding up traffic or causing wrecks through their carelessness or idiocy, but also the road ragers would be mostly eliminated because all the things which make them rage (the behaviors of the nincompoop drivers mainly) would be eliminated. After all, the road ragers are usually set off by something, whether it's a slow driver in the fast lane, being cut off, another aggressive driver flipping them the bird, etc. Automated driving would eliminate all that stuff, so people wouldn't have much of a reason to get mad in the car any more.
As for the "thrill of the open road", good riddance. That was a fun thing back in the old days when there weren't many cars, and sometimes it's still a fun thing if you can find the rare place/time when there's no other cars on the road (3AM in a rural area?), but it's pretty much gone. Heck, even 3AM isn't fun to drive because there's always a bunch of cops out there looking for an excuse to pull you over.
The biggest obstacle I see to automated driving is actually the police. How are local police departments going to handle it when people aren't even driving their own cars any more, and they aren't committing actual infractions? How are they going to finance largesse in small towns with excessive ticket revenue? How are the police going to be able to pull people over for Driving While Black? We might even see automakers suing local governments left and right (and winning) for harassing their customers when the customers weren't in control of the vehicles but got pulled over anyway for some falsified infraction, which the vehicle is easily able to disprove by its logs and recorded video.
The problem is that drivers **cannot** take control, unless it's pre-planned. You can't expect drivers to have their hands on the wheel, ready to take over at a moment's notice. It's simply impossible; if you require that, humans will fail nearly every single time it happens. Humans just can't do that.
What *can* work is the car acting autonomously in certain places (like on highways), and then requiring the driver to take over outside of those situations, *as long as* the driver is given ample warning to be ready to take over. So if you're taking a 1-hour drive with 45 minutes on the freeway, you could have the car take over on the on-ramp and drive autonomously on the freeway, and then require the driver to take over on the off-ramp, giving plenty of auditory warning ("Arriving at off-ramp in 3 minutes, please be prepared to resume manual driving"), and then falling back to pulling over on the off-ramp if the driver has fallen asleep or something.
But any rules requiring drivers to be able to take over at a moment's notice **will** be a failure and cause catastrophic results. If autonomous vehicles are not ready to act autonomously without the need for manual takeover, then they don't belong on the road, or they need to be set up to be restricted to certain places or situations (like freeways, that really should be pretty easy to automate).
I'm not a gamer; my last game system was the NES. I don't have a horse in this race, I'm just pointing out what I see.
Back in the 80s, Nintendo and Sega had no trouble getting regular people to buy all kinds of original (for then) games: Castlevania, Metroid, Zelda, Metal Gear, Sonic, etc. But now, apparently they can't do it any more. It seems to me they just can't come up with good, original concepts any more, so they resort to mining the past.
Apart from a very small handful of notable indie titles that have sold like gangbusters, almost any game company that tries to make a big-budget title that's completely original finds itself pretty quickly in the red.
Maybe they stop making big-budget titles then. All the most successful franchises started out with small, simple games written by a handful of programmers (or even just one). And those successful indie titles you mention prove that you don't need a big budget to make a successful game. Big companies generally suck at creativity and originality anyway, so maybe they should just close shop and give up.
It's not that simple.
Trump is obviously not a religious person. There's very little record of him being much of a church-goer, and what little religious background he has is non-evangelical (Presbyterian in particular).
His biggest opponent, Ted Cruz, is very religious and is an evangelical. If evangelicals really cared about supporting their own, they'd be voting for Cruz in the primaries.
However, Trump is getting a surprising amount of support from the evangelicals (though a lot are voting for Cruz). There's various theories about this. A lot of people don't trust Cruz at all, think he's a big liar, etc. Some could be bad blood because of how Cruz's campaign fucked over Carson's campaign (and Carson was a favorite with the religious set for a while, since Carson is super-religious too).
But the biggest factor in Trump's popularity overall is that his base is working-class white people, of all stripes. They don't feel the Democrats represent them (and they're right, if they look at ones like Hillary who are in the pocket of Wall Street and push free-trade deals and more immigration), and they've finally figured out the mainstream GOP politicians are working against their best interests too. So Trump is basically the best choice they have, in their perspective, because he appears to be working in their best interests.
Right-wing Christians are frequently working-class, so it makes perfect sense that they support the one candidate who appeals to that group.
In case you really don't understand, it's pretty simple (esp. for the "Recommended Sites" feature): advertising.
Firefox is a free download, and it's open-source, so obviously they're not extracting money from their users. But they need money to run the Mozilla Foundation and pay the developers and executives and everyone else that works there and pay the rent. They were(/are?) getting a pile of money from Google, in exchange for making Google the preferred/default search engine. (I think they've shifted to Yahoo now, not sure.) But that's probably not enough so they're pursuing other methods of getting money, and every other feature that looks like crap from a user's perspective is most likely for this exact reason: to make money. Recommended Sites is an obvious one: some sites pay Mozilla to stick them on the new-tab page so users see them and hopefully click on them. Pocket I'm not sure about but I'm sure there's some angle there.
Of course, all this depends on Firefox having as many users as possible: the more users they have, the more eyeballs, and the more money they can get from these other parties. So if they push a bunch of crap on users (and ignore desired features and performance and reliability) and piss them off so they switch to other browsers, that's going to result in less money for them.