The first guy to realize he can light a match and have hilarity ensue will probably create something visible from orbit, and get himself a Darwin award.
Actually, scratch that... bring it on! That would be funny.
The summary indicates that what they have is a vat of bacteria that are making alcohol
Hmmmm... are you sure?
Their work integrates an "artificial leaf," which uses a catalyst to make sunlight split water into hydrogen and oxygen, with a bacterium engineered to convert carbon dioxide plus hydrogen into the liquid fuel isopropanol.
So, they're clearly doing more than just making alcohol with yeast.
"This is a proof of concept that you can have a way of harvesting solar energy and storing it in the form of a liquid fuel
Instead of the app embedded in the TV, run the real version of the app on something else.
Take Samsung out of the equation entirely.
A 'Smart' TV is mostly a vehicle for companies to gather more data about you, and get in on the money action -- which means you should not be trusting it.
Because you're stuck with whatever sleazy stuff they're doing in the background, and whatever changes they're making to the EULA and privacy policy without telling you.
Samsung are increasingly sound like a company I'd not really be willing to buy products from. Because they seem to be suffering from a lot of "because we can, and because we gave ourselves permission" crap.
Sorry, but no. Injecting ads into a stream you have nothing to do with? But that's just assholes in marketing who need to be shot.
open any youtube comment stream: the mindless negativity on the internet is an endless ocean
And yet you've got four posts which are entirely filled with "Yarg, teh comix are the sux0rs and teh pointless".
Seriously, if you don't like comic movies, fine... but if all you're going to do it bitch about how negative the interwebs are while sounding like some screeching monkey... then just shut the fuck up already.
Your existential suffering sounds tragic. But nobody gives a damn.
99% of criticism, especially criticism you didn't ask for, is poison. you must utterly ignore it if you hope to achieve anything in this life
So, basically, everything you've posted in this thread then?
What we see right now is what happens when the society refuses to regulate it.
It's also what happens when you have lawmakers (who profit from this stuff) removing regulation under the absurd notion that regulating corporations is somehow unfair to them.
Look at who is actively preventing companies from being regulated, or dismantling existing ones... they're the people who are essentially trying to legalize theft on a massive scale. And they keep lying to us and say that we benefit from that.
Because they're rich, corrupt, and in on it. They do this to line their own pockets, at the expense of all of us.
As far as they're concerned, if the corporations can rip us off, all the better.
Trust me, you and I are on the same page on this one.
To me this seems to be one of the worst societal problems we have to deal with right now. However no one even talks about it.
The biggest lie perpetuated on the world is that corporations are there for any other reason than greed, and that collectively "the market" will arrive at optimal outcomes.
Corporations will always lie, cheat, and steal to make more money -- and they don't give a crap about us.
And many many politicians start out owning corporations, and are likely already quite corrupt before they even get into office.
All those millionaire businessmen in politics telling us how awesome corporations are and how they deserve tax breaks which will magically make our lives better? They're lining their pockets.
Between the corporations, the lobbyists, and the politicians who tell us the corporations and lobbyists are our friends... the game is so corrupt and rigged as to be laughable. If it wasn't so corrupt and rigged.
I'd bet an awful lot of global politicians have accounts like this they'd rather we didn't know about. Because they're part of the problem.
With all the news stories about how America can (and will, and does) force companies to hand over what's in their clouds... why the hell any member of the EU Parliament would think that using anything from Microsoft isn't a stupid idea is beyond me.
Unless you own every piece in that communication chain, you more or less have to start treating Microsoft as an entirely un-trustworthy entity... because for legal and privacy purposes, they pretty much are.
I think MS (and other American cloud providers) are going to start finding themselves very unwanted... because they literally can't be trusted.
They can't be trusted because they do stupid things like this, and because they want to monetize everything, and because they're more or less covered under the PATRIOT Act.
In deeming themselves above everybody's laws, and entitled to all data... America is essentially no longer trustworthy.
Of course not. Because they're essentially protected by the corporate veil.
So they can do all sorts of malfeasance, and HSBC will say "ooops, sorry", and possibly pay some fines. If they get sacked, they'll still keep their huge bonuses and severance.
The problem with corporations is it more or less encourages people to break the law, since they end up bearing no legal responsibility.
Rich bankers do prison time for ripping people off? Don't make me laugh.
Not a single one of the assholes who ripped off the world leading up to 2008 was charged with anything, despite essentially running an enormous Ponzi scheme to foist off bad debt to other people and make it look like it was AAA rated debt. It was theft, writ large, but not ONE of them was charged.
Because those people advise the government of financial matters.
Being a banker is practically a license to commit fraud on a massive scale, with no personal liability.
Being a banker on a large scale probably means some of the politicians who are supposed to be fixing this probably have an account with you and will give you a wink.
Because the politicians are just as corrupt as the bankers. All of these millionaire politicians are hiding their money in offshore accounts, right along with the drug cartels.
I thought that the whole point of Communism was that nobody was 'rich' or 'poor'....
Funny, I though the whole point of Capitalism was that when rich douchebags got richer they made the world better for all of us, instead of just concentrating wealth and power with rich douchebags.
Oh, wait, you mean economic ideology is a lie? And that Capitalism is just as much complete bullshit as Communism?
My god, man, you could destroy the world with that knowledge.
Fuck knows the idiots making policy who believe either of them are true are killing us all.
That 'lie' built you. Everything from the clothes on your back to the computer you're typing on, the Internet, food, and your home came from the free market.
No, since no market has ever been free -- free of externalities, free of cheating, free of collusion, free of cartels, free of things which make it not a free market -- no fucking free market has ever existed. It was a market, but it was never a free market.
You people who blindly say "Yarg, teh free market fixes all teh problems and teh rest is da socialism" read too much Ayn Rand, and ascribe far too much to what this bullshit pink unicorn actually accomplishes.
It doesn't achieve optimal outcomes -- in the long run, under ideal assumptions and ideal circumstances it is believed it will.
But that assumption is a crock of shit, and you should know it --- because like Communism it commits the fallacy of believing your ideology will work once people are forced to follow it.
The "free market" is what it always has been: shady deals, by assholes, designed to undermine the system around them, gain undue influence on other people, tilt the odds in your favor, and generally try to fuck over your fellow man.
If you're going to tell me that is going to achieve optimal outcomes... you're utterly deluded, or completely full of shit.
I've read, and at one point believed, your libertarian randian capitalist bullshit... and it's all one big fucking lie.
it's a system designed to let the rich pillage the world from the rest of us.
Making up god damn lies and hating them is a path to destruction. Seek help.
Nice strawman, douchebag.
Sorry, but you don't get to insinuate that my rejection of your economic notions is a sign of mental illness.
If all you have to offer in support of your chosen form of economics is "oh yeah, but what am I" and "neener neener", you can go fuck yourself.
If you are so deluded as to think that the "free market" is a real thing, and that it achieves the magical outcomes you think it does... then I suggest you suffer from wishful thinking, delusions, and should also seek help.
I reject the bullshit of the free market because I used to believe in it.
Which means I know a fuck of a lot more about it than most people ever will.
At least, as it's described by delusional assholes who act like disagreeing with the premise of capitalism is a mental illness.
Weird you'd call the free market a rigged game, then ask for it to be rigged by adding in restrictions.
No, what's weird is people continue to believe "free market" isn't a lie no matter where you are in the world, and continue to ascribe magical outcomes to what is essentially every greedy bastard optimizing his own greed, and has NOTHING to do with reality.
The "free market" is an abstraction. And it's a complete fucking lie.
Let's stop letting the game be rigged in favor of corporations so they can keep lying to us and stacking the odds in their favor -- let's finally realize the corporations are precisely WHY it's a rigged game.
What, like it does in the US where the "free market" lets them bring in TFWs and lower the wage?
You'll excuse me if I think the notion of the free market doing anything to help anybody except corporations is complete and utter bullshit. The free market is a rigged game, and always will be.
It doesn't do it in the first world, it sure as hell doesn't do it in developing nations.
According to an article in the Havana Times [havanatimes.org] the average salary in Cuba (as of 2012) was ~$22 based on a report released by the Cuban government.
Then I would say it is considerably up from what Cubans told me it was... but, I'll take it on face value since it's not completely out of whack.
The tourism industry is also likely to see a lot of growth.
The Cuban tourism indust already represents about 60% of GDP, and has done so for a long time. A lot of their infrastructure is more or less at capacity, and isn't going to scale well.
Last I was there, they'd doubled the size of the Juan Gomez airport in Varadero... and they were so over-run that the airport had been reduced to pure chaos -- they had dozens more flights than they could handle. And the resorts themselves didn't know when they were getting huge influxes of people and were unprepared for it. So all of a sudden they had a few hundred people showing up and no rooms for them.
I don't see how this will "eat them alive" though.
Well, I can give you some examples...
Cuba still has a fair amount of people who are little above dirt poor. They have health care, and schooling, but often not much else. Which means there's a lot of pan-handling. For years people have been told to bring toiletries and the like, because the Cubans can't buy them... over the last few years, they've become much more aggressively looking for cash.
The tourism trade has been suffering from a larger amount of outright scams since I've been going -- last I was there I bought a bunch of MP3 CDs, most of which turned out to be blank. They're not even trying any more. They're just getting more brazen and saying "fuck it".
Your average Cuban lines up along the side of the road to get a ride from one city to another to work... and the broke down buses they are on versus the ones the tourists are on are really demonstrating that it's a 3rd world country.
A lot of the most educated people in Cuba work on the resorts... because you get paid more as a bar tender than you do as an engineer in Cuba.
Start bringing large corporations trying to sell them crap they don't need, and they'll be diverting some of their limited money to crap like NetFlix. Corporations like Coca Cola will put their own domestic industries out of buisiness.
Cuba's biggest draw is its beaches, and in many places they're already at capacity and becoming full of garbage as the tourists throw their plastic cups and cigarette butts around. There's only so much beach.
When I say it will eat them alive, I'm saying if you had a sudden increase of even more tourists, they're simply not going to be able to keep up with it. Service and quality will go down across the board -- in fact, I'll argue it already has.
Start importing even more social problems like drugs, or even more widespread prostitution, and things will get worse for them.
Cuba is a small country, with limited resources, and a fairly fragile economy. It simply isn't going to survive a rapid transition without some serious pain, and it might be pain which they don't recover from.
Too much change, too rapidly, and you could seriously make things FAR worse for many people.
In my experience, in the last bunch of years, these things are already happening in Cuba. And, quite frankly, it's likely to keep getting worse.
Available to Cubans with access to broadband, and international payment methods.
So, Raul and Fidel?
Do you have any idea how much $7.99/month is to an average Cuban? More than what they make.
I'm afraid the douchiness of NetFlix making this announcement is mind-boggling as it seems so disconnected from reality as to be absurd.
I fear Cuba isn't ready for the influx of crap this kind of thing is going to do to its society. And no matter what the idealists say, you can't magically turn their economy into a modern thing without causing more damage than you fix.
The "free market" as they'll see it will eat them alive, I'm afraid.
Well, Uber is the modern tech company, who expects to build their fortune on someone else's dime, and then will abandon those people as soon as they can.
In other words, Uber is ran by a bunch of greedy assholes who want someone else to give them a business model, all while pretending local laws don't apply.
Kalanick sounds like an uber asshole to me. And, like most tech CEOs, completely out of touch with reality.
OK, smart ass... what's the singular of antipodes? Yes, antipode.
Now, if it was antipus, I might think you have a point.
I'm not saying there isn't an example but I'm not convinced there's anything else which would be done in the same way "octopus -> octopodes".
If there is, I'd love to see it. We don't have circupodes, or discupodes. *Is* there another word in English which ends in "us" and is pluralized as "odes"? Does the 'p' play a role here?
If this is an outlier from the Greek, do we have any similar uses to extrapolate to a rule? One instance does not a rule make.
But in the meantime, keep driving for us so we can keep the money coming in for R&D to get rid of you!
Sorry, but do you feel this is somehow different from any large corporation?
Because, you know, they all seem to boil down to "We need our employees, our employees are our most important asset... right up until we outsource your jobs to maximize executive bonuses".
Sorry, but pretty much every publicly traded company is looking for a way to fuck you over in order to maximize profits.
Which is precisely why they don't ever deserve your loyalty, because they'd climb over your corpse in a second.
Technically, I think you'd be able to steal it without ever being near it. And this has been true all along.
And suddenly I'm picturing self-driving cars put into Mayhem Mode where you plow them through crowds or buildings.
Suddenly Google's self driving cars become WMDs.
It sounds far fetched, but if they're at all vulnerable, it seems like something which is going to happen just simply because it's an attractive target.
Or, how about data privacy and protection laws in general? You know, actually hold companies accountable for treating security and privacy as optional?
Start fining them 10's or 100's of millions of dollars for being clueless idiots, and they'll get the message.
Keep letting companies do nothing and bear no consequences... nothing at all will change. If you're not hitting them where it counts, corporations won't start acting differently.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmmm .... 100 square kms ... producing flammable alcohol.
Have you seriously thought about this?
The first guy to realize he can light a match and have hilarity ensue will probably create something visible from orbit, and get himself a Darwin award.
Actually, scratch that ... bring it on! That would be funny.
Hmmmm ... are you sure?
So, they're clearly doing more than just making alcohol with yeast.
In fact, I'd say it sounds quite different.
Actually, 100% of all thefts still occur. The total number might be down, though.
The thefts which don't occur aren't thefts. Unless they occur. They don't keep stats on the thefts which don't occur until they do occur.
True facts. ;-)
I must say, I kind of had the same reaction.
Because it seems like every time someone mentions a Stirling generator it's to say "it's not a perpetual motion machine".
I've never really been clear on what they're for or if people actually use them for real world stuff.
This isn't "the ultimate developer's keyboard".
This is a vanity project by one guy to create his ultimate keyboard.
It's kinda cool, kinda neat, and definitely geeky.
But it's entirely about the build, and nothing to do with what makes a good keyboard.
So I applaud him, but I have precisely zero interest in the extra buttons and stuff he's got.
I would say he's made a terrible keyboard, but a cool DIY thing. He probably thinks it's awesome.
Don't buy a fucking 'Smart' TV.
Instead of the app embedded in the TV, run the real version of the app on something else.
Take Samsung out of the equation entirely.
A 'Smart' TV is mostly a vehicle for companies to gather more data about you, and get in on the money action -- which means you should not be trusting it.
Because you're stuck with whatever sleazy stuff they're doing in the background, and whatever changes they're making to the EULA and privacy policy without telling you.
Samsung are increasingly sound like a company I'd not really be willing to buy products from. Because they seem to be suffering from a lot of "because we can, and because we gave ourselves permission" crap.
Sorry, but no. Injecting ads into a stream you have nothing to do with? But that's just assholes in marketing who need to be shot.
And yet you've got four posts which are entirely filled with "Yarg, teh comix are the sux0rs and teh pointless".
Seriously, if you don't like comic movies, fine ... but if all you're going to do it bitch about how negative the interwebs are while sounding like some screeching monkey ... then just shut the fuck up already.
Your existential suffering sounds tragic. But nobody gives a damn.
So, basically, everything you've posted in this thread then?
Seriously, get over it.
I was kind of wondering the same thing ... that's a LOT going on in one day, and quite impressive.
Suddenly I'm visualizing multiple daily launches and landings as if it was no big deal and just thinking "wow, that's awesome".
It's also what happens when you have lawmakers (who profit from this stuff) removing regulation under the absurd notion that regulating corporations is somehow unfair to them.
Look at who is actively preventing companies from being regulated, or dismantling existing ones ... they're the people who are essentially trying to legalize theft on a massive scale. And they keep lying to us and say that we benefit from that.
Because they're rich, corrupt, and in on it. They do this to line their own pockets, at the expense of all of us.
As far as they're concerned, if the corporations can rip us off, all the better.
Trust me, you and I are on the same page on this one.
The biggest lie perpetuated on the world is that corporations are there for any other reason than greed, and that collectively "the market" will arrive at optimal outcomes.
Corporations will always lie, cheat, and steal to make more money -- and they don't give a crap about us.
And many many politicians start out owning corporations, and are likely already quite corrupt before they even get into office.
All those millionaire businessmen in politics telling us how awesome corporations are and how they deserve tax breaks which will magically make our lives better? They're lining their pockets.
Between the corporations, the lobbyists, and the politicians who tell us the corporations and lobbyists are our friends ... the game is so corrupt and rigged as to be laughable. If it wasn't so corrupt and rigged.
I'd bet an awful lot of global politicians have accounts like this they'd rather we didn't know about. Because they're part of the problem.
With all the news stories about how America can (and will, and does) force companies to hand over what's in their clouds ... why the hell any member of the EU Parliament would think that using anything from Microsoft isn't a stupid idea is beyond me.
Unless you own every piece in that communication chain, you more or less have to start treating Microsoft as an entirely un-trustworthy entity ... because for legal and privacy purposes, they pretty much are.
I think MS (and other American cloud providers) are going to start finding themselves very unwanted ... because they literally can't be trusted.
They can't be trusted because they do stupid things like this, and because they want to monetize everything, and because they're more or less covered under the PATRIOT Act.
In deeming themselves above everybody's laws, and entitled to all data ... America is essentially no longer trustworthy.
LOL ... "I can see paradise by the hydrogen glow" ... "Praying for the end of time, so I can end my time with you!!!"
Of course not. Because they're essentially protected by the corporate veil.
So they can do all sorts of malfeasance, and HSBC will say "ooops, sorry", and possibly pay some fines. If they get sacked, they'll still keep their huge bonuses and severance.
The problem with corporations is it more or less encourages people to break the law, since they end up bearing no legal responsibility.
Rich bankers do prison time for ripping people off? Don't make me laugh.
Not a single one of the assholes who ripped off the world leading up to 2008 was charged with anything, despite essentially running an enormous Ponzi scheme to foist off bad debt to other people and make it look like it was AAA rated debt. It was theft, writ large, but not ONE of them was charged.
Because those people advise the government of financial matters.
Being a banker is practically a license to commit fraud on a massive scale, with no personal liability.
Being a banker on a large scale probably means some of the politicians who are supposed to be fixing this probably have an account with you and will give you a wink.
Because the politicians are just as corrupt as the bankers. All of these millionaire politicians are hiding their money in offshore accounts, right along with the drug cartels.
Funny, I though the whole point of Capitalism was that when rich douchebags got richer they made the world better for all of us, instead of just concentrating wealth and power with rich douchebags.
Oh, wait, you mean economic ideology is a lie? And that Capitalism is just as much complete bullshit as Communism?
My god, man, you could destroy the world with that knowledge.
Fuck knows the idiots making policy who believe either of them are true are killing us all.
No, since no market has ever been free -- free of externalities, free of cheating, free of collusion, free of cartels, free of things which make it not a free market -- no fucking free market has ever existed. It was a market, but it was never a free market.
You people who blindly say "Yarg, teh free market fixes all teh problems and teh rest is da socialism" read too much Ayn Rand, and ascribe far too much to what this bullshit pink unicorn actually accomplishes.
It doesn't achieve optimal outcomes -- in the long run, under ideal assumptions and ideal circumstances it is believed it will.
But that assumption is a crock of shit, and you should know it --- because like Communism it commits the fallacy of believing your ideology will work once people are forced to follow it.
The "free market" is what it always has been: shady deals, by assholes, designed to undermine the system around them, gain undue influence on other people, tilt the odds in your favor, and generally try to fuck over your fellow man.
If you're going to tell me that is going to achieve optimal outcomes ... you're utterly deluded, or completely full of shit.
I've read, and at one point believed, your libertarian randian capitalist bullshit ... and it's all one big fucking lie.
it's a system designed to let the rich pillage the world from the rest of us.
Nice strawman, douchebag.
Sorry, but you don't get to insinuate that my rejection of your economic notions is a sign of mental illness.
If all you have to offer in support of your chosen form of economics is "oh yeah, but what am I" and "neener neener", you can go fuck yourself.
If you are so deluded as to think that the "free market" is a real thing, and that it achieves the magical outcomes you think it does ... then I suggest you suffer from wishful thinking, delusions, and should also seek help.
I reject the bullshit of the free market because I used to believe in it.
Which means I know a fuck of a lot more about it than most people ever will.
At least, as it's described by delusional assholes who act like disagreeing with the premise of capitalism is a mental illness.
No, what's weird is people continue to believe "free market" isn't a lie no matter where you are in the world, and continue to ascribe magical outcomes to what is essentially every greedy bastard optimizing his own greed, and has NOTHING to do with reality.
The "free market" is an abstraction. And it's a complete fucking lie.
Let's stop letting the game be rigged in favor of corporations so they can keep lying to us and stacking the odds in their favor -- let's finally realize the corporations are precisely WHY it's a rigged game.
What, like it does in the US where the "free market" lets them bring in TFWs and lower the wage?
You'll excuse me if I think the notion of the free market doing anything to help anybody except corporations is complete and utter bullshit. The free market is a rigged game, and always will be.
It doesn't do it in the first world, it sure as hell doesn't do it in developing nations.
Then I would say it is considerably up from what Cubans told me it was ... but, I'll take it on face value since it's not completely out of whack.
The Cuban tourism indust already represents about 60% of GDP, and has done so for a long time. A lot of their infrastructure is more or less at capacity, and isn't going to scale well.
Last I was there, they'd doubled the size of the Juan Gomez airport in Varadero ... and they were so over-run that the airport had been reduced to pure chaos -- they had dozens more flights than they could handle. And the resorts themselves didn't know when they were getting huge influxes of people and were unprepared for it. So all of a sudden they had a few hundred people showing up and no rooms for them.
Well, I can give you some examples ...
Cuba still has a fair amount of people who are little above dirt poor. They have health care, and schooling, but often not much else. Which means there's a lot of pan-handling. For years people have been told to bring toiletries and the like, because the Cubans can't buy them ... over the last few years, they've become much more aggressively looking for cash.
The tourism trade has been suffering from a larger amount of outright scams since I've been going -- last I was there I bought a bunch of MP3 CDs, most of which turned out to be blank. They're not even trying any more. They're just getting more brazen and saying "fuck it".
Your average Cuban lines up along the side of the road to get a ride from one city to another to work ... and the broke down buses they are on versus the ones the tourists are on are really demonstrating that it's a 3rd world country.
A lot of the most educated people in Cuba work on the resorts ... because you get paid more as a bar tender than you do as an engineer in Cuba.
Start bringing large corporations trying to sell them crap they don't need, and they'll be diverting some of their limited money to crap like NetFlix. Corporations like Coca Cola will put their own domestic industries out of buisiness.
Cuba's biggest draw is its beaches, and in many places they're already at capacity and becoming full of garbage as the tourists throw their plastic cups and cigarette butts around. There's only so much beach.
When I say it will eat them alive, I'm saying if you had a sudden increase of even more tourists, they're simply not going to be able to keep up with it. Service and quality will go down across the board -- in fact, I'll argue it already has.
Start importing even more social problems like drugs, or even more widespread prostitution, and things will get worse for them.
Cuba is a small country, with limited resources, and a fairly fragile economy. It simply isn't going to survive a rapid transition without some serious pain, and it might be pain which they don't recover from.
Too much change, too rapidly, and you could seriously make things FAR worse for many people.
In my experience, in the last bunch of years, these things are already happening in Cuba. And, quite frankly, it's likely to keep getting worse.
Available to Cubans with access to broadband, and international payment methods.
So, Raul and Fidel?
Do you have any idea how much $7.99/month is to an average Cuban? More than what they make.
I'm afraid the douchiness of NetFlix making this announcement is mind-boggling as it seems so disconnected from reality as to be absurd.
I fear Cuba isn't ready for the influx of crap this kind of thing is going to do to its society. And no matter what the idealists say, you can't magically turn their economy into a modern thing without causing more damage than you fix.
The "free market" as they'll see it will eat them alive, I'm afraid.
Well, Uber is the modern tech company, who expects to build their fortune on someone else's dime, and then will abandon those people as soon as they can.
In other words, Uber is ran by a bunch of greedy assholes who want someone else to give them a business model, all while pretending local laws don't apply.
Kalanick sounds like an uber asshole to me. And, like most tech CEOs, completely out of touch with reality.
OK, smart ass ... what's the singular of antipodes? Yes, antipode.
Now, if it was antipus, I might think you have a point.
I'm not saying there isn't an example but I'm not convinced there's anything else which would be done in the same way "octopus -> octopodes".
If there is, I'd love to see it. We don't have circupodes, or discupodes. *Is* there another word in English which ends in "us" and is pluralized as "odes"? Does the 'p' play a role here?
If this is an outlier from the Greek, do we have any similar uses to extrapolate to a rule? One instance does not a rule make.
Sorry, but do you feel this is somehow different from any large corporation?
Because, you know, they all seem to boil down to "We need our employees, our employees are our most important asset ... right up until we outsource your jobs to maximize executive bonuses".
Sorry, but pretty much every publicly traded company is looking for a way to fuck you over in order to maximize profits.
Which is precisely why they don't ever deserve your loyalty, because they'd climb over your corpse in a second.
Punch a CEO in the nuts before he does it to you.
Well ... right up until your other passengers steal your parcels, or steal your car while you're dropping off a parcel.
If people were willing to accept their ride stopping to run a few errands along they way ... they'd take the damned bus.
I think you'd mostly piss off the people you're giving rides to.
Technically, I think you'd be able to steal it without ever being near it. And this has been true all along.
And suddenly I'm picturing self-driving cars put into Mayhem Mode where you plow them through crowds or buildings.
Suddenly Google's self driving cars become WMDs.
It sounds far fetched, but if they're at all vulnerable, it seems like something which is going to happen just simply because it's an attractive target.
Or, how about data privacy and protection laws in general? You know, actually hold companies accountable for treating security and privacy as optional?
Start fining them 10's or 100's of millions of dollars for being clueless idiots, and they'll get the message.
Keep letting companies do nothing and bear no consequences ... nothing at all will change. If you're not hitting them where it counts, corporations won't start acting differently.