Who is expecting self-driven vehicles to be infallible in all conditions?
Quite a few posters in this thread, and every other thread that has existed on self driving cars on this, or any other, forum.
they're still bound by the laws of physics
Heresy! That is NOT a popular opinion around here!
In all seriousness, I'm sick of all the people who think self driving cars will avoid all collisions, and even more sick of those who think that if they don't we should just give up on them.
Self driving cars have the potential to, one day in the future, eliminate almost all preventable collisions. But that is not the same as all collisions. Not everything is avoidable, no matter how many sensors you add, no matter how slow you drive, no matter what you do, some collisions will always remain.
All of that said, I personally think that self driving cars are nowhere near ready for prime-time at this point. Though I don't necessarily think it's really a safety issue. Self driving cars handle the conditions and situations that they are programmed for extremely well. It's just that driving involves a lot of corner cases. So any time some company shows off a car without a steering wheel, I just picture it as a car that can't actually get me where I want to go reliably. I can't have a car that can't handle a blizzard, or can't figure out what to do with the traffic light that's red, but with a cop standing under it waving you through, or can't deal with 2 conflicting sets of lane markings, or when the lanes aren't visible at all. I think the ability to deal with those situations will eventually come, but I have seen no evidence that any current generation of self driving tech can do so. I think we're 10-20 years away realistically, but even that could be an underestimate for all I know. These aren't easy problems.
While I do agree with you. Don't try the statistical approach here. Just because this is the first doesn't mean anything, there simply isn't enough data on self driving vehicles yet as there just aren't enough miles driven to run the analysis. Especially not enough where no human driver could intervene. The 5000+ number everyone quotes is over a LOT of drivers covering a LOT of miles.
We already know the answer. There was a human driver, he did nothing. We also have a second opinion from a person that is presumably a qualified driver, who reviewed the footage. He agreed that the human driver, and the AI driver, likely followed the appropriate course of action.
So we know EXACTLY what a human driver would do, AND what the AI would do. They were the same.
Highly unlikely. You can't drive assuming that all places that someone could step out from are likely to produce such a result. You'd never get anywhere.
It seems many people on here are advocating that self driving vehicles drive with the assumption that all other road users are about to swerve in to their path at full tilt at any given time. That's just not practical, and although driving schools say you should do that, it's obvious that there isn't a driver on the planet that actually does. You'd never go more than 5mph on the freeway if you thought that way. On streets with people on the sidewalk you'd spend most of your time at a stop.
Safety is a collaborative effort for all. You need to drive with the expectation that not everyone will follow all the rules, but they also have to behave in such a way that doesn't demonstrate a death wish. Not all collisions are avoidable. Sometimes people do crazy stupid things, like jump out in front of moving cars, sometimes they do it without any warning, even if you could see them ahead of time. You can't live your life assuming that they will do that or you just won't be able to actually get from A-B.
Self driving cars have the potential to completely eliminate PREVENTABLE collisions. But not to eliminate ALL collisions.
Or maybe the person wasn't doing anything that would appear to be a problem until they suddenly changed direction immediately in front of the car?
You can't have the vehicle assume that all people have a death wish and are likely to dive in front of the car at any moment. If you program it like that it will never be able to move if there are pedestrians anywhere nearby. You have to assume that the person will behave in a somewhat rational way or your car will never be able to actually get anywhere.
I had an incident a while back where I was driving on a residential road at fairly slow speed, there was a kid running all out on the sidewalk beside me, I was watching him. As I passed him, without looking, he made an abrupt 90 degree turn straight in front of my truck. I slammed on the brakes and barely stopped. Had he turned 1/4 second later I wouldn't have been able to stop in time, had he turned 1/2-1 second later the best computer wouldn't have been able to stop in time. But there was also no reason to stop or slow down until he'd already made the 90 degree turn, as it was a highly unlikely thing for him to do. It was illegal, it was dangerous, and it wasn't something you'd expect anyone to do. I thought about it a lot afterwards, and have many times been in similar situations but where the kid didn't make that 90 degree turn. There's just no way I can justify driving with the assumption that every person on the sidewalk, median, lawn, etc, could at any time make that abrupt turn in front of me. I'd never get anywhere, and I'd likely get in a different type of situation caused by the road rage from any driver behind me.
Not all collisions are preventable. They never will be, and no technology can ever prevent all collisions. What we can do is prevent all AVOIDABLE collisions, and doing that would save millions of lives. Is that not worth doing, even if a few UNAVOIDABLE collisions still remain?
Unfortunately at this point in self driving vehicle development it's also a meaningless statistic. Statistics like that are averages, not absolutes. If something happens on average once every hundred million miles, that's no guarantee that it won't happen 4 times in the first 2 miles. The problem is that there are so few miles that have been driven by self driving vehicles, and so few incidents to date, that there's just not enough data yet to make ANY comparison to the safety of the average driver.
If anyone from either side of the argument states that self driving vehicles are more or less safe than the average driver, they are not basing that on any form of fact, just guesses. These vehicles have the POTENTIAL to be much safer than human drivers, but so far we don't know. It all boils down to whether better programming and sensors, and the impossibility of distraction are enough to make up for the lack of intuition, ease of pattern recognition, and versatility of a human driver.
Right now self driving cars can't handle adverse weather. They also can't handle anything unexpected, only things they've been programmed to deal with. But they handle those situations and those conditions extremely well. Over time they will handle more and more situations well, and fewer will fall in to the not handled category. I do truly believe that Self Driving Cars will one day replace human drivers and be far safer. I also don't think we're there yet, nor that we'll be there for quite a while yet. I don't think it's a problem of safety right now though, I think it's a problem of ability. There are just too many "corner cases" where self driving cars can't handle a given situation at all, that would prevent most people from being able to rely on one as their only means of transport without the ability to take over when the system can't figure out what to do next.
So do you think the cop was lying? or do you think that you know more about a collision that you didn't witness, and have seen no evidence on, than the people investigating and reviewing the footage?
You're incredibly arrogant to think that this would be preventable when the investigators don't think so.
I could make a vehicle that doesn't have any collisions, but it also wouldn't go anywhere. If you slowed to a speed where collisions were impossible any time there was another person, animal, or vehicle anywhere that could possibly intersect your path if they performed a sudden, illegal, and unlikely maneuver, you'd be driving on the freeway at 5mph, and you'd be stopped on all residential streets most of the time. Road safety is a combined responsibility by all parties, and the only way anyone can get anywhere is by assuming that those around them don't have a death wish. Sometimes that's not the case, and there's nothing that can be done because the other party does something stupid too close to you and without enough warning. That's life.
Those who think self driving vehicles will eliminate the laws of physics are idiots. Those who think they'll eliminate all collisions are no better. Self driving vehicles have the potential to eliminate all reasonably preventable collisions, and that's absolutely huge, but it's not the same as ALL collisions.
Your Tesla can't detect ANYTHING that's off to the side by any more than the width of one traffic lane. It has ZERO cross traffic detection ability.
By the time your Tesla detects someone blowing a stop sign at the same intersection as you, you have already been highly negligent by not addressing it yourself. The Model S is NOT a self driving car, never has been, and never will be (with current sensors, despite what Tesla's marketing lies say) In fact, any time the car slams on the brakes, you've already proved that you're a horrible driver. That's Automatic Emergency Braking, and per Tesla, it is only to reduce the force of impact of an already unavoidable collision. You're lucky that car kept going, because had it stopped in front of you, you would definitely have hit it had you been relying on the car to do the work. AEB will not bring a Tesla to a full stop.
That said, a vehicle actually equipped for self driving (i.e. nothing Tesla has produced to date) has plenty of ability to detect this sort of thing, and should be able to do a good job of it. As stated in this article, it seems that this wasn't a matter of not behaving appropriately to the stimuli, but a case of there being no stimuli to react to until it was too late to do so.
No matter what people say about self driving cars, there will ALWAYS be situations where a collision is unavoidable. Self driving cars will not eliminate all collisions. There is however a good chance that they will eventually eliminate all PREVENTABLE collisions, but that's not the same thing at all.
That said, it does seem that a self driving car that is capable of driving as safely as the average driver in all conditions (which is not that high a bar to pass if you think of the average driver!) is still quite a ways off. So far the best systems only work in ideal road and weather conditions, and while there isn't really enough data yet for statistical analysis to be meaningful, early indications are that their safety record to date isn't any better than that of the average population. This will improve with time, but I think we need a lot more time than many self driving car proponents seem to think.
Google also offers a remotewipe feature for all Android phones, and I'm pretty sure Apple offers the same for iPhones. Why aren't their CEOs sharing a cell with this guy?
Of course, by that point their spouse has left them, they lost their job and even their family thinks they are paedo, and they sold their house to pay for their defence, and it's taken 3 years from the point of arrest...
Not to mention that nobody will ever hire them again, people whisper and cross the street when they walk by, many businesses refuse to serve them, etc.
And that of course is the real problem with the whole system. No matter how innocent you are, your life will be ruined anyway. It's really guilty until proven guilty. And the worst part about it is, that it doesn't even take that much to frame someone for this. If you really don't like someone, it's a surefire way to ruin their life (now there is a risk that it could backfire and ruin both of your lives, but it's at least guaranteed to ruin theirs, and some people will consider that worth the bargain.)
The person would not be in possession of it until the computer is returned to them, which is unlikely to happen as the FBI take it for evidence.
That said, proving your innocence is near impossible, and make no mistake, this is guilty until proven innocent, not the other way around. And even if you do manage to prove innocence, your life will still be ruined.
Was the material there before, or after it got to Geeksquad? Those guys aren't paid much, and if the FBI wants to top up their paycheque I wouldn't be surprised if the occasional file slipped on to a customer's computer....
Another, possibly bigger, issue is that you've now given geek squad members incentive to plant evidence in exchange for cash.
How do you prove chain of custody in these cases? How much do you trust that near minimum wage "tech" from best buy who now gets paid every time he "finds" something on a computer?
Neither is calling a strike without asking your members.
When, despite the negative stigma, the vast majority of your members cross your picket line, maybe you should re-evaluate your choices in calling the strike in the first place. Never mind that management had to tell the employees that the strike was even happening because the union hadn't bothered communicating it to anyone!
Headquarters are irrelevant, they're only asking for them to implement things at the local level. This is not different than the multitude of other local laws that these organizations must follow, or do you not think that the ISP has to get local permits to dig up the local streets, or local registration for their vehicles based in a certain state, or pay local taxes on their office buildings, and collect local sales taxes on their products?
This is just one more local law they have to implement in one place.
Local lines go to local offices, and can be filtered there (no technical limitation why not, sure it would cost money, but the whole scheme would anyway)
As for interstate commerce law, sure, it may be invoked, but it won't be based on the filtering needing to be done out of state, but rather on the idea that a legal service being sold in one state is being blocked from entering a different state.
You're not making any sense. You say they cancel work from home positions so that they can shrink their real-estate footprint, but people working at home don't require ANY real estate footprint.
As for pissing off people so they'll quit, I suppose that's possible.
Most of the time your ISP is in the same state as you are, and the mandate is for the filtering at the ISP level, not the site level, so the aren't imposing a filter across state lines. Now it could be argued that they are interfering with interstate commerce where the the site is located outside of the state, however that's different than applying a filter across state lines. That said, taxes are allowed on out of state goods, so I'm not completely sure this is different from that. (In fact that may be why they added the fee to remove the block as they feel it stops them from violating interstate commerce provisions in their puritanical quest)
As for how they implement this.... same as all policies to remove content that some random group doesn't like... Magic! who needs an understanding of the technology that the internet works on when you can just legislate it all away?
Also remember that just because you go to the office doesn't mean your job can only be done from there.
People who are smug enough to think that their mere presence in an office building make them safe from having their job sent overseas are delusional, there's no reason to think you're any safer. You might as well enjoy working from home while waiting for your job to be sent overseas instead of commuting to the office each day while awaiting the exact same fate.
There was a bitter labour dispute where I worked a while back. The union went on strike, but forgot to tell the employees, they claimed it was a lockout so they didn't need to hold a strike vote (even though everyone could still go to work) Anyway, long story short, the vast majority of the workers crossed the picket line, while a small but very vocal minority picketed. This was at a telecom company. I remember an incident where I was hooking up a phone line at the top of a telephone pole while a picketer below yelled in to a megaphone "They're sending our jobs overseas!" I called back "I'd like to see them try!". She wasn't particularly impressed....
That's because businesses have lobbied hard to ensure that employees are a global market, but that commodities are not. That's what trade tariffs are for, that's what IP laws that guarantee monopolies on certain ideas are for, that's what region coding and anti-circumvention laws are for, that's what intentionally non-uniform safety standards are for.
As a multi-national corporation you can feel free to make your products in whatever country you chose, have your employees in whatever other countries you chose, and pay your taxes is a completely different country of your choice. As a consumer though you must buy many items only from sanctioned groups in specific countries.
e.g. A company can make my car in Mexico, but I can't buy a car from Mexico, that would be illegal as only vehicles sold in my own country are certified to pass our safety standards, and we don't care about the safety standards of any other country. A company can film a video in India, but if I buy a copy of it sold there it won't play on my DVD player, and it would be illegal to bypass that restriction. The list goes on, and on, and on.
With news story after news story about companies cancelling their work from home programs, it this really true?
Don't get me wrong, I think that remote work SHOULD increase, I see no reason to deal with a commute just to be less productive in the office than I could be at home. all while costing the company more money in real-estate and equivalent.
But as long as managers are lazy and prefer to manage by time-clock rather than by worker performance, I'm not sure we can expect to see large strides in this area.
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Who is expecting self-driven vehicles to be infallible in all conditions?
Quite a few posters in this thread, and every other thread that has existed on self driving cars on this, or any other, forum.
they're still bound by the laws of physics
Heresy! That is NOT a popular opinion around here!
In all seriousness, I'm sick of all the people who think self driving cars will avoid all collisions, and even more sick of those who think that if they don't we should just give up on them.
Self driving cars have the potential to, one day in the future, eliminate almost all preventable collisions. But that is not the same as all collisions. Not everything is avoidable, no matter how many sensors you add, no matter how slow you drive, no matter what you do, some collisions will always remain.
All of that said, I personally think that self driving cars are nowhere near ready for prime-time at this point. Though I don't necessarily think it's really a safety issue. Self driving cars handle the conditions and situations that they are programmed for extremely well. It's just that driving involves a lot of corner cases. So any time some company shows off a car without a steering wheel, I just picture it as a car that can't actually get me where I want to go reliably. I can't have a car that can't handle a blizzard, or can't figure out what to do with the traffic light that's red, but with a cop standing under it waving you through, or can't deal with 2 conflicting sets of lane markings, or when the lanes aren't visible at all. I think the ability to deal with those situations will eventually come, but I have seen no evidence that any current generation of self driving tech can do so. I think we're 10-20 years away realistically, but even that could be an underestimate for all I know. These aren't easy problems.
While I do agree with you. Don't try the statistical approach here. Just because this is the first doesn't mean anything, there simply isn't enough data on self driving vehicles yet as there just aren't enough miles driven to run the analysis. Especially not enough where no human driver could intervene. The 5000+ number everyone quotes is over a LOT of drivers covering a LOT of miles.
We already know the answer. There was a human driver, he did nothing. We also have a second opinion from a person that is presumably a qualified driver, who reviewed the footage. He agreed that the human driver, and the AI driver, likely followed the appropriate course of action.
So we know EXACTLY what a human driver would do, AND what the AI would do. They were the same.
Highly unlikely. You can't drive assuming that all places that someone could step out from are likely to produce such a result. You'd never get anywhere.
It seems many people on here are advocating that self driving vehicles drive with the assumption that all other road users are about to swerve in to their path at full tilt at any given time. That's just not practical, and although driving schools say you should do that, it's obvious that there isn't a driver on the planet that actually does. You'd never go more than 5mph on the freeway if you thought that way. On streets with people on the sidewalk you'd spend most of your time at a stop.
Safety is a collaborative effort for all. You need to drive with the expectation that not everyone will follow all the rules, but they also have to behave in such a way that doesn't demonstrate a death wish. Not all collisions are avoidable. Sometimes people do crazy stupid things, like jump out in front of moving cars, sometimes they do it without any warning, even if you could see them ahead of time. You can't live your life assuming that they will do that or you just won't be able to actually get from A-B.
Self driving cars have the potential to completely eliminate PREVENTABLE collisions. But not to eliminate ALL collisions.
Or maybe the person wasn't doing anything that would appear to be a problem until they suddenly changed direction immediately in front of the car?
You can't have the vehicle assume that all people have a death wish and are likely to dive in front of the car at any moment. If you program it like that it will never be able to move if there are pedestrians anywhere nearby. You have to assume that the person will behave in a somewhat rational way or your car will never be able to actually get anywhere.
I had an incident a while back where I was driving on a residential road at fairly slow speed, there was a kid running all out on the sidewalk beside me, I was watching him. As I passed him, without looking, he made an abrupt 90 degree turn straight in front of my truck. I slammed on the brakes and barely stopped. Had he turned 1/4 second later I wouldn't have been able to stop in time, had he turned 1/2-1 second later the best computer wouldn't have been able to stop in time. But there was also no reason to stop or slow down until he'd already made the 90 degree turn, as it was a highly unlikely thing for him to do. It was illegal, it was dangerous, and it wasn't something you'd expect anyone to do. I thought about it a lot afterwards, and have many times been in similar situations but where the kid didn't make that 90 degree turn. There's just no way I can justify driving with the assumption that every person on the sidewalk, median, lawn, etc, could at any time make that abrupt turn in front of me. I'd never get anywhere, and I'd likely get in a different type of situation caused by the road rage from any driver behind me.
Not all collisions are preventable. They never will be, and no technology can ever prevent all collisions. What we can do is prevent all AVOIDABLE collisions, and doing that would save millions of lives. Is that not worth doing, even if a few UNAVOIDABLE collisions still remain?
Unfortunately at this point in self driving vehicle development it's also a meaningless statistic.
Statistics like that are averages, not absolutes. If something happens on average once every hundred million miles, that's no guarantee that it won't happen 4 times in the first 2 miles. The problem is that there are so few miles that have been driven by self driving vehicles, and so few incidents to date, that there's just not enough data yet to make ANY comparison to the safety of the average driver.
If anyone from either side of the argument states that self driving vehicles are more or less safe than the average driver, they are not basing that on any form of fact, just guesses. These vehicles have the POTENTIAL to be much safer than human drivers, but so far we don't know. It all boils down to whether better programming and sensors, and the impossibility of distraction are enough to make up for the lack of intuition, ease of pattern recognition, and versatility of a human driver.
Right now self driving cars can't handle adverse weather. They also can't handle anything unexpected, only things they've been programmed to deal with. But they handle those situations and those conditions extremely well. Over time they will handle more and more situations well, and fewer will fall in to the not handled category. I do truly believe that Self Driving Cars will one day replace human drivers and be far safer. I also don't think we're there yet, nor that we'll be there for quite a while yet. I don't think it's a problem of safety right now though, I think it's a problem of ability. There are just too many "corner cases" where self driving cars can't handle a given situation at all, that would prevent most people from being able to rely on one as their only means of transport without the ability to take over when the system can't figure out what to do next.
So do you think the cop was lying? or do you think that you know more about a collision that you didn't witness, and have seen no evidence on, than the people investigating and reviewing the footage?
You're incredibly arrogant to think that this would be preventable when the investigators don't think so.
I could make a vehicle that doesn't have any collisions, but it also wouldn't go anywhere. If you slowed to a speed where collisions were impossible any time there was another person, animal, or vehicle anywhere that could possibly intersect your path if they performed a sudden, illegal, and unlikely maneuver, you'd be driving on the freeway at 5mph, and you'd be stopped on all residential streets most of the time.
Road safety is a combined responsibility by all parties, and the only way anyone can get anywhere is by assuming that those around them don't have a death wish. Sometimes that's not the case, and there's nothing that can be done because the other party does something stupid too close to you and without enough warning. That's life.
Those who think self driving vehicles will eliminate the laws of physics are idiots. Those who think they'll eliminate all collisions are no better. Self driving vehicles have the potential to eliminate all reasonably preventable collisions, and that's absolutely huge, but it's not the same as ALL collisions.
Your Tesla can't detect ANYTHING that's off to the side by any more than the width of one traffic lane. It has ZERO cross traffic detection ability.
By the time your Tesla detects someone blowing a stop sign at the same intersection as you, you have already been highly negligent by not addressing it yourself. The Model S is NOT a self driving car, never has been, and never will be (with current sensors, despite what Tesla's marketing lies say) In fact, any time the car slams on the brakes, you've already proved that you're a horrible driver. That's Automatic Emergency Braking, and per Tesla, it is only to reduce the force of impact of an already unavoidable collision. You're lucky that car kept going, because had it stopped in front of you, you would definitely have hit it had you been relying on the car to do the work. AEB will not bring a Tesla to a full stop.
That said, a vehicle actually equipped for self driving (i.e. nothing Tesla has produced to date) has plenty of ability to detect this sort of thing, and should be able to do a good job of it. As stated in this article, it seems that this wasn't a matter of not behaving appropriately to the stimuli, but a case of there being no stimuli to react to until it was too late to do so.
No matter what people say about self driving cars, there will ALWAYS be situations where a collision is unavoidable. Self driving cars will not eliminate all collisions. There is however a good chance that they will eventually eliminate all PREVENTABLE collisions, but that's not the same thing at all.
That said, it does seem that a self driving car that is capable of driving as safely as the average driver in all conditions (which is not that high a bar to pass if you think of the average driver!) is still quite a ways off. So far the best systems only work in ideal road and weather conditions, and while there isn't really enough data yet for statistical analysis to be meaningful, early indications are that their safety record to date isn't any better than that of the average population. This will improve with time, but I think we need a lot more time than many self driving car proponents seem to think.
After all, it's the only amendment Americans actually seem to care about. Well part of it anyway, we'll just ignore the well regulated militia part.
Google also offers a remotewipe feature for all Android phones, and I'm pretty sure Apple offers the same for iPhones. Why aren't their CEOs sharing a cell with this guy?
a) only some countries have that right
b) I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't 100% effective.
Of course, by that point their spouse has left them, they lost their job and even their family thinks they are paedo, and they sold their house to pay for their defence, and it's taken 3 years from the point of arrest...
Not to mention that nobody will ever hire them again, people whisper and cross the street when they walk by, many businesses refuse to serve them, etc.
And that of course is the real problem with the whole system. No matter how innocent you are, your life will be ruined anyway. It's really guilty until proven guilty. And the worst part about it is, that it doesn't even take that much to frame someone for this. If you really don't like someone, it's a surefire way to ruin their life (now there is a risk that it could backfire and ruin both of your lives, but it's at least guaranteed to ruin theirs, and some people will consider that worth the bargain.)
The person would not be in possession of it until the computer is returned to them, which is unlikely to happen as the FBI take it for evidence.
That said, proving your innocence is near impossible, and make no mistake, this is guilty until proven innocent, not the other way around. And even if you do manage to prove innocence, your life will still be ruined.
But "think of the children" indeed.
Was the material there before, or after it got to Geeksquad? Those guys aren't paid much, and if the FBI wants to top up their paycheque I wouldn't be surprised if the occasional file slipped on to a customer's computer....
Another, possibly bigger, issue is that you've now given geek squad members incentive to plant evidence in exchange for cash.
How do you prove chain of custody in these cases? How much do you trust that near minimum wage "tech" from best buy who now gets paid every time he "finds" something on a computer?
Neither is calling a strike without asking your members.
When, despite the negative stigma, the vast majority of your members cross your picket line, maybe you should re-evaluate your choices in calling the strike in the first place. Never mind that management had to tell the employees that the strike was even happening because the union hadn't bothered communicating it to anyone!
Hi, welcome to Slashdot, you must be new here.
Headquarters are irrelevant, they're only asking for them to implement things at the local level. This is not different than the multitude of other local laws that these organizations must follow, or do you not think that the ISP has to get local permits to dig up the local streets, or local registration for their vehicles based in a certain state, or pay local taxes on their office buildings, and collect local sales taxes on their products?
This is just one more local law they have to implement in one place.
Local lines go to local offices, and can be filtered there (no technical limitation why not, sure it would cost money, but the whole scheme would anyway)
As for interstate commerce law, sure, it may be invoked, but it won't be based on the filtering needing to be done out of state, but rather on the idea that a legal service being sold in one state is being blocked from entering a different state.
You're not making any sense. You say they cancel work from home positions so that they can shrink their real-estate footprint, but people working at home don't require ANY real estate footprint.
As for pissing off people so they'll quit, I suppose that's possible.
Most of the time your ISP is in the same state as you are, and the mandate is for the filtering at the ISP level, not the site level, so the aren't imposing a filter across state lines. Now it could be argued that they are interfering with interstate commerce where the the site is located outside of the state, however that's different than applying a filter across state lines. That said, taxes are allowed on out of state goods, so I'm not completely sure this is different from that. (In fact that may be why they added the fee to remove the block as they feel it stops them from violating interstate commerce provisions in their puritanical quest)
As for how they implement this.... same as all policies to remove content that some random group doesn't like... Magic! who needs an understanding of the technology that the internet works on when you can just legislate it all away?
oh, you think the constitution actually is relevant to laws passed in the US? You're funny!
Also remember that just because you go to the office doesn't mean your job can only be done from there.
People who are smug enough to think that their mere presence in an office building make them safe from having their job sent overseas are delusional, there's no reason to think you're any safer. You might as well enjoy working from home while waiting for your job to be sent overseas instead of commuting to the office each day while awaiting the exact same fate.
There was a bitter labour dispute where I worked a while back. The union went on strike, but forgot to tell the employees, they claimed it was a lockout so they didn't need to hold a strike vote (even though everyone could still go to work) Anyway, long story short, the vast majority of the workers crossed the picket line, while a small but very vocal minority picketed.
This was at a telecom company. I remember an incident where I was hooking up a phone line at the top of a telephone pole while a picketer below yelled in to a megaphone "They're sending our jobs overseas!" I called back "I'd like to see them try!". She wasn't particularly impressed....
That's because businesses have lobbied hard to ensure that employees are a global market, but that commodities are not. That's what trade tariffs are for, that's what IP laws that guarantee monopolies on certain ideas are for, that's what region coding and anti-circumvention laws are for, that's what intentionally non-uniform safety standards are for.
As a multi-national corporation you can feel free to make your products in whatever country you chose, have your employees in whatever other countries you chose, and pay your taxes is a completely different country of your choice.
As a consumer though you must buy many items only from sanctioned groups in specific countries.
e.g. A company can make my car in Mexico, but I can't buy a car from Mexico, that would be illegal as only vehicles sold in my own country are certified to pass our safety standards, and we don't care about the safety standards of any other country. A company can film a video in India, but if I buy a copy of it sold there it won't play on my DVD player, and it would be illegal to bypass that restriction. The list goes on, and on, and on.
Best laws money can buy.
With news story after news story about companies cancelling their work from home programs, it this really true?
Don't get me wrong, I think that remote work SHOULD increase, I see no reason to deal with a commute just to be less productive in the office than I could be at home. all while costing the company more money in real-estate and equivalent.
But as long as managers are lazy and prefer to manage by time-clock rather than by worker performance, I'm not sure we can expect to see large strides in this area.