Perhaps, but this story has nothing to do with skype... the driver that caused the accident was using Apple's own technology... so any notions of Apple blocking other people from implementing the tech are inapplicable to the repercussions of this story. I'm unsure why my remark was tagged as flamebait... perhaps it was because I expressed a sincere sentiment about my estimate of the intelligence level of someone that would try to use a video chat system on a hand-held while they are supposed to be concentrating on driving?
I think the argument is that Apple never implemented it because they found it too inconvenient or not practical or whatever, but by holding the patent, they implied they'd go after anybody who produced a comparable system - Apple has a pretty strong reputation for that. Because of that, there aren't any alternative services which could have had the feature, which may have saved the person's life.
Me personally, I think the suit itself is absolutely ridiculous - it's filled with far too many what-ifs and maybes, which severely weakens the ability to show they caused any actual damages, and if this person is stupid enough to text and drive, they would never have used an alternative service in the first place. However, it does raise an interesting moral dilemma - if I patent something that could potentially save thousands of lives, and then block anybody from using it, would that be legal? For example, if you patent a mechanism for a car that reduces crashes by 35%, let's say some crazy crash avoidance algorithm or whatever, and you then prevent anybody from using such a system and thousands die as a result, should it be illegal? I think that's an interesting question for the court to consider...
Don't know what you are talking about. It is extremely simple and I think even built in to the GPS be able to detect the speed of the phone within a few MPH (dx/dt). Detecting if the driver is using face time as opposed to a passenger is almost impossible for GPS alone, but yeah, it is felony stupid to text/facetime/play with your phone while driving. There should be a federal law that locks all features on a phone except hands free calls for drivers 16-24 years of age, considering it is consistently that "invincible" demographic that is killing people while driving and messing with the phone.
Well, that approach depends. Older people are significantly more likely to suffer a stroke on the road, so should we mandate they can only ride as passengers in the backseat? Since middle age drivers tend to drive the riskiest, should we require that people age 45-65 have to attend monthly meditation courses? To be honest, I think you should be either for phones locking out everybody when driving, or not at all - aging works differently for different people. Take a look at the age for alcohol for example - in Germany, you can consume alcohol as young as 10 if your parents supervise, and at age 16 without. Compared to 21, you'd think that people would suffer far higher instances of alcohol abuse - but in actuality, they're far lower, and drunk driving is much less of a problem. The difference is the more open approach to dealing with alcohol's effects, not age - likewise, the campaigns around showing the dangers of distracted driving have done far more for public safety than something like raising the minimum age for a driver's license would. If you lock out phones only for specific age ranges, you're falling into the dangerous gap of ageism, which is both unethical and wouldn't really solve the problem.
Slitting the break lines does not work in a truck.
Trucks have a breaking system that uses pressured air to keep the breaks open.
If you cut a line, the air pressure vanishes imediatly and the breaks close and the truck stops.
I guess you have heared the puffs and whistles when a truck starts moving, this is the air preassure opening the breaks.
Ahh, thank you. I'm afraid I'm only passingly familiar with vehicles, but it's excellent to see someone thought of that. But then, surely somebody could tamper with the break pedal, or in some other manner circumvent the truck's ability to stop? If nothing else, incapacitating the driver would still be an option, and an autonomous truck would still have the benefits of the pressurized braking system, for example. This scenario would, at worst, have turned out the same way, and potentially could have been avoided without a person driving it.
Could have stopped. Should have stopped.... Technology is evolving fast.
If this technologically non-savvy terrorist had no idea about automated braking, just think about technologically savvy terrorist who will be able to program automatic trucks to ignore collision by hacking certain sensors. We are talking about automatic road killing robot.
How would you stop such autonomous cargo truck with no driver to shoot at?
You don't make these systems available remotely. In order for a terrorist to mod the controls, they would need physical access to the truck - and you would still have protection, for example, if you had a system with a burned in checksum that refused to operate if it detected modifications to the firmware. With traditional drivers, all they have to do is slit the brake lines or tranquillize the driver... And automated driving also takes misinterpretation mistakes, aggressive driving, and sleepiness out of the list of possible death situations. Isn't that worth it?
First the sony PS Network hack, then the credit card leaks, and now this? Why is there security consistently so bad? Twitter's not even hard to secure, just use 2-factor authentication, something that'll defeat 90% of hack attempts. That they keep getting breached over and over again says something about their company culture towards investing in their customer's safety...
It is equally infuriating to me when American companies use loopholes in our ridiculously complicated tax code to shelter revenues in foreign tax shelters to avoid paying taxes
So who are you infuriated at? The companies that take advantage of those loopholes, or the politicians that put them there? Fury doesn't help unless it is properly directed. Does your fury influence who you vote for?
You state this question as if politicians and companies have arrived at this current system without influence from each other. They are both responsible for the current system. Voting is irrelevant when both party's representatives are a) known to lie completely about what they stand for when running for election, b) never held accountable for their campaign promises by their own party and their voters, and c) known to put business interests first ahead of the voters. They instead rely on the media spin machine, propaganda mouthpieces in the partisan babble spaces, and outright voter ignorance to pick up the slack between reality and their oft misstated intentions.
Are you from a country other than the US? It appears that way, as you have no idea about how doggedly fascist leaning our government and business intertwining is, despite overt appearances of regulated divisions. Also, you seem to have have a woefully overoptimistic (or overly simplistic) viewpoint of our electorate's ability to directly influence policies through elections. A friend of mine likes to joke: There are two parties in the US. The corporatist party and the corporatist party. This whole article and the repercussions of the policies we have, an how they got to be in the law in the first place, are examples of the above.
Just because you didn't vote for Bernie Sanders doesn't mean he wasn't an option.
Changing one's gender is not something that any government should pay for. Trump's stand on NC's bathroom issue, where he refused to condemn the transgender bathroom stance of the state GOP, putting him at a disadvantage wrt Ted Cruz - and this was during the GOP primary, when candidates normally veer to the right. Cruz pilloried him for stating that businesses should not be burdened w/ having to provide separate facilities for trannies. Also, unlike on everything else, where he does seem to have an opinion, Trump said nothing about the NC bathroom law, and was supported by Peter Thiel, even while Thiel's former company Paypal canned its plans for an office in Charlotte.
What? No one's saying the government should pay for it, although perhaps subsidizing parts of it might be a topic for discussion, if the costs are outweighed by the low amount of people who would use it and how much it improves their lives after. The point I'm making is that many republican states have laws that prevent you from changing your gender on paperwork, prohibit schools from mentioning what gay people are to their students, and most famously, North Carolina's transgender law. Trump has made a few positive remarks, such as saying he'd allow a transgender person to use the bathroom of their choice, but he's never supported that when it comes to laws - for example, he's insistent on assigning a judge to overturn the gay marriage proposition, even though he says he's fine with it. Saying one thing and doing the opposite is the definition of a hypocrite, hardly something I'd have thought an admirable trait in anybody, let alone the president. I thought conservatism was supposed to embrace the right to do what I wish - if I were to change my gender (not that I would, but hypothetically speaking), surely I have the right to change the sign on my passport? (especially one that I'm paying for)
Also, Trump's various appointments in the cabinet - the only Mike Pence fingerprints that I see are people like Tom Price and Scott Pruitt. The bulk of them - Tillerson, Mattis, Flynn - are hardly the people I'd have seen Pence pick had he been the president. While he does do things like the daily briefings, his main role, along w/ Reince Priebus, seems to be a point man b/w Trump and Ryan/McConnell. As for Newt Gingrich, he's nowhere in the organization, and was just shot down a day ago for suggesting that 'Drain the Swamp' is retired as Trump hits the reality of governing.
Mike Pence has largely kept out of Trump's appointment list, surprisingly, although he's implicitly supported all of Trump's choices so far. The real area you see Pence's (and traditional republicans in general) influence is in Congress; Trump's shown support for several of Obamacare's regulations, even though Republicans in congress have given no hint at all that they plan on keeping them. Likewise, Trump promised investments in infrastructure, and yet they've shown no sign of even remotely considering the idea. They don't even rebut him, they simply ignore him altogether - which tells you how much weight Trump really has.
As to Newt Gringich, he was shot down because it might have caused a political backlash. He is, however, a big force in the (attempt of an) obamacare repeal and is a big force in the stalling of the supreme court nomination. He's also well liked by Trump, and Trump seems to take him quite seriously - he's probably one of the few Republicans who are loyal to Trump himself, not just with his voters. I'd say he's as involved with Trump as any other of Trump's supporters, probably more so.
Besides all that, even Mike Pence is not anti gay. The IN law that gay thugs targeted was the one that exempted businesses from going against their religious beliefs, the most glaring example being requiring religious florists and bakers to cater to gay weddings. THAT was what was being argued, and the reason Pence signed the law he did. All those gay thugs who wanna f
While the GOP may have been traditionally biased against LGBT, that's never been true of Trump. Not when he was a Democrat, and neither when he became a Republican. While he may have flipped on a lot of things from Left to Right - like single payer, support for LGBT is something he retained even after switching parties.
Ehh, Trump doesn't support (anymore, at least) gay marriage, discrimination laws, the ability to change your gender, or really any kind of positive policy for LGBT people at all. He doesn't hate them with a passion, but he doesn't even remotely consider them in comparison to religious nuts, so I'm not really sure it's even right to say that he's not traditionally GOP in attitudes.
But it wouldn't matter anyway, because Trump frankly doesn't give a shit. He's far too dependent on the support of Mike Pence and Newt Gringich, and he's not going to give up the White House for something as worthless as somebody else's benefit. And given how Mile Pence supports throwing gay people in jail and recriminalizing homosexuality...
Citizens beware of the pending doom brought on by mad-scientists creating an army of robots that will take away your jobs, raise your children, sex your wife, and transport themselves in flying cars.
You must be prepared to be coddled by your government in order to survive. It is only by further relinquishing your free will and self motivation that you will flourish.
This is all, carry on.
How the hell is being payed overtime and strengthening unions "relinquishing your free will" or "being coddled by the government"? If anything, you're gaining free will by having better grounds for negotiating with your employer, giving you access to better pay, better job safety, and stronger job security.
I think some people are more obsessed with soundbites than learning any US history, because we've already had this exact scenario before, this. exact. scenario. before. Do you want the Progressive era, or the Gilded age?
Gender does not refer to self identity, that is a construct developed by supporters of transgender. Gender is analogous to sex which is encoded into DNA
No, it's not. Sex is the biologically determined aspect of masculinity vs femininity; whether you possess certain organs, what your hormone levels are, and how your body develops. Gender is the socitial expectation for masculinity vs femininity; what jobs you're supposed to have, how you're supposed to dress, and in some cultures, how you speak. For example, we've always had males and females, and males have always had deeper voices; but only 100 years ago, pink was masculine and blue was feminine. Thus, even if you wore a blue shirt as a male in 1900, you'd still be a male by sex; but not very masculine by gender.
And no, these concepts have been around for literally thousands of years. Until the extremo Christians of the middle ages entered, it was actually really normal for people to flirt with the gender lines; read some Roman or Greek poetry. I would love to see your reaction to the Roman emperor Nero's (biologically male) wife, or the widespread act of guys who had open and accepted affairs with other guys (while being both straight and married to women).
Coming to terms with who you actually are is a sign of maturity.
You can use the same argument for depressed people. We all went through it as teenagers, but if you're depressed as an adult, clearly you never matured. I'm not going to pretend to be able to fully comprehend the force of why, and clearly neither can you - but we also don't have the condition, and much like an addiction to drugs, I'm pretty sure neither of us will ever fully understand the force behind it unless we actually became drug addicts ourselves. I daresay that if it matters enough to them that they're willing to undergo the extensive and sometimes absurdly difficult tests and procedures to change, and they report a high increase in happiness afterwards, I think there must be more to it than merely a phase - and it would probably be wise to remember that not everybody lives in your shoes...
! And if you ever catch an US drone, you should better return it fast, or trump will make a furious tweet on twitter!
Actually, the story on that's changed. Now it's that you should never return it, because we don't need it to be returned - and it wasn't ever any other way!
With the rampant sexual harassment that was reported last New Year's Eve in Köln, I'm not sure if they're the Mexicans or pussy-grabbing Trump.
That said, does the US have problems with Mexicans that are religiously motivated to kill everyone that thinks differently from themselves?
We do, actually. We've had tons of attacks by latino terrorists, followed by extremist authoritarians / fascists (objective definition, I'm not labelling people here, I mean someone who actually supports a fascist system of government), and then by Jewish terrorists. Sadly, we don't have any hard statistics on Christian terrorism as a whole, but Christian and extremist xenophobia groups, such as the KKK, are indeed still active, having killed hundreds of Americans over the past decade alone, so that's another major problem the police have been struggling to deal with - 74% of police departments, in fact, rank these people as the most dangerous and violent of terrorists. They have been unofficially endorsed by both our president-elect and our vice president-elect, and so predictions for violence from these groups is expected to rise significantly over the next 4 years.
...any other groups, demographics, or religions not mentioned here *pointedly* fail to score within the top 4, such as communists, anarchists and yes, muslim terrorists. That's why these groups receive a minority of the police's attention... correct?
Seriously the government need to start charging the American citizens with more taxes for all the nanny sitting they are required to carry out, Basically cancel all outstanding lawsuits and give them 100 billions dollars. They just might break even.
I don't even like the Federal government. But it's still like.... oh they fought a small war in some country named "I-rack"... lets sue. Almost as bad as my home state of South Sudan.
This is what your post is going to sound like to the majority of Europeans, I bet. They have a different viewpoint of how government / company balances work, and if I may say so, they enjoy a vastly higher standard of living for far lower costs because of it. If you, or Facebook for that matter, are not willing to respect that, you are always free to leave Germany - whereas, if I may point out, you are never free to leave the US's sphere of influence (unless you deal exclusively with North Korea and Russia).
I'm - as I suspect most of us are here - your classic nerdy/geeky semi-ADHD/Auspergers type. But generally speaking AFAICT nutrition has been linked to this condition and personality type more than once (look for the book "The LCP Solution"). My mother told me she was practically addicted to licorice during her pregnancy with me. This could have been a "self-medication" attempt of her body to mitigate the lack of vitamin D which she recently noticed. And, fittingly enough, excess licorice consumption during pregnancy is actually in fact one of those rare things that has been found to correlate with ADHD symptoms in the child.
As for vitamin D I haven't had a bloodwork in more than a decade but I'd bet money that I've got a vitamin D deficiency, as any indoor computer expert guy probably has. My mom herself is of the nerd/shut-in/bookworm type and ADHD disposition runs on my mothers side of the family.
I myself don't drink alcohol, eat meat very rarely and live quite healthy aside from the fact that I am basically a sugar-addict. A thing I certainly link to my mothers excess licorice consumption during her pregnancy. I also notice that as soon as I actively curb my sugar addiction and lean towards a more organic balanced, whole & fresh foods diet, my awareness hightens notably and I get cooler/calmer than I usually am. If you're a nerdy type, try it out and go full organic & balanced for 8 weeks. The difference you'll notice is palpable.
I'm coping pretty well and wouldn't call my ADHD a disfunction rather than a disposition... "Hunter/Gatherer in a Farmer/Settler society, Rebel/Adventurer/Leader disposition, etc, jada-jada"... you probably know the evolutionary theories concerning ADHD. That aside I truely believe backed by what I've read and experienced nutrition is the biggest leverage any ADHD/Aspergers candidate has, aside from regular excercise and a diversified daily routine.
My 2 cents.
It probably played a role, but something else to consider might also be a genetic component. This can roll two ways; potentially, there might be a gene that weakens your ability to synthesize vitamin D from the sun, which is the primary manner of how we obtain it, or there could be a gene that simply gives you the condition directly. If such a thing were to be the case, it wouldn't matter how your mother raised you, but it would simply be something you were born with - and your children may inherit, should you ever have/currently have some. It might be worth it to see if any members of your family have your condition, but do actively go outside, which may provide some more insight into this matter.
Bullshit, with a large enough cohort, and without telling them it's vitamin D just a new drug, you would have baseline control probably close enough to the average rate of autism that you could discern any potential benefits from vitamin D. That assumes, of course, that this report itself doesn't spur a large amount of mothers to start taking large vitamin D supplements, thus changing the average prior to any trials if the link actually exists.
Its rather amusing that a person who calls bullshit is so full of it.
You weren't by any chance involved in the Tuskegee syphilis experiments were you?
And just how many experimental trials were you involved in?
This isn't the 1940's any more. Any medical experimentation is subject to ethical review, and before you get to even start the experiment. There is absolutely no way that a trial that involves purposefully causing a vitamin deficiency in a selected group will ever make it through an ethics review.
Sorry Dr Mengele, you can't do your twin vivisection experiments any more.
I don't think he means intentionally depriving them of vitamin D, rather I think he means simply creating a control group being given a placebo (pills of sugar, perhaps), and another group being given pills of vitamin D. The control group would have no worse outcomes than the average pregnant women would have, while the experimental group should show some improvement.
However, your point still stands; you wouldn't be able to easily control for lifestyle choices, and those have much more of an impact on vitamin D levels than a pill would.
Eventually, the Market will sort all that out. People with autism will choose to be born in countries that have better public health care, which will bankrupt themselves by subsidizing the weak and useless. America will become greater by not having so many autistic people born here. Of course, once they're born, we won't let them in, unless they can get an H1B visa.
Glad to see the births, lives, and deaths of people can be summed up as "the Market". Also, glad to see eugenics is back in fashion. Also, factually disprovable because the highest rates for autism in the world belong to Denmark, Sweden, and Japan, all countries with vastly higher standards of living and far more robust economies than the USA, which comes just after.
Trump is going to find out people are not going to "just call the president" because all of those calls get blocked by the switchboard. Trump is going to find out that casual phone calls do not happen as president, his schedule is locked down to the minute. This boiler maker atmosphere that trump seems to enjoy is going to be counter productive in an environment where decisions need to be made and then acted on and revisiting choices wastes time that needs to be used on other decisions coming in the door.
It'll work out because it won't be him in this position, it'll be Pence. Trump's presidency will largely rise and fall by how much Pence is willing to do for him, and how much Pence covers him - if Pence gets fed up, I have a suspicion Trump won't be able to cope, and he's used to simply walking away when it gets tough and waiting for a better time. Not an option as president - however, if Pence deals with all of this, as I suspect he will because he wants his own chance in 2020, then all Trump has to do is sit in the office and spend his weekends at his Florida resort, and sign the odd paper here and there. Trump could pull off the latter very successfully, he's good at taking credit (and I don't mean that exclusively in a derogatory sense; one of Obama's biggest issues was that for many of his successes, people simply took them for granted after the fact.)
I'm not so sure I agree. I can't say I have accurate statistics off the top of my head, but I have a hard time believing the majority of people copulate for less than 3 minutes a session. Furthermore, the whole group thing is also improbable - in many tribal cultures, people traditionally engaged together, and even in monogamous societies, humans have sex together an awful lot more than we like to admit.
It probably has more to do with intelligence and social communication, to be honest. The point of it is to help keep your appendage in place, and while I already think it's unlikely it really works that well in humans, it'd have virtually no use if both partners consistently agreed before hand. That's the say, the best use it has is when your partner is trying to get away from you - which probably declined quite a bit as people started to live in larger tribes and developed speech, and thus could decide when they did and didn't want to have sex. Combine that with increasing disapproval of rape, and I think sex simply evolved into more of a cooperative activity for people, and thus a (literal) boner was simply not useful anymore. Imagine if people only ever had each other for 2 minutes a session, from start to finish, how miserable that would be...
Aaaaaaargh I'm an idiot, I should have checked the preview more carefully. Here's the ending of my second paragraph, and my sincere apologies for not having caught that.
"...but for all the people who are afraid that of muslims, if you really are against what you perceive as a culture of barbaric cultural practices, I sure hope you're leading a progressive movement within one of these churches, assuming you're a member. The alternative is that you are, at best, a misinformed hypocrite, which I'm afraid the vast majority seem to be."
Furthermore, I screwed up the first link. Rather than linking to this webpage itself (duh), it's supposed to go here.
Pandemics
Civil and international war
The ongoing islamisation of the population
Pollution and the depletion of natural resources, including fossil fuels
Science denial
Donald Trump
The collapse of the European Union
America's sovereign debt
All of these things concern me more than control of my personal data.
Yes, control of my personal data concerns me - particularly my genome and corporations' attempts to patent something that is inherintly part of me and which they didn't invent. But the above issues are bigger problems.
Well, keep in mind that the original interview was about technology topics, and giving this is Snowden we're talking about here, we're inevitably going to be talking privacy. When he said it's the central issue of the future, he probably meant within that context - as opposed to, for example, the government spying on its citizens. In his mind, there's generally some outrage and opposition to governments trying to enact spying laws - not enough, as the UK's Investigtory Powers bill demonstrates, but generally something. In contrast, most people think nothing of Google or Twitter's collection of knowledge on them, nor has anyone really made much noise about this in politics. Snowden has the ability to put a face on privacy decisions for the news, and in turn to normal people, and so I'm betting that'll be his next target.
The ongoing islamisation of the population
This isn't related to the above paragraph, but please don't say this, it hurts. Fundamentalists groups, such as evangelical, baptist, and mormons, are about as conservative as their islamic counterparts, such as ISIS or Assad's backers. If want an ISIS comparison, look at the KKK - and if you want a public execution match, well, lynching has been around for many hundreds of years before al-quaeda was even a figment in somebody's mind. Furthermore, on social issues, islam Americans are much more relaxed than their Christian counterparts are. Islamists are more likely to accept gay people, far less tolerant of violence, much more accepting of other cultures, and hilariously enough, waaaaaay more likely to see themselves as Americans first and Muslims second (there's a 10 point gap between these two). Note that Christians as a whole are more open then either of these two, but for all the people
Furthermore, there's a lot of free passes we give to hardcore evangelicals that we don't give to muslims - we let people oppose laws because of the bible, which is illegal under the First Amendment by the way, but if a guy says he opposes a law because of the Quran he's labelled a terrorist and gets death threats. If a muslim were to disprove of gay marriage, it's seen as backwards and unacceptable, but if evangelical Christians do, it's seen as acceptable, for no reason other then that they got here first. America isn't accepting of immigrants and never has been, despite the long tirade to the contrary, and if we ever want to live up to the founding father's ideals, then we're going to have to leave these backwards parts of our history behind - and that, my friend, starts with not being xenophobic of immigrants for no reason other then that they're different from you. Of course, Muslims as whole still have a long way to go - but the key point is that they're doing their best, and they're not trying to enshrine their views into law. In contrast, this minority of Christians has become increasingly militant, increasingly violent, and increasingly authoritarian - and given that the darkest eras in our country's history has come from when these wackos had influence, we should be far more scared of the likes of Mike Pence then we should be from the guy down the street who fled from being cooked alive on the street by bombs or from being executed for refusing to kill somebody else.
The best approach for the general consumer is to have a set of standards that, if met, reduce security risks to an acceptable level from a hardware/software perspective. Products can choose to prove compliance with those standards. Educated consumers can require that compliance in their product choice.
Regulation could come in regarding how product can claim compliance.
Many or all of those standards may already exist, but they likely need some motherhood standards to tie them together. All easier said than done because there is not simple answer to 'the right way to do it', and a huge and varied scope of things under the umbrella.
I agree with this mostly, but I do think there need to be some minimum standards for regulation. Some IOT stuff - automated stoves or heating / cooling or whatever - isn't just obnoxious if hacked, it can be downright dangerous if somebody makes the oven set itself on fire while you're asleep. Using a hardcoded check of PASSWORD, for example, is something I think we can all agree is unacceptable, and that shouldn't be tolerated.
If we do make those standards too, they shouldn't be compromises, they should be seriously tough, and come in shades or grades instead of compromise. You can always let people pass lower, but no company is ever going to do better than the minimum required of them, so "A" had better mean pretty solid protection from hacking...
What does that even mean? Forced to continue driving? Driving is one of the most expensive hobbies in the world, and if you can afford to drive you can afford the far cheaper option of public transportation and taxi's.
... The average American living in the suburbs is ~ 20-30 miles from the nearest city / shopping area. If you feel like you can make a 30 mile hike and back in less than a day, at the age of 85, you're welcome to it. But for many elderly people, who live alone, driving is not a luxury - it's a necessity, because there's often no other way for them to get basic needs. (medical care, food, etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps, but this story has nothing to do with skype... the driver that caused the accident was using Apple's own technology... so any notions of Apple blocking other people from implementing the tech are inapplicable to the repercussions of this story. I'm unsure why my remark was tagged as flamebait... perhaps it was because I expressed a sincere sentiment about my estimate of the intelligence level of someone that would try to use a video chat system on a hand-held while they are supposed to be concentrating on driving?
I think the argument is that Apple never implemented it because they found it too inconvenient or not practical or whatever, but by holding the patent, they implied they'd go after anybody who produced a comparable system - Apple has a pretty strong reputation for that. Because of that, there aren't any alternative services which could have had the feature, which may have saved the person's life.
Me personally, I think the suit itself is absolutely ridiculous - it's filled with far too many what-ifs and maybes, which severely weakens the ability to show they caused any actual damages, and if this person is stupid enough to text and drive, they would never have used an alternative service in the first place. However, it does raise an interesting moral dilemma - if I patent something that could potentially save thousands of lives, and then block anybody from using it, would that be legal? For example, if you patent a mechanism for a car that reduces crashes by 35%, let's say some crazy crash avoidance algorithm or whatever, and you then prevent anybody from using such a system and thousands die as a result, should it be illegal? I think that's an interesting question for the court to consider...
Don't know what you are talking about. It is extremely simple and I think even built in to the GPS be able to detect the speed of the phone within a few MPH (dx/dt). Detecting if the driver is using face time as opposed to a passenger is almost impossible for GPS alone, but yeah, it is felony stupid to text/facetime/play with your phone while driving. There should be a federal law that locks all features on a phone except hands free calls for drivers 16-24 years of age, considering it is consistently that "invincible" demographic that is killing people while driving and messing with the phone.
Well, that approach depends. Older people are significantly more likely to suffer a stroke on the road, so should we mandate they can only ride as passengers in the backseat? Since middle age drivers tend to drive the riskiest, should we require that people age 45-65 have to attend monthly meditation courses? To be honest, I think you should be either for phones locking out everybody when driving, or not at all - aging works differently for different people. Take a look at the age for alcohol for example - in Germany, you can consume alcohol as young as 10 if your parents supervise, and at age 16 without. Compared to 21, you'd think that people would suffer far higher instances of alcohol abuse - but in actuality, they're far lower, and drunk driving is much less of a problem. The difference is the more open approach to dealing with alcohol's effects, not age - likewise, the campaigns around showing the dangers of distracted driving have done far more for public safety than something like raising the minimum age for a driver's license would. If you lock out phones only for specific age ranges, you're falling into the dangerous gap of ageism, which is both unethical and wouldn't really solve the problem.
I can find lots of comments from Anonymous Coward here, including many from before you even registered.
Now whether Mr. Anonymous Coward makes those comments worth reading is an entirely different matter.
Slitting the break lines does not work in a truck.
Trucks have a breaking system that uses pressured air to keep the breaks open.
If you cut a line, the air pressure vanishes imediatly and the breaks close and the truck stops.
I guess you have heared the puffs and whistles when a truck starts moving, this is the air preassure opening the breaks.
Ahh, thank you. I'm afraid I'm only passingly familiar with vehicles, but it's excellent to see someone thought of that. But then, surely somebody could tamper with the break pedal, or in some other manner circumvent the truck's ability to stop? If nothing else, incapacitating the driver would still be an option, and an autonomous truck would still have the benefits of the pressurized braking system, for example. This scenario would, at worst, have turned out the same way, and potentially could have been avoided without a person driving it.
Could have stopped. Should have stopped.... Technology is evolving fast.
If this technologically non-savvy terrorist had no idea about automated braking, just think about technologically savvy terrorist who will be able to program automatic trucks to ignore collision by hacking certain sensors. We are talking about automatic road killing robot.
How would you stop such autonomous cargo truck with no driver to shoot at?
You don't make these systems available remotely. In order for a terrorist to mod the controls, they would need physical access to the truck - and you would still have protection, for example, if you had a system with a burned in checksum that refused to operate if it detected modifications to the firmware. With traditional drivers, all they have to do is slit the brake lines or tranquillize the driver... And automated driving also takes misinterpretation mistakes, aggressive driving, and sleepiness out of the list of possible death situations. Isn't that worth it?
First the sony PS Network hack, then the credit card leaks, and now this? Why is there security consistently so bad? Twitter's not even hard to secure, just use 2-factor authentication, something that'll defeat 90% of hack attempts. That they keep getting breached over and over again says something about their company culture towards investing in their customer's safety...
It is equally infuriating to me when American companies use loopholes in our ridiculously complicated tax code to shelter revenues in foreign tax shelters to avoid paying taxes
So who are you infuriated at? The companies that take advantage of those loopholes, or the politicians that put them there? Fury doesn't help unless it is properly directed. Does your fury influence who you vote for?
You state this question as if politicians and companies have arrived at this current system without influence from each other. They are both responsible for the current system. Voting is irrelevant when both party's representatives are a) known to lie completely about what they stand for when running for election, b) never held accountable for their campaign promises by their own party and their voters, and c) known to put business interests first ahead of the voters. They instead rely on the media spin machine, propaganda mouthpieces in the partisan babble spaces, and outright voter ignorance to pick up the slack between reality and their oft misstated intentions.
Are you from a country other than the US? It appears that way, as you have no idea about how doggedly fascist leaning our government and business intertwining is, despite overt appearances of regulated divisions. Also, you seem to have have a woefully overoptimistic (or overly simplistic) viewpoint of our electorate's ability to directly influence policies through elections. A friend of mine likes to joke: There are two parties in the US. The corporatist party and the corporatist party. This whole article and the repercussions of the policies we have, an how they got to be in the law in the first place, are examples of the above.
Just because you didn't vote for Bernie Sanders doesn't mean he wasn't an option.
Changing one's gender is not something that any government should pay for. Trump's stand on NC's bathroom issue, where he refused to condemn the transgender bathroom stance of the state GOP, putting him at a disadvantage wrt Ted Cruz - and this was during the GOP primary, when candidates normally veer to the right. Cruz pilloried him for stating that businesses should not be burdened w/ having to provide separate facilities for trannies. Also, unlike on everything else, where he does seem to have an opinion, Trump said nothing about the NC bathroom law, and was supported by Peter Thiel, even while Thiel's former company Paypal canned its plans for an office in Charlotte.
What? No one's saying the government should pay for it, although perhaps subsidizing parts of it might be a topic for discussion, if the costs are outweighed by the low amount of people who would use it and how much it improves their lives after. The point I'm making is that many republican states have laws that prevent you from changing your gender on paperwork, prohibit schools from mentioning what gay people are to their students, and most famously, North Carolina's transgender law. Trump has made a few positive remarks, such as saying he'd allow a transgender person to use the bathroom of their choice, but he's never supported that when it comes to laws - for example, he's insistent on assigning a judge to overturn the gay marriage proposition, even though he says he's fine with it. Saying one thing and doing the opposite is the definition of a hypocrite, hardly something I'd have thought an admirable trait in anybody, let alone the president. I thought conservatism was supposed to embrace the right to do what I wish - if I were to change my gender (not that I would, but hypothetically speaking), surely I have the right to change the sign on my passport? (especially one that I'm paying for)
Also, Trump's various appointments in the cabinet - the only Mike Pence fingerprints that I see are people like Tom Price and Scott Pruitt. The bulk of them - Tillerson, Mattis, Flynn - are hardly the people I'd have seen Pence pick had he been the president. While he does do things like the daily briefings, his main role, along w/ Reince Priebus, seems to be a point man b/w Trump and Ryan/McConnell. As for Newt Gingrich, he's nowhere in the organization, and was just shot down a day ago for suggesting that 'Drain the Swamp' is retired as Trump hits the reality of governing.
Mike Pence has largely kept out of Trump's appointment list, surprisingly, although he's implicitly supported all of Trump's choices so far. The real area you see Pence's (and traditional republicans in general) influence is in Congress; Trump's shown support for several of Obamacare's regulations, even though Republicans in congress have given no hint at all that they plan on keeping them. Likewise, Trump promised investments in infrastructure, and yet they've shown no sign of even remotely considering the idea. They don't even rebut him, they simply ignore him altogether - which tells you how much weight Trump really has.
As to Newt Gringich, he was shot down because it might have caused a political backlash. He is, however, a big force in the (attempt of an) obamacare repeal and is a big force in the stalling of the supreme court nomination. He's also well liked by Trump, and Trump seems to take him quite seriously - he's probably one of the few Republicans who are loyal to Trump himself, not just with his voters. I'd say he's as involved with Trump as any other of Trump's supporters, probably more so.
Besides all that, even Mike Pence is not anti gay. The IN law that gay thugs targeted was the one that exempted businesses from going against their religious beliefs, the most glaring example being requiring religious florists and bakers to cater to gay weddings. THAT was what was being argued, and the reason Pence signed the law he did. All those gay thugs who wanna f
While the GOP may have been traditionally biased against LGBT, that's never been true of Trump. Not when he was a Democrat, and neither when he became a Republican. While he may have flipped on a lot of things from Left to Right - like single payer, support for LGBT is something he retained even after switching parties.
Ehh, Trump doesn't support (anymore, at least) gay marriage, discrimination laws, the ability to change your gender, or really any kind of positive policy for LGBT people at all. He doesn't hate them with a passion, but he doesn't even remotely consider them in comparison to religious nuts, so I'm not really sure it's even right to say that he's not traditionally GOP in attitudes.
But it wouldn't matter anyway, because Trump frankly doesn't give a shit. He's far too dependent on the support of Mike Pence and Newt Gringich, and he's not going to give up the White House for something as worthless as somebody else's benefit. And given how Mile Pence supports throwing gay people in jail and recriminalizing homosexuality...
Citizens beware of the pending doom brought on by mad-scientists creating an army of robots that will take away your jobs, raise your children, sex your wife, and transport themselves in flying cars.
You must be prepared to be coddled by your government in order to survive. It is only by further relinquishing your free will and self motivation that you will flourish.
This is all, carry on.
How the hell is being payed overtime and strengthening unions "relinquishing your free will" or "being coddled by the government"? If anything, you're gaining free will by having better grounds for negotiating with your employer, giving you access to better pay, better job safety, and stronger job security.
I think some people are more obsessed with soundbites than learning any US history, because we've already had this exact scenario before, this. exact. scenario. before. Do you want the Progressive era, or the Gilded age?
Unless my sarcasm filter is broken tonight.
Gender does not refer to self identity, that is a construct developed by supporters of transgender. Gender is analogous to sex which is encoded into DNA
No, it's not. Sex is the biologically determined aspect of masculinity vs femininity; whether you possess certain organs, what your hormone levels are, and how your body develops. Gender is the socitial expectation for masculinity vs femininity; what jobs you're supposed to have, how you're supposed to dress, and in some cultures, how you speak. For example, we've always had males and females, and males have always had deeper voices; but only 100 years ago, pink was masculine and blue was feminine. Thus, even if you wore a blue shirt as a male in 1900, you'd still be a male by sex; but not very masculine by gender.
And no, these concepts have been around for literally thousands of years. Until the extremo Christians of the middle ages entered, it was actually really normal for people to flirt with the gender lines; read some Roman or Greek poetry. I would love to see your reaction to the Roman emperor Nero's (biologically male) wife, or the widespread act of guys who had open and accepted affairs with other guys (while being both straight and married to women).
Coming to terms with who you actually are is a sign of maturity.
You can use the same argument for depressed people. We all went through it as teenagers, but if you're depressed as an adult, clearly you never matured. I'm not going to pretend to be able to fully comprehend the force of why, and clearly neither can you - but we also don't have the condition, and much like an addiction to drugs, I'm pretty sure neither of us will ever fully understand the force behind it unless we actually became drug addicts ourselves. I daresay that if it matters enough to them that they're willing to undergo the extensive and sometimes absurdly difficult tests and procedures to change, and they report a high increase in happiness afterwards, I think there must be more to it than merely a phase - and it would probably be wise to remember that not everybody lives in your shoes...
Plot twist: Blackberry renames itself to "Research in Motion", becomes a leading seller of autonomous cars to business executives everywhere.
! And if you ever catch an US drone, you should better return it fast, or trump will make a furious tweet on twitter!
Actually, the story on that's changed. Now it's that you should never return it, because we don't need it to be returned - and it wasn't ever any other way!
With the rampant sexual harassment that was reported last New Year's Eve in Köln, I'm not sure if they're the Mexicans or pussy-grabbing Trump.
That said, does the US have problems with Mexicans that are religiously motivated to kill everyone that thinks differently from themselves?
We do, actually. We've had tons of attacks by latino terrorists, followed by extremist authoritarians / fascists (objective definition, I'm not labelling people here, I mean someone who actually supports a fascist system of government), and then by Jewish terrorists. Sadly, we don't have any hard statistics on Christian terrorism as a whole, but Christian and extremist xenophobia groups, such as the KKK, are indeed still active, having killed hundreds of Americans over the past decade alone, so that's another major problem the police have been struggling to deal with - 74% of police departments, in fact, rank these people as the most dangerous and violent of terrorists. They have been unofficially endorsed by both our president-elect and our vice president-elect, and so predictions for violence from these groups is expected to rise significantly over the next 4 years.
Seriously the government need to start charging the American citizens with more taxes for all the nanny sitting they are required to carry out, Basically cancel all outstanding lawsuits and give them 100 billions dollars. They just might break even.
I don't even like the Federal government. But it's still like.... oh they fought a small war in some country named "I-rack"... lets sue. Almost as bad as my home state of South Sudan.
This is what your post is going to sound like to the majority of Europeans, I bet. They have a different viewpoint of how government / company balances work, and if I may say so, they enjoy a vastly higher standard of living for far lower costs because of it. If you, or Facebook for that matter, are not willing to respect that, you are always free to leave Germany - whereas, if I may point out, you are never free to leave the US's sphere of influence (unless you deal exclusively with North Korea and Russia).
I'm - as I suspect most of us are here - your classic nerdy/geeky semi-ADHD/Auspergers type. But generally speaking AFAICT nutrition has been linked to this condition and personality type more than once (look for the book "The LCP Solution"). My mother told me she was practically addicted to licorice during her pregnancy with me. This could have been a "self-medication" attempt of her body to mitigate the lack of vitamin D which she recently noticed. And, fittingly enough, excess licorice consumption during pregnancy is actually in fact one of those rare things that has been found to correlate with ADHD symptoms in the child.
As for vitamin D I haven't had a bloodwork in more than a decade but I'd bet money that I've got a vitamin D deficiency, as any indoor computer expert guy probably has. My mom herself is of the nerd/shut-in/bookworm type and ADHD disposition runs on my mothers side of the family.
I myself don't drink alcohol, eat meat very rarely and live quite healthy aside from the fact that I am basically a sugar-addict. A thing I certainly link to my mothers excess licorice consumption during her pregnancy. I also notice that as soon as I actively curb my sugar addiction and lean towards a more organic balanced, whole & fresh foods diet, my awareness hightens notably and I get cooler/calmer than I usually am. If you're a nerdy type, try it out and go full organic & balanced for 8 weeks. The difference you'll notice is palpable.
I'm coping pretty well and wouldn't call my ADHD a disfunction rather than a disposition ... "Hunter/Gatherer in a Farmer/Settler society, Rebel/Adventurer/Leader disposition, etc, jada-jada" ... you probably know the evolutionary theories concerning ADHD. That aside I truely believe backed by what I've read and experienced nutrition is the biggest leverage any ADHD/Aspergers candidate has, aside from regular excercise and a diversified daily routine.
My 2 cents.
It probably played a role, but something else to consider might also be a genetic component. This can roll two ways; potentially, there might be a gene that weakens your ability to synthesize vitamin D from the sun, which is the primary manner of how we obtain it, or there could be a gene that simply gives you the condition directly. If such a thing were to be the case, it wouldn't matter how your mother raised you, but it would simply be something you were born with - and your children may inherit, should you ever have/currently have some. It might be worth it to see if any members of your family have your condition, but do actively go outside, which may provide some more insight into this matter.
Bullshit, with a large enough cohort, and without telling them it's vitamin D just a new drug, you would have baseline control probably close enough to the average rate of autism that you could discern any potential benefits from vitamin D. That assumes, of course, that this report itself doesn't spur a large amount of mothers to start taking large vitamin D supplements, thus changing the average prior to any trials if the link actually exists.
Its rather amusing that a person who calls bullshit is so full of it.
You weren't by any chance involved in the Tuskegee syphilis experiments were you?
And just how many experimental trials were you involved in?
This isn't the 1940's any more. Any medical experimentation is subject to ethical review, and before you get to even start the experiment. There is absolutely no way that a trial that involves purposefully causing a vitamin deficiency in a selected group will ever make it through an ethics review.
Sorry Dr Mengele, you can't do your twin vivisection experiments any more.
I don't think he means intentionally depriving them of vitamin D, rather I think he means simply creating a control group being given a placebo (pills of sugar, perhaps), and another group being given pills of vitamin D. The control group would have no worse outcomes than the average pregnant women would have, while the experimental group should show some improvement.
However, your point still stands; you wouldn't be able to easily control for lifestyle choices, and those have much more of an impact on vitamin D levels than a pill would.
Eventually, the Market will sort all that out. People with autism will choose to be born in countries that have better public health care, which will bankrupt themselves by subsidizing the weak and useless. America will become greater by not having so many autistic people born here. Of course, once they're born, we won't let them in, unless they can get an H1B visa.
Glad to see the births, lives, and deaths of people can be summed up as "the Market". Also, glad to see eugenics is back in fashion. Also, factually disprovable because the highest rates for autism in the world belong to Denmark, Sweden, and Japan, all countries with vastly higher standards of living and far more robust economies than the USA, which comes just after.
Trump is going to find out people are not going to "just call the president" because all of those calls get blocked by the switchboard. Trump is going to find out that casual phone calls do not happen as president, his schedule is locked down to the minute. This boiler maker atmosphere that trump seems to enjoy is going to be counter productive in an environment where decisions need to be made and then acted on and revisiting choices wastes time that needs to be used on other decisions coming in the door.
It'll work out because it won't be him in this position, it'll be Pence. Trump's presidency will largely rise and fall by how much Pence is willing to do for him, and how much Pence covers him - if Pence gets fed up, I have a suspicion Trump won't be able to cope, and he's used to simply walking away when it gets tough and waiting for a better time. Not an option as president - however, if Pence deals with all of this, as I suspect he will because he wants his own chance in 2020, then all Trump has to do is sit in the office and spend his weekends at his Florida resort, and sign the odd paper here and there. Trump could pull off the latter very successfully, he's good at taking credit (and I don't mean that exclusively in a derogatory sense; one of Obama's biggest issues was that for many of his successes, people simply took them for granted after the fact.)
I'm not so sure I agree. I can't say I have accurate statistics off the top of my head, but I have a hard time believing the majority of people copulate for less than 3 minutes a session. Furthermore, the whole group thing is also improbable - in many tribal cultures, people traditionally engaged together, and even in monogamous societies, humans have sex together an awful lot more than we like to admit.
It probably has more to do with intelligence and social communication, to be honest. The point of it is to help keep your appendage in place, and while I already think it's unlikely it really works that well in humans, it'd have virtually no use if both partners consistently agreed before hand. That's the say, the best use it has is when your partner is trying to get away from you - which probably declined quite a bit as people started to live in larger tribes and developed speech, and thus could decide when they did and didn't want to have sex. Combine that with increasing disapproval of rape, and I think sex simply evolved into more of a cooperative activity for people, and thus a (literal) boner was simply not useful anymore. Imagine if people only ever had each other for 2 minutes a session, from start to finish, how miserable that would be...
Aaaaaaargh I'm an idiot, I should have checked the preview more carefully. Here's the ending of my second paragraph, and my sincere apologies for not having caught that.
"...but for all the people who are afraid that of muslims, if you really are against what you perceive as a culture of barbaric cultural practices, I sure hope you're leading a progressive movement within one of these churches, assuming you're a member. The alternative is that you are, at best, a misinformed hypocrite, which I'm afraid the vast majority seem to be."
Furthermore, I screwed up the first link. Rather than linking to this webpage itself (duh), it's supposed to go here.
Pandemics Civil and international war The ongoing islamisation of the population Pollution and the depletion of natural resources, including fossil fuels Science denial Donald Trump The collapse of the European Union America's sovereign debt
All of these things concern me more than control of my personal data. Yes, control of my personal data concerns me - particularly my genome and corporations' attempts to patent something that is inherintly part of me and which they didn't invent. But the above issues are bigger problems.
Well, keep in mind that the original interview was about technology topics, and giving this is Snowden we're talking about here, we're inevitably going to be talking privacy. When he said it's the central issue of the future, he probably meant within that context - as opposed to, for example, the government spying on its citizens. In his mind, there's generally some outrage and opposition to governments trying to enact spying laws - not enough, as the UK's Investigtory Powers bill demonstrates, but generally something. In contrast, most people think nothing of Google or Twitter's collection of knowledge on them, nor has anyone really made much noise about this in politics. Snowden has the ability to put a face on privacy decisions for the news, and in turn to normal people, and so I'm betting that'll be his next target.
The ongoing islamisation of the population
This isn't related to the above paragraph, but please don't say this, it hurts. Fundamentalists groups, such as evangelical, baptist, and mormons, are about as conservative as their islamic counterparts, such as ISIS or Assad's backers. If want an ISIS comparison, look at the KKK - and if you want a public execution match, well, lynching has been around for many hundreds of years before al-quaeda was even a figment in somebody's mind. Furthermore, on social issues, islam Americans are much more relaxed than their Christian counterparts are. Islamists are more likely to accept gay people, far less tolerant of violence, much more accepting of other cultures, and hilariously enough, waaaaaay more likely to see themselves as Americans first and Muslims second (there's a 10 point gap between these two). Note that Christians as a whole are more open then either of these two, but for all the people
Furthermore, there's a lot of free passes we give to hardcore evangelicals that we don't give to muslims - we let people oppose laws because of the bible, which is illegal under the First Amendment by the way, but if a guy says he opposes a law because of the Quran he's labelled a terrorist and gets death threats. If a muslim were to disprove of gay marriage, it's seen as backwards and unacceptable, but if evangelical Christians do, it's seen as acceptable, for no reason other then that they got here first. America isn't accepting of immigrants and never has been, despite the long tirade to the contrary, and if we ever want to live up to the founding father's ideals, then we're going to have to leave these backwards parts of our history behind - and that, my friend, starts with not being xenophobic of immigrants for no reason other then that they're different from you. Of course, Muslims as whole still have a long way to go - but the key point is that they're doing their best, and they're not trying to enshrine their views into law. In contrast, this minority of Christians has become increasingly militant, increasingly violent, and increasingly authoritarian - and given that the darkest eras in our country's history has come from when these wackos had influence, we should be far more scared of the likes of Mike Pence then we should be from the guy down the street who fled from being cooked alive on the street by bombs or from being executed for refusing to kill somebody else.
The best approach for the general consumer is to have a set of standards that, if met, reduce security risks to an acceptable level from a hardware/software perspective. Products can choose to prove compliance with those standards. Educated consumers can require that compliance in their product choice. Regulation could come in regarding how product can claim compliance. Many or all of those standards may already exist, but they likely need some motherhood standards to tie them together. All easier said than done because there is not simple answer to 'the right way to do it', and a huge and varied scope of things under the umbrella.
I agree with this mostly, but I do think there need to be some minimum standards for regulation. Some IOT stuff - automated stoves or heating / cooling or whatever - isn't just obnoxious if hacked, it can be downright dangerous if somebody makes the oven set itself on fire while you're asleep. Using a hardcoded check of PASSWORD, for example, is something I think we can all agree is unacceptable, and that shouldn't be tolerated.
If we do make those standards too, they shouldn't be compromises, they should be seriously tough, and come in shades or grades instead of compromise. You can always let people pass lower, but no company is ever going to do better than the minimum required of them, so "A" had better mean pretty solid protection from hacking...
What does that even mean? Forced to continue driving? Driving is one of the most expensive hobbies in the world, and if you can afford to drive you can afford the far cheaper option of public transportation and taxi's.
... The average American living in the suburbs is ~ 20-30 miles from the nearest city / shopping area. If you feel like you can make a 30 mile hike and back in less than a day, at the age of 85, you're welcome to it. But for many elderly people, who live alone, driving is not a luxury - it's a necessity, because there's often no other way for them to get basic needs. (medical care, food, etc.)