From the user POV, the question is whether the data is important. If it's important, of course you eject it safely, just in case somewhere in the dozens of layers of engineering involved between generating the data and writing it to disc, there's some issue that arises that happens not to work correctly if you pull it out unsafely.
If it's unimportant data, who cares?
From the engineer's POV, you have to assume some users will pull it out unsafely, so you make it as safe as possible to remove it unsafely, balancing that against the need to keep the write speed from being unacceptably slow.
You also have the issue of child support. While cash is necessary for privacy, its far, far, far bigger effects are (1) avoiding the obligation to pay child support by getting paid in cash, (2) underreporting taxes to commit tax fraud, and (3) money laundering / the purchase of illegal goods.
The big effect on the other side is the issue of how you're going to help people who can't get bank accounts, which is a real problem among poor and homeless people.
It's a small business that made a classic business mistake of attacking a bad review rather than saying they're sorry the person was disappointed.
After the firm filed the defamation case, there was a default judgment, which usually means the defendant didn't fight it in court (they didn't get a lawyer or fight it without a lawyer). Then the law firm tried to use that judgment to force Yelp to take the review down. Yelp didn't, claiming they were protected by the Communications Decency Act, which says they're protected from being considered the "publisher" of third-party content someone posts on their site. The California Supreme Court Agreed. (They also claimed that they had not had due process because they were not part of the original case, but the CA Supreme Court did not need to rule on that issue because the Communications Decency Act determined the outcome of the case).
The law firm could still petition SCOTUS on this (contrary to what the AP coverage says, you don't "appeal" to the United States Supreme Court, you petition them for a writ of certiorari and they choose whether or not to grant it). It would be a fun argument, academically speaking. Very few people actually practice much First Amendment law, but it's a very interesting area. Obviously it's also important for a lot of businesses, because while there are lots of businesses out there with legitimately bad reviews, there are also lots of businesses out there with a couple of terrible customers who never give them a fair shake.
Petty and entitled customers get to play god with the servers jobs. But worse, they get to do it anonymously. They don't have to face the person or their boss - just click a button and quietly stick the dagger in someone's back. If someone really has a problem, they should have to go to the manager, and not be given this coward's weapon.
You've got a couple of factors coming into play. "Cowards" isn't really relevant, since the restaurant goal almost anywhere good is great customer service, and by making confrontation a prerequisite to feedback you are just blocking negative (and positive) feedback that would let you optimize for great customer service.
Any competent restaurant wants to be providing great service because competent restaurants calculate the lifetime value of their average customer, and it's really high. (Because customers come back to places they like). Couple that with the fact that it's really surprisingly hard to find good employees, and with the very high turnover rate in most of the restaurant industry. (Not all of it--some places have very low turnover and employees who stay with them for decades).
Tablets give the restaurant a way to get more information about the customer experience. Plenty of customers will pay a bill and even the customary 20% tip but not come back if they feel slighted in some way. Maybe neither the restaurant nor the server knows about the problem to begin with. The restaurant loses business, more customers are hurt, the server doesn't improve, the customer loses a potentially good or great restaurant, and it's bad for everyone.
By adding the feedback channel, you have a chance for the restaurant to fix it. Great restaurants will reach out to the customer and offer coupons or refunds or apologies or other solutions the instant they hear there's a problem. Even decent restaurants will at least reach out to the waiter or staff about whatever the problem was (overcooked item X, drink Y ingredient was not in stock, waiter sneered at me when they overheard me mention something political to a friend, etc...)
If done well, that's a good thing, because it makes the service better.
It's not the liability, or at least not just the liability, for most items.
It's customer focus. The primary focus of Amazon is customer obsession. The whole business orients towards that. A product returned by one customer is more likely to be a problem for another--it's more likely to be in, say, the bottom 10% of product quality for that item. Asking a customer to return a product is also a hassle for the customer.
The Tesla owners said they paid an extra $5,000 (...) will receive between $20 and $280 in compensation.
So between 0.4% and 5.6% of what they paid, if Tesla gets to keep 95% they're probably happy. The lawyers are happy because they "won" and get paid. But for any of the people in the class this is a joke, either they have a case and should get much more or they have no case and should get nothing. This is just lawyer busywork...
Maybe and maybe not. Numbers lie all the time, and people have different valuations for things based in part on their point of view. You need to look into the details of a case much more to really figure out what's going on; we can just make guesses at this level of generality. It's like asking the court of public opinion to decide whether a murder defendant we hear about in the news is guilty.
Class actions used to be really bad about the kind of thing you're talking about, but things have gotten a little better because it's such a well-known problem, so there has been some reform.
Background on class actions generally: Class actions exist as to hold companies accountable for widespread bad behavior that causes only a little bit of harm to a lot of people. None of those people would sue without the class action and the company would otherwise have less *incentive* to prevent or fix similar bad behavior. So sometimes class actions are bad (when the company is hurt by the bad action anyway AND the rest of the industry would be hurt if they did the same thing AND the victims do not get anything meaningful) and sometimes they are good (when the company or industry would never reform a bad act without the worry about getting sued OR the victims get some meaningful recompense).
You're nuts to have any of these devices in your house, or at the very least, plugged into power when you're not actively using it.
That ship has sailed. Phones are ubiquitous, any VOIP phones you have are on your network, and many computers and monitors and other devices have built-in microphones. Most conversations in the developed world happen in the presence of a microphone, and will do so for the foreseeable future.
Causation is supplied by experimentation and/or human reasoning, whereas supervised learning is currently about *prediction*, not *explanation*. But then someone has to sell the results to a human decision-maker.
Commercial AI right now is almost exclusively trained by data scientists whose job includes actually thinking about the data set they're working with. Businesses rarely plug an AI result into the market without understanding at least a little bit about why is does or doesn't work--although a model they don't understand may give them valuable information about causal hypotheses to test in the market.
Not to mention the fact that the example given probably just reflects a machine learning model that is missing competitors' day-before pricing and/or inputs to their pricing models from its feature set and therefore is failing to perpetuate an ongoing relationship between feature and price, and/or a model wherein a prior relationship did not vary enough to provide meaningful input to your AI model due to humans working to counteract the effect of that variable under the old pricing model. If you don't give humans this information, they also get it wrong.
It's worth noting that 90%+ of science and 98%+ of human reasoning doesn't prove causation either--instead, at most, it guesses that causation exists based on a correlative model or a set of reasoning skills.
People aren't wandering the streets because they can't afford a $722k house! Even if the houses were $10k it wouldn't make any difference in homelessness.
Um. No.
There are many people who can make a $700-$800 payment monthly, but ask them to pay more or give them one bad medical problem or car accident plus recovery time and they can no longer do that. If the labor market doesn't provide a job that lets them earn enough to pay for local housing, or even if they can't find the job because of inefficiencies in the market, they become homeless.
Some programs mitigate that very slightly--emergency shelters are NOT great but it's cold outside in the winter, and subsidized housing can help if the list eventually gets to you--but there's nowhere near enough of it to match the need.
Addressing homelessness requires addressing numerous problems--actual physical health is one part of it. Mental health is one part of it. Training is one part of it. Having someplace you can take a shower, receive mail, and/or sleep while you try to get a job is one part of it.
So yes, plenty of people would still be homeless if the cost of a house was lower, because there are other issues involved in homelessness than just the cost of housing. But of course the two things are related, because people become homeless for the first time when they cannot pay for a home.
Read it literally, and it doesn't require you to be the original leaker of the information. Because you are knowingly and willingly communicating the still classified information to an unauthorized person.
Which is kind of besides the point, since the particular example doesn't matter much.
maybe this is just in the US, but I thought that "ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law."
It depends on precisely what you are ignorant of. "ignorance of the law is no excuse" is usually how it's phrased, IIRC, which strikes closer to the truth because it's about being ignorant of *the law*, not ignorant of *the facts*.
Generally in criminal law (at least in the US), a mistake of law ("I did not think it was illegal to do X") will not excuse a crime, but a mistake of fact ("I did not think I was doing X") can sometimes negate a required element of the crime. So if you take a pen knowing it belongs to someone else you are committing a crime (albeit a small one), but if you take a pen because you confused it with your pen you are generally innocent (unless nobody believes you because you have a habit of stealing pens). It depends on what the specific elements of the crime are, which vary a bit from state to state.
This. Not only intent, but also discretion. As a practical matter, we've known for centuries that democracies overcriminalize because it is in the interests of legislators to never be blamed for letting a bad person out of jail. Thus the justice system depends on the discretion of police officers not to punish every innocent mistake and the discretion of prosecutors not to prosecute when it's too counterproductive or unfair. This doesn't always work, of course, but it's a huge part of criminal justice.
Intent is also critical. Most crimes have a "mens rea" and an "actus rea," basically the criminal intent and the criminal act. So if I take your laptop knowing it's yours, that's theft, but if I mistake your laptop for mine, my mistake of fact (i.e. I thought it was my laptop) negates the criminal intent part of the crime, so I haven't committed theft. (YMMV in practice, since a police officer or a prosecutor or a jury has to believe me.)
Of course, intent in law frequently means intent to do the thing, rather than intent to do the thing with an evil motive. So talking about classified documents may be a crime even if the government accidentally mails them to you or they are published in the Times, but no reasonable prosecutor is likely to go after you for that unless something else pretty bad is going on. That's where discretion comes in.
(And yes, obviously there are first amendment limitations that could come up, which would be balanced by a court against national security interests.)
In this modern age of hold your hand safety features, why exactly doesn't this thing have a seat weight sensor?
Because putting a sensor in for every idiotic thing idiots can do isn't exactly financially viable, and an idiot sensor doesn't exist. Plus, all you'll do is breed a better idiot as a result.
No. We already have these sensors in passenger seats of every vehicle so that they can warn the passenger to buckle their seat belt. It's a commodity.
It is predictable that people would try to use their Tesla this way, and it could obviously cost lives, so they should be built to at least warn you against doing this until they are ready to be fully autonomous. He put the lives of everyone on the road at risk.
If there isn't a sensor, there should be one. If there is one and it's only designed to trigger on the seat belt and he had the seat belt plugged in, then he bypassed the security check.
many many breakthroughs were made by scientists doing 'pure' science. We would NEVER have had, for one random example, lasers, if there had been a profit requirement behind the scientists doing the fundamental science that made it possible.
Sure (at least generally--I'm not sure about the history of lasers specifically). But someone still has to pay for it, assuming you want full-time scientists. Sometimes it's students paying tuition. Sometimes it's grants from government or nonprofits. But someone has to pay for it.
We could have a better system--one that prevents things like the epipen markup. But we still need to pay for the basic drug development and for the human trials, and for reasonable salaries and profits for everyone involved in or bankrolling that. Otherwise nobody will invest in it and many fewer people will work in the field and the drugs won't get made. It costs a lot to bring a drug to market.
If the patent shouldn't have been granted, then it isn't a taking of property because it was never properly instantiated as IP.
Actually, it was instantiated as IP (translating between law and Computerese), which is what makes it more important to fix the mistake. The patent office may reject basically by default, but it still grants (especially after a decent response to their rejection) plenty of things that a smart person who is skilled in the art would consider obvious. People sometimes need a way to challenge a patent that doesn't result in ridiculously expensive and drawn out litigation.
I often wonder if these government institutions actually live in the real world.
The common sense thing to do if their payment system is broken would be to postpone the due date for payments!
"Common Sense" doesn't usually have much to do with whether or not a solution will work in the real world, because even simple problems can have complex constraints. I am not sure offhand where the due date is set. If a delay requires a change to a law or federal regulation it may not be quite that simple.
It also looks like credit card payments are still working (albeit with transaction fees).
We are now in an era where only very few people actually need to know how reality works. The rest of us can become brand managers and youtube content creators.
There's an acceptance of this. It's unusual for someone to read a journal article before, say, junior year of undergrad. A lot of people probably graduate without reading one at all. Many of them will never pick one up in later life.
It means they can be duped more easily. When was the last time someone you know who disagreed with the existence of global warming picked up a journal article by a climate scientist? When was the last time someone who hates charter schools read through a journal article on charter schools by an economist? Most of us almost unknowingly adopt the positions we hear praised that sound reasonable without looking at data, and people who have *never* looked at data barely even have that option open to them.
If you don't read an article every once in a while, or if you don't know how, you're just trusting that whoever sounds best is right.
Maybe they are. They sound reasonable, after all. But it turns out that what sounds reasonable often isn't. The truth isn't about who sounds best to us.
There are lots of places to defend violated civil liberties. This isn't one of them.
So they've charged them with various crimes, and a jury may or may not convict them. But the trial hasn't happened yet - what right does the government have to take down their website and business just in case they get a conviction?
Every right. They shall not be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. But "due process" is just "the process that is due under the circumstances." If I see you shooting your wife, I can lock you up even though you haven't been tried yet. That doesn't mean I have to let you out to shoot your neighbor until you get a trial.
Isn't the whole point of "innocent until proven guilty" that you get your day in court before any punishment happens?
No. "Innocent until proven guilty" is also a presumption, not a fact--courts don't find people innocent, they find people "not guilty," which does NOT mean they're innocent. It just means that either the state failed to make their case or the jury wasn't listening. Juries don't always pay attention. Occasionally a person is actually innocent. The system is very bad about helping people who are actually innocent.
The point of innocent until proven guilty is basically the intuitive belief that it is better to have ten guilty men go free than to send one innocent man to prison. Effectively, we have a very strong belief that people should never be sent to prison unless they are actually guilty. (We are either "retributivists" or "side-constrained consequentialists," but the side-constraint of "must actually be guilty" is there for pretty much everyone.) But it's not an absolute prohibition on denials of life, liberty, or property, because you can't just let people go around murdering or stealing or money laundering while you're waiting for the trial.
Most or all of the people in this story are guilty, with an extremely high degree of probability. In the process of getting rich off of a massive criminal conspiracy, they got kids raped. They're lucky they're not put up against a wall and shot.
You are going for a computer science degree. You must be able to express your ideas on paper, a white board, napkin, back of your hand,....anywhere.
Not only that, but it's a college course run by a professor. The exam format should be the professor's choice, with a very few exceptions mandated by the university. (For example, blind grading most obviously.)
However, the professor should be up-front about the requirement at the beginning of the class, before the student is locked into taking it.
So we tailor their class times to their biological rhythms and they turn into adults with juvenile biological rhythms. Will they ever really grow up?
It doesn't matter. What matters is whether it is more effective to provide more off-shift jobs. We have TRILLIONS of dollars in capital that go unused at night, when people go home. If 10% of labor is also more effective at later hours, that's worth exploring.
How is it an issue? You already need a passport with a photo. How is taking an up to date photo a problem?
It's not a problem per se. However, some people don't like it because of how the information will be used or because of how they're afraid the information will be used. The general rule in a free society should be defense-in-depth of that freedom, which includes both limiting the amount of information about an individual that the government collects and limiting the ways in which the government can use the collected information.
We have relatively small limits on these things. The most significant is a mostly-court-created doctrine to protect us from having the results of unreasonable search and seizure be used against us in a court of law. We should all be able to understand easily why that is inadequate to protecting individual freedoms: once information is collected it can be misused in ways that curtail freedom without going to court. And even if it is used to bring a case in court, the majority of cases are never tried.
Even that small limit on government data collection is almost, but not completely, nonexistent at the airport. The airport is considered the functional equivalent of the border and the First Congress authorized the complete search of all areas of a ship for contraband, so obviously the founders didn't consider thorough searches at the border "unreasonable" under the Fourth Amendment.
Why do I say the prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure is mostly court-created? The U.S. Constitution prohibits the federal government from engaging in unreasonable searches and seizures. When some state governments got too intrusive on individual liberties in the twentieth century, the federal courts began pretending that the guarantees in the Constitution applied against state governments. There are two sanctions for violating the rule: the most common is that evidence can't be used in court against the person whose rights were violated. The other is that occasionally a person whose rights were violated will sue for money damages or to prevent such a violation.
These preserved brains will at some point just be recognized as what they are (medical trash) and be disposed off. It is far to easy to make more humans, nobody will care to revive some fossils that have fallen out of time. That is if the possibility is even there in the first place.
It really depends on the social dynamics of the future and on how you are remembered. Do you really think nobody would want to talk to an accurate simulation of Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, or John D. Rockefeller? Or Shakespeare? Or their own great-great-great grandparents? One day this could be the equivalent of a grade-school family tree project: talk to the simulation of your ancestor.
Diesel cars have far worse levels of local pollution generated. Modern petrol cars generate CO2 but the exhaust is extremely clean.
One important distinction here is in the type of regulation. If any ban is as simple as the summary suggests--diesel-based vehicles are to be prohibited--then it's a bad regulation.
The reason is the distinction is between rule-based and standards-based regulations.
Bottom-line: any city that passes a rule to this effect should make clear that if someone designs a diesel engine with extremely clean exhaust, (or perhaps even if it can show lower total lifetime emissions for a vehicle) it can still be used.
I vaguely remember astrophysicists being excited about neutrino detectors detecting supernovas before you see the explosion, because the neutrinos generated at the center of a supernova had so little mass that they made it through the star's densely packed matter much more quickly than the rest of the energy transmission. Yes, here it is... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Slashdot Mirror
From the user POV, the question is whether the data is important. If it's important, of course you eject it safely, just in case somewhere in the dozens of layers of engineering involved between generating the data and writing it to disc, there's some issue that arises that happens not to work correctly if you pull it out unsafely.
If it's unimportant data, who cares?
From the engineer's POV, you have to assume some users will pull it out unsafely, so you make it as safe as possible to remove it unsafely, balancing that against the need to keep the write speed from being unacceptably slow.
You also have the issue of child support. While cash is necessary for privacy, its far, far, far bigger effects are (1) avoiding the obligation to pay child support by getting paid in cash, (2) underreporting taxes to commit tax fraud, and (3) money laundering / the purchase of illegal goods.
The big effect on the other side is the issue of how you're going to help people who can't get bank accounts, which is a real problem among poor and homeless people.
... which law firm to avoid.
It's a small business that made a classic business mistake of attacking a bad review rather than saying they're sorry the person was disappointed.
After the firm filed the defamation case, there was a default judgment, which usually means the defendant didn't fight it in court (they didn't get a lawyer or fight it without a lawyer). Then the law firm tried to use that judgment to force Yelp to take the review down. Yelp didn't, claiming they were protected by the Communications Decency Act, which says they're protected from being considered the "publisher" of third-party content someone posts on their site. The California Supreme Court Agreed. (They also claimed that they had not had due process because they were not part of the original case, but the CA Supreme Court did not need to rule on that issue because the Communications Decency Act determined the outcome of the case).
The law firm could still petition SCOTUS on this (contrary to what the AP coverage says, you don't "appeal" to the United States Supreme Court, you petition them for a writ of certiorari and they choose whether or not to grant it). It would be a fun argument, academically speaking. Very few people actually practice much First Amendment law, but it's a very interesting area. Obviously it's also important for a lot of businesses, because while there are lots of businesses out there with legitimately bad reviews, there are also lots of businesses out there with a couple of terrible customers who never give them a fair shake.
And because the article ridiculously didn't include a link to the court opinion, here it is: http://www.courts.ca.gov/opini...
Now, what about things like license plate trackers that track where your car goes?
Dude. This is a major victory for people who care about civil liberties and freedom. Take a moment and enjoy it.
Petty and entitled customers get to play god with the servers jobs. But worse, they get to do it anonymously. They don't have to face the person or their boss - just click a button and quietly stick the dagger in someone's back. If someone really has a problem, they should have to go to the manager, and not be given this coward's weapon.
You've got a couple of factors coming into play. "Cowards" isn't really relevant, since the restaurant goal almost anywhere good is great customer service, and by making confrontation a prerequisite to feedback you are just blocking negative (and positive) feedback that would let you optimize for great customer service.
Any competent restaurant wants to be providing great service because competent restaurants calculate the lifetime value of their average customer, and it's really high. (Because customers come back to places they like). Couple that with the fact that it's really surprisingly hard to find good employees, and with the very high turnover rate in most of the restaurant industry. (Not all of it--some places have very low turnover and employees who stay with them for decades).
Tablets give the restaurant a way to get more information about the customer experience. Plenty of customers will pay a bill and even the customary 20% tip but not come back if they feel slighted in some way. Maybe neither the restaurant nor the server knows about the problem to begin with. The restaurant loses business, more customers are hurt, the server doesn't improve, the customer loses a potentially good or great restaurant, and it's bad for everyone.
By adding the feedback channel, you have a chance for the restaurant to fix it. Great restaurants will reach out to the customer and offer coupons or refunds or apologies or other solutions the instant they hear there's a problem. Even decent restaurants will at least reach out to the waiter or staff about whatever the problem was (overcooked item X, drink Y ingredient was not in stock, waiter sneered at me when they overheard me mention something political to a friend, etc...)
If done well, that's a good thing, because it makes the service better.
It's not the liability, or at least not just the liability, for most items.
It's customer focus. The primary focus of Amazon is customer obsession. The whole business orients towards that. A product returned by one customer is more likely to be a problem for another--it's more likely to be in, say, the bottom 10% of product quality for that item. Asking a customer to return a product is also a hassle for the customer.
The Tesla owners said they paid an extra $5,000 (...) will receive between $20 and $280 in compensation.
So between 0.4% and 5.6% of what they paid, if Tesla gets to keep 95% they're probably happy. The lawyers are happy because they "won" and get paid. But for any of the people in the class this is a joke, either they have a case and should get much more or they have no case and should get nothing. This is just lawyer busywork...
Maybe and maybe not. Numbers lie all the time, and people have different valuations for things based in part on their point of view. You need to look into the details of a case much more to really figure out what's going on; we can just make guesses at this level of generality. It's like asking the court of public opinion to decide whether a murder defendant we hear about in the news is guilty.
Class actions used to be really bad about the kind of thing you're talking about, but things have gotten a little better because it's such a well-known problem, so there has been some reform.
Background on class actions generally: Class actions exist as to hold companies accountable for widespread bad behavior that causes only a little bit of harm to a lot of people. None of those people would sue without the class action and the company would otherwise have less *incentive* to prevent or fix similar bad behavior. So sometimes class actions are bad (when the company is hurt by the bad action anyway AND the rest of the industry would be hurt if they did the same thing AND the victims do not get anything meaningful) and sometimes they are good (when the company or industry would never reform a bad act without the worry about getting sued OR the victims get some meaningful recompense).
You're nuts to have any of these devices in your house, or at the very least, plugged into power when you're not actively using it.
That ship has sailed. Phones are ubiquitous, any VOIP phones you have are on your network, and many computers and monitors and other devices have built-in microphones. Most conversations in the developed world happen in the presence of a microphone, and will do so for the foreseeable future.
Causation is supplied by experimentation and/or human reasoning, whereas supervised learning is currently about *prediction*, not *explanation*. But then someone has to sell the results to a human decision-maker.
Commercial AI right now is almost exclusively trained by data scientists whose job includes actually thinking about the data set they're working with. Businesses rarely plug an AI result into the market without understanding at least a little bit about why is does or doesn't work--although a model they don't understand may give them valuable information about causal hypotheses to test in the market.
Not to mention the fact that the example given probably just reflects a machine learning model that is missing competitors' day-before pricing and/or inputs to their pricing models from its feature set and therefore is failing to perpetuate an ongoing relationship between feature and price, and/or a model wherein a prior relationship did not vary enough to provide meaningful input to your AI model due to humans working to counteract the effect of that variable under the old pricing model. If you don't give humans this information, they also get it wrong.
It's worth noting that 90%+ of science and 98%+ of human reasoning doesn't prove causation either--instead, at most, it guesses that causation exists based on a correlative model or a set of reasoning skills.
People aren't wandering the streets because they can't afford a $722k house! Even if the houses were $10k it wouldn't make any difference in homelessness.
Um. No.
There are many people who can make a $700-$800 payment monthly, but ask them to pay more or give them one bad medical problem or car accident plus recovery time and they can no longer do that. If the labor market doesn't provide a job that lets them earn enough to pay for local housing, or even if they can't find the job because of inefficiencies in the market, they become homeless.
Some programs mitigate that very slightly--emergency shelters are NOT great but it's cold outside in the winter, and subsidized housing can help if the list eventually gets to you--but there's nowhere near enough of it to match the need.
Addressing homelessness requires addressing numerous problems--actual physical health is one part of it. Mental health is one part of it. Training is one part of it. Having someplace you can take a shower, receive mail, and/or sleep while you try to get a job is one part of it.
So yes, plenty of people would still be homeless if the cost of a house was lower, because there are other issues involved in homelessness than just the cost of housing. But of course the two things are related, because people become homeless for the first time when they cannot pay for a home.
See, e.g., https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...
Read it literally, and it doesn't require you to be the original leaker of the information. Because you are knowingly and willingly communicating the still classified information to an unauthorized person.
Which is kind of besides the point, since the particular example doesn't matter much.
maybe this is just in the US, but I thought that "ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law."
It depends on precisely what you are ignorant of. "ignorance of the law is no excuse" is usually how it's phrased, IIRC, which strikes closer to the truth because it's about being ignorant of *the law*, not ignorant of *the facts*.
Generally in criminal law (at least in the US), a mistake of law ("I did not think it was illegal to do X") will not excuse a crime, but a mistake of fact ("I did not think I was doing X") can sometimes negate a required element of the crime. So if you take a pen knowing it belongs to someone else you are committing a crime (albeit a small one), but if you take a pen because you confused it with your pen you are generally innocent (unless nobody believes you because you have a habit of stealing pens). It depends on what the specific elements of the crime are, which vary a bit from state to state.
Intent is an important part of many laws.
This. Not only intent, but also discretion. As a practical matter, we've known for centuries that democracies overcriminalize because it is in the interests of legislators to never be blamed for letting a bad person out of jail. Thus the justice system depends on the discretion of police officers not to punish every innocent mistake and the discretion of prosecutors not to prosecute when it's too counterproductive or unfair. This doesn't always work, of course, but it's a huge part of criminal justice.
Intent is also critical. Most crimes have a "mens rea" and an "actus rea," basically the criminal intent and the criminal act. So if I take your laptop knowing it's yours, that's theft, but if I mistake your laptop for mine, my mistake of fact (i.e. I thought it was my laptop) negates the criminal intent part of the crime, so I haven't committed theft. (YMMV in practice, since a police officer or a prosecutor or a jury has to believe me.)
Of course, intent in law frequently means intent to do the thing, rather than intent to do the thing with an evil motive. So talking about classified documents may be a crime even if the government accidentally mails them to you or they are published in the Times, but no reasonable prosecutor is likely to go after you for that unless something else pretty bad is going on. That's where discretion comes in.
(And yes, obviously there are first amendment limitations that could come up, which would be balanced by a court against national security interests.)
In this modern age of hold your hand safety features, why exactly doesn't this thing have a seat weight sensor?
Because putting a sensor in for every idiotic thing idiots can do isn't exactly financially viable, and an idiot sensor doesn't exist.
Plus, all you'll do is breed a better idiot as a result.
No. We already have these sensors in passenger seats of every vehicle so that they can warn the passenger to buckle their seat belt. It's a commodity.
It is predictable that people would try to use their Tesla this way, and it could obviously cost lives, so they should be built to at least warn you against doing this until they are ready to be fully autonomous. He put the lives of everyone on the road at risk.
If there isn't a sensor, there should be one. If there is one and it's only designed to trigger on the seat belt and he had the seat belt plugged in, then he bypassed the security check.
many many breakthroughs were made by scientists doing 'pure' science. We would NEVER have had, for one random example, lasers, if there had been a profit requirement behind the scientists doing the fundamental science that made it possible.
Sure (at least generally--I'm not sure about the history of lasers specifically). But someone still has to pay for it, assuming you want full-time scientists. Sometimes it's students paying tuition. Sometimes it's grants from government or nonprofits. But someone has to pay for it.
We could have a better system--one that prevents things like the epipen markup. But we still need to pay for the basic drug development and for the human trials, and for reasonable salaries and profits for everyone involved in or bankrolling that. Otherwise nobody will invest in it and many fewer people will work in the field and the drugs won't get made. It costs a lot to bring a drug to market.
If the patent shouldn't have been granted, then it isn't a taking of property because it was never properly instantiated as IP.
Actually, it was instantiated as IP (translating between law and Computerese), which is what makes it more important to fix the mistake. The patent office may reject basically by default, but it still grants (especially after a decent response to their rejection) plenty of things that a smart person who is skilled in the art would consider obvious. People sometimes need a way to challenge a patent that doesn't result in ridiculously expensive and drawn out litigation.
I often wonder if these government institutions actually live in the real world.
The common sense thing to do if their payment system is broken would be to postpone the due date for payments!
"Common Sense" doesn't usually have much to do with whether or not a solution will work in the real world, because even simple problems can have complex constraints. I am not sure offhand where the due date is set. If a delay requires a change to a law or federal regulation it may not be quite that simple.
It also looks like credit card payments are still working (albeit with transaction fees).
We are now in an era where only very few people actually need to know how reality works. The rest of us can become brand managers and youtube content creators.
There's an acceptance of this. It's unusual for someone to read a journal article before, say, junior year of undergrad. A lot of people probably graduate without reading one at all. Many of them will never pick one up in later life.
It means they can be duped more easily. When was the last time someone you know who disagreed with the existence of global warming picked up a journal article by a climate scientist? When was the last time someone who hates charter schools read through a journal article on charter schools by an economist? Most of us almost unknowingly adopt the positions we hear praised that sound reasonable without looking at data, and people who have *never* looked at data barely even have that option open to them.
If you don't read an article every once in a while, or if you don't know how, you're just trusting that whoever sounds best is right.
Maybe they are. They sound reasonable, after all. But it turns out that what sounds reasonable often isn't. The truth isn't about who sounds best to us.
There are lots of places to defend violated civil liberties. This isn't one of them.
So they've charged them with various crimes, and a jury may or may not convict them. But the trial hasn't happened yet - what right does the government have to take down their website and business just in case they get a conviction?
Every right. They shall not be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. But "due process" is just "the process that is due under the circumstances." If I see you shooting your wife, I can lock you up even though you haven't been tried yet. That doesn't mean I have to let you out to shoot your neighbor until you get a trial.
Isn't the whole point of "innocent until proven guilty" that you get your day in court before any punishment happens?
No. "Innocent until proven guilty" is also a presumption, not a fact--courts don't find people innocent, they find people "not guilty," which does NOT mean they're innocent. It just means that either the state failed to make their case or the jury wasn't listening. Juries don't always pay attention. Occasionally a person is actually innocent. The system is very bad about helping people who are actually innocent.
The point of innocent until proven guilty is basically the intuitive belief that it is better to have ten guilty men go free than to send one innocent man to prison. Effectively, we have a very strong belief that people should never be sent to prison unless they are actually guilty. (We are either "retributivists" or "side-constrained consequentialists," but the side-constraint of "must actually be guilty" is there for pretty much everyone.) But it's not an absolute prohibition on denials of life, liberty, or property, because you can't just let people go around murdering or stealing or money laundering while you're waiting for the trial.
Most or all of the people in this story are guilty, with an extremely high degree of probability. In the process of getting rich off of a massive criminal conspiracy, they got kids raped. They're lucky they're not put up against a wall and shot.
You are going for a computer science degree. You must be able to express your ideas on paper, a white board, napkin, back of your hand, ....anywhere.
Not only that, but it's a college course run by a professor. The exam format should be the professor's choice, with a very few exceptions mandated by the university. (For example, blind grading most obviously.)
However, the professor should be up-front about the requirement at the beginning of the class, before the student is locked into taking it.
So we tailor their class times to their biological rhythms and they turn into adults with juvenile biological rhythms. Will they ever really grow up?
It doesn't matter. What matters is whether it is more effective to provide more off-shift jobs. We have TRILLIONS of dollars in capital that go unused at night, when people go home. If 10% of labor is also more effective at later hours, that's worth exploring.
How is it an issue?
You already need a passport with a photo. How is taking an up to date photo a problem?
It's not a problem per se. However, some people don't like it because of how the information will be used or because of how they're afraid the information will be used. The general rule in a free society should be defense-in-depth of that freedom, which includes both limiting the amount of information about an individual that the government collects and limiting the ways in which the government can use the collected information.
We have relatively small limits on these things. The most significant is a mostly-court-created doctrine to protect us from having the results of unreasonable search and seizure be used against us in a court of law. We should all be able to understand easily why that is inadequate to protecting individual freedoms: once information is collected it can be misused in ways that curtail freedom without going to court. And even if it is used to bring a case in court, the majority of cases are never tried.
Even that small limit on government data collection is almost, but not completely, nonexistent at the airport. The airport is considered the functional equivalent of the border and the First Congress authorized the complete search of all areas of a ship for contraband, so obviously the founders didn't consider thorough searches at the border "unreasonable" under the Fourth Amendment.
Why do I say the prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure is mostly court-created? The U.S. Constitution prohibits the federal government from engaging in unreasonable searches and seizures. When some state governments got too intrusive on individual liberties in the twentieth century, the federal courts began pretending that the guarantees in the Constitution applied against state governments. There are two sanctions for violating the rule: the most common is that evidence can't be used in court against the person whose rights were violated. The other is that occasionally a person whose rights were violated will sue for money damages or to prevent such a violation.
These preserved brains will at some point just be recognized as what they are (medical trash) and be disposed off. It is far to easy to make more humans, nobody will care to revive some fossils that have fallen out of time. That is if the possibility is even there in the first place.
It really depends on the social dynamics of the future and on how you are remembered. Do you really think nobody would want to talk to an accurate simulation of Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, or John D. Rockefeller? Or Shakespeare? Or their own great-great-great grandparents? One day this could be the equivalent of a grade-school family tree project: talk to the simulation of your ancestor.
Diesel cars have far worse levels of local pollution generated. Modern petrol cars generate CO2 but the exhaust is extremely clean.
One important distinction here is in the type of regulation. If any ban is as simple as the summary suggests--diesel-based vehicles are to be prohibited--then it's a bad regulation.
The reason is the distinction is between rule-based and standards-based regulations.
Bottom-line: any city that passes a rule to this effect should make clear that if someone designs a diesel engine with extremely clean exhaust, (or perhaps even if it can show lower total lifetime emissions for a vehicle) it can still be used.
I vaguely remember astrophysicists being excited about neutrino detectors detecting supernovas before you see the explosion, because the neutrinos generated at the center of a supernova had so little mass that they made it through the star's densely packed matter much more quickly than the rest of the energy transmission. Yes, here it is... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...