I'm not sure that all of the US really came out of the crash. Certainly the stock market, the banks, corporations, and the rich came out of it. But it seems like a lot of the general populous got left behind to foot the bill. Taxpayer money used to bail out the banks, taxpayer money used to bail out the motor industry. And none of those bankers got prosecuted or served a day in jail. Thousands, millions of people lost their homes during the mortgage crisis. Health insurance and health care costs rising year over year by sometimes as much as 40% or more.
I hear some work place insurance plans have already started forcing everyone to take a full physical and are going to start adjusting policy prices on a per worker basis based on an individual's risk factors. Made a few unhealthy lifestyle choices? You're going to pay more. Have high risk of cancer in your family? You're going to pay more. Been to the doctor too often recently? You're going to pay more.
I wouldn't be surprised if suicide rates continue to rise until there's almost no one left for the rich to feed off of.
I don't see how any of these methods put a stop to user tracking unless you're using a VPN to obfuscate your source IP address. So is Safari going to include it's own free VPN service like Opera? Or is this all just a bunch of noise to try and capitalize on the anti-Facebook sentiment and gain market attention?
While this might have been a bit of wikipedia vandalism, until recently apparently one of the front runners for a senate seat on California's Republican ticket was Patrick Little, a self proclaimed Neo-Nazi.
Don't forget that another reason many patients are desperate enough to opt for clinical trials instead of normal treatments is because they can't afford the cost of the normal treatments while the cost for the trials is often waived.
The SCOTUS can't do anything, because of the loop hole statement: "In order to receive State Contracts". Any ISP in CA or any other state that has made one of these Net Neutrality bills into law can decide to forgo lucrative state contracts and ignore net neutrality principles. But if they want a state contract then they have to adhere to the rules state law put forth.
I switched to Kaspersky back in the late 2000s because it was consistently rated as one of the best performing AV suites available, and it didn't have the bloat of Norton or McAfee.
Having the NSA blackball it, the same way they complain about encryption schemes not having backdoors to which they have the keys to, is just another recommendation going for it.
Show me evidence of Kaspersky being used to steal identities and/or financial information, then I'd reconsider using it.
Meanwhile, all that funding that should have gone to improve actual educational resources for the students is instead wasted on a "defense system" that probably won't defend against anything.
IIRC, according to reports, the blame for US life expectancy falling lands at the feet of increased deaths caused by the opioid crisis courtesy of big pharma.
Even then, it's hard to imagine China surpassing US in life expectancy with the pollution problems they have.
The government pays out a lot of subsidies, not just those for renewable energy infrastructure. Fossil fuels are subsidized, nuclear energy programs are subsidized, farms are subsidized, and on and on. I don't think that what is spent on renewables and renewable infrastructure is significantly disproportionate from other expenditures made both past and present.
There is new battery tech being developed, mostly in response to the demand and adoption of EVs that wouldn't happen if we didn't have them. Without supporting infrastructure people wouldn't be buying EVs. Unless you want the government to fund nearly 100% of the R&D for 25+ years in isolation, this is how stuff gets out - incrementally. Infrastructure isn't once and done, it can be and does get upgraded as need requires.
Tesla isn't the only player in the EV market, they're just the most recognized. "Traditional" car companies are working on and testing their own EVs, in fact the Nissan Leaf has been on sale for years. Take a look at chargehub.com 's map of chargers: you'll actually find just as many, if not far more, level 3 EV charge stations than Tesla Superchargers. At least in areas where there is a demand for them.
The parent is absolutely right. Kodi does not allow and has never supported copyright infringement, and they have at times vehemently gone after people that sell boxes with Kodi preinstalled with Third Party plug-ins that allow for such. Like many open source projects though, their time and resources are limited.
Many consumer electronic devices are beyond the simple repairs of yester-year's picture tube TV sets. Not only are the devices much more complicated than they used to be, the very concept of repair manuals is flat out scarce, and then there's the problem of built-in obsolesce as well.
We do need a much better electronics recycling program. Part of which would take those devices that are repairable, fix them, and then sell them at low cost of give them to people that don't have, and can't afford to buy new off the shelf. But when you've got fried circuits that require a replacement part that only the manufacturer can provide, it's not a cheap and easy fix.
On the subject of tariffs however? This move is just plain stupid. We don't manufacture finished products here in the States. This is going to end up being a straight up tax on the middle class, and it's only going to further blow up in our faces. You can't transition from a free trade economy to a protectionist economy overnight, and running around throwing up huge tariffs on imports is not going to hurt the countries we import from nearly as much as it's going to hurt us. It takes years, decades even to setup the manufacturing facilities and establish a sufficient supply chain to assemble a complex product. Meanwhile, it's a big world out there and there are plenty of other people China can sell to and buy from.
IIRC North Korea does have a lot of rare earth element deposits inside it's territory that could be used in consumer electronics. But as long as there is no peace and sanctions remain in place those deposits will never be tapped.
And let's not forget the potential damage to major consumer electronics manufacturers and software/video game industries if war breaks out in the region and damages facilities in South Korea or Japan (even if neither were attacked directly nuclear fallout could be a huge disaster if president pinhead punches his big red button).
A burger flipping robot was a flawed idea. Servo motors can't easily and quickly articulate the kind of motions necessary to flip burgers reliably as efficiently as a human can. If you really wanted to machine grill burgers, you'd make more of a conveyor based machine to do it, just like you have conveyor based pizza ovens. (And there are in fact, conveyor based broilers)
AI is capable of driving a car however. Self driving cars aren't being implemented as a physical robot in the driver's seat, so a robot's limited range of articulation isn't a factor. Many cars already drive-by-wire systems - so it's just a matter of switching the digital input from the normal interface to the AI. The rest is just a matter of giving the AI enough sensory input and training to handle the process of driving - which is why we've got all these prototypes on the road collecting data.
In a few years, once self driving technology has properly matured, we'll see the PR campaigns to go along with it to remind the public about the dangers of human driving and convince them of the enhanced safety of riding in a self driving vehicle. And the majority of people will swallow it hook, line, and sinker whether it's true or not if the advertising guys do their job right.
At one point Netflix DVD could recognize discs that were part of a series and there was an option to have them not sent out of order.
While it seems they still recognize a series of discs, the option to not send them out of order seems to have disappeared. Not sure if it's just automatically done these days or if it's no longer an option at all.
Fun fact though, (not for series) if you have a large queue and you front load the titles that are marked as having a wait time at the top of it they'll end up occasionally sending you an extra disc as one with a wait just happens to become available while it's in the middle of processing the shipment of a different disc that isn't.
I'd say that the point at which AI is powerful enough to where these laws might be able to apply to it, is also the point where AI become AL (artificial life) and we end up with an entire other series of ethical problems to worry about (robotic slavery, robotic rights, robot uprising, etc).
Also, where's the laws saying that:
A robot may not modify itself or others to remove these laws or alter the adherence to these laws.
A robot is not permitted to reinterpret these laws to have any meaning other than their explicitly stated ones.
The other big difference is that back in the 50s/60s only one bread winner was required per household. Nowadays it can be quite difficult to get by even with two working adults in a household, unless one or both of them is/are college educated and has a higher paying job. Even then, the cost and difficulty of raising children when both parents work full time is enough to make many choose not to have children.
Net Neutrality is a separate issue from the regional monopoly BS that most ISPs enjoy. That doesn't make it unimportant after we've already had blatant examples of both Verizon https://www.theverge.com/2017/... and Comcast https://consumerist.com/2014/0... throttling streaming video services like Netflix to try and get customers to subscribe to their services instead or to extort money from streaming video providers.
And that's where I think things get murky fast. I'll be the first to admit I don't understand the details of what happened between Verizon, Comcast, and Netflix. In general terms, I think it was basically a contract dispute about who was going to pay whom for what. I guarantee armies of lawyers and CxOs were involved in the negotiations and I'm not going to try to outguess them. I'm pretty sure Comcast and Verizon would find it a Pyrrhic victory if they really reduced the quality of Netfilx streams for no good reason other than to make their service look better. Anyway, we have ways to resolve contract disputes, they slug it out in courts and the court of public opinion and eventually settle. I, personally, am more comfortable depending on that process than FCC regulation.
Just a few things to add re: Net Neutrality: The Netflix and ISPs throttling streaming video was just one example (the most prominent). In 2007 the FCC took Comcast to court over throttling P2P traffic and forced them to knock it off. Unfortunately, the courts overturned this ruling in 2010 because they ruled that the FCC did not have the authority to issue commands regarding Comcast's shaping practices. But, the courts gave the FCC another option: reclassification. That's why the FCC reclassified broadband services under Title II common carrier protections in 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Other services that have previously been (and are sometimes still) affected by ISPs throttling/shaping traffic are VoIP services (ex Skype and others) as well as VPN use. VoIP services (particularly free ones like Discord) don't have the money to fight ISPs in the courts, but worse is VPN service. VPNs are used by any number of small businesses and individuals and to this day Comcast is still presumably guilty of throttling users' VPN traffic (a quick google search will return dozens of user complaints re: Comcast vs VPN). Short of a class action lawsuit, small businesses and individuals are never going to get Comcast to stop messing with VPN traffic, especially without a solid foundation like them being in violation of Net Neutrality rules to take them to court over.
I don't know that throwing away the Democratic brand would necessarily be a negative, it's gotten fairly tarnished. Connections depend on which connections you're talking about. Connections to big business and industry? Lobbyists? Overpriced consulting firms? Law firms? Civil rights organizations? Seems to me that the Dems have as many if not more negative connections as positive ones.
But, yes, given the current state of affairs (and going along with my original statement regarding the impossibility of getting a third party on the ballot), it is far more effective and productive in the short term to try and take over the Democratic Party than to form a new party. I think long term remains to be seen and probably depends on the outcome of the short term.
If it wasn't next to impossible to get a third party on the general election ballot, I'd say that progressives should split from the democrats and form their own progressive party. "The US Progressive Party - Moving the country forward."
Net Neutrality is a separate issue from the regional monopoly BS that most ISPs enjoy. That doesn't make it unimportant after we've already had blatant examples of both Verizon https://www.theverge.com/2017/... and Comcast https://consumerist.com/2014/0... throttling streaming video services like Netflix to try and get customers to subscribe to their services instead or to extort money from streaming video providers.
You're not wrong about how congress is supposed to work and how fragile policy put in place solely by the executive branch is. Unfortunately, our congress is almost completely broken, and has been for years, decades even. https://www.realclearscience.c...
Maybe if we can accomplish goals like getting money out of politics, implement systems like ranked choice voting, stop voter suppression, make voting easier with early voting/no excuse needed absentee ballots or some other fix, and get a healthy five or six active political parties going we can have a truly representative democracy again. But that's a very big, and very long if.
Not true. Everyone could vote for it in the House, and then it will go to the president...
Veto. Dead and done.
One the other hand, how about those same people in the Senate and the House stop wasting time with this stupid gesture and make a law. Eh that would take real work... Lets just play the politics game.
There are some interpretations of the CRA that argue that if the bill passes then the FCC won't be able to reclassify broadband service ever again, effectively making the Title II classification permanent.
I don't think I'd trust congress to actually write a new law involving Net Neutrality. We've already seen some attempts at this after the original FCC vote was in the news and they contained some pretty big loop holes. The Title II classification is probably the best and safest way to ensure Net Neutrality continues to exist in a way that benefits the average consumer.
It's always a politics game. According to polls some exceedingly high percentage of Americans favor Net Neutrality (somewhere around 85% iirc), and yet the bill just barely passed the senate on a nearly complete party line vote. If that kind of partisanship continues to show itself in the house then the bill is already dead since the Republicans have a 43 seat majority. And Trump is never going to reenact anything that had Obama's name even remotely attached to it. So yeah, in the end it's just a ploy for votes come November.
I think Washington was actually the first to pass it's own Net Neutrality law in response to Pai's bs move. However, IIRC part of Pai's bs was also some garbage that was intended to preempt and prevent states from enacting their own Net Neutrality laws, so it's going to come down to the courts either way.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure that all of the US really came out of the crash. Certainly the stock market, the banks, corporations, and the rich came out of it. But it seems like a lot of the general populous got left behind to foot the bill. Taxpayer money used to bail out the banks, taxpayer money used to bail out the motor industry. And none of those bankers got prosecuted or served a day in jail. Thousands, millions of people lost their homes during the mortgage crisis. Health insurance and health care costs rising year over year by sometimes as much as 40% or more.
I hear some work place insurance plans have already started forcing everyone to take a full physical and are going to start adjusting policy prices on a per worker basis based on an individual's risk factors. Made a few unhealthy lifestyle choices? You're going to pay more. Have high risk of cancer in your family? You're going to pay more. Been to the doctor too often recently? You're going to pay more.
I wouldn't be surprised if suicide rates continue to rise until there's almost no one left for the rich to feed off of.
I don't see how any of these methods put a stop to user tracking unless you're using a VPN to obfuscate your source IP address. So is Safari going to include it's own free VPN service like Opera? Or is this all just a bunch of noise to try and capitalize on the anti-Facebook sentiment and gain market attention?
While this might have been a bit of wikipedia vandalism, until recently apparently one of the front runners for a senate seat on California's Republican ticket was Patrick Little, a self proclaimed Neo-Nazi.
Don't forget that another reason many patients are desperate enough to opt for clinical trials instead of normal treatments is because they can't afford the cost of the normal treatments while the cost for the trials is often waived.
The SCOTUS can't do anything, because of the loop hole statement: "In order to receive State Contracts". Any ISP in CA or any other state that has made one of these Net Neutrality bills into law can decide to forgo lucrative state contracts and ignore net neutrality principles. But if they want a state contract then they have to adhere to the rules state law put forth.
I switched to Kaspersky back in the late 2000s because it was consistently rated as one of the best performing AV suites available, and it didn't have the bloat of Norton or McAfee.
Having the NSA blackball it, the same way they complain about encryption schemes not having backdoors to which they have the keys to, is just another recommendation going for it.
Show me evidence of Kaspersky being used to steal identities and/or financial information, then I'd reconsider using it.
Meanwhile, all that funding that should have gone to improve actual educational resources for the students is instead wasted on a "defense system" that probably won't defend against anything.
IIRC, according to reports, the blame for US life expectancy falling lands at the feet of increased deaths caused by the opioid crisis courtesy of big pharma.
Even then, it's hard to imagine China surpassing US in life expectancy with the pollution problems they have.
The government pays out a lot of subsidies, not just those for renewable energy infrastructure. Fossil fuels are subsidized, nuclear energy programs are subsidized, farms are subsidized, and on and on. I don't think that what is spent on renewables and renewable infrastructure is significantly disproportionate from other expenditures made both past and present.
There is new battery tech being developed, mostly in response to the demand and adoption of EVs that wouldn't happen if we didn't have them. Without supporting infrastructure people wouldn't be buying EVs. Unless you want the government to fund nearly 100% of the R&D for 25+ years in isolation, this is how stuff gets out - incrementally. Infrastructure isn't once and done, it can be and does get upgraded as need requires.
Tesla isn't the only player in the EV market, they're just the most recognized. "Traditional" car companies are working on and testing their own EVs, in fact the Nissan Leaf has been on sale for years. Take a look at chargehub.com 's map of chargers: you'll actually find just as many, if not far more, level 3 EV charge stations than Tesla Superchargers. At least in areas where there is a demand for them.
Have journalists always been weaponized idiots?
The parent is absolutely right. Kodi does not allow and has never supported copyright infringement, and they have at times vehemently gone after people that sell boxes with Kodi preinstalled with Third Party plug-ins that allow for such. Like many open source projects though, their time and resources are limited.
Many consumer electronic devices are beyond the simple repairs of yester-year's picture tube TV sets. Not only are the devices much more complicated than they used to be, the very concept of repair manuals is flat out scarce, and then there's the problem of built-in obsolesce as well.
We do need a much better electronics recycling program. Part of which would take those devices that are repairable, fix them, and then sell them at low cost of give them to people that don't have, and can't afford to buy new off the shelf. But when you've got fried circuits that require a replacement part that only the manufacturer can provide, it's not a cheap and easy fix.
On the subject of tariffs however? This move is just plain stupid. We don't manufacture finished products here in the States. This is going to end up being a straight up tax on the middle class, and it's only going to further blow up in our faces. You can't transition from a free trade economy to a protectionist economy overnight, and running around throwing up huge tariffs on imports is not going to hurt the countries we import from nearly as much as it's going to hurt us. It takes years, decades even to setup the manufacturing facilities and establish a sufficient supply chain to assemble a complex product. Meanwhile, it's a big world out there and there are plenty of other people China can sell to and buy from.
IIRC North Korea does have a lot of rare earth element deposits inside it's territory that could be used in consumer electronics. But as long as there is no peace and sanctions remain in place those deposits will never be tapped.
And let's not forget the potential damage to major consumer electronics manufacturers and software/video game industries if war breaks out in the region and damages facilities in South Korea or Japan (even if neither were attacked directly nuclear fallout could be a huge disaster if president pinhead punches his big red button).
A burger flipping robot was a flawed idea. Servo motors can't easily and quickly articulate the kind of motions necessary to flip burgers reliably as efficiently as a human can. If you really wanted to machine grill burgers, you'd make more of a conveyor based machine to do it, just like you have conveyor based pizza ovens. (And there are in fact, conveyor based broilers)
AI is capable of driving a car however. Self driving cars aren't being implemented as a physical robot in the driver's seat, so a robot's limited range of articulation isn't a factor. Many cars already drive-by-wire systems - so it's just a matter of switching the digital input from the normal interface to the AI. The rest is just a matter of giving the AI enough sensory input and training to handle the process of driving - which is why we've got all these prototypes on the road collecting data.
In a few years, once self driving technology has properly matured, we'll see the PR campaigns to go along with it to remind the public about the dangers of human driving and convince them of the enhanced safety of riding in a self driving vehicle. And the majority of people will swallow it hook, line, and sinker whether it's true or not if the advertising guys do their job right.
At one point Netflix DVD could recognize discs that were part of a series and there was an option to have them not sent out of order. While it seems they still recognize a series of discs, the option to not send them out of order seems to have disappeared. Not sure if it's just automatically done these days or if it's no longer an option at all.
Fun fact though, (not for series) if you have a large queue and you front load the titles that are marked as having a wait time at the top of it they'll end up occasionally sending you an extra disc as one with a wait just happens to become available while it's in the middle of processing the shipment of a different disc that isn't.
I'd say that the point at which AI is powerful enough to where these laws might be able to apply to it, is also the point where AI become AL (artificial life) and we end up with an entire other series of ethical problems to worry about (robotic slavery, robotic rights, robot uprising, etc).
Also, where's the laws saying that:
A robot may not modify itself or others to remove these laws or alter the adherence to these laws.
A robot is not permitted to reinterpret these laws to have any meaning other than their explicitly stated ones.
The other big difference is that back in the 50s/60s only one bread winner was required per household. Nowadays it can be quite difficult to get by even with two working adults in a household, unless one or both of them is/are college educated and has a higher paying job. Even then, the cost and difficulty of raising children when both parents work full time is enough to make many choose not to have children.
Net Neutrality is a separate issue from the regional monopoly BS that most ISPs enjoy. That doesn't make it unimportant after we've already had blatant examples of both Verizon https://www.theverge.com/2017/... and Comcast https://consumerist.com/2014/0... throttling streaming video services like Netflix to try and get customers to subscribe to their services instead or to extort money from streaming video providers.
And that's where I think things get murky fast. I'll be the first to admit I don't understand the details of what happened between Verizon, Comcast, and Netflix. In general terms, I think it was basically a contract dispute about who was going to pay whom for what. I guarantee armies of lawyers and CxOs were involved in the negotiations and I'm not going to try to outguess them. I'm pretty sure Comcast and Verizon would find it a Pyrrhic victory if they really reduced the quality of Netfilx streams for no good reason other than to make their service look better. Anyway, we have ways to resolve contract disputes, they slug it out in courts and the court of public opinion and eventually settle. I, personally, am more comfortable depending on that process than FCC regulation.
Just a few things to add re: Net Neutrality: The Netflix and ISPs throttling streaming video was just one example (the most prominent). In 2007 the FCC took Comcast to court over throttling P2P traffic and forced them to knock it off. Unfortunately, the courts overturned this ruling in 2010 because they ruled that the FCC did not have the authority to issue commands regarding Comcast's shaping practices. But, the courts gave the FCC another option: reclassification. That's why the FCC reclassified broadband services under Title II common carrier protections in 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Other services that have previously been (and are sometimes still) affected by ISPs throttling/shaping traffic are VoIP services (ex Skype and others) as well as VPN use. VoIP services (particularly free ones like Discord) don't have the money to fight ISPs in the courts, but worse is VPN service. VPNs are used by any number of small businesses and individuals and to this day Comcast is still presumably guilty of throttling users' VPN traffic (a quick google search will return dozens of user complaints re: Comcast vs VPN). Short of a class action lawsuit, small businesses and individuals are never going to get Comcast to stop messing with VPN traffic, especially without a solid foundation like them being in violation of Net Neutrality rules to take them to court over.
They'd probably make actual profit if it was an adult video service.
I don't know that throwing away the Democratic brand would necessarily be a negative, it's gotten fairly tarnished. Connections depend on which connections you're talking about. Connections to big business and industry? Lobbyists? Overpriced consulting firms? Law firms? Civil rights organizations? Seems to me that the Dems have as many if not more negative connections as positive ones.
But, yes, given the current state of affairs (and going along with my original statement regarding the impossibility of getting a third party on the ballot), it is far more effective and productive in the short term to try and take over the Democratic Party than to form a new party. I think long term remains to be seen and probably depends on the outcome of the short term.
When is this bullshit going to stop?
By the time the USofA joins the EU. Now the UK is all but gone we can do with another English language group.
You probably wouldn't want one with as much baggage as the US has.
If it wasn't next to impossible to get a third party on the general election ballot, I'd say that progressives should split from the democrats and form their own progressive party. "The US Progressive Party - Moving the country forward."
Net Neutrality is a separate issue from the regional monopoly BS that most ISPs enjoy. That doesn't make it unimportant after we've already had blatant examples of both Verizon https://www.theverge.com/2017/... and Comcast https://consumerist.com/2014/0... throttling streaming video services like Netflix to try and get customers to subscribe to their services instead or to extort money from streaming video providers.
You're not wrong about how congress is supposed to work and how fragile policy put in place solely by the executive branch is. Unfortunately, our congress is almost completely broken, and has been for years, decades even. https://www.realclearscience.c... Maybe if we can accomplish goals like getting money out of politics, implement systems like ranked choice voting, stop voter suppression, make voting easier with early voting/no excuse needed absentee ballots or some other fix, and get a healthy five or six active political parties going we can have a truly representative democracy again. But that's a very big, and very long if.
Not true. Everyone could vote for it in the House, and then it will go to the president...
Veto. Dead and done.
One the other hand, how about those same people in the Senate and the House stop wasting time with this stupid gesture and make a law. Eh that would take real work... Lets just play the politics game.
There are some interpretations of the CRA that argue that if the bill passes then the FCC won't be able to reclassify broadband service ever again, effectively making the Title II classification permanent.
I don't think I'd trust congress to actually write a new law involving Net Neutrality. We've already seen some attempts at this after the original FCC vote was in the news and they contained some pretty big loop holes. The Title II classification is probably the best and safest way to ensure Net Neutrality continues to exist in a way that benefits the average consumer.
It's always a politics game. According to polls some exceedingly high percentage of Americans favor Net Neutrality (somewhere around 85% iirc), and yet the bill just barely passed the senate on a nearly complete party line vote. If that kind of partisanship continues to show itself in the house then the bill is already dead since the Republicans have a 43 seat majority. And Trump is never going to reenact anything that had Obama's name even remotely attached to it. So yeah, in the end it's just a ploy for votes come November.
I think Washington was actually the first to pass it's own Net Neutrality law in response to Pai's bs move. However, IIRC part of Pai's bs was also some garbage that was intended to preempt and prevent states from enacting their own Net Neutrality laws, so it's going to come down to the courts either way.
It's worse when you realize that both options are probably bought and paid for by big money interests.