What you're talking about is socialism. It's wasteful and inefficient. It sounds good when you assume that the money will go to the right people, but it never does, even when the officials aren't corrupt, because there are only a few officials. Capitalism gets everyone doing their best to calculate where their money will do them the most good. You still don't get perfect answers, but you generally get better ones.
Direct profit incentives from the users to the creators are possible for open source software, but require an active approach from the users, and a cooperative one from the creators. It's called open donation. It says, "Look at what this guy did! I like it so much I'm giving him money, so if you want some of my money, just be more like him!"
It's just getting rolling (there might be as little as a few million dollars a month going around as donations to for-profit groups), but it'll catch on and be big business some day. Give it time.
I don't remember the precise expression, but in its language, it was much closer to:
Datum: Members of the class of humans are intelligent. Datum: Individual entity Cyc is intelligent. Query: Individual entity Cyc is member of the class of humans?
It's not a direct logical conclusion, but it's a question worth asking, which is what the programmers were shooting for.
Don't get me wrong, I think Cyc was a good academic exercise, a worthy experiment, and it will pay off for the field in the long term. I don't think the project is generating a practical system, though. Some investors are getting royally screwed, and it's being taken to an insane stage of development.
MULE . o O (The carrot's only a yard in front of me, so that means it's only two or three steps away!)
Basically, Cyc finds questionable conclusions following backwards reasoning, then asks humans for confirmation. A decent strategy, when you consider that the structure of common human knowledge is built to work for people with less than perfect logic.
The exchange went something like: Datum: Humans are intelligent. Datum: Cyc is intelligent. Query: Cyc is a human?
Not in natural language, though, but its custom data language.
That, to me, is the biggest weakness of the system. IMHO, tying the data to a natural language, or to the real world in any other way, will take as much work as building up the knowledge directly tied to a natural language. This elaborate, detached structure is basically wasted effort, castles in the clouds, which is why they've had such a hard time applying it to the real world.
Re:Change the data: change the conclusion
on
Data Quality Act
·
· Score: 2
Rememeber, at the end of the day, a civil servant is there to serve us.
"State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies too; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.' " -Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathushtra
...but only for musicians who play their instruments 6+ hours every day.
How many of those are there? Compare to the number of people who use keyboards for 6+ hours per day.
The problem for musicians is old and well-recognized, so exercises and techniques to avoid RSI are part of the formal education of almost every serious music student.
So it's a relatively small pool of people, many of whom are carefully taught to avoid the problem. Of course you're not going to hear about it much.
You obviously haven't heard of next year's project: "I Can't Believe It's Not Human Bravery!" the human bravery substitute in a can.
Now, these results are purely preliminary, but in early field testing 9 out of 10 guerilla soldiers, terrorists, and hostage-takers couldn't tell the difference!
Folgers Defense Contracting is also working on a crystalline substitute of some kind.
What about the Dragon's Breath (a self-propelled, autonomous microwave for warming field rations) or the Dragon's [censored] (a self-propelled autonomous latrine)?
These are especially important since the Dragon Warrior is unlikely to ever be put into service due to issues with infinite loops in the control software ("Dost thou love me?" "No" "But thou must!"), and a vulnerability to enemy subversion, despite self-destruct failsafes. Also, there is a considerable amount of tuning and calibration that each unit must go through under battlefield conditions, and there aren't always enough slimes and drakees to use for target practice. Finally, budget cuts threaten to drastically under-equip each unit, and simulations show that the operators quickly resort to looting defeated enemies.
File under "High-tech product obeys manufacturer over owner."
You laugh now, but wait until your flying car automatically lands at a McDonalds every hour during any long trip. A feature they didn't tell you about when you bought it. In fact, one that didn't exist when you bought it...
Thank you, I'll take the product that you can't reprogram remotely. The one that works for me.
But it's not healthy for a society to arrange things so there is such a large advantage to disobeying unenforceable rules.
It breeds disrespect for the rule of law.
People stop just obeying the law, and start calculating the odds of being caught. In competitive situations they have no choice but to weigh the chance of being caught against the chance of losing out to those who have no respect for the law.
It doesn't help that the laws are basically arbitrary and unproductive. It's cheaper to clone software than to develop it in the first place, and that's a completely legal way to destroy someone else's incentive to innovate.
So what's your ethical motivation to pay for cloneware? To encourage the useless duplication of effort? Sounds like a negative value proposition to me.
It's not good for laws to be at odds with ethics, either, for the stronger versions of the same reasons.
For almost any software problem, there are a thousand ways to solve it. A good programmer will pick one very quickly. Another equally good programmer will pick a completely different one, in about the same amount of time. Arguably, each of the thousand ways is non-obvious, even though any skilled programmer will pick one, because even if you take ten programmers and ask them to solve the problem, there's only about a one in a hundred chance than any of them will pick the one you're testing for obviousness.
By the standards of any other field, most full-time programmers come up with a dozen or more patentable ideas every day. Unlike in other fields, where an idea takes an expensive cooperative idea to develop, the programmer also implements them about as fast as he invents them, and it costs almost nothing to distribute the development. The main barrier to patenting software is not finding ideas worth developing, but the cost of the patent process itself.
Patents don't really promote invention. They promote factory-building. Manufacturers don't want to take a chance on a novel product when another manufacturer can just come along, see how they did it, and do it for a quarter of the investment. This consideration obviously doesn't apply to software.
Patents make some degree of sense when there's a large enough investment in developing a product that the additional trouble of doing a patent search is a small part of the total expense, because the cost of design is dwarfed by the cost of manufacturing. When there's nothing but design, and the cost of patent searches threaten to be the main cost, then patents are utterly counterproductive.
In one of the articles on him, I read about him pointing out this seashell, and how it closely resembled one of his automata. Well, duh. How else would cells organize themselves? They don't line up in neat grids, and they move around sometimes, but of course the growth (and practically everything else) of cellular organisms will be closely related to cellular automata.
I don't think anyone has been disputing that.
Could the basic building blocks of the universe be modeled this way? Maybe. But it's not going to matter. The universe we see and measure would be emergent properties, anyway, and it's pretty well established that perfect measurement is impossible.
The problem with cellular automata is that they're hard to approximate. You can't predict the general behavior of a million-square game of Life with a thousand grey squares.
You could have your model of the universe in 4 lines of code, and not be able do a damn thing with it. A finite system can't contain a copy of itself (let alone one running at a higher speed) in one corner. So we could neither confirm such a model nor apply it.
I'm sure of only one practical application of this admittedly revolutionary development of cellular automata: this is going to form the foundations of some terrific computer games. I want a copy of that book. It's no 42, but I'm sure it's awfully interesting anyway.
Just think of it as a physics textbook. As college textbooks go, it's not exceptionally large. My favorite basic physics text is bigger than any phone book I've seen.
I had one manager who was adamant that for any medium sized project there ought to be NO time spent on making the code re-usable. Every line of code should be directly related to specific aspects of the customer's requirements/specification document. At first I thought he was crazy.
I had a guy who thought dynamic memory allocation should be avoided at all costs, and you should never use a data structure more complex than an array.
I still think he's crazy, but now I see his point. I mean, he was terrible for global variables and giant functions, but his programs never leaked memory and very rarely wrote to bad pointers. If you don't need dynamic memory allocation, you shouldn't use it, and when you do need it, you should only have one malloc and one free (or equivalent) for every dynamic data structure. Often, you only need one or two, even in a relatively large and featureful program. That way, I can write a good page of error handling code and comments on memory consumption for each dynamic memory access, and it saves me a lot of grief.
I don't like reusing code, either, unless you can make a good case for it being a part of the underlying system. I like the analogy of an architect stapling someone else's blueprint of a fully-equipped foundry and machine shop to his design because the inhabitants will need a screwdriver. Reuse means bloat, and bloat is bad. Every extra line you add is another place for a bug to hide.
You just have to ignore all the opinion that goes along with it and form your own conclusion.
I mean, did you know about the Solaris problems? I didn't, and I find it interesting. I mean sure, every UNIX deviates a little, and causes some compatibility problems, but I have really been bothered by the attitude displayed in some of the GNU documentation. For example, I remember reading about the gcc extensions, and how you should go ahead and use them because everybody should be using gcc.
RISKS is a big pile of random technology problems, accompanied by off-the-cuff commentary usually by non-experts (who don't seem to shout "I am not an expert!" as typically as most discussion groups). It makes a great jumping-off point for case studies for the continuous education any good tech needs, but a lousy source of pre-packaged judgements.
I mean, they let practically anyone post, you expect a zillion monkeys at keyboards to come up with a professional journal of technology risks?
Yeah, this is exactly what the industry needs: price controls and mandatory redistribution of wealth according to government policy. That has just worked so very well in the past.
Anything is better than a this proposed tax and commercial welfare system. Well, except perhaps outlawing general purpose computers and network equipment (such as by mandating universal DRM).
Look for the small print: "Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is, hence this game system is only to be used for acting out movie scenes exactly as they were presented."
You claimed that the Segway is a "vehicle" and a "motor vehicle". I say it isn't.
It's simple English. You ride on it, it was built to ride on from place to place, so it's a vehicle. It's driven by a motor, so it's a motor vehicle.
If you're talking about whether it meets the specialized definition of a motor vehicle in a certain act, that's not what I was arguing. We're talking about whether there's a basis in the common law for regulating this conveyance.
You made slanderous statements that I recklessly endangered other travelers.
You're talking about riding an unfamiliar conveyance through an area intended for foot traffic. This is a hazard by default. If you are arrested on these grounds (which I am not stipulating would be necessary for your arrest), you might have a chance with a positive defense that your conveyance does not impose a significant additional risk on other traffic, but a positive defense puts the burden of proof on you.
You'd lose, anyway, because the destructive potential of a careless Segway rider is greater than that of a careless person walking, by virtue of added mass and the fact that you don't need to exert an unusual effort to accelerate to a hazardous speed.
We are assuming a warrantless arrest was made (California vehicle code 40300 or your state's equivalent)
Oh, "we" are? I have been assuming no such thing. Unless you have a very good reason why we must in this case, you're just baselessly insisting on
If the position is that it's a hazard (again, not stipulating), its use disturbs the peace, just like waving a gun around, even if you don't fire it.
...prove your case, Mr. Prosecutor...
Now, what you're doing here is trying to shift the burden of proof onto me, by putting me into the role of prosecutor. Then you're changing the argument to all of these fine points of specific laws.
But I'm not the prosecutor, I'm not an accuser, I'm a challenger of your unorthodox claim that the government has no right to regulate Segway traffic, despite the well-known precedents of them successfully regulating any other form of conveyance they please. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The burden of proof must rest on you.
And, to be frank, you're being a crackpot. Listen to yourself, your argument is taking the form of: "First put this obvious practical consideration aside, next put that generally-accepted fact aside unless you can prove it to my satisfaction, now you take the general burden of proof against my strange claim..."
Crackpotism is a terrible habit to fall into. Sensible people learn to ignore you and you end up spending all your time arguing with other crackpots who each put the burden of proof on each other, make noises back and forth, then walk away each feeling that they won the "debate." Knock it off. It's not good for you.
Now it's true that you put it in the form of a question, but the uncertainty in that question relies on an assumption that references a familiar (utterly crackpot) misconception of legal rigidity. I moved to dismiss the question by attacking that foundation (first, and most importantly, the rigid theory of law deriving strictly from an unbroken chain to ancient laws of other countries does not accurately describe the process by which laws are made or dismissed, regardless of how much tidier this might seem; second, even this ancient principle of the right to use public easement for private travel was never free from restrictions on the mode of transportation, in particular ones against established custom and introducing an additional hazard), and you moved to champion your bizarre structure of assumptions (however incompetently) by demanding I disprove it before we continue.
I'm not here to prove the conventional wisdom to your satisfaction. Your strange and interesting assumption attracted me to try and throw a monkey wrench into it, and see whether you can produce any support for it. If your response to such an attack, as its only present promoter, is to shift the burden of proof (and thus change your position from "this is true" to "this has not been proven untrue"), it is no longer even an interesting claim, but an undistinguished possibility among infinite possibilities. A waste of time.
Your unsupported assumptions are no longer even interesting. You certainly shouldn't expect a more direct response just because you complain that you aren't getting an answer that accepts your unsupported assumptions.
I would really like an answer better than "because we say so".
When it comes right down to it, all law is ultimately based on, "because we say so," backed up with the threat of violent retribution. Different laws and principles of law are just seperated from this by greater or lesser degrees of derivation. There's a principle that it's better if you can introduce new laws and principles as non-contradictory clarifications of old, established principles, but it's not an absolute requirement that must be followed in an unbroken chain to the country's founding. Last year's precedent is more relevant and valid than one that's two-hundred years old, even if they are contradictory and that means there's a break in the chain of derivation where someone just said, "because I said so," and everybody who mattered eventually went along with it.
If there was ever any question of whether government has the right to regulate any and all modes of transportation on public paths and roads, it was solved in this manner a long time ago. Whether the government could have done it 200 years ago is a moot point.
If that's unsatisfying for you, too damn bad. This is real life, not some abstract logic game. Apply some common sense!
I mean, look at their progression: Disney Land, Disney World...
It's pretty clear where they're headed.
"Please keep all parts of your body inside the vehicle at all times, for your own safety from moving parts and hard vacuum. No flash photography is permitted."
"Piracy is not a private offense, it hurts everyone by diminishing the incentive to invest in the creation of music."
Actually, this primarily hurts the pirate. Other people aren't particularly benefitted by someone else encouraging investment in his own taste in music. If Britney Spears fans don't pay for her music, non-fans won't be hurt by her going into another business, and people who actively dislike her won't have to hear her on the radio or at parties any more.
Encouragement or non-encouragement of further production is very much a private, individual issue.
They're in for the long haul. They know people will buy the GameCube for the Mario/Zelda/Metroid games when they come out. They're not going to abandon their system, or development of their flagship products, just because people haven't bought it on the merits of the first wave software.
I also believe that their next portable platform will play GC discs. Long haul.
If I ran a game company, I'd be working on GC games. Ones with big, readable text for small screens.
...and that's after Saturn sold at a loss. It cost them nearly a billion dollars and put them out of the hardware business. That kind of thinking is what killed the Dreamcast.
It was a seriously over-ambitious system. The electronics were too expensive (hence the loss), and (likely in an attempt to compensate) the other parts were cheap and poorly designed. When you pick up a Dreamcast controller in your hands, it screams "Piece of junk!" through your fingers.
Sega needed it to sell big, and sell lots of games to make up the loss, basically to push Playstation aside right out the gate. It didn't, and by the time word started getting around about the great games, talk of the Playstation 2 killed it.
It didn't look or feel like a better system than the Playstation, and it was launched with the unrealistic expectation of (and desperate need for) a quick win. People perceived it as a loser box, a machine that would be abandoned, and lo and behold it was. This drove away users and developers alike.
It's true, good games aren't enough to carry a system. You also need a solid strategy for more new games, and a system that looks like you should buy it and feels like something worth hundreds of dollars.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are sincere in wanting to learn the truth, then read this book Steal this idea, amazon.
Oh, so now we come to it, you spammy troll.
You know, it would probably be less obvious and more successful if you didn't post your referrer link half a dozen times in the same thread.
What you're talking about is socialism. It's wasteful and inefficient. It sounds good when you assume that the money will go to the right people, but it never does, even when the officials aren't corrupt, because there are only a few officials. Capitalism gets everyone doing their best to calculate where their money will do them the most good. You still don't get perfect answers, but you generally get better ones.
Direct profit incentives from the users to the creators are possible for open source software, but require an active approach from the users, and a cooperative one from the creators. It's called open donation. It says, "Look at what this guy did! I like it so much I'm giving him money, so if you want some of my money, just be more like him!"
It's just getting rolling (there might be as little as a few million dollars a month going around as donations to for-profit groups), but it'll catch on and be big business some day. Give it time.
I don't remember the precise expression, but in its language, it was much closer to:
Datum: Members of the class of humans are intelligent.
Datum: Individual entity Cyc is intelligent.
Query: Individual entity Cyc is member of the class of humans?
It's not a direct logical conclusion, but it's a question worth asking, which is what the programmers were shooting for.
Don't get me wrong, I think Cyc was a good academic exercise, a worthy experiment, and it will pay off for the field in the long term. I don't think the project is generating a practical system, though. Some investors are getting royally screwed, and it's being taken to an insane stage of development.
MULE . o O (The carrot's only a yard in front of me, so that means it's only two or three steps away!)
Not exactly as exciting as it sounds.
Basically, Cyc finds questionable conclusions following backwards reasoning, then asks humans for confirmation. A decent strategy, when you consider that the structure of common human knowledge is built to work for people with less than perfect logic.
The exchange went something like:
Datum: Humans are intelligent.
Datum: Cyc is intelligent.
Query: Cyc is a human?
Not in natural language, though, but its custom data language.
That, to me, is the biggest weakness of the system. IMHO, tying the data to a natural language, or to the real world in any other way, will take as much work as building up the knowledge directly tied to a natural language. This elaborate, detached structure is basically wasted effort, castles in the clouds, which is why they've had such a hard time applying it to the real world.
Have your keyboard in the natural ass-scratching position.
(and make one for under $20)
Rememeber, at the end of the day, a civil servant is there to serve us.
"State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies too; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.' "
-Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathushtra
...but only for musicians who play their instruments 6+ hours every day.
How many of those are there? Compare to the number of people who use keyboards for 6+ hours per day.
The problem for musicians is old and well-recognized, so exercises and techniques to avoid RSI are part of the formal education of almost every serious music student.
So it's a relatively small pool of people, many of whom are carefully taught to avoid the problem. Of course you're not going to hear about it much.
You obviously haven't heard of next year's project: "I Can't Believe It's Not Human Bravery!" the human bravery substitute in a can.
Now, these results are purely preliminary, but in early field testing 9 out of 10 guerilla soldiers, terrorists, and hostage-takers couldn't tell the difference!
Folgers Defense Contracting is also working on a crystalline substitute of some kind.
What about the Dragon's Breath (a self-propelled, autonomous microwave for warming field rations) or the Dragon's [censored] (a self-propelled autonomous latrine)?
These are especially important since the Dragon Warrior is unlikely to ever be put into service due to issues with infinite loops in the control software ("Dost thou love me?" "No" "But thou must!"), and a vulnerability to enemy subversion, despite self-destruct failsafes. Also, there is a considerable amount of tuning and calibration that each unit must go through under battlefield conditions, and there aren't always enough slimes and drakees to use for target practice. Finally, budget cuts threaten to drastically under-equip each unit, and simulations show that the operators quickly resort to looting defeated enemies.
File under "High-tech product obeys manufacturer over owner."
You laugh now, but wait until your flying car automatically lands at a McDonalds every hour during any long trip. A feature they didn't tell you about when you bought it. In fact, one that didn't exist when you bought it...
Thank you, I'll take the product that you can't reprogram remotely. The one that works for me.
If I steal a car from the dealership, the dealership is MORALLY OBLIGATED to give me warranty on the stolen car?
If you steal a car from the dealership, the dealership is MORALLY ENTITLED to remotely cut the brake lines on the stolen car?
The issue here is that unpatched machines are a public hazard. I'm not necessarily agreeing with the original poster, but it's a complicated issue.
But it's not healthy for a society to arrange things so there is such a large advantage to disobeying unenforceable rules.
It breeds disrespect for the rule of law.
People stop just obeying the law, and start calculating the odds of being caught. In competitive situations they have no choice but to weigh the chance of being caught against the chance of losing out to those who have no respect for the law.
It doesn't help that the laws are basically arbitrary and unproductive. It's cheaper to clone software than to develop it in the first place, and that's a completely legal way to destroy someone else's incentive to innovate.
So what's your ethical motivation to pay for cloneware? To encourage the useless duplication of effort? Sounds like a negative value proposition to me.
It's not good for laws to be at odds with ethics, either, for the stronger versions of the same reasons.
For almost any software problem, there are a thousand ways to solve it. A good programmer will pick one very quickly. Another equally good programmer will pick a completely different one, in about the same amount of time. Arguably, each of the thousand ways is non-obvious, even though any skilled programmer will pick one, because even if you take ten programmers and ask them to solve the problem, there's only about a one in a hundred chance than any of them will pick the one you're testing for obviousness.
By the standards of any other field, most full-time programmers come up with a dozen or more patentable ideas every day. Unlike in other fields, where an idea takes an expensive cooperative idea to develop, the programmer also implements them about as fast as he invents them, and it costs almost nothing to distribute the development. The main barrier to patenting software is not finding ideas worth developing, but the cost of the patent process itself.
Patents don't really promote invention. They promote factory-building. Manufacturers don't want to take a chance on a novel product when another manufacturer can just come along, see how they did it, and do it for a quarter of the investment. This consideration obviously doesn't apply to software.
Patents make some degree of sense when there's a large enough investment in developing a product that the additional trouble of doing a patent search is a small part of the total expense, because the cost of design is dwarfed by the cost of manufacturing. When there's nothing but design, and the cost of patent searches threaten to be the main cost, then patents are utterly counterproductive.
I've heard of the company this guy works for. Their products are a load of crap.
In one of the articles on him, I read about him pointing out this seashell, and how it closely resembled one of his automata. Well, duh. How else would cells organize themselves? They don't line up in neat grids, and they move around sometimes, but of course the growth (and practically everything else) of cellular organisms will be closely related to cellular automata.
I don't think anyone has been disputing that.
Could the basic building blocks of the universe be modeled this way? Maybe. But it's not going to matter. The universe we see and measure would be emergent properties, anyway, and it's pretty well established that perfect measurement is impossible.
The problem with cellular automata is that they're hard to approximate. You can't predict the general behavior of a million-square game of Life with a thousand grey squares.
You could have your model of the universe in 4 lines of code, and not be able do a damn thing with it. A finite system can't contain a copy of itself (let alone one running at a higher speed) in one corner. So we could neither confirm such a model nor apply it.
I'm sure of only one practical application of this admittedly revolutionary development of cellular automata: this is going to form the foundations of some terrific computer games. I want a copy of that book. It's no 42, but I'm sure it's awfully interesting anyway.
Just think of it as a physics textbook. As college textbooks go, it's not exceptionally large. My favorite basic physics text is bigger than any phone book I've seen.
I had one manager who was adamant that for any medium sized project there ought to be NO time spent on making the code re-usable. Every line of code should be directly related to specific aspects of the customer's requirements/specification document. At first I thought he was crazy.
I had a guy who thought dynamic memory allocation should be avoided at all costs, and you should never use a data structure more complex than an array.
I still think he's crazy, but now I see his point. I mean, he was terrible for global variables and giant functions, but his programs never leaked memory and very rarely wrote to bad pointers. If you don't need dynamic memory allocation, you shouldn't use it, and when you do need it, you should only have one malloc and one free (or equivalent) for every dynamic data structure. Often, you only need one or two, even in a relatively large and featureful program. That way, I can write a good page of error handling code and comments on memory consumption for each dynamic memory access, and it saves me a lot of grief.
I don't like reusing code, either, unless you can make a good case for it being a part of the underlying system. I like the analogy of an architect stapling someone else's blueprint of a fully-equipped foundry and machine shop to his design because the inhabitants will need a screwdriver. Reuse means bloat, and bloat is bad. Every extra line you add is another place for a bug to hide.
You just have to ignore all the opinion that goes along with it and form your own conclusion.
I mean, did you know about the Solaris problems? I didn't, and I find it interesting. I mean sure, every UNIX deviates a little, and causes some compatibility problems, but I have really been bothered by the attitude displayed in some of the GNU documentation. For example, I remember reading about the gcc extensions, and how you should go ahead and use them because everybody should be using gcc.
RISKS is a big pile of random technology problems, accompanied by off-the-cuff commentary usually by non-experts (who don't seem to shout "I am not an expert!" as typically as most discussion groups). It makes a great jumping-off point for case studies for the continuous education any good tech needs, but a lousy source of pre-packaged judgements.
I mean, they let practically anyone post, you expect a zillion monkeys at keyboards to come up with a professional journal of technology risks?
Yeah, this is exactly what the industry needs: price controls and mandatory redistribution of wealth according to government policy. That has just worked so very well in the past.
Anything is better than a this proposed tax and commercial welfare system. Well, except perhaps outlawing general purpose computers and network equipment (such as by mandating universal DRM).
Look for the small print: "Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is, hence this game system is only to be used for acting out movie scenes exactly as they were presented."
(okay, maybe that's 5 words)
You claimed that the Segway is a "vehicle" and a "motor vehicle". I say it isn't.
...prove your case, Mr. Prosecutor...
It's simple English. You ride on it, it was built to ride on from place to place, so it's a vehicle. It's driven by a motor, so it's a motor vehicle.
If you're talking about whether it meets the specialized definition of a motor vehicle in a certain act, that's not what I was arguing. We're talking about whether there's a basis in the common law for regulating this conveyance.
You made slanderous statements that I recklessly endangered other travelers.
You're talking about riding an unfamiliar conveyance through an area intended for foot traffic. This is a hazard by default. If you are arrested on these grounds (which I am not stipulating would be necessary for your arrest), you might have a chance with a positive defense that your conveyance does not impose a significant additional risk on other traffic, but a positive defense puts the burden of proof on you.
You'd lose, anyway, because the destructive potential of a careless Segway rider is greater than that of a careless person walking, by virtue of added mass and the fact that you don't need to exert an unusual effort to accelerate to a hazardous speed.
We are assuming a warrantless arrest was made (California vehicle code 40300 or your state's equivalent)
Oh, "we" are? I have been assuming no such thing. Unless you have a very good reason why we must in this case, you're just baselessly insisting on
If the position is that it's a hazard (again, not stipulating), its use disturbs the peace, just like waving a gun around, even if you don't fire it.
Now, what you're doing here is trying to shift the burden of proof onto me, by putting me into the role of prosecutor. Then you're changing the argument to all of these fine points of specific laws.
But I'm not the prosecutor, I'm not an accuser, I'm a challenger of your unorthodox claim that the government has no right to regulate Segway traffic, despite the well-known precedents of them successfully regulating any other form of conveyance they please. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The burden of proof must rest on you.
And, to be frank, you're being a crackpot. Listen to yourself, your argument is taking the form of: "First put this obvious practical consideration aside, next put that generally-accepted fact aside unless you can prove it to my satisfaction, now you take the general burden of proof against my strange claim..."
Crackpotism is a terrible habit to fall into. Sensible people learn to ignore you and you end up spending all your time arguing with other crackpots who each put the burden of proof on each other, make noises back and forth, then walk away each feeling that they won the "debate." Knock it off. It's not good for you.
Now it's true that you put it in the form of a question, but the uncertainty in that question relies on an assumption that references a familiar (utterly crackpot) misconception of legal rigidity. I moved to dismiss the question by attacking that foundation (first, and most importantly, the rigid theory of law deriving strictly from an unbroken chain to ancient laws of other countries does not accurately describe the process by which laws are made or dismissed, regardless of how much tidier this might seem; second, even this ancient principle of the right to use public easement for private travel was never free from restrictions on the mode of transportation, in particular ones against established custom and introducing an additional hazard), and you moved to champion your bizarre structure of assumptions (however incompetently) by demanding I disprove it before we continue.
I'm not here to prove the conventional wisdom to your satisfaction. Your strange and interesting assumption attracted me to try and throw a monkey wrench into it, and see whether you can produce any support for it. If your response to such an attack, as its only present promoter, is to shift the burden of proof (and thus change your position from "this is true" to "this has not been proven untrue"), it is no longer even an interesting claim, but an undistinguished possibility among infinite possibilities. A waste of time.
Your unsupported assumptions are no longer even interesting. You certainly shouldn't expect a more direct response just because you complain that you aren't getting an answer that accepts your unsupported assumptions.
I would really like an answer better than "because we say so".
When it comes right down to it, all law is ultimately based on, "because we say so," backed up with the threat of violent retribution. Different laws and principles of law are just seperated from this by greater or lesser degrees of derivation. There's a principle that it's better if you can introduce new laws and principles as non-contradictory clarifications of old, established principles, but it's not an absolute requirement that must be followed in an unbroken chain to the country's founding. Last year's precedent is more relevant and valid than one that's two-hundred years old, even if they are contradictory and that means there's a break in the chain of derivation where someone just said, "because I said so," and everybody who mattered eventually went along with it.
If there was ever any question of whether government has the right to regulate any and all modes of transportation on public paths and roads, it was solved in this manner a long time ago. Whether the government could have done it 200 years ago is a moot point.
If that's unsatisfying for you, too damn bad. This is real life, not some abstract logic game. Apply some common sense!
...that Disney is destined to rule the stars.
I mean, look at their progression: Disney Land, Disney World...
It's pretty clear where they're headed.
"Please keep all parts of your body inside the vehicle at all times, for your own safety from moving parts and hard vacuum. No flash photography is permitted."
"Piracy is not a private offense, it hurts everyone by diminishing the incentive to invest in the creation of music."
Actually, this primarily hurts the pirate. Other people aren't particularly benefitted by someone else encouraging investment in his own taste in music. If Britney Spears fans don't pay for her music, non-fans won't be hurt by her going into another business, and people who actively dislike her won't have to hear her on the radio or at parties any more.
Encouragement or non-encouragement of further production is very much a private, individual issue.
They're in for the long haul. They know people will buy the GameCube for the Mario/Zelda/Metroid games when they come out. They're not going to abandon their system, or development of their flagship products, just because people haven't bought it on the merits of the first wave software.
I also believe that their next portable platform will play GC discs. Long haul.
If I ran a game company, I'd be working on GC games. Ones with big, readable text for small screens.
...and that's after Saturn sold at a loss. It cost them nearly a billion dollars and put them out of the hardware business. That kind of thinking is what killed the Dreamcast.
It was a seriously over-ambitious system. The electronics were too expensive (hence the loss), and (likely in an attempt to compensate) the other parts were cheap and poorly designed. When you pick up a Dreamcast controller in your hands, it screams "Piece of junk!" through your fingers.
Sega needed it to sell big, and sell lots of games to make up the loss, basically to push Playstation aside right out the gate. It didn't, and by the time word started getting around about the great games, talk of the Playstation 2 killed it.
It didn't look or feel like a better system than the Playstation, and it was launched with the unrealistic expectation of (and desperate need for) a quick win. People perceived it as a loser box, a machine that would be abandoned, and lo and behold it was. This drove away users and developers alike.
It's true, good games aren't enough to carry a system. You also need a solid strategy for more new games, and a system that looks like you should buy it and feels like something worth hundreds of dollars.