Books are just a symptom of the underlying problems in Uganda. Considering the country's ranking on the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business Index (near the bottom on several important factors), an average person getting books at a reasonable price is just one of many issues plaguing this country: http://www.doingbusiness.org/r...
I don't think Amazon on-demand access is at the top of their long-term solutions list...
Can someone explain what the objection by Uber/Lyft was compared to background checks they already do (based on SSN/ID/DL)? They already have to physically see the person applying, don't they? Was it objection to the cost of a few fingerprint scanning terminals, the software infrastructure, or a principled objection to the regulation?
Yeah, lots of inapt examples you gave there. All of the items you quote have many other legitimate uses. In this case, the Snapchat function so intimately related to the sharing of exceptional experiences that a *rational* observer could conclude that Snapchat could have anticipated that their user base would use it in a way that might be dangerous.
That is enough of a bar to bring suit in court, and not get it immediately tossed out.
That is also why gun manufacturers are at risk of being on the hook for their products. How do you feel about that one? While guns also have a few other legitimate uses, in the case of say, assault weapons, they can be so intimately linked to contributing to the death of people that a lawsuit against them could be entertained by a reasonable observer.
So, just because a business that is successful sits within your small jurisdiction, you're entitled to a cut of taxes from everything that they produce worldwide? That's a pretty expansive argument.
I would be in support of Apple paying its rightful share of all the taxes needed to support the city infrastructure and government that it burdens. Not much more. Sounds like these councilmembers want the "more".
Well of course there's nothing wrong with taking a picture of yourself as a passenger going below the speed limit! Duh.
The point is that by the existence of a function that promotes recording your speed -- within an application that is designed to share exceptional experiences -- you might reasonably think that people would be driven to get into situations that would result in exceptional speeds. Hmm?
And do you really think that most people, even as passengers, are recording photos of themselves marked with the speed, below the speed limit, because that's cool?
That's a very charitable interpretation of the Speed filter. I think most people would recognize that recording and displaying a speed, especially in an app designed to show off your experiences in front of others, might lead to competitive behavior on the speed.
No one is showing off or competing, or trying to share their environmental temperature in the same way. That logic is a stretch.
I know there can be a kneejerk libertarian argument for personal responsibility, but certainly a rational observer could reasonably entertain the idea of "contributory negligence" against Snapchat. If Snapchat enables very easily some behavior that could be considered negligent or law-breaking, some party could sue them for contributing to a reasonably-anticipated outcome of that contribution.
If Snapchat started having a feature called "Number of red lights run!" -- would you defend them from liability?
Elsevier and other publishing conglomerates are absolutely milking researchers, universities, and governments for access to information that in many cases, these public institutions have paid for already through research subsidies, government grants, taxpayer funds, and more. So don't be too sympathetic to the claim that this is ripping off a company's intellectual property.
In case you have any love for such publishing companies, know that they are really not much better than cable companies. They bundle unpopular journals together that libraries are required to purchase, just to get access to the one journal that they actually want. They add little value aside from binding the paper journals (which is dying) or putting up paywalls to restrict access to information. They bill researchers who submit papers with per-page charges (with surcharges for "color" figures, if you can believe it) for the publication of their works which are submitted for free. And then they recruit academic researchers yet again to be editors for pennies, and then charge subscription fees to authors to access their own and other people's works, who no one got paid for but somehow Elsevier deserves a cut of.
They deserve to die a slow and painful death for all the value they have extracted from the academic community over decades. And scientists should be more vocal about wresting control of journals from them -- and I mean in a way that more effective than the current open-source / borderline-spam journals that exist out there. This is a market failure / monopoly situation that needs to be broken up like the worst examples in history.
There's a reasonable level of expectation of technology that people are gradually pushed to use, whether it's proprietary or not. When something becomes so common that everyone has relatively barrier-free and low-cost access to it, you've got to give in even if you're the government or providing a public service.
We might as well take the truly principled stand and object that interacting with the government requires having telephone service (!), paying for postage stamps (!), or paying for the bus to get to city hall (!).
We'd better be careful as a society about slowly eroding the value of in-depth, not-yet-trending or popular journalism that creates significant public value, but is hard to recognize while it's being done.
The kind of respected journalism that takes time and effort to research and write, where the journalist/researcher/writer don't have the promise of instant reward, and maybe are facing significant personal risk to find the story that takes down an injustice, powerful person, or entrenched interest.
If you don't watch out diligently, the funneling of our popular consciousness through these most-votes-win, popular-for-today, let's-not-offend-anyone, feel-good-only channels will result in us becoming more and more of a stupidity contest where the fastest, easiest, cheap thrills and sugary taste wins and we have no cultural backbone worth respecting at all.
Wow, the technology that was once shown in cheesily-uninformed future-guessing depictions in Mission Impossible and other action movies 10 years ago, is actually coming true...
Well, actually, it sounds like the Chinese government is realizing it needs its own version of the FDA.
The FDA in the US is so effective and yet underfunded, that we could afford to increase its budget by multiple x, and it would still be a wise expenditure of government funds. That organization protects us from far more than we give credit for.
Well, the thing they fundamentally misunderstand about the issue is that companies now are disclaiming ownership of the data. At least the stuff that exists purely on people's phones for example.
Senators Burr and Feinstein, failing to grasp this issue, actually have a beef with the people who now seek to use freely available encryption (which can be broken by no one practically) to protect themselves against intrusive government behavior -- which government has itself fueled by its own responsibility. Not the phone manufacturers -- which is why Apple, for example, have been racing forward to take the issue out of their own hands.
If they want access to records about who uses public networks, transmits public information, etc, etc, then fine. Tap those networks, and make those companies who transmit information comply. But hands off my data, on my device, thank you.
Regardless of whether he's correct about the exact functional distinctions between Volvo's technology and Tesla's, of one thing I am sure:
Tesla will more actively continue to improve and push out improvements to drivers faster and more conscientiously than Volvo ever can or would. And will do it as part of serving drivers better, not lining the pockets of dealers charging for minimally useful services.
Agreed, very confusing headline. Maybe a simplified way to explain it would be to say:
"This year, Tesla will singlehandedly double the amount of battery storage installed in the United States."
The point is that so little has been done at large scale with batteries/storage to date that Tesla's efforts are a big leap for the cost and installed base of battery storage, and now feasibly making off-the-grid / backup / peak shaving / frequency regulation / demand response a real possibility to experiment with at scale.
The thing to realize (and the way to view) these technology-based impacts to social/public policy is that power flows back and forth between the protagonists and antagonists over decades. And the newfound power that ordinary people now have (or just began to realize) is a gradual shift from government unsupervised/unchallenged intelligence, to protection in the hands of ordinary people.
It's a refreshing public realization of what we've been giving up, unawares, because we didn't know any better. And note that it may not even last. People may forget why we need privacy, and vigilance against an all-pervasive state. They may choose to give it up in the name (not even reality) of security. Maybe there'll be another event that changes public opinion in favor of more surveillance. Or, people might gradually see the extent that stupidity/invasiveness has reached, and continue to make decisions with their wallets and votes.
But as long as this issue has been around, the balance of power has, and will continue to, ebb and flow between the struggling parties on either side. (And note, the good guys / bad guys are not always definitively on the public/individual vs. government sides -- that can swap too.)
Congress, collectively, should get off its ass (which is being incentivized to do nothing by corporate money), and reform the tax codes with a renewed and vigorous sense of public duty. Public duty to the country, people, and public good -- not their select few lobbied corporations who don't represent the majority of companies and people who are willing to pay their taxes fairly and fully if they can see that others are doing the same.
And stop picking on Apple. Though I'm no fanboy, Apple is just one symptom of the problem. Punishing Apple isn't going to fix the 10,000 other companies that do what they do. Reform the system in general, not prune/pluck at 1-2 examples.
I would bet that in closed doors, CEOs of many companies would tell Congress to fix the damn system and make us pay more tax, if everyone were forced to follow the same rules. Stop the leakage and loopholes that are benefitting only those who are rich enough to afford the lawyers and accountants who are smart at shifting money around...
Like so many transitions, they were underambitious and didn't go far enough in the first round. They should've gone straight to chip-and-pin, which Europe uses, and enhances security further.
They worried that having PINs would confuse people, etc. etc. Boo hoo. If history shows anything, it's that providers way overestimate the cost of making these upgrades, and people get used to it and get dragged into the future quicker than you think, and there's no point delaying. Grandma needs to switch, and will deal. Two more years of delaying isn't going to make her any better at using credit cards.
So many decades of transitioning things like digital TV, paperless checks, etc, which are handicapped by half-measures. Just rip the bandaid off all at once. Most people only change when forced to anyway, so just do it now!
Look at the great (even just good) technologies that other countries use in their payment systems. Ability to run the credit card wirelessly at your restaurant table, split the bill, transfer funds (without cost and as a national system) between bank accounts, no more paper checks at all etc. Why can't we do that? A small minority of dumb people, that's who -- and we shouldn't let them hold us back.
Maybe this is a bit Rumsfeld-esque, but I don't really see what's so harsh about solitary. I experienced it for 5 years in grad school. I know what I'm talking about.
Maybe this is a bit Rumsfeld-esque, but I don't really see what's so harsh about solitary. I experienced it for 5 years in grad school. I know what I'm talking about.
Maybe if the FBI stopped requiring drug tests and lie detector tests for those employees it wants to be security and programming experts / hackers of its own, they might get some better applicants. The Venn diagram of those qualities reduces your option pool by quite a lot.
And by the way, the diversity of mobile phones in China (and Japan/Korea) is way beyond what we have here in the US, where Apple is pretty well regarded as superior to most other brands. In those countries, many other brands offer similar functionality -- and I would argue that Apple gets bought (partly) as a status symbol because of its price and Western cachet.
So having its IP copied to lower cost phones that look the same might not eat much into the (maybe limited) market that Apple could capture in China anyway. But when you're talking about a billion people, of course it adds up to a big market at stake.
Anyway, back to topic, I might argue that Apple would even prefer to develop a separate iOS and encryption key for China it it believed that someday it had to turn those over...
That is all true. I was thinking more from the security point of view. And it would be a hard choice -- compromise the security of all devices out there, or compromise the intellectual property of the company long term. In that hypothetical, it might be a decision to pull out of China altogether...
Slashdot Mirror
Books are just a symptom of the underlying problems in Uganda. Considering the country's ranking on the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business Index (near the bottom on several important factors), an average person getting books at a reasonable price is just one of many issues plaguing this country: http://www.doingbusiness.org/r... I don't think Amazon on-demand access is at the top of their long-term solutions list...
Can someone explain what the objection by Uber/Lyft was compared to background checks they already do (based on SSN/ID/DL)? They already have to physically see the person applying, don't they? Was it objection to the cost of a few fingerprint scanning terminals, the software infrastructure, or a principled objection to the regulation?
Really, so having a disagreeing opinion = Troll?
Yeah, lots of inapt examples you gave there. All of the items you quote have many other legitimate uses. In this case, the Snapchat function so intimately related to the sharing of exceptional experiences that a *rational* observer could conclude that Snapchat could have anticipated that their user base would use it in a way that might be dangerous.
That is enough of a bar to bring suit in court, and not get it immediately tossed out.
That is also why gun manufacturers are at risk of being on the hook for their products. How do you feel about that one? While guns also have a few other legitimate uses, in the case of say, assault weapons, they can be so intimately linked to contributing to the death of people that a lawsuit against them could be entertained by a reasonable observer.
So, just because a business that is successful sits within your small jurisdiction, you're entitled to a cut of taxes from everything that they produce worldwide? That's a pretty expansive argument.
I would be in support of Apple paying its rightful share of all the taxes needed to support the city infrastructure and government that it burdens. Not much more. Sounds like these councilmembers want the "more".
Well of course there's nothing wrong with taking a picture of yourself as a passenger going below the speed limit! Duh.
The point is that by the existence of a function that promotes recording your speed -- within an application that is designed to share exceptional experiences -- you might reasonably think that people would be driven to get into situations that would result in exceptional speeds. Hmm?
And do you really think that most people, even as passengers, are recording photos of themselves marked with the speed, below the speed limit, because that's cool?
That's a very charitable interpretation of the Speed filter. I think most people would recognize that recording and displaying a speed, especially in an app designed to show off your experiences in front of others, might lead to competitive behavior on the speed.
No one is showing off or competing, or trying to share their environmental temperature in the same way. That logic is a stretch.
I know there can be a kneejerk libertarian argument for personal responsibility, but certainly a rational observer could reasonably entertain the idea of "contributory negligence" against Snapchat. If Snapchat enables very easily some behavior that could be considered negligent or law-breaking, some party could sue them for contributing to a reasonably-anticipated outcome of that contribution.
If Snapchat started having a feature called "Number of red lights run!" -- would you defend them from liability?
Elsevier and other publishing conglomerates are absolutely milking researchers, universities, and governments for access to information that in many cases, these public institutions have paid for already through research subsidies, government grants, taxpayer funds, and more. So don't be too sympathetic to the claim that this is ripping off a company's intellectual property.
In case you have any love for such publishing companies, know that they are really not much better than cable companies. They bundle unpopular journals together that libraries are required to purchase, just to get access to the one journal that they actually want. They add little value aside from binding the paper journals (which is dying) or putting up paywalls to restrict access to information. They bill researchers who submit papers with per-page charges (with surcharges for "color" figures, if you can believe it) for the publication of their works which are submitted for free. And then they recruit academic researchers yet again to be editors for pennies, and then charge subscription fees to authors to access their own and other people's works, who no one got paid for but somehow Elsevier deserves a cut of.
They deserve to die a slow and painful death for all the value they have extracted from the academic community over decades. And scientists should be more vocal about wresting control of journals from them -- and I mean in a way that more effective than the current open-source / borderline-spam journals that exist out there. This is a market failure / monopoly situation that needs to be broken up like the worst examples in history.
There's a reasonable level of expectation of technology that people are gradually pushed to use, whether it's proprietary or not. When something becomes so common that everyone has relatively barrier-free and low-cost access to it, you've got to give in even if you're the government or providing a public service.
We might as well take the truly principled stand and object that interacting with the government requires having telephone service (!), paying for postage stamps (!), or paying for the bus to get to city hall (!).
We'd better be careful as a society about slowly eroding the value of in-depth, not-yet-trending or popular journalism that creates significant public value, but is hard to recognize while it's being done.
The kind of respected journalism that takes time and effort to research and write, where the journalist/researcher/writer don't have the promise of instant reward, and maybe are facing significant personal risk to find the story that takes down an injustice, powerful person, or entrenched interest.
If you don't watch out diligently, the funneling of our popular consciousness through these most-votes-win, popular-for-today, let's-not-offend-anyone, feel-good-only channels will result in us becoming more and more of a stupidity contest where the fastest, easiest, cheap thrills and sugary taste wins and we have no cultural backbone worth respecting at all.
Wow, the technology that was once shown in cheesily-uninformed future-guessing depictions in Mission Impossible and other action movies 10 years ago, is actually coming true...
Well, actually, it sounds like the Chinese government is realizing it needs its own version of the FDA.
The FDA in the US is so effective and yet underfunded, that we could afford to increase its budget by multiple x, and it would still be a wise expenditure of government funds. That organization protects us from far more than we give credit for.
Well, the thing they fundamentally misunderstand about the issue is that companies now are disclaiming ownership of the data. At least the stuff that exists purely on people's phones for example.
Senators Burr and Feinstein, failing to grasp this issue, actually have a beef with the people who now seek to use freely available encryption (which can be broken by no one practically) to protect themselves against intrusive government behavior -- which government has itself fueled by its own responsibility. Not the phone manufacturers -- which is why Apple, for example, have been racing forward to take the issue out of their own hands.
If they want access to records about who uses public networks, transmits public information, etc, etc, then fine. Tap those networks, and make those companies who transmit information comply. But hands off my data, on my device, thank you.
Regardless of whether he's correct about the exact functional distinctions between Volvo's technology and Tesla's, of one thing I am sure:
Tesla will more actively continue to improve and push out improvements to drivers faster and more conscientiously than Volvo ever can or would. And will do it as part of serving drivers better, not lining the pockets of dealers charging for minimally useful services.
The point is that so little has been done at large scale with batteries/storage to date that Tesla's efforts are a big leap for the cost and installed base of battery storage, and now feasibly making off-the-grid / backup / peak shaving / frequency regulation / demand response a real possibility to experiment with at scale.
For employing faith-based coding and security practices!
The thing to realize (and the way to view) these technology-based impacts to social/public policy is that power flows back and forth between the protagonists and antagonists over decades. And the newfound power that ordinary people now have (or just began to realize) is a gradual shift from government unsupervised/unchallenged intelligence, to protection in the hands of ordinary people.
It's a refreshing public realization of what we've been giving up, unawares, because we didn't know any better. And note that it may not even last. People may forget why we need privacy, and vigilance against an all-pervasive state. They may choose to give it up in the name (not even reality) of security. Maybe there'll be another event that changes public opinion in favor of more surveillance. Or, people might gradually see the extent that stupidity/invasiveness has reached, and continue to make decisions with their wallets and votes.
But as long as this issue has been around, the balance of power has, and will continue to, ebb and flow between the struggling parties on either side. (And note, the good guys / bad guys are not always definitively on the public/individual vs. government sides -- that can swap too.)
Congress, collectively, should get off its ass (which is being incentivized to do nothing by corporate money), and reform the tax codes with a renewed and vigorous sense of public duty. Public duty to the country, people, and public good -- not their select few lobbied corporations who don't represent the majority of companies and people who are willing to pay their taxes fairly and fully if they can see that others are doing the same.
And stop picking on Apple. Though I'm no fanboy, Apple is just one symptom of the problem. Punishing Apple isn't going to fix the 10,000 other companies that do what they do. Reform the system in general, not prune/pluck at 1-2 examples.
I would bet that in closed doors, CEOs of many companies would tell Congress to fix the damn system and make us pay more tax, if everyone were forced to follow the same rules. Stop the leakage and loopholes that are benefitting only those who are rich enough to afford the lawyers and accountants who are smart at shifting money around...
Like so many transitions, they were underambitious and didn't go far enough in the first round. They should've gone straight to chip-and-pin, which Europe uses, and enhances security further.
They worried that having PINs would confuse people, etc. etc. Boo hoo. If history shows anything, it's that providers way overestimate the cost of making these upgrades, and people get used to it and get dragged into the future quicker than you think, and there's no point delaying. Grandma needs to switch, and will deal. Two more years of delaying isn't going to make her any better at using credit cards.
So many decades of transitioning things like digital TV, paperless checks, etc, which are handicapped by half-measures. Just rip the bandaid off all at once. Most people only change when forced to anyway, so just do it now!
Look at the great (even just good) technologies that other countries use in their payment systems. Ability to run the credit card wirelessly at your restaurant table, split the bill, transfer funds (without cost and as a national system) between bank accounts, no more paper checks at all etc. Why can't we do that? A small minority of dumb people, that's who -- and we shouldn't let them hold us back.
Maybe this is a bit Rumsfeld-esque, but I don't really see what's so harsh about solitary. I experienced it for 5 years in grad school. I know what I'm talking about.
Maybe this is a bit Rumsfeld-esque, but I don't really see what's so harsh about solitary. I experienced it for 5 years in grad school. I know what I'm talking about.
Maybe if the FBI stopped requiring drug tests and lie detector tests for those employees it wants to be security and programming experts / hackers of its own, they might get some better applicants. The Venn diagram of those qualities reduces your option pool by quite a lot.
And by the way, the diversity of mobile phones in China (and Japan/Korea) is way beyond what we have here in the US, where Apple is pretty well regarded as superior to most other brands. In those countries, many other brands offer similar functionality -- and I would argue that Apple gets bought (partly) as a status symbol because of its price and Western cachet.
So having its IP copied to lower cost phones that look the same might not eat much into the (maybe limited) market that Apple could capture in China anyway. But when you're talking about a billion people, of course it adds up to a big market at stake.
Anyway, back to topic, I might argue that Apple would even prefer to develop a separate iOS and encryption key for China it it believed that someday it had to turn those over...
That is all true. I was thinking more from the security point of view. And it would be a hard choice -- compromise the security of all devices out there, or compromise the intellectual property of the company long term. In that hypothetical, it might be a decision to pull out of China altogether...