I've come across a "road" shown as a back route up to the top of a local mountain. The main road was closed one time so I tried it. It took me through many one lane roads and ended at a locked gate onto forest company land.
At the top level, most people have good addresses. The problem is that people confuse "address" with "location". And changing how we do things to make life easier for Uber is just nonsense. Also for autonomous vehicles in general. These uber-smart cars need to understand how humans do things, not force all of humanity to change to make programming them simpler. The latter is an epic fail mode.
Usually we butt heads on this forum, but here I basically agree. It's a corollary to "you can't make things foolproof because fools are too ingenious".
"If you make a tool foolproof then fools will use it." And the remainder of that sentence could be "and then complain when they get the wrong answer."
The problem is that spreadsheets and databases solve different problems, yet they are related enough that folks confuse the two.
That's today. The cause of today's problem is "creeping featuritis". Spreadsheets used to be spreadsheets. Now they plot data, do complicated calculations, and searches, because someone said "hey, we've got this spreadsheet, wouldn't it be great if we made it act like a database, too?"
Aside from programmers, who has time to construct a full data modeling environment using the right tools?
People who care if their data gets mangled because it looks like a number when it is really text, or looks like a date, or any of the other heuristic operations that Excel does to keep people from having to understand what they are doing.
Because applications like Excel provide more complete functionality ( or try to at any rate ), that's naturally what anyone who needs to model data wants to use.
The reason is much simpler: it's the tool that is already installed because it came as part of MS Office and it looks simple enough that it fools people into thinking they are experts when they aren't. The creeping featuritis issue has made the tool look like the right one when it truly isn't, but the basic problem is that "it's here, it's free, we might as well use it".
One of my earliest experiences with this kind of problem is when the sales department where I worked insisted on using a word processor to maintain customer records instead of a real database. Real database was too hard. Free format text in a document was much easier.
Yes but this happened a year ago, and was covered in the news and on Slashdot then. Who brought it back up now and why?
Well, it certainly wasn't for the reason bug1 claimed -- to get people to stop looking at Wikileaks. Anyone who reads/. for any length of time knows what the Streisand Effect is. Since the Streisand Effect would only hurt Clinton by drawing even more eyes to a site that is leaking bad things about her, it wouldn't be the Clinton people who did it. Unless the "Clinton People" are working against that result.
You idiot, they didn't "release information about a gay Saudi", they published more than half a million Saudi diplomatic cables which contained, among many many other things, the fact that this one guy had been arrested for homosexuality.
The only polite interpretation of this statement is that English is not your native language. Otherwise you would know that "publishing" some private information that was previously not publicly published is called "releasing" it. It was controlled, until Wikileaks released it to the public.
(Now would be a good time to pause for a moment and make sure that your drool is not getting on your keyboard while you read this. Consider a bib.)
Yes, the phrase "fucking moron" was quite correct when I used it before.
I might further make a distinction between private information, personal records, and secrets,
That would be another tactic to try to whitewash Wikileaks and Assange in this situation, but you'd be ignoring the fact that while the terms are not synonyms (look it up if you don't know what that means), the term "secret" applies to "private" information and "personal" records. Lots of things can be "secrets"; two categories of such are "private" and "personal" information. If you argue that having secrets is not good, then you by definition argue against the right of people to have private and personal information, and against the basic concept of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution.
Certainly looks like its Clinton backers behind it.
Yes, it is certainly clear that Clinton backers published the secret information about rape victims and medical records and stuff. Oh, that's not what you meant?
They are trying to highlight the "bad" information on wikileaks, they want people to stop looking at wikileaks,
It's called the Streisand Effect, and no, it doesn't stop people from looking, it only encourages them to see what kind of other juicy private information they might be able to find if they look.
Yeah, this really seems like they're stretching for something to criticize Wikileaks over.
The only "stretching" going on here is the vast stretch trying to remove the label "evil" from Wikileaks.
It's ok to release the information about a gay Saudi because the government has already arrested him. It doesn't matter if the government might have shown some leniency, but now cannot do so because the info is public, or that this guy's neighbors might beat him to a pulp were the government to let him go. No, Wikileaks is right to publish this information.
And it's ok to publish the names of rape victims because it will somehow benefit the next rape victim, and besides, some women who choose to go public with the assaults become CELEBRITIES! It's not like these women live in a society that considers rape victims to be permanently impure and can be killed by their families for the disgrace they've brought. Yeah, it's not Julian's fault they live in such a society, and so he bears no responsibility for the result.
The medical records of cancer patients shouldn't be private at all, for some reason I don't understand. And credit card data for crime victims? PUBLIC INFORMATION!
This stuff feels like they're trying to promote the position that having secrets is good
Please tell me that you are not seriously arguing against the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which is all about the ability of private citizens to have secrets from the government and everyone else. YES, HAVING SECRETS IS GOOD, you fucking moron, when those secrets belong to private individuals and concern their lives, health, and well being.
If you weren't an AC and I had mod points I'd mod this up. It's perfectly true. If you care what people can figure out about you, don't post it to Facebook and don't use Facebook to "like" that stuff. Why is it a big surprise that Facebook has a good chance of pinning down your politics (or anything else) when you post about your politics (or something else) to Facebook?
If Google designed Android so that they could push out forced updates to the OS,
Then they would be no different than Microsoft and Windows 10 forced updates. It would require the same kind of "phone home to momma" (pun intended) "service" running in the background consuming memory and CPU cycles and data all the time. Their current spyware (Location Manager, e.g.) is bad enough.
You might say that using Google's Android is a choice so that makes it different than Windows 10 -- but is it really?
Google only requires you to install their apps if you want access to the Play store.
As I recall, Google requires you to run a verified Google version of Android to access the Play Store, not just copy their apps. I bought a Chinese dual-boot tablet a couple of weeks ago and it came with NO apps and NO access to any store on the Android side. Very disappointing. I've had other Chinese tablets that had only a Chinese store, and I think I tried putting a Play Store app on the device with no luck. Amazon I could do, but Amazon demands that even the free apps be able to call home to validate their existence every so often, and it needs the bloated Amazon App installed to do that. I stay away from Amazon because of that, even though they had some very nice "app of the day" free apps.
where they know they'll never be left behind on an antiquated OS
You know, there are times when I try to compile or do something on a server where it having an older version of an operating system is a problem. The OS isn't antiquated, it just doesn't have the same version of libraries that the newer ones have, and some developers think they aren't "doing it right" unless they write their code so it won't run on anything other than the current OS. THAT latter bit is what causes the problems I've seen. Developer arrogance/ignorance, not OS obsolescence.
But I have yet to see that on any of the phones or mobile devices I have. The apps on the phones I already have keep working, the apps on new ones work. The main issue is that some old apps won't run on later Android OSs.
So far, it seems the android phone makers' attitudes are to do only enough to sell the phones, and then move on to selling the next phone.
I actually prefer that when I buy a mobile device, it keeps doing what I want it to do, and not have it stop because the manufacturer thought I needed an update that removed functionality. I don't like it when MS does it to my real computers, so why would I like it when Google does it?
This not only ruined normal internet use but cause all sorts of digital signal artifacts during primetime TV.
Cable TV is not provided using the Internet service, it is a fixed set of channels that have no interaction at all with internet.
TV artifacts are due to the over-compression of the TV signals so they can put more TV signals into the same space, not because your neighbors were sucking up all the internet. And part of the "more TV signals" comes from the broadcasters who have found they can put four "channels" onto one carrier and show you not only the major networks but things like Me, This, Grit, Joe, etc.
We're overlooking the accidents, injuries, and deaths today.
You may be doing that, but that's not everyone.
You probably drove today, despite knowing its one of the most dangerous things you do daily.
Yep. And I did that because I evaluate the costs and benefits of doing that, considering the risks and hazards and mitigating what I could and then reaching an informed decision. With an autonomous vehicle it is entirely "trust me, we know how to program things better than you know how to drive". As someone who works with computers programmed by the same kinds of people every day, that scares me.
Do you really think a car that's actively monitoring its environment thousands of times a second can actually do WORSE?
Yes. Of course. "Monitoring" doesn't mean shit when "the proper reaction" is required. And "monitoring" can fail.
But it doesn't matter that it can do worse. I am not ready to accept the grandiose, unproven claims of magical safety that autonomous vehicle proponents keep spreading around. If you notice, the argument for how safe these things will be always devolves into "but humans aren't perfect...", as if that were the only concern. And you started your posting with exactly that argument. "We're overlooking" the death and carnage and wanton destruction...
You mean like the same "failure" mode that crashed the Tesla into the semi? Yes, that failure mode is (was) in all of them, but only one out of the thousands on the road managed to trip the scenario that caused a crash.
Yes, a failure mode that exists in all implementations, so claiming it was "just one" so it's not a problem IS a problem.
but only one out of the thousands on the road managed to trip the scenario that caused a crash.
1. So far.
2. It was an unknown problem until it happened, just like the next problem will be, and the one after that, and the one after that. Trying to claim that this is the only problem there will ever be and everything will be unicorns and pixie dust after this one vehicle with just one problem is fixed is ridiculous. That is exactly the kind of claim being made when claims of unrealizable safety are made regarding autonomous vehicles.
Further, while an alert, attentive driver could have avoided the collision,
Not when his perfectly safe autonomous vehicle has no steering wheel or pedals.
there are plenty of less-alert, distracted drivers out there
Yes, we know, humans make mistakes, so it is ok that we deliberately create autonomous systems that will make mistakes and use smoke and mirrors to try to hide the unsafe situations that those systems have already demonstrated. It is ok to turn everyone into innocent victims reliant on some distant computer engineer to understand the full ramifications of any tiny change to the system instead of keeping some human responsible for the stupid mistakes he makes.
And baring a true mechanical issue (that can occur in all cars), there's no need for massive recalls in case of a software glitch, just download the latest update into the car's computer overnight
Are you truly ignorant of the safety issues such a system has, over and above the safety issues that it is trying to resolve? Do the words "windows" and "ten" not mean anything, that we'd want to create such a large scale problem with two-ton rolling steel missles instead of just a laptop computer?
and the next morning everyone's good to go.
"Preparing your car for updates, please do not shut the car off. Processing update 2 of 318..." OMG.
You are reasoning like they took a loan from a human person.
With government-backed student loans, or government financed student loans, they did.
They took a loan from a financial institution. The financial institution created the money from thin air
What utter nonsense. That "financial institution" got the money from the people who put money into that system. For banks and credit unions, that's the "human persons" who have accounts there. Thin air? Don't be foolish.
When you take out a loan with the promise to pay it back it doesn't matter if you get the loan from a "human person" (like banks, credit unions, or the taxpayers) or a robot. It is unethical to later decide, after you spend the money to get what you want, that you aren't going to pay it back. "Those awful banks" aren't an excuse.
Well, this is the "risk" come home to roost.
That 'risk' is coming "home to roost" in the taxpayers wallet, and we are "human persons". Pay your student loans if you took one out. You made the choice to agree to pay it back, now do it.
What we need is not a disingenuous technological solution from a phone company with a conflicted interest. Simply make it illegal to make pre-recorded phone calls that are not pre-approved by the recipient. Make it illegal to obfuscate the caller-ID system and make text-based caller ID mandatory for anything commercial.
Another "just one more law" solution to something that is already illegal and is a social issue created by a technical problem.
Think about it. BOING! Congress acts. (Or Obama makes it an Executive Order, bypassing Congress.) It is now illegal to call RonTheHurler for any reason that RonTheHurler doesn't approve of. Now tell me how this is enforced. You don't have any caller id information to turn over to the feds. Your phone company fed you the invalid caller id info that they passed on to you. They maybe can tell you that the call came from another phone company, but if that company doesn't have the info, or is overseas, what do you do? Nothing. The legal solution is specious.
2. Door-to-door sales people and church solicitors often knock on my door. I have a nifty tool called a peephole that allows me to determine whether I want to open the door or not.
Trespass laws, if they were enforced, can stop this. The problem is getting them enforced. And you have to get up and walk to the door to look through the peephole, an serious intrusion on time.
3. If I put up a fence around my property, they cannot get to my front door without committing the crime of trespassing.
What makes you think you need a fence, or that a fence is the sufficient condition for trespass?
I want a fence around my phone.
A fence is not what defines the crime of trespass. And that fence will do nothing if the trespass laws are not enforced.
Free speech is still intact because a human can still make the call, just as a human can knock on my door to try and sell me pest control services or soul-saving sermons.
Not on my phone or at my door. DNC outlaws the former, my NO TRESPASSING signs the latter. I DO NOT CARE if the caller is a human or a recording, the DNC makes it illegal. And if it is a fraudulent call it is illegal for many other reasons.
ALREADY ILLEGAL. Your "one more law" solution is nonsense.
ALL of which is extra steps for users and extra time.
Uh, No. There are no extra steps for users.
I think this is the correct quoting for a posting what appears to have the same person saying two different things.
In any case, YES, extra steps.
1) Answer phone. Oops, that ones one extra step for me already, since I don't answer 99% of the time now.
2) Wait for popup. Another extra step (but impossible for my phone, so not an extra step for me).
3) Select option on popup. Another extra step.
The pop up -- which can be ignored/disabled and only appears when a new phone number appears -- happens AFTER the phone call and you don't need to click ignore it will go away automatically.
Wow. Your system doesn't create any extra steps for people who don't use your system, so you claim that your system doesn't create extra steps for anyone. That's as stupid as saying that Verizon FIOS is free because it doesn't cost anything if you don't buy it. Or you can get free Whoppers from Burger King because you won't stop by to pick one up.
It rarely happens for me, if seeing a popup after a call like that makes you upset maybe you should get therapy?
And now you resort to ad hominem to support your proposed solution. Ta'.
Uh, if people don't answer telespammers then the robocalling issue wouldn't exist in the first place.
I don't answer 99% of them and the robocalling issue still exists. I don't care what other people do, your proposed solution doesn't help me because it requires answering all of them. And somehow getting a "popup" that cannot physically happen.
The thing is with my system most spammers will be shutdown quickly.
Hardly. None of the laws against it have shut it down, so expecting them to all use legitimate, law abiding phone providers is overly optimistic. That's what you'd need to have if you expect a "call rating popup" to have any effect. It's the same failure of legal limits to stop email spammers -- as long as someone is willing to sell them network services, no law will stop it.
In the meantime, forcing people to answer the calls means the phone list the spammer is using will be verified, and be worth more money. It's a help to the spammer. A solution to telespamming that has the side-effect of making it more profitable isn't a good solution.
And btw, a list of numbers without useful information about the person being called is useless.
Really? Seems that I get a lot of telespamming calls from outfits that obviously have no information about the person being called, because they want to sell me things I don't want and are done ignoring the major bit of information they could garner were they doing this legally: the number is on the national DNC list. So no, not knowing anything other than the number is valid doesn't mean the list is worthless. Knowing the number is valid is enough. In fact, I just got a call from "Julie" saying I'm preapproved for a "$250,000 small business loan", on a phone line behind the PBX at a major university. Every number with this prefix is someone who works at a University who has no authority to accept a loan on behalf of our "small business." The telespammers don't care, this telespammer has been told who this number belongs to and they still call it.
I mean, if you dial a random phone number 90% of the time it's valid number -- try it.
I don't need to "try it" to know that's nonsense. Just given the number of non-human phone connections out there (FAX, modem, ATM, etc.) I know that 90% is hyperbole. You need to support this extreme claim with something more than assertions, or anecdotal claims that one area code has this problem.
Such a list is useless to spammers.
1. The number connects to a person.
2. The person answers the phone to unrecognized numbers or doesn't have caller id.
Those are two very important pieces of information that your system hands over to every telespammer. And that information is worth money since it means they can concentrate their calling and not waste time and money calling modems, ATMs, FAX machines, disconnected numbers, or numbers that never answer.
And that money can cover expenses so they can pursue things that actually make their lives worthwhile.
1. The person I replied to said nothing about them doing anything except getting UBI. Handing someone free money in the form of a UBI doesn't give them worth, it gives them money. It is what they do with their lives outside of taking free money that determines their worth.
2. "Make their lives worthwhile" is not the same as "not worthless". The former is an internal feeling; the latter is an external value judgement. Yes, it is now common to equate the two so that self esteems are not damaged, but that doesn't change the difference. Billy, who made an own goal and caused his team to lose while playing in an AYSO match for five minutes, gets a participation trophy. This does not prove his worth to the team, it only supports his own feeling of being worthwhile -- while he was actually a drawback to the team as a whole.
You know, those things that help make us human and not just worker bees.
People have been able to do that for millenia without UBI and the requirement for other people to work their asses off to pay the taxes that would allow UBI to succeed. Do you not consider the "worker bees" who pay taxes and care only about the ones to whom the free money is being given?
No. There may be a temporary "rate this call" pop up after you hang up when it's a number that doesn't normally call you.
I would certainly be more annoyed if things started popping up on my phone. It would be magic, since it has no display.
You also refer to "hanging up", and since I don't waste time answering in the first place, your solution is useless to me.
In fact, it's a godsend to telespammers since it requires people to answer the spam phone calls before they can "rate" it, thus providing confirmation of the validity of the number and making the spammer's number list more valuable when they sell it to the next spammer.
If you are on the DNC list it is already outlawed. "Just one more law" won't fix this problem any more than it will fix the problem of criminals using guns, or secretaries of state using personal email servers for classified email.
Slashdot Mirror
Its not that hard to give out your coordinates if needed.
NAD27, NAD83, WGS-84, NAVD88, UTM, or state plane? Or any of a thousand other datums in use all over the world?
That's a small issue for self driving cars, they have much harder challenges.
It is a small part of the very large problem of knowing where it needs to be and where it cannot go.
At the top level, most people have good addresses. The problem is that people confuse "address" with "location". And changing how we do things to make life easier for Uber is just nonsense. Also for autonomous vehicles in general. These uber-smart cars need to understand how humans do things, not force all of humanity to change to make programming them simpler. The latter is an epic fail mode.
"If you make a tool foolproof then fools will use it." And the remainder of that sentence could be "and then complain when they get the wrong answer."
The problem is that spreadsheets and databases solve different problems, yet they are related enough that folks confuse the two.
That's today. The cause of today's problem is "creeping featuritis". Spreadsheets used to be spreadsheets. Now they plot data, do complicated calculations, and searches, because someone said "hey, we've got this spreadsheet, wouldn't it be great if we made it act like a database, too?"
Aside from programmers, who has time to construct a full data modeling environment using the right tools?
People who care if their data gets mangled because it looks like a number when it is really text, or looks like a date, or any of the other heuristic operations that Excel does to keep people from having to understand what they are doing.
Because applications like Excel provide more complete functionality ( or try to at any rate ), that's naturally what anyone who needs to model data wants to use.
The reason is much simpler: it's the tool that is already installed because it came as part of MS Office and it looks simple enough that it fools people into thinking they are experts when they aren't. The creeping featuritis issue has made the tool look like the right one when it truly isn't, but the basic problem is that "it's here, it's free, we might as well use it".
One of my earliest experiences with this kind of problem is when the sales department where I worked insisted on using a word processor to maintain customer records instead of a real database. Real database was too hard. Free format text in a document was much easier.
Yes but this happened a year ago, and was covered in the news and on Slashdot then. Who brought it back up now and why?
Well, it certainly wasn't for the reason bug1 claimed -- to get people to stop looking at Wikileaks. Anyone who reads /. for any length of time knows what the Streisand Effect is. Since the Streisand Effect would only hurt Clinton by drawing even more eyes to a site that is leaking bad things about her, it wouldn't be the Clinton people who did it. Unless the "Clinton People" are working against that result.
You idiot, they didn't "release information about a gay Saudi", they published more than half a million Saudi diplomatic cables which contained, among many many other things, the fact that this one guy had been arrested for homosexuality.
The only polite interpretation of this statement is that English is not your native language. Otherwise you would know that "publishing" some private information that was previously not publicly published is called "releasing" it. It was controlled, until Wikileaks released it to the public.
(Now would be a good time to pause for a moment and make sure that your drool is not getting on your keyboard while you read this. Consider a bib.)
Yes, the phrase "fucking moron" was quite correct when I used it before.
I might further make a distinction between private information, personal records, and secrets,
That would be another tactic to try to whitewash Wikileaks and Assange in this situation, but you'd be ignoring the fact that while the terms are not synonyms (look it up if you don't know what that means), the term "secret" applies to "private" information and "personal" records. Lots of things can be "secrets"; two categories of such are "private" and "personal" information. If you argue that having secrets is not good, then you by definition argue against the right of people to have private and personal information, and against the basic concept of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution.
Certainly looks like its Clinton backers behind it.
Yes, it is certainly clear that Clinton backers published the secret information about rape victims and medical records and stuff. Oh, that's not what you meant?
They are trying to highlight the "bad" information on wikileaks, they want people to stop looking at wikileaks,
It's called the Streisand Effect, and no, it doesn't stop people from looking, it only encourages them to see what kind of other juicy private information they might be able to find if they look.
Yeah, this really seems like they're stretching for something to criticize Wikileaks over.
The only "stretching" going on here is the vast stretch trying to remove the label "evil" from Wikileaks.
It's ok to release the information about a gay Saudi because the government has already arrested him. It doesn't matter if the government might have shown some leniency, but now cannot do so because the info is public, or that this guy's neighbors might beat him to a pulp were the government to let him go. No, Wikileaks is right to publish this information.
And it's ok to publish the names of rape victims because it will somehow benefit the next rape victim, and besides, some women who choose to go public with the assaults become CELEBRITIES! It's not like these women live in a society that considers rape victims to be permanently impure and can be killed by their families for the disgrace they've brought. Yeah, it's not Julian's fault they live in such a society, and so he bears no responsibility for the result.
The medical records of cancer patients shouldn't be private at all, for some reason I don't understand. And credit card data for crime victims? PUBLIC INFORMATION!
This stuff feels like they're trying to promote the position that having secrets is good
Please tell me that you are not seriously arguing against the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which is all about the ability of private citizens to have secrets from the government and everyone else. YES, HAVING SECRETS IS GOOD, you fucking moron, when those secrets belong to private individuals and concern their lives, health, and well being.
If you weren't an AC and I had mod points I'd mod this up. It's perfectly true. If you care what people can figure out about you, don't post it to Facebook and don't use Facebook to "like" that stuff. Why is it a big surprise that Facebook has a good chance of pinning down your politics (or anything else) when you post about your politics (or something else) to Facebook?
If Google designed Android so that they could push out forced updates to the OS,
Then they would be no different than Microsoft and Windows 10 forced updates. It would require the same kind of "phone home to momma" (pun intended) "service" running in the background consuming memory and CPU cycles and data all the time. Their current spyware (Location Manager, e.g.) is bad enough.
You might say that using Google's Android is a choice so that makes it different than Windows 10 -- but is it really?
Google only requires you to install their apps if you want access to the Play store.
As I recall, Google requires you to run a verified Google version of Android to access the Play Store, not just copy their apps. I bought a Chinese dual-boot tablet a couple of weeks ago and it came with NO apps and NO access to any store on the Android side. Very disappointing. I've had other Chinese tablets that had only a Chinese store, and I think I tried putting a Play Store app on the device with no luck. Amazon I could do, but Amazon demands that even the free apps be able to call home to validate their existence every so often, and it needs the bloated Amazon App installed to do that. I stay away from Amazon because of that, even though they had some very nice "app of the day" free apps.
where they know they'll never be left behind on an antiquated OS
You know, there are times when I try to compile or do something on a server where it having an older version of an operating system is a problem. The OS isn't antiquated, it just doesn't have the same version of libraries that the newer ones have, and some developers think they aren't "doing it right" unless they write their code so it won't run on anything other than the current OS. THAT latter bit is what causes the problems I've seen. Developer arrogance/ignorance, not OS obsolescence.
But I have yet to see that on any of the phones or mobile devices I have. The apps on the phones I already have keep working, the apps on new ones work. The main issue is that some old apps won't run on later Android OSs.
So far, it seems the android phone makers' attitudes are to do only enough to sell the phones, and then move on to selling the next phone.
I actually prefer that when I buy a mobile device, it keeps doing what I want it to do, and not have it stop because the manufacturer thought I needed an update that removed functionality. I don't like it when MS does it to my real computers, so why would I like it when Google does it?
Less popular channels are often delivered through "switched digital video" (SDV),
I have Comcast and they don't do that.
They have exclusive franchises granted to them in exchange for paying for the infrastructure up front
Exclusive franchises have been illegal for so long that there is little chance that they still exist.
Some of us are still waiting for a low-cost 4 GB + 4 Core embedded device with a Real-Time-Clock
2Gb, 8 core, RTC. Gigabit ethernet. Odroid XU4. $79
This not only ruined normal internet use but cause all sorts of digital signal artifacts during primetime TV.
Cable TV is not provided using the Internet service, it is a fixed set of channels that have no interaction at all with internet.
TV artifacts are due to the over-compression of the TV signals so they can put more TV signals into the same space, not because your neighbors were sucking up all the internet. And part of the "more TV signals" comes from the broadcasters who have found they can put four "channels" onto one carrier and show you not only the major networks but things like Me, This, Grit, Joe, etc.
We're overlooking the accidents, injuries, and deaths today.
You may be doing that, but that's not everyone.
You probably drove today, despite knowing its one of the most dangerous things you do daily.
Yep. And I did that because I evaluate the costs and benefits of doing that, considering the risks and hazards and mitigating what I could and then reaching an informed decision. With an autonomous vehicle it is entirely "trust me, we know how to program things better than you know how to drive". As someone who works with computers programmed by the same kinds of people every day, that scares me.
Do you really think a car that's actively monitoring its environment thousands of times a second can actually do WORSE?
Yes. Of course. "Monitoring" doesn't mean shit when "the proper reaction" is required. And "monitoring" can fail.
But it doesn't matter that it can do worse. I am not ready to accept the grandiose, unproven claims of magical safety that autonomous vehicle proponents keep spreading around. If you notice, the argument for how safe these things will be always devolves into "but humans aren't perfect...", as if that were the only concern. And you started your posting with exactly that argument. "We're overlooking" the death and carnage and wanton destruction ...
You mean like the same "failure" mode that crashed the Tesla into the semi? Yes, that failure mode is (was) in all of them, but only one out of the thousands on the road managed to trip the scenario that caused a crash.
Yes, a failure mode that exists in all implementations, so claiming it was "just one" so it's not a problem IS a problem.
but only one out of the thousands on the road managed to trip the scenario that caused a crash.
1. So far.
2. It was an unknown problem until it happened, just like the next problem will be, and the one after that, and the one after that. Trying to claim that this is the only problem there will ever be and everything will be unicorns and pixie dust after this one vehicle with just one problem is fixed is ridiculous. That is exactly the kind of claim being made when claims of unrealizable safety are made regarding autonomous vehicles.
Further, while an alert, attentive driver could have avoided the collision,
Not when his perfectly safe autonomous vehicle has no steering wheel or pedals.
there are plenty of less-alert, distracted drivers out there
Yes, we know, humans make mistakes, so it is ok that we deliberately create autonomous systems that will make mistakes and use smoke and mirrors to try to hide the unsafe situations that those systems have already demonstrated. It is ok to turn everyone into innocent victims reliant on some distant computer engineer to understand the full ramifications of any tiny change to the system instead of keeping some human responsible for the stupid mistakes he makes.
And baring a true mechanical issue (that can occur in all cars), there's no need for massive recalls in case of a software glitch, just download the latest update into the car's computer overnight
Are you truly ignorant of the safety issues such a system has, over and above the safety issues that it is trying to resolve? Do the words "windows" and "ten" not mean anything, that we'd want to create such a large scale problem with two-ton rolling steel missles instead of just a laptop computer?
and the next morning everyone's good to go.
"Preparing your car for updates, please do not shut the car off. Processing update 2 of 318 ..." OMG.
You are reasoning like they took a loan from a human person.
With government-backed student loans, or government financed student loans, they did.
They took a loan from a financial institution. The financial institution created the money from thin air
What utter nonsense. That "financial institution" got the money from the people who put money into that system. For banks and credit unions, that's the "human persons" who have accounts there. Thin air? Don't be foolish.
When you take out a loan with the promise to pay it back it doesn't matter if you get the loan from a "human person" (like banks, credit unions, or the taxpayers) or a robot. It is unethical to later decide, after you spend the money to get what you want, that you aren't going to pay it back. "Those awful banks" aren't an excuse.
Well, this is the "risk" come home to roost.
That 'risk' is coming "home to roost" in the taxpayers wallet, and we are "human persons". Pay your student loans if you took one out. You made the choice to agree to pay it back, now do it.
What we need is not a disingenuous technological solution from a phone company with a conflicted interest. Simply make it illegal to make pre-recorded phone calls that are not pre-approved by the recipient. Make it illegal to obfuscate the caller-ID system and make text-based caller ID mandatory for anything commercial.
Another "just one more law" solution to something that is already illegal and is a social issue created by a technical problem.
Think about it. BOING! Congress acts. (Or Obama makes it an Executive Order, bypassing Congress.) It is now illegal to call RonTheHurler for any reason that RonTheHurler doesn't approve of. Now tell me how this is enforced. You don't have any caller id information to turn over to the feds. Your phone company fed you the invalid caller id info that they passed on to you. They maybe can tell you that the call came from another phone company, but if that company doesn't have the info, or is overseas, what do you do? Nothing. The legal solution is specious.
2. Door-to-door sales people and church solicitors often knock on my door. I have a nifty tool called a peephole that allows me to determine whether I want to open the door or not.
Trespass laws, if they were enforced, can stop this. The problem is getting them enforced. And you have to get up and walk to the door to look through the peephole, an serious intrusion on time.
3. If I put up a fence around my property, they cannot get to my front door without committing the crime of trespassing.
What makes you think you need a fence, or that a fence is the sufficient condition for trespass?
I want a fence around my phone.
A fence is not what defines the crime of trespass. And that fence will do nothing if the trespass laws are not enforced.
Free speech is still intact because a human can still make the call, just as a human can knock on my door to try and sell me pest control services or soul-saving sermons.
Not on my phone or at my door. DNC outlaws the former, my NO TRESPASSING signs the latter. I DO NOT CARE if the caller is a human or a recording, the DNC makes it illegal. And if it is a fraudulent call it is illegal for many other reasons.
ALREADY ILLEGAL. Your "one more law" solution is nonsense.
ALL of which is extra steps for users and extra time.
Uh, No. There are no extra steps for users.
I think this is the correct quoting for a posting what appears to have the same person saying two different things.
In any case, YES, extra steps.
1) Answer phone. Oops, that ones one extra step for me already, since I don't answer 99% of the time now.
2) Wait for popup. Another extra step (but impossible for my phone, so not an extra step for me).
3) Select option on popup. Another extra step.
The pop up -- which can be ignored/disabled and only appears when a new phone number appears -- happens AFTER the phone call and you don't need to click ignore it will go away automatically.
Wow. Your system doesn't create any extra steps for people who don't use your system, so you claim that your system doesn't create extra steps for anyone. That's as stupid as saying that Verizon FIOS is free because it doesn't cost anything if you don't buy it. Or you can get free Whoppers from Burger King because you won't stop by to pick one up.
It rarely happens for me, if seeing a popup after a call like that makes you upset maybe you should get therapy?
And now you resort to ad hominem to support your proposed solution. Ta'.
Uh, if people don't answer telespammers then the robocalling issue wouldn't exist in the first place.
I don't answer 99% of them and the robocalling issue still exists. I don't care what other people do, your proposed solution doesn't help me because it requires answering all of them. And somehow getting a "popup" that cannot physically happen.
The thing is with my system most spammers will be shutdown quickly.
Hardly. None of the laws against it have shut it down, so expecting them to all use legitimate, law abiding phone providers is overly optimistic. That's what you'd need to have if you expect a "call rating popup" to have any effect. It's the same failure of legal limits to stop email spammers -- as long as someone is willing to sell them network services, no law will stop it.
In the meantime, forcing people to answer the calls means the phone list the spammer is using will be verified, and be worth more money. It's a help to the spammer. A solution to telespamming that has the side-effect of making it more profitable isn't a good solution.
And btw, a list of numbers without useful information about the person being called is useless.
Really? Seems that I get a lot of telespamming calls from outfits that obviously have no information about the person being called, because they want to sell me things I don't want and are done ignoring the major bit of information they could garner were they doing this legally: the number is on the national DNC list. So no, not knowing anything other than the number is valid doesn't mean the list is worthless. Knowing the number is valid is enough. In fact, I just got a call from "Julie" saying I'm preapproved for a "$250,000 small business loan", on a phone line behind the PBX at a major university. Every number with this prefix is someone who works at a University who has no authority to accept a loan on behalf of our "small business." The telespammers don't care, this telespammer has been told who this number belongs to and they still call it.
I mean, if you dial a random phone number 90% of the time it's valid number -- try it.
I don't need to "try it" to know that's nonsense. Just given the number of non-human phone connections out there (FAX, modem, ATM, etc.) I know that 90% is hyperbole. You need to support this extreme claim with something more than assertions, or anecdotal claims that one area code has this problem.
Such a list is useless to spammers.
1. The number connects to a person.
2. The person answers the phone to unrecognized numbers or doesn't have caller id.
Those are two very important pieces of information that your system hands over to every telespammer. And that information is worth money since it means they can concentrate their calling and not waste time and money calling modems, ATMs, FAX machines, disconnected numbers, or numbers that never answer.
And that money can cover expenses so they can pursue things that actually make their lives worthwhile.
1. The person I replied to said nothing about them doing anything except getting UBI. Handing someone free money in the form of a UBI doesn't give them worth, it gives them money. It is what they do with their lives outside of taking free money that determines their worth.
2. "Make their lives worthwhile" is not the same as "not worthless". The former is an internal feeling; the latter is an external value judgement. Yes, it is now common to equate the two so that self esteems are not damaged, but that doesn't change the difference. Billy, who made an own goal and caused his team to lose while playing in an AYSO match for five minutes, gets a participation trophy. This does not prove his worth to the team, it only supports his own feeling of being worthwhile -- while he was actually a drawback to the team as a whole.
You know, those things that help make us human and not just worker bees.
People have been able to do that for millenia without UBI and the requirement for other people to work their asses off to pay the taxes that would allow UBI to succeed. Do you not consider the "worker bees" who pay taxes and care only about the ones to whom the free money is being given?
No. There may be a temporary "rate this call" pop up after you hang up when it's a number that doesn't normally call you.
I would certainly be more annoyed if things started popping up on my phone. It would be magic, since it has no display.
You also refer to "hanging up", and since I don't waste time answering in the first place, your solution is useless to me.
In fact, it's a godsend to telespammers since it requires people to answer the spam phone calls before they can "rate" it, thus providing confirmation of the validity of the number and making the spammer's number list more valuable when they sell it to the next spammer.
I don't know why they don't just outlaw this.
If you are on the DNC list it is already outlawed. "Just one more law" won't fix this problem any more than it will fix the problem of criminals using guns, or secretaries of state using personal email servers for classified email.
Whoosh.