The driver-substitute is normally the one responsible for having the vehicle on the road in the first place. If that self-driving car hadn't been on that street at that time, there would have been no accident.
The programmers have no legal responsibility. We're not going to write bug-free software. We do our best. If you want to hold programmers legally responsible for their bugs, you need to pay us an awful lot more. Management per se has no legal responsibility. The corporation has the responsibility for producing an adequately safe system.
That being said, auto insurance rates are not infinite. There are limits as to how much will be paid out for a fatality, and there will be a finite number of fatalities.
If I were driving 200 miles on slippery highways with no visible lane markings, I'd expect to wind up in a ditch somewhere, and I live in Minnesota and do commute to work by driving. Also, that "nuanced" sort of driving is what I'd expect an autonomous car to excel at. It's got better sensors than I do, and can react faster.
From everything I've read, Tesla gets a positive margin on each car. By that, I mean that Tesla gets more money on the sale than they spend to produce, sell, and support that car. Where do you get the "negative margin", bearing in mind that it's independent of whether the company is making a profit?
We can extract work from any temperature differential. (How practical it is is another matter.) If the surface warms a uniform 2 kelvins, there's no increase in work possible. I see no reason to assume that the difference in temperature between air and ocean is likely to increase.
The reason there's so much denialism is that we're facing a really hard problem that is likely to require sacrifices from most people. I don't know anyone who insists that they've got the only response, although it's very clear that burning fewer fossil fuels will have to happen.
Seems like the Law of unintended consequences is going to kick in sooner or later if we start expensive engineering projects to counteract climate change.
It already has. People didn't think that industrializing would cause global warming when they started. We're already messing with things we don't fully understand (which is pretty much the human condition).
There's a lot of science in psychology nowadays. Experimental psychology dates back to at least 1885, when Ebbinghaus published his research on memory. Without looking into it, it's very likely that Pinker does science. (I'm not saying that all psychology is scientific, since clinical psychology really isn't.)
Whenever somebody brings up "carbon tax", which would internalize costs and provide incentives for the market to fix that, somebody else attacks it. The only problem I see is that nobody knows how much a certain volume of CO2 should be taxed within an order of magnitude.
My breathing is carbon-neutral. Carbon dioxide goes into plants, carbon gets into my food somehow or other, I burn it internally, and breathe it out. The problem is a result of burning fossil fuels.
OK
First claim: temperatures in some areas will become too high for people to survive. We're getting there. Solution: wave of refugees overwhelms ability to take care of them.
Second claim: sea level rising 5-6m in 200-400 years. For various reasons, sea walls are impractical. (One is that they'd block off ports; another is that we're talking continental-scale walls here that have to be high enough to stop tsunamis.) Lots more refugees.
Third claim: ocean acidification (not actually global warming, but also caused by burning fossil fuel). This is part of the global collapse of fisheries, which will dramatically harm the diets of many people.
Fourth claim: release of CO2 from melting permafrost. This one I don't know as much about, but I suspect I can find good science about this.
So, GP's claims seem scientifically reasonable. They don't mean the planet will be uninhabitable, but they do mean a very large amount of hardship and disruption. These problems will cost much more than money, and they'll be very expensive in any case. It is going to be a great strain on civilization.
Lastly, approximately nobody wants a catastrophe. Many informed people think one's going to happen anyway, whether they want it or not, and want to try to address it ahead of time, when it'll be a lot cheaper to deal with.
People didn't have to learn about cryptographic algorithms to use HTTPS.
Of course not. All technical details are handled by the software. The user doesn't have to have a clue that something called a "key" is involved. A random key can be generated and discarded, since it's of no use after the session, and doesn't have to be used on any other browser.
This won't work for email. To use PGP effectively, the user must generate a key pair and publicize the public key. This means that the user has to be aware of a multi-kilobit persistent key, and safeguard it and transfer it to any mail client the user reads email on. If the user loses the key, all future email is unreadable. If the private key gets known to others, the others can pose as the original user and there's no reliable way to tell the difference. All of the other details can be handled in software, but key management is vital.
Lots of us here know what's going on, and know how to handle this situation. Very few people in the general population do.
Religion doesn't necessarily fly in the face of reality. Many religious statements are unfalsifiable. There's a big difference between believing something that can't be falsified and believing in something that already has been falsified.
I can perhaps turn off location history in my phone, but that's not where the police were searching. If you turn off location history, does that stop Google from keeping what they've got?
Good call, but you missed private prisons. A private prison wants people to be incarcerated. Whether the inmate actually committed a crime or got a fair sentence is completely irrelevant to financial accounting.
I've read "the way forward" in so many contexts it's ridiculous. Almost everyone wants to move forward (you get into wildly different ideas of what "forward" is and far more disagreement about how to get there, of course).
I do. The latter doesn't matter; the former is what keeps a company afloat.
Depends on the company. Obviously a company that's not profitable and shows no sign of being profitable in the future is unlikely to sell much stock (modulo bubbles), but a company that's not profitable now but has credible plans to make lots of money is in a much different state.
The margins on product are important. Selling below cost (or even with insufficient margin) isn't sustainable, and the performance of a company with artificially cheap product isn't really indicative of the performance with a reasonably priced product. In this case, people are buying Tesla cars, and Tesla is making adequate profit on each car. That is sustainable. It shows that Tesla has a real-life market and can supply at least a limited portion of it. If Tesla had to start showing a profit, Tesla could. Instead, Tesla's investing a lot of money in order to be able to build more cars and sell them at a decent profit.
I had a friend who was working on a product once. (He never got it commercially successful, unfortunately.) He had made plans for unexpected success, which lots of people don't do. Tesla has plans.
I've read of communities of a few thousand living communally for about a generation. This appears to require isolation and a charismatic leader. (Figuring out the line between charismatic leader and tyrant is left as an exercise for the reader.) Strong uniform religious beliefs can also help (which is functionally authoritarian).
You've got a point. I just see so many people talking about how Islam is a dangerous ideology based on its holy book that I may not read carefully. (It may be worth remembering that the Christian holy book also has atrocities committed in the name of God.)
I fail to understand. I said that there would not necessarily be unfounded complaints, and provided a possible explanation. Clearly, if X is possible, not-X is not necessarily true.
Why? Because it was easy, and nobody paid attention to security. Look up SCADA. There were never any serious plans to make it secure, as far as I can tell. This didn't really matter as long as SCADA communications were off the Internet, but a lot of them are.
It wasn't any desire for surveillance, it was a desire to get stuff up and running before the engineer was fired, with no thought to security.
That would have approximately no effect. A temporary move like that, even if California let them vote, would not increase California's representation in Congress or its electoral votes.
You're missing the point. Everybody does propaganda. That's not a problem. Giving money to groups in other countries is also common. Interfering with elections directly is the problem.
Could you give me an actual pointer to a claim that Ted Kennedy got help from Russia/the USSR? Your cite is useless in tracking that down.
Considering how blacks were treated before the Civil Rights movement, you're going to have a hard sell to convince me that black liberation actually increased hate and division in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
The driver-substitute is normally the one responsible for having the vehicle on the road in the first place. If that self-driving car hadn't been on that street at that time, there would have been no accident.
The programmers have no legal responsibility. We're not going to write bug-free software. We do our best. If you want to hold programmers legally responsible for their bugs, you need to pay us an awful lot more. Management per se has no legal responsibility. The corporation has the responsibility for producing an adequately safe system.
That being said, auto insurance rates are not infinite. There are limits as to how much will be paid out for a fatality, and there will be a finite number of fatalities.
If I were driving 200 miles on slippery highways with no visible lane markings, I'd expect to wind up in a ditch somewhere, and I live in Minnesota and do commute to work by driving. Also, that "nuanced" sort of driving is what I'd expect an autonomous car to excel at. It's got better sensors than I do, and can react faster.
From everything I've read, Tesla gets a positive margin on each car. By that, I mean that Tesla gets more money on the sale than they spend to produce, sell, and support that car. Where do you get the "negative margin", bearing in mind that it's independent of whether the company is making a profit?
We can extract work from any temperature differential. (How practical it is is another matter.) If the surface warms a uniform 2 kelvins, there's no increase in work possible. I see no reason to assume that the difference in temperature between air and ocean is likely to increase.
In what way does favoring a carbon tax mean I'm not open to other ideas?
The reason there's so much denialism is that we're facing a really hard problem that is likely to require sacrifices from most people. I don't know anyone who insists that they've got the only response, although it's very clear that burning fewer fossil fuels will have to happen.
It already has. People didn't think that industrializing would cause global warming when they started. We're already messing with things we don't fully understand (which is pretty much the human condition).
There's a lot of science in psychology nowadays. Experimental psychology dates back to at least 1885, when Ebbinghaus published his research on memory. Without looking into it, it's very likely that Pinker does science. (I'm not saying that all psychology is scientific, since clinical psychology really isn't.)
Whenever somebody brings up "carbon tax", which would internalize costs and provide incentives for the market to fix that, somebody else attacks it. The only problem I see is that nobody knows how much a certain volume of CO2 should be taxed within an order of magnitude.
We could do lots of neat and useful things if it wasn't for that pesky Second Law of Thermodynamics.
My breathing is carbon-neutral. Carbon dioxide goes into plants, carbon gets into my food somehow or other, I burn it internally, and breathe it out. The problem is a result of burning fossil fuels.
OK First claim: temperatures in some areas will become too high for people to survive. We're getting there. Solution: wave of refugees overwhelms ability to take care of them.
Second claim: sea level rising 5-6m in 200-400 years. For various reasons, sea walls are impractical. (One is that they'd block off ports; another is that we're talking continental-scale walls here that have to be high enough to stop tsunamis.) Lots more refugees.
Third claim: ocean acidification (not actually global warming, but also caused by burning fossil fuel). This is part of the global collapse of fisheries, which will dramatically harm the diets of many people.
Fourth claim: release of CO2 from melting permafrost. This one I don't know as much about, but I suspect I can find good science about this.
So, GP's claims seem scientifically reasonable. They don't mean the planet will be uninhabitable, but they do mean a very large amount of hardship and disruption. These problems will cost much more than money, and they'll be very expensive in any case. It is going to be a great strain on civilization.
Lastly, approximately nobody wants a catastrophe. Many informed people think one's going to happen anyway, whether they want it or not, and want to try to address it ahead of time, when it'll be a lot cheaper to deal with.
Of course not. All technical details are handled by the software. The user doesn't have to have a clue that something called a "key" is involved. A random key can be generated and discarded, since it's of no use after the session, and doesn't have to be used on any other browser.
This won't work for email. To use PGP effectively, the user must generate a key pair and publicize the public key. This means that the user has to be aware of a multi-kilobit persistent key, and safeguard it and transfer it to any mail client the user reads email on. If the user loses the key, all future email is unreadable. If the private key gets known to others, the others can pose as the original user and there's no reliable way to tell the difference. All of the other details can be handled in software, but key management is vital.
Lots of us here know what's going on, and know how to handle this situation. Very few people in the general population do.
How about considering high-powered semi-automatic rifles with large magazines?
Religion doesn't necessarily fly in the face of reality. Many religious statements are unfalsifiable. There's a big difference between believing something that can't be falsified and believing in something that already has been falsified.
I can perhaps turn off location history in my phone, but that's not where the police were searching. If you turn off location history, does that stop Google from keeping what they've got?
Good call, but you missed private prisons. A private prison wants people to be incarcerated. Whether the inmate actually committed a crime or got a fair sentence is completely irrelevant to financial accounting.
I've read "the way forward" in so many contexts it's ridiculous. Almost everyone wants to move forward (you get into wildly different ideas of what "forward" is and far more disagreement about how to get there, of course).
Depends on the company. Obviously a company that's not profitable and shows no sign of being profitable in the future is unlikely to sell much stock (modulo bubbles), but a company that's not profitable now but has credible plans to make lots of money is in a much different state.
The margins on product are important. Selling below cost (or even with insufficient margin) isn't sustainable, and the performance of a company with artificially cheap product isn't really indicative of the performance with a reasonably priced product. In this case, people are buying Tesla cars, and Tesla is making adequate profit on each car. That is sustainable. It shows that Tesla has a real-life market and can supply at least a limited portion of it. If Tesla had to start showing a profit, Tesla could. Instead, Tesla's investing a lot of money in order to be able to build more cars and sell them at a decent profit.
I had a friend who was working on a product once. (He never got it commercially successful, unfortunately.) He had made plans for unexpected success, which lots of people don't do. Tesla has plans.
I've read of communities of a few thousand living communally for about a generation. This appears to require isolation and a charismatic leader. (Figuring out the line between charismatic leader and tyrant is left as an exercise for the reader.) Strong uniform religious beliefs can also help (which is functionally authoritarian).
You've got a point. I just see so many people talking about how Islam is a dangerous ideology based on its holy book that I may not read carefully. (It may be worth remembering that the Christian holy book also has atrocities committed in the name of God.)
I fail to understand. I said that there would not necessarily be unfounded complaints, and provided a possible explanation. Clearly, if X is possible, not-X is not necessarily true.
Why? Because it was easy, and nobody paid attention to security. Look up SCADA. There were never any serious plans to make it secure, as far as I can tell. This didn't really matter as long as SCADA communications were off the Internet, but a lot of them are.
It wasn't any desire for surveillance, it was a desire to get stuff up and running before the engineer was fired, with no thought to security.
That would have approximately no effect. A temporary move like that, even if California let them vote, would not increase California's representation in Congress or its electoral votes.
You're missing the point. Everybody does propaganda. That's not a problem. Giving money to groups in other countries is also common. Interfering with elections directly is the problem.
Could you give me an actual pointer to a claim that Ted Kennedy got help from Russia/the USSR? Your cite is useless in tracking that down.
Considering how blacks were treated before the Civil Rights movement, you're going to have a hard sell to convince me that black liberation actually increased hate and division in the US.