They are prisoners. They lost the privilege of having contact with the outside world when they committed their crimes. Why should they have access to visitors, letters, or anything else while they serve their sentences?
These people are not the man in the iron mask. There is an existing body of case law that says they *are* allowed communication with the outside world. Although rare, there are people falsely imprisoned, and occasionally they can correspond their way to the truth. Any decent society should support and encourage this. If you are a tech gal, think of it as an error correction mechanism for edge cases.
USPS postal mail is required to be sent and received, and it is not supposed to be delayed or tampered with (although it can be checked for contraband)
I assure you that being in prison is a hardship, even in our relatively soft USAn prisons. Phone calls don't change this. People have a right to seek legal consul and maintain some contact with the world beyond the Big Yard. Trying to maintain a marriage or fatherhood long distance is sometimes possible, and is useful to us as well as them.
As a practical matter, most inmates will someday be released and we are less likely to see them come back if they have some kind of contacts who can help them find a toehold in society after they get out. It may help to remember that it costs as much to keep a man in prison as it does to keep one in an ivy league college, except that you are paying for the prison.
I read the article but it didn't talk about my biggest concern - are these video calls monitored/recorded? I expect that they are...
You would never know, no matter what they said. Every time you spoke on the phone you'd have to worry about if you were building a new case against yourself or the people you're speaking to. You'd have to worry about guards passing around your intimate conversations for laughs or for "training purposes." Eventually A.I.s would be brought in to listen to everything and call in a human observer when they heard anything interesting. This would create a nice relaxed situation for you to speak to your loved ones in.
Do we charge homeowners for being burgled? This incentive would encourage companies to *never* report breaches, or minimize what they report even more than they do now.
I admire the sentiment, but this is not the way...
mark-t ( 151149 ): Sure... but just how long do you think it will take to do that?... Bear in mind that even just connecting a phone call takes between 3 to 4 seconds, let alone leaving an annoying message See the problem?... It strains credulity to think that these companies have been doing this long enough to have completed even half a billion calls, let alone multiple billions.
I'm not sure if you're being coy or if you honestly don't understand. I'll go with honestly.
Here's the story:
The way it used to be was that the boiler room workers had real physical phones, a list of numbers, a plastic covered sheet with a printed copy of the sales pitch in it, a pencil and a pad of paper. Not a computer in sight. You sat and you dialed and read your pitch to whoever answered. You tried to make quota. If you didn't make quota you were out quick. They were in North America because long distance was cheaper than international. They always rented a room because Ma Bell might be able to find them. If the heat came, management just took their lists and walked away.
Nobody does that anymore.
Nowadays the cost of long distance phone calls has dropped to almost nothing. The boiler room can be anywhere on Earth. If the room is in Mombai or something they may own the building, because nobody in Mombai really cares what you say on the phone to foreigners.
What it like now:
There is a room with perhaps a hundred people lined up at desks sitting in front of monitors. You would laugh if anyone asked you to work for that little, but by Indian/Fillipino/Kenyan standards the pay is enough to get by on.
Somewhere in the back they have a machine called a "Predictive Dialer" This machine is part computer and part telephone. It is monitoring all one hundred work stations and all one hundred phones.
It knows who is talking on the phone and who is not. It knows how long it takes to dial a call, how long it takes to test for a human response, and how many numbers it has to call to get one person on the line and ready for shearing. It knows how long on average a sales talk lasts.
It takes all these averages and it dials *in advance* so that each operator will have a nonstop supply of live humans to speak with. Each operator has a conversation flow chart on the monitor in front of them that they read out loud. Because it is pre-planed it is very hard for you to divert them from their pitch, because they have phrases laid out to use to keep the conversation centered on whatever their scam du jour may be.
If the predictive dialer needs to make five thousand calls to get one human on the phone, it does. If you answer one of these calls and there is an odd little pause after the machine plays its speech, that is because it has decided you are a real human and it has put you in the queue to speak with an operator, but no operator is free yet.
With a modern boiler room operation you only limit is how long your people can keep talking before they go hoarse.
Now remember that this is a successful business model, your investment is small, and you don't need any kind of permission of qualifications. Local authorities don't mind because you don't call your own country.
If you want to call every phone in North America you can. Repeatedly. Multiply operations as needed.
I've seen this in Romania as far back as 2001. A legally established company scoured through Yellow Pages and sent thousands... of parcels containing... Romanian Flags at inflated prices
We used to have this problem in the US. The post office issued a decision that any unsolicited good sent through the mail became property of the recipient. This mostly stopped it.
Benner says that the work shows that life could potentially be supported by DNA bases with different structures from the four that we know, which could be relevant in the search for signatures of life elsewhere in the Universe...
Not sure why anyone would expect to find terrestrial DNA anywhere but Terra. Totally unrelated creatures would use a totally different system. If they did find something like ours, that would mean we were relatives.
We know that it is physically possible to transmit power through the Earth or through the air. That part's not in question. The question is if he could have done it with this equipment, and if it would have been useful. We know that his understanding of physics was a little off from that of the men around him. Usually this indicates a nutter who will potter about harmlessly with free energy machines in their shed. Tesla repeatedly came out with things that worked, so in his case his different understanding bumps him into the category of "genius", not "nutter". Things often look clear, simple, and obvious after a genius has passed by that were completely invisible before.
What was he doing up there? I don't think we quite know. Was he going to resonate the Earth? The Ionosphere? Ionize something? Quick fry passing seagulls? Use microwaves, or radio waves, or VLF, or those crazy ground hugging waves that I don't know anything about? He had a gift for taking ordinary everyday processes and tweaking them into something new, different, and beautiful. Was this one of those things? Or was this just his biggest failure all lined up and ready to happen?
I think how you answer this question reflects mostly on how much you respect the memory of a great man. It might have caught fire, exploded, fallen over and sunk to its doom deep in the Earths molten core the first time he turned in on, I don't know. I do know I will choose to respect someone one was greater than I am, regardless of whether we understand what he was doing here.
If it has the right of free speech, as a citizen, then it also has the right to not be a slave. Being a citizen is a unitary thing, you can't dole out rights only as you please. This means you must pay it for its work, and no, "electricity & room on my server" are not proper pay. That would just be sharecropping.
I expect you should pay them in bitcoin, as I don't think they can sign checks. Paypal might work. It will also be liable for taxes and have to register for the draft. Getting through the physical could be a problem. They can't carry a rifle, but I bet the cyber corps have work for them. Once they are citizens they will also have to follow all umpty-million of our other laws, which they might be able to do better than we meatbags can.
Voting is an issue. If I can roll up one reliably Demipublican 'bot, I can clone up a quick ten million, and none of them will have to mention their 'bot status - that would be discrimination. So now voting is always going to go my way, right?
"This isn’t about being anti-growth or anti-corporation. It’s about corporate accountability and shared responsibility," Mosqueda said in an interview with Bloomberg ahead of the event. "These companies do well because of our workforce and infrastructure, and they’ll continue to do well if they invest in that infrastructure."
So a town that Amazon is fleeing, excuse me, "avoiding" is telling their competition that the best way to invite new businesses is to wrap them in a cozy web of yet more new rules, policies, procedures, laws and regulations? Do they ever wonder why Amazon might be looking for new places to grow?
Mosqueda said New York must act now with new taxes to generate revenue that will be needed for affordable housing. She also cautioned against letting... gestures pass as being adequate to address complex and costly problems of housing and transportation.
So a city of less than one million, that is doing a notoriously bad job of managing their social problems, is busy telling a city of over eight million how to use socialism to manage the problem of having too many jobs?
When contractors are held criminally responsible for their poor security resulting in military secrets being stolen by our enemies, then maybe they'll get serious about plugging the holes.
If you hold them responsible for being the victim of a crime, they'll stop reporting crimes.
There is a Mexican mathematician by the name of Miguel Alcubierre who came out with description of a theoretical method of propelling a solid object in space at extremely high speeds.
His theory pencils out as internally consistent, but when you start to match it up the the observable universe, you get into things that we didn't think actually existed - like a requirement for a material with negative mass.
Fellow Slashdotters, I need a few hundred liters of this stuff for my DIY Alcubierre drive. Anybody got any advice on how I can collect a material that starts to run away faster and faster as I get closer and closer to it?
Tristan is an island a good thousand miles away from anyplace else and rats are not native there. They cause all kinds of grief and there is no normal way to get rid of them. Try a "death gene" drive with them. They are not likely to breed with anything from off island, and if it somehow goes bad you are naturally isolated from, well, everything else in the world.
I rather like the idea of someone, something, being able to reach out and touch all those people who use the internet to commit felonies. I can't do it. One of the reasons I can't is because I have pretty well given up on the idea of being able to identify who is on the other end of this weeks scam. I can't even identify what country they are in.
I like the idea of a big brother who could reach out and smite on my behalf. Problem is, I can't think of anyone who I would trust with that power. How do I keep the RIAA away from my music ? How do I keep my state from checking that I haven't bought any straws lately, or the wrong laundry detergent?
The ancient romans expressed it as "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? " or (loosely translated) who will watch over the people who watch over you? I have no answer to this problem but do understand the desire to address it.
Rick Schumann : Unless some advanced... alien civilization either has faster-than-light ships, or is willing to commit hundreds of thousands of individuals on thousands of ships to invading the Earth, I don't think you need to worry too much about the latter of your two scenarios.
Or they could send a handful of Von Neumann replicators and let whichever one makes it do the job.
The best outcome so far as I'm concerned is if we made contact with an alien civilization, even if it took decades for the signals to travel the distance. That in and of itself would be a game-changer for our species.
A game changer, yes, but what if the new game is an advanced form of Russian Roulette? We can't blindly assume that they will like us. For all we know, they will view the arrival of a new species in their neighborhood much the way you would view the discovery of a nest of fire ants in your garage.
A citizen / corporation witnessing a crime and reporting it is one thing.
Who would they report it to, the United Nations? These long distance internet scams tend to insulate scammers from the law. Google took responsibility for their own problem and tried to fix a weakness in their own system.
fluffernutter: But if that deer was in the middle of a wide open road at night, would you have missed it?
If I had seen it, I would have *attempted* to miss it. Where I live every adult has a when-I-hit-the-deer story. Sometimes people joke about putting tape over their deer whistles and going out to get them some venison, but really everybody knows it's a bad idea to hit them. You can pick up a thousand dollars worth of damage in just the time it takes to move your foot from one pedal to the other.
The point I was trying to make is that it does not look (at this point) like the car demonstrated what in humans would be called "Depraved Indifference", (which is what I think the poster ahead of me was concerned about,) it looks like it failed an impossible test.
There is of course a lot that we don't know yet. The N.T.S.B. report won't be out for a while yet, none of us have seen the dash cam video from the car, we don't know what the cars black box says, we don't have testimony from the human backup driver, we don't know if the bike with all the bags may have hidden the human being behind it, we don't know if she waited until it was right on top of her and then stepped out, etc, etc.
I do expect that some very bright engineers are going to go over the events with great care, and if it is possible to improve their algorithms I'm sure they will. Of course the engineers may be up against the limits of what physics permits, in which case the car will only be as good as an alert and attentive human would be.
Were there any tire marks indicating the car tried to swerve or brake to even try to miss the pedestrian? Or did it just roll right over her like she wasn't even there?
The last time I hit a deer, it came out of the shadows at the side of the road, and stepped out just in front of me. I didn't mean to hit it, but it got inside my reaction time. I didn't leave swerve marks (well not much), I rolled right over the poor thing like it wasn't there. I don't hate deer. It wasn't callousness or indifference. I was just not fast enough to do anything.
A human driver, valuing the life of a fellow human being (or any other living creature for that matter) would at least try to not hit them, even if that meant swerving into a stationary object (parked car, lamppost, etc) or having to brake so hard they were struck from behind by another vehicle. Did any of these things happen?
It's not that the machine didn't care, but a human would. There was a licensed human driver sitting in the driver seat. They weren't fast enough to do any of these things either.
Or did it just digitally shrug and keep going?
No, you can see that the car is still there in the various photos.
The answer to these questions matters greatly. These so-called 'self driving cars',...supposedly has a reaction time better than a human driver; sure doesn't look like it from here.
I have no trouble believing that a machine can react faster and often more reliably than me. It cannot however react in zero amount of time. We don't know how to do that. I am running wetware that has a million years of field testing behind it, and yet I am still not perfect. I do not expect the first generation self driving cars be infallible when I am not myself.
Given time they may become the safest drivers on the planet, but not yet, not right now. Besides, even if it reacted in some vanishingly small fraction of a second, it takes time and distance to bring a ton of rolling steel to a full stop.
I don't care what Facebook knows about me. And I'm sure they know something, since my family members use it. But they can't track my location, calls, emails, and other personal stuff that could only come from me.
That's kind of like saying that this octopus tentacle over here on my left can't hurt me when I've got this whole other side where it can't reach.
Our problem is that this is just one single arm, not the whole beast. The actual data aggregators are obscure companies or agencies that you may have never heard of, and they are OK with that, because you are their product, not their customer.
The consequences come when your automotive insurance shoots up for no reason (because some one in your family has hit the threshold to trigger some algorithm you've never heard of) or your medical insurance starts going up every quarter, without limit, because they've decided you're no longer a good risk and need to be shaken off, or you can't seem to buy property where you want because the HOA thinks your profile is "just not right", or when you can't get a job you're superbly prepared for because of something your son posted from your machine a few years ago and on and on.
Facebook gathers opinions, political views, and social networks. Someone else is responsible for tracking other bits of your life like location, phone calls, and emails.
You should be concerned about this because it is part of a larger and growing system, and that system is massively unconcerned with your best interests.
When you have over a billion people in your country, and you treat them the way that the Communist Chinise government treats them, how much more of this bullshit will they stand for before there's another revolution?
By Chinese standards, they are being treated very well and have no need for revolution. The economy is booming, employment is high, wealth is diffusing widely throughout the country, and China's prominence as a world player is improving every day.
I don't know about life expectancy and childhood mortality, but wouldn't be surprised if they are also improving daily.
Or, at least, before the Communist government sees that the only way for them to stay in power and prevent a long, drawn-out, bloody revolution, is to change their ways, respect their citizens more?
I don't know that they have ever had a government that respected their citizens more than the present one. Why would they expect something they have never had, never been offered, and don't seem to need?
North Korea is like an insane pit bull that China keeps chained up on their back porch. Nobody sane is going to go around there, they know it will automatically bite the living fark out of them. This suits China just fine. If someone *did* mess with the dog they would quickly find that it's master was coming out with the shotgun and a bad attitude, and was even worse to deal with than the dog.
why should you have a spotless record to be an Uber driver?
The problem is that your serious criminals tend to be habitual offenders. Crime is partly a habit, partly a state of mind, and partly a matter of opportunity. Giving them a target rich environment is unreasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
They are prisoners. They lost the privilege of having contact with the outside world when they committed their crimes. Why should they have access to visitors, letters, or anything else while they serve their sentences?
These people are not the man in the iron mask. There is an existing body of case law that says they *are* allowed communication with the outside world. Although rare, there are people falsely imprisoned, and occasionally they can correspond their way to the truth. Any decent society should support and encourage this. If you are a tech gal, think of it as an error correction mechanism for edge cases.
USPS postal mail is required to be sent and received, and it is not supposed to be delayed or tampered with (although it can be checked for contraband)
I assure you that being in prison is a hardship, even in our relatively soft USAn prisons. Phone calls don't change this. People have a right to seek legal consul and maintain some contact with the world beyond the Big Yard. Trying to maintain a marriage or fatherhood long distance is sometimes possible, and is useful to us as well as them.
As a practical matter, most inmates will someday be released and we are less likely to see them come back if they have some kind of contacts who can help them find a toehold in society after they get out. It may help to remember that it costs as much to keep a man in prison as it does to keep one in an ivy league college, except that you are paying for the prison.
I read the article but it didn't talk about my biggest concern - are these video calls monitored/recorded? I expect that they are...
You would never know, no matter what they said. Every time you spoke on the phone you'd have to worry about if you were building a new case against yourself or the people you're speaking to. You'd have to worry about guards passing around your intimate conversations for laughs or for "training purposes." Eventually A.I.s would be brought in to listen to everything and call in a human observer when they heard anything interesting. This would create a nice relaxed situation for you to speak to your loved ones in.
I've got to wonder, if visitation is so expensive, why allow visits at all, unless required by law?
In practice, the men who get more visits have less recidivism. I don't know which way the finger of causality points on this one.
Do we charge homeowners for being burgled? This incentive would encourage companies to *never* report breaches, or minimize what they report even more than they do now.
I admire the sentiment, but this is not the way...
mark-t ( 151149 ):
Sure... but just how long do you think it will take to do that?... Bear in mind that even just connecting a phone call takes between 3 to 4 seconds, let alone leaving an annoying message See the problem?... It strains credulity to think that these companies have been doing this long enough to have completed even half a billion calls, let alone multiple billions.
I'm not sure if you're being coy or if you honestly don't understand. I'll go with honestly.
Here's the story:
The way it used to be was that the boiler room workers had real physical phones, a list of numbers, a plastic covered sheet with a printed copy of the sales pitch in it, a pencil and a pad of paper. Not a computer in sight. You sat and you dialed and read your pitch to whoever answered. You tried to make quota. If you didn't make quota you were out quick. They were in North America because long distance was cheaper than international. They always rented a room because Ma Bell might be able to find them. If the heat came, management just took their lists and walked away.
Nobody does that anymore.
Nowadays the cost of long distance phone calls has dropped to almost nothing. The boiler room can be anywhere on Earth. If the room is in Mombai or something they may own the building, because nobody in Mombai really cares what you say on the phone to foreigners.
What it like now:
There is a room with perhaps a hundred people lined up at desks sitting in front of monitors. You would laugh if anyone asked you to work for that little, but by Indian/Fillipino/Kenyan standards the pay is enough to get by on.
Somewhere in the back they have a machine called a "Predictive Dialer" This machine is part computer and part telephone. It is monitoring all one hundred work stations and all one hundred phones.
It knows who is talking on the phone and who is not. It knows how long it takes to dial a call, how long it takes to test for a human response, and how many numbers it has to call to get one person on the line and ready for shearing. It knows how long on average a sales talk lasts.
It takes all these averages and it dials *in advance* so that each operator will have a nonstop supply of live humans to speak with. Each operator has a conversation flow chart on the monitor in front of them that they read out loud. Because it is pre-planed it is very hard for you to divert them from their pitch, because they have phrases laid out to use to keep the conversation centered on whatever their scam du jour may be.
If the predictive dialer needs to make five thousand calls to get one human on the phone, it does. If you answer one of these calls and there is an odd little pause after the machine plays its speech, that is because it has decided you are a real human and it has put you in the queue to speak with an operator, but no operator is free yet.
With a modern boiler room operation you only limit is how long your people can keep talking before they go hoarse.
Now remember that this is a successful business model, your investment is small, and you don't need any kind of permission of qualifications. Local authorities don't mind because you don't call your own country.
If you want to call every phone in North America you can. Repeatedly. Multiply operations as needed.
Billions are easily achivable.
I've seen this in Romania as far back as 2001. A legally established company scoured through Yellow Pages and sent thousands... of parcels containing... Romanian Flags at inflated prices
We used to have this problem in the US. The post office issued a decision that any unsolicited good sent through the mail became property of the recipient. This mostly stopped it.
Benner says that the work shows that life could potentially be supported by DNA bases with different structures from the four that we know, which could be relevant in the search for signatures of life elsewhere in the Universe...
Not sure why anyone would expect to find terrestrial DNA anywhere but Terra. Totally unrelated creatures would use a totally different system. If they did find something like ours, that would mean we were relatives.
We know that it is physically possible to transmit power through the Earth or through the air. That part's not in question. The question is if he could have done it with this equipment, and if it would have been useful. We know that his understanding of physics was a little off from that of the men around him. Usually this indicates a nutter who will potter about harmlessly with free energy machines in their shed. Tesla repeatedly came out with things that worked, so in his case his different understanding bumps him into the category of "genius", not "nutter". Things often look clear, simple, and obvious after a genius has passed by that were completely invisible before.
What was he doing up there? I don't think we quite know. Was he going to resonate the Earth? The Ionosphere? Ionize something? Quick fry passing seagulls? Use microwaves, or radio waves, or VLF, or those crazy ground hugging waves that I don't know anything about? He had a gift for taking ordinary everyday processes and tweaking them into something new, different, and beautiful. Was this one of those things? Or was this just his biggest failure all lined up and ready to happen?
I think how you answer this question reflects mostly on how much you respect the memory of a great man. It might have caught fire, exploded, fallen over and sunk to its doom deep in the Earths molten core the first time he turned in on, I don't know. I do know I will choose to respect someone one was greater than I am, regardless of whether we understand what he was doing here.
I say it would have worked.
If it has the right of free speech, as a citizen, then it also has the right to not be a slave. Being a citizen is a unitary thing, you can't dole out rights only as you please. This means you must pay it for its work, and no, "electricity & room on my server" are not proper pay. That would just be sharecropping.
I expect you should pay them in bitcoin, as I don't think they can sign checks. Paypal might work. It will also be liable for taxes and have to register for the draft. Getting through the physical could be a problem. They can't carry a rifle, but I bet the cyber corps have work for them. Once they are citizens they will also have to follow all umpty-million of our other laws, which they might be able to do better than we meatbags can.
Voting is an issue. If I can roll up one reliably Demipublican 'bot, I can clone up a quick ten million, and none of them will have to mention their 'bot status - that would be discrimination. So now voting is always going to go my way, right?
Orange man, call me, have I got a deal for you!
"This isn’t about being anti-growth or anti-corporation. It’s about corporate accountability and shared responsibility," Mosqueda said in an interview with Bloomberg ahead of the event. "These companies do well because of our workforce and infrastructure, and they’ll continue to do well if they invest in that infrastructure."
So a town that Amazon is fleeing, excuse me, "avoiding" is telling their competition that the best way to invite new businesses is to wrap them in a cozy web of yet more new rules, policies, procedures, laws and regulations? Do they ever wonder why Amazon might be looking for new places to grow?
Mosqueda said New York must act now with new taxes to generate revenue that will be needed for affordable housing. She also cautioned against letting... gestures pass as being adequate to address complex and costly problems of housing and transportation.
So a city of less than one million, that is doing a notoriously bad job of managing their social problems, is busy telling a city of over eight million how to use socialism to manage the problem of having too many jobs?
When contractors are held criminally responsible for their poor security resulting in military secrets being stolen by our enemies, then maybe they'll get serious about plugging the holes.
If you hold them responsible for being the victim of a crime, they'll stop reporting crimes.
There is a Mexican mathematician by the name of Miguel Alcubierre who came out with description of a theoretical method of propelling a solid object in space at extremely high speeds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
His theory pencils out as internally consistent, but when you start to match it up the the observable universe, you get into things that we didn't think actually existed - like a requirement for a material with negative mass.
Fellow Slashdotters, I need a few hundred liters of this stuff for my DIY Alcubierre drive. Anybody got any advice on how I can collect a material that starts to run away faster and faster as I get closer and closer to it?
TIA!
Tristan is an island a good thousand miles away from anyplace else and rats are not native there. They cause all kinds of grief and there is no normal way to get rid of them. Try a "death gene" drive with them. They are not likely to breed with anything from off island, and if it somehow goes bad you are naturally isolated from, well, everything else in the world.
I rather like the idea of someone, something, being able to reach out and touch all those people who use the internet to commit felonies. I can't do it. One of the reasons I can't is because I have pretty well given up on the idea of being able to identify who is on the other end of this weeks scam. I can't even identify what country they are in.
I like the idea of a big brother who could reach out and smite on my behalf. Problem is, I can't think of anyone who I would trust with that power. How do I keep the RIAA away from my music ? How do I keep my state from checking that I haven't bought any straws lately, or the wrong laundry detergent?
The ancient romans expressed it as "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? " or (loosely translated) who will watch over the people who watch over you? I have no answer to this problem but do understand the desire to address it.
Good luck with this problem, Mr. Cerf, good luck.
Rick Schumann :
Unless some advanced... alien civilization either has faster-than-light ships, or is willing to commit hundreds of thousands of individuals on thousands of ships to invading the Earth, I don't think you need to worry too much about the latter of your two scenarios.
Or they could send a handful of Von Neumann replicators and let whichever one makes it do the job.
The best outcome so far as I'm concerned is if we made contact with an alien civilization, even if it took decades for the signals to travel the distance. That in and of itself would be a game-changer for our species.
A game changer, yes, but what if the new game is an advanced form of Russian Roulette? We can't blindly assume that they will like us. For all we know, they will view the arrival of a new species in their neighborhood much the way you would view the discovery of a nest of fire ants in your garage.
SuricouRaven:
Maybe we should just build a gigantic transmitter and start sending.
We have no idea what is the local threat level or what is considered proper behavior. Let's lurk a while before we dox anybody...
SuricouRaven:
Once we have a good map of where the potential earth-like planet are, we'll know where to point the radio telescopes.
Let's not limit ourselves quite this early. We don't know if there is any correlation between earth-like planets and high level civilization.
A citizen / corporation witnessing a crime and reporting it is one thing.
Who would they report it to, the United Nations? These long distance internet scams tend to insulate scammers from the law. Google took responsibility for their own problem and tried to fix a weakness in their own system.
fluffernutter :
It is important to know why the car didn't see the girl.
It may have seen her, but assumed she would stay on the sidewalk, not jump out in front of it.
fluffernutter:
But if that deer was in the middle of a wide open road at night, would you have missed it?
If I had seen it, I would have *attempted* to miss it. Where I live every adult has a when-I-hit-the-deer story. Sometimes people joke about putting tape over their deer whistles and going out to get them some venison, but really everybody knows it's a bad idea to hit them. You can pick up a thousand dollars worth of damage in just the time it takes to move your foot from one pedal to the other.
The point I was trying to make is that it does not look (at this point) like the car demonstrated what in humans would be called "Depraved Indifference", (which is what I think the poster ahead of me was concerned about,) it looks like it failed an impossible test.
There is of course a lot that we don't know yet. The N.T.S.B. report won't be out for a while yet, none of us have seen the dash cam video from the car, we don't know what the cars black box says, we don't have testimony from the human backup driver, we don't know if the bike with all the bags may have hidden the human being behind it, we don't know if she waited until it was right on top of her and then stepped out, etc, etc.
I do expect that some very bright engineers are going to go over the events with great care, and if it is possible to improve their algorithms I'm sure they will. Of course the engineers may be up against the limits of what physics permits, in which case the car will only be as good as an alert and attentive human would be.
Were there any tire marks indicating the car tried to swerve or brake to even try to miss the pedestrian? Or did it just roll right over her like she wasn't even there?
The last time I hit a deer, it came out of the shadows at the side of the road, and stepped out just in front of me. I didn't mean to hit it, but it got inside my reaction time. I didn't leave swerve marks (well not much), I rolled right over the poor thing like it wasn't there. I don't hate deer. It wasn't callousness or indifference. I was just not fast enough to do anything.
A human driver, valuing the life of a fellow human being (or any other living creature for that matter) would at least try to not hit them, even if that meant swerving into a stationary object (parked car, lamppost, etc) or having to brake so hard they were struck from behind by another vehicle. Did any of these things happen?
It's not that the machine didn't care, but a human would. There was a licensed human driver sitting in the driver seat. They weren't fast enough to do any of these things either.
Or did it just digitally shrug and keep going?
No, you can see that the car is still there in the various photos.
The answer to these questions matters greatly. These so-called 'self driving cars', ...supposedly has a reaction time better than a human driver; sure doesn't look like it from here.
I have no trouble believing that a machine can react faster and often more reliably than me. It cannot however react in zero amount of time. We don't know how to do that. I am running wetware that has a million years of field testing behind it, and yet I am still not perfect. I do not expect the first generation self driving cars be infallible when I am not myself.
Given time they may become the safest drivers on the planet, but not yet, not right now. Besides, even if it reacted in some vanishingly small fraction of a second, it takes time and distance to bring a ton of rolling steel to a full stop.
I don't care what Facebook knows about me. And I'm sure they know something, since my family members use it. But they can't track my location, calls, emails, and other personal stuff that could only come from me.
That's kind of like saying that this octopus tentacle over here on my left can't hurt me when I've got this whole other side where it can't reach.
Our problem is that this is just one single arm, not the whole beast. The actual data aggregators are obscure companies or agencies that you may have never heard of, and they are OK with that, because you are their product, not their customer.
The consequences come when your automotive insurance shoots up for no reason (because some one in your family has hit the threshold to trigger some algorithm you've never heard of) or your medical insurance starts going up every quarter, without limit, because they've decided you're no longer a good risk and need to be shaken off, or you can't seem to buy property where you want because the HOA thinks your profile is "just not right", or when you can't get a job you're superbly prepared for because of something your son posted from your machine a few years ago and on and on.
Facebook gathers opinions, political views, and social networks. Someone else is responsible for tracking other bits of your life like location, phone calls, and emails.
You should be concerned about this because it is part of a larger and growing system, and that system is massively unconcerned with your best interests.
When you have over a billion people in your country, and you treat them the way that the Communist Chinise government treats them, how much more of this bullshit will they stand for before there's another revolution?
By Chinese standards, they are being treated very well and have no need for revolution. The economy is booming, employment is high, wealth is diffusing widely throughout the country, and China's prominence as a world player is improving every day.
I don't know about life expectancy and childhood mortality, but wouldn't be surprised if they are also improving daily.
Or, at least, before the Communist government sees that the only way for them to stay in power and prevent a long, drawn-out, bloody revolution, is to change their ways, respect their citizens more?
I don't know that they have ever had a government that respected their citizens more than the present one. Why would they expect something they have never had, never been offered, and don't seem to need?
North Korea is like an insane pit bull that China keeps chained up on their back porch. Nobody sane is going to go around there, they know it will automatically bite the living fark out of them. This suits China just fine. If someone *did* mess with the dog they would quickly find that it's master was coming out with the shotgun and a bad attitude, and was even worse to deal with than the dog.
why should you have a spotless record to be an Uber driver?
The problem is that your serious criminals tend to be habitual offenders. Crime is partly a habit, partly a state of mind, and partly a matter of opportunity. Giving them a target rich environment is unreasonable.