Even if the car's performance characteristics contributed in this very specific way to this very specific crash his argument amounts to "This car wasn't designed to be driven while drunk."
In her impaired state there's no reason to assume she wouldn't have just been in a different accident had she been in a different car.
When a driver makes a decision, even a bad one, the car is obligated to follow their lead because that's what it means to be "driving".
Absolutely. We have gone to great lengths to establish legal precedent that employers can fire you for any reason, no reason and even faulty reasons with no consequence to them.
Doctors are terrible businesspeople. I work in the patient refunds department for a very large insurer and it's absolutely out of control. I've seen 12 year old refunds of simple duplicate payments. It often takes them 4 years to notice a payment which wasn't even for them. The most basic of "does this account balance" is beyond them.
It's bad when they do their own books but it's still bad when you let them hire their own office staff. They need to be firewalled away from the business side of their practice in a big way.
Make the datalogger very infectious but otherwise look harmless.
The datalogger dumps the information back into someplace like say the portable hard drive that brought it into the secured area to begin with. It sets up shop and makes a gazillion copies of the data it was designed to ferret out but it does nothing but log the data.
Then the portable hard drive gets walked out of the building and used on other hosts, at least one of which is infected with a transmission vector which picks up the payload and forwards it to somewhere else.
The transmission vector doesn't have to be ubiquitous or virulent because that would be very easy to catch. All it needs to be is patient and wait for someone to deliver a suitable payload from any datalogger created to interface with it. The datalogger(s) will always look harmless because they can't even transmit the information on their own and the transmitter will look harmless since it doesn't replicate aggressively or quickly and doesn't ever appear to do anything at all until it encounters an appropriate payload.
I'm actually on G+ and I use it kind of a lot. I thought the discussion might benefit from somebody who's actually actively using the service rather than having sampled it and written it off as "I hate social networking and this is social networking". I'm enjoying it a good bit because it's more interactive and engaging than Twitter and with a lot more obvious and up-front control over everything than on Facebook.
The integration with Picasa is excellent and I'm looking forward to the (optional) integration with the other services. I'll really be happy with it when Gmail and Voice filters can use my Circles to do useful work, i.e. let family and friends through, dump the other crap.
I'm still using Twitter, mostly because I'm still following #FuckYouWashington, but less and less. G+ easily occupies the same space as Twitter and with a little tweaking will easily replace Facebook for me.
As for the supposed privacy issues, I haven't run into anything that concerns me. When I share something Public, I take for granted that means Public. When I post to a smaller Circle, I trust it go to that smaller Circle. If they want a more accurate profile of me to present ads which I might conceivably be interested in while I'm doing my friends-and-family socializing, that works fine by me. I've dismissed about a million Zynga ads on Facebook and their ad-bot code can't take a hint so more accurate ad profiling works in my favor by being less irritating by several orders of magnitude.
Moreover, I can use any pseudonym I like as long as I don't use it on G+ which seems a reasonable trade-off. If your concern is that the CIA might get grandma's cookie recipe, then you're screwed if your family is contacting you through G+ but hopefully you're bright enough to do anything truly nefarious on a more secure channel.
I follow a couple of Googlers, a couple of celebrities I was already following on Twitter and that's just about it for now until invites are opened a little wider. In all it's low-key and fosters a more interesting kind of correspondence. Open discourse seems to pop up a lot more often and it's a lot more coherent than either a Twitter discussion or a Facebook comment thread not to mention a lot easier to join a public thread.
In all, I like it a lot and I'm looking forward to the improvements.
Except that Murdoch is making some fundamentally flawed assumptions about the business and market.
He assumes that what's wrong is the business model, as if nothing about journalism, publication, advertising or content has to change to capitalize on a fundamentally different market.
Murdoch seems to be expressing the view that the "problem" with the internet is that information isn't scarce enough and he's entirely missing the point. Information was never actually scarce, it just wasn't distributed as evenly as it is now. The only way to make information scarce on the internet is to make up your own stories and put up a paywall. Everything that doesn't originate with you will route around you somehow.
Putting up a paywall around the same old stuff isn't going to make us spontaneously want to pay for it.
This isn't even about the content though, this is about the ads that don't get through in the aggregator's linked version of the story.
You and your eyeballs are the product, not the customer or the consumer. They believe that they deserve to get paid for stories which you don't even read. In the case of Google News you can scan through, decide which story you want to read and then click through to read it, ads and all. Their "lost revenue" consists of all the ads you didn't see because of all the stories you didn't flip past on the way to the thing you actually wanted to read.
It's a failure of their journalism and marketing. If their stories were more widely appealing or their marketing more narrowly focused they wouldn't see this loss of revenue. They'd be advertising the right things to the right people and increasing click-through even as they saw reduced traffic on particular page or story or they'd be attracting a sufficiently broad audience as to increase the raw number of hits and proportionally increasing their click-through.
In this case they're saying "Our stories and marketing at perfect! It's the readers' habits which are wrong!"
So the print media thinks that they'll benefit from the loss of the digital equivalent of word-of-mouth advertising? Isn't becoming invisible the last thing you want your website to do?
That's insane but we should let them have it. Any company who understands the internet will modify their copyright license terms to circumvent this ridiculousness and any company that doesn't just has to search for referrer=anything-at-all and deny everyone from viewing their content unless they actually bookmarked or manually entered the URL in the browser.
I don't really savour the idea of the death of "real" media, central control is bad but having actual life-long students of journalism working the stories is good. If media companies decide that they won't go where the market is leading them, that's their decision.
The answer is this: People who care about a given project, feature, etc. either work on it or pay someone to work on it.
Developers with no incentive but their own interests, satisfy their own interests. Developers given incentive to do otherwise would likely do otherwise.
I don't need to know what resin my Legos are made of in order to use them for what I consider to be useful application. I get what I want out of them without knowing the intimate details and in fact knowing wouldn't do me any good at all.
Does knowing a processor has registers improve your code? And moreover does it improve or guide your code in a specific language? Unless you're doing some very low-level work, which not everyone aspires to or needs, that knowledge is entirely academic, not exactly useless but simply of no consequence.
The parallel argument to yours would be that car mechanics who are trained in materials engineering or thermodynamics are too rare these days. If the machine is a black box with discrete, replaceable parts, that's just as good for most purposes.
Roughly 2004ish I bought what was on paper a very nice Alienware desktop.
While I waited, my machine bounced around their eleventy bajillion phases of testing and building and installing, etc. seemingly at random for about 2 months. When the machine arrived, it still hadn't hit "shipped" status on their site.
When it arrived, I opened the box and plugged everything in and SLI didn't work... I investigated and found that the SLI bridge wasn't seated properly. I fixed that and everything was okay for a couple days.
Then I discovered that I was getting corruption on the hard drive and things weren't working *quite* right on the RAID. After poking around I found it'd been configured slightly wrong. Being a power user I wasn't really worried, I'd paid for them to image my hard drive and a restore after configuring it right couldn't be *that* hard...
Then I discovered that my restore disc was completely blank. The only way Alienware was willing to help me was if I shipped it at my expense to their service center to be reimaged. (Reimage WHAT exactly? The RAID was hosed, there wasn't anything to reimage!) Relatively minor setback but I can install Windows, I just didn't want to...
So I installed Windows and discovered my driver disc was completely blank as well. I used my wife's machine and managed to get online to download drivers from their website. After rebooting an ungodly number of times, downloading for seemingly forever and putting together my own backups, the machine finally worked properly.
The parts would have been far cheaper at NewEgg but I was flush with cash from my mother's life insurance and wanted to have a flawless machine I didn't have to build and troubleshoot myself. The same machine was twice as expensive from Falcon Northwest and parts availability was an issue so I went to Alienware. This didn't work out. In the end, Alienware offered me the amazingly unhelpful option of shipping it back at my own expense and being refunded most of my money, the 30% restocking fee still applies when they manage to fuck up the machine before shipping it untested.
Fast forward 2 years and my Windows restore/install disk doesn't work for reasons which are vague and stupid. I installed Linux and various WINE implementations and it does what I want it to do, runs faster and more solidly than it did out of the box.
I had a geometry teacher in high school who asked for the most precise possible answer...
When I gave her 3*pi, she told me that was wrong, I should have given her 9.42 and my arguments that 3*pi was precise to infinite digits while 9.42 was only an approximation fell on deaf ears.
Just another instance where the correct answer and the right answer are different.
None of the aforementioned wars were "initiated" by the US, but they were all entered voluntarily and in some cases based on false information.
Korea had little or no interest for us except the abstract notion of defeating communism.
The Tonkin Gulf has been brought into harsh criticism, some even saying it was a fraud.
Did we have to enter WWI other than to line someone's coffers? WWII would arguably have not happened at all except for the harsh penalties visited on Germany after WWI.
Pearl Harbor was an attack we went to great trouble to make sure it happened the way it did, even withholding intelligence from the base command that would have prepared them for the attack. This was done specifically to give us an excuse to enter the war.
None of this was done with any sense of altruism, none of this "came to us" in any factual way.
This has been incredibly important from the first time Diebold claimed their machines were perfect and secure but refused third-party audit of their code or hardware.
Any doubt whatsoever about our votes is damaging to our national identity and voter enfranchisement. Any amount of time that passes between discovery of this kind of insecurity and either fixing or banning the affected machines is too long. The *only* way that, 6 years later, we can force this issue is with widespread abuse and tampering of the machines.
Diebold (among others) simply doesn't plan to address this issue unless they are forced to do so. We can't wait any longer and let any more questionable elections happen.
My high school typically never "finished" a textbook. We skipped around doing maybe half the chapters of any given book in a given class. Unless that unfinished 5% is basic arithmetic this book could easily be ready for use under such conditions.
I pulled this bait and switch on my SimCity denizens quite some time ago.
They bitch about pollution, you raise taxes until they can't stand it anymore. They make taxes priority 1, bitch and moan. You lower taxes and they forget they had *anything* to bitch about at the beginning.
Yours strikes me as a very fair but naive opinion.
For each individual child, there is an age at which one may trust them to make certain decisions. There is not a hard and fast rule here, we are all individuals.
It has not been my experience that children are born with the ability to control their behaviour in the normal adult sense nor are they graced with the judgement to know what is good or right for them and what may be fun but bad for them.
My brother and I shared a bottle of Children's Tylenol about the time I was 7 or 8. We wound up taking Ipecac to dump whatever we could from our systems. As a young kid "tastes good" was all we thought we needed to know but my mother obviously knew otherwise. The media has a much more subtle effect than physical poison, we would have shortly been very sick or even died and *that* was the natural learning process had our mother not intervened; how much Vice City does a kid have to absorb before obvious signs of trouble appear?
The jury is in, violent and depraved media makes violent and depraved kids if we let them absorb too much, too fast. Waiting until they're skinning kittens to ban the kitten skinning game from your household is perhaps a bit delayed.
Parents must absolutely be aware of what they are buying for their children. The ESRB definitely does its job here but most parents don't bother reading even the box before making a purchase, much less checking the rating or reading reviews.
This is not a legislative problem, this is a conditioning problem. Parents think games are for kids as a blanket rule and don't put any more effort into it. How the "Hot Coffee" debacle, BMX XXX and the like haven't taught them otherwise, I haven't the foggiest.
The same parents who paid $800 for their 4th grader's laptop will buy the $600 PS3.
My now departed mother's 3rd grade students had plenty of buying power and parents do *not* pay enough attention to kids' gaming. One of her kids spent all his free time playing Vice City. I don't believe that game restrictions need to be draconian but if the line be drawn, 3rd graders don't make it by a long shot.
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Even if the car's performance characteristics contributed in this very specific way to this very specific crash his argument amounts to "This car wasn't designed to be driven while drunk."
In her impaired state there's no reason to assume she wouldn't have just been in a different accident had she been in a different car.
When a driver makes a decision, even a bad one, the car is obligated to follow their lead because that's what it means to be "driving".
Absolutely. We have gone to great lengths to establish legal precedent that employers can fire you for any reason, no reason and even faulty reasons with no consequence to them.
Doctors are terrible businesspeople. I work in the patient refunds department for a very large insurer and it's absolutely out of control. I've seen 12 year old refunds of simple duplicate payments. It often takes them 4 years to notice a payment which wasn't even for them. The most basic of "does this account balance" is beyond them.
It's bad when they do their own books but it's still bad when you let them hire their own office staff. They need to be firewalled away from the business side of their practice in a big way.
Make the datalogger very infectious but otherwise look harmless.
The datalogger dumps the information back into someplace like say the portable hard drive that brought it into the secured area to begin with. It sets up shop and makes a gazillion copies of the data it was designed to ferret out but it does nothing but log the data.
Then the portable hard drive gets walked out of the building and used on other hosts, at least one of which is infected with a transmission vector which picks up the payload and forwards it to somewhere else.
The transmission vector doesn't have to be ubiquitous or virulent because that would be very easy to catch. All it needs to be is patient and wait for someone to deliver a suitable payload from any datalogger created to interface with it. The datalogger(s) will always look harmless because they can't even transmit the information on their own and the transmitter will look harmless since it doesn't replicate aggressively or quickly and doesn't ever appear to do anything at all until it encounters an appropriate payload.
I'm actually on G+ and I use it kind of a lot. I thought the discussion might benefit from somebody who's actually actively using the service rather than having sampled it and written it off as "I hate social networking and this is social networking". I'm enjoying it a good bit because it's more interactive and engaging than Twitter and with a lot more obvious and up-front control over everything than on Facebook.
The integration with Picasa is excellent and I'm looking forward to the (optional) integration with the other services. I'll really be happy with it when Gmail and Voice filters can use my Circles to do useful work, i.e. let family and friends through, dump the other crap.
I'm still using Twitter, mostly because I'm still following #FuckYouWashington, but less and less. G+ easily occupies the same space as Twitter and with a little tweaking will easily replace Facebook for me.
As for the supposed privacy issues, I haven't run into anything that concerns me. When I share something Public, I take for granted that means Public. When I post to a smaller Circle, I trust it go to that smaller Circle. If they want a more accurate profile of me to present ads which I might conceivably be interested in while I'm doing my friends-and-family socializing, that works fine by me. I've dismissed about a million Zynga ads on Facebook and their ad-bot code can't take a hint so more accurate ad profiling works in my favor by being less irritating by several orders of magnitude.
Moreover, I can use any pseudonym I like as long as I don't use it on G+ which seems a reasonable trade-off. If your concern is that the CIA might get grandma's cookie recipe, then you're screwed if your family is contacting you through G+ but hopefully you're bright enough to do anything truly nefarious on a more secure channel.
I follow a couple of Googlers, a couple of celebrities I was already following on Twitter and that's just about it for now until invites are opened a little wider. In all it's low-key and fosters a more interesting kind of correspondence. Open discourse seems to pop up a lot more often and it's a lot more coherent than either a Twitter discussion or a Facebook comment thread not to mention a lot easier to join a public thread.
In all, I like it a lot and I'm looking forward to the improvements.
Everything else?
Except that Murdoch is making some fundamentally flawed assumptions about the business and market.
He assumes that what's wrong is the business model, as if nothing about journalism, publication, advertising or content has to change to capitalize on a fundamentally different market.
Murdoch seems to be expressing the view that the "problem" with the internet is that information isn't scarce enough and he's entirely missing the point. Information was never actually scarce, it just wasn't distributed as evenly as it is now. The only way to make information scarce on the internet is to make up your own stories and put up a paywall. Everything that doesn't originate with you will route around you somehow.
Putting up a paywall around the same old stuff isn't going to make us spontaneously want to pay for it.
This isn't even about the content though, this is about the ads that don't get through in the aggregator's linked version of the story.
You and your eyeballs are the product, not the customer or the consumer. They believe that they deserve to get paid for stories which you don't even read. In the case of Google News you can scan through, decide which story you want to read and then click through to read it, ads and all. Their "lost revenue" consists of all the ads you didn't see because of all the stories you didn't flip past on the way to the thing you actually wanted to read.
It's a failure of their journalism and marketing. If their stories were more widely appealing or their marketing more narrowly focused they wouldn't see this loss of revenue. They'd be advertising the right things to the right people and increasing click-through even as they saw reduced traffic on particular page or story or they'd be attracting a sufficiently broad audience as to increase the raw number of hits and proportionally increasing their click-through.
In this case they're saying "Our stories and marketing at perfect! It's the readers' habits which are wrong!"
So the print media thinks that they'll benefit from the loss of the digital equivalent of word-of-mouth advertising? Isn't becoming invisible the last thing you want your website to do?
That's insane but we should let them have it. Any company who understands the internet will modify their copyright license terms to circumvent this ridiculousness and any company that doesn't just has to search for referrer=anything-at-all and deny everyone from viewing their content unless they actually bookmarked or manually entered the URL in the browser.
I don't really savour the idea of the death of "real" media, central control is bad but having actual life-long students of journalism working the stories is good. If media companies decide that they won't go where the market is leading them, that's their decision.
The answer is this: People who care about a given project, feature, etc. either work on it or pay someone to work on it.
Developers with no incentive but their own interests, satisfy their own interests. Developers given incentive to do otherwise would likely do otherwise.
I don't need to know what resin my Legos are made of in order to use them for what I consider to be useful application. I get what I want out of them without knowing the intimate details and in fact knowing wouldn't do me any good at all.
Does knowing a processor has registers improve your code? And moreover does it improve or guide your code in a specific language? Unless you're doing some very low-level work, which not everyone aspires to or needs, that knowledge is entirely academic, not exactly useless but simply of no consequence.
The parallel argument to yours would be that car mechanics who are trained in materials engineering or thermodynamics are too rare these days. If the machine is a black box with discrete, replaceable parts, that's just as good for most purposes.
You agree to a license on any software. If consumers demand liability clauses in those licenses, commercial vendors will have to pony up.
If we fail to demand such a clause, there's no reason to believe they'll ever volunteer one.
Roughly 2004ish I bought what was on paper a very nice Alienware desktop.
While I waited, my machine bounced around their eleventy bajillion phases of testing and building and installing, etc. seemingly at random for about 2 months. When the machine arrived, it still hadn't hit "shipped" status on their site.
When it arrived, I opened the box and plugged everything in and SLI didn't work... I investigated and found that the SLI bridge wasn't seated properly. I fixed that and everything was okay for a couple days.
Then I discovered that I was getting corruption on the hard drive and things weren't working *quite* right on the RAID. After poking around I found it'd been configured slightly wrong. Being a power user I wasn't really worried, I'd paid for them to image my hard drive and a restore after configuring it right couldn't be *that* hard...
Then I discovered that my restore disc was completely blank. The only way Alienware was willing to help me was if I shipped it at my expense to their service center to be reimaged. (Reimage WHAT exactly? The RAID was hosed, there wasn't anything to reimage!) Relatively minor setback but I can install Windows, I just didn't want to...
So I installed Windows and discovered my driver disc was completely blank as well. I used my wife's machine and managed to get online to download drivers from their website. After rebooting an ungodly number of times, downloading for seemingly forever and putting together my own backups, the machine finally worked properly.
The parts would have been far cheaper at NewEgg but I was flush with cash from my mother's life insurance and wanted to have a flawless machine I didn't have to build and troubleshoot myself. The same machine was twice as expensive from Falcon Northwest and parts availability was an issue so I went to Alienware. This didn't work out. In the end, Alienware offered me the amazingly unhelpful option of shipping it back at my own expense and being refunded most of my money, the 30% restocking fee still applies when they manage to fuck up the machine before shipping it untested.
Fast forward 2 years and my Windows restore/install disk doesn't work for reasons which are vague and stupid. I installed Linux and various WINE implementations and it does what I want it to do, runs faster and more solidly than it did out of the box.
The parameters were as I stated them, the most precise answer possible.
Since the pi symbol represents pi perfectly, to infinite digits, it didn't seem that there could *be* any more precise representation.
Ugh, precision vs. accuracy again...
I had a geometry teacher in high school who asked for the most precise possible answer...
When I gave her 3*pi, she told me that was wrong, I should have given her 9.42 and my arguments that 3*pi was precise to infinite digits while 9.42 was only an approximation fell on deaf ears.
Just another instance where the correct answer and the right answer are different.
None of the aforementioned wars were "initiated" by the US, but they were all entered voluntarily and in some cases based on false information.
Korea had little or no interest for us except the abstract notion of defeating communism.
The Tonkin Gulf has been brought into harsh criticism, some even saying it was a fraud.
Did we have to enter WWI other than to line someone's coffers? WWII would arguably have not happened at all except for the harsh penalties visited on Germany after WWI.
Pearl Harbor was an attack we went to great trouble to make sure it happened the way it did, even withholding intelligence from the base command that would have prepared them for the attack. This was done specifically to give us an excuse to enter the war.
None of this was done with any sense of altruism, none of this "came to us" in any factual way.
Absolutely.
This has been incredibly important from the first time Diebold claimed their machines were perfect and secure but refused third-party audit of their code or hardware.
Any doubt whatsoever about our votes is damaging to our national identity and voter enfranchisement. Any amount of time that passes between discovery of this kind of insecurity and either fixing or banning the affected machines is too long. The *only* way that, 6 years later, we can force this issue is with widespread abuse and tampering of the machines.
Diebold (among others) simply doesn't plan to address this issue unless they are forced to do so. We can't wait any longer and let any more questionable elections happen.
My high school typically never "finished" a textbook. We skipped around doing maybe half the chapters of any given book in a given class. Unless that unfinished 5% is basic arithmetic this book could easily be ready for use under such conditions.
I pulled this bait and switch on my SimCity denizens quite some time ago.
They bitch about pollution, you raise taxes until they can't stand it anymore. They make taxes priority 1, bitch and moan. You lower taxes and they forget they had *anything* to bitch about at the beginning.
Yours strikes me as a very fair but naive opinion.
For each individual child, there is an age at which one may trust them to make certain decisions. There is not a hard and fast rule here, we are all individuals.
It has not been my experience that children are born with the ability to control their behaviour in the normal adult sense nor are they graced with the judgement to know what is good or right for them and what may be fun but bad for them.
My brother and I shared a bottle of Children's Tylenol about the time I was 7 or 8. We wound up taking Ipecac to dump whatever we could from our systems. As a young kid "tastes good" was all we thought we needed to know but my mother obviously knew otherwise. The media has a much more subtle effect than physical poison, we would have shortly been very sick or even died and *that* was the natural learning process had our mother not intervened; how much Vice City does a kid have to absorb before obvious signs of trouble appear?
The jury is in, violent and depraved media makes violent and depraved kids if we let them absorb too much, too fast. Waiting until they're skinning kittens to ban the kitten skinning game from your household is perhaps a bit delayed.
Not in the legislative sense, no.
Parents must absolutely be aware of what they are buying for their children. The ESRB definitely does its job here but most parents don't bother reading even the box before making a purchase, much less checking the rating or reading reviews.
This is not a legislative problem, this is a conditioning problem. Parents think games are for kids as a blanket rule and don't put any more effort into it. How the "Hot Coffee" debacle, BMX XXX and the like haven't taught them otherwise, I haven't the foggiest.
I'm not sure how you read my comment to infer otherwise. Please explain.
The same parents who paid $800 for their 4th grader's laptop will buy the $600 PS3.
My now departed mother's 3rd grade students had plenty of buying power and parents do *not* pay enough attention to kids' gaming. One of her kids spent all his free time playing Vice City. I don't believe that game restrictions need to be draconian but if the line be drawn, 3rd graders don't make it by a long shot.
Curiously you disregard the notion of a democratic nation which conforms to the will of the people, liberal or not.
Instead you opt in for an autocratic nation with open borders.
I'll have to think on that a bit.
Where, precisely, did I imply I don't understand the plunger? I just expressed a distaste for the thing.
Do you not understand how to dig your own sewer lines? Then why would you pay someone to do it for you!