Changing it to a percent of wealth or income would encourage more rich people to hide their assets overseas.
These days it seems the wealthy will hide their assets overseas if someone so much as farts too loudly, so I don't see this as an argument against.
They have plenty of money to hire fancy lawyers and accountants to make sure their wealth remains in tact.
And they have to pay these fancy lawyers and accountants, which means that their wealth still decreases and the money is spread around. If they have to pay another, or pay an existing one more, in order to avoid these fines, that seems like a good outcome to me.
Meanwhile, the middle class would probably get hosed because they have enough to be hurt by higher fines, but not enough to defend against it or hide their assets.
Fines are supposed to hurt at least a bit; that's how they're a deterrent. There's also no guarantee that the rough amount would increase for the middle class, either, depending on the fees already in place and the equation that replaces them. A proper equation would leave fines about the same or slightly less for the middle class.
And what happens to the poor? They'd get zero fine because they have nothing and earn nothing?
The class tiers aren't "Upper, Middle, Zero". Someone with no income is extremely unlikely to have a car in the first place. You can be poor and still have some discretionary funds, though quite small; or do you think that not a single person below the poverty line has a TV? So, while the rich are paying the lawyers, Joe Poor isn't tossed in jail for failing to pay a fine that is onerous to his income, a fine he got because he didn't slow down enough on a steep downhill slope.
But wait, there's more! Fines that are more in line with your income make them a more effective deterrent for the poor, too! Imagine that you only make $2K/mo. Something happens and you get a fine for $500. You get the fine, laugh, and throw it away; there's no way you can pay this fine, you're on a shoestring budget as it is. If there was some long-term payment option maybe you could pay it, but AFAIK this isn't a common thing. In a risk vs. reward scenario, it makes more sense to keep the $500 and hope no one tracks you down (which is incredibly unlikely for that amount.)
Now imagine the fine is only $50. The risk vs. reward balance changes greatly now: It's not worth the risk of getting arrested over $50 if you can realistically pay the fine, even if that means a bit more ramen and a bit less McDonald's for the month. It not only becomes more likely to pay but also to avoid offending in the first place.
I do agree about many driving laws being too strict, or the attention paid to them imbalanced (speeding is the common stopping reason, but tailgating and failing to pass in the left lane are more likely accident causes), but even if those were improved fines would still be a problem.
The government is going to touch the money at some point in order to collect the fines, even if they don't hold onto it, so you can't completely remove government from the situation. The way I think it should be: 1) Fine as % of income 2) Put each amount into an emergency relief fund, to be used in "Act of God" disasters 3) If unspent after a year, remove the amount (and any interest generated from it) and use it for one or all of the following: A) A public work, such as a park (something that is a nicety but not necessity) B) Lottery for those who have registered vehicle in the area, that are not government employees, that have not gotten a single citation during the year (this gives an extra incentive to drive well in addition to the disincentive to not break the law ) C) Equal tax refund/credit for all citizens
The reason it's not kept for more than a year is because the area would become reliant on it as a primary emergency fund; instead it's used as a boost, if available.
Alternative medicine guaranteed that he would die sooner than later. Routine operation, while it did have risks of a quicker death, at least had a good chance of extending his life.
I imagine there will be some sort of two-factor authentication. The car can recognize the lights or, more reliably, a standardized signal from the police vehicle. It begins to pull over and, while it does so, contacts a standard system to verify that the copy signalling is a legitimate one. If not recognized as a police vehicle, or the police car sends a "move past" signal, it would just move over/slow down to allow the emergency vehicle to pass.
There are layers involved, of course, and wouldn't be fool-proof, but I think this is one of the easier problems to solve with self-driving vehicles.
While it's true that this isn't a test of a fully self-driving car, solid, long distance driving is going to be the "kickstarter" for getting full self-driving automobiles into people's homes. Families are going to love setting out on the highway, setting the car to "maintain", and then everyone (driver included!) can just sleep or play games or whatever. Car alerts when it's running low on gas, there's a potential problem, or you're coming to a more congested area that requires human take-over.
But then there are semis. Allowing truck drivers to sleep while their semi drives a steady route is going to save serious man hours and real hours (and likely many lives). This will likely come before the minivan does, because there are all sorts of extra pressures put on the trucking industry that are miniscule for consumer driving. You don't want to test this kind of thing with a giant truck, though, which is why it's a car. Test with the car, apply to the truck, prove the usefulness and reliability on the truck, apply to the car.
As with most things consumer, we're going to see heavy use by businesses before they're common amongst people. City street auto-driving will likely be taken by FedEx or UPS first, moving on to driverless, inner-city taxis, and so forth.
And Wii-U fans have a strange obsession that they have some kind of monopoly on fun.
Not fun in general, but Nintendo fun via Nintendo properties. These will never be multi-platform, so if you want to play Zelda, Star Fox, Mario, or Pokemon you're going to have to buy a Nintendo console. The reason the Wii U's main reason wasn't "brand" like Xbone is because most Nintendo fans (so far as I can tell) are tepid about decisions Nintendo made with the console. Despite this, they still get one because they want access to those games.[1]
Not that you can't get light-hearted affairs and platformers on other systems, but they usually take a far back seat to games rated T/M.
[1]At the very least, that's why I'm planning to get one this year, when a number of large names come out or will come out early 2016.
The focus on resolution seems ridiculously overblown.
I think developers brought this upon themselves. Near the end of last gen, poly-count got with extremely diminishing returns and particle effects hit a roof, so they made up for the lack of graphical improvements by touting 1080p whenever they possibly could. Thus console gamers came to expect it of higher-end titles, especially when the console manufacturers moderately pushed the ability.
This gen can do more in terms of particle generation/poly count (with the Wii U far behind), so the focus has shifted back to those and away from 1080p.
This. When they first introduced ads, you could go into settings and opt out. I did so, then turned off auto-updating. I'm happy with the version of the client I have (2.something)
Why does the FTC even bother? How is that supposed to deter anybody?
My guess is that the abilities of the FTC to punish are severely hampered so that they can't be used on otherwise-legit businesses when they do a bad thing.
That reminds me of waiting in a very long line (maybe it was Christmas?) to send packages through the USPS, and someone at one of the counters spent their entire time ranting to the postal worker about how USPS service was horrible and they hoped the service would become a private one, and that private industry was better.
If I'd had my wits about me then, I would have said "Hey, if you like private industry so much, why are you here instead of FedEx or UPS?"
Their ranting probably delayed the rest of us getting to the counter by a minute.
I often wonder why we've not heard a peep about Half Life (2: Episode) 3. I understand the concept of Valve Time, but even taking that into consideration we're closing in a decade since Episode 2 (and the whole episodic started with the claim that they could put out an Episode every six months). To have nothing, not even a single screenshot or even an official "yeah, we're making Pikm- er, Episode 3", in 8 years, seems really bizarre. At best we had a blurb about "Ricochet 2" as a thinly-veiled explanation of the HL3 lack of information in 2012. I understand that they want to get it right, but at this point they risk "Duke Nukem Forever" syndrome, where the vacuum created by the lack of information is filled by user hype and it will become impossible to meet gamer's expectations. (I don't expect the eventual HLF3 to be as poor as DNF was, though.)
My assumption as this point is that a small group is quietly tooling away at HL3 using the Source 2 engine (perhaps co-developing). Once both HL3 is more-or-less done, they'll sit on it and just keep the graphics updated. Right now Valve has so many things its trying (like SteamOS) and is still getting a ton of attention/money from Steam trading cards and marketplace, TF2 hats, and DOTA 2 that the company itself doesn't need HL3. Thus it will maintain and use HL3 as its "Final Fantasy" if it feels the company could be in financial trouble within two years. They could release it on the N-Gage and it will still sell millions of copies, so it's like one funds where you put something in and can't touch it for 20 years.
ow does a single company make bad decision after bad decision so persistently?
In the case of SEGA, I think another interview with Tom Kalinski spoke volumes about the problem: Sega of Japan. The interview touches on the fact that SEGA partnered with Sony to create a CD peripheral but cut their ties before it was complete. Nintendo also did this, to make a peripheral for the SNES, and cut ties with Sony to partner with Philips (Sony found out about the change when Nintendo announced their partnership with Phillips.) Sony then took the work they had done with the two video game giants of the time and created the Playstation. In particular, I think the following part of the interview highlights the whole problem with SEGA (emphasis mine):
I remember Joe Miller and I were talking about this, and we had been contacted by Jim Clark, the founder of SGI (Silicon Graphics Inc.), who called us up one day and said that he had just bought a company called MIPS Inc. which had been working on some things with some great R&D people, and it just so happened that they came up with a chip that they thought would be great for a video game console. We told them that in the U.S., we don't really design consoles; we do the software, but it sounded interesting and we would come over and take a look at it. We were quite impressed, and we called up Japan and told them to send over the hardware team because these guys really had something cool. So the team arrived, and the senior VP of hardware design arrived, and when they reviewed what SGI had developed, they gave no reaction whatsoever. At the end of the meeting, they basically said that it was kind of interesting, but the chip was too big (in manufacturing terms), the throw-off rate would be too high, and they had lots of little technical things that they didn't like: the audio wasn't good enough; the frame rate wasn't quite good enough, as well as some other issues.
So, the SGI guys went away and worked on these issues and then called us back up and asked that the same team be sent back over, because they had it all resolved. This time, Nakayama went with them. They reviewed the work, and there was sort of the same reaction: still not good enough.
Now, I'm not an engineer, and you kind of have to believe the people you have at the company, so we went back to our headquarters, and Nakayama said that it just wasn't good enough. We were to continue on our own way. Well, Jim Clark called me up and asked what was he supposed to do now? They had spent all that time and effort on what they thought was the perfect video game chipset, so what were they supposed to do with it? I told them that there were other companies that they should be calling, because we clearly weren't the ones for them. Needless to say, he did, and that chipset became part of the next generation of Nintendo products (N64).
Sure, they repaid with interest "that money" which was their bailout
And the interest they paid back was paid for by: A) Increasing fees and penalties on customers B) Stagnating wages and bonuses of regular employees C) Laying off employees D) Decreasing the compensation and withholding bonuses of the CxOs and upper management that led the company to needing the loans, by a large amount E) Decreasing their profits F) All of the above (except D and E)
So when the cop believes that the wallet a man is removing from his coat slowly, after being shouted at to show ID, is a gun then shooting the man five times is justifiable?
I like T-mobile as well, but have a completely opposite plan. I rarely use my phone (no social life), don't want to do anything on the web, and never travel outside a 60 mile radius from home. (Once in the last three years.) I dropped Verizon and switched to T-mobile, going with their prepaid option and a cheap flip phone. I top off the account and pay 10c min/text. This might seem like a lot for those who use their phones quite often, but for me this is great. With Verizon I was paying $70/mo, even after military and a secondary discount, and they said I couldn't get a no-data plan if I had a smartphone (I had a Droid 2 with them). With T-Mobile I've averaged about $15/mo.
Their signal can be weak and spotty in my area (Boulder, CO and abouts), and I can't get any picture/long texts (a rare occasion for me) because I don't have a data plan, but outside those I am extremely happy that I switched to them.
It is just a bunch of whiny asshats who care about specs on paper rather than real world performance.
If "real world performance" cannot at least meet "specs on paper", then it is false advertising.
Yes, in this case it's an extremely little thing compared to the overall card, but corporations are trying their damnedest to slip in/out whatever they can at the expense of the consumer. So long as they can get away with it (which includes paying a fine/lawsuit that costs less than the profit from their misleading statements) they will continue to do it. If we can use lawsuits or laws to stop such practices now, while the claims are relatively small, it's for the best.
If we instead say "eh, that's no big deal", then it will continue and latter suits will be harder to win. At some point it might become easy to win, say when the box reads "Will not set your house on fire!", no less than five house fires are caused directly by normal operation of the card, AND the card spontaneously bursts into flames just sitting on the defendant's desk, but it's in our best interest to fight these practices now rather than waiting for that time.
The reason that they don't offer auto-update is that, if they did, Adobe/Oracle wouldn't be able to offer you crapware along with your update, pre-checked for your convenience (Norton something and Ask.com Toolbar, respectively.)
Because that goes from private censorship to impersonation, which can run afoul of a lot of laws in a lot of countries even for something as relatively "innocent" as game recommendation.
In this case, Valve is simply refusing to pass on the message to the other party in one circumstance (one specific domain). Not a good thing, but not illegal or even necessarily amoral (though that is up for debate) when done through their own service. In the other circumstance (related domains) they pass the message on but change the client behavior to not automatically open the browser. This is also their prerogative, again neither illegal nor amoral (except, perhaps, mischaracterizing the site as malicious), though if they tried doing this for links to, say, EA's Origin website they could be sued by EA for anti-competitive practices.
Because children never lose objects, even medium-sized ones. If Mommy is sick, the last thing the child will be thinking is "where did I put my green fun phone?"
The option of a panic button that is firmly attached somewhere (or, better yet, a panic button in every room, firmly attached) won't get lost, and the kid can be taught easily enough to hunt down the nearest one and smack it repeatedly.
I suppose you could strap the phone to the kid somehow, but it has to come off at some point so it's still not as reliable. You could combine the two ideas, and have the phone attached to a fixed object and easy to get to.
There's building off of others' work, and then there's just adding a veneer.
Using your scenario, what Elementary OS seems to do is to take a bread product created by someone else, already wrapped, and take the bread out to put in their own nicer-looking wrapper. They don't claim to make the bread, true, but what they add is a miniscule part of the overall product. They then say that people can pay the same price as the originally-wrapped bread, but it would be good to pay more. This is the veneer. (Incidentally, this is how a lot of store brands work, but the store brand is instead cheaper than the name brand.)
If they were building off of someone else's work they would use the bread to make a sandwich they sold or to make other derivatives with it (croutons, offer bags of crumbs to people at parks for duck feeding, some food-art project).
Not that the veneer is necessarily bad; if someone feels that it offers more value over the original product and would like to pay more, fine and dandy.
Yes, but you have to have substantial capital to use as influence in the commodities market and perhaps a connection to some mercenaries in an oil-rich country, primarily in the middle east.
Considering how much our federal government has tried to extend its power into other countries, I wouldn't be surprised if they start flying SWAT teams overseas or cobble them up from soldiers stationed at bases in the area.
Slashdot Mirror
These days it seems the wealthy will hide their assets overseas if someone so much as farts too loudly, so I don't see this as an argument against.
And they have to pay these fancy lawyers and accountants, which means that their wealth still decreases and the money is spread around. If they have to pay another, or pay an existing one more, in order to avoid these fines, that seems like a good outcome to me.
Fines are supposed to hurt at least a bit; that's how they're a deterrent. There's also no guarantee that the rough amount would increase for the middle class, either, depending on the fees already in place and the equation that replaces them. A proper equation would leave fines about the same or slightly less for the middle class.
The class tiers aren't "Upper, Middle, Zero". Someone with no income is extremely unlikely to have a car in the first place. You can be poor and still have some discretionary funds, though quite small; or do you think that not a single person below the poverty line has a TV? So, while the rich are paying the lawyers, Joe Poor isn't tossed in jail for failing to pay a fine that is onerous to his income, a fine he got because he didn't slow down enough on a steep downhill slope.
But wait, there's more! Fines that are more in line with your income make them a more effective deterrent for the poor, too! Imagine that you only make $2K/mo. Something happens and you get a fine for $500. You get the fine, laugh, and throw it away; there's no way you can pay this fine, you're on a shoestring budget as it is. If there was some long-term payment option maybe you could pay it, but AFAIK this isn't a common thing. In a risk vs. reward scenario, it makes more sense to keep the $500 and hope no one tracks you down (which is incredibly unlikely for that amount.)
Now imagine the fine is only $50. The risk vs. reward balance changes greatly now: It's not worth the risk of getting arrested over $50 if you can realistically pay the fine, even if that means a bit more ramen and a bit less McDonald's for the month. It not only becomes more likely to pay but also to avoid offending in the first place.
I do agree about many driving laws being too strict, or the attention paid to them imbalanced (speeding is the common stopping reason, but tailgating and failing to pass in the left lane are more likely accident causes), but even if those were improved fines would still be a problem.
The government is going to touch the money at some point in order to collect the fines, even if they don't hold onto it, so you can't completely remove government from the situation. The way I think it should be:
1) Fine as % of income
2) Put each amount into an emergency relief fund, to be used in "Act of God" disasters
3) If unspent after a year, remove the amount (and any interest generated from it) and use it for one or all of the following:
A) A public work, such as a park (something that is a nicety but not necessity)
B) Lottery for those who have registered vehicle in the area, that are not government employees, that have not gotten a single citation during the year (this gives an extra incentive to drive well in addition to the disincentive to not break the law )
C) Equal tax refund/credit for all citizens
The reason it's not kept for more than a year is because the area would become reliant on it as a primary emergency fund; instead it's used as a boost, if available.
Alternative medicine guaranteed that he would die sooner than later.
Routine operation, while it did have risks of a quicker death, at least had a good chance of extending his life.
I imagine there will be some sort of two-factor authentication. The car can recognize the lights or, more reliably, a standardized signal from the police vehicle. It begins to pull over and, while it does so, contacts a standard system to verify that the copy signalling is a legitimate one. If not recognized as a police vehicle, or the police car sends a "move past" signal, it would just move over/slow down to allow the emergency vehicle to pass.
There are layers involved, of course, and wouldn't be fool-proof, but I think this is one of the easier problems to solve with self-driving vehicles.
While it's true that this isn't a test of a fully self-driving car, solid, long distance driving is going to be the "kickstarter" for getting full self-driving automobiles into people's homes. Families are going to love setting out on the highway, setting the car to "maintain", and then everyone (driver included!) can just sleep or play games or whatever. Car alerts when it's running low on gas, there's a potential problem, or you're coming to a more congested area that requires human take-over.
But then there are semis. Allowing truck drivers to sleep while their semi drives a steady route is going to save serious man hours and real hours (and likely many lives). This will likely come before the minivan does, because there are all sorts of extra pressures put on the trucking industry that are miniscule for consumer driving. You don't want to test this kind of thing with a giant truck, though, which is why it's a car. Test with the car, apply to the truck, prove the usefulness and reliability on the truck, apply to the car.
As with most things consumer, we're going to see heavy use by businesses before they're common amongst people. City street auto-driving will likely be taken by FedEx or UPS first, moving on to driverless, inner-city taxis, and so forth.
Not fun in general, but Nintendo fun via Nintendo properties. These will never be multi-platform, so if you want to play Zelda, Star Fox, Mario, or Pokemon you're going to have to buy a Nintendo console. The reason the Wii U's main reason wasn't "brand" like Xbone is because most Nintendo fans (so far as I can tell) are tepid about decisions Nintendo made with the console. Despite this, they still get one because they want access to those games.[1]
Not that you can't get light-hearted affairs and platformers on other systems, but they usually take a far back seat to games rated T/M.
[1]At the very least, that's why I'm planning to get one this year, when a number of large names come out or will come out early 2016.
I think developers brought this upon themselves. Near the end of last gen, poly-count got with extremely diminishing returns and particle effects hit a roof, so they made up for the lack of graphical improvements by touting 1080p whenever they possibly could. Thus console gamers came to expect it of higher-end titles, especially when the console manufacturers moderately pushed the ability.
This gen can do more in terms of particle generation/poly count (with the Wii U far behind), so the focus has shifted back to those and away from 1080p.
In programmer parlance:
if(bill.Name.ToLower().Contains("freedom")) {
boolean passed = congress.vote(bill);
if(passed)
panic();
}
This. When they first introduced ads, you could go into settings and opt out. I did so, then turned off auto-updating. I'm happy with the version of the client I have (2.something)
My guess is that the abilities of the FTC to punish are severely hampered so that they can't be used on otherwise-legit businesses when they do a bad thing.
That reminds me of waiting in a very long line (maybe it was Christmas?) to send packages through the USPS, and someone at one of the counters spent their entire time ranting to the postal worker about how USPS service was horrible and they hoped the service would become a private one, and that private industry was better.
If I'd had my wits about me then, I would have said "Hey, if you like private industry so much, why are you here instead of FedEx or UPS?"
Their ranting probably delayed the rest of us getting to the counter by a minute.
I often wonder why we've not heard a peep about Half Life (2: Episode) 3. I understand the concept of Valve Time, but even taking that into consideration we're closing in a decade since Episode 2 (and the whole episodic started with the claim that they could put out an Episode every six months). To have nothing, not even a single screenshot or even an official "yeah, we're making Pikm- er, Episode 3", in 8 years, seems really bizarre. At best we had a blurb about "Ricochet 2" as a thinly-veiled explanation of the HL3 lack of information in 2012. I understand that they want to get it right, but at this point they risk "Duke Nukem Forever" syndrome, where the vacuum created by the lack of information is filled by user hype and it will become impossible to meet gamer's expectations. (I don't expect the eventual HLF3 to be as poor as DNF was, though.)
My assumption as this point is that a small group is quietly tooling away at HL3 using the Source 2 engine (perhaps co-developing). Once both HL3 is more-or-less done, they'll sit on it and just keep the graphics updated. Right now Valve has so many things its trying (like SteamOS) and is still getting a ton of attention/money from Steam trading cards and marketplace, TF2 hats, and DOTA 2 that the company itself doesn't need HL3. Thus it will maintain and use HL3 as its "Final Fantasy" if it feels the company could be in financial trouble within two years. They could release it on the N-Gage and it will still sell millions of copies, so it's like one funds where you put something in and can't touch it for 20 years.
In the case of SEGA, I think another interview with Tom Kalinski spoke volumes about the problem: Sega of Japan. The interview touches on the fact that SEGA partnered with Sony to create a CD peripheral but cut their ties before it was complete. Nintendo also did this, to make a peripheral for the SNES, and cut ties with Sony to partner with Philips (Sony found out about the change when Nintendo announced their partnership with Phillips.) Sony then took the work they had done with the two video game giants of the time and created the Playstation. In particular, I think the following part of the interview highlights the whole problem with SEGA (emphasis mine):
And the interest they paid back was paid for by:
A) Increasing fees and penalties on customers
B) Stagnating wages and bonuses of regular employees
C) Laying off employees
D) Decreasing the compensation and withholding bonuses of the CxOs and upper management that led the company to needing the loans, by a large amount
E) Decreasing their profits
F) All of the above (except D and E)
So when the cop believes that the wallet a man is removing from his coat slowly, after being shouted at to show ID, is a gun then shooting the man five times is justifiable?
I like T-mobile as well, but have a completely opposite plan. I rarely use my phone (no social life), don't want to do anything on the web, and never travel outside a 60 mile radius from home. (Once in the last three years.) I dropped Verizon and switched to T-mobile, going with their prepaid option and a cheap flip phone. I top off the account and pay 10c min/text. This might seem like a lot for those who use their phones quite often, but for me this is great. With Verizon I was paying $70/mo, even after military and a secondary discount, and they said I couldn't get a no-data plan if I had a smartphone (I had a Droid 2 with them). With T-Mobile I've averaged about $15/mo.
Their signal can be weak and spotty in my area (Boulder, CO and abouts), and I can't get any picture/long texts (a rare occasion for me) because I don't have a data plan, but outside those I am extremely happy that I switched to them.
If "real world performance" cannot at least meet "specs on paper", then it is false advertising.
Yes, in this case it's an extremely little thing compared to the overall card, but corporations are trying their damnedest to slip in/out whatever they can at the expense of the consumer. So long as they can get away with it (which includes paying a fine/lawsuit that costs less than the profit from their misleading statements) they will continue to do it. If we can use lawsuits or laws to stop such practices now, while the claims are relatively small, it's for the best.
If we instead say "eh, that's no big deal", then it will continue and latter suits will be harder to win. At some point it might become easy to win, say when the box reads "Will not set your house on fire!", no less than five house fires are caused directly by normal operation of the card, AND the card spontaneously bursts into flames just sitting on the defendant's desk, but it's in our best interest to fight these practices now rather than waiting for that time.
Here's an article about how your listed height can affect your chances. There's a "ceiling" for women and a "floor" for men, according to this study (though that link is Daily Mail, so don't bet your life on this info.)
The reason that they don't offer auto-update is that, if they did, Adobe/Oracle wouldn't be able to offer you crapware along with your update, pre-checked for your convenience (Norton something and Ask.com Toolbar, respectively.)
Because that goes from private censorship to impersonation, which can run afoul of a lot of laws in a lot of countries even for something as relatively "innocent" as game recommendation.
In this case, Valve is simply refusing to pass on the message to the other party in one circumstance (one specific domain). Not a good thing, but not illegal or even necessarily amoral (though that is up for debate) when done through their own service. In the other circumstance (related domains) they pass the message on but change the client behavior to not automatically open the browser. This is also their prerogative, again neither illegal nor amoral (except, perhaps, mischaracterizing the site as malicious), though if they tried doing this for links to, say, EA's Origin website they could be sued by EA for anti-competitive practices.
Because children never lose objects, even medium-sized ones. If Mommy is sick, the last thing the child will be thinking is "where did I put my green fun phone?"
The option of a panic button that is firmly attached somewhere (or, better yet, a panic button in every room, firmly attached) won't get lost, and the kid can be taught easily enough to hunt down the nearest one and smack it repeatedly.
I suppose you could strap the phone to the kid somehow, but it has to come off at some point so it's still not as reliable. You could combine the two ideas, and have the phone attached to a fixed object and easy to get to.
There's building off of others' work, and then there's just adding a veneer.
Using your scenario, what Elementary OS seems to do is to take a bread product created by someone else, already wrapped, and take the bread out to put in their own nicer-looking wrapper. They don't claim to make the bread, true, but what they add is a miniscule part of the overall product. They then say that people can pay the same price as the originally-wrapped bread, but it would be good to pay more. This is the veneer. (Incidentally, this is how a lot of store brands work, but the store brand is instead cheaper than the name brand.)
If they were building off of someone else's work they would use the bread to make a sandwich they sold or to make other derivatives with it (croutons, offer bags of crumbs to people at parks for duck feeding, some food-art project).
Not that the veneer is necessarily bad; if someone feels that it offers more value over the original product and would like to pay more, fine and dandy.
Yes, but you have to have substantial capital to use as influence in the commodities market and perhaps a connection to some mercenaries in an oil-rich country, primarily in the middle east.
Those in power all cry "Think of the children!",
None of them will cry "Think of the children's future!"...
Considering how much our federal government has tried to extend its power into other countries, I wouldn't be surprised if they start flying SWAT teams overseas or cobble them up from soldiers stationed at bases in the area.