It's easy to attack and criticize. But he offers no solution. Seriously, how does this "privacy commissioner" *think* one would moderate platforms this large... particularly while negating the possibility of false positives?
I haven't seen the NZ shooter's stream in full. But the clips I've seen look like they could come from a FPS streaming on Twitch. Probably, that was because the news was sensationalizing the "just like a video game" element of the stream. But still... if a human can mistake the stream for a Twitch feed, than a machine certainly can. So automation is right out. You need humans monitoring content and more human monitoring those humans and even more humans monitoring those humans to both prevent things like that lifestream; but also prevent false positives (The innocent should never be punished along with the guilty. So false positives are unacceptable.). I can't even fathom the size of the moderation workforce that would be necessary, given the size of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and the like.
And if Facebook, Twitter, et al. ever DID manage to build that sort of moderation regime; how much do you want to bet that the we-hate-nerds outrage crowd would then be screeching "big brother" and "censorship"? It's especially ironic, considering that the screecher in this particular case IS a privacy commissioner... advocating for a level of surveillance that would eliminate anything even resembling privacy.
> Until developers start pushing out major Apps for > Linux
That kind of speaks to the other issue with Linux... unless and until the Linux community is willing to PAY for those apps, developers (Aside from Indies and enthusiasts) won't bother. There's too much "GPL or GTFO" in the Linux community. And it's not as if it hasn't been tried. An old friend of mine worked for an outfit call Loki Games a while back, porting AAA game titles to Linux... not years later as is the norm for games coming to Mac; but often within mere *months* of the windows release. And I don't mean obscure titles, I'm taking the Dooms, Civilizations, Simcities, etc. They even opened and contributed back some of the tools they used to do so like OpenAL. The linux community's reaction? "PAY for software??? Fuck you! GPL or GTFO!!!"
Suffice it to say, Loki died an ignominious death.
Yeah, if what you're doing can be done with free software, Linux is fantastic. It's my own choice of server software by leaps and bounds. But if I were running a commercial software shop? I wouldn't waste my time or effort. I've seen what happened to the people who did.
Okay, genius: We're taking about a system that samples volatile aromatics in the cabin, but without relying on a breath tube. Just how exactly will there be no false positives? TFA did not specify. Presumably then, you have some great insight to ameliorate any skepticism. What don't you share it, rather than attacking people for being wary.
The possibility of a false positive is what's wrong; not with me or any other critic of the system, but with the idea of the system itself.
Aromatic-based system? What if I'm the designated driver for some drunk friends? If there's a chance that my car won't start for me, that's unacceptable. I used to tend bar. Oddly enough, that was one of the most sober periods of my life because I quickly became disgusted with drunks and stopped drinking for a long while even after I quit the job. But one spilt drink, and I'd stink like a drunk. So, likewise, a car that would not start for me after work would have been entirely unacceptable.
Touch-based system? Well, there's the aforementioned bartending job again. After an entire shift, it's pretty likely that my hands have come into contact with plenty of spilt alcohol. Yeah, we'd wash our hands... and then immediately sanitize them. That hand sanitizer contains... yup... alcohol. Then, there are the people who work with chemicals, including ethanol and methanol as part of their industrial jobs.
Sure, if the system is good enough such that there's never a chance of a false positive such that someone who's not drunk can't start their car; then sure this *might* be a good idea. I don't exactly have a lot of confidence that it would be good enough to not have false positives though; particularly if it's meant to be cheap enough to add to every car on the road without undue additional expense.
You really think the people who drive pre-smogcheck cars do so because they can't afford to buy something newer? Aside from the original VW Beetle, for which parts practically fall from the sky and which can be successfully worked on by a blind drunken monkey with a $20 starter toolkit from Walgreens; the maintenance and operation of old cars is stupidly expensive. A Civic, Corolla, Accord, or Camry; OTOH, ever since the '90s, will run basically forever so long as you keep the fluids changed on-schedule. The people who go through the trouble to keep up old pre-smog mostly do so for a few reasons:
1). It's their hobby. They just like maintaining and driving classic cars... 2002s, DB5s, old 911s, original MINIs, etc. these are not their daily drivers anyway.
2). They never accepted that the 1960s are over. And damned if they're EVER going to let "the man" get them out of their VW Microbus. These people are slowly dying out.
3). They think that emissions controls are inherently evil. "CARB = Communism" Yes, I've actually seen that bumper sticker a few times. Not sure what can be said or done about these people; except that there are fortunately few enough of then that they can be considered to be edge cases and mostly ignored.
Targeted advertising doesn't really bother me. I mean... it would sure be *nice* if we could get along without ads in general. And, on the internet, I use a blocker to get rid of the more obnoxious ones which actively interfere with my ability to get to content, or which drive up my CPU usage or pose a security risk. But I get that internet infrastructure has to be paid for; and that, when you're not paying a subscription fee (And paying for a subscription damn well BETTER come with a 100% ad-free experience.), someone ELSE is paying for the service. And the only real way that happens is if that someone is advertising to me.
So, I figure if I have to see ads anyway, why SHOULDN'T they be targeted at me so they'll actually be relevant? In fact, considering the data that Google and Facebook already have on me, they damn well BETTER be relevant. Thus, it's not targeted ads that really bother me. But POORLY targeted ads trigger an irrational level of rage. I can't fathom ever wanting to buy a house in somewhere boring and suburban like Marin or Contra Costa counties; or taking a job as a cop or security guard. You can call Miller low-life "the champagne of beers", but as far as I'm concerned, that swill should be poured back into the horse it came from. You can wrap micro-transaction shovelware in a Star Trek or Game of Thrones skin and call it an iOS "game"; but it's still trash I'll never pay in to. And Google and Facebook sure as hell have enough data that they should know this. So, dammit, not a single whit of my time, attention, bandwidth or CPU capacity should be wasted with ads for any of the same. Creditkarma.com knows my FICO score, so I shouldn't have to see ads there for credit repair tools for people fresh out of bankruptcy or student loan default. (And hell... if Google and Facebook *DON'T* know my actual FICO, they should sure as hell be able to make a pretty good guess.) And no, it's not Orwellian, you tools. Corporations don't want us to embrace Insoc, hate Eurasia (or is is Eastasia?) or to love Big Brother. They just want our money.
Sure, people can be assholes. So maybe... MAYBE... there are some categories should not be allowed to be manually targeted for some categories of product. But if it's an automated and algorithmically targeted advertisement? If a computer (Which, not being human, is inherently NOT racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, or whatever.) is making the call without human intervention? I'm kind of on Facebook's side on this one.
> I remember reading some studies on this, and the > reduced cost of Uber/Lyft has indeed dropped drunk > driving.
More than that, I'd wager that, if you were to run the numbers, Uber/Lyft would also be shown to be good for bars and nightclubs. That same $8 Uber home from the Castro used to be a $45 taxi ride. And that's if you could successfully hail a cab in the first place; because their dispatch number is something between an exercise in futility and a sick joke. With Uber and Lyft, I go out a lot more because of the ease and convenience of getting home. And the remainder of what would have gone to the taxi company versus Uber/Lyft? Well, that's 3 or 4 more drinks... profit to the bar or club and tip to the bartender. Everyone wins... except perhaps my liver.
As for the trip out, why not just use MUNI, or AC Transit, or whatever? I do. And, while I do have my complaints about it, it's perfectly fine for the trip out. You don't *have* to be so snooty as to refuse to set foot on mass transit, after all. And that $6 you save, taking transit versus a rideshare is most of another drink.:)
They're not exempt from mandatory liability insurance. If Google is telling anything remotely resembling the truth about their Waymo division; once the data finds it into the hands of the insurance companies' actuaries, it will quickly become prohibitively expensive to drive human-operated cars, except perhaps occasionally as a hobby.
"The problem isn't with the self-driving cars, it's with the cars that aren't self-driving, cars that are driven by idiots like me."
I've been saying for a while now that real adoption of self-driving cars will not be driven by early adopters, or even legislation. If Google/Waymo is even half right about the reduced accident rate of self-driving cars, the watershed will be driven by actuaries. Because a reduced accident rate also means a reduced insurance payout rate. Once enough of the data are in, the insurance companies will do the math and start raising the rates on human-driven cars. Once that drives a few more people to self-drivers, they'll have even more supporting data. And the insurance premiums will wind up set such that it will be prohibitively expensive for humans to drive their own cars; except, perhaps as a weekend hobby. But certainly, once the actuaries do their thing, none of us will be manually driving for our daily commute or errands.
Believing in the rights of individual PEOPLE to do what they like with what they've bought is one thing. I'm 100% in favor of that. You want to work on your own Tesla? Cool. Go for it.
Abuse of the legal system by one BUSINESS to force another to subsidize it... now that's something else entirely. And I'm entirely opposed to that. Your business wants to open a shop repairing Teslas? Okay. Do the work of developing the skills, building your parts supply chain, and learning the technology yourself. You want a law forcing Tesla to help you? Go fuck yourself.
I don't see the switch being all *that* quick. The big blocker for Tesla, I think, is still charging. I would likely have bought a Tesla already... If I already owned my own house and could have the home charger installed. But alas, I rent right now. Driving to the nearest supercharger every time I need a juice up is in no way practical. And I suspect that there are a great many people who are in a similar situation.
Now, buying a home is on my near-to-mid-term horizon. But then there's the problem that I will *just* have bought a HOUSE. And dropping another $50-100K on a car would be significantly less reasonable... at least until 2021, at the earliest, when 45 could be expunged from the White House and the mortgage and itemized tax deductions, which he gutted, could be restored.
Now... If Tesla were, instead of just superchargers which really only solve the "road trip" problem, to buy one of the major gas station brands and convert it to superchargers chain-wide... I think *THAT* will be the watershed moment that will cause the quick switch of the general masses to electric.
Well, if you'd actually bothered to read the article, or any of the articles about the study when it launched, or any of the materiel and disclosures from the study itself; or if you'd bothered to educate yourself in any way whatsoever, you'd know that you had to volunteer and opt in by:
1) Downloading a separate app for the study 2) Read the agreement about what data is collected and how it is used 3) Explicitly agree to said agreement 4) Wait to be accepted into the study 5) Be notified that you were accepted and that data sharing would begin 6) Remain in the study by keeping the app installed throughout
But hey... Don't let any little thing like facts get in the way of your "Apple is teh satan" narrative. Rant on.
Itâ(TM)s not the â70s or â80s anymore. My Mazda 3 (Not a hybrid. Not a Smart or iQ or even Fiat500 sized mini. Just a normal, everyday, ICE hatchback.) does better than 300 even in 100% stop-and-go hilly city driving. On an average tank, with mixed driving, I get about 375. And on a freeway road trip, itâ(TM)s good for nearly 500 to a tank. Itâ(TM)s actually the first car Iâ(TM)ve owned that routinely beats its EPA numbers.
Tech companies engaged in hardly any lobbying back in the '90s during that tech boom. And we got screwed because of it. Established industry players, with long histories of LOTS of lobbying bought laws like the DMCA, for example. How many tech companies were wiped out by that one abuse alone? I had friends at Napster, and at two other Napster-like companies, that were put out of work by the RIAA/Metallica lobby. And the demise of one of the companies I worked for was hastened by being forced to waste engineering time and effort, and waste money to bring a lawyer onto the payroll; to deal with DMCA BS. And some of you will recall that 2001 was a BAD time for your employer to be going under.
And that's just one of a number of laws that those entrenched interests bought that have adversely... sometimes grievously... affected tech. Yeah, it's a dirty game and it would be nice for it to go away entirely. But as long as scum like the RIAA/Metallica play it; tech really has no choice now. Bringing a knife to a gun fight seldom works out.
The fact is that, considering the size of modern TVs and quality of modern home audio, most of us have setups at home that are just as, if not more (When you factor in the overpriced tickets and food; and the awfulness of the crowd that only the Alamo Drafthouse bothers to do anything about.), enjoyable than the theater for most movies.
SOME movies do command a theater showing. But many donâ(TM)t. Picking on a few WW2 flicks, for example: The Darkest Hour and The Imitation Game were fantastic. But I see no compelling reason why I should have gone to see them on the big screen. And indeed I did not. Dunkirk and Saving Private Ryan, OTOH, absolutely did and DO command theater attendance.
The weirdness here is that much of Spielbergâ(TM)s work does fall into the category of âoeMust see it in the theater.â If, for example, he were to re-release the Indiana Jones Trilogy into the theater, I absolutely would buy tickets and see it on the big screen. Something still good, but much less spectacular, like The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind... not so much.
This law is simply meaningless. Vermont is just too small for this to have any significant impact on anyone, even its own residents. According to Wikipedia, at 623,657 Vermont is smaller than the 28 largest *cities* in the US; to say nothing about counties, metropolitan areas, or other states.
My bet is that these 120 brokers are the handful that have offices, employees, or other operations in Vermont. Honestly, I'm surprised the number is even that high. And my prediction is that 120 will be dropping fairly quickly as companies close up shop in Vermont and tell it to go pound sand.
My dad used to say that, in the navy, the first thing to do when something doesn't work is to whack it a few times with a wrench, and it'll usually start working again. I've found that a similar technique works on those self-checkout scales. I always try to bag the heaviest and most durable items first... canned goods, for example, at Safeway. When the inevitable "unexpected item in bagging area" happens; two or three good lift-and-drops seem to usually reset the thing and let me continue checking out.
The workers' request is perfectly reasonable though; particularly if working for a defense contractor is not what you signed up for in the first place. And it doesn't even need to be an anti-combat, or any other ethical, stance. Have you every worked for a defense, or other government, contractor? I did, in my first job out of college. And that's a mistake I plan to never, EVER, make again. And it's nothing at all to do with ethics; though with the current occupant of the White House, that is a certainly greater concern than it was when I graduated. I'm not at all naive enough to believe that we can just abolish the military. I just don't want to work for it.
Rather, it's the culture of government work. I's toxic. You're a tiny cog in a gigantic machine without any way for your own contributions to be meaningful. It's cubes as far as the eye can see in warehouse-sized buildings. The technology, both hardware and software, is older-than-dirt and will serve you nowhere in any other job. It's super-political. And I don't mean R vs D. I mean every single little person who attains the slightest bit of power is king of his little hill and will require tribute if you need access to any resource in their domain, greater concerns like productivity be damned. It's like those old adventure games where you might be tasked with saving the kingdom, world, or galaxy. But every... single... NPC... wants you to do stupid shit before they'll aid you in the smallest way. Tasked with going to person A to get item X? Before A will give you access to X, he will require you to goto person B to get item Y. B will require you to get Z from C before giving you Y. And C will make you go out and grind, killing orcs or boars or womprats or something similarly stupid and pick up 100 item drops before giving you Z. And a task that should take no more than a day winds up taking up two weeks. (That two weeks, by the way, is BEFORE administrative overhead. Expect to do about a page and a half of paperwork for every line of code. Oh, and account for your time in 6-minute intervals and don't ever Ever EVER accidentally use the wrong billing code.) And there'd better actually be a god to help you if you need to deal with procurement to get something from a vendor.
Basically... tl;dr... imagine the bastard offspring of Office Space, Brazil, and Dilbert; but just all the awful parts without any of the funny bits. THAT is defense/government contractor work.
No thank you. I've been in Bay Area consumer and B2B tech companies ever since; and have not the slightest interest in ever doing government work again. And yeah... If my current employer were to develop the aspiration to become another Lockheed-Martin; I'd urge management to reconsider too... right after I update my resume in case they say no and want to keep going for that filthy D.C. lucre.
Hell. You don't even need to send them anywhere miserable or radioactive. One of the islands in Hawaii is a former leper colony. Since leprosy can actually be treated and cured nowadays, there's hardly a need for its former purpose. We could just exile the unvaccinated to that island. And they couldn't even make any claim that they were being mistreated. "Wait... so I don't have to be vaccinated; AND I get to live in Hawaii???" The only problem I can see is that some people might actually become anti-vaxers just for the relocation to Hawaii.
And you're perfectly free to open up your iPhone or Android or whatever and do anything you like to it. Fix it yourself. Pay someone else to do so. Break it up and sell the parts to others. Leave it in the box in the hope that it somehow becomes a collector's item. Put it in a Vitamix and upload the video to YouTube. Once money has changed hands, the phone is yours to do with as you please and the seller cannot stop you by legal means, or any other.
You already have the right to repair your own hardware. And you always have. You may or may not have the knowledge or skill to do so. And the companies that manufacture the internal parts may not sell them in lots of less than a hundred thousand. But neither of those factors have anything at all to do with your own rights.
No. The whole "right to repair" hullabaloo has absolutely nothing at all to do with your rights. It's entirely the invention of third-party businesses; looking after their interests with only a public relations campaign that claims they have any interest in your rights. These businesses simply don't want to bother to establish, for instance, their own supply chains for spare parts. Rather, they are trying to abuse the legal system to force Apple, Samsung, Sony, et al, to allow the "right to repair" businesses to glom onto the manufacturers' own supply chains so they can skip out on doing the work of establishing the business relationships themselves. They want access to internal data and manuals of the manufacturers; so they can cheat without doing the work of developing their own knowledge and skill bases. They are in no way fighting for YOUR right to repair, or any other right of YOURS. They're just looking to boost their own profit margins by trying to skip the hard work and ride the coattails of others.
Well... god forbid anyone take an unauthorized picture of Atlanta((TM)allrightsreserved)) that might include a glimpse of Mercedes-Benz Stadium((TM)allrightsreserved)), or anything else football((TM)allrightsreserved)) or Superbowl((TM)allrightsreserved)) related. The NFL((TM)allrightsreserved)) might not realize some tiny shred of revenue from its exclusive rights to all structures, skylines, logos, colors, images, players, teams, personas, activities, foods, and apparel. And we can't have that, now can we?
As the saying goes: "He that lieth down with dogs shall rise up with fleas"
There's an easy way to not be mistaken for a Nazi: Don't do Nazi-like things. And don't stand with those who do. If you're of the opinion that Nazis are "very fine people", then you're doing the latter.
> If we are really serious about combating fake news, > then why shouldn't Google have to delist the biased > and misleading blacklist, in favor of other more > accurate reviews?
Because Google is not the source or offender. It's a neutral third party. If some article or site is libelous or defamatory, the proper course of action id to address it at the source. Do that, and it falls off the Google index the next time the original site gets spidered. Attacking Google instead is nothing more than going after the party with the biggest pockets. Plus, I'd argue that it displays blatant bias and discrimination on the part of the EU courts. When have one of these articles about "the right to be forgotten" EVER been about the original libel or defamation (Almost always published in EU newspapers or on EU sites.) being taken down? It's ALWAYS Google, or some other US company, that's under attack in these cases.
Slashdot Mirror
It's easy to attack and criticize. But he offers no solution. Seriously, how does this "privacy commissioner" *think* one would moderate platforms this large... particularly while negating the possibility of false positives?
I haven't seen the NZ shooter's stream in full. But the clips I've seen look like they could come from a FPS streaming on Twitch. Probably, that was because the news was sensationalizing the "just like a video game" element of the stream. But still... if a human can mistake the stream for a Twitch feed, than a machine certainly can. So automation is right out. You need humans monitoring content and more human monitoring those humans and even more humans monitoring those humans to both prevent things like that lifestream; but also prevent false positives (The innocent should never be punished along with the guilty. So false positives are unacceptable.). I can't even fathom the size of the moderation workforce that would be necessary, given the size of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and the like.
And if Facebook, Twitter, et al. ever DID manage to build that sort of moderation regime; how much do you want to bet that the we-hate-nerds outrage crowd would then be screeching "big brother" and "censorship"? It's especially ironic, considering that the screecher in this particular case IS a privacy commissioner... advocating for a level of surveillance that would eliminate anything even resembling privacy.
> Until developers start pushing out major Apps for
> Linux
That kind of speaks to the other issue with Linux... unless and until the Linux community is willing to PAY for those apps, developers (Aside from Indies and enthusiasts) won't bother. There's too much "GPL or GTFO" in the Linux community. And it's not as if it hasn't been tried. An old friend of mine worked for an outfit call Loki Games a while back, porting AAA game titles to Linux... not years later as is the norm for games coming to Mac; but often within mere *months* of the windows release. And I don't mean obscure titles, I'm taking the Dooms, Civilizations, Simcities, etc. They even opened and contributed back some of the tools they used to do so like OpenAL. The linux community's reaction? "PAY for software??? Fuck you! GPL or GTFO!!!"
Suffice it to say, Loki died an ignominious death.
Yeah, if what you're doing can be done with free software, Linux is fantastic. It's my own choice of server software by leaps and bounds. But if I were running a commercial software shop? I wouldn't waste my time or effort. I've seen what happened to the people who did.
Okay, genius: We're taking about a system that samples volatile aromatics in the cabin, but without relying on a breath tube. Just how exactly will there be no false positives? TFA did not specify. Presumably then, you have some great insight to ameliorate any skepticism. What don't you share it, rather than attacking people for being wary.
I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill there. I've taken Ubers and Lyfts in plenty of places that are not NYC, Chicago, Boston, or SF.
The possibility of a false positive is what's wrong; not with me or any other critic of the system, but with the idea of the system itself.
Aromatic-based system? What if I'm the designated driver for some drunk friends? If there's a chance that my car won't start for me, that's unacceptable. I used to tend bar. Oddly enough, that was one of the most sober periods of my life because I quickly became disgusted with drunks and stopped drinking for a long while even after I quit the job. But one spilt drink, and I'd stink like a drunk. So, likewise, a car that would not start for me after work would have been entirely unacceptable.
Touch-based system? Well, there's the aforementioned bartending job again. After an entire shift, it's pretty likely that my hands have come into contact with plenty of spilt alcohol. Yeah, we'd wash our hands... and then immediately sanitize them. That hand sanitizer contains... yup... alcohol. Then, there are the people who work with chemicals, including ethanol and methanol as part of their industrial jobs.
Sure, if the system is good enough such that there's never a chance of a false positive such that someone who's not drunk can't start their car; then sure this *might* be a good idea. I don't exactly have a lot of confidence that it would be good enough to not have false positives though; particularly if it's meant to be cheap enough to add to every car on the road without undue additional expense.
You really think the people who drive pre-smogcheck cars do so because they can't afford to buy something newer? Aside from the original VW Beetle, for which parts practically fall from the sky and which can be successfully worked on by a blind drunken monkey with a $20 starter toolkit from Walgreens; the maintenance and operation of old cars is stupidly expensive. A Civic, Corolla, Accord, or Camry; OTOH, ever since the '90s, will run basically forever so long as you keep the fluids changed on-schedule. The people who go through the trouble to keep up old pre-smog mostly do so for a few reasons:
1). It's their hobby. They just like maintaining and driving classic cars... 2002s, DB5s, old 911s, original MINIs, etc. these are not their daily drivers anyway.
2). They never accepted that the 1960s are over. And damned if they're EVER going to let "the man" get them out of their VW Microbus. These people are slowly dying out.
3). They think that emissions controls are inherently evil. "CARB = Communism" Yes, I've actually seen that bumper sticker a few times. Not sure what can be said or done about these people; except that there are fortunately few enough of then that they can be considered to be edge cases and mostly ignored.
Targeted advertising doesn't really bother me. I mean... it would sure be *nice* if we could get along without ads in general. And, on the internet, I use a blocker to get rid of the more obnoxious ones which actively interfere with my ability to get to content, or which drive up my CPU usage or pose a security risk. But I get that internet infrastructure has to be paid for; and that, when you're not paying a subscription fee (And paying for a subscription damn well BETTER come with a 100% ad-free experience.), someone ELSE is paying for the service. And the only real way that happens is if that someone is advertising to me.
So, I figure if I have to see ads anyway, why SHOULDN'T they be targeted at me so they'll actually be relevant? In fact, considering the data that Google and Facebook already have on me, they damn well BETTER be relevant. Thus, it's not targeted ads that really bother me. But POORLY targeted ads trigger an irrational level of rage. I can't fathom ever wanting to buy a house in somewhere boring and suburban like Marin or Contra Costa counties; or taking a job as a cop or security guard. You can call Miller low-life "the champagne of beers", but as far as I'm concerned, that swill should be poured back into the horse it came from. You can wrap micro-transaction shovelware in a Star Trek or Game of Thrones skin and call it an iOS "game"; but it's still trash I'll never pay in to. And Google and Facebook sure as hell have enough data that they should know this. So, dammit, not a single whit of my time, attention, bandwidth or CPU capacity should be wasted with ads for any of the same. Creditkarma.com knows my FICO score, so I shouldn't have to see ads there for credit repair tools for people fresh out of bankruptcy or student loan default. (And hell... if Google and Facebook *DON'T* know my actual FICO, they should sure as hell be able to make a pretty good guess.) And no, it's not Orwellian, you tools. Corporations don't want us to embrace Insoc, hate Eurasia (or is is Eastasia?) or to love Big Brother. They just want our money.
Sure, people can be assholes. So maybe... MAYBE... there are some categories should not be allowed to be manually targeted for some categories of product. But if it's an automated and algorithmically targeted advertisement? If a computer (Which, not being human, is inherently NOT racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, or whatever.) is making the call without human intervention? I'm kind of on Facebook's side on this one.
> I remember reading some studies on this, and the
> reduced cost of Uber/Lyft has indeed dropped drunk
> driving.
More than that, I'd wager that, if you were to run the numbers, Uber/Lyft would also be shown to be good for bars and nightclubs. That same $8 Uber home from the Castro used to be a $45 taxi ride. And that's if you could successfully hail a cab in the first place; because their dispatch number is something between an exercise in futility and a sick joke. With Uber and Lyft, I go out a lot more because of the ease and convenience of getting home. And the remainder of what would have gone to the taxi company versus Uber/Lyft? Well, that's 3 or 4 more drinks... profit to the bar or club and tip to the bartender. Everyone wins... except perhaps my liver.
As for the trip out, why not just use MUNI, or AC Transit, or whatever? I do. And, while I do have my complaints about it, it's perfectly fine for the trip out. You don't *have* to be so snooty as to refuse to set foot on mass transit, after all. And that $6 you save, taking transit versus a rideshare is most of another drink. :)
They're not exempt from mandatory liability insurance. If Google is telling anything remotely resembling the truth about their Waymo division; once the data finds it into the hands of the insurance companies' actuaries, it will quickly become prohibitively expensive to drive human-operated cars, except perhaps occasionally as a hobby.
"The problem isn't with the self-driving cars, it's with the cars that aren't self-driving, cars that are driven by idiots like me."
I've been saying for a while now that real adoption of self-driving cars will not be driven by early adopters, or even legislation. If Google/Waymo is even half right about the reduced accident rate of self-driving cars, the watershed will be driven by actuaries. Because a reduced accident rate also means a reduced insurance payout rate. Once enough of the data are in, the insurance companies will do the math and start raising the rates on human-driven cars. Once that drives a few more people to self-drivers, they'll have even more supporting data. And the insurance premiums will wind up set such that it will be prohibitively expensive for humans to drive their own cars; except, perhaps as a weekend hobby. But certainly, once the actuaries do their thing, none of us will be manually driving for our daily commute or errands.
Believing in the rights of individual PEOPLE to do what they like with what they've bought is one thing. I'm 100% in favor of that. You want to work on your own Tesla? Cool. Go for it.
Abuse of the legal system by one BUSINESS to force another to subsidize it... now that's something else entirely. And I'm entirely opposed to that. Your business wants to open a shop repairing Teslas? Okay. Do the work of developing the skills, building your parts supply chain, and learning the technology yourself. You want a law forcing Tesla to help you? Go fuck yourself.
I don't see the switch being all *that* quick. The big blocker for Tesla, I think, is still charging. I would likely have bought a Tesla already... If I already owned my own house and could have the home charger installed. But alas, I rent right now. Driving to the nearest supercharger every time I need a juice up is in no way practical. And I suspect that there are a great many people who are in a similar situation.
Now, buying a home is on my near-to-mid-term horizon. But then there's the problem that I will *just* have bought a HOUSE. And dropping another $50-100K on a car would be significantly less reasonable... at least until 2021, at the earliest, when 45 could be expunged from the White House and the mortgage and itemized tax deductions, which he gutted, could be restored.
Now... If Tesla were, instead of just superchargers which really only solve the "road trip" problem, to buy one of the major gas station brands and convert it to superchargers chain-wide... I think *THAT* will be the watershed moment that will cause the quick switch of the general masses to electric.
Well, if you'd actually bothered to read the article, or any of the articles about the study when it launched, or any of the materiel and disclosures from the study itself; or if you'd bothered to educate yourself in any way whatsoever, you'd know that you had to volunteer and opt in by:
1) Downloading a separate app for the study
2) Read the agreement about what data is collected and how it is used
3) Explicitly agree to said agreement
4) Wait to be accepted into the study
5) Be notified that you were accepted and that data sharing would begin
6) Remain in the study by keeping the app installed throughout
But hey... Don't let any little thing like facts get in the way of your "Apple is teh satan" narrative. Rant on.
Um. No.
Itâ(TM)s not the â70s or â80s anymore. My Mazda 3 (Not a hybrid. Not a Smart or iQ or even Fiat500 sized mini. Just a normal, everyday, ICE hatchback.) does better than 300 even in 100% stop-and-go hilly city driving. On an average tank, with mixed driving, I get about 375. And on a freeway road trip, itâ(TM)s good for nearly 500 to a tank. Itâ(TM)s actually the first car Iâ(TM)ve owned that routinely beats its EPA numbers.
Tech companies engaged in hardly any lobbying back in the '90s during that tech boom. And we got screwed because of it. Established industry players, with long histories of LOTS of lobbying bought laws like the DMCA, for example. How many tech companies were wiped out by that one abuse alone? I had friends at Napster, and at two other Napster-like companies, that were put out of work by the RIAA/Metallica lobby. And the demise of one of the companies I worked for was hastened by being forced to waste engineering time and effort, and waste money to bring a lawyer onto the payroll; to deal with DMCA BS. And some of you will recall that 2001 was a BAD time for your employer to be going under.
And that's just one of a number of laws that those entrenched interests bought that have adversely... sometimes grievously... affected tech. Yeah, it's a dirty game and it would be nice for it to go away entirely. But as long as scum like the RIAA/Metallica play it; tech really has no choice now. Bringing a knife to a gun fight seldom works out.
The fact is that, considering the size of modern TVs and quality of modern home audio, most of us have setups at home that are just as, if not more (When you factor in the overpriced tickets and food; and the awfulness of the crowd that only the Alamo Drafthouse bothers to do anything about.), enjoyable than the theater for most movies.
SOME movies do command a theater showing. But many donâ(TM)t. Picking on a few WW2 flicks, for example: The Darkest Hour and The Imitation Game were fantastic. But I see no compelling reason why I should have gone to see them on the big screen. And indeed I did not. Dunkirk and Saving Private Ryan, OTOH, absolutely did and DO command theater attendance.
The weirdness here is that much of Spielbergâ(TM)s work does fall into the category of âoeMust see it in the theater.â If, for example, he were to re-release the Indiana Jones Trilogy into the theater, I absolutely would buy tickets and see it on the big screen. Something still good, but much less spectacular, like The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind... not so much.
This law is simply meaningless. Vermont is just too small for this to have any significant impact on anyone, even its own residents. According to Wikipedia, at 623,657 Vermont is smaller than the 28 largest *cities* in the US; to say nothing about counties, metropolitan areas, or other states.
My bet is that these 120 brokers are the handful that have offices, employees, or other operations in Vermont. Honestly, I'm surprised the number is even that high. And my prediction is that 120 will be dropping fairly quickly as companies close up shop in Vermont and tell it to go pound sand.
My dad used to say that, in the navy, the first thing to do when something doesn't work is to whack it a few times with a wrench, and it'll usually start working again. I've found that a similar technique works on those self-checkout scales. I always try to bag the heaviest and most durable items first... canned goods, for example, at Safeway. When the inevitable "unexpected item in bagging area" happens; two or three good lift-and-drops seem to usually reset the thing and let me continue checking out.
The workers' request is perfectly reasonable though; particularly if working for a defense contractor is not what you signed up for in the first place. And it doesn't even need to be an anti-combat, or any other ethical, stance. Have you every worked for a defense, or other government, contractor? I did, in my first job out of college. And that's a mistake I plan to never, EVER, make again. And it's nothing at all to do with ethics; though with the current occupant of the White House, that is a certainly greater concern than it was when I graduated. I'm not at all naive enough to believe that we can just abolish the military. I just don't want to work for it.
Rather, it's the culture of government work. I's toxic. You're a tiny cog in a gigantic machine without any way for your own contributions to be meaningful. It's cubes as far as the eye can see in warehouse-sized buildings. The technology, both hardware and software, is older-than-dirt and will serve you nowhere in any other job. It's super-political. And I don't mean R vs D. I mean every single little person who attains the slightest bit of power is king of his little hill and will require tribute if you need access to any resource in their domain, greater concerns like productivity be damned. It's like those old adventure games where you might be tasked with saving the kingdom, world, or galaxy. But every... single... NPC... wants you to do stupid shit before they'll aid you in the smallest way. Tasked with going to person A to get item X? Before A will give you access to X, he will require you to goto person B to get item Y. B will require you to get Z from C before giving you Y. And C will make you go out and grind, killing orcs or boars or womprats or something similarly stupid and pick up 100 item drops before giving you Z. And a task that should take no more than a day winds up taking up two weeks. (That two weeks, by the way, is BEFORE administrative overhead. Expect to do about a page and a half of paperwork for every line of code. Oh, and account for your time in 6-minute intervals and don't ever Ever EVER accidentally use the wrong billing code.) And there'd better actually be a god to help you if you need to deal with procurement to get something from a vendor.
Basically... tl;dr... imagine the bastard offspring of Office Space, Brazil, and Dilbert; but just all the awful parts without any of the funny bits. THAT is defense/government contractor work.
No thank you. I've been in Bay Area consumer and B2B tech companies ever since; and have not the slightest interest in ever doing government work again. And yeah... If my current employer were to develop the aspiration to become another Lockheed-Martin; I'd urge management to reconsider too... right after I update my resume in case they say no and want to keep going for that filthy D.C. lucre.
Are you high? I've a *long* list of: "-1, Not kissing the ass of Dear Leader", moderations in my comment history over the last couple of years.
Hell. You don't even need to send them anywhere miserable or radioactive. One of the islands in Hawaii is a former leper colony. Since leprosy can actually be treated and cured nowadays, there's hardly a need for its former purpose. We could just exile the unvaccinated to that island. And they couldn't even make any claim that they were being mistreated. "Wait... so I don't have to be vaccinated; AND I get to live in Hawaii???" The only problem I can see is that some people might actually become anti-vaxers just for the relocation to Hawaii.
And you're perfectly free to open up your iPhone or Android or whatever and do anything you like to it. Fix it yourself. Pay someone else to do so. Break it up and sell the parts to others. Leave it in the box in the hope that it somehow becomes a collector's item. Put it in a Vitamix and upload the video to YouTube. Once money has changed hands, the phone is yours to do with as you please and the seller cannot stop you by legal means, or any other.
You already have the right to repair your own hardware. And you always have. You may or may not have the knowledge or skill to do so. And the companies that manufacture the internal parts may not sell them in lots of less than a hundred thousand. But neither of those factors have anything at all to do with your own rights.
No. The whole "right to repair" hullabaloo has absolutely nothing at all to do with your rights. It's entirely the invention of third-party businesses; looking after their interests with only a public relations campaign that claims they have any interest in your rights. These businesses simply don't want to bother to establish, for instance, their own supply chains for spare parts. Rather, they are trying to abuse the legal system to force Apple, Samsung, Sony, et al, to allow the "right to repair" businesses to glom onto the manufacturers' own supply chains so they can skip out on doing the work of establishing the business relationships themselves. They want access to internal data and manuals of the manufacturers; so they can cheat without doing the work of developing their own knowledge and skill bases. They are in no way fighting for YOUR right to repair, or any other right of YOURS. They're just looking to boost their own profit margins by trying to skip the hard work and ride the coattails of others.
Well... god forbid anyone take an unauthorized picture of Atlanta((TM)allrightsreserved)) that might include a glimpse of Mercedes-Benz Stadium((TM)allrightsreserved)), or anything else football((TM)allrightsreserved)) or Superbowl((TM)allrightsreserved)) related. The NFL((TM)allrightsreserved)) might not realize some tiny shred of revenue from its exclusive rights to all structures, skylines, logos, colors, images, players, teams, personas, activities, foods, and apparel. And we can't have that, now can we?
As the saying goes: "He that lieth down with dogs shall rise up with fleas"
There's an easy way to not be mistaken for a Nazi: Don't do Nazi-like things. And don't stand with those who do. If you're of the opinion that Nazis are "very fine people", then you're doing the latter.
> If we are really serious about combating fake news,
> then why shouldn't Google have to delist the biased
> and misleading blacklist, in favor of other more
> accurate reviews?
Because Google is not the source or offender. It's a neutral third party. If some article or site is libelous or defamatory, the proper course of action id to address it at the source. Do that, and it falls off the Google index the next time the original site gets spidered. Attacking Google instead is nothing more than going after the party with the biggest pockets. Plus, I'd argue that it displays blatant bias and discrimination on the part of the EU courts. When have one of these articles about "the right to be forgotten" EVER been about the original libel or defamation (Almost always published in EU newspapers or on EU sites.) being taken down? It's ALWAYS Google, or some other US company, that's under attack in these cases.