The court has ordered Apple to write a piece of software that Apple claims does not exist. Apple claim they can write the software but are refusing to do so because they consider such a tool to be "digital cancer". The legal argument appears to boil down to the definition of "reasonable burden", ie: is it reasonable to burden Apple with writing a piece of software that they claim would significantly damage their commercial reputation?
The court seems to be in a position of weighing up which of two things are more 'valuable', the unknown future value of the information vs the unknown future loss to Apple.
But, is not the piece of code in question to stop the phone from erasing itself after 10 failed password attempts versus actually decrypting the data? It is hard to see the ability to disable auto-erase, when ordered to do so by a court of law is going to be a digital cancer. It is more likely that their approach to this is that it will spur Congress both in the US and elsewhere to prohibit encryption on such devices. Then we all lose.
This will eventually become a matter of practicality and insurance. If autonomous cars can go 100M miles/accident and humans average 2.3M miles/accident, then insurance for autonomous cars will be nearly nothing and insurance for manually driven cars will be $5000 a month if you can even find a company to insure you.
I don't know if/when autonomous will reach that level, but I feel there is a good chance they will be better than humans. They can see better, have much better reflexes, are never distracted, can communicate with the vehicle to know how good the brakes/tires/etc are, can communicate with other autonomous vehicles, and more.
Average accident rate for passenger vehicles in 2012 was 6.75 per million miles driven. Average fatality rate was 1.27 per 100 million miles driven. Of the first number 60% were caused by distracted drivers, 20% of which were teenagers. Of those 60%, 1/2 of the accidents were where the driver was using a cell phone or other electronic device while driving. Of the 1.27 per 100 million figure excessive speed was involved in over 60% of them. In both sets, weather was a factor in just over 1/2 of the accidents.
Still, to make a significant dent in either the overall accident rate or the fatality rate, autonomous vehicles will need to be used by the majority of individuals. Then there is the cost benefit. Yes, insurance will probably be cheaper, but probably not as much as you would thing because there are still many ways for an autonomous vehicle to be involved in an accident and repair cost will probably be significantly higher. So, if an AV is $60,000 and insurance is $600 every six months, while a regular vehicle is $28,000 and insurance is $1,000 every six month. The cost per year including purchase price still favors the regular vehicle.
Think of it like buying a hybrid. Yes, they save on fuel costs, but if it take 10 years to break even on the cost differential and you don't plan to keep the car that long, then you lose money. Even if you do keep it that long, you only break even. Now, substitute AV for hybrid and cost of insurance for fuel cost and you get the idea. That's not to say it's not worthwhile to do it. Maybe you want to save the environment so you are willing to pay more for a hybrid. That's fine. Likewise, maybe you feel safer in the AV, so you buy it. That's fine, too. Just don't try and use cost savings as the justification, because it is unlikely to be the case.
Your individual freedom ends just before my bumper, so if self-driving cars result in a significant decrease in accidents, I have little sympathy for your desire to be able to T-bone my car in an intersection and kill my family when you missed the stop sign because you sneezed.
Do you take the same approach with your neighbors? Do they use gas powered lawn mowers or trimmers? The emission from those is a significant health hazard. How about barbecue grills or burning trash? House fires are much more prevalent in neighborhoods that allow open burning. Let's not forget that the neighbor that has trees in his yard is also a hazard to you because in a storm or high wind, that tree can come crashing through your roof.
Now, if you are really concerned about protecting your family, don't live in a major city, where accident rates are significantly higher. Of course, that is your personal choice, but then that isn't about the other person's liberty or choice having a negative impact on your life, but instead it is directly related to your choice.
1. Response time is only a small part of the equation. 2. It's not all about what YOU want.
It's a matter of public health - if self driving cars will save lives, they should be required. Just like vaccines. Of course, there will be the anti-robot-cars movement, but they'll have to stay on private property with their old fashioned manually driving cars -- with steering wheels if you can imagine such a thing! How quaint!
The purpose of vaccines is to limit the spread of disease. Most vaccinations are for agents that aren't necessarily life threatening to the general population but they are often life altering. As such, while vaccinations are a matter of public health, they only work when enough of the population is vaccinated. Autonomous vehicles will reduce certain kinds of accidents, but even if they save some lives there is a huge difference between the number killed in auto accidents say, polio. In addition, for autonomous vehicles to be effective at saving lives, they need to reach critical mass in utilization by the public. At current projected pricing, even with government/taxpayer subsidies, that is unlikely to happen for a very long time.
There is no doubt that some people will be able to afford and by autonomous vehicles. But, the real ROI for those developing them is not the individual market but for fleet and commercial use. There, the use is not about public health, but in reducing the cost of labor. Think of trucks, taxis, shuttles, etc.
For those developing autonomous vehicles, the motivation is not about safety or saving lives. It is about maximizing shareholder value. If AVs don't do that, they won't be produced, plain and simple.
Lets see, a computer with a sample rate of 1000 Hz always on, always watching 360 degrees or Grandma that hasn't had to renew her license since she started losing vision or a teenager trying to take a selfie.
I don't care if it takes twice as long to get anywhere (30 MPH max), as long as I can turn my brain off and do something else I'm happy.
For many, the appeal in a car is being in control of a (relatively) high horse powered machine. You lose that with autonomous vehicles. If you don't care if it takes twice as long to get anywhere as long as you can turn off your brain and do something else, you don't need to wait for autonomous vehicles. Call a cab or uber.
We should all be careful what we ask for. As it stands, right now, for the FBI to gain access to a phone in a criminal investigation, they need to get a court order to have Apple, or whomever unlock it. There is at least some check and balance to government intrusion, albeit small. If Apple succeeds in their appeal, then it is likely that the FBI will develop their own tools to access the data in the future, in which case, they will not need a court order any longer.
If Apple succeeds, this may be a case of winning the battle, but losing the war.
In this case, the suggestion is (perhaps accidentally) correct in that it is the FBI's job to discover evidence in their own possession, not Apple's. The burden of cracking the phone should be on the agency.
Isn't that what they are trying to do (not that I'm saying they are in the right, here). They are trying to get to the data on the phone. They aren't asking Apple to decrypt the evidence, just to keep the phone from erasing the evidence.
Here is a simple test if you think McAffee is being legit here. Take another iPhone and encrypt it and give it to him and see if he can get the data off of it. Otherwise, talk is cheap, particularly if you know you never will have to make good on it.
Obviously none of our laws apply to law enforcement, so sure, go right ahead - and while you're at it tell the government that the constitution is meaningless - they can trample any right they like at any time for anyone.
Just the opposite. If the laws didn't apply to law enforcement, then there wouldn't be a court case about this incident. It would already have been unlocked.
The primary care fields are usually in the inner-cities where there is a large proportion of street-gang violence, drug addiction, and mental health issues. That tends to scare away most doctors due to safety issues. So they have to import international doctors to work in these areas.
That's actually not true. There are community hospitals in such locations, but primary care fields are in rich and poor areas alike.
Therein lies the problem, not every market niche is profitable.
This is not a niche that is growing, a company here is not investing in a future hit. If the remaining users aren't willing to support an entire production line that line goes away. Fuji's exit says one of two things: 'They needed the money invested in that line for something else that was more profitable.' or 'The line was no longer profitable and never would be.'
If it is true that Fuji was not making enough profit to continue doing this, they could have raised the price point so their ROI was in line with their needs. Then the market niche that is out there would have had a choice to continue using this media or not.
Compare this to dot matrix printers. There still is a niche market for very particular use cases. Today's dot matrix printers are expensive compared to when they were the main type of printer available and very expensive to compared to today's cheap dot matrix printers. However, manufacturers and buyers have found a price point they can both agree on.
It is quite possible that could have occurred with Fuji. It might have meant that the price would triple or more, but if there were a buyer at that price point then things could have continued.
If a niche market is not profitable, it isn't a market, niche or otherwise.
STEM work is for off-shoring to developing countries and immigrants from those countries. Any smart American kid should go into medicine. Have a look someday at what the AMA does to immigrant doctors. (Hint: they usually end up as nurses.)
Or neurologists, or primary care physicians or pediatricians or internists or any number of medical fields requiring a doctor but not paying the big money like plastic surgeons, dermatologists, anesthesiologists and other specialists.
One of the reasons medicine is so expensive in the US is because we produce a large number of doctors, very few of which go into primary care fields where the majority of the need is.
A vehicle in a moving lane of traffic is not required to yield to a vehicle trying to enter that lane, unless the vehicle entering the lane is an emergency vehicle, of course. The bus did exactly what it was supposed to do. Could it have stopped or swerved to avoid being hit, possibly, but if you take that approach than all of those collisions where a google vehicle was rear ended because it reacted quicker than the drivers behind it should be google's fault because it failed to adjust to the traffic conditions. It would seem to go both ways.
The reality is that the bus did nothing wrong and was required to do nothing different. At 15mph a sudden stop or swerve could have seriously injured passengers (who are not restrained). Chances are that if the bus was an AV and the car wasn't, because of the potential harm to the passengers, it would have done the exact same thing.
However, this story is old now and not really worth discussing any longer. AV have great potential to improve many areas of life, but like everything else, they cannot guarantee 100% safety and never will. To be successful, they only need to be "more" safe than regular cars (and at a price point that most people can afford).
The US is not about free market capitalism. We give lip service to it, the talking heads point out the other party ruining it, but in reality most if not all industries have gamed the system. It is now about socializing the costs as much as possible and privatizing the profits. This is near end game capitalism and its ugly as fuck.
I agree totally. The US left capitalism back in the 1980s and shifted to corporatism, which is the politically correct term for fascism. Nobody wants to admit that the US has become fascist because of the ties to Nazi Germany. But it is/was a most efficient mechanism to have a robust economy. Of course, only those at the top benefited and the common workers (middle class) became more like serfs.
To bad Lincoln was wrong at Gettysburg when he stated "... a government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth..." It most certainly has.
Somebody should tell NASA. From their very own vision statement they say:
What Does NASA Do?
NASA's vision: We reach for new heights and reveal the unknown for the benefit of humankind.
To do that, thousands of people have been working around the world -- and off of it -- for more than 50 years, trying to answer some basic questions. What's out there in space? How do we get there? What will we find? What can we learn there, or learn just by trying to get there, that will make life better here on Earth?
It would seem that funding commercial airline products does not fit with that.
For most people a bicycle is not an alternative to a car and yet both are modes of transportation. But it's not about alternatives. Disney doesn't want people to go spend their money elsewhere. Their stated goal is to reduce load on peak times so that people will go at less desirable times. When one's work schedule and the kid's school schedule dictate the available days, changing the pricing won't cause that to happen. It could very well reduce the load on peak times, but at the cost of lost customers if they chose alternatives.
I would agree with most of what you say until you get to "Researching high speed flight is EXACTLY the kind of thing that NASA was created to do." Technically, NASA was created because of Sputnik and had nothing to do with anything but the space race.
But ignoring that point. Isn't the US about free market capitalism. Doesn't that mean that those that risk capital benefit from the success of taking that risk? Government funding of the project removes the risk, but Lockheed still gets the reward. Now government funding makes sense when there is low return so nobody takes the risk such as certain medical research, infrastructure projects, etc. But that is not the case with this. Government funding of this is like government funding of an oil pipeline. Surely the private sector can do this on their own.
If one truly values capitalism as an economic system, then how can this be seen as anything other than corporatism, which is basically corporate welfare.
That "objective description" omits a key detail: that the bus was behind the Google car at the time that the Google car began its maneuver. Given that rights of way are determined by facts such as which car was in front at which time, your omission would implicitly place the blame solely on the Google car, when, in fact, the actual facts suggest that the case is more nuanced.
Which isn't to say that my description is objective either, to be clear, nor am I suggesting that the bus should have stopped. I'm merely pointing out that your description has flaws as well.
That is true, the bus was behind the google car while the car was blocked from advancing. Then the light turned green and the bus and the rest of traffic started moving and the the google car tried to switch lanes and turned into the side of the bus, sideswiping it. The blame is solely on the google care because the bus did nothing wrong.
Hard to reason with an anonymous coward. As for price gouging, I'm pretty sure you can do that regardless of the commodity, particularly if there is a lack of competition.
Disney is doing this, not because of supply and demand, but to gouge even more profits.
I don't think you quite understand how supply and demand (and capitalism) works.
Supply and demand would would dictate an equilibrium would be reached between buyer and seller based on the value of the goods and services. That is not what I am complaining about. Disney is saying they are doing this to combat overcrowding. That is the disengenous part. I agree with the supply and demand, not the spin put on it by Disney. Granted, if they said we are raising the price because we can, that wouldn't have gone over well, but that is exactly what they are doing. So why lie as to the reason?
By that standard you will be stuck in traffic constantly and be an even greater hazard on the road. The reason this AV even got into this situation was because it was testing software that allowed it to make reasonable assumptions about other traffic as any sane driver would.
I'm pretty sure that in every state the law is , if you are blocked in your lane, you either wait for somebody to let you in or you just wait. Just because you are blocked doesn't mean you have the right of way to force your way into moving traffic. If you do that, and I know everybody does, and there is an accident, you get ticketed for failure to yield right of way or improper lane change or something such as that. In effect, you get a ticket for causing an accident, just like the AV did in this case.
Your description seems to inject blame, particularly with the bus. Maybe a better description would be
1) Red light. 2) Google car signals for a right turn. 3) Google car gets into right side of the double-wide lane and passes cars that are stopped for the red light. 4) Google car has to stop because there are sandbags blocking the storm drain. 5) Light turns green, cars start moving. 6) Google car attempts to slowly moves back towards the center of the lane. 7) Google car scrapes bus that is in center lane.
That is an objective description. It will be up to the authorities to determine who, if anybody was at fault. As for those who are positing that the bus should have stopped. According to the facts it was going 15mph, which means the unrestrained passengers were also traveling 15mph. An emergency stop or swerve would have surely done more harm to them than the sideswipe did, at least using basic physics would indicate it would.
Slashdot Mirror
The court has ordered Apple to write a piece of software that Apple claims does not exist. Apple claim they can write the software but are refusing to do so because they consider such a tool to be "digital cancer". The legal argument appears to boil down to the definition of "reasonable burden", ie: is it reasonable to burden Apple with writing a piece of software that they claim would significantly damage their commercial reputation?
The court seems to be in a position of weighing up which of two things are more 'valuable', the unknown future value of the information vs the unknown future loss to Apple.
But, is not the piece of code in question to stop the phone from erasing itself after 10 failed password attempts versus actually decrypting the data? It is hard to see the ability to disable auto-erase, when ordered to do so by a court of law is going to be a digital cancer. It is more likely that their approach to this is that it will spur Congress both in the US and elsewhere to prohibit encryption on such devices. Then we all lose.
This will eventually become a matter of practicality and insurance. If autonomous cars can go 100M miles/accident and humans average 2.3M miles/accident, then insurance for autonomous cars will be nearly nothing and insurance for manually driven cars will be $5000 a month if you can even find a company to insure you.
I don't know if/when autonomous will reach that level, but I feel there is a good chance they will be better than humans. They can see better, have much better reflexes, are never distracted, can communicate with the vehicle to know how good the brakes/tires/etc are, can communicate with other autonomous vehicles, and more.
Average accident rate for passenger vehicles in 2012 was 6.75 per million miles driven. Average fatality rate was 1.27 per 100 million miles driven. Of the first number 60% were caused by distracted drivers, 20% of which were teenagers. Of those 60%, 1/2 of the accidents were where the driver was using a cell phone or other electronic device while driving. Of the 1.27 per 100 million figure excessive speed was involved in over 60% of them. In both sets, weather was a factor in just over 1/2 of the accidents.
Still, to make a significant dent in either the overall accident rate or the fatality rate, autonomous vehicles will need to be used by the majority of individuals. Then there is the cost benefit. Yes, insurance will probably be cheaper, but probably not as much as you would thing because there are still many ways for an autonomous vehicle to be involved in an accident and repair cost will probably be significantly higher. So, if an AV is $60,000 and insurance is $600 every six months, while a regular vehicle is $28,000 and insurance is $1,000 every six month. The cost per year including purchase price still favors the regular vehicle.
Think of it like buying a hybrid. Yes, they save on fuel costs, but if it take 10 years to break even on the cost differential and you don't plan to keep the car that long, then you lose money. Even if you do keep it that long, you only break even. Now, substitute AV for hybrid and cost of insurance for fuel cost and you get the idea. That's not to say it's not worthwhile to do it. Maybe you want to save the environment so you are willing to pay more for a hybrid. That's fine. Likewise, maybe you feel safer in the AV, so you buy it. That's fine, too. Just don't try and use cost savings as the justification, because it is unlikely to be the case.
Your individual freedom ends just before my bumper, so if self-driving cars result in a significant decrease in accidents, I have little sympathy for your desire to be able to T-bone my car in an intersection and kill my family when you missed the stop sign because you sneezed.
Do you take the same approach with your neighbors? Do they use gas powered lawn mowers or trimmers? The emission from those is a significant health hazard. How about barbecue grills or burning trash? House fires are much more prevalent in neighborhoods that allow open burning. Let's not forget that the neighbor that has trees in his yard is also a hazard to you because in a storm or high wind, that tree can come crashing through your roof.
Now, if you are really concerned about protecting your family, don't live in a major city, where accident rates are significantly higher. Of course, that is your personal choice, but then that isn't about the other person's liberty or choice having a negative impact on your life, but instead it is directly related to your choice.
1. Response time is only a small part of the equation.
2. It's not all about what YOU want.
It's a matter of public health - if self driving cars will save lives, they should be required. Just like vaccines. Of course, there will be the anti-robot-cars movement, but they'll have to stay on private property with their old fashioned manually driving cars -- with steering wheels if you can imagine such a thing! How quaint!
The purpose of vaccines is to limit the spread of disease. Most vaccinations are for agents that aren't necessarily life threatening to the general population but they are often life altering. As such, while vaccinations are a matter of public health, they only work when enough of the population is vaccinated. Autonomous vehicles will reduce certain kinds of accidents, but even if they save some lives there is a huge difference between the number killed in auto accidents say, polio. In addition, for autonomous vehicles to be effective at saving lives, they need to reach critical mass in utilization by the public. At current projected pricing, even with government/taxpayer subsidies, that is unlikely to happen for a very long time.
There is no doubt that some people will be able to afford and by autonomous vehicles. But, the real ROI for those developing them is not the individual market but for fleet and commercial use. There, the use is not about public health, but in reducing the cost of labor. Think of trucks, taxis, shuttles, etc.
For those developing autonomous vehicles, the motivation is not about safety or saving lives. It is about maximizing shareholder value. If AVs don't do that, they won't be produced, plain and simple.
They wouldn't feel safe in a mechanical beast.
Lets see, a computer with a sample rate of 1000 Hz always on, always watching 360 degrees or Grandma that hasn't had to renew her license since she started losing vision or a teenager trying to take a selfie.
I don't care if it takes twice as long to get anywhere (30 MPH max), as long as I can turn my brain off and do something else I'm happy.
For many, the appeal in a car is being in control of a (relatively) high horse powered machine. You lose that with autonomous vehicles. If you don't care if it takes twice as long to get anywhere as long as you can turn off your brain and do something else, you don't need to wait for autonomous vehicles. Call a cab or uber.
We should all be careful what we ask for. As it stands, right now, for the FBI to gain access to a phone in a criminal investigation, they need to get a court order to have Apple, or whomever unlock it. There is at least some check and balance to government intrusion, albeit small. If Apple succeeds in their appeal, then it is likely that the FBI will develop their own tools to access the data in the future, in which case, they will not need a court order any longer.
If Apple succeeds, this may be a case of winning the battle, but losing the war.
In this case, the suggestion is (perhaps accidentally) correct in that it is the FBI's job to discover evidence in their own possession, not Apple's. The burden of cracking the phone should be on the agency.
Isn't that what they are trying to do (not that I'm saying they are in the right, here). They are trying to get to the data on the phone. They aren't asking Apple to decrypt the evidence, just to keep the phone from erasing the evidence.
Here is a simple test if you think McAffee is being legit here. Take another iPhone and encrypt it and give it to him and see if he can get the data off of it. Otherwise, talk is cheap, particularly if you know you never will have to make good on it.
Obviously none of our laws apply to law enforcement, so sure, go right ahead - and while you're at it tell the government that the constitution is meaningless - they can trample any right they like at any time for anyone.
Just the opposite. If the laws didn't apply to law enforcement, then there wouldn't be a court case about this incident. It would already have been unlocked.
The primary care fields are usually in the inner-cities where there is a large proportion of street-gang violence, drug addiction, and mental health issues. That tends to scare away most doctors due to safety issues. So they have to import international doctors to work in these areas.
That's actually not true. There are community hospitals in such locations, but primary care fields are in rich and poor areas alike.
Kids don't have to pay for the film.
Kids don't pay for most things.
Therein lies the problem, not every market niche is profitable.
This is not a niche that is growing, a company here is not investing in a future hit. If the remaining users aren't willing to support an entire production line that line goes away. Fuji's exit says one of two things: 'They needed the money invested in that line for something else that was more profitable.' or 'The line was no longer profitable and never would be.'
If it is true that Fuji was not making enough profit to continue doing this, they could have raised the price point so their ROI was in line with their needs. Then the market niche that is out there would have had a choice to continue using this media or not.
Compare this to dot matrix printers. There still is a niche market for very particular use cases. Today's dot matrix printers are expensive compared to when they were the main type of printer available and very expensive to compared to today's cheap dot matrix printers. However, manufacturers and buyers have found a price point they can both agree on.
It is quite possible that could have occurred with Fuji. It might have meant that the price would triple or more, but if there were a buyer at that price point then things could have continued.
If a niche market is not profitable, it isn't a market, niche or otherwise.
STEM work is for off-shoring to developing countries and immigrants from those countries. Any smart American kid should go into medicine. Have a look someday at what the AMA does to immigrant doctors. (Hint: they usually end up as nurses.)
Or neurologists, or primary care physicians or pediatricians or internists or any number of medical fields requiring a doctor but not paying the big money like plastic surgeons, dermatologists, anesthesiologists and other specialists.
One of the reasons medicine is so expensive in the US is because we produce a large number of doctors, very few of which go into primary care fields where the majority of the need is.
A vehicle in a moving lane of traffic is not required to yield to a vehicle trying to enter that lane, unless the vehicle entering the lane is an emergency vehicle, of course. The bus did exactly what it was supposed to do. Could it have stopped or swerved to avoid being hit, possibly, but if you take that approach than all of those collisions where a google vehicle was rear ended because it reacted quicker than the drivers behind it should be google's fault because it failed to adjust to the traffic conditions. It would seem to go both ways.
The reality is that the bus did nothing wrong and was required to do nothing different. At 15mph a sudden stop or swerve could have seriously injured passengers (who are not restrained). Chances are that if the bus was an AV and the car wasn't, because of the potential harm to the passengers, it would have done the exact same thing.
However, this story is old now and not really worth discussing any longer. AV have great potential to improve many areas of life, but like everything else, they cannot guarantee 100% safety and never will. To be successful, they only need to be "more" safe than regular cars (and at a price point that most people can afford).
The US is not about free market capitalism. We give lip service to it, the talking heads point out the other party ruining it, but in reality most if not all industries have gamed the system. It is now about socializing the costs as much as possible and privatizing the profits. This is near end game capitalism and its ugly as fuck.
I agree totally. The US left capitalism back in the 1980s and shifted to corporatism, which is the politically correct term for fascism. Nobody wants to admit that the US has become fascist because of the ties to Nazi Germany. But it is/was a most efficient mechanism to have a robust economy. Of course, only those at the top benefited and the common workers (middle class) became more like serfs.
To bad Lincoln was wrong at Gettysburg when he stated "... a government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth..." It most certainly has.
Somebody should tell NASA. From their very own vision statement they say:
What Does NASA Do?
NASA's vision: We reach for new heights and reveal the unknown for the benefit of humankind.
To do that, thousands of people have been working around the world -- and off of it -- for more than 50 years, trying to answer some basic questions. What's out there in space? How do we get there? What will we find? What can we learn there, or learn just by trying to get there, that will make life better here on Earth?
It would seem that funding commercial airline products does not fit with that.
For most people a bicycle is not an alternative to a car and yet both are modes of transportation. But it's not about alternatives. Disney doesn't want people to go spend their money elsewhere. Their stated goal is to reduce load on peak times so that people will go at less desirable times. When one's work schedule and the kid's school schedule dictate the available days, changing the pricing won't cause that to happen. It could very well reduce the load on peak times, but at the cost of lost customers if they chose alternatives.
"
So by "operated profitably," you mean it didn't operate profitably, it just pushed development costs onto European taxpayers.
Which is what NASA is doing, now.
I would agree with most of what you say until you get to "Researching high speed flight is EXACTLY the kind of thing that NASA was created to do." Technically, NASA was created because of Sputnik and had nothing to do with anything but the space race.
But ignoring that point. Isn't the US about free market capitalism. Doesn't that mean that those that risk capital benefit from the success of taking that risk? Government funding of the project removes the risk, but Lockheed still gets the reward. Now government funding makes sense when there is low return so nobody takes the risk such as certain medical research, infrastructure projects, etc. But that is not the case with this. Government funding of this is like government funding of an oil pipeline. Surely the private sector can do this on their own.
If one truly values capitalism as an economic system, then how can this be seen as anything other than corporatism, which is basically corporate welfare.
That "objective description" omits a key detail: that the bus was behind the Google car at the time that the Google car began its maneuver. Given that rights of way are determined by facts such as which car was in front at which time, your omission would implicitly place the blame solely on the Google car, when, in fact, the actual facts suggest that the case is more nuanced.
Which isn't to say that my description is objective either, to be clear, nor am I suggesting that the bus should have stopped. I'm merely pointing out that your description has flaws as well.
That is true, the bus was behind the google car while the car was blocked from advancing. Then the light turned green and the bus and the rest of traffic started moving and the the google car tried to switch lanes and turned into the side of the bus, sideswiping it. The blame is solely on the google care because the bus did nothing wrong.
Disney is doing this, not because of supply and demand, but to gouge even more profits.
Because supply and demand doesn't affect prices? What?
Supply and demand only works in a free market. Are you taking the position that there is adequate competition to Disney?
Hard to reason with an anonymous coward. As for price gouging, I'm pretty sure you can do that regardless of the commodity, particularly if there is a lack of competition.
Disney is doing this, not because of supply and demand, but to gouge even more profits.
I don't think you quite understand how supply and demand (and capitalism) works.
Supply and demand would would dictate an equilibrium would be reached between buyer and seller based on the value of the goods and services. That is not what I am complaining about. Disney is saying they are doing this to combat overcrowding. That is the disengenous part. I agree with the supply and demand, not the spin put on it by Disney. Granted, if they said we are raising the price because we can, that wouldn't have gone over well, but that is exactly what they are doing. So why lie as to the reason?
By that standard you will be stuck in traffic constantly and be an even greater hazard on the road. The reason this AV even got into this situation was because it was testing software that allowed it to make reasonable assumptions about other traffic as any sane driver would.
I'm pretty sure that in every state the law is , if you are blocked in your lane, you either wait for somebody to let you in or you just wait. Just because you are blocked doesn't mean you have the right of way to force your way into moving traffic. If you do that, and I know everybody does, and there is an accident, you get ticketed for failure to yield right of way or improper lane change or something such as that. In effect, you get a ticket for causing an accident, just like the AV did in this case.
Your description seems to inject blame, particularly with the bus. Maybe a better description would be
1) Red light.
2) Google car signals for a right turn.
3) Google car gets into right side of the double-wide lane and passes cars that are stopped for the red light.
4) Google car has to stop because there are sandbags blocking the storm drain.
5) Light turns green, cars start moving.
6) Google car attempts to slowly moves back towards the center of the lane.
7) Google car scrapes bus that is in center lane.
That is an objective description. It will be up to the authorities to determine who, if anybody was at fault. As for those who are positing that the bus should have stopped. According to the facts it was going 15mph, which means the unrestrained passengers were also traveling 15mph. An emergency stop or swerve would have surely done more harm to them than the sideswipe did, at least using basic physics would indicate it would.