Governments don't really have the power to discriminate, because, the good ones anyway, provide the same services for all their citizens, regardless of their condition.
You must have an awful lot faith in your fellow man.
In any event, discrimination is inevitable with finite resources and anything demanding a non-free service, such as health care. Organ transplantation, for instance, entails some selection so long as there is a relative shortage of suitable donors that match potential recipients. Governments in charge of health care will ration it, since the services and availability of health practitioners tend not to be free -- especially for specialties, or anything requiring very expensive equipment or medication. And certain such governments, such as that of Canada, have already demonstrated a willingness to force people into the system by blocking alternatives...
And if you combine a government single-payer health care system with the right (or wrong) cultural blocs, you may create a situation in which the government feels it has the right or even the duty to ration health care on a behavioral basis or even to legislate against 'unhealthy' behaviors. If they're paying for your health, for instance, they have a keen interest in forcing you to avoid any behaviors (at least, the ones without powerful constituencies) that would drive up their costs. You may doubt that this would happen, but would you bet on it?
Family history isn't genetic screening; it's a substitute, really. Neither is asking about current health problems, since that's asking about the ailments themselves.
A genetic screen would require sequencing the DNA and looking for genes that are linked to ailments, not asking about the ailments themselves. In some cases, the linkages may not be firmly understood or the genes may not be sufficient to cause an ailment by themselves. There's the real ugly area; while it's pretty much guaranteed that trisomy-21 leads to Down's syndrome with all its symptoms IIRC, there may be genes that are associated with a slightly higher probability of some cardiovascular disease or cancer or so forth. Such a gene -may- be related to a later impairment that could generate increased health costs or impair performance, but how should one act regarding such a gene? And if the person's behavior takes the risk into account -- eating a careful diet if one has a genetic predisposition to obesity, say -- should its presence be considered just as hazardous?
Should we ask employees about their driving history, and treat them differently if they have a higher risk of being involved in a not-on-the-job auto accident? Or if they frequently go to McDonalds with the kids and eat Big Macs and drink sodas? Or if they go rock climbing, hang gliding, or bungee jumping?
Well, it's three treason points, if memory serves -- except for machine empathy, which at something like fifty treason points is grounds for immediate termination.
You wouldn't have machine empathy, would you, Citizen?
All businesses discriminate. Well, the ones that like to stay in business, anyway. They normally don't like to hire violent, blind sociopaths with a habit of carrying giant swords, for instance, or employees with a history of embezzlement or fraud. Businesses tend to be reluctant to hire people who'd be categorized as mentally impaired. Businesses don't grant credit to just any customer, and they discriminate with respect to lending terms, as well, based on risk. Landlords reserve the right to reject your application for a variety of reasons; not any reason will do, but they don't -have- to take you.
And choice or responsibility isn't necessarily a factor. If you're congenitally blind, or paralyzed in an auto-accident when somebody blows through a red light at 85mph, it's not your fault -- but it's still going to hurt you.
What differentiates 'bad' forms of discrimination from tolerated forms tends to be the connection -- or, rather, the lack thereof -- between what's being discriminated against and the nominal reason for the whole selection process. It's hard to justify arbitrarily favoring white males for management of a business, for instance, since there's no reason to expect that being a white male intrinsically makes one a better manager (even though it may be correlated with higher odds of having an MBA and previous management experience). I wouldn't argue against the FBI favoring white males over black females for a mission involving infiltrating a violent white supremacist group, however, since the latter would likely have an extremely reduced chance of success unless they're *blind* violent white supremacists.
There's such a thing as being overqualified for both economic and job satisfaction reasons. A company doesn't necessarily hire the -most- fit for the job, if this would be much more expensive than hiring people that do an adequate job. If an "enhanced" person only got that way through expensive treatments, he's probably going to shift towards occupations that could really take advantage of that and would be willing to pay significantly more.
It's not necessarily like that. Just because somebody places an ad for trademarked keyword 'Foo' does not necessarily mean that the person who placed the ad is actually selling 'Foo'; it might be a competitive ad or other related but different bit.
In theory, for instance, it might make sense for Edmunds.com, a major auto review / discussion site, to place bids on keywords referencing specific car models. Even though Edmunds.com does not actually sell those vehicles, those looking for vehicles might also reasonably be interested in discussion regarding those vehicles. If a search engine sells an ad for 'Ford Mustang' to a car review site, then it's profiting using Ford's trademark. In that case, Ford might be interested in finding out whether it can in fact claim part of that revenue.
Do Google's search algorithms make sense for an intranet in which you probably don't have quite the diversity of link counts? On the web, you have pages which have massive in-links and pages which have extremely few, but on an intranet, is that a reliably available and reasonable indicator of authority?
A patent in Microsoft's hands may become a lot less valuable then it is in somebody else's. A company that focuses on obtaining patents for offensive use but does nothing else is not really vulnerable to retalliation in-kind, but a large tech company like Microsoft can't really litigate against other large tech companies (at least ones that hold their own useful patent databases) without risking Patent Armageddon. So while a small IP-only shop may be able to effectively extort large sums of money through patent abuse, Microsoft has far fewer potential victims against which to use patents without substantial risk to itself.
I would actually prefer a SecurID-sort of device that I -- owner -- can read a number off of for somebody else to type in, rather than something that needs to be plugged in or scanned.
Anything that needs to be scanned or plugged in to a reader controlled by the merchant is at a bit of risk unless you can absolutely trust that reader. And you definitely don't want to be in a situation where the waiter takes the token to the register for scanning, and then hands you a token that looks the same but isn't. It's bad enough letting the credit card out of your physical control; given the chance to design a supplementary system, one might as well do a better job this time around. On the other hand, the odds are good that my eyes have not been subverted...
Plus, numbers that can be typed in are probably a lot easier to shoe-horn into e-commerce sites than USB fobs.
Not unusual. My mug adorns my one of my cards. It's not going to affect any online transactions, or any offline ones in which a machine accepts the card. I might wonder how easy it would be for a thief to alter a card here.
- requiring a pin
Still vulnerable to phishing or other man-in-the-middle attacks, unless the transmission scheme is not subject to replay. It'd help if somebody just grabs your wallet, 'tho.
- designating a geographical area in which your cards work (which you can adjust if you go on vacation)
Interesting. There's the difficulty of how you authenticate to arrange for such geographical restrictions, of course, but if you got it from a bank which has local branches, or they ask you for a secret *shrug*.
I think that some credit cards attempt to do some checks at point of sale, and probably look at geography; however, my credit card company has never contacted me to verify a transaction, even when it's in Cairo.
- an automated call when you purchase something online or over the phone, where you can enter your pin
So it's be over a different channel from the original system? Could be nice, at least for those with cell phones or who otherwise can reliably be reached at one number. You'd have to make sure that the phone call can be properly authenticated to the user so that somebody can't mimic this -- ISTR that CallerID is not terribly reliable if somebody really wants to fool with it.
- and my favourite idea - have an emergeny pin number in the case you've been taken to a bank machine. When you enter it, the police are notified and only $100 or so shows up in your accounts.
I suppose, although what I had in mind was more the social effects -- as in, what sort of message does it send to your kids to say "Hey, I can't be bothered to pick you up, so I'll just send the car"? What is the value of the (now missing) human interaction?
'course, I grew up in a more traditional nuclear family with one parent as wage earner and the other taking care of the kids. Maybe more modern kids would be fine with it, or even think of it as cool.
It would be interesting if a bank would offer incentives in exchange for requiring the use of SecurID-style authentication systems; that'd drastically cut down the feasibility of taking somebody's login and password for later use.
Hm, if I trust my e-mail provider, I should be able to trust the very last Received: header -- the one that my e-mail provider uses to indicate the last stop the message took before landing in my e-mail box. And I have my doubts that eBay would be stupid enough to relay third-party mail... so one should be able to check the IP address that my e-mail provider recorded and match it to eBay properties. On the other hand, there's approximately zero chance that eBay would really be sending requests for account information from a machine belonging to a DSL network somewhere in the Ukraine.
If I don't trust my e-mail provider, then there are obviously larger problems involved here and we need something like trusted third-party keyservers and strong public-key encryption for both encryption and authentication.
Considering that "humanitarians" frequently go on and on about how human life is paramount, that for a home owner to not take EVERY means to de-escalate a situation including running away from his own property, and that to defend yourself is to be judge, jury and executioner -- you'd think you WOULD love that.
Because, of course, it doesn't matter if they burn your house and steal your property; you're not supposed to value your property over their life. Gosh, they might even be mentally ill and therefore it's not really their fault. Oh well.
(And yes, that's the sort of argument one hears an awful lot... on Fark, anyway.)
On a less incendiary note, you should take note that it's not infrequently the slightly disadvantaged side that starts wars -- but that they do not necessarily fully realize their own difficulties. For example: In retrospect, a sane analysis should have indicated that the Confederacy, with much inferior manpower, industrial base, and naval forces and no real advantage in doctrine (officers in both sides having been trained through the same system) was essentially doomed barring a sudden shock that would make war politically unpalatable for the North. The "one of ours is worth ten of theirs because our boys learned to shoot when young" spiel and other myths, however, combined with bravado to apparently mislead them. Were they facing a force that they could not see any means to defeat, they probably wouldn't have started a war, and a rather great number of people wouldn't have died. You wouldn't have had the abuses of Reconstruction, and perhaps the South would have been less ready for the rise of the Klan.
It might also have been suggested that for Germany and Japan to have thought they could win against the rest of the world over the long haul was insane, based on population, area, resource distribution, and so forth. Japan, in particular, had vulnerable supply lines... It took an awful lot of inhumanity to prove them wrong.
But if Saddam -knew- that the US would have intervened after the Kuwait situation, and he -knew- that the US had not only the military means but the political will to defeat him utterly, would he have gone ahead anyway? Assuming that he was even slightly rational, he probably would have backed down instead of trying to enforce his territorial claims, and we wouldn't have ended up with years of sanctions hurting his general population while illicit oil revenue found its way into his palaces. Wars start when people think they can win, even when they're actually wrong.
Yeah, you could do pretty interesting things with it.
Combine it with a rental system, for instance -- and have it meet you at your doorstep and drive you to your destination. And then drive itself back to to wherever it next needs to be.
One could also see it being useful for the elderly -- those with poor eyesight or reflexes, and who don't want to have to depend on somebody else to drive them. Ditto for others not able to drive themselves. Maybe you won't need designated drivers anymore.
Theoretically, an autonomous vehicle should be able to pick up one's kids and drive them elsewhere if it's scheduled (time and location) and the parents are both busy, but I have my doubts as to whether this would be a good thing to do.
War isn't about fairness. You want to see the results of similar technology, fervor and doctrine? Try Antietam or Gettysburg and consider the results.
One of the most reliable ways to prevent a war is to thoroughly convince an enemy that they have no chance whatsoever, and that they're better off -not- fighting. That should appeal to humanitarians.
We do, however, sell them weapons, and have a law currently obligating us to defend them in certain circumstances -- even against their nominal national government. That should suggest how we -really- view them in practical matters. It's not like we sell weapons to Quebec primarily for aimed at the rest of Canada, or make promises to assist their defense. It'd be a pretty big deal if we did.
While one might argue about whether nor not a thousand years ago they contributed some technology to the rest of the world, you can't really dispute the facts that now they have a thoroughly corrupt, autocratic police state with extra-judicial re-education and hard-labor camps, aided by a wonderfully vague "state secrets" law; a notoriously unresponsive bureaucracy that's experienced at ignoring mere commoners; a habit of propping up the sociopaths running North Korea; a severe habit of fanning extreme nationalism, aided by repeatedly rewriting history; and no tolerance for political dissent of any kind. That's not intolerance as in they merely criticize you back, but as in they use a variety of means to completely and perhaps permanently remove you from society if they don't like what you're saying.
Technology tends to help offense more than defense, especially combined with an open society. A defender doesn't get the luxury of knowing time or place.
Consider, for instance, 1945-era technology: a Hiroshima-type device. The difficulty of constructing and moving one into position is far less than the difficulty of figuring out who's built them and where they are. Sure, you can use radiation scanners and searches to achieve near-100% coverage of containers -- if you're willing to bring international shipping to a crawl, and hire vast numbers of screeners. On the other hand, an attacker only needs to move a single device into an appropriate position to have an impact, rather than invest in defenses at every point of entry. The construction or acquisition of a nuclear device may be difficult, but is simple compared to the defender's task...
And we've had 60 years to work on the technological means for preventing nuclear attacks. During that time, the principal defense relied on the doctrine of mutually-assured destruction, which is only a meaningful defense if (a) you can identify your attacker, which is a lot easier with an land-based ICBM launch (or even SLBM, considering that the SLBM-capable club is fairly small IIRC) than a smuggled device, and (b) your attacker would seriously object to his own destruction (or of something else that you can destroy).
If somebody were working on ubiquituous low-power audiovisual sensor networks, for instance, it would not be unreasonable to wonder what those sensor networks might be used for. If somebody developed technologies for manipulating memories, what do you think THAT would be used for?
You don't need to be wealthy to have health insurance that covers damn near anything past a small out-of-pocket limit, given how many employers subsidize it heavily.
'course, cancer is one of those classes of illness which is pretty good at striking down people, poor OR rich.
The decision was explicitly made before the phone was ever dialed. If I wanted to make an exemption for you, you'd almost certainly already know by now. I repeat: the decision has been made. Explicitly. Voluntarily. My numbers don't appear on DNC lists "just because". So there really is one way to interpret the presence of my number on such a list, and that's as a warning of substantial hostility to such calls. Groups should be happy for the warning, so they can call people who -don't- mind.
You're better off abiding by that warning unless the real reason you want to call is to ensure that I -won't- support you because you're willfully ignoring my wishes. And if I'm already supporting you, bothering me against my stated pre-emptive refusal is a good way to make me walk away -- even if I share your ideas, that's not going to make me necessarily support *you*.
Oh, and if there aren't regulations: fools will simply call over and over, to be refused over and over, wasting everybody's time. There needs to be legal teeth to deal with the people who don't seem to be able to comprehend that calling me over and over again is not going to change a 'no' to a 'yes'. A DNC list also helps against the obvious loophole if "one free call" is allowed -- the creation of bogus groups, just for calling people. And creating bogus front groups is something that political factions know quite a bit about...
Slashdot Mirror
Governments don't really have the power to discriminate, because, the good ones anyway, provide the same services for all their citizens, regardless of their condition.
You must have an awful lot faith in your fellow man.
In any event, discrimination is inevitable with finite resources and anything demanding a non-free service, such as health care. Organ transplantation, for instance, entails some selection so long as there is a relative shortage of suitable donors that match potential recipients. Governments in charge of health care will ration it, since the services and availability of health practitioners tend not to be free -- especially for specialties, or anything requiring very expensive equipment or medication. And certain such governments, such as that of Canada, have already demonstrated a willingness to force people into the system by blocking alternatives...
And if you combine a government single-payer health care system with the right (or wrong) cultural blocs, you may create a situation in which the government feels it has the right or even the duty to ration health care on a behavioral basis or even to legislate against 'unhealthy' behaviors. If they're paying for your health, for instance, they have a keen interest in forcing you to avoid any behaviors (at least, the ones without powerful constituencies) that would drive up their costs. You may doubt that this would happen, but would you bet on it?
Family history isn't genetic screening; it's a substitute, really. Neither is asking about current health problems, since that's asking about the ailments themselves.
A genetic screen would require sequencing the DNA and looking for genes that are linked to ailments, not asking about the ailments themselves. In some cases, the linkages may not be firmly understood or the genes may not be sufficient to cause an ailment by themselves. There's the real ugly area; while it's pretty much guaranteed that trisomy-21 leads to Down's syndrome with all its symptoms IIRC, there may be genes that are associated with a slightly higher probability of some cardiovascular disease or cancer or so forth. Such a gene -may- be related to a later impairment that could generate increased health costs or impair performance, but how should one act regarding such a gene? And if the person's behavior takes the risk into account -- eating a careful diet if one has a genetic predisposition to obesity, say -- should its presence be considered just as hazardous?
Should we ask employees about their driving history, and treat them differently if they have a higher risk of being involved in a not-on-the-job auto accident? Or if they frequently go to McDonalds with the kids and eat Big Macs and drink sodas? Or if they go rock climbing, hang gliding, or bungee jumping?
Well, it's three treason points, if memory serves -- except for machine empathy, which at something like fifty treason points is grounds for immediate termination.
You wouldn't have machine empathy, would you, Citizen?
All businesses discriminate. Well, the ones that like to stay in business, anyway. They normally don't like to hire violent, blind sociopaths with a habit of carrying giant swords, for instance, or employees with a history of embezzlement or fraud. Businesses tend to be reluctant to hire people who'd be categorized as mentally impaired. Businesses don't grant credit to just any customer, and they discriminate with respect to lending terms, as well, based on risk. Landlords reserve the right to reject your application for a variety of reasons; not any reason will do, but they don't -have- to take you.
And choice or responsibility isn't necessarily a factor. If you're congenitally blind, or paralyzed in an auto-accident when somebody blows through a red light at 85mph, it's not your fault -- but it's still going to hurt you.
What differentiates 'bad' forms of discrimination from tolerated forms tends to be the connection -- or, rather, the lack thereof -- between what's being discriminated against and the nominal reason for the whole selection process. It's hard to justify arbitrarily favoring white males for management of a business, for instance, since there's no reason to expect that being a white male intrinsically makes one a better manager (even though it may be correlated with higher odds of having an MBA and previous management experience). I wouldn't argue against the FBI favoring white males over black females for a mission involving infiltrating a violent white supremacist group, however, since the latter would likely have an extremely reduced chance of success unless they're *blind* violent white supremacists.
There's such a thing as being overqualified for both economic and job satisfaction reasons. A company doesn't necessarily hire the -most- fit for the job, if this would be much more expensive than hiring people that do an adequate job. If an "enhanced" person only got that way through expensive treatments, he's probably going to shift towards occupations that could really take advantage of that and would be willing to pay significantly more.
Verizon Wireless offers pay-as-you-go plans. So does Cingular, if memory serves.
TracFone offers a similar service by reselling airtime via cards. I don't think they're the only ones, either.
For very light use, these may work for you.
It's not necessarily like that. Just because somebody places an ad for trademarked keyword 'Foo' does not necessarily mean that the person who placed the ad is actually selling 'Foo'; it might be a competitive ad or other related but different bit.
In theory, for instance, it might make sense for Edmunds.com, a major auto review / discussion site, to place bids on keywords referencing specific car models. Even though Edmunds.com does not actually sell those vehicles, those looking for vehicles might also reasonably be interested in discussion regarding those vehicles. If a search engine sells an ad for 'Ford Mustang' to a car review site, then it's profiting using Ford's trademark. In that case, Ford might be interested in finding out whether it can in fact claim part of that revenue.
That might have been difficult in the narrow tunnels, depending on how narrow those tunnels actually are.
Do Google's search algorithms make sense for an intranet in which you probably don't have quite the diversity of link counts? On the web, you have pages which have massive in-links and pages which have extremely few, but on an intranet, is that a reliably available and reasonable indicator of authority?
Gah. I saw CTHD once, and would much rather have spent the time re-watching John Woo's "The Killer" or Kaige Chen's "The Emperor and the Assassin".
CTHD is arty, but... Lil' Miss Havoc was -far- too irritating and the other main characters much too tolerant of her to get any sympathy from me.
A patent in Microsoft's hands may become a lot less valuable then it is in somebody else's. A company that focuses on obtaining patents for offensive use but does nothing else is not really vulnerable to retalliation in-kind, but a large tech company like Microsoft can't really litigate against other large tech companies (at least ones that hold their own useful patent databases) without risking Patent Armageddon. So while a small IP-only shop may be able to effectively extort large sums of money through patent abuse, Microsoft has far fewer potential victims against which to use patents without substantial risk to itself.
I would actually prefer a SecurID-sort of device that I -- owner -- can read a number off of for somebody else to type in, rather than something that needs to be plugged in or scanned.
Anything that needs to be scanned or plugged in to a reader controlled by the merchant is at a bit of risk unless you can absolutely trust that reader. And you definitely don't want to be in a situation where the waiter takes the token to the register for scanning, and then hands you a token that looks the same but isn't. It's bad enough letting the credit card out of your physical control; given the chance to design a supplementary system, one might as well do a better job this time around. On the other hand, the odds are good that my eyes have not been subverted...
Plus, numbers that can be typed in are probably a lot easier to shoe-horn into e-commerce sites than USB fobs.
- putting your picture on your cards
Not unusual. My mug adorns my one of my cards. It's not going to affect any online transactions, or any offline ones in which a machine accepts the card. I might wonder how easy it would be for a thief to alter a card here.
- requiring a pin
Still vulnerable to phishing or other man-in-the-middle attacks, unless the transmission scheme is not subject to replay. It'd help if somebody just grabs your wallet, 'tho.
- designating a geographical area in which your cards work (which you can adjust if you go on vacation)
Interesting. There's the difficulty of how you authenticate to arrange for such geographical restrictions, of course, but if you got it from a bank which has local branches, or they ask you for a secret *shrug*.
I think that some credit cards attempt to do some checks at point of sale, and probably look at geography; however, my credit card company has never contacted me to verify a transaction, even when it's in Cairo.
- an automated call when you purchase something online or over the phone, where you can enter your pin
So it's be over a different channel from the original system? Could be nice, at least for those with cell phones or who otherwise can reliably be reached at one number. You'd have to make sure that the phone call can be properly authenticated to the user so that somebody can't mimic this -- ISTR that CallerID is not terribly reliable if somebody really wants to fool with it.
- and my favourite idea - have an emergeny pin number in the case you've been taken to a bank machine. When you enter it, the police are notified and only $100 or so shows up in your accounts.
Quite interesting, and it sounds workable to me.
I suppose, although what I had in mind was more the social effects -- as in, what sort of message does it send to your kids to say "Hey, I can't be bothered to pick you up, so I'll just send the car"? What is the value of the (now missing) human interaction?
'course, I grew up in a more traditional nuclear family with one parent as wage earner and the other taking care of the kids. Maybe more modern kids would be fine with it, or even think of it as cool.
It would be interesting if a bank would offer incentives in exchange for requiring the use of SecurID-style authentication systems; that'd drastically cut down the feasibility of taking somebody's login and password for later use.
Hm, if I trust my e-mail provider, I should be able to trust the very last Received: header -- the one that my e-mail provider uses to indicate the last stop the message took before landing in my e-mail box. And I have my doubts that eBay would be stupid enough to relay third-party mail... so one should be able to check the IP address that my e-mail provider recorded and match it to eBay properties. On the other hand, there's approximately zero chance that eBay would really be sending requests for account information from a machine belonging to a DSL network somewhere in the Ukraine.
If I don't trust my e-mail provider, then there are obviously larger problems involved here and we need something like trusted third-party keyservers and strong public-key encryption for both encryption and authentication.
Considering that "humanitarians" frequently go on and on about how human life is paramount, that for a home owner to not take EVERY means to de-escalate a situation including running away from his own property, and that to defend yourself is to be judge, jury and executioner -- you'd think you WOULD love that.
Because, of course, it doesn't matter if they burn your house and steal your property; you're not supposed to value your property over their life. Gosh, they might even be mentally ill and therefore it's not really their fault. Oh well.
(And yes, that's the sort of argument one hears an awful lot... on Fark, anyway.)
On a less incendiary note, you should take note that it's not infrequently the slightly disadvantaged side that starts wars -- but that they do not necessarily fully realize their own difficulties. For example: In retrospect, a sane analysis should have indicated that the Confederacy, with much inferior manpower, industrial base, and naval forces and no real advantage in doctrine (officers in both sides having been trained through the same system) was essentially doomed barring a sudden shock that would make war politically unpalatable for the North. The "one of ours is worth ten of theirs because our boys learned to shoot when young" spiel and other myths, however, combined with bravado to apparently mislead them. Were they facing a force that they could not see any means to defeat, they probably wouldn't have started a war, and a rather great number of people wouldn't have died. You wouldn't have had the abuses of Reconstruction, and perhaps the South would have been less ready for the rise of the Klan.
It might also have been suggested that for Germany and Japan to have thought they could win against the rest of the world over the long haul was insane, based on population, area, resource distribution, and so forth. Japan, in particular, had vulnerable supply lines... It took an awful lot of inhumanity to prove them wrong.
But if Saddam -knew- that the US would have intervened after the Kuwait situation, and he -knew- that the US had not only the military means but the political will to defeat him utterly, would he have gone ahead anyway? Assuming that he was even slightly rational, he probably would have backed down instead of trying to enforce his territorial claims, and we wouldn't have ended up with years of sanctions hurting his general population while illicit oil revenue found its way into his palaces. Wars start when people think they can win, even when they're actually wrong.
Yeah, you could do pretty interesting things with it.
Combine it with a rental system, for instance -- and have it meet you at your doorstep and drive you to your destination. And then drive itself back to to wherever it next needs to be.
One could also see it being useful for the elderly -- those with poor eyesight or reflexes, and who don't want to have to depend on somebody else to drive them. Ditto for others not able to drive themselves. Maybe you won't need designated drivers anymore.
Theoretically, an autonomous vehicle should be able to pick up one's kids and drive them elsewhere if it's scheduled (time and location) and the parents are both busy, but I have my doubts as to whether this would be a good thing to do.
War isn't about fairness. You want to see the results of similar technology, fervor and doctrine? Try Antietam or Gettysburg and consider the results.
One of the most reliable ways to prevent a war is to thoroughly convince an enemy that they have no chance whatsoever, and that they're better off -not- fighting. That should appeal to humanitarians.
We do, however, sell them weapons, and have a law currently obligating us to defend them in certain circumstances -- even against their nominal national government. That should suggest how we -really- view them in practical matters. It's not like we sell weapons to Quebec primarily for aimed at the rest of Canada, or make promises to assist their defense. It'd be a pretty big deal if we did.
While one might argue about whether nor not a thousand years ago they contributed some technology to the rest of the world, you can't really dispute the facts that now they have a thoroughly corrupt, autocratic police state with extra-judicial re-education and hard-labor camps, aided by a wonderfully vague "state secrets" law; a notoriously unresponsive bureaucracy that's experienced at ignoring mere commoners; a habit of propping up the sociopaths running North Korea; a severe habit of fanning extreme nationalism, aided by repeatedly rewriting history; and no tolerance for political dissent of any kind. That's not intolerance as in they merely criticize you back, but as in they use a variety of means to completely and perhaps permanently remove you from society if they don't like what you're saying.
Technology tends to help offense more than defense, especially combined with an open society. A defender doesn't get the luxury of knowing time or place.
Consider, for instance, 1945-era technology: a Hiroshima-type device. The difficulty of constructing and moving one into position is far less than the difficulty of figuring out who's built them and where they are. Sure, you can use radiation scanners and searches to achieve near-100% coverage of containers -- if you're willing to bring international shipping to a crawl, and hire vast numbers of screeners. On the other hand, an attacker only needs to move a single device into an appropriate position to have an impact, rather than invest in defenses at every point of entry. The construction or acquisition of a nuclear device may be difficult, but is simple compared to the defender's task...
And we've had 60 years to work on the technological means for preventing nuclear attacks. During that time, the principal defense relied on the doctrine of mutually-assured destruction, which is only a meaningful defense if (a) you can identify your attacker, which is a lot easier with an land-based ICBM launch
(or even SLBM, considering that the SLBM-capable club is fairly small IIRC) than a smuggled device, and (b) your attacker would seriously object to his own destruction (or of something else that you can destroy).
It depends.
If somebody were working on ubiquituous low-power audiovisual sensor networks, for instance, it would not be unreasonable to wonder what those sensor networks might be used for. If somebody developed technologies for manipulating memories, what do you think THAT would be used for?
You don't need to be wealthy to have health insurance that covers damn near anything past a small out-of-pocket limit, given how many employers subsidize it heavily.
'course, cancer is one of those classes of illness which is pretty good at striking down people, poor OR rich.
The decision was explicitly made before the phone was ever dialed. If I wanted to make an exemption for you, you'd almost certainly already know by now. I repeat: the decision has been made. Explicitly. Voluntarily. My numbers don't appear on DNC lists "just because". So there really is one way to interpret the presence of my number on such a list, and that's as a warning of substantial hostility to such calls. Groups should be happy for the warning, so they can call people who -don't- mind.
You're better off abiding by that warning unless the real reason you want to call is to ensure that I -won't- support you because you're willfully ignoring my wishes. And if I'm already supporting you, bothering me against my stated pre-emptive refusal is a good way to make me walk away -- even if I share your ideas, that's not going to make me necessarily support *you*.
Oh, and if there aren't regulations: fools will simply call over and over, to be refused over and over, wasting everybody's time. There needs to be legal teeth to deal with the people who don't seem to be able to comprehend that calling me over and over again is not going to change a 'no' to a 'yes'. A DNC list also helps against the obvious loophole if "one free call" is allowed -- the creation of bogus groups, just for calling people. And creating bogus front groups is something that political factions know quite a bit about...