As far as I know, no tax authority anywhere includes the chattels stored or used in a building when assessing that buildings value for municipal tax purposes. The idea being to make an estimate of the buildings likely value if sold on the open real estate market. The tax rate that then gets applied depends on the function (aka zoning) of that building. The tax rates a municipality comes up with depends on numerous factors, but one of the largest is how much of a burden on the municipality that property represents. e.g. Farms and empty lots are typically given the lowest rates because they use the least amount of municipal services, while high density housing gets taxed higher. The municipality needs to make sure that they have sufficient income to cover the garbage, fire, infrastructure, schooling and so on for the given property. For industrial and manufacturing zones, a prudent municipality will also have an earmarked contingency fund to do environmental remediation in the event that the company goes under and abandons a contaminated site.
In Apples case, they have a huge campus and a pretty new multi-million dollar building that they were publicly bragging about when it went up. As far as I know, the only way that building could be valued so cheaply was if the building was so heavily specialized that any hypothetical purchaser would only be buying it for the land, intending to demolish the existing building and put up there own. Since the Infinite Loop building is just a very pretty office building, I can't see Apple getting away with claiming it is virtually worthless. Even the value of the building aside, tax rates are also based on the zoning of the land it sits on and its size. Trying to argue the land it sits on it virtually worthless would be even harder to pull off.
From the summary (this being Slashdot, I can't be bothered to actually read TFA), the criticism is all based on the researchers methodology and statistical rigour when analysing the resultant data. Not the ethics or morality of such experiments. For the record, I have no ethical problem with experiments of this nature, provided the embryos are terminated before a certain point in their development. In my opinion, that is before the sixth week, so that the spinal cord and brain haven't properly developed yet. In my opinion, it is our brains that make us human and until the developing collection of cells has developed a brain complex enough to react to stimuli, it isn't a human being.
That being the case, I think this is crucial research with enormous potential for good (as with any new tech, balanced by potential for harm). One of my children has a severe genetic defect, once that confines him to a wheelchair and will condemn him to a slow, lingering death sometime in his twenties. CRISPR is the leading candidate for treating his condition, but the odds are that it won't be ready for clinical use in time to save his life. His defect can already be detected in vivo and fixing it in in vitro is an important step before treating embryos in vivo that are intended to be brought to term. Saying we're five years away from clinical use of this technology and technique is the same as saying we are five years away from eliminating a whole host of crippling genetic defects.
I do understand and share the concerns about designer babies, eugenics and unknown long term effects of such medically unnecessary tinkering. But given the parsimonious approach the medical profession has to using new techniques, I think we'll see a well established track record of treating birth defects long before the industry embraces those techniques for selecting desirable traits.
Others have pointed out the problems of ensuring a) that the bugs really aren't exploitable b) that the bugs are preserved by the compiler and not corrected. I'd like to add a few other sources of problems:
First is this is going to contribute to code bloat and make it harder to maintain the code. I've seen a few programmers here on slashdot admit that they've had serious "WTF?" moments when reviewing their own code years or even just months later. Having deliberately non-functional code is going to make support programmers brains hurt, I just know it.
Second is: Your going to have to do a lot more testing to make sure those do-nothing bugs really are inert on your customers systems. What do you do when your code on a customers system conflicts with some obscure factor in their run-time environment? This will add another level to the "It works on our systems" problem.
Third: Software licensing terms aside, I think deliberately adding to flaws to code has the potential to open a can of worms in terms of liability.
There is a problem with his example as stated. Sure, us peasants aren't granted access to the license plate database the government maintains, but car financing companies, repo agents, parking authorities and in some places, any one who pays the fees can access that database. On top of that, there is a thriving and little known industry of compiling wholly civilian databases of license plates to serve those groups as well. Those private concerns are worse in my opinion, because while the DMV has your name and address, that's all it has and many places have laws to ensure that this data isn't linked to the criminal database or medical databases. The private plate databases though not only compile a list of all plates it finds, but when and where they find them. Those databases are increasingly being linked to other database silos. Right now it is technically and legally possible for some third party company to compile a database that links license plates, social security numbers, health information, criminal records, credit scores, educational records and so on. Depending on jurisdiction of course. Some places criminal records are protected, other places have little known methods for polling the state criminal database. Intended to allow employer criminal record checks on prospective employees, but there is nothing really to prevent them from saving that information and then selling it to a database compiling company.
It is already routine for marketing companies to compile surprisingly detailed profiles on people based on browsing habits, but that profile can be tricky to link to a specific person. Right now it's all based on IP addresses and browser fingerprints. Having some kind of license scheme, wherein all internet users in a region must be registered with an authority will only enable tying those profiles to specific people. The potential for censorship and suppressing dissent should be obvious to the slashdot crowd.
I wonder how many of the remaining test subjects who took longer to flip the switch on the robot did so either a) just struck by the novelty of the robot doing something "off the script" leading to a lightning calculation, did it actually think to say that, or is it a simple automaton programmed to make that plea? or b) secretly enjoying the moment of quiet power over a helpless thing. If the subject pool came from 4chan, I'd know it was almost certainly B.
Oh sure, but what I actually said was that they should give away the content at the exact same pricing of torrent sites (namely free, but with perhaps a registered email address and site account). Their competitive advantage would be several-fold: 1) They can guarantee the quality and security of the downloaded content 2) Being legal, they can probably get a high per-click rate from advertisers and would likely have a LOT more traffic than most current torrent sites get. 3) They can readily and fairly easily do tie-ins for merchandise, fan clubs and so on. PirateBay and KickAssTorrents can't offer you t-shirts, boxed sets, autographed pictures and so on.
But the Earth's rotation is always slowing down thanks to the tug of the Moon. Ever so slightly of course, but it is still a measurable effect, something like one millisecond every hundred years. That's not enough to need to adjust the length of our day on any human scale of course, but it's enough that the systems which use millisecond timing (GPS units, Stock Market systems, just about any physics experiment these days, the list goes on) has to have a mechanism for adding leap seconds. Changing the definition of the second, over and above any chaos caused in the short term, means you'd have to adjust that definition every hundred years or so. You'd never see very nation adopt the changes at the same time, so you'd end up with fragmented micro time zones. (e.g. the US decides 2400.0.1 hrs on January first is when they will add their leap second, but Canada decides to do so at 2400 hrs sharp while Mexico doesn't change at all. Ask the network admins here what effect that might have on the Internet backbone connections or the stock market reporting systems)
I have some fraction of First Nations ancestry from both parents, so I have always been sympathetic about native issues. And while I'm glad to see some bands trying to diversify from tobacco and casinos, I never understood the logic of the sovereign claim.
Yes, the various bands were promised, by treaty (the highest law in the land as I understand it) and by later court verdicts, that they would be sovereign on their own land. But this has always been an empty promise. Any time it turned out they were sitting on land that turned out to be valuable, it just got taken away. Despite being sovereign nations in their own right, their young men were (and still are) subject to the draft. Despite being sovereign, federal law enforcement agencies have had a piss poor track record of respecting that and engaging in proper cooperation with any reservation police. In short, America (and Canada) have only allowed the native peoples a limited form of autonomy NOT sovereignty and always ignored even that when convenient.
With that kind of track record in place, I don't see how the St Regis Mohawk ever thought it might work. Mind you, that first 13.75 million was certainly welcome.
There's another angle by which this would have failed as well. Lets suppose, for the sake of argument, that the sovereign claims were upheld (ignoring the fact that questions of sovereignty are only properly address by Congress, not a lower Federal court). You would end up with a situation analogous to one company using a patent granted in the US while another company is paying for the license rights to a very similar US patent owned by the government of Canada so they can market a competing drug in the US. And if I read the summary right, it is on this basis that the judge ruled that a patent review can proceed. Regardless of who owns the patents, they are still patents issued by the US government for products being sold in the US.
Cynically of me, I don't think anybody involved expected this tactic to really work. They just thought it would long enough to make some money for them.
Those examples you mention are just more examples of shuttling kids around though aren't they? I did think of such extra-curricular activities, but for the sake of simplicity, I used school in my post because it is the most common example.
One aspect I thought of after posting my original post was the perceived safety of the kids in an autonomous vehicle. Right or wrong, there is a perception of putting kids at risk of encountering nefarious individuals (primarily sex offenders) when using any form of public transport. I think the local transit system is perceived as safest while the kids are on board, because there is a driver, with a known route he can't deviate from and usually other passengers to act as witnesses. (there is of course the usual risk between bus stop and door of the destination, but that window of opportunity is pretty small)
Next safest would be official taxis, because cabbies have to have a criminal background check and in most places have to have a cab specific license. And there is always a dispatcher who knows which cabbie got assigned to which fare. Official taxis are clearly marked with a distinctive livery paint job, roof light, trunk trouble light and hack license riveted to the trunk. Ride sharing apps like Uber and Lyft don't feel as safe because the drivers may get checked, but not by your local police dept, The vehicles are basically unmarked with just an easily forged sticker indicating which service they work with. I honestly don't know if taxi drivers are any safer than Uber or Lyft drivers in terms of assaulting the passengers. But given the comparative novelty of ride sharing, any misbehaviour by the drivers often gets national level news coverage, so the public perception of the relative risk is skewed.
The only thing that is likely to offset the perceived safety for the kids in autonomous vehicles vs driven vehicles is if the whole class of autonomous vehicles gets hit with a couple of big, splashy accidents that a human driver could have easily avoided. (it won't matter if the autonomous cars have a better record over all, or never make the type of mistake a human driver would.)
To be fair, piracy does indeed generate revenue. It's just a) not nearly as much revenue as might be realized by an absolutely enforced licensed distribution system and b) not coming into the coffers of RIAA/MPAA, similar organizations around the world and the member content owners.
Let me give you some examples:
1) A bit torrent site, well known for hosting a certain type of content, latest theatrical releases for example, gets a lot of traffic from people who want to download that content. Even though the desired content is effectively given away free and the servers and bandwidth needed to provide that service certainly are not, the site makes a profit through the ad revenue and any marketing data they can harvest and sell. For this case, the content owners should be collaborating on a competitive site where the content is available equally free, of guaranteed quality (encoding, bit rate etc) and legal. Their profits would come from the same sources as the pirate site. The reason they don't do this is because they can't let go of the idea of being able to sell that content, or better yet, rent it to the consumers.
2) There are numerous streaming sites out there, many of whom are not paying license fees for their content. This is very prominent in the anime and hentai genres because Japanese production and distribution companies seem to be reluctant to do the subs, dubs and editing needed to legal market their content elsewhere. (CrunchyRoll not withstanding) Those sites are also making money on content they didn't pay for.
3) There is a recent explosion in Android based digital media appliances whose core purpose is to access all of the free content available online, much of it unlicensed of course. RIAA and the MPAA aren't getting any royalties on that hardware and they can't let go of the idea that they should be. (much like the surtax levied on CD-Rs)
One small nitpic: As far as I know, the only bittorrent clients that allow pure leeching are BitComet and its derivative BitLord (there's bitthief, but that is a research project). And as far as I know, many of the major torrent sites actively block those clients because they are leechers. (in addition to any criticisms about mishandling DHT and useless file padding). All of the sites where membership is required maintain sharing ratios and block or throttle downloads by members whose share ratio gets too far out of balance. Enforced share ratios benefit everybody in the swarm, not just the hosting sites reputation. Strict leeching only benefits an individual user and only to avoid legal complications. (an iffy proposition depending on your local laws). A healthy swarm can survive a certain percentage of leechers, but past a certain point it becomes self defeating since it ends up taking a lot longer to get your file(s) because there just isn't that many uploaders and they all likely have their clients set to only upload a certain percentage of their download rate. (in fact that is default behaviour in most clients)
Private trackers where share ratios are enforced actually sometimes end up with the opposite problem. Torrents can get "overseeded", where uploaders struggle to meet share ratios because there are so many uploaders compared to the number of downloaders.
I can see a couple of valid use cases that can help drive early adoption of this sort of thing. And of course, like any new technology or process, there are pros and cons.
The first use case is senior citizens. Lets not forget that we're dealing with a major demographic shift here as the baby boomers are now edging into retirement age. Agnes lives in a retirement community and is now old enough to feel insecure behind the wheel (dear old Arthur always drove when he was alive anyway so...). Plus, being on a fixed income, being able to call for a ride when she needs to go shopping instead of owning and maintaining a car seems a lot safer and cheaper. (among other things, Agnes is likely to feel uneasy about car maintenance since Arthur always handled that as well and she fears being ripped off or sudden unexpected and expensive repair bills) While a self driving car is likely to be cheaper than a taxi, the downside is that while she might have a bag boy help load the car at the store, she won't have a cabbie to help her unload back home.
The second use case I can foresee is people living in dense urban areas, especially areas where the market value of the parking spot associated with your house, apartment or condo approaches the value of the residence itself. As with Agnes; for Betty self driving car services offer a way to avoid the headaches of car ownership while offering more flexibility than public transit. The cost difference between human driven taxis and ride hailing services vs an autonomous vehicle will matter to her as well, but the need for human assistance at either end won't be as important.
The last use case I can see would be for shuttling kids around. (not car seat sized mind you). In my area, there are a handful of families who send their kids to school by cab because either they are not on a school bus route or they are deemed to be too close to the school to be entitled to bus service yet feel they are too far for their kids to walk unaccompanied. Autonomous cars would be cheaper and possibly more responsive to the surge demand loads of that practice. But for this use case to succeed, there would need to be some mechanism whereby parents can be assured the kids will end up at that school and not change the destination once they are onboard. A cabbie knows to disallow any changes to the destination and can be expected to remind Junior to not forget his or her backpack in the car.
The biggest downside I can see is my cynical expectation that early players in this market are going to subsidize their costs by allying with major retailers and marketing companies. e.g. I can see Wal-mart being pleased to offer free or dirt cheap autonomous transport to seniors via a partnership with Waymo. The catch of course being that you can only go to Walmart and back. And/Or an autonomous ride provider harvesting all the details of their passengers itinerary along with the credit card data the passengers have to provide and selling access to this data to the already too invasive marketing industry. I think it is patently obvious that marketing data definitively tied to a credit card is more valuable than marketing data associated with an IP or email address.
A fact which also means that it is difficult, maybe even impossible, for a manufacturer to add value and differentiate themselves in the set top appliance market. Why bother making yet another Android based streaming content appliance when the only way you can compete is on price? Since Google has its own digital media appliance line, handicapping other manufacturers ability to differentiate themselves is arguably a clear case of anti-competitive behaviour. Both Amazon and Google have vast amounts of cash reserves they can spend on lawyers, so any legal challenge to this practice would likely be long and expensive. What would matter to Amazon is whether the cost of winning is out-weighed by the potential profits. (It seems that Amazon's primary interest in this market is as a channel for promoting their own software and entertainment content, so access to Youtube content would be a lower priority for them anyway)
Military units around the world are already equipped with a decent laser defence mechanism. It's called a smoke grenade. It even comes in bigger sizes, from mortars all the way up to the bigger cannons. The US army at least now has smoke screen rounds engineered to also block out IR so as to defeat thermal and IR sighting systems. (and therefore would also be a good defence against IR up through the visual range laser wavelengths.)
I agree with the need for teaching critical thinking skills to the public, I've thought it was desperately needed since I was old enough to understand what hypocrisy was.
There are several hurdles to overcome however, some of them I think are unsolvable:
1) Collectively; the human race isn't as smart as it thinks it is. The larger the group, the lower the effective IQ of that group. Critical thinking is hard compared to the sort of thought processes the vast majority of us use daily. Even on a self selected group like us slashdotters, every day on this site we see numerous examples of people saying things so stupid that it's hard or impossible to figure out what sort of thought process could lead to such statements.
2) Teaching critical thinking is best done when the person is young. You can teach a 5 year old basic critical thinking skills. The majority of grade school students can understand logical fallacies like post hoc propter hoc, confirmation bias, contradiction of terms and so on. (granted, you'd have to use plain language, avoid Latin etc) Making ANY major change to how education of our young is enormously difficult. Look at the push back the educational system gets from subjects like teaching evolution and sex ed.
3) One of the things that cause the push back in #2 is large enough to justify it's own position on this list: Religion, particularly organized religion. In school, teaching evolution and safe sex contradicts core values of some rather large religious groups. When you combine that with the fact that when critical thinking is applied to any religion, the entire structure falls apart. (virtually all religions, certainly all the Abrahamic religions are based on the assumption that all of Creation must have a Creator.) The vitriol aimed at evolution and sex ed would be a spit in the bucket compared to what the threat of critical thinking in kids would provoke.
4) The reason why critical thinking is hard is because it goes against the grain of our evolved mental patterns. Our brains are wired to make assumptions, to fill in gaps of data with guesses, to make quick but sloppy categories of things. From the utterly basic of saccades movements and unfocused peripheral vision with the brain filling in the differences so seamlessly that we don't even notice it, to the assumptions that a persons appearance is a reliable indicator of their inner traits. (gender bias, race bias, good looking bias etc) We share a lot of common neurological structures with the other mammals, particularly the other primates. Because of that, we have the same instincts, rules of thumb and emotional make up as those primates. Modern man and the civilization it has created is a triumph over those base patterns, but that doesn't mean those base patterns have disappeared. Because it's hard, many of those we teach those critical thinking skills won't bother to use them once they are out of school. In our culture, you can survive and even thrive without critical thinking. The only downside is being easy to manipulate by others, and for most people that is an abstract risk that is hard to properly understand (ironically, critical thinking skills would help)
I wonder if any of that build quality issue you mention is because of the switch from steel plates with enamel paint to aluminium plates with low-VOC paints? I know that here in Ontario, after the mandated switch to low-VOC paints, certain models of cars had massive paint fade and/or flaking issues and for about a 2 year stretch, the license plates suffered a lot of fading in the blue lettering.
Much as hate such seemingly morals based refusal to do business polices, I have to admit I see some important points from the payment processors side of things.
Online payments (primarily credit card based, but I include things like Paypal and Bitcoin) are effectively forms of banking transactions. While it would be nice from a libertarian point of view to consider financial transaction providers as common carriers like the post and telephone networks, the reality is that they can't be. There is a large amount of laws and regulations that dictate how financial companies can do business. For actual banking in cash, as long as the bank follows the regulations, does the due diligence reporting of suspicious activity and allows law enforcement access to customer accounts, they do have common carrier-like protection from being considered an accessory to any criminal activity on the part of the customer(s). But those laws were mostly written in the pre-Internet age They generally assume that a person in country A is paying someone else in country A using a bank based in country A.
Online payments however are a significantly different proposition. A person in country A could be paying a person or business in country B via a web portal hosted in country C and using a financial services provider from country D. Which nations countries laws apply here? Note that the US dominates both the web hosting and financial services industries. So regardless of where the customer and artist happen to live, they both end up being controlled by US law.
Furthermore, unlike the banks, online payment processors are not as legally separated from a customers crimes as a physical bank would be. IANAL of course, but I think under US law, if person A in Canada bought content that was created by an artist in Australia but was hosted in the US and payment was processed in the US where that content was illegal, then the payment processor can be charged as an accessory to a crime. (I'm reminded of the hoary legal joke about the man convicted of taking a bribe from the man who was acquitted of paying it)
I predict that Yahoo Squirrel will struggle to find relevance and market share once it comes out of beta and is open to the public. The instant messaging and group communications space is already pretty crowded. Whether it be business or individual use focused, there is several well established competitors.
One of the biggest, yet least appreciated drivers of success in the instant messaging market is having huge masses of free users. That's what provided the foundation for MSN Messenger and Skype to succeed. (The same marketing model is a large driver of Facebook's success) Knowing that many of your friends were already using X is a good reason for you to start using it too. Another driver, at least in my opinion, is the ability to connect to your network using third party applications. That lets you get more users with no cost to you beyond the bandwidth and server load charges. That's why applications like Trillian and Pidgin were so popular.
But Yahoo Messenger shot itself in the foot when it changed the API several times before closing it altogether. Sure, it unloaded all those leeches who were using third party apps and hence weren't seeing the ads the official client carried. But at the same time it drastically cut into the relevance for the users of the official client. Why use Yahoo if many of your friends are migrating to $otherapp?
In my opinion, Yahoo has made a similar critical error in just dumping its current user base. What I think they should be doing is maintaining that user base and offering a free and extremely painless migration to Squirrel once it is ready for prime time. Making Squirrel invite only is doubling down on a bad bet. Any invite only community is going to be small. Who is going to want to go through the hassle of asking around for an invite when most of their friends and colleagues are already using Facebook, WhatsApp, Skype, KIk, Snapchat et all? Through in any lingering feelings of abandonment and resentment from the former Yahoo Messenger user base and you have a recipe for market failure.
You know, that's one area of particle physics that's always troubled me. For the longest time we thought that mass gave rise to gravity. Then it looked like it might have been the other way around. Now it looks like a particles gravity and mass are effectively independent. (which is just weird as hell)
Considering how rarely existing neutrinos interact with common matter, I'm not surprised that there is another flavour that doesn't interact *at all* or, more pedantically, doesn't interact with matter at all to the limits of our ability to measure. After all, your typical neutrino can go through a light year thick piece of lead without interacting. Existing detection set ups would have billions or trillions of neutrinos pass through them undetected for every neutrino that does manage to interact with an atom of the detecting material.
Much as I dislike Trump, to be fair I have to say that I think the problems of his offspring are more a nurture rather than nature problem. Trump clearly picks trophy wives who are not only good looking, but fairly smart as well. (he then divorces them and extorts very controlling and even punitive divorce settlements out them if they show too much autonomy. He expects his wives to be arm candy, to shut up and look pretty so as to reflect on his success as a man)
Being raised in that sort of environment is highly unlikely to produce admirable people or behaviours. It is the archetype for spoiled rich kid.
Your own link supports AC's correct assertion that the term for interfering in some one else's business (in this case the US election) is meddling. Medaling (one L), which is not a commonly used verb form of the noun medal, would describe the act of giving someone or something a medal (an award, typically made of metal and pinned on or suspended from a sash or ribbon) for an achievement of some sort. In standard English, you would normally say that a medal was awarded to someone, or that the medal for X was conferred upon recipient for their action(s) A(B,C etc) However, Medaled is a verb, such as when you say So-and-so medaled in the 300m hurdles, meaning they earned gold, silver or bronze.
While I am on the subject, medal is a noun "oh a noun is a person place or thing" (thank you Schoolhouse rock) not a verb, whereas "meddle" is a verb since it describes an action.
You made a simple grammar mistake, but when called on it, you doubled down and not only made the same mistake again, you made another one on top of it. You've given us a textbook example of Skitt's Law and. I'd argue, a good example of the Dunning-Kruger effect as well.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I know, no tax authority anywhere includes the chattels stored or used in a building when assessing that buildings value for municipal tax purposes. The idea being to make an estimate of the buildings likely value if sold on the open real estate market. The tax rate that then gets applied depends on the function (aka zoning) of that building. The tax rates a municipality comes up with depends on numerous factors, but one of the largest is how much of a burden on the municipality that property represents. e.g. Farms and empty lots are typically given the lowest rates because they use the least amount of municipal services, while high density housing gets taxed higher. The municipality needs to make sure that they have sufficient income to cover the garbage, fire, infrastructure, schooling and so on for the given property. For industrial and manufacturing zones, a prudent municipality will also have an earmarked contingency fund to do environmental remediation in the event that the company goes under and abandons a contaminated site.
In Apples case, they have a huge campus and a pretty new multi-million dollar building that they were publicly bragging about when it went up. As far as I know, the only way that building could be valued so cheaply was if the building was so heavily specialized that any hypothetical purchaser would only be buying it for the land, intending to demolish the existing building and put up there own. Since the Infinite Loop building is just a very pretty office building, I can't see Apple getting away with claiming it is virtually worthless. Even the value of the building aside, tax rates are also based on the zoning of the land it sits on and its size. Trying to argue the land it sits on it virtually worthless would be even harder to pull off.
That being the case, I think this is crucial research with enormous potential for good (as with any new tech, balanced by potential for harm). One of my children has a severe genetic defect, once that confines him to a wheelchair and will condemn him to a slow, lingering death sometime in his twenties. CRISPR is the leading candidate for treating his condition, but the odds are that it won't be ready for clinical use in time to save his life. His defect can already be detected in vivo and fixing it in in vitro is an important step before treating embryos in vivo that are intended to be brought to term. Saying we're five years away from clinical use of this technology and technique is the same as saying we are five years away from eliminating a whole host of crippling genetic defects.
I do understand and share the concerns about designer babies, eugenics and unknown long term effects of such medically unnecessary tinkering. But given the parsimonious approach the medical profession has to using new techniques, I think we'll see a well established track record of treating birth defects long before the industry embraces those techniques for selecting desirable traits.
First is this is going to contribute to code bloat and make it harder to maintain the code. I've seen a few programmers here on slashdot admit that they've had serious "WTF?" moments when reviewing their own code years or even just months later. Having deliberately non-functional code is going to make support programmers brains hurt, I just know it.
Second is: Your going to have to do a lot more testing to make sure those do-nothing bugs really are inert on your customers systems. What do you do when your code on a customers system conflicts with some obscure factor in their run-time environment? This will add another level to the "It works on our systems" problem.
Third: Software licensing terms aside, I think deliberately adding to flaws to code has the potential to open a can of worms in terms of liability.
It is already routine for marketing companies to compile surprisingly detailed profiles on people based on browsing habits, but that profile can be tricky to link to a specific person. Right now it's all based on IP addresses and browser fingerprints. Having some kind of license scheme, wherein all internet users in a region must be registered with an authority will only enable tying those profiles to specific people. The potential for censorship and suppressing dissent should be obvious to the slashdot crowd.
I wonder how many of the remaining test subjects who took longer to flip the switch on the robot did so either a) just struck by the novelty of the robot doing something "off the script" leading to a lightning calculation, did it actually think to say that, or is it a simple automaton programmed to make that plea? or b) secretly enjoying the moment of quiet power over a helpless thing. If the subject pool came from 4chan, I'd know it was almost certainly B.
Thank you for the correction.
Oh sure, but what I actually said was that they should give away the content at the exact same pricing of torrent sites (namely free, but with perhaps a registered email address and site account). Their competitive advantage would be several-fold: 1) They can guarantee the quality and security of the downloaded content 2) Being legal, they can probably get a high per-click rate from advertisers and would likely have a LOT more traffic than most current torrent sites get. 3) They can readily and fairly easily do tie-ins for merchandise, fan clubs and so on. PirateBay and KickAssTorrents can't offer you t-shirts, boxed sets, autographed pictures and so on.
But the Earth's rotation is always slowing down thanks to the tug of the Moon. Ever so slightly of course, but it is still a measurable effect, something like one millisecond every hundred years. That's not enough to need to adjust the length of our day on any human scale of course, but it's enough that the systems which use millisecond timing (GPS units, Stock Market systems, just about any physics experiment these days, the list goes on) has to have a mechanism for adding leap seconds. Changing the definition of the second, over and above any chaos caused in the short term, means you'd have to adjust that definition every hundred years or so. You'd never see very nation adopt the changes at the same time, so you'd end up with fragmented micro time zones. (e.g. the US decides 2400.0.1 hrs on January first is when they will add their leap second, but Canada decides to do so at 2400 hrs sharp while Mexico doesn't change at all. Ask the network admins here what effect that might have on the Internet backbone connections or the stock market reporting systems)
Yes, the various bands were promised, by treaty (the highest law in the land as I understand it) and by later court verdicts, that they would be sovereign on their own land. But this has always been an empty promise. Any time it turned out they were sitting on land that turned out to be valuable, it just got taken away. Despite being sovereign nations in their own right, their young men were (and still are) subject to the draft. Despite being sovereign, federal law enforcement agencies have had a piss poor track record of respecting that and engaging in proper cooperation with any reservation police. In short, America (and Canada) have only allowed the native peoples a limited form of autonomy NOT sovereignty and always ignored even that when convenient.
With that kind of track record in place, I don't see how the St Regis Mohawk ever thought it might work. Mind you, that first 13.75 million was certainly welcome.
There's another angle by which this would have failed as well. Lets suppose, for the sake of argument, that the sovereign claims were upheld (ignoring the fact that questions of sovereignty are only properly address by Congress, not a lower Federal court). You would end up with a situation analogous to one company using a patent granted in the US while another company is paying for the license rights to a very similar US patent owned by the government of Canada so they can market a competing drug in the US. And if I read the summary right, it is on this basis that the judge ruled that a patent review can proceed. Regardless of who owns the patents, they are still patents issued by the US government for products being sold in the US.
Cynically of me, I don't think anybody involved expected this tactic to really work. They just thought it would long enough to make some money for them.
One aspect I thought of after posting my original post was the perceived safety of the kids in an autonomous vehicle. Right or wrong, there is a perception of putting kids at risk of encountering nefarious individuals (primarily sex offenders) when using any form of public transport. I think the local transit system is perceived as safest while the kids are on board, because there is a driver, with a known route he can't deviate from and usually other passengers to act as witnesses. (there is of course the usual risk between bus stop and door of the destination, but that window of opportunity is pretty small)
Next safest would be official taxis, because cabbies have to have a criminal background check and in most places have to have a cab specific license. And there is always a dispatcher who knows which cabbie got assigned to which fare. Official taxis are clearly marked with a distinctive livery paint job, roof light, trunk trouble light and hack license riveted to the trunk. Ride sharing apps like Uber and Lyft don't feel as safe because the drivers may get checked, but not by your local police dept, The vehicles are basically unmarked with just an easily forged sticker indicating which service they work with. I honestly don't know if taxi drivers are any safer than Uber or Lyft drivers in terms of assaulting the passengers. But given the comparative novelty of ride sharing, any misbehaviour by the drivers often gets national level news coverage, so the public perception of the relative risk is skewed.
The only thing that is likely to offset the perceived safety for the kids in autonomous vehicles vs driven vehicles is if the whole class of autonomous vehicles gets hit with a couple of big, splashy accidents that a human driver could have easily avoided. (it won't matter if the autonomous cars have a better record over all, or never make the type of mistake a human driver would.)
That would be the Electronic Frontier Foundation. https://www.eff.org/
Let me give you some examples:
1) A bit torrent site, well known for hosting a certain type of content, latest theatrical releases for example, gets a lot of traffic from people who want to download that content. Even though the desired content is effectively given away free and the servers and bandwidth needed to provide that service certainly are not, the site makes a profit through the ad revenue and any marketing data they can harvest and sell. For this case, the content owners should be collaborating on a competitive site where the content is available equally free, of guaranteed quality (encoding, bit rate etc) and legal. Their profits would come from the same sources as the pirate site. The reason they don't do this is because they can't let go of the idea of being able to sell that content, or better yet, rent it to the consumers.
2) There are numerous streaming sites out there, many of whom are not paying license fees for their content. This is very prominent in the anime and hentai genres because Japanese production and distribution companies seem to be reluctant to do the subs, dubs and editing needed to legal market their content elsewhere. (CrunchyRoll not withstanding) Those sites are also making money on content they didn't pay for.
3) There is a recent explosion in Android based digital media appliances whose core purpose is to access all of the free content available online, much of it unlicensed of course. RIAA and the MPAA aren't getting any royalties on that hardware and they can't let go of the idea that they should be. (much like the surtax levied on CD-Rs)
Private trackers where share ratios are enforced actually sometimes end up with the opposite problem. Torrents can get "overseeded", where uploaders struggle to meet share ratios because there are so many uploaders compared to the number of downloaders.
The first use case is senior citizens. Lets not forget that we're dealing with a major demographic shift here as the baby boomers are now edging into retirement age. Agnes lives in a retirement community and is now old enough to feel insecure behind the wheel (dear old Arthur always drove when he was alive anyway so...). Plus, being on a fixed income, being able to call for a ride when she needs to go shopping instead of owning and maintaining a car seems a lot safer and cheaper. (among other things, Agnes is likely to feel uneasy about car maintenance since Arthur always handled that as well and she fears being ripped off or sudden unexpected and expensive repair bills) While a self driving car is likely to be cheaper than a taxi, the downside is that while she might have a bag boy help load the car at the store, she won't have a cabbie to help her unload back home.
The second use case I can foresee is people living in dense urban areas, especially areas where the market value of the parking spot associated with your house, apartment or condo approaches the value of the residence itself. As with Agnes; for Betty self driving car services offer a way to avoid the headaches of car ownership while offering more flexibility than public transit. The cost difference between human driven taxis and ride hailing services vs an autonomous vehicle will matter to her as well, but the need for human assistance at either end won't be as important.
The last use case I can see would be for shuttling kids around. (not car seat sized mind you). In my area, there are a handful of families who send their kids to school by cab because either they are not on a school bus route or they are deemed to be too close to the school to be entitled to bus service yet feel they are too far for their kids to walk unaccompanied. Autonomous cars would be cheaper and possibly more responsive to the surge demand loads of that practice. But for this use case to succeed, there would need to be some mechanism whereby parents can be assured the kids will end up at that school and not change the destination once they are onboard. A cabbie knows to disallow any changes to the destination and can be expected to remind Junior to not forget his or her backpack in the car.
The biggest downside I can see is my cynical expectation that early players in this market are going to subsidize their costs by allying with major retailers and marketing companies. e.g. I can see Wal-mart being pleased to offer free or dirt cheap autonomous transport to seniors via a partnership with Waymo. The catch of course being that you can only go to Walmart and back. And/Or an autonomous ride provider harvesting all the details of their passengers itinerary along with the credit card data the passengers have to provide and selling access to this data to the already too invasive marketing industry. I think it is patently obvious that marketing data definitively tied to a credit card is more valuable than marketing data associated with an IP or email address.
A fact which also means that it is difficult, maybe even impossible, for a manufacturer to add value and differentiate themselves in the set top appliance market. Why bother making yet another Android based streaming content appliance when the only way you can compete is on price? Since Google has its own digital media appliance line, handicapping other manufacturers ability to differentiate themselves is arguably a clear case of anti-competitive behaviour. Both Amazon and Google have vast amounts of cash reserves they can spend on lawyers, so any legal challenge to this practice would likely be long and expensive. What would matter to Amazon is whether the cost of winning is out-weighed by the potential profits. (It seems that Amazon's primary interest in this market is as a channel for promoting their own software and entertainment content, so access to Youtube content would be a lower priority for them anyway)
Military units around the world are already equipped with a decent laser defence mechanism. It's called a smoke grenade. It even comes in bigger sizes, from mortars all the way up to the bigger cannons. The US army at least now has smoke screen rounds engineered to also block out IR so as to defeat thermal and IR sighting systems. (and therefore would also be a good defence against IR up through the visual range laser wavelengths.)
If only Maurice Ward hadn't taken his recipe for Starlite to the grave with him.
There are several hurdles to overcome however, some of them I think are unsolvable:
1) Collectively; the human race isn't as smart as it thinks it is. The larger the group, the lower the effective IQ of that group. Critical thinking is hard compared to the sort of thought processes the vast majority of us use daily. Even on a self selected group like us slashdotters, every day on this site we see numerous examples of people saying things so stupid that it's hard or impossible to figure out what sort of thought process could lead to such statements.
2) Teaching critical thinking is best done when the person is young. You can teach a 5 year old basic critical thinking skills. The majority of grade school students can understand logical fallacies like post hoc propter hoc, confirmation bias, contradiction of terms and so on. (granted, you'd have to use plain language, avoid Latin etc) Making ANY major change to how education of our young is enormously difficult. Look at the push back the educational system gets from subjects like teaching evolution and sex ed.
3) One of the things that cause the push back in #2 is large enough to justify it's own position on this list: Religion, particularly organized religion. In school, teaching evolution and safe sex contradicts core values of some rather large religious groups. When you combine that with the fact that when critical thinking is applied to any religion, the entire structure falls apart. (virtually all religions, certainly all the Abrahamic religions are based on the assumption that all of Creation must have a Creator.) The vitriol aimed at evolution and sex ed would be a spit in the bucket compared to what the threat of critical thinking in kids would provoke.
4) The reason why critical thinking is hard is because it goes against the grain of our evolved mental patterns. Our brains are wired to make assumptions, to fill in gaps of data with guesses, to make quick but sloppy categories of things. From the utterly basic of saccades movements and unfocused peripheral vision with the brain filling in the differences so seamlessly that we don't even notice it, to the assumptions that a persons appearance is a reliable indicator of their inner traits. (gender bias, race bias, good looking bias etc) We share a lot of common neurological structures with the other mammals, particularly the other primates. Because of that, we have the same instincts, rules of thumb and emotional make up as those primates. Modern man and the civilization it has created is a triumph over those base patterns, but that doesn't mean those base patterns have disappeared. Because it's hard, many of those we teach those critical thinking skills won't bother to use them once they are out of school. In our culture, you can survive and even thrive without critical thinking. The only downside is being easy to manipulate by others, and for most people that is an abstract risk that is hard to properly understand (ironically, critical thinking skills would help)
I wonder if any of that build quality issue you mention is because of the switch from steel plates with enamel paint to aluminium plates with low-VOC paints? I know that here in Ontario, after the mandated switch to low-VOC paints, certain models of cars had massive paint fade and/or flaking issues and for about a 2 year stretch, the license plates suffered a lot of fading in the blue lettering.
Online payments (primarily credit card based, but I include things like Paypal and Bitcoin) are effectively forms of banking transactions. While it would be nice from a libertarian point of view to consider financial transaction providers as common carriers like the post and telephone networks, the reality is that they can't be. There is a large amount of laws and regulations that dictate how financial companies can do business. For actual banking in cash, as long as the bank follows the regulations, does the due diligence reporting of suspicious activity and allows law enforcement access to customer accounts, they do have common carrier-like protection from being considered an accessory to any criminal activity on the part of the customer(s). But those laws were mostly written in the pre-Internet age They generally assume that a person in country A is paying someone else in country A using a bank based in country A.
Online payments however are a significantly different proposition. A person in country A could be paying a person or business in country B via a web portal hosted in country C and using a financial services provider from country D. Which nations countries laws apply here? Note that the US dominates both the web hosting and financial services industries. So regardless of where the customer and artist happen to live, they both end up being controlled by US law.
Furthermore, unlike the banks, online payment processors are not as legally separated from a customers crimes as a physical bank would be. IANAL of course, but I think under US law, if person A in Canada bought content that was created by an artist in Australia but was hosted in the US and payment was processed in the US where that content was illegal, then the payment processor can be charged as an accessory to a crime. (I'm reminded of the hoary legal joke about the man convicted of taking a bribe from the man who was acquitted of paying it)
One of the biggest, yet least appreciated drivers of success in the instant messaging market is having huge masses of free users. That's what provided the foundation for MSN Messenger and Skype to succeed. (The same marketing model is a large driver of Facebook's success) Knowing that many of your friends were already using X is a good reason for you to start using it too. Another driver, at least in my opinion, is the ability to connect to your network using third party applications. That lets you get more users with no cost to you beyond the bandwidth and server load charges. That's why applications like Trillian and Pidgin were so popular.
But Yahoo Messenger shot itself in the foot when it changed the API several times before closing it altogether. Sure, it unloaded all those leeches who were using third party apps and hence weren't seeing the ads the official client carried. But at the same time it drastically cut into the relevance for the users of the official client. Why use Yahoo if many of your friends are migrating to $otherapp?
In my opinion, Yahoo has made a similar critical error in just dumping its current user base. What I think they should be doing is maintaining that user base and offering a free and extremely painless migration to Squirrel once it is ready for prime time. Making Squirrel invite only is doubling down on a bad bet. Any invite only community is going to be small. Who is going to want to go through the hassle of asking around for an invite when most of their friends and colleagues are already using Facebook, WhatsApp, Skype, KIk, Snapchat et all? Through in any lingering feelings of abandonment and resentment from the former Yahoo Messenger user base and you have a recipe for market failure.
You know, that's one area of particle physics that's always troubled me. For the longest time we thought that mass gave rise to gravity. Then it looked like it might have been the other way around. Now it looks like a particles gravity and mass are effectively independent. (which is just weird as hell)
Considering how rarely existing neutrinos interact with common matter, I'm not surprised that there is another flavour that doesn't interact *at all* or, more pedantically, doesn't interact with matter at all to the limits of our ability to measure. After all, your typical neutrino can go through a light year thick piece of lead without interacting. Existing detection set ups would have billions or trillions of neutrinos pass through them undetected for every neutrino that does manage to interact with an atom of the detecting material.
Being raised in that sort of environment is highly unlikely to produce admirable people or behaviours. It is the archetype for spoiled rich kid.
While I am on the subject, medal is a noun "oh a noun is a person place or thing" (thank you Schoolhouse rock) not a verb, whereas "meddle" is a verb since it describes an action.
You made a simple grammar mistake, but when called on it, you doubled down and not only made the same mistake again, you made another one on top of it. You've given us a textbook example of Skitt's Law and. I'd argue, a good example of the Dunning-Kruger effect as well.