You'd think they were out of the mainstream of jurisprudence, judging by how often that happens.
It is not nearly so clear cut as that. The huge majority of all cases decided by any appeals court never make it to the Supreme Court, so if you look at the likelihood of any given ruling being reversed by the Supreme court, it is on the order of 0.1%.
And the 9th Circuit is the biggest circuit, so if you talk in absolute numbers it will have the most ruling reviewed and overturned, just because it hears the most cases.
Depending on how you do the math and what period you analyze, the 9th Circuit is not even the most overruled circuit - that distinction goes to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which incidentally handles patent filings.
So the computer produces a list of possible diagnosis. This list I understand is called a "differential diagnosis" and may have as few as 2 or 3 items or as many as several hundred.
I would expect that this diagnosis list, as well as a management plan, to be then put in the hands of a human. After a series of tests I would expect the AI to be consulted again if necessary.
The scenario you describe is the easy one, because the AI generates a (potentially large) list of potential diagnoses, and the human doctor uses that as input to their decision making process. In that case, the human doctor is still in charge and ultimately responsible.
For a more troublesome case, consider the article (https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/08/chinese-startup-infervision-emerges-from-stealth-with-an-ai-tool-for-diagnosing-lung-cancer/) I read recently about automated lung cancer detection from CT images. Suppose that all CT lung images are automatically screened by the AI for lung cancer. And further suppose that as a cost saving measure the lung cancer screening is farmed out to the AI and not read manually as well (given medical costs and the expense of trained radiologists, this is not at all implausible, at least in poorer locales). Just to make it fun, assume that a human radiologist gets it correct 85% of the time, and the AI gets it right 88% of the time.
Now assume that you or a loved one is one of the 12% that the AI gets wrong. At a population statistics level, the AI is doing better overall than a pure human read, and because it is less expensive, more screenings were done catching even more cancers overall. Your case was missed, and it sucks to be you, but is there even any liability here? Overall, the AI is saving lives, and a priori, you had no way of knowing that your individual outcome was going to be worse.
It still lives in hearts of many IoT devices and especially as embedded OS in all the printers, copiers, ATMs, and hell knows where else, showing that all-too-familiar red box with cross on top right corners on displays of all these devices, notwithstanding all the familiar WinXP warning and dialogue boxes.
Are IoT devices effectively vulnerable to this particular malware? And if they do become infected, is there anything to ransom on these systems? Can't you just reset them back to factory state if needed?
So the blame is 100% on Microsoft. The whole Windows 10 debacle shows that Microsoft's updates cannot be trusted. So the Windows population now consists of mainly two groups: those who could not switch updates off on time (and now never can switch off again because they have windows 10 involuntarily) and those who could switch them off and dare not install anything from Microsoft ever again. Microsoft itself has made terribly sure that updates are not installed if it can be avoided.
Given the statistic I recently read that Windows 10 is on over 400 million devices, I think you are missing a third group that contains in excess of 100 million people: those who want Windows 10 and believe that all things considered, it is a better choice for them than earlier versions of Windows.
Microsoft did absolutely everything they could to get Windows 10 into the field, including some sleazy tactics. But auto updating systems are like vaccinations. They provide herd immunity to everyone around them even if some people have bad reactions to vaccines.
Privacy concerns already stopped such efforts in the USA, and are unlikely to be resolved any time soon. No real privacy, or privacy concerns in China.
Actually, something very similar has already happened in the USA. Enlitic (http://www.enlitic.com/) is a company that uses neural networks and machine vision to do lung cancer detection in CT images, with accuracy rates that already compare favorably to human read images.
Do any reading in the radiology space, and you see headlines about machine learning every day. It is definitely coming.
I have never met someone below the age of 30 that thought they had a chance of retiring at all. The majority expects Social Security to be gone..
While the state of Social Security is not good, it is not nearly so dire as that. It is one of the most popular government programs around, and current projections are that in 203x when the trust funds are exhausted (and yes, the trust funds are nothing more than bonds that have to be paid by the Treasury, so in some senses don't really exist), ongoing payroll deductions at the current level would pay 71% of current benefits (inflation adjusted).
So a haircut, not a death sentence. And the popularity of the program means that it is one of the least likely things to go away. Rising debt service is probably a greater threat to social security than anything else, crowding out all other spending.
One thing I have never seen is very long term projections. When the bulk of the boomers die off I can imagine Social Security going back into the black.
If you are a millennial, hope for something like a flu pandemic with mortality concentrated in the old - that would knock a bunch of boomers out of the Social Security pool and leave more money for you. .
Yeah, at least the summary appears to be completely vapid. Like it is somehow unpossible for these computers to have been hooked up to a local server to track when they are worn out or are failing. Nope, the data has to be sent to the cloud for the magic to happen.
Obviously not impossible to have done it with a local server, but potentially very difficult. The internet based server likely belongs to the manufacturer of the robot, not GM. So they are enabling service monitoring by the manufacturer or distributor, not doing it themselves.
If they needed to convince the robot manufacturer to install the server at each factory, that would be more difficult, and obviously require cooperation from the manufacturer.
And lastly, nothing in the summary talks about the communication channel being two ways. If the robot sends data out and doesn't take any inbound connections the security risk is reduced.
I live in the downtown area of a large city. We have two parking spaces, a dog, and grass for her to run around on. I am able to be as loud as I want to be (YMMV), mostly because new buildings are much better at soundproofing than was true even 20 years ago.
Our condo is smaller than our suburban house was, but plenty large enough for the two of us, and bigger than the median square footage of a house when I was a kid.
And we pay more than I did in the burbs, but we have baseball, football and basketball stadiums within walking distance, as well as theaters and easily 2 dozen restaurants. Expand my range to what I can reach for the minimum Uber fare or a bike share, and I have easy access to all of the downtown area.
It's a personal decision, but it is not nearly as bleak a life as you paint it.
HR might also be pissed at both supervisor and candidate that the wife's terminal cancer diagnosis has obviously not been mentionned at all during the interview process - as a candidate in that position, I would be tempted to keep quiet about it unless the cancer was so advanced that my wife had only a couple of months to live, in which case I pretty much have to 'fess up to it at an interview - "look, my wife has terminal stomach cancer, and has at most a few months. During that time, I am her out-of-hours carer so if OOH work is required, I would need to tackle that from home". From the HR perspective, if that vital information was not forthcoming during interview, what else is there to come out, and is this candidate suddenly a bad risk? At the very least, will the candidate need extensive bereavement leave that was not anticipated during the hiring, or will this go on for an extended period because the wife hangs on for years rather than weeks/months (not likely with stomach cancer, but that is not an evaluation HR can make). It should still be handled professionally and with compassion, rather than by going postal on the guy, but the interview and candidate evaluation process is the stage where all such issues need to be raised.
My experience as an interviewer is that I don't want to know any of those details. I don't know the exact laws that apply in this case, but in the US it would be job discrimination to refuse to hire a woman who is pregnant because of the pregnancy and upcoming maternity leave. I assume it would also be discriminatory to refuse to hire because of his wife's condition. So don't ask, don't tell. If I don't know about the issue, and decide not to hire you, then you can't claim that I discriminated on that basis.
Autotuned voices, corporate-created-idols (usually some pretty teenaged kid with a previous 'career' as a Disney 'talent employee'), new stars with a pre-baked 'image' (naturally built/provided by the studio), lyrics that are focus-group-tested and written by someone else, a catchy tune usually ripped-off from some unknown who got paid a pittance for it...
Most *music* these days is fucking garbage. Okay, some of that may be the 'get off my lawn' syndrome on my part, but honestly, in the past the musician and/or band usually had to come up with everything themselves: lyrics, chords, composition, image, vision, etc. Even as late as the 1990s or so, there were still artists who did it themselves, and the quality tended to show through more readily. Yes there were pre-baked 'stars' in the past as well, but their appeal tended to die off pretty quickly, or their star faded long before their second album... much like, well, today. It's just that the signal-to-noise ratio went to hell of late.
Appreciation of music is inherently subjective, so I won't argue with whatever makes something garbage to you, but some of the elements you list just don't matter to me. I don't care if the performer wrote the song or not, or if a producer packaged them to be more appealing to an audience. If I like the song I like the song, and I don't have to be a purist about it.
Do you feel the same way about a car or a computer? Would Photoshop have more value to you if it was produced by a single person? Does a car have more authenticity if the body and the engine come from the same team?
That's why there used to be a saying, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM". The clear implication was that you could well be fired for buying from some other vendor. IBM was unique, both because it swung enough weight to rescue anyone who got into trouble for choosing its products and services, and because it was always best chums with the CEO and his inner circle.
I think the "No one every got fired for buying IBM" saying was more about going with the herd. It wasn't that IBM was foolproof or could rescue you in ways that other people couldn't, it was that IBM was widely accepted as a very solid choice, and if you were wrong to go with IBM then so were millions of others.
I'm too lazy to look for the cite, but I have read in the past that in the short term virtually any change you make is good and results in a productivity improvement. Then the novelty wears off and you go back to the old baseline. So people may be motivated to work harder or try to get more done in a 30 hour week initially, but that effect tends to wear off once it becomes the new normal.
Rather than traditional auto insurance, the better model may be medical malpractice insurance.
Medical care has inherent risks, and when a patient dies or has serious complications, the question becomes whether those were the result of errors made during the treatment process or essentially bad luck. If the doctor should have done better, then you are talking malpractice. If the patient had a drug allergy that could not reasonably have been detected in advance, that is bad luck.
Self driving cars may be in the same boat. If a car's systems behaved correctly and an accident still results, even if you can imagine a better system that would not have that limitation, there may be no product liability, and you would purchase insurance to cover damage the vehicle, properties, and people.
This is where certain Slashdotters would accuse me of being a "shill", if I were defending an Apple policy; so, pray tell, why wouldn't the term apply to you and your response?
If I were to be pedantic, I would say that a shill is someone who is paid by the entity being promoted, or at a minimum has a self interest at stake in the promotion. I get nothing from Microsoft (you will have to take my word on that I guess), so at worst I am being guilty of being a fanboi.
But I would also say that my statement was correct, and truth is an affirmative defense. Microsoft backdates their drivers. They don't ask anyone else to do so, and the fact that copying a Windows install doesn't work isn't solely (or even mostly) due to driver dating, so I don't consider driver backdating to be something that inconveniences users. That goes to my assertion that this at most inconveniences Microsoft's own developers.
Why don't they simply add another record ("source") to help make the driver comparison? A typical Microsoft solution I would say.
So how do you compare sources? If I have a nVidia reference driver, a custom driver from the hardware OEM, and a Microsoft driver, how do I rank those? Or is source simply MS vs non-MS?
Don't forget that whatever change to driver ranking MS makes also has to have provision with the thousands of already existing drivers that won't get updated to include a new field.
Hold on. Let's say that a virus modifies the older driver which, of course, now bumps the timestamp to the day of the infection. This would move the older - now infected - driver up in the priority? Wow. That explains so much.
As Raymond Chen would say, "That rather involved being on the other side of the airtight hatchway". If you can modify the driver, who cares about the timestamp, just modify the actual driver being used and be done with it.
Microsoft Developers have got to be the laziest on the planet. EVERYTHING that MS does is done for the ease of their Developers, regardless of what hoops or inconvenience it causes the User.
Given that in the this case the kludge only affects Microsoft developers, it forces other developers and users to go through exactly zero hoops.
Microsoft backdates their drivers so that they don't win timestamps and will only win on version compares. I think changing the order of the timestamp and version compares would be a simple solution, but I can imagine that they considered that and had some reason why that led to undesirable results. So they have a solution where they backdate their drivers and nobody else has to.
Laws barring property rental are per se illegal, as the constitution does not give the government, at any level, the explicit right to dictate what one does (or does not do) with their own property. This goes for zoning as well.
If you take an originalist, states right centric view of the constitution, the constitution defines limits on what the federal government can do, but does not in any way restrict the rights of the states to pass whatever laws they wish.
In the modern view of constitutional supremacy, where states are not allowed to limit rights granted by the constitution and the states are generally subordinate to the feds, there is nothing to prevent either the states or the feds from limiting rental rights.
So in both of the major schools of thought regarding the constitution, this is perfectly legitimate.
(Do you realize that only once since 1988 has a Republican candidate actually won the popular vote? That's 6 of the last 7 elections. Talk about evidence of a screwed up election system...)
Given that in most of the elections in that period a democrat won, that hardly seems shocking. And since the electoral/popular split has only happened 5 times in US history, it is not a common occurrence, even if it has happened twice in the last sixteen years.
This is why big oil has been sitting on the technology to turn water into gasoline for years, and why I keep seeing ads about the miracle products that the power company doesn't want me to know about.
A company that had a cure for HIV would market it, for some combination of the following reasons: 1. Even if temporary, it would represent a massive slug of business, extending over multiple years. Given the short term focus of most US based businesses, that it hard to pass up. 2. The secret is too hard to keep. If your researchers have created something that is likely to lead to the Nobel prize, and the company decides to sit on it, it becomes a huge scandal waiting to be uncovered. 3. The situation is unstable. The first company to market a cure puts the recurring revenue of everybody with ongoing treatment at risk. It is like the prisoners dilemma. You maximize your profits by being first to market with the cure.
A cure for Hepatitis C has recently come to market. It is phenomenally expensive, but it is a genuine cure. That is an anecdote, but at least one instance of a cure being developed.
So the threat of death is enough for you to argue the status quo standing behind proprietors and denying the user full control of a device they obtained (in Sandler's case wear inside their body) but not enough for you to let the user control. We still don't think that's the case for more common devices that are involved in lot of harm such as cars. In light of what's actually already happened to Sandler, your response is remarkably sycophantic to power.
I think you are mixing arguments. I was making the utilitarian case that the remedy proposed (software freedom) was unlikely to be an effective remedy in this case. I said nothing pro or con about software freedom.
If you want to argue conceptually for software freedom, then Karen Sandler's case is nothing but an anecdote, and we can rehash the usual pro/anti FSF and GPL arguments all day long. Personally I don't view proprietary software as evil or even morally suspect, and I am fairly sure you disagree with that view.
I don't see anything in your post that makes me believe that if Karen Sandler had access to the code she could make improvements to the device for her particular situation.
First, as another poster has noted, modern implantable devices are extensively configurable, and yet most of them go in with the default settings, because the cardiologist/surgeon don't know enough about each device to tweak the settings. So it is quite conceivable that it could be already be configured to deal properly with a pregnant woman's racing heartbeat.
Second, all of these devices walk a hazard/benefit tightrope. You are dealing with devices that can kill the patient if they fail. The patient might die due to the ordinary surgical complication risk that is always present. The device might function but not actually help them because of their particular physiology. So the validation of the device talks a lot about risk and reward, and the testing will focus on the population most likely to benefit. It is likely that pregnant women form a miniscule market for this device, so they may be considered an off label use - something that was not studied and about which nothing is known.
Think of pharmaceutical ads, and how often you hear the phrase "women who are pregnant or thinking of becoming pregnant should consult their doctor". That tells you right there that either pregnant women weren't studied, or that they have additional risk factors because of the pregnancy.
To think that access to the sourcecode by an interested layperson could make the software meaningfully better is a stretch. Perhaps getting access to the programming manual for the device would help, but that doesn't require access to the source code.
It's the new business model: as long as you can keep investment capitol coming in, you expand like wildfire in the hope that what you do eventually becomes profitable.
As a way to build a new market, subsidized pricing works and may well be justified. When Amazon started, the notion of shopping for books on your computer was strange. For the most part people were used to browsing through their neighborhood bookstore, and it was not at all apparent that an online only store was viable. But by undercutting brick and mortar stores, they got people to try their services, which let them expand and continue to build their infrastructure.
I haven't been paying much attention lately, but I don't think Amazon emphasizes the lowest prices anymore. Now they are all about convenience and selection, meaning that they don't have to subsidize the products they sell.
Similarly, prior to Uber and Lyft, ride hailing on your phone wasn't a thing for most people. At least in my case, it was easy to try, and cheap enough that I gave it a shot. Now my perception of the value it provides has gone up, to the point where I might grumble about a price hike but would probably keep riding.
But had the prices been higher when I initially tried it, it would have been more likely to prevent me from trying it in the first place.
...because it allows the various cranks and racists to borrow the goodwill of these sites to create a veneer of respectability around what are ultimately noxious and vile views.
I just don't see anyone going "Oh, look, its on Twitter, so it must be true".
Social platforms allow like-minded people to connect. It doesn't have any additional power of persuasion that you are attributing to it.
But since most people tend to self select news sources that they agree with, it is very easy to get pulled into a more and more monolithic world view. Someone who is politically conservative might genuinely approach the issue of climate change with an open mind, but if they start with articles about climate change they find on right wing websites I can pretty much guarantee that they will see an echo chamber of sites and articles that all tell them it is a vast hoax and nobody really believes in it. So they think they are doing their own research, but all the results they see come from people telling one side of the story.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd think they were out of the mainstream of jurisprudence, judging by how often that happens.
It is not nearly so clear cut as that. The huge majority of all cases decided by any appeals court never make it to the Supreme Court, so if you look at the likelihood of any given ruling being reversed by the Supreme court, it is on the order of 0.1%.
And the 9th Circuit is the biggest circuit, so if you talk in absolute numbers it will have the most ruling reviewed and overturned, just because it hears the most cases.
Depending on how you do the math and what period you analyze, the 9th Circuit is not even the most overruled circuit - that distinction goes to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which incidentally handles patent filings.
This site has some good information: http://ellisp.github.io/blog/2...
So the computer produces a list of possible diagnosis. This list I understand is called a "differential diagnosis" and may have as few as 2 or 3 items or as many as several hundred.
I would expect that this diagnosis list, as well as a management plan, to be then put in the hands of a human. After a series of tests I would expect the AI to be consulted again if necessary.
The scenario you describe is the easy one, because the AI generates a (potentially large) list of potential diagnoses, and the human doctor uses that as input to their decision making process. In that case, the human doctor is still in charge and ultimately responsible.
For a more troublesome case, consider the article (https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/08/chinese-startup-infervision-emerges-from-stealth-with-an-ai-tool-for-diagnosing-lung-cancer/) I read recently about automated lung cancer detection from CT images. Suppose that all CT lung images are automatically screened by the AI for lung cancer. And further suppose that as a cost saving measure the lung cancer screening is farmed out to the AI and not read manually as well (given medical costs and the expense of trained radiologists, this is not at all implausible, at least in poorer locales). Just to make it fun, assume that a human radiologist gets it correct 85% of the time, and the AI gets it right 88% of the time.
Now assume that you or a loved one is one of the 12% that the AI gets wrong. At a population statistics level, the AI is doing better overall than a pure human read, and because it is less expensive, more screenings were done catching even more cancers overall. Your case was missed, and it sucks to be you, but is there even any liability here? Overall, the AI is saving lives, and a priori, you had no way of knowing that your individual outcome was going to be worse.
It still lives in hearts of many IoT devices and especially as embedded OS in all the printers, copiers, ATMs, and hell knows where else, showing that all-too-familiar red box with cross on top right corners on displays of all these devices, notwithstanding all the familiar WinXP warning and dialogue boxes.
Are IoT devices effectively vulnerable to this particular malware? And if they do become infected, is there anything to ransom on these systems? Can't you just reset them back to factory state if needed?
So the blame is 100% on Microsoft. The whole Windows 10 debacle shows that Microsoft's updates cannot be trusted. So the Windows population now consists of mainly two groups: those who could not switch updates off on time (and now never can switch off again because they have windows 10 involuntarily) and those who could switch them off and dare not install anything from Microsoft ever again. Microsoft itself has made terribly sure that updates are not installed if it can be avoided.
Given the statistic I recently read that Windows 10 is on over 400 million devices, I think you are missing a third group that contains in excess of 100 million people: those who want Windows 10 and believe that all things considered, it is a better choice for them than earlier versions of Windows.
Microsoft did absolutely everything they could to get Windows 10 into the field, including some sleazy tactics. But auto updating systems are like vaccinations. They provide herd immunity to everyone around them even if some people have bad reactions to vaccines.
Privacy concerns already stopped such efforts in the USA, and are unlikely to be resolved any time soon. No real privacy, or privacy concerns in China.
Actually, something very similar has already happened in the USA. Enlitic (http://www.enlitic.com/) is a company that uses neural networks and machine vision to do lung cancer detection in CT images, with accuracy rates that already compare favorably to human read images.
Do any reading in the radiology space, and you see headlines about machine learning every day. It is definitely coming.
I have never met someone below the age of 30 that thought they had a chance of retiring at all. The majority expects Social Security to be gone..
While the state of Social Security is not good, it is not nearly so dire as that. It is one of the most popular government programs around, and current projections are that in 203x when the trust funds are exhausted (and yes, the trust funds are nothing more than bonds that have to be paid by the Treasury, so in some senses don't really exist), ongoing payroll deductions at the current level would pay 71% of current benefits (inflation adjusted).
So a haircut, not a death sentence. And the popularity of the program means that it is one of the least likely things to go away. Rising debt service is probably a greater threat to social security than anything else, crowding out all other spending.
One thing I have never seen is very long term projections. When the bulk of the boomers die off I can imagine Social Security going back into the black.
If you are a millennial, hope for something like a flu pandemic with mortality concentrated in the old - that would knock a bunch of boomers out of the Social Security pool and leave more money for you. .
Yeah, at least the summary appears to be completely vapid. Like it is somehow unpossible for these computers to have been hooked up to a local server to track when they are worn out or are failing. Nope, the data has to be sent to the cloud for the magic to happen.
Obviously not impossible to have done it with a local server, but potentially very difficult. The internet based server likely belongs to the manufacturer of the robot, not GM. So they are enabling service monitoring by the manufacturer or distributor, not doing it themselves.
If they needed to convince the robot manufacturer to install the server at each factory, that would be more difficult, and obviously require cooperation from the manufacturer.
And lastly, nothing in the summary talks about the communication channel being two ways. If the robot sends data out and doesn't take any inbound connections the security risk is reduced.
I live in the downtown area of a large city. We have two parking spaces, a dog, and grass for her to run around on. I am able to be as loud as I want to be (YMMV), mostly because new buildings are much better at soundproofing than was true even 20 years ago.
Our condo is smaller than our suburban house was, but plenty large enough for the two of us, and bigger than the median square footage of a house when I was a kid.
And we pay more than I did in the burbs, but we have baseball, football and basketball stadiums within walking distance, as well as theaters and easily 2 dozen restaurants. Expand my range to what I can reach for the minimum Uber fare or a bike share, and I have easy access to all of the downtown area.
It's a personal decision, but it is not nearly as bleak a life as you paint it.
HR might also be pissed at both supervisor and candidate that the wife's terminal cancer diagnosis has obviously not been mentionned at all during the interview process - as a candidate in that position, I would be tempted to keep quiet about it unless the cancer was so advanced that my wife had only a couple of months to live, in which case I pretty much have to 'fess up to it at an interview - "look, my wife has terminal stomach cancer, and has at most a few months. During that time, I am her out-of-hours carer so if OOH work is required, I would need to tackle that from home".
From the HR perspective, if that vital information was not forthcoming during interview, what else is there to come out, and is this candidate suddenly a bad risk? At the very least, will the candidate need extensive bereavement leave that was not anticipated during the hiring, or will this go on for an extended period because the wife hangs on for years rather than weeks/months (not likely with stomach cancer, but that is not an evaluation HR can make). It should still be handled professionally and with compassion, rather than by going postal on the guy, but the interview and candidate evaluation process is the stage where all such issues need to be raised.
My experience as an interviewer is that I don't want to know any of those details. I don't know the exact laws that apply in this case, but in the US it would be job discrimination to refuse to hire a woman who is pregnant because of the pregnancy and upcoming maternity leave. I assume it would also be discriminatory to refuse to hire because of his wife's condition. So don't ask, don't tell. If I don't know about the issue, and decide not to hire you, then you can't claim that I discriminated on that basis.
Autotuned voices, corporate-created-idols (usually some pretty teenaged kid with a previous 'career' as a Disney 'talent employee'), new stars with a pre-baked 'image' (naturally built/provided by the studio), lyrics that are focus-group-tested and written by someone else, a catchy tune usually ripped-off from some unknown who got paid a pittance for it...
Most *music* these days is fucking garbage. Okay, some of that may be the 'get off my lawn' syndrome on my part, but honestly, in the past the musician and/or band usually had to come up with everything themselves: lyrics, chords, composition, image, vision, etc. Even as late as the 1990s or so, there were still artists who did it themselves, and the quality tended to show through more readily. Yes there were pre-baked 'stars' in the past as well, but their appeal tended to die off pretty quickly, or their star faded long before their second album... much like, well, today. It's just that the signal-to-noise ratio went to hell of late.
Appreciation of music is inherently subjective, so I won't argue with whatever makes something garbage to you, but some of the elements you list just don't matter to me. I don't care if the performer wrote the song or not, or if a producer packaged them to be more appealing to an audience. If I like the song I like the song, and I don't have to be a purist about it.
Do you feel the same way about a car or a computer? Would Photoshop have more value to you if it was produced by a single person? Does a car have more authenticity if the body and the engine come from the same team?
That's why there used to be a saying, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM". The clear implication was that you could well be fired for buying from some other vendor. IBM was unique, both because it swung enough weight to rescue anyone who got into trouble for choosing its products and services, and because it was always best chums with the CEO and his inner circle.
I think the "No one every got fired for buying IBM" saying was more about going with the herd. It wasn't that IBM was foolproof or could rescue you in ways that other people couldn't, it was that IBM was widely accepted as a very solid choice, and if you were wrong to go with IBM then so were millions of others.
I'm too lazy to look for the cite, but I have read in the past that in the short term virtually any change you make is good and results in a productivity improvement. Then the novelty wears off and you go back to the old baseline. So people may be motivated to work harder or try to get more done in a 30 hour week initially, but that effect tends to wear off once it becomes the new normal.
Rather than traditional auto insurance, the better model may be medical malpractice insurance.
Medical care has inherent risks, and when a patient dies or has serious complications, the question becomes whether those were the result of errors made during the treatment process or essentially bad luck. If the doctor should have done better, then you are talking malpractice. If the patient had a drug allergy that could not reasonably have been detected in advance, that is bad luck.
Self driving cars may be in the same boat. If a car's systems behaved correctly and an accident still results, even if you can imagine a better system that would not have that limitation, there may be no product liability, and you would purchase insurance to cover damage the vehicle, properties, and people.
This is where certain Slashdotters would accuse me of being a "shill", if I were defending an Apple policy; so, pray tell, why wouldn't the term apply to you and your response?
If I were to be pedantic, I would say that a shill is someone who is paid by the entity being promoted, or at a minimum has a self interest at stake in the promotion. I get nothing from Microsoft (you will have to take my word on that I guess), so at worst I am being guilty of being a fanboi.
But I would also say that my statement was correct, and truth is an affirmative defense. Microsoft backdates their drivers. They don't ask anyone else to do so, and the fact that copying a Windows install doesn't work isn't solely (or even mostly) due to driver dating, so I don't consider driver backdating to be something that inconveniences users. That goes to my assertion that this at most inconveniences Microsoft's own developers.
Why don't they simply add another record ("source") to help make the driver comparison? A typical Microsoft solution I would say.
So how do you compare sources? If I have a nVidia reference driver, a custom driver from the hardware OEM, and a Microsoft driver, how do I rank those? Or is source simply MS vs non-MS?
Don't forget that whatever change to driver ranking MS makes also has to have provision with the thousands of already existing drivers that won't get updated to include a new field.
Hold on. Let's say that a virus modifies the older driver which, of course, now bumps the timestamp to the day of the infection. This would move the older - now infected - driver up in the priority? Wow. That explains so much.
As Raymond Chen would say, "That rather involved being on the other side of the airtight hatchway". If you can modify the driver, who cares about the timestamp, just modify the actual driver being used and be done with it.
Microsoft Developers have got to be the laziest on the planet. EVERYTHING that MS does is done for the ease of their Developers, regardless of what hoops or inconvenience it causes the User.
Given that in the this case the kludge only affects Microsoft developers, it forces other developers and users to go through exactly zero hoops.
Microsoft backdates their drivers so that they don't win timestamps and will only win on version compares. I think changing the order of the timestamp and version compares would be a simple solution, but I can imagine that they considered that and had some reason why that led to undesirable results. So they have a solution where they backdate their drivers and nobody else has to.
Laws barring property rental are per se illegal, as the constitution does not give the government, at any level, the explicit right to dictate what one does (or does not do) with their own property. This goes for zoning as well.
If you take an originalist, states right centric view of the constitution, the constitution defines limits on what the federal government can do, but does not in any way restrict the rights of the states to pass whatever laws they wish.
In the modern view of constitutional supremacy, where states are not allowed to limit rights granted by the constitution and the states are generally subordinate to the feds, there is nothing to prevent either the states or the feds from limiting rental rights.
So in both of the major schools of thought regarding the constitution, this is perfectly legitimate.
(Do you realize that only once since 1988 has a Republican candidate actually won the popular vote? That's 6 of the last 7 elections. Talk about evidence of a screwed up election system...)
Given that in most of the elections in that period a democrat won, that hardly seems shocking. And since the electoral/popular split has only happened 5 times in US history, it is not a common occurrence, even if it has happened twice in the last sixteen years.
This is why big oil has been sitting on the technology to turn water into gasoline for years, and why I keep seeing ads about the miracle products that the power company doesn't want me to know about.
A company that had a cure for HIV would market it, for some combination of the following reasons:
1. Even if temporary, it would represent a massive slug of business, extending over multiple years. Given the short term focus of most US based businesses, that it hard to pass up.
2. The secret is too hard to keep. If your researchers have created something that is likely to lead to the Nobel prize, and the company decides to sit on it, it becomes a huge scandal waiting to be uncovered.
3. The situation is unstable. The first company to market a cure puts the recurring revenue of everybody with ongoing treatment at risk. It is like the prisoners dilemma. You maximize your profits by being first to market with the cure.
A cure for Hepatitis C has recently come to market. It is phenomenally expensive, but it is a genuine cure. That is an anecdote, but at least one instance of a cure being developed.
So the threat of death is enough for you to argue the status quo standing behind proprietors and denying the user full control of a device they obtained (in Sandler's case wear inside their body) but not enough for you to let the user control. We still don't think that's the case for more common devices that are involved in lot of harm such as cars. In light of what's actually already happened to Sandler, your response is remarkably sycophantic to power.
I think you are mixing arguments. I was making the utilitarian case that the remedy proposed (software freedom) was unlikely to be an effective remedy in this case. I said nothing pro or con about software freedom.
If you want to argue conceptually for software freedom, then Karen Sandler's case is nothing but an anecdote, and we can rehash the usual pro/anti FSF and GPL arguments all day long. Personally I don't view proprietary software as evil or even morally suspect, and I am fairly sure you disagree with that view.
I don't see anything in your post that makes me believe that if Karen Sandler had access to the code she could make improvements to the device for her particular situation.
First, as another poster has noted, modern implantable devices are extensively configurable, and yet most of them go in with the default settings, because the cardiologist/surgeon don't know enough about each device to tweak the settings. So it is quite conceivable that it could be already be configured to deal properly with a pregnant woman's racing heartbeat.
Second, all of these devices walk a hazard/benefit tightrope. You are dealing with devices that can kill the patient if they fail. The patient might die due to the ordinary surgical complication risk that is always present. The device might function but not actually help them because of their particular physiology. So the validation of the device talks a lot about risk and reward, and the testing will focus on the population most likely to benefit. It is likely that pregnant women form a miniscule market for this device, so they may be considered an off label use - something that was not studied and about which nothing is known.
Think of pharmaceutical ads, and how often you hear the phrase "women who are pregnant or thinking of becoming pregnant should consult their doctor". That tells you right there that either pregnant women weren't studied, or that they have additional risk factors because of the pregnancy.
To think that access to the sourcecode by an interested layperson could make the software meaningfully better is a stretch. Perhaps getting access to the programming manual for the device would help, but that doesn't require access to the source code.
At least in USD, gold prices have declined about $200/oz since July.
It's the new business model: as long as you can keep investment capitol coming in, you expand like wildfire in the hope that what you do eventually becomes profitable.
As a way to build a new market, subsidized pricing works and may well be justified. When Amazon started, the notion of shopping for books on your computer was strange. For the most part people were used to browsing through their neighborhood bookstore, and it was not at all apparent that an online only store was viable. But by undercutting brick and mortar stores, they got people to try their services, which let them expand and continue to build their infrastructure.
I haven't been paying much attention lately, but I don't think Amazon emphasizes the lowest prices anymore. Now they are all about convenience and selection, meaning that they don't have to subsidize the products they sell.
Similarly, prior to Uber and Lyft, ride hailing on your phone wasn't a thing for most people. At least in my case, it was easy to try, and cheap enough that I gave it a shot. Now my perception of the value it provides has gone up, to the point where I might grumble about a price hike but would probably keep riding.
But had the prices been higher when I initially tried it, it would have been more likely to prevent me from trying it in the first place.
...because it allows the various cranks and racists to borrow the goodwill of these sites to create a veneer of respectability around what are ultimately noxious and vile views.
I just don't see anyone going "Oh, look, its on Twitter, so it must be true".
Social platforms allow like-minded people to connect. It doesn't have any additional power of persuasion that you are attributing to it.
But since most people tend to self select news sources that they agree with, it is very easy to get pulled into a more and more monolithic world view. Someone who is politically conservative might genuinely approach the issue of climate change with an open mind, but if they start with articles about climate change they find on right wing websites I can pretty much guarantee that they will see an echo chamber of sites and articles that all tell them it is a vast hoax and nobody really believes in it. So they think they are doing their own research, but all the results they see come from people telling one side of the story.