Good point. I think the state will have to take on the liability.
The future is not only self-driving cars, but roads composed of only light-weight self-driving cars. In such a system, where, in order to maximize efficiency, the safety offered by heavier vehicles has been compromised, it may make sense for a centralized agency to ultimately vouch for and maintain the vehicles on the road.
Furthermore, I see no reason why these vehicles can't be shared, like taxis. That eliminates the need to park, which eliminates parking lots. It eliminates public fueling stations, it eliminates the complexities of home charging (especially for urbanites). The vehicles are simply rented for a time, and returned to the herd. In dense urban areas, they can be sitting outside, waiting a hail. In suburban areas, maybe a text from your cell phone will bring one to your location in minutes. In very rural areas, perhaps people will be licensed to buy and keep their own vehicles.
Make no mistake, once the public is more aware of this technology people will demand it. Like cell phones and the Internet, I (and many automotive insiders) expect it to take over in a relatively short amount of time. Liability is perhaps the last major hurdle, and I see no other solution than this sort of transportation being taken over by the state, as has been other shared, ground transit.
The incentives are obvious--provide them more entry-level engineers. Did you miss that?
And what's manufacturing competitiveness got to do with it? The US is the world's largest manufacturer, and what we don't make here we can design and make overseas. The two have nothing to do with one another. The economy is global, as you well know.
Libertarianism seems to be married to a distrust of authority, including academic or otherwise intellectual authority whose power isn't based on some sort of commercially-viable aesthetic appeal (for example, libertarians will acknowledge the authority of bestsellers widely read in their circles, or directors, video game designers, programmers, or musicians).
You have no right to tell them what is right or wrong to delete.
I'm never good at this--is it irony when someone thinks they have a right to tell people they don't have a right to tell other people to do or not do stuff, or when someone makes it their business to tell someone else, whom presumably they don't know, that something else is none of their business?
I'll add that muskets were also very expensive, but that might not be a downside. Given many British soldiers didn't actually own their weapons, by training on guns they had to return and couldn't afford to buy for themselves they became incapable of rebellion. At the same time, training on longbows, which had been required previously of many men in England, was outlawed.
Presumably this is specifically what the Second Amendment is about--militiamen must be able to own their weapon, and militias are the more democratic form of army. Of course, the point became moot once Federal armies were drawn up and we routinely had soldiers practice with weapons they couldn't afford and, nowadays, can't legally own. What good do your tank, fighter jet, mortar, grenade skills do you when you're not in uniform? You'll never have access to those weapons to use against the government. Therefore, the government doesn't have to worry about you using those skills against it.
That might be the point of the phaser. In the "peaceful" world of Star Trek, phasers have replaced guns specifically because they're more technologically advanced, expensive, and less lethal.
The "sophisticated means" used to cover their tracks cover their IP addresses, not their group affiliation. No one wants to be personally indicted for this.
Then the problem isn't Facebook; it's the FBI, it's your employers, it's your neighbors.
I'm not going to hide my associations with people because I'm terrified the FBI will use them against me, or because my employer might fire me if the FBI calls them, or because my neighbors will hassle me if the Feds deign to visit them.
Previously, I had to buy two sodas, and then hand one of the sodas to friend.
With the magic of social networking and Pepsi, now I only have two buy two sodas, enter a phone number, enter a greeting, record a video, and send a free soda code to a friend's mobile device, which they can use to access the same machine and retrieve a free soda.
I'm not arguing this gives Apple any legal ground at all (it's not a case I'd like them to win), but I think their role in changing our use of the word "app" to mean "smartphone program," and increasingly only "smartphone program," shouldn't be ignored.
The case is a bit different than your example, because they branded a subset of the application market (perhaps the original "app") as "app," a subset that previously hadn't been very profitable or popular. For example, if I decided to sell an emerging, but not original coffee product as "java," (bad example, I know) and called my marketplace "The Java Store," if another company, seeing my success, decided to create its own "Java Store" that sold the special kind of coffee product I had been selling, it would be painfully obvious they were trying to ride my coattails because I, through painstakingly precious and irritating marketing, built the associations between "Java" and some silly little coffee product, instead of coffee at large. The fact that some competitors may have tried to use "Java" to describe their somewhat different coffee products (i.e., Google and "Google Apps") but failed to brand that connection in our collective lexicons, to some extent demonstrates that my marketing was special (because it turns out Apple is "cooler" than Google) and I deserve credit for that.
But again, I don't think that should have a legal basis, but I think we all do know that Apple has changed how we can use the word "app," at least for the time being. If you tell your boss "I'm thinking of developing an app for brewing coffee" s/he is going to think "new $0.99 (I have no idea how much they cost) smart phone program," not "big Windows application." At least that's my hunch. Especially for the kind of people who will make most use of this new "app store."
But would you call WordPerfect an "app" today? Would you refer to Word as an "app" in an official document? I'm sure smartphone developers refer to their products as "apps" in official documents.
Perhaps more than polysemy, the concept of semantic drift is relevant. I suspect Apple has been the driving force behind that semantic drift, with their incessant (and obnoxious, IMHO) "there's an app for that" ads.
That said, I'm not sure if this is legal ground, but I do think Apple deserves some credit for the semantic drift that has taken place, for better or worse. I choose worse.
Still, I don't believe products were marketed as "apps" before Apple.
Google searches ignore polysemy -- when I think "app," I don't think Photoshop or Microsoft Excel, I think "a program for a smartphone." If you do too, then that's because Apple cultivated that word usage via the App Store.
"App" can mean a job application, a computer program (although typically non-entertainment), a great computer program (including entertainment) when following "killer," or a smartphone program. They're slightly different meanings. But while few people regularly referred to Microsoft PowerPoint as an "app," nearly everyone calls all smartphone applications "apps." More and more, the word "app" is synonymous with smartphone programs, and fewer and fewer people will use it outside of that context. Including me, and I don't have a smartphone--I've just seen many advertisements Apple made and paid to run.
If you're talking about the ridiculous row limit, that went away in Excel 2007.
However, like many researchers I have used several versions of Excel to produce publishable graphs from summary data--means, SEMs, etc. I love R, but it was only recently that I decided to spend enough time learning the ins and outs of its graphing capabilities that I felt comfortable producing even a bar chart in R for publication. Since I had been producing my tables in Excel anyway--and I'm still not entirely in love with using Sweave or other LaTeX packages in R, so I still find myself going to Excel for producing summary tables--it's trivial to then tell Excel to plot away.
That said, this book would seem very cool had the review actually talked about what sort of graphing capabilities are described in the text. I'm personally curious about its lattice graphing packages, which R has good support for but for which I haven't seen any great instructional resources. Those are the sorts of graphs I imagine you are referring to, which are exploratory or diagnostic or just too sophisticated for Excel, and work over entire datasets using models you specify.
I think it's premature, though. Right now, we should be taxing gas more to encourage it's abandonment.
We should, but that's political suicide. Furthermore, once one Congress raises the tax on gas, the next Congress (which will inevitably be elected to replace that one after a wave of townhall meetings) will lower it.
To liken this to Paine--while he did not sign his name to the original Rights of Man, presumably he gave it to someone, and that transaction wasn't anonymous. His efforts to distribute it at first would certainly have linked his identity to the work among the publisher or publishers he used. The book was sold, and the sellers were obviously not anonymous.
You want _more_ privacy than Paine had. You want the right to publish a comment without _anyone_ knowing who wrote it. That's not really what newspaper forums are for (which I think is just to generate page hits). If you have something to say anonymously, and want a lot of people to read it, you're going to have to work with someone who can get it out there and will hide your identity. That's really the only safe way to ever be sure regardless.
This is what Wikileaks was _supposed_ to be for (hence the Wiki), but I think it strayed a bit from that objective in recent years.
I won't defend that - they were certainly overzealous and careless in their handling of that domain. However, it appeared to be accidental, and in three days the websites were restored. Presumably the website owners have some legal case for any lost revenue.
This happens off-line, as well. Police make mistakes, innocents are harmed. Police are sometimes punished, and the state ends up paying out if the victim can engage in litigation. It's unfortunate, and often the side-effect of having a police force that is often given far too much leeway by a public that is too often too anxious about security.
To make any comparison between this and governments like Egypt, however, is dishonest. In Egypt, the intent, quite plainly, was censorship of political thought and speech. The freedns investigation was censorship of images the majority of Westerners agree should be illegal to produce and distribute that overstepped its bounds via either simple administrative error or a (bad) policy of "better safe than sorry." It was corrected fairly quickly.
I also question the numbers - sure, 84,000 sounds like a lot, but computers can make 84,000 different versions of the same thing in milliseconds. I've had some freedns domains in the past that I haven't used in years; I wouldn't know if there was this sort of disruption. Ultimately it sounds like a few businesses were temporarily disrupted as a result of a large police action. That's always happened in the physical world - which is unfortunate - and the Internet is not immune.
I don't think you can easily get phones dumber than that - unless you're willing to pay more. The "free" ones my wife and I got from T-Mobile recently have all those features. Does anyone actually use the calendar features on their dumb phones?
The only times I find myself really wishing I had a smart phone are when I'm waiting for something, like take-out; but then I play 30 seconds of Pac-Man (which came as a free demo on my phone) to see how high a score I can get before it times out, and repeat as necessary - and I feel like a big enough jerk standing next to a take-out counter doing that, I can only imagine how conspicuous I'd feel playing an actual game or reading email on a smart phone.
Note to self - bring book when I anticipate waiting. Problem solved. $70/mo. saved.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point. I think the state will have to take on the liability.
The future is not only self-driving cars, but roads composed of only light-weight self-driving cars. In such a system, where, in order to maximize efficiency, the safety offered by heavier vehicles has been compromised, it may make sense for a centralized agency to ultimately vouch for and maintain the vehicles on the road.
Furthermore, I see no reason why these vehicles can't be shared, like taxis. That eliminates the need to park, which eliminates parking lots. It eliminates public fueling stations, it eliminates the complexities of home charging (especially for urbanites). The vehicles are simply rented for a time, and returned to the herd. In dense urban areas, they can be sitting outside, waiting a hail. In suburban areas, maybe a text from your cell phone will bring one to your location in minutes. In very rural areas, perhaps people will be licensed to buy and keep their own vehicles.
Make no mistake, once the public is more aware of this technology people will demand it. Like cell phones and the Internet, I (and many automotive insiders) expect it to take over in a relatively short amount of time. Liability is perhaps the last major hurdle, and I see no other solution than this sort of transportation being taken over by the state, as has been other shared, ground transit.
I'm curious, did you somehow post that comment without looking at a screen?
A lifetime sentence for what? Was any demonstrable harm done?
If the allegations are true he engaged in criminal activity, no doubt, but let's not lump him in with war criminals.
The incentives are obvious--provide them more entry-level engineers. Did you miss that?
And what's manufacturing competitiveness got to do with it? The US is the world's largest manufacturer, and what we don't make here we can design and make overseas. The two have nothing to do with one another. The economy is global, as you well know.
Yeah, I'm sure Obama independently arrived at this conclusion.
Libertarianism seems to be married to a distrust of authority, including academic or otherwise intellectual authority whose power isn't based on some sort of commercially-viable aesthetic appeal (for example, libertarians will acknowledge the authority of bestsellers widely read in their circles, or directors, video game designers, programmers, or musicians).
You have no right to tell them what is right or wrong to delete.
I'm never good at this--is it irony when someone thinks they have a right to tell people they don't have a right to tell other people to do or not do stuff, or when someone makes it their business to tell someone else, whom presumably they don't know, that something else is none of their business?
Because whining about suburbanites is a better solution to dwindling fossil fuels, air pollution, and accidents than transportation innovation?
Plus, if this works, we'll see platooning buses on cross-country trips. And virtually accident-free.
That's a good point.
I'll add that muskets were also very expensive, but that might not be a downside. Given many British soldiers didn't actually own their weapons, by training on guns they had to return and couldn't afford to buy for themselves they became incapable of rebellion. At the same time, training on longbows, which had been required previously of many men in England, was outlawed.
Presumably this is specifically what the Second Amendment is about--militiamen must be able to own their weapon, and militias are the more democratic form of army. Of course, the point became moot once Federal armies were drawn up and we routinely had soldiers practice with weapons they couldn't afford and, nowadays, can't legally own. What good do your tank, fighter jet, mortar, grenade skills do you when you're not in uniform? You'll never have access to those weapons to use against the government. Therefore, the government doesn't have to worry about you using those skills against it.
That might be the point of the phaser. In the "peaceful" world of Star Trek, phasers have replaced guns specifically because they're more technologically advanced, expensive, and less lethal.
The "sophisticated means" used to cover their tracks cover their IP addresses, not their group affiliation. No one wants to be personally indicted for this.
This sounds silly then. It's £15, but then you need to buy a keyboard, a mouse, and now an LCD television? Just buy a netbook and be done with it.
Then the problem isn't Facebook; it's the FBI, it's your employers, it's your neighbors.
I'm not going to hide my associations with people because I'm terrified the FBI will use them against me, or because my employer might fire me if the FBI calls them, or because my neighbors will hassle me if the Feds deign to visit them.
Why are you prepared to do that?
Have we learned NOTHING from Maximum Overdrive?
Previously, I had to buy two sodas, and then hand one of the sodas to friend.
With the magic of social networking and Pepsi, now I only have two buy two sodas, enter a phone number, enter a greeting, record a video, and send a free soda code to a friend's mobile device, which they can use to access the same machine and retrieve a free soda.
I'm not arguing this gives Apple any legal ground at all (it's not a case I'd like them to win), but I think their role in changing our use of the word "app" to mean "smartphone program," and increasingly only "smartphone program," shouldn't be ignored.
The case is a bit different than your example, because they branded a subset of the application market (perhaps the original "app") as "app," a subset that previously hadn't been very profitable or popular. For example, if I decided to sell an emerging, but not original coffee product as "java," (bad example, I know) and called my marketplace "The Java Store," if another company, seeing my success, decided to create its own "Java Store" that sold the special kind of coffee product I had been selling, it would be painfully obvious they were trying to ride my coattails because I, through painstakingly precious and irritating marketing, built the associations between "Java" and some silly little coffee product, instead of coffee at large. The fact that some competitors may have tried to use "Java" to describe their somewhat different coffee products (i.e., Google and "Google Apps") but failed to brand that connection in our collective lexicons, to some extent demonstrates that my marketing was special (because it turns out Apple is "cooler" than Google) and I deserve credit for that.
But again, I don't think that should have a legal basis, but I think we all do know that Apple has changed how we can use the word "app," at least for the time being. If you tell your boss "I'm thinking of developing an app for brewing coffee" s/he is going to think "new $0.99 (I have no idea how much they cost) smart phone program," not "big Windows application." At least that's my hunch. Especially for the kind of people who will make most use of this new "app store."
But would you call WordPerfect an "app" today? Would you refer to Word as an "app" in an official document? I'm sure smartphone developers refer to their products as "apps" in official documents.
Perhaps more than polysemy, the concept of semantic drift is relevant. I suspect Apple has been the driving force behind that semantic drift, with their incessant (and obnoxious, IMHO) "there's an app for that" ads.
That said, I'm not sure if this is legal ground, but I do think Apple deserves some credit for the semantic drift that has taken place, for better or worse. I choose worse.
Still, I don't believe products were marketed as "apps" before Apple.
Google searches ignore polysemy -- when I think "app," I don't think Photoshop or Microsoft Excel, I think "a program for a smartphone." If you do too, then that's because Apple cultivated that word usage via the App Store.
"App" can mean a job application, a computer program (although typically non-entertainment), a great computer program (including entertainment) when following "killer," or a smartphone program. They're slightly different meanings. But while few people regularly referred to Microsoft PowerPoint as an "app," nearly everyone calls all smartphone applications "apps." More and more, the word "app" is synonymous with smartphone programs, and fewer and fewer people will use it outside of that context. Including me, and I don't have a smartphone--I've just seen many advertisements Apple made and paid to run.
I guess that didn't create any American jobs.
If you're talking about the ridiculous row limit, that went away in Excel 2007.
However, like many researchers I have used several versions of Excel to produce publishable graphs from summary data--means, SEMs, etc. I love R, but it was only recently that I decided to spend enough time learning the ins and outs of its graphing capabilities that I felt comfortable producing even a bar chart in R for publication. Since I had been producing my tables in Excel anyway--and I'm still not entirely in love with using Sweave or other LaTeX packages in R, so I still find myself going to Excel for producing summary tables--it's trivial to then tell Excel to plot away.
That said, this book would seem very cool had the review actually talked about what sort of graphing capabilities are described in the text. I'm personally curious about its lattice graphing packages, which R has good support for but for which I haven't seen any great instructional resources. Those are the sorts of graphs I imagine you are referring to, which are exploratory or diagnostic or just too sophisticated for Excel, and work over entire datasets using models you specify.
Notice how there is no P in it.
We'd like to keep it that way.
Seriously, the P stands for "program." Just drop it.
Working overtime can kill you.
And what are these "doctor-supervised slimming regimens?" Gastric bypasses, which can kill you?
I think it's premature, though. Right now, we should be taxing gas more to encourage it's abandonment.
We should, but that's political suicide. Furthermore, once one Congress raises the tax on gas, the next Congress (which will inevitably be elected to replace that one after a wave of townhall meetings) will lower it.
You can still publish anonymously.
To liken this to Paine--while he did not sign his name to the original Rights of Man, presumably he gave it to someone, and that transaction wasn't anonymous. His efforts to distribute it at first would certainly have linked his identity to the work among the publisher or publishers he used. The book was sold, and the sellers were obviously not anonymous.
You want _more_ privacy than Paine had. You want the right to publish a comment without _anyone_ knowing who wrote it. That's not really what newspaper forums are for (which I think is just to generate page hits). If you have something to say anonymously, and want a lot of people to read it, you're going to have to work with someone who can get it out there and will hide your identity. That's really the only safe way to ever be sure regardless.
This is what Wikileaks was _supposed_ to be for (hence the Wiki), but I think it strayed a bit from that objective in recent years.
I won't defend that - they were certainly overzealous and careless in their handling of that domain. However, it appeared to be accidental, and in three days the websites were restored. Presumably the website owners have some legal case for any lost revenue.
This happens off-line, as well. Police make mistakes, innocents are harmed. Police are sometimes punished, and the state ends up paying out if the victim can engage in litigation. It's unfortunate, and often the side-effect of having a police force that is often given far too much leeway by a public that is too often too anxious about security.
To make any comparison between this and governments like Egypt, however, is dishonest. In Egypt, the intent, quite plainly, was censorship of political thought and speech. The freedns investigation was censorship of images the majority of Westerners agree should be illegal to produce and distribute that overstepped its bounds via either simple administrative error or a (bad) policy of "better safe than sorry." It was corrected fairly quickly.
I also question the numbers - sure, 84,000 sounds like a lot, but computers can make 84,000 different versions of the same thing in milliseconds. I've had some freedns domains in the past that I haven't used in years; I wouldn't know if there was this sort of disruption. Ultimately it sounds like a few businesses were temporarily disrupted as a result of a large police action. That's always happened in the physical world - which is unfortunate - and the Internet is not immune.
I don't think you can easily get phones dumber than that - unless you're willing to pay more. The "free" ones my wife and I got from T-Mobile recently have all those features. Does anyone actually use the calendar features on their dumb phones?
The only times I find myself really wishing I had a smart phone are when I'm waiting for something, like take-out; but then I play 30 seconds of Pac-Man (which came as a free demo on my phone) to see how high a score I can get before it times out, and repeat as necessary - and I feel like a big enough jerk standing next to a take-out counter doing that, I can only imagine how conspicuous I'd feel playing an actual game or reading email on a smart phone.
Note to self - bring book when I anticipate waiting. Problem solved. $70/mo. saved.