If you're an honest business, you will see many regulations as an absolute hassle and cost. For every Enron there's a hundred relatively honest book-keepers who think the SOX laws as an unnecessary giant pain in the ass. Unfortunately they're needed to keep the market as a whole to function well, just like you need everything from health inspections for restaurants to safety inspections for construction workers. We know many would care anyway, but we also know some don't.
Any Canadian Company that has a subsidiary in the USA has to implement SOX. I did that for a company that I worked for, back in 2008. SOX in the end was a good set of rules to follow. It made us more responsable to the shareholders.
This is commonly the result of the government promising something free. The taxes get collected, no doubt, but the promised freebie never quite pans out.
Keep that in mind when voting.
Nothing from governments work unless the work is audited, and there are scheduled payments based on signed off delivery demonstrations.
And when the contract is for profit, where the profit is in the installation, but not in the maintenance, you are in the situation indicated above.
I am a socialist and a European. I was very surprised to hear that Trump was/is against the TPP. When I heard that, I started following him a bit. I also started paying attention to the campaign. In the end, while I have always been a lefty, I realized I can't stand Hillary, whereas I find some points in Trump which I agree with. Hillary looks like someone who'd sell her own mother for money and power, and would throw anyone under the bus.
Strictly from the POV of TPP, if either Trump or Bernie become presidents, the deal will be dead in the water.
The deal, particularly around the subject of copyrights, and entertainment leaves all countries but Disneyland, Bollywood, and Hollywood vulnerable. The TPP is a gift to content providers, who, from this deal, will grow stronger and will monopolize the internet, communications and entertainment. Canada has signed to the TPP, but with tremendous opposition from Canadian citizens, particularly around .
Hopefully, instead of Free Trade, it becomes Fair Trade. Currently Canada's patent and copyright laws will be overridden by the rules within the TPP contract.
And the small movie/entertainment producer won't have a financial chance to compete in his domestic market.
Programmers look at logic and and analyse / scrutinize their code for errors. We tend to also use editors of software to perform auto - indentation (readability issues).
Since we are proof reading, it's something that we do by habit. We are conditioned. When we scan code, we scan text messages to insure that they are gramatically perfect. That obligation spills over to non-programming i.e newspaper, internet blogs, and whatever.
We can't help ourselves. Sigh, I feel badly about my peers and myself being jerks. We jerks must hang together, that's all I can say about work related injuries.
The ideal is convincing Nvidia that software patents will not be an issue if they open up the code. We may have to wait for the ex-SGI guys in that place to retire because they were burnt before. The absolute ideal way for that to happen is if those stupid software patents that are normally just a description of a problem instead of a solution to be completely discarded.
There was an article on ARS T, that Intel is considering to replace NVIDIA for 2017 with AMD. It makes sense for me. Intel needs a less powerful second source and they also need to insure AMD is kept as 2nd source. They also like the AMD graphics hardware.
Get busted for smoking Marijuana and suddenly you are a master criminal. You have to be punished by not being allowed a cellphone or access to a telephone at a cent per minute rate or even free. Need to talk to your child and it will cost you $0.22 per minute. That is a real miscarriage of justice, as is "for profit prisons". That telephone is a major profit centre.
It seems to claim 'orange juice' is very high in sugar, but then implies it means orange juice with added sugar, not pure OJ.
Pure orange juice has about 8.5% of sugar and about 2% of other carbohydrates. That could be called 'very high'
Did you ever research "Natural Flavors" when used with Juices? Your pure Orange juice is really not very pure. Natural flavours is one reason why I consume washed unprocessed "raw" fruits eg, Oranges
My children and I received anti-measles, anti-tuberculosis, anti-polio and a cocktail vaccine for these and other ailments. I had measles and will be taking the vaccine for anti-shingles. My brother-in-law lost the vision in one eye from shingles. Will I listen to that stupid man rant against vaccines?
AMD might have a bit of an upswing once their new Zen CPUs come out next year, but they'll need to have made some serious strides because they can't afford another Bulldozer.
My guess is that Intel is hedging and looking for a way to keep AMD around in order to avoid becoming a de facto monopoly in the x86 space, which they'd rather avoid. Give AMD enough cash to keep them upright while Intel continues to rake in big profits.
Intel needs a second source, in order to remain a government supplier or as a supplier for large orgs.
It's killing the branch offices but the central offices are still doing pretty well.
Banks makes money on lending money to people and collecting interest on that money. They actually don't want you to mortgage the loans you take but they accept it as it is also lowering the risk for them.
Personnel and offices - that's what costs banks money so therefore they want to centralize. Online banking is cheap for the banks. But a fast-changing economy is requiring system updates on a frequent basis and when the old classic systems are written in Cobol there are a massive number of things that can go wrong if the changes made aren't tested thoroughly. Cobol is a bit dated when it comes to coding strategies and even though there are object oriented variants they aren't easy to integrate into the minds of people that have been coding Cobol for the last 40 or more years. But coding Cobol is actually pretty well-paid since not many are good at Cobol today and it has even created a market for retired people to come back and code.
What the current banks shall fear is new upcoming banks that have thrown off the old Cobol yoke and started to look at modern languages with strong typing and strict bounds checks.
Re Cobol Systems and Cobol programmers. Old programmers know the bank systems intimately. They can make changes faster than someone writing object oriented code. OO creation of or creating new classes is fraught with hidden errors or side effects.
Branches are required for currency exchanges, loans, mortgages and cheque casing, letters of credit, helping small businesses and more. PAP eliminates handling the branch a dozen cheques to hold and deposit on the appropriate date. Not all transactions are PAP.
Seniors on fixed pensions visit branches on payment due dates or just after that date to make payments. This is done by them in order to avoid Insufficient funds fees/penalties if they were using PAP.
Meh, except in extreme cases, it's not public opinion that kills nuclear power in the general case (developers generally can find at least *some* site that will let them build). It's finances. Nuclear power has always had a lot more support on K-Street than Wall Street. If nuclear power is to have a future, they need to stop having new construction projects run behind schedule and over budget.
Yes to nuclear for aircraftcarriers and submarines.
Snowden leaks are HUGE steps to allow places like China and Russia to kill the light of freedom that is America
That "Shining City on the Hill" exists because we have always taken steps to protect our freedoms from countries that do not respect individual rights
The instant that they were given access to our methods, we all became less safe
It is time to stop acting like offended children and take responsibility for our safety, bending over and letting putin put-it-in (like Snowden has) is not the path to more freedom or security (they go hand in hand)
What freedoms do you have when the superpacs buy the congressmen and senators? The energy sector put aside over 860million dollars to help their congress wimp and senator wimp to win. Favourable laws for the super rich mean that you are no better off then the Chinese with their restrictions on freedoms.
No, that's the problem- it isn't. The number of people who want to wear a watch is incredibly small. You have a small number who have to due to job (nurses, for example)- but they don't need a smartwatch, they just need a hands free second hand. You have a small set who wear it as a fashion statement, but they want metals and gems and fancy that will last a long time, not an electronic screen that will last 2 years.
The number of people who actually want a smartwatch is ridiculously small- single digit percents of the population, possibly less. Everyone else is ok taking their phone out of their pocket.
Most people in a business environment wear a watch. The watch saves having to pull out your smart phone to see the time. It is also a tool to let you glance at your wrist to let you know when to move on (end a meeting, etc.) And more than that, it is a quick glance to confirm today's date.
My simple thin Seiko watch comes with a 7 year lifespan battery. My watch weighs a few grams (under an ounce). It has hands, and day of week-date dial. It is rugged, rain resistant, and for my needs, most functional.
My cellphone screen is hardly visible in bright sunlight. Yes, I will keep wearing a watch.
Some of my 20 questions Is there such a thing as too much profit? How much net profit is enough profit? 10%, 20%, 40%? Does a corporation that makes it's money from society have an obligation sustain the existing workers who are responsible for that profit? Does the excess profit go to the shareholders or as bonuses to the senior staff (president, directors, and other skimmers)? Do not issue bonuses If employees are replaced. There should be no bonuses at all. The extra savings belongs to the shareholders.
By your logic, we'd be at 75% unemployment (figure pulled out of my ass, admittedly, but just making a point here...) right now with all the technological advances since the 1970s. What do you think happened to our economy to achieve our current 5% unemployment rate? Are all those file clerks and bookkeepers still out of work or did they find something else to do?
People made the same arguments you're making for every technological leap forward. The net result has always been people thrown out of low wage, miserable jobs have found higher wage, less miserable jobs, given enough time.
It's called Structural Unemployment. It is a problem for workers who are too old to retrain - think people in their upper 50's trying to sprint to retirement - but for the vast majority of the workforce, it's a net benefit in the long run at the cost of a little short term pain.
The unemployment rate is based on people drawing unemployment insurance. When that runs out, they are no longer part of the statistics. I agree if a person has skills and can move onto something better, that this action (automation) is an incentive to do better. Just look at small towns where Walmart arrived. What happened there. Look at the infrastructure of these towns. Is the infrastructure being sustained?
This entire thread is based on a false idea that if people are thrown out of minimum wage jobs that they'll be unemployed forever.
This has been proven countless times since the 1700's to be absolutely false.
Once a technological innovation disrupts employment - the loom, the cotton gin, the computer, the combine planter/harvester, the robot - those who were displaced from employment find new jobs in higher paying sectors, at least in the aggregate. How many file clerks do you know? Know anybody picking corn, wheat, or soybeans by hand? Yet unemployment is around 5%.
The people slinging burgers will find new work. They'll have to. New employment opportunities will open up; they always have.
But these are the hamburger slingers that are being put out to the street by automation. Are you saying that its only one automation site and only those workers will be on the street.
What about your own job. When AI automates it out of existence, do you have skills to adapt, or will you look to maintaining the automation, the hamburger flipping machines.
The bottom line is "Businesses are for profit and for society", A business that produces reasonable profit (define reasonable), owes society and their employees some kind of security. When society puts them out to the street, you also put out customers. Yes, profits today, but no customers tomorrow.
I wonder, have they discovered in gnome 3.x that real people need to open real applications on the same screen?
Or on multiple screens, for that matter. Or run the desktop environment in a window on a bigger screen (e.g. a VM).
Relying on pointing devices not going past the edge of the screen takes a certain kind of talent.
You could always press the Super key as an alternative to the hot corner. Or you could install one of the many extensions https://extensions.gnome.org/ that gives you an alternative way to launch applications. Neither of these things would take as much time out of your day as your slightly odd/. post.
Why should the lack of corners on your virtual machine prevent me from having access to useful features?
why be shocked. An old Bourne Supremacy movie showed David slipping a "burn" phone to a newspaper reporter. He and the reporter communicated "off the network"
Throw-away (limited use prepaid) phones are hard to track.
Humans suck at driving. The problem is that 99.999% of the time, you can be borderline incompetent at driving and you'll still get there safely, because things only go wrong on rare occasions. Most of the time, at city street speeds, you could glance at the road for two seconds out of every ten, and you wouldn't crash, because there just isn't much happening. There are situations, however, in which humans are physically incapable of being good drivers. For example:
Fatigue/falling asleep at the wheel (computers don't get tired)
Distractions (both driver-initiated and external, e.g. rubbernecking at a wreck site; computers don't get distracted)
Sudden, unexpected traffic stops in front of you (human reaction time is a large fraction of a second, versus microseconds)
Backing out of a parking place into traffic (limited human vision versus ability to simultaneously monitor cameras pointed in every direction)
Intoxication
Cardiac arrest/seizure/narcolepsy/other medical issues or events
And in some cases, each of those situations can result in a crash with a human driver, depending mostly on luck. Computers, by contrast, won't exhibit any of those physical failings, and thus won't crash in any of those situations, typically.
So the key question is whether they will crash more often in other situations where a human wouldn't (e.g. when nothing is going wrong). As long as that answer is no, then they will likely be safer than human drivers.
Regardless, automation can kinda sorta mostly run trains and other vehicles on fixed guideways in a pristine environment most of the time without failing. That's about the state of things and it's not changing all that fast despite the constant droning from the "futurists" who have been wrong about absolutely everything ever.
That's just not true at all. Google's self-driving cars have clocked over a million miles on the roads, with basically no at-fault crashes. That's a far cry from barely being able to work in a pristine environment on a fixed guideway. It has some ability to recognize pedestrian behavior, avoid obstacles in the road, handle traffic lights (as long as it knows to look for them at a particular intersection), etc. It does require a lot of pre-mapping of the terrain so that it knows where to watch for traffic lights, roughly where lanes are, etc., but still, they've gone way beyond a subway system on a fixed track as you imply.
In Quebec Canada, when we have a winter storm, the sensors will get covered with ice. After some driving, the road salt dissolves and replaces the ice. The sensor lenses will be completely layered with roadsalt. And of course, we have a more slippery road surface. Slippery from ice/snow, but after that is dissolved, slippery from the road salt that has become a powdered layer.
Humans will be needed, particularly if following a taxi driver. No, automation will require more human interventions.
I think they want to have the seats voted for like all the other positions. I'd be a colder day in hell before any sitting justice would allow that. I also think it is stupid as hell. Them not having to run for office and get to their positions by more merit than the elected officials, removes a lot of the pissing match in their branch that others have. Keep it that way.
The people elect representatives that would hopefully know better than them, so that the people can handle their own lives, and the elected people can focus on doing their end. Those elected people in turn elect justices, so we do get a say, just a derivative vote. If the person really wants to have a say in the matter, then they better as hell start sending letters and phone calls to their representative. If that person doesn't listen, then don't vote for them next time. If that person still stays in office, well your voice and those with your opinion aren't as important as the voices of others.
When you have to run for office as a judge, your priority is to insure re-election. That requirement to be re-elected takes away impartiality. Proof of this is with judges who were measured on their number of convictions or were handing out maximum penalties. Why max penalties? The "for profit" prison corporations (owners) wanted as many inmates as possible. In turn they helped finance the judge's relection if this judge was leaning to assigning max penalties.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're an honest business, you will see many regulations as an absolute hassle and cost. For every Enron there's a hundred relatively honest book-keepers who think the SOX laws as an unnecessary giant pain in the ass. Unfortunately they're needed to keep the market as a whole to function well, just like you need everything from health inspections for restaurants to safety inspections for construction workers. We know many would care anyway, but we also know some don't.
Any Canadian Company that has a subsidiary in the USA has to implement SOX. I did that for a company that I worked for, back in 2008. SOX in the end was a good set of rules to follow. It made us more responsable to the shareholders.
This is commonly the result of the government promising something free.
The taxes get collected, no doubt, but the promised freebie never quite pans out.
Keep that in mind when voting.
Nothing from governments work unless the work is audited, and there are scheduled payments based on signed off delivery demonstrations.
And when the contract is for profit, where the profit is in the installation, but not in the maintenance, you are in the situation indicated above.
I am a socialist and a European. I was very surprised to hear that Trump was/is against the TPP. When I heard that, I started following him a bit. I also started paying attention to the campaign. In the end, while I have always been a lefty, I realized I can't stand Hillary, whereas I find some points in Trump which I agree with. Hillary looks like someone who'd sell her own mother for money and power, and would throw anyone under the bus.
Strictly from the POV of TPP, if either Trump or Bernie become presidents, the deal will be dead in the water.
The deal, particularly around the subject of copyrights, and entertainment leaves all countries but Disneyland, Bollywood, and Hollywood vulnerable.
The TPP is a gift to content providers, who, from this deal, will grow stronger and will monopolize the internet, communications and entertainment. Canada has signed to the TPP, but with tremendous opposition from Canadian citizens, particularly around .
Hopefully, instead of Free Trade, it becomes Fair Trade. Currently Canada's patent and copyright laws will be overridden by the rules within the TPP contract.
And the small movie/entertainment producer won't have a financial chance to compete in his domestic market.
AdBlock plus shows you the acceptable ads by default, but it has an option to block them anyway.
I use privacy badger (GNU provided and in my view, better than adBlock).
Programmers look at logic and and analyse / scrutinize their code for errors. We tend to also use editors of software to perform auto - indentation (readability issues).
Since we are proof reading, it's something that we do by habit. We are conditioned. When we scan code, we scan text messages to insure that they are gramatically perfect. That obligation spills over to non-programming i.e newspaper, internet blogs, and whatever.
We can't help ourselves. Sigh, I feel badly about my peers and myself being jerks. We jerks must hang together, that's all I can say about work related injuries.
The ideal is convincing Nvidia that software patents will not be an issue if they open up the code. We may have to wait for the ex-SGI guys in that place to retire because they were burnt before. The absolute ideal way for that to happen is if those stupid software patents that are normally just a description of a problem instead of a solution to be completely discarded.
There was an article on ARS T, that Intel is considering to replace NVIDIA for 2017 with AMD. It makes sense for me. Intel needs a less powerful second source and they also need to insure AMD is kept as 2nd source. They also like the AMD graphics hardware.
As we say, "We shall see!"
Get busted for smoking Marijuana and suddenly you are a master criminal. You have to be punished by not being allowed a cellphone or access to a telephone at a cent per minute rate or even free. Need to talk to your child and it will cost you $0.22 per minute.
That is a real miscarriage of justice, as is "for profit prisons". That telephone is a major profit centre.
It seems to claim 'orange juice' is very high in sugar, but then implies it means orange juice with added sugar, not pure OJ.
Pure orange juice has about 8.5% of sugar and about 2% of other carbohydrates. That could be called 'very high'
Did you ever research "Natural Flavors" when used with Juices? Your pure Orange juice is really not very pure. Natural flavours is one reason why I consume washed unprocessed "raw" fruits eg, Oranges
My children and I received anti-measles, anti-tuberculosis, anti-polio and a cocktail vaccine for these and other ailments. I had measles and will be taking the vaccine for anti-shingles. My brother-in-law lost the vision in one eye from shingles. Will I listen to that stupid man rant against vaccines?
Even if you're correct: Does it matter? Does any of this change the fact that, in the end, he did the right thing?
Who is the "he" being referred to?
AMD might have a bit of an upswing once their new Zen CPUs come out next year, but they'll need to have made some serious strides because they can't afford another Bulldozer.
My guess is that Intel is hedging and looking for a way to keep AMD around in order to avoid becoming a de facto monopoly in the x86 space, which they'd rather avoid. Give AMD enough cash to keep them upright while Intel continues to rake in big profits.
Intel needs a second source, in order to remain a government supplier or as a supplier for large orgs.
It's killing the branch offices but the central offices are still doing pretty well.
Banks makes money on lending money to people and collecting interest on that money. They actually don't want you to mortgage the loans you take but they accept it as it is also lowering the risk for them.
Personnel and offices - that's what costs banks money so therefore they want to centralize. Online banking is cheap for the banks. But a fast-changing economy is requiring system updates on a frequent basis and when the old classic systems are written in Cobol there are a massive number of things that can go wrong if the changes made aren't tested thoroughly. Cobol is a bit dated when it comes to coding strategies and even though there are object oriented variants they aren't easy to integrate into the minds of people that have been coding Cobol for the last 40 or more years. But coding Cobol is actually pretty well-paid since not many are good at Cobol today and it has even created a market for retired people to come back and code.
What the current banks shall fear is new upcoming banks that have thrown off the old Cobol yoke and started to look at modern languages with strong typing and strict bounds checks.
Re Cobol Systems and Cobol programmers. Old programmers know the bank systems intimately. They can make changes faster than someone writing object oriented code. OO creation of or creating new classes is fraught with hidden errors or side effects.
Branches are required for currency exchanges, loans, mortgages and cheque casing, letters of credit, helping small businesses and more. PAP eliminates handling the branch a dozen cheques to hold and deposit on the appropriate date. Not all transactions are PAP.
Seniors on fixed pensions visit branches on payment due dates or just after that date to make payments. This is done by them in order to avoid Insufficient funds fees/penalties if they were using PAP.
Yes, branches are still required.
One should be hashing each alphanumeric input field on an input form in order to prevent hacker activities.
Much less a problem in Quebec, Canada. Married name for spouse is surnameSpouse-SurnameHusband for most govt papers.
Meh, except in extreme cases, it's not public opinion that kills nuclear power in the general case (developers generally can find at least *some* site that will let them build). It's finances. Nuclear power has always had a lot more support on K-Street than Wall Street. If nuclear power is to have a future, they need to stop having new construction projects run behind schedule and over budget.
Yes to nuclear for aircraftcarriers and submarines.
Snowden leaks are HUGE steps to allow places like China and Russia to kill the light of freedom that is America
That "Shining City on the Hill" exists because we have always taken steps to protect our freedoms from countries that do not respect individual rights
The instant that they were given access to our methods, we all became less safe
It is time to stop acting like offended children and take responsibility for our safety, bending over and letting putin put-it-in (like Snowden has) is not the path to more freedom or security (they go hand in hand)
What freedoms do you have when the superpacs buy the congressmen and senators? The energy sector put aside over 860million dollars to help their congress wimp and senator wimp to win. Favourable laws for the super rich mean that you are no better off then the Chinese with their restrictions on freedoms.
No, that's the problem- it isn't. The number of people who want to wear a watch is incredibly small. You have a small number who have to due to job (nurses, for example)- but they don't need a smartwatch, they just need a hands free second hand. You have a small set who wear it as a fashion statement, but they want metals and gems and fancy that will last a long time, not an electronic screen that will last 2 years.
The number of people who actually want a smartwatch is ridiculously small- single digit percents of the population, possibly less. Everyone else is ok taking their phone out of their pocket.
Most people in a business environment wear a watch. The watch saves having to pull out your smart phone to see the time. It is also a tool to let you glance at your wrist to let you know when to move on (end a meeting, etc.) And more than that, it is a quick glance to confirm today's date.
My simple thin Seiko watch comes with a 7 year lifespan battery. My watch weighs a few grams (under an ounce). It has hands, and day of week-date dial. It is rugged, rain resistant, and for my needs, most functional.
My cellphone screen is hardly visible in bright sunlight. Yes, I will keep wearing a watch.
Some of my 20 questions
Is there such a thing as too much profit?
How much net profit is enough profit? 10%, 20%, 40%?
Does a corporation that makes it's money from society have an obligation sustain the existing workers who are responsible for that profit?
Does the excess profit go to the shareholders or as bonuses to the senior staff (president, directors, and other skimmers)?
Do not issue bonuses If employees are replaced. There should be no bonuses at all. The extra savings belongs to the shareholders.
And no other jobs come to fill their places?
By your logic, we'd be at 75% unemployment (figure pulled out of my ass, admittedly, but just making a point here...) right now with all the technological advances since the 1970s. What do you think happened to our economy to achieve our current 5% unemployment rate? Are all those file clerks and bookkeepers still out of work or did they find something else to do?
People made the same arguments you're making for every technological leap forward. The net result has always been people thrown out of low wage, miserable jobs have found higher wage, less miserable jobs, given enough time.
It's called Structural Unemployment. It is a problem for workers who are too old to retrain - think people in their upper 50's trying to sprint to retirement - but for the vast majority of the workforce, it's a net benefit in the long run at the cost of a little short term pain.
The unemployment rate is based on people drawing unemployment insurance. When that runs out, they are no longer part of the statistics. I agree if a person has skills and can move onto something better, that this action (automation) is an incentive to do better. Just look at small towns where Walmart arrived. What happened there. Look at the infrastructure of these towns. Is the infrastructure being sustained?
This entire thread is based on a false idea that if people are thrown out of minimum wage jobs that they'll be unemployed forever.
This has been proven countless times since the 1700's to be absolutely false.
Once a technological innovation disrupts employment - the loom, the cotton gin, the computer, the combine planter/harvester, the robot - those who were displaced from employment find new jobs in higher paying sectors, at least in the aggregate. How many file clerks do you know? Know anybody picking corn, wheat, or soybeans by hand? Yet unemployment is around 5%.
The people slinging burgers will find new work. They'll have to. New employment opportunities will open up; they always have.
But these are the hamburger slingers that are being put out to the street by automation. Are you saying that its only one automation site and only those workers will be on the street.
What about your own job. When AI automates it out of existence, do you have skills to adapt, or will you look to maintaining the automation, the hamburger flipping machines.
The bottom line is "Businesses are for profit and for society", A business that produces reasonable profit (define reasonable), owes society and their employees some kind of security. When society puts them out to the street, you also put out customers. Yes, profits today, but no customers tomorrow.
I wonder, have they discovered in gnome 3.x that real people need to open real applications on the same screen?
Or on multiple screens, for that matter.
Or run the desktop environment in a window on a bigger screen (e.g. a VM).
Relying on pointing devices not going past the edge of the screen takes a certain kind of talent.
You could always press the Super key as an alternative to the hot corner. Or you could install one of the many extensions https://extensions.gnome.org/ that gives you an alternative way to launch applications. Neither of these things would take as much time out of your day as your slightly odd /. post.
Why should the lack of corners on your virtual machine prevent me from having access to useful features?
One of the best extensions is taskBar
I'm shocked, shocked I say!
why be shocked. An old Bourne Supremacy movie showed David slipping a "burn" phone to a newspaper reporter. He and the reporter communicated "off the network"
Throw-away (limited use prepaid) phones are hard to track.
Humans suck at driving. The problem is that 99.999% of the time, you can be borderline incompetent at driving and you'll still get there safely, because things only go wrong on rare occasions. Most of the time, at city street speeds, you could glance at the road for two seconds out of every ten, and you wouldn't crash, because there just isn't much happening. There are situations, however, in which humans are physically incapable of being good drivers. For example:
And in some cases, each of those situations can result in a crash with a human driver, depending mostly on luck. Computers, by contrast, won't exhibit any of those physical failings, and thus won't crash in any of those situations, typically.
So the key question is whether they will crash more often in other situations where a human wouldn't (e.g. when nothing is going wrong). As long as that answer is no, then they will likely be safer than human drivers.
That's just not true at all. Google's self-driving cars have clocked over a million miles on the roads, with basically no at-fault crashes. That's a far cry from barely being able to work in a pristine environment on a fixed guideway. It has some ability to recognize pedestrian behavior, avoid obstacles in the road, handle traffic lights (as long as it knows to look for them at a particular intersection), etc. It does require a lot of pre-mapping of the terrain so that it knows where to watch for traffic lights, roughly where lanes are, etc., but still, they've gone way beyond a subway system on a fixed track as you imply.
In Quebec Canada, when we have a winter storm, the sensors will get covered with ice. After some driving, the road salt dissolves and replaces the ice. The sensor lenses will be completely layered with roadsalt. And of course, we have a more slippery road surface. Slippery from ice/snow, but after that is dissolved, slippery from the road salt that has become a powdered layer.
Humans will be needed, particularly if following a taxi driver. No, automation will require more human interventions.
Hope those machines buy his crappy food...
Nah, his machines will automate him out of business. By being disgruntled and screwing up on the recipes and the food temperatures.
And we are supposing that machines know how to smile and understand mis-pronounciations. Are we back to the Automat -- deposit your nickels here....
I think they want to have the seats voted for like all the other positions. I'd be a colder day in hell before any sitting justice would allow that. I also think it is stupid as hell. Them not having to run for office and get to their positions by more merit than the elected officials, removes a lot of the pissing match in their branch that others have. Keep it that way.
The people elect representatives that would hopefully know better than them, so that the people can handle their own lives, and the elected people can focus on doing their end. Those elected people in turn elect justices, so we do get a say, just a derivative vote. If the person really wants to have a say in the matter, then they better as hell start sending letters and phone calls to their representative. If that person doesn't listen, then don't vote for them next time. If that person still stays in office, well your voice and those with your opinion aren't as important as the voices of others.
When you have to run for office as a judge, your priority is to insure re-election. That requirement to be re-elected takes away impartiality. Proof of this is with judges who were measured on their number of convictions or were handing out maximum penalties. Why max penalties? The "for profit" prison corporations (owners) wanted as many inmates as possible. In turn they helped finance the judge's relection if this judge was leaning to assigning max penalties.