roc

> "Unlike the cleaning staff, who can "be shown the door if that's how they feel about it.""

Cleaning staff are (overwhelmingly) entitled to overtime pay, by law.

"doing it wrong" sums up how most people use most software.

I wonder to what degree navigation is a fundamentally different case.

A given driver on a given trip is well-shown to be more attentive to traffic and less disruptive if you deny them distractions. (conversation, radio, food, etc)

But it seems plausible that a lost driver is a special case and may be less attentive and more disruptive to traffic if you deny them a navigational aid.

Anecdotally that feels true, though I don't know if it's been studied specifically.

> "It's a worrying meme that you shouldn't even expect your internet-connectible devices to survive the internet, and when they break its your fault."

This has been the go-to techie reaction to security problems since the time of dial-up modems. It's a bad attitude [1], but it's not a "meme". It's the only successful strategy an entire generation of technologically-minded people have found and preached in response to a generation's-worth of terrible software security, slow/absent/can't-be-arsed software providers and under-educated users.

Should things be different? Sure. Attitudes should be better and the software should be better. But so long as the latter isn't reflected in reality, there isn't much hope for the former.

[1] It's a bad attitude because blaming the user puts them on the defensive and reduces the chance of any progress being made.

If the point is to attract users who haven't joined Google+ (likely because they don't want another Facebook-shaped social network), why in the world would they keep "Google+" in the name?

I'd be surprised if this were anything other than an Instagram and/or Snapchat clone, with a Google+ login, but with a stream and friends-list distinct from Google+.

You're absolutely right. I was wrong to carelessly specify fault in the journalist, rather than simply faulting the piece.

However: If I had correctly identified that the piece was shoddy, rather than the journalist, wouldn't materially impact the points in my post. That's a nit.

Including Marvel's existing mis-steps would materially impact the points of an article recounting Marvel's lack of mis-steps. That is not a nit.

How about noticing that the article tossed the tepid Ed Norton HULK film (Marvel film #2) down the memory hole altogether?

It does reference The Hulk in the context of the license to Universal. But Marvel regained the film rights in 2006 and Universal was just a distribution partner on Norton-Hulk. It was much more a Marvel Studios film than any sort of Universal-driven successor to Bana-Hulk.

Nor does it ever mention Agents of SHIELD by name. To omit the name after specifically discussing the TV appearance clauses is pretty poor form for a journalist, particularly one who dedicated so much ink to the "Universe" strategy.

But I guess facing Marvel's mis-steps just didn't fit a "Marvel is unstoppable" storyline.

> "self-driving cars will make the controversy over the EU's "right to be forgotten" law look like a polite discussion over a beer."

You misunderstand me. Of course self-driving cars will generate many and expensive legal fights. But those lawsuits will look much like any of our current lawsuits.

That the courts don't understand the technology will not stop jury trials from deciding liability, just as courts not understanding genetic evidence doesn't stop them from throwing people in jail for life based on misunderstandings.

That legislators don't understand the technology will not stop laws from being written any more than their not understanding criminal justice stops them from writing self-defeating "tough on crime" laws and "prison as punishment" regulations that only increase recidivism and multiply the social cost of crimes.

My point is that courts and legislators not having an understanding, let alone answers, is not a stumbling block to self-driving cars. It won't prevent self-driving cars from moving forward until and unless it's addressed.

They'll just blunder through it, making a mess, making mistakes, as they've done with everything else.

And which/how many of those would it take to justify a special trip to a special-purpose building to introduce people to it?

Their more-interesting projects would make a particularly-popular exhibition in an interactive museum. And that's about it.

e.g.

Why would someone want to spend more than 5 minutes on a 3D mapping phone? What would they do with 3D models, aside from playing Interior Decorator in their own living room or Hollywood Makeup Artist on their own face?

Those are neat ideas, don't get me wrong. But while more apps may eventually be found, it could hardly justify a specialized gadget for most people as-is. Particularly when traditional mobile device cameras are turning out inferior-but-quite-usable versions of those same apps.

Google Glass is similar. There's been a handful of really compelling use cases for HMDs for more than a decade. But the general public has never had more than about a 2-minute-demo-reel level of interest. And Google hasn't found/developed anything in Glass, yet, that changes things for people who already have a magical slab of glass in their pocket, everywhere they go.

(Google's actually dug a slightly deeper hole, in that people's 2-minutes-worth of interest in Glass was quickly dominated by how incredibly unsettling connected cameras can be, when they're potentially on anyone, anywhere. Including on the anti- and a-social, in places where people had traditionally let their guard down.)

> " The question is where that line will be in the myriad of situations that will be more complex due to the the introduction of automation."

It will be determined via litigation, as it is now. Technological complexity of subject matter has yet to present any serious roadblock, or cause any significant change, in the prosecution of the law.

Similarly, whether neglected maintenance (or third-party modifications/parts) contributed to a collision will be determined in court, just as it is now.

As a side note: given the service opportunities afforded by self-driving vehicles, I would be surprised if operators and insurers didn't subsidize or operate "while you sleep" maintenance service plans. e.g. Once a month or so, while you sleep, your car will drive itself to the shop to get checked out, ensure updates are received, recall services performed, etc.

Manufacturers would add a revenue stream and lower their legal costs/exposure and consumers would have yet-another-hassle of car ownership removed.

If that was the fundamental issue, ISPs would be talking about provider-agnostic throttling of usage to protect network stability and performance during periods of high utilization.

Which is something they already do.

What they're actually talking about, Re: Net Neutrality, is throttling a particular provider, regardless of the usage level of the network or the total traffic being streamed by that provider.

It certainly feels like it came from a company that would buy the Dre/Beats team.

That is: historically Apple has emphasized the emotional pitch to the things that you (can) do with their gear, and the expression of personality through that use.

This commercial is much more an emotional pitch to the gear in-and-of itself, and the expression of personality via (crass/commercial) personalization of the gear.

It's not wholly incompatible with the older Apple approach, but it's much more in-line with Beats' approach.

This also seems to walk directly into the old criticism that Apple is primarily an enabler of corporate consumption as opposed to creation.

It's unclear whether they're ignoring those old knocks with new confidence, or are simply unaware of how this looks (and more importantly: how the shift looks).

Surely they can distinguish between one-time IAPs and "consumable" IAPs.

Net Neutrality isn't about usage, it's about destinations.

Even with Net Neutrality it's fully within an ISPs right to say X GB/mo for $Y and throttle or block over-use. The problem is an ISP deciding that, regardless of what is going on in the network, regardless of what a particular user has used or is trying to use, traffic to Netflix will be slower than traffic to Vudu.

Verizon, Comcast, et al have plenty of available tools to prevent congestion without violating Net Neutrality.

They're intentionally trying to confuse the issue with usage, because it's an easier PR sell.

Waggle for gaming certainly seems "done" as a trend.

But Kinect, as technology, has huge potential in the robotics and connected home spaces.

Also, if they can cram it into Windows Phone, they could easily out-pace Google's Tango to consumer-facing apps and products that really differentiate their mobile devices.

If they're serious about 3d printing support, it would be incredibly powerful to have a device that can create a source model just from waving your phone around a thing to be replicated.

> "it's also one of the single biggest proofs that Wall Street analysts have no idea how to run a real business."

While it sounds like your friend definitely knows how to run a real business, he/you may want to re-asses Wall Street's real business: it isn't "running companies", it isn't "building value" and it sure isn't "giving away solid analysis for free".

They make money off trade-activity that generates short-term returns.

The sell trades, not stocks. Not unlike eBay. They can and do profit from irrational/emotional behavior and they have no qualms about designing their business to fuel and leverage those behaviors for increased returns.

If 2007 taught us anything, it should be that Wall Street is more than happy to tell you whatever you need to hear to generate predictable trades -- more than happy to tell business news channels whatever will generate predictable trades -- even those they know those trades to be bad and foolish to the extent that they personally bet against them.

Political tap-dancing has been parodied for generations and that still happens.

Heck, Cheney all but quoted Reagan's "I don't recall"-defense as a 20th anniversary tribute and that had been lampooned specifically.

I'm sure Nokia itself knew these layoffs were likely-to-inevitable whether that deal happened or not.

> "What is the end game?"

It appears to be: force the industry to move somewhere else.

Whether that's a good plan or not is moot. Decades of votes have underscored it repeatedly. That the situation is unsustainable seems to be the entire point.

I'm increasingly surprised people still insist on the region. I'd have thought more companies would have moved on by now.

> "i prefer universal essential services (healthcare, education, etc.) over a guaranteed basic income."

If we believe in the market's ability to efficiently find the path forward, identifying "essential services", even if it were possible, is wasteful at best and more likely counter-productive over time.

Twenty years ago we'd have locked in home phone service and missed internet. 10 years ago we might have locked in cell service, but missed mobile data. We'd have propped up "bad" products, at massive profits for the benefactors, for years beyond their relevance, instead of allowing the market to evaluate and react to changing conditions.

And while we might agree that it's logically possible for efficient and effective government to correct mistakes like those, the "money is speech" reality in the US gives such outsized power to lobbying interests that even an optimist has to rate effective "steering" of any definition of "essential services" as "unlikely".

Never mind the basic question of whether it's at all desirable to force a youth from an underprivileged family to "buy" government-guaranteed education, instead of allowing him to spend even a fraction of the equivalent on a laptop, smartphone and developer tools -- or a 3d printer and amazon hosting services. Or even allowing him to look outside the box of lobbiest-approved education providers, and allowing him to "spend" his assistance on developer conferences or workshops or online learning or just moving to another town that has a better local program.

Would some people inevitably spend a guaranteed income poorly? Of course they would. They also sell food stamps for cash -- at 50% of their face value -- to make their bad decisions regardless of what we might prefer.

It isn't worth the cost to try to enforce "essential services" spending at the micro level. It's too rich a target for corporate lobbyists to define approved services at the macro level. And at the economic level, there's little reason to believe it will give us better outcomes.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were. There are plenty of up-and-coming cities with relatively low car ownership (and lots of growth) today. An autonomous-zip-car-ish offering wouldn't have to displace existing motorists to become dominant in such cities. It would just have to outgrow individual-ownership, which would seem more likely than not. Particularly as it subsumes the entire cab and rental industry.

It's just a question of "at what point do the consumer-facing products actually exist?" over that 25-year scale.

It became somewhat about money, but that's a fairly recent development in policing in general -- it's not much different from allowing the executive branch to keep all or part of other various fines.

But there's nowhere near as much money coming from seizure as is coming from the government to fund the manpower and equipment used to do the seizing.

The enforcement divisions of the DOJ seize less than 2B annually. (That's FBI/DEA/ATF/etc combined.) Their combined budget is ~27B.

Seizure (and prosecution in general) is more a problem due to perverse incentive schemes: Police are incentivized to seize money not so much to have the money directly, but to have those seizures show up on their performance reviews. Not unlike prosecutors trying to rack up convictions or traffic cops trying to fill ticket quotas.

The Drug War is much more about race.

> "Now the world is worried about what we put in our systems that we export."

That's not remotely a new state of affairs. Nor is it new for them -- Russia in particular -- to have very good reasons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage

To be fair: they don't want short, small videos any more than they specifically wanted gifs.

They want moving images that load quickly. Which has meant short/small/gifs, because most US bandwidth still sucks. And thanks to the mobile explosion it now means short/small/h264.

But I bet that as people become used to 5-10x space savings from h264, they'll quickly respond with videos having 5-10x more data. (larger/longer/higher-res clips)

You have to consider price, particularly in the American West, as desalination can make as much fresh water as you can afford.

The only thing stopping California from building massive solar-powered desalination plants is that bullying the surrounding states is (currently) cheaper and easier (politically).

There's no constitutional concern here. Tenure would provide no protection for a teacher who was using their position to preach. Any talk of creationism or reading from a holy text would have to be part of a lesson that didn't run afoul of the establishment clause.

Neither does tenure necessarily provide protection for a teacher who refused to teach the curriculum to such an extent that they failed their students. Tenure is about protecting teachers from being fired for controversial positions, not protecting them from having to teach the material they agreed to teach.

I can't speak to the particulars of California's tenure or contract in general. Maybe their contract really could protect a physics teacher who taught epicycles instead of heliocentricity despite failing class after failing class.

But I would doubt it.

> "I imagine you would want to fire teachers who teach their students that the Earth is 6000 years old"

The funny thing about that, is that public school science education isn't politicized in that "both sides do it" sort of way. Where's the public school teacher who dedicated their life to the study and teaching of biology, only to disregard all of it and teach creationism at the expense of their students? Has it ever happened?

What we actually see, is that people who dedicate themselves to a scientific subject (almost overwhelmingly) accept the current best conclusions of that study and teach it accordingly. And even where those scientific understandings run into non-scientific beliefs, people tend to adapt their thoughts to complement one another. (e.g. "gaps which they fill up with God")

Abject politicization only really comes from the outsiders, who decide they don't like some part of our scientifically formulated understanding of the natural world and attempt to legislate it away.

So you rarely, if ever, see the problem as a teacher refusing to teach the subject they dedicated their lives to, or choosing to do an active disservice to the students that they pledged to serve.

And equating "tenure" with "preventing administrators from ever firing a teacher" is pretty ridiculous and politicized framing. It's more difficult to fire a teacher than a contract plumber, sure. But I don't think it's ever been shown to be more difficult to fire a teacher than a union plumber.

Which makes the gripe about "inability to fire incompetence" just a reframing of the old attack on unions and union contracts -- with little or nothing to do with tenure itself.

> "On the flipside, doesn't tenure allow teachers to defy a progressive administration and teach Creationism just as easily?"

Teaching creationism (as opposed to not teaching evolution) is a funny edge case that runs, pretty quickly, into the establishment clause. So it's perhaps not the best example.

But, sure, tenure protects teachers who refuse to teach evolution just as it protects those who would teach it.

And I see that as a feature as well. It's not there to further any particular ideology. That's rather the point.

And the problem with a federal curriculum as ultimate judge is that such a curriculum is ultimately a political creation. If today's legislature were voting on the NCLB act, the Santorum amendment would very likely have become law. And then we'd have biology teachers forced (via the courts if necessary) to "teach the controversy".

Wrongful termination only applies if the employment contract, or some statute of employment law, was violated. The law has little-to-nothing to say about this topic, which is why educators fought for these protections in the first place.

And we're talking specifically about what can happen if existing protections are taken out of the employment contract.

In which hypothetical case, suing for "wrongful termination" would seem, to me, to be reduced to fishing for judicial activism.

The problem isn't rogue administrators, it's an abusive majority deciding en masse to harm/under-serve a minority.

You don't get an administrator seeking to ban the teaching of evolution without a majority of voters in the district (or at least political support) who agree with that.

So the ability for an administrator to be fired doesn't enter into it. Even if one were to go "too far", they're just going to be replaced by another who shares the same general values, but perhaps with a more tactful presentation.