Because, in all honesty, you can probably assume that the "trade deal" is heavily skewed to protect corporate interests, and will not benefit anybody else.

Essentially these treaties are heavily influenced (if not actually written) by corporate demands.

It's secret because if people knew the government was essentially acting as lackeys for the copyright cartels and the like, people might disagree with it.

It really can't be a good "treaty" if you have secret terms with each of the countries you're trying to get do sign on.

They just don't want their peers to know how much they're getting screwed by globalization.

Mark my words, the only ones who will benefit from this will be multinational corporations. And it will probably extend copyright in a few more countries.

You can't actually take the sample on the phone - the idea is that you can get your DNA sampled, then the results get stored on your phone - which you can if you wish share that anyone who would like to have it after that, if you choose.

So it's pretty close in terms of value (because if a lot of people do this a lot of researchers could get quick access to DNA data instead of having to do it once per test). But it's not as widespread as direct collection would be.

I don't think I'd want my phone actually being the DNA collection point anyway as it would think I was some kind of human/cat hybrid.

Sure, until insurance companies and governments start demanding access to it.

You don't need to be much of a conspiracy nut to realize the potential for privacy invasion and abuse of this data is absolutely staggering.

There simply are way too few legal controls on how this stuff is used to safely make it as commonplace as that.

Essentially, corporations and the government will have massive databases of the DNA of pretty much everybody ... and it will be used to deny you service, in criminal proceedings because they can demand it, and who knows what else.

DNA samples on an iPhone is a hell of a way to get the fully distopian future and Big Brother .. because you can bet your ass that secret warrants will be used to force companies to hand this stuff over and then have it collated into one big giant database.

I don't care if it's Apple, Microsoft, Google, or anybody else ... this is a creepy idea which will have enormous implications to society.

The price out to the collection agency reflects the likelihood that an uninsured person - a pretty good indicator that he can't pay - will pay a huge bill, not what the costs are. Now the US system is fucked but proper medical care is expensive, here in Norway we have universal healthcare and it's 11% of the national budget. It is three times the size of our defense budget, for example.

In large parts of your life, particularly until you finish college or you plan to take the money to your grave you don't have a chance at footing the bill for a major medical emergency. And if your parents don't have the money the first part is easily 25 years of your life. Particularly the final years are nothing but rolling the dice, some people drop dead with hardly any cost to the healthcare system while others have long-winded slides into terminal care.

Only 50 years ago you'd need a small army of people to do my job, simply because we have computers to do 99% of the legwork. One doctor is still treating one patient and the standard of adequate care has actually gone significantly up as we gain more knowledge, tests and treatments. And the narrower the scope, usually the more expensive the care.

In my country it's been hotly debated whether we should spend $100.000+ per patient per year to prolong the life of certain very rare diseases with extraordinarily expensive medication. I know we've sent children with brain tumors to the US for proton therapy many hundred thousands of dollars per patient, because the estimated cost of establishing our own is 200 million dollars to treat 200 patients/year.

And we want the best care, it's real hard to hear there's treatment that can help but we're not going to that because it's too expensive. Yet that is increasingly the case, it's not that the treatment doesn't exist it's that if everyone gets everything the system chokes. P.S. A modern medical X-ray machine is not cheap at all.

That is, until the video surfaces.

There have been enough high profile instances of police officers outright lying about what happened that I simply am not willing to assume they're telling the truth. Because often when a video shows up the police are proven to be lying.

If the good cops can't weed out the bad ones, then it's time to treat them all like children who can't be trusted.

In the fall of 2012, Ben Livingston (a past Stranger contributor) was the subject of a Washington State Patrol traffic stop. Livingston requested dash-cam video of the traffic stop, but the Washington State Patrol denied possessing such footage. The following year, Livingston, Rachner, Mocek, and Seattle civil rights attorney Cleveland Stockmeyer created a nonprofit called the Center for Open Policing (COP). Their first effort was to sue.

They won, and the state patrol settled to the tune of about $23,000. "I particularly enjoyed that case," said Mocek.

If you or I did that, it would be perjury and obstruction of justice.

This is a police force which was already under a federal consent decree ... which means they've been acting like this for a long time.

Boo hoo ... the poor police feel all ganged up on because they can't break the law and get away with it.

Oh, look, fascists defending corrupt police forces.

How cute.

And though they have only combed through a small portion of the data, they say they have found several instances of officers appearing to lie, use racist language, and use excessive forceâ"with no consequences. In fact, they believe that the Office of Professional Accountability (OPA) has systematically "run interference" for cops. In the aforementioned cases of alleged officer misconduct, all of the involved officers were exonerated and still remain on the force.

"We're trying to do OPA's job for them because OPA was so explicitly not interested in doing their own job," said Rachner.

When the police ignore the law without consequence, someone needs to be doing something, because clearly the damned police are incapable of it.

Sorry, but crooked cops are just criminals like the rest of them ... and they deserve the same treatment.

You mean when the police investigate their own misconduct they find there was none?

I'm shocked I tell 'ya.

And the police wonder why they're no longer treated with respect, while being people who regularly abuse their power and ignore the law. All cops need to start wearing body cameras at all times. Because it has reached the point where taking them at their word is a stupid idea.

If the police choose to ignore the law, they should be charged like the rest of us.

You could reasonably address this to some degree by marking the temporary lanes with colored paints.

Yeah, sure.

Let's change all construction practices and infrastructure to try to solve the ways in which self driving vehicles will be completely unprepared for the real world.

We can remove all the other drivers, embed tracking sensors in the road, build it out of special materials, put sensors everywhere. That will totally work. Except in the massive amount of places where it won't.

For these things to ever actually work in the real world, it's not the world which will have to adapt to them.

Who is going to pay for all of this? Everybody except the company who makes them.

"People" aren't pushing back, entrenched "organizations" are pushing back

Bullshit.

Municipalities and states which have passed laws around commercial for-hire vehicles are pushing back and saying "you don't get to tell us what our laws are". This has nothing to do with entrenched players pushing back other than them pointing out that if they're subject to those laws, Uber can't come along and claim to not be.

Let's keep some perspective, even while Uber is obviously circumventing laws

They're breaking the law, and throwing a whiny temper tantrum is irrelevant.

The laws exist to protect people from shady players without proper licensing and insurance looking to make a buck.

Uber is basically a dispatcher for illegal cabs. That's it.

You can claim it's some innovative noble thing to be assholes who ignore the law. But that doesn't make it true.

Criminal activity isn't a business model. It's a temper tantrum by greedy assholes who claim the law doesn't apply to them.

If by "pushing the boundaries" you mean "straight up ignoring the law", then that is essentially what they do.

They show up, say they're going to ignore the law because they're special little snowflakes, and then act like victims when they get told that's not going to work.

Their entire business model is "we don't give a crap about the law, because we're magical and special assholes".

Essentially they want to pretend that they shouldn't be covered by existing regulations.

I'm forced to conclude the owners are either massive assholes, or seriously delusional.

Sorry, but this is a $40 billion dollar corporation whose entire operations is based on ignoring laws and throwing a temper tantrum when they're enforced.

They say disruptive technology. I say uber douchebags.

Honestly, it's stupidity, and trying very hard to "protect" their culture and language.

This is a province where they've tried to get companies like "Canadian Tire" and "Home Depot" to rename their companies to French because they've outlawed English signage. It's a place where they keep trying to make it illegal to have your kids educated in English.

Ironically, French speakers from almost anywhere else in the world typically can't understand WTF Quebec people are saying.

No no no .. this is Quebec ... it's oui.

Sigh. Why do people take an argument and ad absurdum it without trying to understand what is being said and what isn't?

I didn't say there weren't older cities out there. I'm simply explaining part of why NYC is the way it is.

If you look at Paris, London and Tokyo, they're all wasteful as well.

Maybe not AS wasteful as NYC. But that could simply be a function of something else as well. There's no straight-line formula for this.

Not sure the analogy is good as the content, yes obviously. If you're a fugitive from the law but they suspect your mom is secretly sending you letters do they need a warrant to read the mailing address? Probably not, a court order will probably do since it's information that the post office obviously must have in order to deliver it, just like the number you dialed.