.....and ban this right away, it will not matter if the fatality rate is even lower than manually driven cars.

You ignore the gargantuan influence insurance companies wield over politicians.

Who do you think got these types of laws passed?

• No smoking in bars
• No sodas sold in big cups
• Mandatory seat belts
• Child safety seats

Those were the doing of an entity who could see that modifying these behaviors would reduce the payouts they make each year. This entity lives and breaths statistics and charges its customers based on anticipated payouts and profits off the difference. By modifying the behaviors while keeping the premiums at the same level, the insurance companies are able to expand their profits. Insurance companies use these profits to control politicians.

Self-driving cars are hugely attractive to insurance companies. If they can overall reduce payouts by some small number, they'll happily pay for the fewer claims made against their customers' self-driving cars. Should cases go to court, they'll have plenty of telemetric data to throw in front of a jury to bolster their defense.

Really excellent current-day technology thrillers. They expand on some very contemporary surveillance / privacy issues and also project many currently-available technologies into advanced what-if scenarios. It was hard not to think that the creator of the AI in these two books was not conceived as a reference to either Elon Musk or John Carmack. Definitely Carmack was an inspiration to the author at some level, but the weaponized self-driving cars hints at Musk.

If Musk is warning about this AI-gone-wild threat, these two New York Times bestsellers might have given him the fright...

• Daemon by Daniel Suarez
• Freedom(TM) by Daniel Suarez

The reason Marc Cuban is wealthy is because he had a dumb idea and was able to sell it to Yahoo before they realized they should only buy companies with paying customers rather than a pie-in-the-sky idea. Marc Cuban sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo, and they didn't know how to get any subscribers and that asset eventually evaporated into nothing.

Then Marc Cuban started HDnet cable channel thinking he would corner the market on producing high-definition cable TV content. Then all the other cable channels began broadcasting in HD and the property floundered for a reason to exist until Ryan Seacrest bought and rebranded it as another entertainment variety channel-- AXS..

Take a read of Cuban's blog. It's fun to click around in the archives to read his thoughts on the direction of future technology trends. Like when he predicted just ten years ago people would go into video rental stores to have movies transferred to a physical hard drive instead of walking out with optical disk media.. Somehow he didn't see the rise of Netflix and Redbox, did he?

Cuban and Ballmer have a LOT in common. When a board of directors selects either of them to be the CEO of a multi-billion $ company, their opinion might be relevant. Right now, the industry and stock market has a lack of faith in the decision-making powers of these two.

Any organization attacking your published site will send DMCA emails to the hosting / bandwidth provider, but will also attack the DNS registrar for copyright violation. That's going to be the more difficult one to choose because there are a finite number of registrars and they all want to cover-their-ass against ICAAN violations.

Well-chosen slashdot nickname, Dimwit.

All the public infrastructure crap you're complaining about was part of bond packages that voters approved and paid for with tax money.

Google fiber ain't that. It's a subscription service being provided by a corporation. The fact that you're complaining of not having sewers hooked up indicates you live in a rural section which isn't the most lucrative region for Google to spend money where the people / mile-of-fiber ratio is thin.

An NSL can be sent to Apple telling it to give the FBI all information it has.

Brune,

Pump the brakes, son. The words you have written here strongly indicate an irresponsible underestimation of the power wielded by National Security Letters. Go ask the ex-owner of Lavabit if he agrees with you that there are limitations on how National Security Letters may be applied to corporations.

I just checked less than 24 hours later. It's up to $247,000. Something tells me there is strong consumer interest in this type of a product.

According to the kickstarter page, the campaign is over $170,000.

A $51 pledge gets you one shipped to your house in the USA.

From Wikipedia:

The Firefox project began as an experimental branch of the Mozilla project by Dave Hyatt, Joe Hewitt and Blake Ross. They believed the commercial requirements of Netscape's sponsorship and developer-driven feature creep compromised the utility of the Mozilla browser.[29] To combat what they saw as the Mozilla Suite's software bloat, they created a stand-alone browser, with which they intended to replace the Mozilla Suite

In competitive sales situations, each company has performed competitive analysis on the strengths and weaknesses of their competition's product. When talking to a customer, the sales team is emphasizing the problems of the competitor's product and the strength of their own. The customer is beating up the salesman by asking questions about the weaknesses of their product that were fed to the customer by the competing salesperson.

"It took them six years to fix these three simple bugs."

"It wasn't until release 4.5 before they found a critical security vulnerability that has probably been exploited since release 1.0."

"They decided not to fix these important problems in the current release and customers are going to have to wait another year for this functionality to work properly."

Helping your competition perform competitive analysis is a really good way to help your company go out of business. The benefit of transparency will be hugely outweighed by the savagery that will be perpetrated against your sales team. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see the sales team quit if this transparency continues.

Because car analogies are so hated on Slashdot, here's one:

If a dealer handed you a piece of paper listing 100 things mechanically wrong with one car and then offered a second car that they said verbally had nothing wrong with it, would you really buy the car that is documented to be broken in 100 ways or would you trust the dealer's word on the other car?

It is a working system with everything you'd need to run a legitimate server.

I have wanted to run *BSD as our server OS for years, but the lack of native Oracle java support has held us back. Our app demands Oracle java and will not run on OpenJDK. Wish it would, because that's the only dang thing holding me off of *BSD these days.

I can fully expect some people will claim the lack of availability of native Oracle java support is a benefit of BSD. I would not argue against that sentiment, but my paycheck depends on other criteria.

I think you have Dr. Dre confused with Rick Rubin.

Dre does create the music you hear while a vocalist raps. He's known as a perfectionist in the industry and has refused to release material that was not up to his ideals even though contracts were signed, etc.

As for Bono and Apple working together to prevent piracy, I think U2's newest album is an example of the technology-- create an uninspired, unnecessary product that a major corporation gives away to consumers for free. Seems like the Fort Knox of piracy protection.

Ok. I have mostly been working with Beaglebone and looked at this video to see what I might be missing with Edison. The shill in the video promotes Edison by saying it has all these things built in-- wifi and bluetooth.

From this video, it's clear the board is missing USB and any kind of normal power connector. Oh, and removable storage? And ethernet?

This device screams of a scheme to dump atom processors after the market disappeared for netbooks and intel was left with a few million chips on their hands. I'll stick with ARM and the larger ecosystem that has grown around the Beaglebone Black and Rpi, thank you.

Most commenters here and elsewhere assume these references to a competing product were accidental. I believe they were likely intentional. The $400m paid to the NFL did not include any money paid to the broadcast corporations. They're sitting there wondering why they should help the NFL promote something while at the same time having to pay the NFL similarly-sized piles of cash.

I think these carefully-executed comments were an intentional message to Microsoft that their promotional budget is better spent with them on commercials rather than trying to embed them in the content without paying the broadcasters.

Fully agreed. Additionally, if it's lucrative, that means the organization perceives it as a cost-center. At some point, management will finally tire of the burden of this inflated paycheck and under-performing technology and will dump it out along with you.

I find that the more reliably lucrative jobs are the ones that provide efficiency and cost-savings to organizations.