I thought legal barratry had to target the same defendant repeatedly.

The iPhone got in on this somehow without all that; while Motorola, Samsung, HTC, and so forth kept their hold. Nokia went another way; Blackberry has been up and down. The manufacturers who didn't pounce on Android dropped out of the running.

It seems open-source software didn't displace those manufacturers who took advantage of the market change. What makes you think all this new technology will displace GM?

It's a bit simpler than that.

There are all kinds of strategies and techniques geniuses use--the same way a woodworker uses a rotary router upon wood--to achieve maximum utility from their brain. It is a simple tool requiring skill to produce results, as you apply skill with e.g. Krita to draw a digital painting: one tool, hundreds of technical procedures to produce complex results.

One of the most primary strategies used by the greatest geniuses--not simply experts who excel in a single field of interest, but geniuses who excel at anything they attempt on a dare--is to instill motivation. They examine a problem requiring effort, understand its implications, and find a reason for interest: something they already want, or a new thing they suddenly realize a desire for, is more readily achieved by this new effort. In this way, every task, every study, every problem becomes engrossing; the individual has an unfettered desire to pursue this thing which is lain before him, and so fails to recognize the effort he puts forth, and so puts forth much effort without resistance, and so excels.

You observe simply that some things require excessive effort to gain an end not sufficiently interesting; were that end more interesting, it would be more pursued. Likewise, the closer that effort is to something interesting--if an aspect of the effort itself is discovered interesting, or if each step of progression directly translates to a useful step of progression in something else interesting--the more strongly it is pursued. Simply put: if upon completion of X you can improve Y, completing X becomes interesting because of Y; if by way of progressing toward completion of X you improve Y, X becomes interesting because it is essentially Y as well.

You observe, of course, that turning the second situation into the first is a good control for humans: if doing 10% of X grants you 10% of Y, and you do not want people interested in Y to perform X, then you must adjust the system surrounding X, Y, or both such that completing X grants Y, or such that X has less impact on Y, so as to require more effort for returns and less returns for effort.

They wouldn't. They'd outsource that part, and keep their necessary engineers. They'd pay Apple or Google or Tesla to build their fancy displays, their self-navigation systems, and their electric battery management systems, in the same way Subaru pays Porsche to build engines and Cadillac pays Mercedes-Benz to build their suspension systems. The investment for any of these companies to build the systems of the others would be large, save Tesla who would just ensure their continuous survival by becoming the battery supplier for everyone.

It is malicious prosecution. They're setting settlement lower than cost, meaning they're not confident they can win a high-cost lawsuit. If they ever initiate prosecution, it's straight malicious prosecution; holding the threat and strategically avoiding prosecution is coercion and legal racketeering, possibly criminal directly under the RICO act, supported by pattern behavior which indicates that they believe their activities constitute malicious prosecution.

In other words: they're generating circumstantial evidence enough to demonstrate malicious intent and abuse of the legal system in court. A good prosecuting lawyer can raise a lawsuit here and argue, legally, that these people are intentionally avoiding entanglement in an actual lawsuit, and so believe themselves to be pursuing a criminal action, and are avoiding that action but using the threat as leverage for racketeering--they are attempting to extort a broad base of victims for money through illegal abuse of the courts.

They're all working with the same faculties, you know; geniuses aren't endowed with better brains.

I have a large and fairly complex plan that puts a permanent end to all homelessness and hunger in the United States, costing less than our current welfare system, softening the blow of economic downturns and high unemployment, and even satisfying the problems of social security old-age pensions. It's a simple set of core actions with piles and piles of justification and analysis attached, rather than a network of fragile and uncertain bits of legislation built in a delicate web of questionable certainty. The beauty of it is that it's quick, easy, and durable; it solves all sorts of social problems through very minor action, through action which cannot fail because failure would come by spite which would only open the door for others to come profit by pushing success: this system will make some people extremely rich, and they will become rich by taking action to house and feed the poor, and yet the well of money they draw from for this is strictly and absolutely limited so as to not create a dangerous drain on our economy.

Do you think I was able to do such a thing because I was born with a much more capable brain than yours? Do you think it came with the package, a special upgrade you did not receive? Would you determine I'm some sort of in-born economic genius with a brain anatomy functionally superior to yours, genetics which you are denied, above and beyond the collective ability of all other humans on this planet? I have none of that; you have the same facilities I do, simply not put to the same use.

Your observation is quite right, but incomplete: there is no "smart kid" in the class; you only have one with some interest, and you will foster geniuses by creating interest in them. There are mental techniques to turn humans into intellectual gods, yes, and you can instill them within every single human child who enters your classroom, if only you can push the right button to make that child interested in learning. With those tools, then, you can repeat the same: grant them an interest in history, in mathematics, in languages, in technology, and they will become experts in those subjects in short order.

Do note that "uneconomic" means costs to someone increase. When that someone is taxpayers, money comes out of people's and business's hands; when that someone is the operator, they raise prices. In the first cases, people have less money with which to eat and commute, and businesses have less money with which to hire people, and so some people fall to poverty where they become mentally ill and diseased; in the second case, some people can't or refuse to afford the service, reducing its usefulness, slowing economy, and causing a similar effect on a larger or smaller scale--larger if it affects commerce at a high comparative advantage, smaller if it only affects people's ability to commute to work and the employer just fires them and hires more local people.

Economic consequences trickle down to real consequences measured in human suffering and death. Every economic action is measured by its offset: it causes damage amounting to 1500 people dying of poverty, but creates stimulus amounting to 2000 people rising out of poverty, and thus gives a bonus of 500 people rising out of poverty--the first 1500 may be sheltered, or they may be exchanged (person A falls to poverty so persons B and C can rise out of poverty). When given the equivalent option, I tend to favor sheltering; when given no equivalent option, I am completely unmoved by exchange (given the option of 50 million starving adults who are starving now or 0.1 million starving children who would starve if we saved those adults, I'll throw the children into the streets). I solidly oppose actions which increase human suffering in total, because it's uneconomic.

That switch controls a throttle system that manages air intake in gas trains, fuel intake in diesel trains, and electricity regulation to the motors in electric rail. If the air or fuel intake sticks open, you get runaway acceleration; if an electrical component shorts or a solid state power MOSFET starts bleeding current, you get excess power to the motors. In that case, your switch might not work, unless it's engineered to cut off some other system--in race cars, the kill switch powers down the fuel pump by disconnecting the battery, because the throttle may stick open and cutting fuel pump cuts fuel going to engine in any and all cases.

Knee-jerk reaction. "It flipped over! You should have X! Do it! Do it now!" Next week: "The automated system didn't work, and caused the train to accelerate out of control and flip over! What irresponsible ass turned this on without proper testing?!"

It's simpler than that: the author purports to see a black swan that will blindside the industry and cause a major turn-over; but you can't see black swans, and so this is not a blind risk. The auto industry is probably sitting on contingency plans to partner with various manufacturers at the tipping point, waiting back to avoid the major investment, knowing that it's a lot of start-up risk to start manufacturing cars. This is a controlled and managed risk, not the kind of industry-disrupting black swan that rises out of nowhere and leaves everyone confused about wtf just happened.

Security isn't a measurable commodity, It's a philosophy.

Yeah, I think that's the point: the 4th amendment has become a privilege. Not just phone calls and emails, not having your pockets searched is a, well, white privilege.

Hate to disagree with another FORTH fan (saw your sig) but dictionary says he's right. Haters called a social safety net "socialism" as a pejorative, conflating any government activity at all with state ownership of factories in Russia. They started off saying it was "socialistic" and then graduated to just calling it socialism. But the dictionary definition remains. You're talking about a "mixed market economy"...which is of course what they ALL are. There is zero pure socialism or entirely free markets anywhere. Demagogues hate shades of grey and love to call you black or white. Ayn Rand embraced that criticism, saying that once you have admitted there's evil, how can you consent to even the smallest admixture of it. Of course, there's no totally free markets anywhere because they, too, would create great evil, so it's all about the balancing act.

> A free market system with a reasonable amount of regulation, for all its flaws, works.\\\\\\ ...has worked in the technological environment since mechanization, the way feudalism worked in the agricultural one...for all its flaws.

(fixed that for you).

It wasn't much of a free market for 99.9% of actors during feudalism, because the feudal lord could interfere with it any time he felt like waving a sword around.

And the "flaws" of the current system may one day be seen as only a little less bad than the "flaws" of feudalism, which worked for 10,000 years. But fell apart rapidly with Gutenberg and literacy and satanic mills and the need for capital to build them. No inherent right-to-exist will protect our current culture and economic system from obsolescence should it fail to match new realities.