Sure, but when you have outages and stability issues which impact your business, is it really a good trade off?

Sure. You get to blame your cloud provider for their problems, and with luck for even some of your own. You get bonuses for the savings and a scapegoat for the costs. What's there to trade off?

Don't need to upgrade regularly anymore, huh? Go look at the system requirements on AC: Unity and tell me you can play that on even medium settings with a system that hasn't been upgraded in years.

Go loot at pretty much any other game and you can. That you can find always find a game that requires a high-end PC to run, doesn't mean that you have to upgrade. Especially not when the game in question has around 7 or so practically identical predecessors which run on mid-level machines just fine.

If anything, modern PCs with their multicore 64-bit CPUs are years ahead of game development, which still targets 32-bit machines by default.

The Libertarian philosophy is the most self-consistent of all available. It requires the fewest "common-sense" exceptions to be practical.

Right. So you're okay with me opening an open-air nuclear waste dumb next door to your house? Or do you reserve the right to keep redefining "force" to cover everything I do which might negatively affect you yet not cover anything you do that might negatively affect me?

"By the same logic, computers should not be allowed in any life-critical situation."

That isn't true. Some of those situations have clearly defined parameters. For instance air traffic control is collision avoidance. You can build a truth table and mathematically prove every possible outcome within certain bounds. We can do and do do this for many critical programs.

"Civilian" and "Combatant", "Us" and "Them" these are fuzzy classifications at best. Human's fed all the data could not consistently classify people into one category or another, in fact, they can only achieve a better consensus with data limited by a perspective. If humans can't come up with a consistent definition how can they assess whether or not a machine is more or less accurately adhering to it?

The fact that we can all conceive of the vague notion of a "bad guy." Doesn't mean such a thing exists. The fact that no individual can come up with a set of discrete and measurable criteria that will successfully classify "bad guy" in a logically consistent way even for themselves, let alone get a consensus among others, says that being able to agree on a vague notion of a thing doesn't mean that vague notion actually exists. There is no such thing as a "bad guy." No matter how much we can all agree we should stop the bad guys.

You are personally going to migrate your employer's systems because you personally do not like something, something every single major distro is moving too, and the top kernel developers are already using?

Isn't that kinda his job? Institutional decisions aren't engraved in CEOs granite desktop in fiery letters by an invisible finger; they're always made by some agent acting on behalf of the institution. Which is actually a pretty fascinating process, the way personal convictions and institutional culture interact to give raise to them, and probably behind more than a few religious and secular cults. Which, I'm more and more convinced, is very relevant to the topic of both pro- and anti-systemd camps.

Both are pretty likely. Let's start by defining civilian. Is the farmer who supports the militants cause and brings them goat cheese and steel a civilian? What about the farmer who is afraid of them and does the exact same thing? What if the farmer knows the danger level and carries a gun for personal defense?

You can't compute us and them in an analogue world where the real value is never actually 0 or 1 but always a shifting value in between and usually multiple shifting values in between. YOU can't, and neither can your robot.

Excellent, sending a drone for you now.

It provides access to what is effectively the largest library of information in the world for starters. Also, computer based learning provides the opportunity for open source collaborative educating auto-pilots that can be incrementally improved. Rather than a teacher expending efforts to help a single student, they can expend efforts improving the adaptive learning system in a way that will help that student and everyone like that student from then on.

Of course, if the teacher just continues to do the same old "cover a section and assign the questions at the end" in a standardized text book or the same thing with a test of their own making testing that same material as their teaching style, it does no good at all. We can make anyone fashion a bucket to put the water in and we can't make the teachers lead their horses to the water, but without access and computers there is no water they COULD lead them to.

I do. For starters this kind of thing increases access to resources like Khan academy, wikipedia, open text books, and the internet as a whole which provides an information resource that makes a typical school library look like a giant waste of space.

The old guard following along with standardized texts and curriculum needs to be tossed out. Our schools are woefully inadequate. Our teachers are spread too thin. The internet allows for building interactive learning labs that adapt to individual students and their strengths and weaknesses in the kind of ways a good teacher would if they had the time to dedicate one on one with each student.

Our teachers instead of being babysitters each trying to re-invent the wheel should be doing three things, counting attendance and collaborating and contributing to open and free resources of this type, and last but not least they should be spending their efforts with students teaching things computers can't do like physical and spatial learning and tasks.

Why would we want to waste all the education that is required of our teachers on tutoring a student effectively or ineffectually tutoring 30 when that teacher can instead focus on an adaptive tutoring auto-pilot? As teachers recognize a failing (in the form of having to expend personal efforts) they collaborate, build an improvement for the auto-pilot, and the auto-pilot carries that ability to adapt to every single student thereafter. Eventually it becomes in effect a teacher with hundreds of years of collective experience providing one-on-one tutoring of our children. It slows down or speeds up as appropriate for the student in question so "no child is left behind" but also "no child is kept behind."

In general our students should be programming and studying physics and sciences in grade school. We should be moving on to more abstract maths as soon as possible because the younger we are the BETTER we are at understanding fluid and creative abstract concepts like these. And STEM is the key to the future success of our society.

All funds from government and for government should go through the standard tax system, nothing should bypass in the form of fees.

The problem with bypassing in the form of fees is that a certain portion of every dollar you make is related to government supported infrastructure (including education). It takes a lot more public infrastructure to enable the generation of million dollars worth of wealth than it does to generate $30,000. Thus a person making $30,000 has a much smaller debt to society to pay back. Anytime a fee like this is introduced that person with the smaller debt is subsidizing and paying debt owed by the person with the larger income.

Given that Uber is legal in a lot of places (and still done in places it's not), there should be plenty of statistical evidence that they get into more accidents per mile driven than "normal" drivers.

Do accident statistics have a handy "works for Uber" column now?

So, can you point me at the evidence that supports your statement, or were you just talking out your ass?

Do you have evidence that I have an ass to talk out of? Seeing how you apparently require evidence of such basic physiological facts as "people get tired" and "tired people make more mistakes".

Disclaimer: I've got no interest in this whatsoever.

So... why did you read this story and posted your comment? Did you get paid for it?

Yes, and that difference is who is getting paid. That is literally the only difference.

Joe Average has no incentive to drive 16+ hours a day. Joe Uber does. That means Joe Uber is going to get into more accidents, and requires a far higher level of skill to get the rate down to acceptable level. Furthermore, while it's of course nice to have cheap taxis, it also means that Joe Uber pretty much has to work those 16+ hours a day to make a living, and that's not so nice for everyone who shares the roads - and sidewalks, and occasionally a living room with a new hole in the wall - with him. So I, for one, wholeheartedly support limiting the supply to the level where Mr. Uber can go home after 8 hours and then mandating that he actually does just that rather than continues busting his ass at the expense of public safety.

And when you drive through a city, the taxi drivers are always the biggest assholes, cutting people off and whatnot, even when they don't actually know where they are going.

So do you think this situation would get better or worse by having a lot more and more desperate taxi drivers around?

A wind plant does not require any 'wilderness'.

A wind turbine requires land that isn't otherwise occupied. In practice this means wilderness.

If in your case the bad guys cut all the trees, they made a mistake :)
I would in your case rather wonder why they did it, where the wood especially valuable? Did they want to gain new farmland?

How do you propose getting a wind turbine, or any heavy equipment for that matter, in the middle of a forest without clearing the trees first? For that matter, how do you propose building a tower for holding said wind turbine without clearing the trees first? How about power lines?

You have to clear an area for any kind of construction. Pretending this isn't the case for wind turbines is deception.

Modern power plants don't employ that many people - it usually takes around 3 people to run a power plant so with shifts that's around 10.

What this actually means is that nothing gets maintained, nothing gets cleaned, no problem gets adressed until something blows, at which point it gets duck taped rather than properly repaired since ten other things are screaming for urgent attention. You can't actually run any kind of industrial site with just 3 people, except in the dreams of bean-counters. Not without the whole thing being a slowly unfolding disaster.

But that's okay, because when the whole thing finally reaches its climax, it's the poor bastard who happened to be present for the final stage who gets the blame, possibly posthumously. The economic geniuses who cut the personnel to unworkable level are safe with their bonuses. And that's all that matters.

It's many orders of magnitude better than living near the coal fired electrical generation plant that was likewise a few miles from my place.

I dunno. I used to live a kilometer or so of a coal (or possibly wood) fired power (municipal heating) plant, and in fact walked my dog right past it, and the effect was... absolutely nothing. I only knew the thing was there because I could see the smokestack.