How many times I've thought about it... what I was thinking about that caused me to think about it... p.s. you just lost.

(Prediction: this is going to be my most-downvoted post ever.)

Congratulations, you're on a watchlist now! You just said "assassination", and "Obama", in the same post.

Wait, crap, now I am too.

I am absolutely willing to trade my personal data for fun and/or profit. I figure they'll get it anyway, might as well help them along if I can get something out of it. Only if what I have to trade is worth what I'm getting, though. My personal data is worth way more to an aggregator than it is to me, so I'm happy to sell it to them.

Generally speaking, though, all the *mobile* apps that try to help me sell that data, suck my phone's battery like a cheap robot hooker, and *that's* worth way more to me. So I don't bother with them, which is too bad. (I've tried a couple similar programs for PC use, too. Don't have to worry about battery in that context, of course, but I do have to worry that they won't sporadically bug out and totally go crazy eating all my cpu and/or ram, which they have, so not bothering with those, either.)

Just sticking to *passive* methods of selling my data (i.e. surveys) has been pretty lucrative, though. A little bit more time-consuming, and the data they're getting might not be quite as precise, but it won't interfere with the things I actually *want* to use my laptop and/or phone for.

Isn't that basically what MSG is?

Taxis are losing money to Uber? Certainly true, but isn't Uber also still losing money to taxis in the same way?

I'm surprised Comcast hasn't tried suing Verizon, or the reverse, yet, with the same logic: "we aren't *technically* a monopoly yet. Verizon is taking some of our customers cause we suck so badly! They're eating our profits, which is illegal based on the 'law I just made up and also here have some money, judges, nudge nudge' principle. Lawsuit!"

Walter White would *never* blow up a building. Well, I mean, he blew up plenty of buildings, but not accidentally, and not the ones he was making meth in. If you suggest the building blew up due to the behavior of someone acting like he was in Breaking Bad, I would assume the building was being used as the headquarters of some nasty Mexican drug lord, and the dude had to teach the guy a lesson in badassitude. (Sorry, spoilers.)

> "I quit my job at my "Unicorn" company on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto. I wish them well (a year of vested stock) but now I'm happily setting up data logging systems on marijuana grows."

> "If you're 40+ like me, just take a hit now"

Heh heh heh. I see you enjoy your new job. :)

Not good at all, but that isn't what the person I responded to was snarking about.

I absolutely agree, I would not ever buy a self-driving car where *any* features essential to driving safely - wheels, brakes, acceleration, maps, etc. - were hooked up in any way to any system that was remotely accessible from outside the car in any way, no matter how much it was promised that they "take security seriously". Air gap or nothing.

I absolutely agree, nonsarcastically - do you know how awesome a self-driving RV would be? Pretty awesome.

I don't want any of that crap in my regular boring 4 door commute-to-work car, granted, but I am absolutely ecstatic about the idea of a google/tesla partnered self-driving electric RV - retire in style, see the whole country, sleep at night while your RV drives through the boring bits and not pay for a hotel. Sounds amazing.

Yes, I have been there. I was there last year on honeymoon, Rome, Venice and Florence, all three of which are now among my favorite cities I've been. I didn't feel even remotely threatened a single time by anyone in any of those places. Well, except by drivers; drivers in Rome have zero concern for pedestrians (and vice versa). But I didn't feel *intentionally* threatened by anyone, anyway (did run into several tourist scammers, but they were easy enough to ignore). Didn't feel like prices of anything were unreasonable, either (except hotels in Rome, but I think we just got unlucky, picked a weekend without realizing it until too late that everyone had hiked up prices of hotels because something big was going on that weekend in the Vatican.) And if you don't want it to be stupid hot, just don't go in the summer. May, when we were there, was perfect.

That said, your description, minus the completely unnecessary racial epithets that mark you as an obvious troll, do sound quite a bit more like parts of the the Greece component of that vacation. So much poorer, dirtier, the tourist parts were way touristier, a lot (though by no means everything, you just had to know how to avoid the touristy crap) was overpriced, and we did actually feel a bit unsafe once, but it wasn't from a black person. Much the opposite, in fact: was from someone we were about 90% sure was a neonazi.

Only if cars have any way of accepting remote override requests, in which case cops would be the least of my worries.

What I love so much about the series Extant is, other than obviously the aliens and the one plot-necessary true AI, the technology in the show feels like an amazingly real near-future extrapolation of current technology. This includes a proper self-driving car... which just killed a guy by parking on a train track and locking all the doors "for his safety", after being presumably tampered with by someone that wanted to murder him and make it look like an accident.

I absolutely am looking forward to self-driving cars, but I will insist that they not auto-update, and certainly not allow remote override while the car is driving - preferably not even have any potential *mechanism* for that even being a possibility.

What was the Space Junk doing with the shelter in the first place? And what forced the astronauts to take it away?

I'm with Jick on this one:

        It's "artisanal," which means it's more expensive than things that aren't "artisanal." Actually, that's a lie. "Artisanal" doesn't mean anything. Seriously. Look it up.

(Incidentally, they later reused the same joke, with the random monster modifier effect "artisanal", which as you might guess, does nothing.)

And we'll be paying for it in bitcoins, don't forget.

It'd probably make me use public transportation somewhat more frequently for the sorts of trips I already use public transportation for sometimes. There are costs associated with a particular mode of transportation that aren't always monetary - for instance, time. The trip I most frequently use public transportation for, for instance, to get from my house to downtown LA, I have to factor in:
* Time to get there: for the train, first I have to walk to the train (~10 minutes), then I have to wait for the train (anywhere from 0-15 minutes), then I have to actually take the train there (~1hr). Then the same amount of time to get back. By car, I can just get in my car and drive there, but the amount of time it takes is widely dependent on traffic, which impacts the decision greatly. (Also when I get there, I have to find parking, which is a consideration as well, and how hard that is depends somewhat on where in LA I'm trying to end up.)
* Actual monetary cost: by train it's a few dollars each way for a ticket, per person. By car, it's pocket change in gas, but then you have to factor in parking, which is more per car but less per person depending how many people are going, so you have to factor that in, too.
* Might I be buying large, fragile or perishable things home? Obviously if so, a car is better.

So for that trip, there are a bunch of factors - sometimes it's better to go by car, sometimes by train. I've done both. Reducing the monetary cost of the train would just change the parameter values slightly in favor of the train, other than then the train would be even more totally jam packed with poor people who can't afford cars, as it goes through some rather less savory parts of LA in between (not saying that's bad that it goes through those parts, just that it would be bad taking a train that's jammed to capacity).

My 10 minute car commute to work, though, those same parameters are far more heavily skewed towards driving - the "walking" and "waiting for a train" times would heavily outweigh the "actually on the train" time (which would already be slower than driving, as there isn't particularly measurable traffic on that commute). Gas is tiny, parking is free, so it doesn't cost me much to drive, and would cost *loads* in time to take the train or bus. So no thanks.