V2V is coming whether it's a good idea or not

Except, it won't. Not really nearly as soon as you think, and nowhere near as widespread.

Sure, there will be some fancy expensive cars with it. But look around at the cars on the road. The overwhelming majority of people will simply NOT be paying for this feature.

They'll be driving older cars, or they'll be unwilling to pay a premium for it.

All of these wonderful future pieces of tech are contingent on two things: people actually paying for them, and adoption of the technology so that it goes beyond just a few.

All of this future "we're all going to have V2V" sounds all good and Flash Gordon. In reality, that guy behind you in the 1987 Malibu isn't going to have it, and never will.

All technologies which depend on the world splashing out money to make it happen are probably doomed to fail.

A few here and there, sure. But everybody, or even a majority? Not happening.

Your wife has a flying car? That is so cool.

All 'vette owners think they're pilots.

Apparently, a surprisingly large amount of pilots also own 'vettes. Because, you know, it was good enough for the astronauts. ;-)

I guess if estimates say 5% of fuel, but...

- half or more of flights are in the winter, when there are no bugs or a lot less of them.

- most flights spend most of their time at bug free altitudes.

- many airports are in urban areas with reduced bug populations

Is this mostly a small plane phenomenon?

Of course they can control their economic destiny. They could impose massive spending cuts, refuse to pay pensions, take big wage cuts and so on, and trigger the recession that way. But they'd rather not (no surprise)

Bitcoin is not actually deflationary. Its supply grows constantly until it eventually stabilises. The fact that Bitcoin prices have fallen a lot is more because lots of new people have discovered the project and decided they want some, but that effect will eventually peter out as Bitcoin becomes boring and everyone finalises their opinions of it.

Greece doesn't need fiat currency. What Greece needs is hard money – like the Euro (which is hard-ish, though not as hard as Bitcoin). This is because the Greek government is notoriously corrupt and the fact that they couldn't just print the pensions of their civil servants was one of the few things creating pressure to reform, and preventing outright pillaging of the savings of Greeks who do actually work in the private sector. Seeing Greece as one monolithic entity isn't right: there are different factions, not all of whom want the government to suddenly be able to spend whatever it wants. Hence the Greek people apparently voting for both keeping the Euro and not enacting any spending cutbacks, a contradictory position.

Ultimately Greece is going to get a lot poorer, no matter what. In many ways it's practically a third world country, one that was simply kept afloat by huge injections of foreign cash. But it never really stopped being third world in the way that it was run.

Bitcoin could, theoretically, benefit some Greek people now in the heat of the crisis because the Greek government wouldn't be able to impose capital controls on it. Thus preventing the outright theft of whatever little cash Greek's have left in the bank (sorry, I mean, solidarity tax/haircut/pick euphemism of choice). It is no magical cure for Greece's problems but it could tip the balance away from a government that discovered it was paying salaries and pensions for entirely non-existent departments, and towards people who are just trying to make a living.

I think silver has been a reasonable competitor to gold as a commodity metal. The Romans used it, I'm pretty sure the Pound Sterling is called that for a reason, the Americans used it, etc.

It was probably because its much lower scarcity that it was used as "change" versus higher denomination/value coinage made from gold.

Lots of things can be considered an API. For instance, who owns the copyright on OpenGL? Does anyone even know? What about HTTP? After all, a protocol is basically an API that runs over wires instead of call stacks. And HTTP/2.0 is a derivative work of SPDY which is .... developed by Google. And is now being added back into Java. What about SQL? It's managed by ISO these days so probably Oracle would avoid slicing their own throats like this.

Following this US ruling all sorts of people and companies are now finding that they own IP they never even knew they had. This is already making lawyers the world over start licking their lips. It's going to be a shitstorm.

And yet something written against the Java API can fairly trivially be made to work against the Google API -- well, in theory.

The interfaces for APIs have been borrowed and re-implemented for literally decades. If you retroactively go back and say all of them are licensed and you need to pay money ... you fuck up the entirety of computing history.

Like I said, the standard C library, most of POSIX, the C++ template libraries, Mono ... all sorts of stuff was basically a re-implementation of an API.

This ruling completely ignores several decades worth of precedent, and grants Oracle something nobody else has ever had.

Hell, even Microsoft's vaporware to provide Android support is covered by this. This has very far reaching implications, and makes no sense in the context of computers since the 70s.

So ... basically every modern implementation of C illegally copied AT&T's or K&R's shit?

Mono has illegally copied Microsoft's shit?

The API is a contract, which you publish in order to allow people to use it. But you specifically do publish it.

Java was released by Sun without licensing, just saying you needed to be compatible with the core and not screw things up -- and now retroactively Oracle can claim copyright on it? There sure as hell were other implementations of Java out there which nobody was complaining about.

That pretty much sounds like bullshit. Interoperability is part of fair use. Have we so thoroughly eroded this concept that the copyright lawyers have won?

I'm pretty sure at the time Google was copying those interfaces, not a damned person EVER suggested this required licensing.

This isn't a question, but thanks for games like Chez Geek.

Discovering games which were goofy, not "me against you", and often won by sheer dumb luck opened a whole new kind of gaming for me.

The game mechanics of a bunch of people playing silly games for the purpose of hanging out and not having winners and losers was far more interesting, inclusive, and fun.

Much more enjoyable as a group game than so many other games with terrible game mechanics.

This has been known for years. Those privacy promises do not survive bankruptcy, and your personal information they promised never to sell becomes another asset to be disposed of.

This has been happening for years. Don't want your personal information sold, don't provide it to them.

Even their privacy policies which say they'll never sell it will have legal language which says "unless we change our mind".

The promises by corporations to play nicely aren't legally binding and can be changed on a whim. I'm pretty sure we've seen other examples of this over the last decade.

Unless there are actual laws preventing this, any promises are pretty much worthless.

Some countries have enacted privacy laws, but I'm pretty sure the US never would -- because that would limit corporations.

This might finally becoming plain to everybody else, but the vast majority of people here should already know this.

Of course they will (and do). They want their customers to have a great experience so they don't go to the competition. Hence the ability to review drivers, hence the automated calculation of the trip cost and so on.

And to whom do you file the bug report again?

I can just imagine it now "Yeah, we run this cool thing called CodePhage which patched the software, but now it broke". They'll laugh at you and hang up.

This sounds like an automated system for mangling together random bits of software and hoping you still have something usable.

"The longer-term vision is that you never have to write a piece of code that somebody else has written before," Rinard says. "The system finds that piece of code and automatically puts it together with whatever pieces of code you need to make your program work."

Sounds totally cool. Also sounds like complete fiction.

Well ... duh?

So, you ask Google a semantic/natural language question ... are you actually surprised that Google uses their own results to determine this?

Do you expect an objective determination of this? Would we need a court to decide who is actually the best?

You asked a search engine to give you a subjective response based on the information is has. Do you expect it to give you the results from Bing or Yahoo?

So, yes, the subjective evaluation as returned by Google using their own stuff as a basis is skewed to their own stuff.

Why is anybody surprised by this? Does anybody think Google is going to promote someone else's stuff?

Search results are a starting point. But if you want to know the best burger joint, eat there, or read a whole bunch of different review sites.

This seems to be a lot of hand wringing about the fact that some kinds of search results, which aren't based on objective facts, aren't returning objective facts.

Hell, I've seen user voted polls in newspapers which were as subjective and broken just because the stuff in the area where all the bars were got reviewed more. So all of the downtown stuff was reviewed more. That didn't make it better, just better known.

You asked Google to provide you what is essentially a distillation of opinions, and you're surprised it's not a 100% accurate set of results?

I just don't know why people are surprised by this. Whose stuff do you think Google should be promoting?

Tell me about the time in the last 2500 years when gold wasn't valuable.

It has a value which has fluctuated over time, but it never seems to become valueless, either because of its history as a means of exchange, its intrinsic value as a material, or both.