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Comment Re:The central pro-escrow argument is idiotic. (Score 2) 82

You would think a pair of gloves would render all the police fingerprinting useless, yet haphazard criminals are caught by it all the time. Like everyone else with limited resources, they either catch you because you're important or because you make it easy. Heck, I bet many criminals using computers don't even know what crypto is.

Comment Re:The title is terrible (Score 1) 231

The car insurance industry is making a lot of money on the fact that your driving profile is individual and will trick you into keep paying a high premium despite having moved into a lower risk segment. All autonomous cars of the same model will drive the same way, which makes it a lot harder to price gouge. It doesn't matter if you're 18 or 80, male or female, single driver or whatever. It's one Google car, 10000 miles/year, parked in garage - what are you charging? In fact, Google might easily just offer insurance themselves since they're the driver and got deep enough pockets they don't need an insurance company.

Comment Re:Ha, lower rates lol (Score 2) 231

One of the major reasons traffic deaths went down is we redesigned cars so that instead of being able to withstand a crash without injury to the car, they absorb the crash in a 'crush zone', meaning the car itself takes the damage instead of a person.

And this made a lot of lesser crashes that wouldn't have injured the passengers anyway far more expensive because even small damage is distributed on a large area. I was in an accident not so long ago and despite being a fairly low speed collision where the air bag did not deploy, the damage to my car alone amounted to about 1/5th of the sticker price for a new one and in total I think it wiped out everything I've paid in insurance premiums over the last ten years. So I got no reason to complain, really...

Comment Re:Why animals can't be given human rights. (Score 1) 172

I tend to weigh on the side that sentient animals should receive protections similar to the protections we give to children or to adults deemed legally incompetent. That means they can't exercise many of the rights that we recognize adult humans have, but neither can they be wantonly exploited, physically or psychologically harmed.

There are already animal cruelty laws that could be amended to grant better protection from human-on-animal neglect and abuse. The problem with giving them rights is that they'd apply to animal-on-animal action or environmental harm. You wouldn't let a child assault another child, would you? But it would be crazy if we were equally compelled to intervene if a gorilla assaults another gorilla. And we wouldn't let kids hunger or thirst or freeze to death, yet that happens to animals in nature all the time. Not doing them harm is way different from being responsible for their well-being.

Comment Re:The Segway problem (Score 1) 45

The hapless Segway would have been hero technology had it first been marketed to those handicapped who can stand but not walk. It would be intermediate tech between fully mobile and chairs, which take you out of the eye-contact world of the normally upright.

And who exactly might that be? Anyone with a bad hip or knee wouldn't want to stand any significant amount of time. Nor the morbidly obese. And those with balance or support problems probably can't use a Segway at all, they'd still need their walker. Amputees would still prefer prosthetics that cloak their handicap better. Sure they're faster and less tiresome, but I can't really think of any condition where you're unable to stand/walk short distances and still able to use a Segway.

Comment What a load of bullcrap (Score 1) 112

Compassion and empathy is an indication that while I have a life to live, I care about yours too. Computers and robots already exist solely to serve me, whether they can beat me at chess or not doesn't give them any life of their own. If you're already a doormat, there's no point in saying please walk all over me. For the same reason I've never felt the need to say please to a computer, though I might occasionally call on a higher power for it to please work. And you will know it's a load of circuits, unless you like to live a self-delusion you'll know there's no feeling behind it. Faking it will just get creepy, like HAL 9000: "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" instead of "Permission denied."

Let's review a few of the inventions that have replaced work already like the washing machine or the dishwasher. If I had a person to do my laundry, I mean literally scrub it like in ye olde days I'd treat them nicely. The washing machine I turn a few knobs and it works or I curse it because I have to call a plumber. I won't thank my car for driving itself, nor for a robot being my housekeeper, chef, waiter, butler, gardener, delivery boy or whatever else work they can get it just becomes a piece of machinery that we expect to work. I've already outsourced my vacuuming to a slightly intelligent robot, the main thing is it's functional.

Comment Re:In the US. (Score 1) 904

Again, this works in the US with big suburbs where everyone has a parking lot with an electric outlet. In other countries (like good old Europe), where most people live in apartments and there is just no way you can plug your car at night, it doesn't work.

Apartment buildings and fixed parking spots are far from mutually exclusive, either through a parking cellar or dedicated garages/parking spots. Granted, Norway is a cold country where a garage may be more useful than down south but by household:

58% have a garage or carport
25% have a private parking spot
17% have no parking

Of the last 17% only 38% have a car, so in practice it's only 6.5% that don't have a fixed spot for their car. And that probably includes people that have rented a parking spot nearby, in practice few wants to be nomads trying to find free street parking every day. Of course you would have to get an electrician to mount an outlet, but beyond that it's not really a problem.

Comment Re:settled cannon for about a decade now (Score 1) 83

Part of me wonders if this is deliberate. No graphics drivers that are useful, no games. No games, no Linux desktop.

Why? AMD has no stake or interest in what OS you game on, they're just looking to sell their hardware. They get no benefit from enabling or pushing a migration to Linux unless they can steal customers from nVidia/Intel that way, which seems highly unlikely. You don't need a conspiracy to explain why companies don't do things that don't benefit them.

Comment Re:Seems silly. (Score 1) 66

The cooler thing would be if you have enough high speed printing capacity that you could manufacture and assemble a 1000 drone swarm in a very short period of time and overwhelm an adversaries defenses without requiring a ship big enough to carry a 1000 completed drones. And then another one, and another one. You would need a tanker full of plastic and a freighter full of batteries, electronics and propellers.

âoeKill decisionâ baby.

Comment Re:wrong question (Score 1) 54

Honestly, I'd beg to differ. When you cut a human body open you're likely to find a relatively standard set of organs. Even with all conditions and permutations it is a whole less open-ended than say driving a car, where arguably a lot of odd conditions could happen at any time. In short, there's a few vital functions that that the body must uphold and if a robot surgeon does he's not making anything worse. He might not cure everything, but that's not the point.

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