And there I thought the problem with vigilantism was that it violates the due process requirement of justice.

I don't think this was vigilantism, I think it was just a crime by some angry criminal dude.

"Most people who have studied it believe the reason was that the third brake light was something strikingly different"

I'd be interested to know how they isolated the several billion other variables in this study that might have affected accident rates.

Traffic drops on the road for all sorts of reasons, including natural business cycles. The price of gas can affect rates of speeding.

There is no social contract and citizens don't actually "forgo taking the law into their own hands" - that's why there is such a thing as a citizen's arrest. Citizens are required to ensure there is due process (vigilante justice is a problem because it violates due process), but that's because due process is a principle of justice, not because they're "forgoing" something.

Will Android apps run on a forked version of the open source portions? (I actually don't know the answer, but it's an important question .... part of the lock-in comes from the application ecosystem).

You realize that the reason a billion Chinese were poor in the first place is because of the Cultural Revolution, their violent Communist revolutionary past? But yeah, it's those "evil businesses". The main reason Chinese wages have been rising for the past few decades is because they partially ended the Communism and began partial market reforms.

It's also a helpful reminder of why the effect of Chinese wages on global inflation and wage inflation (e.g. flooding the world with cheap Chinese products) was largely a once-in-history thing. As they recover fully from Communism, their quality of life rises to be closer on par with developed nations. As the summary mentions, Chinese wages have been rising for some time, thanks to those evil businesses.

"Toyoda for example has done this repeatedly and been able to produce cars more cheaply in the US then many of their American competitors using the same labor."

Good at building cars, they are! Follow the dark side, they do not.

But this is something new, don't you get it? And since we're apparently now all Amish, we automatically ban all new technology. Existing technology is OK.

It's not that simple; if the public don't trust these systems then there is less money coming in overall, across the board. So there is some incentive to have a system people can trust. What makes it difficult is how to rate products ... scams like this require advanced knowledge to rate as scams or not, and on the bleeding edge of innovation it might not even be possible to distinguish a clever scam from a real innovative product in some cases. (And the last people on Earth who can do that are the SEC, never mind Kickstarter/Amazon. E.g. a product like this requires a high degree of knowledge of physics even just to analyze the claims.)

Me, I think the solution is to prosecute scammers as fraudsters to discourage them - put them in prison if found guilty (but keep the bar of proof just high enough that you don't put genuine innovators in prison, of course).

Sorry, just to add to the above, adding flying cars to the mix may actually improve overall travel safety - it sounds counter-intuitive, but think about it this way: Roads are highly congested, where over a million people are killed in traffic accidents a year. If half of road travellers took to the skies, it would significantly reduce the congestion on the roads - and therefore the road fatalities - because it opens up many more "virtual lanes".

Think about it this way: If your'e on the highway and a drunk driver goes head-on into your lane, you're f-scked. If you're flying above him in a virtual lane, you're safe from him ... and with less traffic on the road, he's more likely to just run into the ditch.

Ground cars are already a "safety nightmare": Globally, they kill over a million people a year. The reason we tolerate such low safety is because it's something we know; humans have a reasoning error whereby they have a lower safety tolerance for new things. Know that it's a reasoning error.

Flying car tech is already so "fly by wire" that they may actually be safer than ground cars, but the problem is the uncertainty around the regulatory environment is killing investment in developing and bringing products to market ... nobody wants to invest much to take the risk, because nobody knows how strict the laws are going to be etc.

Android already have ~80% of the market, this move seems to destroy one of the only competitors left ... empirically, that kind of monopoly has historically never been a good thing in the software industry.

Scams aren't limited to crowdfunding systems .. investors are scammed by traditionally structured BS companies all the time too.

A good way to help limit fraud would be jailtime if you're caught creating such a scam, but then, that would go against our cultural tradition of letting white-collar financial fraudsters get off scott-free on anything they do.

> does not mean that you can run a 4 litre V8 engine at full power and get 100 miles to the gallon

Thanks, you've given me an idea for my next Kickstarter campaign.

What makes it obvious to me it's a scam is that if they really had this technology, they would hardly be limiting themselves to crap like "oh it'll help you find your keys" ... the potential applications for such technology are huge and could make them millionaires multiple times over in various domains, and if they had this tech, they would know that ... if I had this tech I wouldn't even be thinking about key-finders - I'd be talking to many different device manufacturers to license the tech for the many different products it has potential applications for. They wouldn't even need a Kickstarter.

There were also people who sought to partially end slavery. No, slavery was evil, and you either ended it, or not. There is no such concept as "slavery isn't entirely bad". Likewise with patents. From a patent attorney: "Intellectual Property Is “Evil” - And Businesspeople Should Oppose It"