Not really. We already have self-driving cars, and we have a lot of data about traffic accidents and mortality. The cars aren't available at retail yet, but they exist. Teaching them to drive in a way that makes the right safety tradeoffs is appropriate. (E.g. driving slowly through a stoplight might cause more accidents and fewer deaths; that's a hunch, but we have lots of data so there's a moral calculation that should be made based on the data and desired outcomes.)

A "seriously" tag should also exist. It's not the satire that's problematic--it's the real news that is so absurd it seems to be satire. This pops up with amazing frequency.

Parent A/C is right.

This is entirely about marketshare. Apple decided its market in China was worth making it really easy for China to take Apple's data and use it against people. It's an understandable business decision. You know, like when the Pope didn't denounce Hitler.

Not necessarily. Suppose the back of the ticket agreed in advance to sell the copyright to any media you take, or to grant an exclusive, irrevocable license, or the like. Then you get to fight about whether that's a valid agreement, but you may not own the copyright.

The lawyers and judges will be happy to spend hundreds of hours trying to figure it out.

Even in the US, it is arguable how much context, and what kind, you would need to give the video in order to make it fall under "fair use." Even major television studios avoid using game footage without permission, even when they know they have an absolute right to use it, in part because of reputation issues but really because they don't want to be sued. You also have the issue of breaking copy protection by using the analog gap, at least in theory.

Bottom-line: if you're risk-averse, don't do it. Instead, describe it with your pretty words. If you want to do it, pay a copyright and sports law expert in your jurisdiction a few hundred euros to give you his best answer and listen to his advice. Do not get legal advice on slashdot.

History has always been altered. Napoleon was the greatest general in the world not because of his generalling, but because he *bought the newspapers*.

People who had a bad reputation used to be able to move to another town. Now we have tracking.

That's good because it warns us when someone actually has molested children, but bad because it makes people unemployable even a thousand miles from their home because of stupid mistakes they made when they were 18 or 19, for example.

It's not black and white that all history should be preserved. Some history hurts the future more than it helps it. If tomorrow the whole world forgot the Israel-Palestine conflict, would it make the future better?

Actually, if the employee was selling Amtrak's proprietary information without Amtrak's consent and was keeping the money, they are guilty of embezzlement and DEA employees may be guilty of crimes related to arranging that activity, e.g. conspiracy or solicitation.

If the employee was selling Amtrak's proprietary information and giving the money to Amtrak, the DEA was breaching its contract with Amtrak. The DEA has to share the proceeds of drug busts based on information that comes from Amtrak with Amtrak, and this method circumvented that deal.

You will be punishing the service reps, not the people who make policy.

The problem with this kind of tech is a combination of false positive and police harassment of false positives.

Suddenly anyone with high blood pressure is a suspect.

I wonder if when tech will get deployed at customs.

When an institution or a person does something right, I find it useful to commend them for it.

There may be many other things they can do right in the future, that they are doing wrong now. And there may be things done in the past that were profoundly wrong.

But they've still done a good thing.

In the United States, communications professionals (and the people they coach, like our politicians) avoid admitting when they are wrong, avoid even *engaging* in serious discussion, precisely because people so easily latch onto any words acknowledging another position and turn it into a sound byte. Attacking people who do the right thing for not doing more encourages them *not* to do the right thing in the first place.

Here, a company admitted it was wrong and apologized. It may or may not be disinformation to distract us from spying on behalf of the Chinese Government; and the company may or may not still be doing things we consider wrong. But the company's message was the right one, and they deserve praise for taking responsibility for a foul-up and acting to correct it.

Patent examiners are not experts in the sense that we think of experts--they are not, for example, in the top 100 people in the world working in a given space, nor do they even have lots of professional experience in the space.

They are also not laypeople. They need to have a technical degree, and the degree they have is generally but not always relevant to the patents the office has them review.

So while they are not experts and not supposed to be experts, they are also not the clerk from your supermarket--unless the clerk happens to have studied engineering.

Nothing is going to happen until (1) a senior officer at GM has his car hacked, (2) a very public hacking makes security a point on which automakers compete, or (3) they get sued.

That is one goal. Another goal is having students be employable when they graduate. These are not mutually exclusive.

Yes. Freedom of Speech, as conceived in many nations, includes the freedom to speak irresponsibly. These nations may be destroyed by that freedom, which creates an ecosystem of mostly-stupid ideas that it is very, very hard for wiser minds to change. Or they may be saved by it, if nations such as China tighten their grip on information far enough that they overly limit the free flow of innovative ideas and legitimate idea-generating-and-analyzing debate.

There are people on both sides of the political spectrum who should never be allowed to publicly speak to the American public about politics again. Not because we may disagree with them, but because they are obviously wrong, and alarmist, and they are hurting America by their false contributions to the debate. So it is in many free nations.

I had to build my infinite tape drive so that it stretched uphill in the snow...