This thread isn't about downloading the latest pop album. I was talking about Chinese companies stealing hardware and software technologies in order to resell them or to use them to outcompete the original developer in the market. Most people (even on Slashdot) would regard that as stealing

My GPS doesn't know about entire streets. Apple Maps doesn't know about entire cities. What if I pick a destination that is a hospital or repair shop that it doesn't know about? What if the only one it does know about is closed or is tens of miles further away? You're adding new liability in order to guard yourself against liability

I'm not sure a judge is going to listen to that argument if he believes that the only reason the detector that failed was added to the car is because the manufacturer didn't want to potentially lose a court case over a broken taillight.

Step back and look at the big picture here. We're making a lot of changes here (paying for broken taillight detectors and hundreds of other detectors to be installed, adding other laws that have their own wrinkles) in order to save on a few court appearances where a car owner tries to pass on the blame for his ticket. Cases that the car owner may lose anyway and therefore would have solved themselves fairly

Then my medical insurance company is probably going to take the car company to court for the ambulance bill, which can be pretty steep

The original post played Devil's Advocate and said essentially "shouldn't a car manufacturer make a car that can't get repair tickets", and I'm just saying that sometimes even a reasonable person would use a technically ticketable car in an emergency. And if a reasonable person would do that *ever*, then blocking someone from using a technically ticketable car is a potential new liability. If we're playing Devil's Advocate, then you can't just play it on one side.

So right now in the current system, if you had to go to the hospital and you were alone you wouldn't drive there if your taillight was broken? You wouldn't assume that people can see your other taillights or brake lights, or maybe it's even daytime? Cops can give tickets for broken taillights even if you have other working lights and even if it's daytime. Usually they'd give a warning or an order to show proof of maintenance at a later date, but they *can* ticket because technically that's not "100% safety compliance” as the original poster mentioned.

The primary purpose of Google fiber is to threaten anyone in the industry that would charge Google (as a content owner) a fee to move data to their customers (i.e. network neutrality). "You charge us to reach your customers, and we'll make them our customers or less profitable customers with a price war." They probably only need to successfully wire one city to do that, so we'll see what happens after that. They try to avoid entering industries that require a lot of customer service, so it seems unlikely they'd follow up K.C. with a lot more deployments unless they feel they need to do so to prove their point.

Actually it's more like "all the money we were spending on R&D was producing technology that China was stealing anyway"

That's just introducing new liability:

I needed to go to the hospital, but the car wouldn't drive because it said I had a broken brake light
I missed my flight and lost my job, because the broken brake light detector was faulty
My car drove itself to the repair shop, and got a ticket for a broken brake light on the way
My car drove itself to the repair shop while I was indoors, and I came out to drive to the hospital and had no car

I guess this is anecdotal, but I'm human and I stopped understanding about halfway through your otherwise high-quality explanation

As a bonus Dora the Explorer will make so much more sense (and your kids who watch it will too)

Exactly. It just means they're past the Bargaining and Depression stages and are into Acceptance...

It's not terribly far from Flowers for Algernon either

This argument would be a slam dunk if this were posted AFTER it shipped. But until then this story is just as premature as the ones saying it'd fail

Good point, sounds like it might be PHB-proof

It's worse than that. Even if you can manage to separate the different roles (or treat every post like it's completely public as a common denominator), if your friends can't do it too then you can get in trouble for things they post about you

I wonder how many pointy-haired bosses have used Chaos Monkey to load test their own Amazon setup but accidentally hit someone else's servers (or is it somehow PHB proof?)

It's a mistake because an error was made in the process of transcribing genes between DNA strands. The mechanism failed in its task, no matter whether that mechanism itself was designed or evolved