The next one will be automated "city cars" built by Google, that will pickup and drop off people at work and take them shopping and whatnot.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, such a car has yet to be demonstrated. Google's demo vehicles are incapable of taking riders anywhere apart from a set track of stops, like a Disneyworld people-mover ride.

There's still probably a need in some cities for street-hail livery, which is what classic yellow cabs are -- in NY you can wait 5-10 minutes for the Uber or hail a cab in 30 seconds, and frankly the cabbie will be less of a pain -- my experience with Uber drivers in Manhattan has been a pretty mixed bag. As long as humans are doing the driving it might still be advisable for the drivers to get background checks and have commercial licensing and insurance, such things are prudent and won't kill the magic free market pixies that flutter about e-hailed car services.

As I understand it, city governments have a few simple problems with Uber-

1) Ubers can avoid poor neighborhoods at will, and there's really nothing the city can do about it. I live in LA, and if you live in, say, Watts, you must call a cab if you want a car, no Uber will find you there, because it's "the ghetto" and there's never an Uber within 20 minutes. Taxis can be and are required to pick up from all parts of the city, and their statistics are closely monitored by regulators to make sure they do.

2) Uber's trip pricing structure is very free-markety but it conflicts with most city's basic taxi regs, wherein a trip's price is a fixed formula of distance and time, no special charge for time of day or pickup/destination location. Uber can't provide this, because they use rate premiums to recruit drivers. Again the system is completely open to various kinds of discrimination, and the pricing process is completely private and not open to any sort of public accountability or scrutiny -- even they drivers, who are nominally the service providers ("Uber is not a transportation company"), can't control it.

3) These of course lead to the more philosophical dispute, namely, Uber handles the hailing, transaction processing, driver and rider ratings, and branding of the interaction, but whenever there's any sort of trouble, Uber can vehemently claim they have nothing to do with the driver or the ride, that it's none of their business, and governments and harmed parties must direct all their laws and lawsuits at little sole proprietors. This is a little too clever by half for some people and while following the letter of the law tends to skirt the equities a little too close.

All of this is totally fine as long as e-hail livery is a "premium" service, but some cities rely on taxis as a critical part of the transport infrastructure, and that's when price disparities and availability blackouts start to be problematic, politically.

Also, what problems does it solve exactly?

It is yet another attempt by Rails developers to construct a web app IDE that squares with their idealism.

We used to think something like a simple text web search was "too impercise" and you needed a hierarchical organization or semantic web to organize information on the Internet...

When the domain is restricted natural language can be quite sufficient- SHRDLU had a workable natural language system in the 1960s, and the relevant Siri/Android solutions today are quite up to the task of creating and copying logical objects, selection by attribute, transformation...

And, this will do nothing at all to fight addiction.

Nope, but it will save lives from overdoses.

There's a line of reasoning that's somewhat common, it goes: "We should never do anything altruistic ever, because it will create a moral hazard, and the mere potential of moral hazard is always worse than concrete good." Similar arguments are used against drugs that treat opiate overdoses, and relatedly, drugs used to fight alcoholism. Some of this is bound up in the idea that addiction is a moral or character failing, or strictly a psychological disorder that can only be treated with therapy and "getting to the real problem," and anything else we do is simply palliative and forestalls treating the "real" problem.

To your point, what needs to be done is a real epidemiological study, to see if people really end up taking more drugs, or if the trauma of OD'ing, being revived by the paramedics and spending a week in the ER with heroic interventions isn't sufficient to make some people hit bottom and scare them straight.

What's a secretary?

He is confirming that he is a self-absorbed narcissist with an inflated sense of self-confidence who has no remorse.

So basically he's just a Wall Street bankster, but with Bitcoins.

Foreign, no cultural context, limited language skills -- It sounds like this AI is ready to be deployed at Dell technical support. (You laugh today.)

There is no necessity to trust anyone.

Well, you're commenting on slashdot, so firstly, even if you've validated all your apps and system software against certificates, you're trusting a hardware vendor.

You're also trusting Dice Media not to /dev/null arbitrary comments.

The Apple people do some significant jiggery-pokery to keep the atomic retainCount mutations down to a minimum in the Objective-C runtime.

ARC makes a lot of deallocations deterministic and static, I'm not sure of the usage stats but the biggest graphs people have in running applications are usually either their UI View tree or their model object graph, the retain/release calls for the former generally reduces to a malloc/free after static analysis, and the latter lives almost solely in autorelease pools.

I'm not saying it's OK, I'm just saying the assertion that the NSA is "currently breaking the law" is doubtful. They shouldn't be doing what they're doing, but if you have congress passing acts authorizing X, a president who's regulations basically affirm X, and courts that refuse to rule on X, that's sorta the definition of legal acts.

There's a difference between "legitimate" and "legal," the NSA is doing the latter, not the former. Snowden is (claiming) to do the former, and freely admits to be in violation of the latter.

To be honest I'm not actually sure the NSA is breaking the law, they've got FISA rulings, the Protect America Act 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, all of which basically legitimize the known aspects of PRISM -- PRISM's who schtick is basically implementation of Title 50 USC 1881a. I don't think these laws are constitutional or legitimitate, but we'd need new law or a constitutional amendment to clear the air, because a lot of lawyers (and the SCOTUS for that matter) seem to disagree with me.

How can you advocate punishing Snowden while the NSA continues to break the law? At least Snowden is done with his law breaking.

I would definitely advocate trying Snowden.

We have a right to know what our government is doing, and the people voting for these idiots are responsible, but that does not mean they agree with their candidates 100%.

I don't see what "agreeing" with a candidate's actions has to do with it, we're responsible wether we agree or not. We're responsible regardless of who we vote for, or even if we vote or not. If you're a citizen, you're responsible -- if you don't like the candidates, you're responsible for changing the system to produce better candidates. Nobody else is going to do it. It's counterproductive and obnoxious to always vote for some marginal third-party and loudly assert "none of this is MY fault!" Your job is bigger than just turning in a ballot.

Did you ever consider why third parties in the US always lose? A protip: if your theory of politics insists that commanding majorities of people are persistently lazy, stupid or evil, you've got a bad theory.

Considering the situation, why would anyone have an iota of respect for the ignorant general public?

This sentiment seems completely at odds with his stated intentions. Again, if your theory of politics...

Another false dichotomy you're setting up. It is possible to believe that the general public is being fooled by the government or is ignorant, and still believe that there is a non-zero chance that positive change could happen if things are leaked.

I think this chance is significantly lessened by his refusal to stand trial, and his insistence on disclosing information that's patently intended to weaken the data collection of western powers to the benefit of his benefactor, Russia. His loyalty and intentions are definitely in question -- his actions are either fantastically principled, or he's epic trolling all of us. Most epic trolls, however, tend to lose track of exactly how serious they are and how much they're trolling. In this sense I agree with you, and Snowden is definitely not one thing or the other, though I suspect he's so deluded that even he isn't sure how much he's serious and how much he's just doing this to troll authority.

Insofar as he's leaking classified information just to tr0ll authority, though, he definitely belongs in jail.

That we elected someone does not give them a free pass to fuck everything up and say it's our fault.

It might not be our "fault," implying moral or direct culpability, but as citizens of a republic, the actions of our government are our responsibility, even if we didn't vote for the guy, even if we didn't vote at all. We have elections and we agree to be bound by the rules of them, and we confer great powers upon the people that win elections.

Do votes hold zero consequence for voters? If an elected leader does poorly, is it always just his fault, and the voters don't have to reconsider anything?

(I would add that, in the case of Bush, it's pretty clear the voters did want him to start wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, considering they reelected him by a healthy margin subsequent to those events, so I'm not even sure your concrete example applies. He didn't "fuck things up," he gave people pretty much what they wanted, they just wanted really fucked up things.)

Again it's like this total double-bind. If you think that there's a good chance that people won't properly debate the NSA after you've released the information, if you don't trust the American people to take it all in and take responsible steps one way or the other, there's absolutely no reason to release the information in the first place.

Unless, of course, you're motivated by pique and a desire to embarrass powerful people and institutions, because you're a radical that just likes to break things.

but he doesn't trust that we'd see he'd have a fair trial.

He doesn't trust the US government. And no, just because someone voted for someone, that doesn't mean they agree with the candidate 100%.

We're responsible for the fairness of our trials, not our government. The government isn't some foreign occupier that imposes its justice on us. YOU were the one downthread who was arguing that we're obliged to know everything the government does, because we're responsible for what it does on our behalf. Either we're responsible for what our government does, thus we must know everything it does, or we aren't responsible, so we have no duty to know. If we must know, we ar responsible, so we are responsible for the fairness of Edward Snowden's trial.

This would make sense if Snowden had an iota of respect for the American people's wisdom and discernment, as opposed to his doctrinaire ideology, but as you intimate, he probably doesn't:

When it comes to actually trusting the American people to come through and deliver on their own ideals, he'd rather take his chances with Putin.

That's actually a good idea, sadly. The American people are stuck in the mentality that they need to vote for 'the lesser of the two evils', which allows the government to distract people with 'hot topics' like abortion, gay marriage, etc., while making them ignore all the other important issues.

Exactly, he thinks we're moronic sheeple that must be lead by the nose to his morally superior position. This is why his argument is ultimately irreconcilable with his actions -- he says he made his disclosures to encourage debate and to let people know what's really happening, but he's unwilling to stand trial because he's reasonably sure that while people are upset with PRISM, they're probably just fine with the NSAs global surveillance in general, a program that he has utterly betrayed. He says he does this on our behalf, but he won't dare take the chance we won't be grateful. You cannot claim to be an idealistic American while fighting for American ideals from a Moscow safe house.