Facebook did NOT test it's systems

None of my examples related to testing systems; they all related to testing how users reacted. Literally the only thing that seems different about this to the thousands of other experiments Facebook and other companies are running constantly is that it had an explicit intention to measure the users state rather than just behaviour. I'm not sure that makes any real difference to the ethics.

Websites are conducting research constantly. When Google moves a letter a pixel in their logo it isn't for shits and giggles; it's because testing showed them that it changed something for their benefit. That testing was an experiment and involved users who will have had no idea that an experiment is going on. When a company tries putting something new in high visibility spots in some of its stores, then uses that data to decide how to place products they are performing an experiment on people who haven't given 'informed consent'.

Literally millions of experiments like this are happening all the time. It isn't viable to inform users of all of them, especially as many people performing them may not even realise they are doing it and it isn't beneficial to stop them all. Read what Facebook actually did, it may be that it crosses a line for you even though it didn't for me, and that's fine; so let's try and come up with a line we can all accept rather than a kneejerk reaction of claiming that any experiment is bad, no matter how trivial, without informed consent.

Where do you draw the line? If Facebook realised that showing more negative stories (by monitoring what people already see) makes people more likely to click adverts is that really any better/worse than them artificially increasing/decreasing the amount of positive stories a user sees?

If Google was having a hard time deciding if a page was junk or not, would it be unethical to put it in the results for some users and see how they react? Clearly that's an experiment without user knowledge, but it certainly doesn't sound like it's unethical to me and stopping that kind of experimentation or flooding sites with notices about them would make things better for users.

Obviously there are experiments they could run that would be unethical if users weren't informed and monitored; discussing where the lines are and agreeing some best practices would therefore make sense.

I've been trying to watch the entirity of Star Trek TNG. In one episode a system for monitoring and abating tornadoes is mentioned. I would expect any viable solution to tornadoes is going to be based on detecting likely tornadoes faster and applying counter-measures on a case by case basis. Most big tornadoes form from mesocyclones within supercells. Intervention to disrupt the formation of those mesocyclones, perhaps targetting the hot air updraft, is probably the most plausible way of stopping tornadoes.

That would work if you're a passive-aggressive out to get some kicks however it'd do nothing to make you or the roads safer. Being near drivers using phones is bad enough, do you really want to be near drivers who are confused about why it just cut off and are now trying to redial!?

I don't like littering, middle land hogs and people who don't recycle. That doesn't mean I get to go around breaking laws to try and punish them for it and nor should it.

What about their claims don't make sense then?

The calculation for how much energy you could harvest in a 100% efficient item the size of a dogtag is already on here and easy to calculate. The energy required to run devices like this (including very efficient ones) is well known. There is a considerable shortfall of energy provided and energy required even if everything is 100% efficient. It's quite literally like me saying that I can build a 3' by 3' solar panel that can run everything in your house. It doesn't take a genius to work out that the solar energy available couldn't possibly power anything like a normal (or even ultra energy efficient) house.

But this does raise a real point. Kickstarter needs some basic donor protections and means of reporting scams. Otherwise they'll just devolve in a feeding ground for con men and no one will take any project posted there seriously.

A mechanism for reporting scams, and some investigation of heavily reported scams is fine. Donor protection is just going to add more costs to all the projects. If these guys are running a scam then there's already a way to deal with this: The courts. As has been shown before crowdfunding doesn't mean you can't be sued for fraud. Kickstarter is fine as it is and throwing more regulation and costs at because of the odd abuse is just as stupid as the security theatre at airports to protect against the almost imaginary risk of attack.

It is informative. Unless you knew that a particular record in the dataset was for a specific medallion/plate combo then what he's suggesting is sufficient to obscure the driver. If you did know that then you couldn't obfuscate the data without making it impossible to tell which records relate to the same (known) vehicle. If you're happy to do that then you could just not include any reference to either medallion or plates in any format in the data.

I'm not remotely surprised that someone on the internet can lambast someone else when they clearly haven't understood either the issue or their proposed solution.

When the law said they couldn't do it in the first place and they did it, what makes you think asking them not to spend money on it would stop them ;)

It seems pretty obvious that people carrying small, expensive gadgets around with them are a prime target for thieves, that this is a legitimate, pervasive problem, and that this solution is effective in combating this crime.

Plenty of things can seem pretty obvious, it doesn't make them true by definition. Having said that, the figures look like a good enough reason for other manufacturers to follow suit. If it turns out it's a statistical blip then thieves are still left with less viable phones (proceeds from crime) and if it is working then great. Having said that, I do wonder what proportion of phone thefts are by people who don't make a living out of crime and so aren't being displaced into another form of crime? If we're getting less iPhones nicked but the criminals are just stealing wallets, house breaking or whatever instead it's hardly a step forwards...

Germany isn't a free market; I forget sometimes that people sufficiently dense not to know that lurch through here and thus didn't add sarcasm tags.

Because under the socialist Obama administration

Thank god that free market, not socialist at all Germany is interested then *rolls eyes* Fuck me some of you Obama haters are retarded.

Wouldn't you rather look up recipes on a pad so

Yes I would, but maybe I'd like my fridge to do it so that it can see if I have the ingredients I need.

I'm using a 10 year old 2nd hand fridge that won't break so and is efficient enough that I can't really justify replacing it so I'm hardly the target market for IoT fridges; that doesn't mean I'm woefully short on imagination and can't think of dozens of useful things it could enable, or need to dismiss them out of hand because of some superficial assumptions about them being unusuable.

If I can get one with Ethernet instead of WiFi, I'll be a happier camper.

Because if it's wireless it's going to brute force your key, or because you lack the self-control not to fill it in even though you claim not to want the functionality? Damn smart TVs, how horrible of them to give you something that will allow you to watch Netflix (just like you want to) directly on the device.

Not that there will be commonplace autonomous cars in the next 20 years, they will remain as common as the flying cars hypothesized in the 1960s ... and the reason is simple:

Flying cars actually offered very little. Flying is comparatively hard even in vehicles made for it, especially in what would be an inherently high traffic environment. Something that works well on land has compromised quality in the air and vice versa. There are a multitude of reasons why combining a car and plane was unlikely to be a worthwhile endeavour, even if the technical issues were minimal.

I don't expect to be driving an autonomous car in the next 5 years, but given the HUGE benefits they would provide a huge amount of money and effort is gong to keep being thrown at the considerable issues. There will be self-driving vehicles within a decade, not because it'll be easy but because the money waiting for the people who crack it is huge.