Because they want to charge you for the privilege. Remember, corporations are machines built to make money and that is all. They will fight anything that reduces the amount of money they can make no matter how completely idiotic and absurd it is. Politicians have already sided with corporations, democrats and republicans alike. Here's hoping judges are not as easily bought off and will have some common sense.

With all that is going down around the country, this is what they spend our money on? With the unemployment the way it is, social security not keeping up with inflation, and people having trouble making it, THIS is what my tax dollars are being spent on?

As a genome researcher, I'd like to point out that I, for one, do not have nearly enough genome data. I simply need about 512GB of RAM on a computer with a hard drive that is about 100x faster than my current SSD, and processing power about 1000x cheaper. Right now, I bite the bullet and carefully construct data structures and implement all sorts of tricks make the most out of the RAM I do have, minimize how much I have to use a hard drive, and extract every bit of performance available out of my 8 core machine. I wait around and eventually get things done, but my research would go way faster and be more sophisticated if I didn't have these hardware limitations.

I'm pretty sure the music industry gets to tax us for private profits and prosecute us despite the tax. They're businesses and they will do whatever it takes to maximize profit. Right or wrong is not a variable in their equation.

Red means higher risk and green means lower risk. There's a legend on the top left. Click on the circle that represents your ancestral origins. You can see the predicted increase in risk (likelihood ratio). It also traces the migration path your ancestors took to found your ancestral population. Click the other figure (Human Relationships) on the top left to see the same stuff but on a view that shows how all relationships on the map are related.

Plenty of hoarders will attempt to buy them, thereby creating demand for them. There will always be some people who want to hoard bitcoins and not generate the bitcoins personally. They will want to buy them at market prices. This constant demand will ensure transactions keep occuring. Look at any bitcoin exchange and you'll see that there is no shortage of transactions and the "hoarding" isn't bringing bitcoin transactions to a standstill by any means. My advice is put in a few hundred dollars on bitcoins.

A court of law does not decide whether something is ethical or not. It only decides whether something is legal or not. Corporations have a huge influence on what becomes "legal" and as such, get away with things a lot of people consider unethical (e.g. removing a linux install option from the PS3 after it was bought and paid for or making it illegal to open and modify a piece of electronic equipment after it is purchased). Assuming the neighbors is just a regular neighbor and never fuked you over the same way SONY has, then it is an improper comparison to make.

I smell BS. If someone ever tries to charge Bush and/or Obama for blatantly violating their oaths of office and the constitution, Obama will be able to say he didn't technically sign the bill into law and can not be held liable.

All this focus on the safety issue really exposes the critical flaws in logic we are committing. These cars are already safer than human drivers. If these cars took over today, we'd have fewer fatalities a year than we do now. That should be the end of it, but people are still going to complain because we'll accept 100 deaths caused by a human driver before we accept one death caused by a AI controlled car. Not to mention that any death caused by the AI controlled car would result in a massive investigation and therefore the death rate would asymptotically approach zero, unlike with human drivers where there's a bad driver born every second. The massively increased safety is still only one of the many benefits associated with this technology. There are a lot of people with severe disabilities who will have the roads open to them for the first time in their lives. It's hard to imagine for us what that is like because we were all able to drive at 15/16 years old. There are older people who are no longer able to drive as well and will now be able to. You can go bar hopping without worrying about getting a ride home. Cars will be significantly more efficient since the accident rates would plummet, cars can be made of lighter material. Electric motors would be more of an option since cars will be lighter and we will not be burdened with having to find an electric charge station for our cars. Parking will never be an issue again. We will be dropped off and picked up right at the front of any building. The list goes on and on people. Let's put all of these illogical fears behind us and help usher in a new age in human civilization before we're all old and gray.

> I think we can be pretty sure they wouldn't have I disagree. The Winklevii had the exclusivity to Harvard thing down first, which arguably made facebook what it is. The concept that they'd expand is perfectly logical as more users = more $$$.

It's convenient for him to say that his ambition was never to be local now and to assume that the Winklevii were against expansion, but this facebook drama intrigues me and I've read about it. I've never come across any evidence supporting your retort. We'll never really know what the Winklevii had in mind. I don't think it was the "elegant design" that made facebook successful, but the initial exclusivity to Harvard and subsequent expansions. That IS what the Winklevii had in mind Mark.

There's no telling if the Winklevii would have taken the site in the same direction did if they weren't screwed over. Facebook was initially local as well.

We're entering one ugly fucked up future where people who had certain types of surgeries will have to get used to being interrogated and searched every time they enter a major event wherever they go. Where people can see you and you entire family naked all the time. Carry something that resembles a gun? You'll probably be on a government list somewhere. If this is a representative democracy, why do these things happen? Our leaders are bought and paid for by people selling such security theater. I don't get how people can justify spending money on this crap when people in this country still don't have access to publicly financed healthcare for every single citizen, regardless of their ability to pay. We're willing to protect the public from a bomb, but not cancer? Where is the logic in that? Oh, that's right, Senators and politicians want to feel safe when they go to a baseball game.