You're looking at this the wrong way. The problem is their customer not being able to access the services they wish to in a reasonable manner.

You do realize that the whole point of the internet is to connect to servers, clients, and peers of an unverified nature, right? And if they co-locate for any of their clients, they already deal with this issue on a daily basis? Go ahead and google Verizon colocation services, just for fun.

Well, the benefit to their other customers would be that their connection to other servers outside of Verizon's network wouldn't be impeded by the congestion of their customers who would like to stream said movies. Keep in mind, the customer who wants to watch movies on Netflix have exactly as many rights as the customer who wants to play MMOs, or the one who wants to send emails. This benefits all their customers - just not their RedBox business.

It must be a source of relief to you to know that all those services that you use are vitally important to all the other Verizon customers. Or just maybe those other customers' service fees pay for those services they use, on average.

And then the company who developed the software will be sued for negligent homicide, and the trucking and software companies will be on the hook for a preventable accident with no risk of human life on their side of the scale. Any software that is designed to have a preference to save the cargo of an unmanned vehicle versus not hitting a potentially manned vehicle will likely be ruled as failing to take action to prevent an accident (which will also be provable from the video recordings). There will be plenty of lawyers and jurors who will be happy to say robots are evil and the faceless companies should pay.

The two more likely scenarios are that a) the software will not be able to prevent all accidents, and hence loss of life, and b) people who are recorded engaging in reckless behaviour which causes massive loss of cargo will be summarily sued out of existence (if they survived in the first place). Tthe combination of the two will mean that there will be a spate of people doing stupid things, and then being reasonably cautious around unmanned cargo vehicles, at much the same levels as today.

Well, I can't honestly say I'm worried about hot button issues, and I wouldn't say I strayed from facts, either.

You are correct, little things like ethics, and 'doing the right thing' often have a financial cost, however small it might be. Just as not 'doing the right thing' will have a social cost, which can be surprisingly large at times. This, coupled with the irrational belief that a free market is any better than communism, does lead to some ridiculous discussions. See, communism and the free market do have at least one thing in common: they're both models which look good on paper, but do not take human flaws into consideration. And if you don't take those flaws into consideration, they will show themselves, usually in the most horrible ways.

For a look at the failings of the free (or unregulated) market, take a moment to read about a little thing called phossy jaw. And in response to the comment "Ah, but that wasn't truly a free market - the consumers didn't have enough information or influence." First, the problem was known (and solved!) for at least 5 decades, with employees dying on a regular basis before changes were made to improve employee health. Second, when the problem was first addressed, the companies in question were making about 20% dividends, and the industry is still around a century after they stopped poisoning their employees (mainly due to regulation). Third, please find me a free market today that works the way the model predicts, and isn't literally destroying people in the process, merely to maximize profits.

Models are wonderful things, even bad (or incomplete) models. But using models with known flaws doesn't lead to happy endings.

Just to be clear, that was an honest "good luck with that" right?

Why would they "get blown out of" court exactly? Do most federal judges enjoy things which, to me, seem to intentionally violate the constitution? Does google lack the funds to hire lawyers who would be competent enough to point out how idiotic these things are? I'm not a lawyer, as most slashdotters are not.

So, a thief who steals as much as an HFT corporation is also fine? Without the metric of social value, there is little or no point to many of the laws we have, especially the ones we think of as 'good'. I'd posit that if the social value of HFT is on par with grand theft, it should be outlawed, and for the same reason.

Which may be his point when he said we're "leading."

Seems a bit like saying "You chose to have nice stuff, it's partly your fault that someone stole it." Unless they offered it to the NSA, simply collecting the data isn't exactly inviting the NSA to shit all over the constitution.

You SPEAK a language? Like as in using your mouth with other people? You must be new here.

Okay, you really gotta pick one. Use whatever term you like, but either you can be depressed and then no longer be depressed, or once you get depressed you will remain depressed for the rest of your life.

I agree, far too many pharmaceuticals are made with the primary (or sole) intention of making profits, which probably includes using them where they shouldn't be. But as you said, they can be effective in extreme cases.

Well, having been extremely depressed, if this is, "marginally less shitty", I'll take it. I believe I feel pretty damned good (but what basis do I have to make that distinction on). As for normal, that's not something I was ever aiming for. ;)

What it comes down to for me is, if you have a problem, deal with it. Pharmaceuticals may be the solution for some people. If it isn't working, stop taking it! If it's done its job, stop taking it! If you still need it to function normally (or what passes for it), keep taking it! That can be applied to any situation you can find yourself in. "If you act like an ass whenever you drink, maybe you should stop drinking." "If you can't stand the pain without a having a joint, maybe you should have one." "If that anti-depressant isn't making standing in front of a bus look like a bad idea, maybe you need to do something else (but don't stand in front of a bus!)."

For the record, I find most psychologists and psychiatrists to be a waste of time. My anti-depressant was prescribed by my GP. The other things I had to help deal with my depression was coping mechanisms I had developed for myself over decades of undiagnosed major clinical depression (the label my doctor gave me on our second discussion).

P.S. The poorest test for depression is asking "How often do you think about suicide?" and taking anything but a number over a time span as an answer. Depressed people often have no idea how often is normal, so "Not very" doesn't mean very much at all.

The timescale is pretty short though. We're not talking about a natural food source that has been around forever, we're talking about something that has been around in mass quantities for, what, a century?

Punctuated Equalibrium, the theory, applies to evolution really, not ecology. And in one of his books at least, Gould points out it's really only talking about multicellular evolution. Bacteria don't do sex, they don't have "species" in the same sense that we do. "Species" often means something close to "organisms which can breed together." Asexual division obviously makes that not an issue. So bacteria aren't really constrained to punctated equalibrium.

He also pointed out in that same chapter that since bacteria dramatically outnumber eukarya, anytime some creationist starts yapping about how macroevolution is "unproven" despite microevolution, you could point out that microevolution is really the big picture that they've granted, and macroevolution is just a small, trivial detail.

The only specific microbes mentioned in the abstract is the genus vibrio. The vast majority of microbes are uncharacterized, which is not surprising given the sheer number of branches in archea and eubacteria. Bacteria, for example, it's estimated that there are 10 million to a billion species. It would be surprising, to say the least, if there is only one microbe out there that eats petroleum or it's byproducts.

He's not perfect in "The Dark Knight Returns" comic books if I remember correctly. He's a stupid tool for a tyrannical government who gets beat up by batman with kryptonite gloves and then comes around. Or something, it's been about a decade since I read it. At any rate, he can be a more interesting character, and "should" be for it to be an interesting movie. Jerry Siegel might say he's all around perfect, I don't know, but I do know that rules of interesting characters don't make an exception just because someone said that superman was "supposed" to be perfect."

Construction company executives, on the other hand, have perfect judgement about what is important and what is not.

~s

Idiots making decisions is inevitable. When talking about goverment regulation vs self regulation, it's question of whether you want the poor decisions to come from someone who is elected through a semi-democratic process with at least a stated goal of public interest or whether you want the poor decisions to come from someone put in place by the executive board whose stated goal is to make money.

An excellent question about a very nuanced and complex issue. I'm guessing the answer they will come up with be "Experts will define it" and the experts will be whoever set the default settings for censoring software that successfully schmoozes the right ISP executives and or politicians.

On the violent media thing, the logic there is that kids are more likely to have sex than go on violent rampages, which is not totally crazy. The crazy part is that kids are going to be brainwashed by media out there, and that sex is as worrisome as violence, but the being more concerned about youths reproducing than worrying about youths reenacting Terminator, that makes some sense at least.

If he's anything like the average salesman, only improvements could have occurred.