A video is a poor substitute for a well-designed user interface. For one thing, the forced-pace of a video can overwhelm new users [for whom it seems to fast] and tempt experts [for whom it seems to slow] to skip the tutorial altogether. But mainly, all forms of documentation (videos, manuals, etc.) exist separately from the artifact they document. They have to be remembered or referenced and mentally paired up with what the user is currently looking at. By contrast, design cues (labels, shadows, animations, etc.) are welded to the exact moment and place in which a user is trying to figure something out.

That's not to say that good design can completely eliminate the need for documentation, but should you need to watch a video to figure out how to launch an app on a modern OS? Or open the control panels / system settings / whatever you want to call them? This is a solved problem in OS design, and Microsoft doesn't get a bye in my book for adding a tutorial to compensate--that they tried to paper over it in that fashion is evidence of design denialism at Redmond.

While I agree with your examples (as you've stated them), manufacturers do have a responsibility for building safe products, anticipating obvious failure modes that could cause human injury, and adequately/appropriately communicating safety issues to end users. As the saying goes, safety is everyone's responsibility (manufacturer's and owner's), and while there are some egregious examples of folks seeking a payday off their own stupidity, let's not forget that good product design is the surest defense against human folly.

Moreover, this whole "IQ is wrong because intelligence can be measured in many different dimensions" idea never seems to hit the other major problem with how we typically think about IQ: IQ is bad because it suggests that intelligence is a fixed, innate quantity.

Why does this matter? Well, psychologists have found that people who perceive intelligence as an intrinsic personal characteristic have trouble learning new skills and overcoming certain types of obstacles. (Presumably because they are worried about appearing stupid at something.) By contrast, people who think of intelligence as something that is fluid, that can be built, are more willing to throw themselves into a new activity. Of course, the latter group ends up learning more, which makes your views on IQ curiously self-fulfilling.

As an example, one group of researchers gave elementary kids a reading assignment. The first paragraph contained some really dense material way above their reading level. The remaining paragraphs were accessible and age-appropriate. Kids who believed in fixed intelligence (as determine by a separate test) did very poorly on the reading assignment compared to their peers. Apparently, they got tripped up on the first paragraph and seldom completed the reading.

It's not just that we humans have things to hide (legitimate or not), it's that privacy is a basic psychological need. Some people can't work or even pee if someone's watching over their shoulder. Zoologist see this basic need in animals that start going crazy (exhibiting stereotypic motions, etc.) because they've been kept in a concrete pit in front of the public for years (and now zoos exhibits are designed completely differently as a result).

Privacy is a human right--not because we have secrets, but because it's a fundamental need.

But... it takes a huge amount of land to support hunter-gatherer cultures. I don't know how much, exactly, but I've seen estimates from ~25 acres per person up to 640 acres per person (1 square mile). Which means these folks were living in very small groups, probably migratory but still extremely spread out. A global drought or el-Nino style weather changes seem like a more likely global threat than flu.

Groan.... everybody's got a solution for code quality, and it always seems to involve being real anal in some respect or another.

The problem with these (untested, speculative) solutions is that they prioritize one development concern at the expense of others. Notice how your own solutions, for example, do nothing to address the installation/deployment issues spoken about in the fine article. Mandatory unit testing is not going to solve usability problems and better static analysis tools (wonderful as they are) aren't going to cue your dev team to add good diagnostic support to the product.

That's not to say that you can't improve code quality thru better languages and tools. You can. But it takes engineering wisdom. And it takes testing (both dog-fooding your own dev tools and community review). And languages/tools can't do everything: to get better code, you ultimately need to get better people, ideally ones who have a balance of all the hard and soft skills needed for successful development. For a field with strong market demand and low barrier to entry, that's going to be hard do anytime soon.

The parents are legally obligated to send them there. They can change (for now, maybe not for long) that by paying lots of money or uprooting their life and moving somewhere else. That's not acceptable for a free society

I don't really like Texan-style religious crazies, and I'm not saying that these badges are a bona fide violation of her faith, but no friend of liberty ever says "if you don't like it, don't live here".

Ads would have cropped up anyways, just like they did with cable TV (originally sold under the "pay-and-don't see ads" theory).

And it's easy to see why this is... the penalty for slowly introducing ads, even to a paying audience, is effectively near zero. Oh, people will gripe and you might lose a tiny sliver of your audience, but most folks aren't going to have the righteous ire to punish you long term if they still like your content.

So I think it's pretty silly to hope that "advertising recedes and we come up with [a] ... straight-forward, less socially-destructive way to fund ... content." Advertising is not going away, ever, even if you had a time machine. And micro-payments would bring its own social ills.

Well... time and gas money for one thing. For gangs operating out of major metro areas far from state lines, it kinda makes copper theft uneconomical at current price points. (It also makes other crimes [relatively] more attractive, too. An interesting question to ask would be... what crimes will increase as a result of the legislation?) You won't stop everyone, but legislation like this will be considered successful if it substantially reduces such losses.

Also, with something like this, the net inevitably gets tighter as more and more states pass similar laws [and notice that article is 4 years old].

That's what other states have done, but the fence is more amusing.

Not location-based, but country-based... if we had it to do over again, ccTLD's would be the way to go. That clearly "silos" trademark disputes and numerous other legal issues to each country's respective governing laws. You might make an exception for the root DNS servers and other ICANN-designated entities, but the principal would be the same: the TLD identifies the legal authority for the underlying names.

Somebody tried that already. The supreme court smacked that down. However, it probably would not apply to a low-flying surveillance drone that has no navigational purpose other than interfering with one's enjoyment of their own property. You would think the activist face some sort of criminal or civil liability if the drones are crossing onto private property.

At the same time, the hunters may have criminal liability too... depending on the specific of where they were shooting.

It's more likely that WIPO will be co-opted by first world interests and used to strong-arm developing nations into unfavorable positions, in some cases robbing them of their very inheritance (cref., WTO). More misery for Africa... that's my guess anyways.

Actually, one could argue it's supported by the moral codes of most religions, as they all tend to feature some form of reciprocity. Of course, this would be a simplistic argument since any one religion you look at will have other principals, philosophies, and fads affecting how this gets interpreted and applied.

Personally, while I think the Golden Rule has significant weaknesses as a moral guideline, I think it can be helpful in situations like this where you don't have the ability to communicate with the other person. Even if you feel uncomfortable answering the death question (as we all should), someone who is exercising power-of-attorney is going to have to use their own reactions to a judge/make guesses about the other person's thoughts and desires in how to deal with a specific situation.