I don't think that it matters... we are talking about innocent people who were later found to have done nothing to deserve death, rather than people who the police had legitimate cause to seek to apprehend... people who did not seek a violent confrontation with the police, but got one nevertheless.

I think that what you are getting at is something that my mother used to say to me when I was a kid... the friends one associates with, the way one presents themselves through dress, demeanour, etc., the neighbourhood that one hangs out at and more, all go towards other people's characterisation of you as an individual. If you hang out with your friends who sell drugs in a crime ridden neighbourhood, you are going to have more encounters with the police, regardless of race. The question is: is there a greater likelihood that one of those encounters might spiral into a violent and possibly fatal encounter because of one's race.

This is the problem with selecting a single element of detail out of a body of data and using it to make an argument that completely ignores the rest of the data.

If you look at the data in its entirety you will realise that no race, sex, or whatever is immune to being killed by the police... especially if you charge at the police with a knife or point something that may look like a firearm at them... the police will shoot you no matter who or what you are - this is just Darwin's theory of natural selection in action - weeding out the stupid gene so that it hopefully does not multiply, regardless of race.

However, if you look at all the data... not just the part that support the argument that you have already decided you want to make... all of the data... you will see that from time to time innocent men and women, black, white and everything in between, are sometimes killed needlessly by police. Sometimes it is an error - a civilian crossing the street in the middle of a shoot out with criminals - sometimes it is a cop who has had a bad week and that innocent person just happened to in the wrong place at the wrong time when the police officer lost control of their faculties. Regardless of the reasons, if you look deeper into the data... once again all of the data at the same time, not individual strands separated from the rest of the data... you will see that all too often, when this happens... when an innocent person is killed by the police... there is a disproportionate probability that that innocent person is going to be a black male than any other race or sex.

This is not a point of view to be debated... this is a matter of fact as evidenced by the publicly available data - we can debate why this might be the case, but not whether or not it is happening... that would be disrespectful to all he innocent people, of all races, whose deaths at the hands of the police make up the data we are discussing.

Now lets go out and celebrate one more gangster, murderer, rapist, etc who was stupid enough to go toe-to-toe with the police... and is now six feet under pushing daisies. We should not forget that sometimes the officers may not have had an alternative option that would safeguard life and property at the time or may have already exhausted non-lethal options at the time they took the lethal action.... sometimes.

The Guardian has been running a live counter of people killed by police in the US. The site is pretty haunting... showing a picture of the deceased as a normal smiling person before they died. While statistics can be projected so as to further any agenda, even a racist one as you rightly state, the raw data - without any biased analysis or interpretation - speaks for itself: 1145 people were killed by police in the US last year, and if you were black, you were 2.5 times as likely to be killed by the police as a white person.

But this is only part of the story... the Guardian counter allows you to click a link in the image of each person killed by the police to read about the circumstances under which they were killed, and it is clear that the vast majority of these people (regardless of race, ethnicity or sex) were out looking for trouble when they met their demise - criminal intent knows no racial or genetic boundaries - and maybe many of these people got what they deserved.

I think that the issue that many people take umbrage of is the clear disparity in which police handled the 226 unarmed people they killed in 2015. Once again, many of these so-called unarmed people were not innocent in their endeavours at the time they had their untimely encounter with the police. However, what the facts tell us is that if you were an unarmed black person and had a violent encounter with the police in 2015, you were 3.8 times as likely to be killed by the police as a white person. This includes people such as Keith Childress who failed to drop an object in his hand when instructed to do so by the police - the object turned out to be his cell phone, and one might understand why he might have hesitated flinging that onto the floor - as well as Leroy Browning who allegedly reached for a deputy's firearm during a physical struggle, prompting officers to open fire; Keith did not deserve to die while Leroy probably got what he deserved.

To be fair, Google has not made much from Java either... APIs on their own do not make money, it is what you do with the API that makes you money.

The challenge or the jury will be in quantifying the extent to which building the Java APIs into Android might have been responsible for the success of Android.

In June 2015, Wolfgang Epple, head of research and development at JLR, was widely quotes as saying that JLR will never make a self driving car:

Speaking through its head of research and development, Wolfgang Epple, JLR says customers should not expect an autonomous car from them as it has no plans to manufacture cars that drive themselves for one reason: They view owners of self-driving car or people who ride in them as cargo and don't consider their customers as such. ''We don't consider customers cargo. We don't want to build a robot that delivers the cargo from A to B"

I wonder what changed in the last 6 months.

Chaum is also building into PrivaTegrity another feature that’s sure to be far more controversial: a carefully controlled backdoor that allows anyone doing something “generally recognized as evil” to have their anonymity and privacy stripped altogether.

Whoever controls that backdoor within PrivaTegrity would have the power to decide who counts as “evil” - too much power, Chaum recognizes, for any single company or government. So he’s given the task to a sort of council system. When PrivaTegrity’s setup is complete, nine server administrators in nine different countries would all need to cooperate to trace criminals within the network and decrypt their communications.

So... my question would be... Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? who will appoint, monitor and document the decisions of these administrators and if necessary revoke their anointed status as the determiners of what is or isn't acceptable evil (e.g. is sharing a commercial movie evil enough to attract the attention of "the nine"... how about a casual statement calling for the non-constitutional overthrow of a government... clearly child porn would be considered evil, but what would the cut off age be, 16, 17 or 18... would planning to blow up a public facility in a western country be more evil than threatening to blow up a public facility in a country already mired in a civil war)? Will they be accuser, prosecutor, judge and jury? who will take cases to them and which legal system will apply... can they be sued in the event that they err? what will keep them beyond reproach and will their decisions be made public? will it be possible to appeal their decisions?

Lots of questions and no clear answers.

Any ship embarking on interstellar travel in the near future using any of the first two methods (a generation ship using conventional propulsion or a hyper speed ship using fuel, thrust or time improvements) is likely to be beaten to the destination by a explorers leaving earth hundreds of years later using superior interstellar travel technology.

Although a generation ship carrying massive amounts of fuel and a gigantic solar sail could boost up to speeds of hundreds of km/s, it could still be thousands of years before such a ship reached even the nearest star system... and then it would have to expend vast amounts of stored fuel to slow down, slip into a suitable orbit around the local sun and commence a search for potentially habitable planetary bodies, with no hope of ever being able to generate sufficient thrust to move on to a further star system, should the first prove to have no suitable planets to settle on.

Consider the rate of communications, propulsion, etc. advancement that would have taken place in the intervening 5000- odd years between the departure of interstellar explorers leaving earth over the next 100 years and those leaving earth, say, 2-3000 years from today. How would our present day explorers even communicate with earth using 5000 year old communication technology - heck, it would be tough to communicate with just 100 year old technology, let alone 5000 year old relics. And suppose the mission was successful... later and technologically more advanced departures travelling in the same direction would have to make first contact decisions not too dissimilar to the ones we make today about isolated peoples such as isolated tribes in the Amazon rain forest - only it would be more similar to travelling back 5000 years to the bronze age - round about the time when Stonehenge was built and Papyrus invented.

Future propulsion technologies, would not fare much better. The more efficient the propulsion technology, the faster the rate of travel. This might appear to be the answer, except that special relativity would mean that while time slowed down for the travelling explorers, hundreds or even thousands of years could pass here on Earth for a few years of time for our hyper-speed interstellar travellers. So, while interstellar travellers travelling at hyper-speed could reach their destination in a single life time, they too could be beaten to the punch by a later departure hundreds of years later (or just a months days later in time passed aboard the interstellar ship).

That special relativistic time dilation thingamajig can be a bitch!

Just my thoughts and observation

It matters because 100 years from now, people will want to know in much the same way we want to know the people who gave birth to much of our present day civilisation... the Newtons, Marconis, Teslas, Edissons, Berners-Lees, Da Vincis, Graham Bells, Franklins, Einsteins, Pasteur, Curies, Wright Brothers and lots more.

Bitcoin may not still be around in 100 years, but the distributed ledger and crypto currency genies are never going back into their bottles and they will transform the world as we know it in more ways than the internet and world wide web has. The concept of centralised control over the generation, storage and transmission of tokens of value is unravelling faster than the centralised control and distribution of information and knowledge has.

It matters because 100 years from now people will want to know more than a pseudo name... they will want to know to who Nakamoto really was, where he lived, what inspired him, what he ate for breakfast, and all the other stuff that make our modern day legends more than myths.

It matters because if we do not solve this mystery in our lifetime, the genius of Nakamoto will remain a myth forever.

Surely we are beyond this... don't we already have self destructing software?

Making a self destructing chip, will not destroy the software and data on the electronic device powering and commanding the chip (chips need, power, storage, memory and other i/o stuff to be useful)

Do not project your racism on others

To a large extent Google's mobile advertising business is already dependent on Apple's "generosity". Up to 75% of Google's mobile ad revenue is dependent on Apple's continued placement of Google as the default search engine on its iOS devices http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05... - a treasured position which Google pays Apple an estimated $2 billion a year to hold onto http://bgr.com/2015/05/27/ipho.... The loss of of mobile advertising revenue from iOS platforms would knock over 13% off Googles total revenue (nearly $9 billion in 2014 numbers)

Yes, things could be a lot worse if Google had not entered the market with its own mobile operating system... But with support for ad blocking, Apple is going after Google, not Android (after having earned 90% of the smartphone profits in 2014, Apple needs Android as much as Microsoft needed the Mac in the late 1990's to stave off the scrutiny of regulators around the world).

According to Jason Calacanis https://www.linkedin.com/pulse..., Tim Cook is slowly getting revenge on Google on behalf of Steve Jobs - without doing it directly... "We did not enter the search business," Jobs said. "They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them..." So, Tim Cook is playing the slow revenge game....

Given the revenue challenges that all Android OEMs are facing (with the obvious exception of Samsung), by going after Google's ability to remain Android's the benevolent benefactor - i.e. ad revenue - Apple may yet give Steve Jobs the revenge he sought... only it will not be the thermonuclear victory he envisaged... its a slow war of attrition.

Even Google has to obey the law in India.

If Google, Facebook or any other company doing business in India, Germany, Sudan, Britain or any other country for that matter, does not like the laws in that country, then they can take the moral high-ground, as Google did in China, and leave... even if it costs them dearly in future revenue growth.

A victory in a US court for Sikhs For Justice will remain a hollow victory because it would be unenforceable outside the jurisdiction of that US court (unless Facebook is willing to be in contempt of an Indian court order - which will be fully enforceable in India). What Sikhs For Justice should be doing is applying pressure on Facebook to pull out of India in protest over Indian censorship... then a local social network site will take its place just as happened to Google in China.

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:
[auntie Elizabeth returns Firefox phone because she can’t Skype/FaceTime/WhatsApp/...]
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[reality sets in at Mozilla]
:
[consumers in emerging markets don’t care about operating systems, walled gardens, lock-in, etc. as long as the phone runs their favourite apps] :

:
[Mozilla declares Android’s picket fence more acceptable than iOS’s palisade fence]
:
[Mozilla digs foxhole in Android’s not-so-walled garden and declares it open]
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[Mozilla tunnels under iOS palisade fence and declares it web enabled]

If I could give you a vote for insightfulness I would... I fully agree with you... idiocy is not as rare as the smart people of slash-dot think... its quite common place in the bowels of most governments around the world.

I do not know of any legal jurisdiction that tries government officials or politicians for the accidental and unforeseeable death of a civilian killed during a legally sanctioned security operation

However, most societies expect that everything will be done to ensure that the probability of such a tragedy occurring again in future can be minimised