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Comment In 2017 He Predicted Level 5 Autonomy (Score 2) 104

Musk has a history of overblown promises in AI. In April of 2017, he said that a Tesla would be able to drive from "a parking lot in California to a parking lot in New York, no controls touched at any point during the entire journey" (https://electrek.co/2017/04/29/elon-musk-tesla-plan-level-5-full-autonomous-driving/).

Spoiler: it did not.

Comment Re:Younger folks loved it (Score 1) 447

I grew up with the original trilogy. I'm not sure how to back this up without listing a bunch of ridiculous examples, but it's safe to say I'm a fan of the series.

I really liked The Last Jedi. It's not perfect, but I enjoyed it. I understand how a lifetime can cause someone (Luke) to change his perspective from hopeful to embittered. I understand failing to meet the expectations of your youth.

I liked Rose, and the adventure to Canto Bight.

Do I count?

Comment Re: Same with China (Score 1) 188

Legal process service does not go through first class mail.

If you're referring to a summons, usually it is done through certified mail, which is a service of the USPS. Further, all service after the initial service is done via first class mail. That is changing in some areas of some states due to efiling, but service by USPS is still a critical part of the infrastructure on which the legal system depends.

Comment Re:The big picture (Score 1) 211

Help me out here, because I really don't understand how it works....but how are you supposed to pay for private health insurance if you lose employment?

I think that the argument was that you could leave your job and become self-employed or join a small business without a company plan. I did that. I left my job to start my own business, and I insure myself and my family through the marketplace.

It has not been a particularly pleasant experience. While yes, I am able to get insurance, the marketplace has an extremely limited number of options. For 2014, I had 3 choices in my state. For 2015, it's better and bigger, but choice basically amounts to "choose your hospital system."

The worst part, though, has been the repeated bureaucratic barriers the system puts into place. First, I had to prove the citizenship of me, my wife, and my children. Our birth certificates were not initially accepted as proof. After a back and forth with the Marketplace, I eventually convinced them that we were, in fact, citizens of the US. I should note that for at least four generations from me and my wife, our ancestors were born in the US. It's probably more than four.

The issue we continue to battle, though, is "proof of income." My income decreased dramatically -- it was to be expected as I went from a dependable salary to starting my own business. Every few months, I get a request from the marketplace to submit a W-2. After getting on the phone and explaining that I'm self-employed, I get asked to submit an income ledger. As I am an attorney, many of my financial transactions are legally privileged and I am not permitted to disclose them except in a general sense. The first several times I submitted my self-employment ledger, it was rejected on the grounds that it did not contain sufficient information. Additional calls followed, and I have some small hope that my most recent submission (done this month) will be accepted without further objection.

In any case, someone who says that it's easier to start your own business now than before may be technically correct (the best kind of correct), but it's no cakewalk now.

Comment Re:Multiplatform? (Score 5, Informative) 164

It does indeed appear to be OpenBSD only at present (from http://www.libressl.org/ ):

Multi OS support will happen once we have

        Flensed, refactored, rewritten, and fixed enough of the code so we have stable baseline that we trust and can be maintained/improved.
        The right Portability team in place.
        A Stable Commitment of Funding to support an increased development and porting effort.

Comment Re:No so much (Score 1) 637

If the answer is "No," then I've got some even worse news for you: we already have "socialized medicine." The patient will, in fact, be treated, and you and I will, in fact, pick up the tab. It just costs us several times more than it would in any other civilized nation on Earth, because unlike those nations, we insist on kidding ourselves.

This

This is where the debate ends. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act passed in 1986 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_and_Active_Labor_Act) made the US a single payer system, we just haven't been honest about it. Because of this law, anyone who enters the ER with an emergency must be treated. If the person does not have an emergency, they may be sent away; however, if they have an actual condition (e.g. cancer), the hospital must treat it later when it is worse and an actual emergency.

I dislike the concept of the government being the purveyor of healthcare for philosophical reasons -- because if it provides it, it is at least implied that it can take it away. It also gives the government essential control over the medical profession (again, if you're the only payer, you can set the rules). The government manages to mess up most things it touches. That said, the current situation is both morally and economically untenable. At some point, reality and practicality triumph over philosophy. Everyone is living longer, and nearly everyone is going to need some form of long term care. The only economically efficient way to handle that is to have a single payer. Or let them die.

Games

Video Slashdot's Rob Rozeboom Interviews D&D Designer Mike Mearls (video) 139

Mike Mearls is the Senior Manager for the Dungeons and Dragons Design Team. He's been with D&D publishers Wizards of the Coast (a subsidiary of Hasbro) since 2005, Before that he was a free-lance game writer and designer. In this conversation with Slashdot editor Rob "samzenpus" Rozeboom, he talks about changes in the latest version of D&D and how the company interacts with players. (We'll have some more chat with Mike next week, different wizard time, same wizard channel, so stay tuned.)

Comment Re:What? (Score 3, Informative) 31

What are they referring to here? This seems like a quote pulled out of context and now it makes no sense.

"It's only 40 lines, but every line carried some careful thought. "

Indeed it is taken totally out of context -- it's from pg 4 of the article, talking about a library called d3.js, which is apparently a library "to make things move on the screen"

Windows

What's Keeping You On Windows? 1880

tearmeapart writes "It may be time again for another discussion/flamewar on the reasons why a lot of us are (still) using Microsoft. The last big discussion on Slashdot was close to 10 years ago, and a lot has changed since then: Windows XP and 7 have proven to be stable (and memories of Windows ME are mostly gone.) There are many more distributions for Linux, especially commercial options. Distributions like Ubuntu and CentOS have made GNU/Linux more friendly. Options for word processing, spreadsheets, etc. have grown. Apple and their products have changed considerably, though their philosophy hasn't. Microsoft Silverlight came and is on the way out. Wine and solutions like Transgaming have matured. So... why are a lot of us still using Windows? What would it take for us to switch?"
Moon

Reported Obama Plan Would Privatize Manned Launches 450

couchslug writes with this excerpt from the not-yet-paywalled New York Times: "President Obama will end NASA's return mission to the moon and turn to private companies to launch astronauts into space when he unveils his budget request to Congress next week, an administration official said Thursday. The shift would 'put NASA on a more sustainable and ambitious path to the future' said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. But the changes have angered some members of Congress, particularly from Texas, the location of the Johnson Space Center, and Florida, the location of the Kennedy Space Center. 'My biggest fear is that this amounts to a slow death of our nation's human space flight program,' Representative Bill Posey, Republican of Florida, said in a statement." If true, this won't please the federal panel that recommended against just such privatization.
Privacy

Detailed Privacy Study Finds Loopholes Galore 126

BrianWCarver writes "The San Francisco Business Times covers a study by student researchers at UC Berkeley's School of Information pointing up the massive holes in privacy policies and protections of which US companies take advantage. The researchers have released a study and launched a Web site, knowprivacy.org, in which they found that Web bugs from Google and its subsidiaries were placed on 92 of the top 100 Web sites and 88 percent of the approximately 394,000 unique domains examined in the study. This larger data set was provided by the maintainer of the Firefox plugin Ghostery, which shows users which Web bugs are on the sites they visit. The study also found that while the privacy policies of many popular Web sites claim that the sites do not share information with third parties, they do allow third parties to place Web bugs on their sites (which collect this information directly, typically without users' knowledge) and share with corporate 'affiliates.' Bank of America, to take one extreme example, has more than 2,300 affiliates — and users cannot learn their identities. The full report and more findings are available from their Web site."
Biotech

Umbilical Cord Blood Banking? 409

Maestro writes "There must be many parents (and soon-to-be parents) here at Slashdot. What are your thoughts on umbilical cord blood banking? This seems like a major question for our newborn; the question is almost as stressful for us as naming the baby. Given Obama's stance on stem cells, the topic is timely. My understanding is that while the current uses for cord blood are limited, the sky's the limit for the future of stem cell therapies. But with the initial cost over $1000, and ongoing yearly fees, is it worth it?"

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