From the user POV, the question is whether the data is important. If it's important, of course you eject it safely, just in case somewhere in the dozens of layers of engineering involved between generating the data and writing it to disc, there's some issue that arises that happens not to work correctly if you pull it out unsafely.

If it's unimportant data, who cares?

From the engineer's POV, you have to assume some users will pull it out unsafely, so you make it as safe as possible to remove it unsafely, balancing that against the need to keep the write speed from being unacceptably slow.

You also have the issue of child support. While cash is necessary for privacy, its far, far, far bigger effects are (1) avoiding the obligation to pay child support by getting paid in cash, (2) underreporting taxes to commit tax fraud, and (3) money laundering / the purchase of illegal goods.

The big effect on the other side is the issue of how you're going to help people who can't get bank accounts, which is a real problem among poor and homeless people.

It's a small business that made a classic business mistake of attacking a bad review rather than saying they're sorry the person was disappointed.

After the firm filed the defamation case, there was a default judgment, which usually means the defendant didn't fight it in court (they didn't get a lawyer or fight it without a lawyer). Then the law firm tried to use that judgment to force Yelp to take the review down. Yelp didn't, claiming they were protected by the Communications Decency Act, which says they're protected from being considered the "publisher" of third-party content someone posts on their site. The California Supreme Court Agreed. (They also claimed that they had not had due process because they were not part of the original case, but the CA Supreme Court did not need to rule on that issue because the Communications Decency Act determined the outcome of the case).

The law firm could still petition SCOTUS on this (contrary to what the AP coverage says, you don't "appeal" to the United States Supreme Court, you petition them for a writ of certiorari and they choose whether or not to grant it). It would be a fun argument, academically speaking. Very few people actually practice much First Amendment law, but it's a very interesting area. Obviously it's also important for a lot of businesses, because while there are lots of businesses out there with legitimately bad reviews, there are also lots of businesses out there with a couple of terrible customers who never give them a fair shake.

And because the article ridiculously didn't include a link to the court opinion, here it is: http://www.courts.ca.gov/opini...

Dude. This is a major victory for people who care about civil liberties and freedom. Take a moment and enjoy it.

You've got a couple of factors coming into play. "Cowards" isn't really relevant, since the restaurant goal almost anywhere good is great customer service, and by making confrontation a prerequisite to feedback you are just blocking negative (and positive) feedback that would let you optimize for great customer service.

Any competent restaurant wants to be providing great service because competent restaurants calculate the lifetime value of their average customer, and it's really high. (Because customers come back to places they like). Couple that with the fact that it's really surprisingly hard to find good employees, and with the very high turnover rate in most of the restaurant industry. (Not all of it--some places have very low turnover and employees who stay with them for decades).

Tablets give the restaurant a way to get more information about the customer experience. Plenty of customers will pay a bill and even the customary 20% tip but not come back if they feel slighted in some way. Maybe neither the restaurant nor the server knows about the problem to begin with. The restaurant loses business, more customers are hurt, the server doesn't improve, the customer loses a potentially good or great restaurant, and it's bad for everyone.

By adding the feedback channel, you have a chance for the restaurant to fix it. Great restaurants will reach out to the customer and offer coupons or refunds or apologies or other solutions the instant they hear there's a problem. Even decent restaurants will at least reach out to the waiter or staff about whatever the problem was (overcooked item X, drink Y ingredient was not in stock, waiter sneered at me when they overheard me mention something political to a friend, etc...)

If done well, that's a good thing, because it makes the service better.

It's not the liability, or at least not just the liability, for most items.

It's customer focus. The primary focus of Amazon is customer obsession. The whole business orients towards that. A product returned by one customer is more likely to be a problem for another--it's more likely to be in, say, the bottom 10% of product quality for that item. Asking a customer to return a product is also a hassle for the customer.

Maybe and maybe not. Numbers lie all the time, and people have different valuations for things based in part on their point of view. You need to look into the details of a case much more to really figure out what's going on; we can just make guesses at this level of generality. It's like asking the court of public opinion to decide whether a murder defendant we hear about in the news is guilty.

Class actions used to be really bad about the kind of thing you're talking about, but things have gotten a little better because it's such a well-known problem, so there has been some reform.

Background on class actions generally: Class actions exist as to hold companies accountable for widespread bad behavior that causes only a little bit of harm to a lot of people. None of those people would sue without the class action and the company would otherwise have less *incentive* to prevent or fix similar bad behavior. So sometimes class actions are bad (when the company is hurt by the bad action anyway AND the rest of the industry would be hurt if they did the same thing AND the victims do not get anything meaningful) and sometimes they are good (when the company or industry would never reform a bad act without the worry about getting sued OR the victims get some meaningful recompense).

That ship has sailed. Phones are ubiquitous, any VOIP phones you have are on your network, and many computers and monitors and other devices have built-in microphones. Most conversations in the developed world happen in the presence of a microphone, and will do so for the foreseeable future.

Causation is supplied by experimentation and/or human reasoning, whereas supervised learning is currently about *prediction*, not *explanation*. But then someone has to sell the results to a human decision-maker.

Commercial AI right now is almost exclusively trained by data scientists whose job includes actually thinking about the data set they're working with. Businesses rarely plug an AI result into the market without understanding at least a little bit about why is does or doesn't work--although a model they don't understand may give them valuable information about causal hypotheses to test in the market.

Not to mention the fact that the example given probably just reflects a machine learning model that is missing competitors' day-before pricing and/or inputs to their pricing models from its feature set and therefore is failing to perpetuate an ongoing relationship between feature and price, and/or a model wherein a prior relationship did not vary enough to provide meaningful input to your AI model due to humans working to counteract the effect of that variable under the old pricing model. If you don't give humans this information, they also get it wrong.

It's worth noting that 90%+ of science and 98%+ of human reasoning doesn't prove causation either--instead, at most, it guesses that causation exists based on a correlative model or a set of reasoning skills.

Um. No.

There are many people who can make a $700-$800 payment monthly, but ask them to pay more or give them one bad medical problem or car accident plus recovery time and they can no longer do that. If the labor market doesn't provide a job that lets them earn enough to pay for local housing, or even if they can't find the job because of inefficiencies in the market, they become homeless.

Some programs mitigate that very slightly--emergency shelters are NOT great but it's cold outside in the winter, and subsidized housing can help if the list eventually gets to you--but there's nowhere near enough of it to match the need.

Addressing homelessness requires addressing numerous problems--actual physical health is one part of it. Mental health is one part of it. Training is one part of it. Having someplace you can take a shower, receive mail, and/or sleep while you try to get a job is one part of it.

So yes, plenty of people would still be homeless if the cost of a house was lower, because there are other issues involved in homelessness than just the cost of housing. But of course the two things are related, because people become homeless for the first time when they cannot pay for a home.

See, e.g., https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.law.cornell.edu%2Fus...

Read it literally, and it doesn't require you to be the original leaker of the information. Because you are knowingly and willingly communicating the still classified information to an unauthorized person.

Which is kind of besides the point, since the particular example doesn't matter much.

It depends on precisely what you are ignorant of. "ignorance of the law is no excuse" is usually how it's phrased, IIRC, which strikes closer to the truth because it's about being ignorant of *the law*, not ignorant of *the facts*.

Generally in criminal law (at least in the US), a mistake of law ("I did not think it was illegal to do X") will not excuse a crime, but a mistake of fact ("I did not think I was doing X") can sometimes negate a required element of the crime. So if you take a pen knowing it belongs to someone else you are committing a crime (albeit a small one), but if you take a pen because you confused it with your pen you are generally innocent (unless nobody believes you because you have a habit of stealing pens). It depends on what the specific elements of the crime are, which vary a bit from state to state.

This. Not only intent, but also discretion. As a practical matter, we've known for centuries that democracies overcriminalize because it is in the interests of legislators to never be blamed for letting a bad person out of jail. Thus the justice system depends on the discretion of police officers not to punish every innocent mistake and the discretion of prosecutors not to prosecute when it's too counterproductive or unfair. This doesn't always work, of course, but it's a huge part of criminal justice.

Intent is also critical. Most crimes have a "mens rea" and an "actus rea," basically the criminal intent and the criminal act. So if I take your laptop knowing it's yours, that's theft, but if I mistake your laptop for mine, my mistake of fact (i.e. I thought it was my laptop) negates the criminal intent part of the crime, so I haven't committed theft. (YMMV in practice, since a police officer or a prosecutor or a jury has to believe me.)

Of course, intent in law frequently means intent to do the thing, rather than intent to do the thing with an evil motive. So talking about classified documents may be a crime even if the government accidentally mails them to you or they are published in the Times, but no reasonable prosecutor is likely to go after you for that unless something else pretty bad is going on. That's where discretion comes in.

(And yes, obviously there are first amendment limitations that could come up, which would be balanced by a court against national security interests.)

No. We already have these sensors in passenger seats of every vehicle so that they can warn the passenger to buckle their seat belt. It's a commodity.

It is predictable that people would try to use their Tesla this way, and it could obviously cost lives, so they should be built to at least warn you against doing this until they are ready to be fully autonomous. He put the lives of everyone on the road at risk.

If there isn't a sensor, there should be one. If there is one and it's only designed to trigger on the seat belt and he had the seat belt plugged in, then he bypassed the security check.

Sure (at least generally--I'm not sure about the history of lasers specifically). But someone still has to pay for it, assuming you want full-time scientists. Sometimes it's students paying tuition. Sometimes it's grants from government or nonprofits. But someone has to pay for it.

We could have a better system--one that prevents things like the epipen markup. But we still need to pay for the basic drug development and for the human trials, and for reasonable salaries and profits for everyone involved in or bankrolling that. Otherwise nobody will invest in it and many fewer people will work in the field and the drugs won't get made. It costs a lot to bring a drug to market.