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Comment Stop the Moral Panic (Score 4, Insightful) 214

Please folks, let's get back to reality. First, it is completely legal in the United States to build your own firearms ( https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.quora.com%2FIs-is-tr... )-- anyone with access to basic machinery tools can do it -- think Zip Guns created by prisoners for the ease of creation. Second, plastic 3D gun are terrible.I would rather have a 1700s musket instead. The 3D printed guns have more in common with ancient firearms than modern firearms. It is cheaper and simpler to buy a fully built AR-15 than it is to "print" your own firearm from files downloaded off the internet. And if you really want to make your own M16 based pistol, Google will provide you detailed plans from their own servers: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpatents.google.com%2Fpat.... You provide the tools and skill, Google will provide the detailed schematics. Will Facebook now block Google?

Comment Re:No winners economically (Score 1) 268

I have little sympathy for an industry that could have spent the last 40 years reducing their emissions.

Paying for extra emission reduction would put you at a competitive disadvantage against power plants who just did the bare minimum. Or, in a highly regulated environment, it might run you afoul of price controls.

Comment Deception? (Score 3, Insightful) 157

If you are going to whip out the credit card to spend a little money, take a little time to read all the text on the page. It was in large type that it was a donation to defeat the candidate. How many times in the past have we seen cute, cleaver and obscene assaults on congressional candidates on the Internet? Just google Santorum.

If you like your fake congressional candidate website, you can keep your fake congressional candidate website. Its political speech.

Comment Re:Not as silly as it sounds (Score 3, Informative) 337

This isn't as hard as you make it out to be.

If your driverless car hits another car, your respective insurance companies pay for it unless it can be shown that you showed negligence. There is no liability for anyone. It goes from a case of assigning blame to treating it like getting cancer. Your medical insurance doesn't assign blame. It just pays out. You pay enough so that the insurance company always makes a buck. End of story. If a car company showed gross negligence, maybe someone could take legal action against them, but if occasionally shit happens and that is life, the simple and easy solution is just to have insurance be no-fault unless someone did something stupid, like modify the software. This is how most insurance works. Car insurance just starts to act like normal insurance.

In the case of your car killing someone, again, it is simple. Your insurance just acts like normal insurance. Your insurance company just pays out unless it can be shown that the pedestrian did something stupid and is own their own (like dive in front of the car). Again, if the software really bit the bullet, maybe you could try and hit the car company, but for the most part your insurance simply pays out and that is the end of the story.

The real change would be in insurance price. Your insurance price will probably swing based upon how good the car is at avoiding accidents. A car with a slow stopping speed and 5 year old software is going to be more expensive to insure than an agile car that can stop quickly and has the latest software. It is a boring numbers games that actuaries will have a field day with. You will probably have lower insurance rates regardless because the cost to insure for insurance companies will bottom out. You will have fewer accidents and blow less money on trying to determine liability. It will mean that they can score the same profit doing a whole lot less work, It is a win for everyone.

People are over thinking this trying to apply a world of liability to a world where there is little to none. If you break the speed limit, the cops might pull you over, but it will be just to check that your software and sensors are not screwed up, and maybe a warning to get your car checked out, not to give you a ticket.

Comment Re:Problem (Score 1) 661

Retina displays are the full actual resolution. For example, the Macbook Retina I'm typing on has a physical resolution of 2880x1800 and the GPU is physically rendering all those pixels. What you've just said actually makes no sense whatsoever. Multiplication of pixels in a 1:4 ratio of a smaller resolution? Making smaller resolutions just "blown up". WTF does that actually mean?

You can run the retina display at native mode but everything will be half the size (physically) on the screen. The standard default mode for the retina display keeps all your elements the same "physical" size on your screen but renders them with four times the pixels (1:2 ratio) to increase the detail and crispness of text and images.

Comment Re:Gridlocked with No Way to Prime the Pump (Score 1) 438

...and get drugs. Seriously. BitCoins have value. So long as they work as an exchange medium that is more or less untraceable, they have very real value. You can decry it as glorified monopoly money, but so long as you can covert from dollars to BitCoin and back to dollars with dollars in roughly equal to dollars out, BitCoin has value.

I wouldn't invest my life savings into BitCoin, but so long as "and get drugs" works, it has value.

The Matrix

Physicists Devise Test For Whether the Universe Is a Simulation 529

olsmeister writes "Ever wonder if the universe is really a simulation? Well, physicists do too. Recently, a group of physicists have devised a way that could conceivably figure out one way or the other whether that is the case. There is a paper describing their work on arXiv. Some other physicists propose that the universe is actually a giant hologram with all the action actually occurring on a two-dimensional boundary region."

Comment Re:Well if they want ... (Score 1) 178

I'm not arguing that its not open. I'm questioning how useful that is for consumers when in the end they can't even run the latest OS release until months or years after its released.

If you want an opn platform for hacking and modifying an contributing back to google then go for android. No problems there. Just don't think that that somehow means its better when you look at it from the consumers' perspective.

Comment Re:Well if they want ... (Score 4, Interesting) 178

How many people *ACTUALLY* need to run custom code tho? It keeps the iPhone mostly free of viruses or crash prone apps and the target audience for iPhone is customers not DIY hackers.

Android is so open but yet the Jelly Bean installation base is only 1.5% after 3 months. There's a difference between "theoretically open" and actual real world practise.

If you really want to run your own code for whatever reason (custom robot?) you can either Jailbreak or just get an enterprise license from Apple then you can run any code you want.

Comment Re:I've said it before and I'll say it again... (Score 1) 57

Um, money well bet? When you use the Google voice features it asks if it can build a database based on your voice so that it responds better to you. You can say no and it will just default to a standard attempt at voice match. Say yes, and it will start learning... like what most voice software does.

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