Not really. In a future of self-driving cars most people won't even own their own car so most of these cars will be shared - essentially automated taxis. So after the car drops you off it will go to its next call or park somewhere until someone calls it.
How is the car going to park itself? The grandparent's point was about how annoying trying to find a parking space is.
Can self-driving cars parallel park yet?
Can they detect a strip where parking is only allowed between 9-4 and it's 4:30? Can they detect fire lanes?
EDIT:
Also, are these automated taxis really going to be more affordable than owning your own car? Taxis are incredibly expensive today. Sure you save a lot of money when you don't have to pay a driver, but is it really enough to make car ownership undesirable?
> Can they detect a strip where parking is only allowed between 9-4 and it's 4:30? Can they detect fire lanes?
I don't have specific examples, but I know that it's possible to read signs easily, (as in you can write a program to do it yourself with no great techno-wizardry,) and I don't see any reason they couldn't use that data.
Yeah, sure, we can think of a far future where everything is automated but I think this discussion is more about the near future (near being when self-driving cars are for sale).
The logistics of parking go far beyond getting into the space. How does it pay the parking meter? How does it know if a parking lot is public or not, how does it pay for that? How does it know not to go into the unsafe neighborhood where wheels get stolen?
Compared to the logic involved in actually driving down the road safely these are all easy problems to solve.
But realistically they are problems that won't be had, because in the near future (and probably in the far future as well) most people aren't going to buy their own personal self driving car because not only are they expensive, but it is pointless to have a personal car when it is way more convenient to offload responsibility for the car ownership to someone else.
Instead they will use an app to summon an automated taxi car owned by a corporate entity (Google, Uber, etc), and when they are at their destination that car isn't going to park, it is going to be off to pick up another passenger.
The car owner will have designated secure parking lots for overflow cars that aren't needed out on the roads during non peak hours. The cars would return to that designated lot when not needed.
Sure, I might be overstated the problem of parking, but I still don't see how this is more economical than car ownership. If I have to summon a taxi for everywhere I need to go I need the taxi rates to be a fraction of what they are today.
I can't disagree with you on all of that, but I feel like you might be making the problem harder than it needs to be:
Almost any initial solution is going to be imperfect, and is going to involve mistakes if you try to solve for the entire problem space. Usually, the way to address this is to solve a small subset of the problem. If you don't know how to pay for the parking in a particular place, don't park there. Things like that. You limit the problems that you have to address, and the lessons you learn while applying that technology and the infrastructure that develops around its use alters the difficulty of refining it to address other cases.
I can easily imagine the way that I would solve the parking problem, at least initially: Set it up so that the car can pay wirelessly and make it so that people who own parking spaces can add their carpark to a database as enabled for wireless payment. There are even systems which already exist that do something similar to this; toll roads, toll bridges, et cetera: you put a little device on the front of your car and that records your usage of the relevant infrastructure, which is then charged to your account.
Put a bunch of image recognition for parking signs in the car - good parking space usually follow fairly straightforward formats; I'm not sure whether the signage is defined in statute or regulation, but generally they're much alike. Do some simple correlations on whether the person actually indicates they want to park there to refine the algorithm....
Crime figures are publicly available, so you can hook into that database for avoiding bad areas...
And have a rule that says not to park somewhere if you're unsure.
#
In the case of taxis, it's even easier: there are designated taxi ranks where they have to wait. And, considering there commercial enterprise, (there are two types of taxi regulation here, it's a bit weird,) you could rely on the taxi company to fill out a database themselves of other places that the car could wait - it's in their financial interest to do so.
>Taxis are incredibly expensive today. Sure you save a lot of money when you don't have to pay a driver, but is it really enough to make car ownership undesirable?
This seems to be a point that is often missed. In denser cities--where utilization can be relatively high--drivers make maybe $15 per hour. (Maybe a bit higher when actually carrying passengers which is probably the relevant metric.) So it's not clear to me how these hypothetical vehicles are going to so revolutionize the way people get around by cutting costs by maybe $15/hour (ignoring other labor costs associated with cleaning or any incremental cost of the vehicle).
The Google self driving car already relies on being fed a detailed map of everywhere it's going to drive. Adding things like fire lanes and parking restrictions to that should be relatively easy.
I think that will be the case for most families second car, but not their primary. People will own one family car, that's feels comfortable and contains personal items. The second car (today used largely for commuting) will be self-driving.
>> "Real" soldiers do sometimes use weapon-mounted optics for observation and target ID. They don't always end up shooting the people they're looking at.
I've yet to hear a vet tell me that's an acceptable crowd control tactic. Not everything the military does is crowd control, and when they engage in crowd control they don't use all of the tactics that an infantryman at the front lines might use.
To put into less hyperbolic context : when a 'target' is standing seven feet from you, you shouldn't need to aim a sniper rifle at them to identify them through its' optics.
A police sniper with a magnified scope isn't there to provide "crowd control" in the sense that you're describing, i.e., getting up close and personal with a crowd. They'd be providing overwatch from a distance.
That said, using binoculars would convey a much less threatening impression than observing through a weapon-mounted scope. On the other hand, we don't know exactly what the tactical situation was when that sniper was aiming at the crowd. Unless you do, you're not in a position to say whether he should have been aiming at people or not.
Think of it this way: you're in jail and you're talking to your lawyer about what he thinks the prosecutor's strategy will be, and how he's going to defend you against it. That has nothing to do with evidence admissibility but could still be damaging to your case if the prosecutor finds out about it.
I talked to a relative who is a lawyer and was told that court cases are not dramatic as seen on TV. Both the prosecutor and defense side have access to all documents and have ample time to prepare their arguments. There are no surprises in court (if there is either side can ask for more time to prepare based on new info).
So knowing strategies doesn't really help, because you kind of already know the strategy and have prepared your response.
Now - if you are guilty, and you tell your lawyer where you buried the bodies and the police happen to let a cadavar dog lose in that general location ...
However, I agree with the first poster - there should be an official secure channel for communicating with counsel after you are convicted.
"Now - if you are guilty, and you tell your lawyer where you buried the bodies and the police happen to let a cadavar dog lose in that general location ..."
This does release the Kafka-esque possibility of being indicted for contempt of court or obstruction of justice by telling a lie to your lawyer in a supposedly private email, and then the cops wasting lots of money on it.
If you can avoid indictment under the above, this is an interesting DDOS opportunity against the system. All prisoners should immediately email their lawyer that they know where Jimmy Hoffa is buried etc. Send three "private" emails to your lawyer with three different strategies and then conduct a fourth at trial. Something like that.
It's not about knowing the identity of the person, it's knowing how they are going to proceed in arguing their case. Setting up an argument takes a lot of time, it's their strategy for winning a case / defending their client. Knowing this beforehand will put one side at an advantage in preparing their case and specifically aim at any faults in arguments.
Also why is "win" in quotes? There's generally no winners in flame wars, but in a court of law decisions are made on who wins and loses unless there's a mistrial/deals being cut by both sides. So being able to concentrate efforts directly preparing against a known strategy that the opponent is using is a big advantage.
That's absolutely right, and in the few articles I've seen that break out Manhattan, it's still significantly more expensive than SF. Of course, that's old news, right? And being old news, "Manhattan is the most expensive place to live" doesn't fit into the current tech boom, linkbait narrative that all the blogs and news outlets are exploting.
Uber has higher-quality cars and you get to rate the drivers so they tend to be a little more polite and professional. Not that taxis can't have high-quality cars and drivers but it's more of a crap shoot.
I'm a big user of Workflowy and I felt the same about Gingko at first. The keyboard shortcuts help a lot though because I can get my thoughts down on paper much more quickly.
Interesting idea. Can you make it so that when I click in the card it automatically goes into edit mode? Having to click an "edit" button really slows things down.
I believe the issue is what happens to all the other data that's not related to the intent of the surveillance. For example, if you're talking to your spouse about a health issue, your sex life, etc. If that's not the target of the surveillance, the government shouldn't be retaining it.
And hopefully there are checks-and-balances in place to alert others if a government employee is accessing data about someone that he personally knows.
It's not as easy as "only save texts with the words bomb and weed in them". It's all saved, then analyzed, then retained a few years, then eventually deleted. Is that acceptable for the US government to do?
No, it's not. If a person isn't suspected of a crime the government shouldn't be searching or collecting any of their information. This isn't China or North Korea, we're supposed to be a free country.
It's also amusing how sure you seem about some things, while also adding in a few "hopefully"-s here and there. The truth is, you don't have any idea what they're doing because they don't tell anybody.
"It is never read by humans though unless flagged."
With the criteria for being "flagged" remaining secret. Are you a dissident? Now the government can make your life difficult by leaking information about your brief extramarital affair. Maybe the government will concoct a sexual assault case against you to shut you up.
It's not just about whistleblowers or Wikileaks. What about the guy who is critical of US government policies and is gaining a large following? What about the guy who organizes a boycott against a well-connected corporation or industry? What about independent politicians? What about protesters and activists? Almost all adults have some embarrassing secret that might undermine their credibility in the court of public opinion.
I'm not sure that the handling of a single document, especially one that happens to be about intelligence gathering procedures, should be THE standard by which we judge transparency.
This is not a unique occurrence. Not long ago, the DoJ responded to a Congressional subpoena for "Operation Fast and Furious" documents by delivering some 7000 pages, mostly redacted.
Seems this isn't particularly unusual for the last few years.
This "most transparent administration in history" by far isn't.
The entire point of FOIA requests is to allow access to previously undisclosed documents that aren't legally considered secret.
The notably weird thing here is that they released a completely redacted document rather than just declining the request. Is there some minimum amount of text required to be considered a response?
Politics aside, this is certainly one of the strangest things I've seen in a while.
There's some information here. There was a policy sent out for what information to keep from cell phones, to all US Attorneys and Assistant US Attorneys, and it's 15 pages long. It would have been nice if they'd included a date.
It's not strange when you are familiar with the behavior of large bureaucracies. In doing this they are able to say they replied to the FOIA request, and satisfied the letter of that law. The request was for a document, and the document was provided.
There was sensitive information in the document that happened to be 100% of the contents, this was redacted. They now cannot be sued for not responding.
"There was sensitive information in the document that happened to be 100% of the contents, this was redacted."
Is it a defensible position to assume that 100% of a document was excised as sensitive data? Since the subject of the memo itself is announced clearly, are we to believe that the presentation of the term "message" which almost certainly occurred one or more times in the body text was sensitive? What about harmless pronouns, conjunctions, articles, etc?
If a citizen were to reply to a government request of information from the government in the same manner, few would be surprised at legal consequences (penalties, incarceration) as a result. Actions such as this, in response to a legitimate request from the public allowed under law, can only serve the purpose of undermining confidence in the rule of law.
It's a pattern. This is the same kind of response the EFF got to its FOIA requests about NSLs (national security letters). They were sent back a pack of blank pages as all the text had been redacted. When the ACLU issued a request to the FBI on GPS tracking activity, they were sent back 111 blank pages.
I should hope so! The government is rather more regular than a particularly noisy lab experiment.
Now, as to what it meets the hurdle for statistical significance for . . . well, I personally prefer to avoid conspiracy theories when possible. So I'll just be keeping an eye open for more information.
It proves that they responded to this FOIA request by releasing a blank document. There are many different possible reasons why they released a blank document, but that's another question. (One which we can hopefully answer by examining the history of previous FOIA responses, but still another question.)
For proof that there's a transparency problem, I'd want to look at hundreds of FOIA requests across 10-20 categories, content of news conferences and press conferences, level of press access to government officials, responsiveness to press inquiries, responsiveness to Congressional inquiries, and I could probably think of a few more things if I put more time into it. Then I'd want to compare that to data from previous administrations.
