Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which other laptops support macOS? I have a company Dell that's horrible. Had many Vaios in the past that were great but the new ones aren't that great. Don't want a tablet or a touch screen as my main device or an Internet only device (chrome book).
Personally I've mostly been using ASUSes lately, which IMO offer decent value and have generally been very easy to upgrade. > I have a company Dell that's horrible. Aren't company computers pretty generally crap? I'm not sure that's a fair comparison to draw...
The Fight for the “Right to Repair”
301–310 of 325 posts
Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”
#302John Deere is attempting to make sales of their tractors 'leases' to enforce their ban on self repair: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/
I am super hardcore stallman-esque pro openness, but I also have somewhat libertarian views on how people should be allowed to operate. My thinking is: let them lock them down and after a few years, someone who genuinely values openness will come in as a competitor. If you pass a law requiring some kind of openness, companies against openness will just hang out at the edge of what is legally permissible. I am curious…
In short, if this theory actually worked, someone would have already done it. Instead, large established incumbents are mostly moving to this kind of behavior, because it's more profitable for them, even though it screws over their customers. When the customers have no viable alternatives, the customers aren't going to stop being customers. This is basically why we need laws for things in the first place: you can't trust people to act in the best interests of society (they don't: they're greedy), and the real world is too complex for "the invisible hand" to solve these problems through competition.
A good example of all this is Tesla cars: some people have been screaming for electric cars for decades, even resorting to building their own. The incumbent automakers did some half-assed attempts, mainly to please regulators in California, but never invested any serious effort into it. So finally an independently wealthy guy comes along and decides to make his own car company. (And even here people have a lot of complaints: Teslas are extremely locked-down and they'll threaten you for plugging into the Ethernet port.) Building a modern car just isn't that easy, even if you eliminate the gas-powered engine, and not many people or companies have the resources to jump in and have a go at it, so competition is naturally limited.
So yes, a legislative solution is highly desirable IMO. We've been down this road before: carmakers refused to honor warranties on vehicles if they were repaired or maintained outside of official dealerships, or with non-OEM parts. This necessitated passing the Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975, which forbade this practice, and only allowed manufacturers to refuse to honor warranty claims if they could prove that an owner's modifications or use of improper parts directly caused the problem. There is also a "right to repair" law in Massachusetts, which forces the aforementioned Tesla to make available factory repair manuals in that state (at a ridiculous cost though), but they only make them available within that state, and no other. What we really need is a federal law that goes much further than MA's law. Small business is the largest employer in this nation by far, and independent repair shops are being forced out of business by these consumer-unfriendly practices. The right to repair isn't just for end-users, it also gives end-users the ability to benefit from competition among repair shops, something you don't get if you can only go to official manufacturer shops. Anyone with libertarian leanings should appreciate this, and the benefit to small business.
Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a human would drive over a kidnapper. Say your car is bullet proof. A man in a ski mask wielding a machine gun jumps in front of the road and orders you to stop. You refuse, he starts shooting at your car as you get near him (this is why I made your car bullet proof, to keep you alive but unequivocally demonstrate clear and present danger to you). In such a scenario, if your only escape route is over the dead…
Wow, where did the machine gun come from!
Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”
#304If we go down this road, you'll be at the behest of all manufacturers. It's injurious to the consumer and environment alike, assuming more people will simply dispose of items rather than repairing them.
Of course it could give rise to disrupters who don't use these practices and win market share over the entrenched interests.
To me the key thing is this: if we lose the right to repair virtually all manufacturers will include some IP that precludes independent repair. The first battleground would be auto makers. Prepare to pay a lot more.
Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you even been in a Taxi? Or a bus? Or any situation where someone who is not you is driving the car? You have put your life into their hands when you do this. No matter what algorithm the self driving car is running, it is going to be 100 times safer than you driving the car. Yes, YOU are a worse driver than a self driving car, NO MATTER what "ethics algorithm" it is running, because any of the ones that could b…
No matter what algorithm the self driving car is running, it is going to be 100 times safer than you driving the car. And yet, I have driven hundreds of thousands of miles over many years under all kinds of road conditions without ever having an accident. Statistically my record is better than many, but it's hardly a unique achievement among experienced drivers who are careful. Tesla's Autopilot probably has done mor…
Are the algorithms a useful helper for some drivers?
I really really want all our rental vehicles to remind the drivers if they are on the wrong side of the road (we get multiple deaths every year from Americans and Europeans driving incorrectly in our small country).
Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also could not think. If you've ever been in an accident, you know that there's no time for thinking. Reflexes take over. Ascribing ethical decisions to the driver in such a situation is not rational nor ethical.
no, but it's a situation in which a computer could make a decision
Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think the ethical question is greatly overblown. Agreed. At least at the level these cars are likely to enter the market, the whole concept of what the car "knows" isn't likely to extend to "other people", "my passengers", "inanimate objects" and a probability matrix of injury/death/damage among these categories. Instead of this heavily anthropomorphized view, cars are much more likely to have a highly simplified…
More likely than one might want to think. A car traveling the same direction swerves into your lane, crowding you off the road. Does your self-driving car allow the collision and push the offending car back in order to hold your lane? Or does it avoid the collision and run you off the road? (As a person who drives in the mountains, this could have deadly results. If you live in the plains of Kansas, maybe not so much…
Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought the entire point of computer driven cars was to reduce the dangers of driving. What exactly is the point if we give everyone with a self driving car a steering wheel like they have now?
If that is the entire point, I'd rather they be illegal altogether, and we could avoid the debate by saying that we only license human drivers. I thought the entire point was to lower the costs of transportation and lower the number of cars on the road. The dangers of driving are not great enough to give up individual agency to that degree.
And I'm not saying your agency isn't worth other peoples' lives, but the argument that this doesn't matter because it would be rare is silly. It's still a decision that will have to be made and it's an interesting question nonetheless.
Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The former is still strictly safer. I find this to be an absolutely ridiculous statement. Software as we know it today is incredibly brittle. What will eventually be put on the road as fully autonomous vehicular control software will have been HEAVILY QA'ed, and will be continuously QAed by telemetry. Random people modifying that software invalidate any proof-of-safety from the upstream QA and monitoring processes.
Random people manually driving their cars are "modifying" their input as well. You have drunk drivers, texting drivers, distracted drivers.... The human attention span is incredibly brittle as well. In terms of QA'ing a manual driver in the US? You take a 10 minute driving test when you're 16 and you're licensed to drive for the rest of your life.
Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”
#310As someone who came of tinkering age in the early 70s and spend lots of time taking apart and repairing old machines, I wish to express another concern. How do we expect to hook the next generation of engineers if there is no opportunity to tinker as a child? For me that spark (excuse the pun) definitely came from those early "break it/fix it" sessions. Is tinkering going to be relegated to playing with the public AP…
There are so many amazing things you can do nowadays for not much money that it is still so much better for kids now in terms of tinkering IMO. You can order so many cheap boards on ebay from China, it's crazy. When I was a kid it was impossible to find datasheets for anything, now you can find more information than anyone can handle on the internet for free.
You can even watch youtube videos on how to hack all those NDA locked things.