Should Self-Driving Cars Chauffeur Shopping 'Whales' For Free? 213
theodp writes "Probably not the most fortuitous timing, but the USPTO has granted Google its wish for a patent on Transportation-Aware Physical Advertising Conversions, a system that arranges for free or discounted transportation to an advertiser's business location that will be more or less convenient based upon how profitable a customer is deemed. It's reminiscent of the free personal chauffeured limousine rides long enjoyed by Las Vegas casino 'whales', but at scale and using cars that may not have drivers. A server, Google explains, 'arranges the selected transportation option, for example, by dispatching a vehicle or providing instructions for using public transportation.' So, it seems a Larry or Sergey type might expect to be taken gratis to the Tesla dealership via a private autonomous car or even helicopter, while others may get a discount on a SF Muni bus ride to Safeway. Google also describes how advertisers will be able to use a customer's profile 'to exclude a customer from being considered for an offer based on exclusion criteria identified by a business,' such as age, job title, purchasing history, clothing size, or other 'desirable' characteristics."
Discriminate by age and other characteristics (Score:5, Insightful)
Age discrimination (Score:2, Informative)
I'm pretty sure that at least in the U.S., deciding whether to give people a special offer based on their age is illegal. It's called age discrimination.
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Uhh, how do you explain senior discounts? Or the AARP? Heck, how about Social Security and Medicare?
If there's a law against giving special offers based on a person's age, they're certainly doing a shit job enforcing it.
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You're confusing two completely different things: laws that take your age into account (which by definition is legal - it's the law), and illegal discrimination based on age (which is illegal because the law says it is). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org] for example.
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It seems they have banned discriminating against old people but not discriminating against young people.
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All youngsters under 21 applaud your willingness to serve them alcohol. Doing otherwise would be age discrimination.
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You should have picked on something sensible, like not allowing tweens to drive.
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The problem is that it's almost impossible to prove. Say you go for a job interview at age 55, they can easily say you were overqualified or not "dynamic" enough. It might be easier to prove here because there will be code written that checks the age bracket entry in your file, but it wouldn't be hard to obfuscate.
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um... this isn't the pick & save... this is the jail... hey car... CAR! Get back here!
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Like race, perhaps? Even if it works out to race by other proxy characteristics, this has a lot of potential to blow up in the merchants' faces.
Pretty much any sorting ends up inadvertently sorting by race as a side effect
Then we all get to run around in ever smaller circles with our hair on fire, freaking out about it.
Mod the parent up. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm black. I'll freely admit it. And you're spot-on correct. Blacks in America today are given every opportunity to excel, and then some additional opportunities beyond that. We get the same access to public schools as anyone else. We get special scholarships at most colleges. We even get preferential treatment when applying for certain well-paying jobs. There's absolutely no excuse for a black youth of today to grow up into anything other than a successful, self-sustaining, law-abiding individual. When one
Re:Mod the parent up. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, that's not the whole story. Many of those kids come from wildly dysfunctional families. When your mom was knocked up at 16, you don't know who your dad is, and your uncle is a junkie, things won't be that easy. This is a self-perpetuating problem - it's been like that for well over a century.
Re:Mod the parent up. (Score:4, Informative)
it's been like that for well over a century.
No it hasn't. In 1960, 5.3% of black babies were born out of wedlock. In 2012 it was 69%. We can "blame society" for many of the problems, due to misguided social policies on the left, and massive expansion of prisons on the right, but there is still plenty of additional blame to heap on the individuals for their own bad choices.
Re:Mod the parent up. (Score:5, Insightful)
Being born out of wedlock isn't a problem unless you're a religious nut. A stable relationship is important, and marriage, by far, guarantees no such thing (as we've seen with divorce rates).
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True as far as it goes. The legal status of your parent's relationship doesn't matter (much), but being raised by two biological parents do.
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Being born out of wedlock isn't a problem unless you're a religious nut. A stable relationship is important, and marriage, by far, guarantees no such thing (as we've seen with divorce rates).
Which have gone nowhere but up, post sexual revolution. Along with all other indicators of dysfunction.
But why look at actual reality? That's for "religious nuts".
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You seem to think you're disagreeing with him, when you're both actually making the exact same point.
Divorce rates have gone up, which is an indicator that marriage is no guarantee of a stable relationship, despite the constant insistence by "religious nuts" that marriage is essentially the *only* guarantee of one.
Divorce isn't necessarily an indicator of dysfunction though either -- a wife who stays married to her abusive husband is more dysfunctional than if she divorced him. Easier to do that today than
Re:Mod the parent up. (Score:5, Insightful)
it's been like that for well over a century.
No it hasn't. In 1960, 5.3% of black babies were born out of wedlock. In 2012 it was 69%. We can "blame society" for many of the problems, due to misguided social policies on the left, and massive expansion of prisons on the right, but there is still plenty of additional blame to heap on the individuals for their own bad choices.
In 1960 if you knocked up a 16 yr old girl, her dad made you marry her at gunpoint.
In 2012, if you knock up a 16 yr old girl, you get counseling whilst she goes on 16 and pregnant.
Marriage is a terrible metric for teen pregnancy considering fewer people in this age are actually getting married and those that do are generally getting married later in life. Now I think that teen pregnancy is actually lower today than in 1960 simply because there is more emphasis on contraception and sexual education.
As for blaming society, people are ultimately the product of the society they live in. Trying to push the blame solely onto individuals is a cop out. If you don't take measures to improve society, you cant expect individuals to better themselves en mass. When a lot of individuals from the same area or socioeconomic background make the same mistakes, you can almost always trace this back to their education (or lack their of), which makes is a social issue.
Re:Mod the parent up. (Score:4, Insightful)
Got some problems here. Yes, there are problems that need to be addressed that are social problems more than individual problems. There are also problems that need to be addressed that are more individual than social. And the two sets of problems are tightly intertwined. But ANY either/or "solution" is not a solution.
E.g., marriage. Did you ever read/see "My Fair Lady"? Consider the morality of Eliza's father. She was out of wedlock. He knew of her, and didn't feel obliged to support her. (More the converse, actually.) Now realize that this is a romanticized version of Shaw's Pygmalion, and that Shaw, himself, was not poor. But he knew his population. The poor, because of their economic incentives, diidn't take things like marriage seriously. The middle class did. So when Professor 'iggins arranged for Eliza's father to become relatively prosperous, he ended up getting married to Eliza's mother.
Well, fiction is not life. It's a simplified image of life. And many considered Shaw to be "too brutally frank". So I think we can be sure that he made things look better than they really were. But he also didn't lie about what he saw as the nature of morality. (This frequently got people quite upset with him.)
Now when we look at the modern US we see similar social customs. (Well, we need to mix in "Mack the Knife" to get an accurate image. Different authors show different aspects of their current social scene.) But when we see the same patterns popping up again, we are justified in assuming that there is something systematic going on. Blaming individuals won't solve that. But some people will succeed despite the environment. This is probably due to more luck than they will admit, but also due in part to their nature.
Additionally, "As the twig is bent..." has an unfortunate amount of truth to it. Solving the social problems won't immediately cure the individuals who have been warped by the existing system. Indeed, epigenetics suggests that there may be some physical damage that persists for several generations. (I think three is the largest that has been shown experimentally.) And the social equivalent of that is that children who are raised by parents who have been warped tend to acquire a warped personality in turn. Again, this has been shown to disipate over generations, but THIS problem can significantly diminish over just a few years. So it persists, but the level at which it persists can become low enough that it stops being a major impediment to others.
Please note that I have not recommended any particular means of solving the problem. I haven't been convinced by any proposal I've heard. Certainly not by any "anonomous coward" who claims to have escaped from the mess. Even if I had a real reason to believe that he is who he says, I would probably consider him mainly (though not entirely) someone who was extremely fortunate.
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I love what you wrote - and for the most part I agree. I would say - read up a bit about UBI case studies - a solution that has been tested in proper trials around the world from the richest to the poorest countries, and actually works.
Welfare WITHOUT a disincentive to work, without any need for a big, expensive bureaucracy or interference in personal decisions and which has shown massive positive benefits where-ever it was applied. Promoted by such economists as Hayek and Friedman (and then forgotten by th
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It takes money to start a business. How is someone making LESS than the current minimum wage going to do that?
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You didn't bother to find out what a UBI plan is, did you ?
Universal Basic Income - it means everybody, rich and poor alike, get a certain amount from the government (set at just above the current poverty rate) every month (and yes, it means the rich are subsidizing because it comes from taxes) - but everybody gets it, to spend as you wish - no questions asked.
That's UBI. So Even if your job earns you less than minimum wage you've still GOT way MORE than minimum wage was, that's why suddenly poor but smart
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Marriage is a failing institution. It exists solely to make arrangements for the care of children and the disposition of property. One day, children will be legally be people as opposed to property (they enjoy substantially fewer natural "rights" than the rest of us) and perhaps we will even learn to care for one another (beginning with a COLA, and not from pepsico or cocacolaco) and then child support won't even be a thing any more. People will form interpartner or childcare contracts conferring the legal
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In the US? No, you end up on the sex offender registry. In some cases even if you're 16 or younger yourself.
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That depends on the state.
Re:Mod the parent up. (Score:5, Interesting)
Marriage may be a terrible metric, but study after study has proven that the best place for a child to grow up is in a stable home with a mother and a father looking after them. That sounds oddly familiar. Almost like it used to be a standard arrangement to have children in ...
When Mommy is knocked up at 16, there is no Daddy in sight and extended family, at best, doesn't care and at worst has their own problems (ie. drugs, alcohol, etc) to deal with, what hope does the kid have?
You are wrong. There are several studies from various tribes where children don't get raised by their mother and father, but by the whole village. They even breast feed eachothers children. The children are socially very well off. Having lots of adults they know and trust is very good for them. The children are mentally not as dependant of their own mother and father. The children learn to deal with diferent type of adults. A mother, father, and a child is not somehow magically best arrangement for children. The best is having multiple stable and caring adults around daily. (your extended family, if you wish. Any adults will do) Also having lots of siblings (or other kids, they don't really care about the blood relation) is generally good. Humans are social creatures, we thrive with other people around. When you separate everyone to their own boxes anxiety grows, and people become very awkward. All kinds of mental illnesses start showing up. Just look at the news. Antisocial behauvior stems directly from not learning to be normally social at young age.
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How did you come to the conclusion that the situation where noone is caring for you is equal with a situation where a whole tribe takes care of you?
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Marriage may be a terrible metric, but study after study has proven that the best place for a child to grow up is in a stable home with a mother and a father looking after them. That sounds oddly familiar. Almost like it used to be a standard arrangement to have children in ...
Yes. But where is that situation tied to marriage?
"Loving&caring family" and "Marriage" aren't synonyms.
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The rightwingers think they are. They also think "married" means "man and woman" and they probably think "polyamory" is something you veneer kitchen cupboards with.
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Just out of interesting how can they prove who the father is? Can they force a DNA test?
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The higher divorce rate is a consequence, not just a cause, of poor people's woes (of all races). Money can't buy happiness, but it can plaster over a lot of problems, including relationship problems.
Funny how "bad choices" aren't randomly distributed, but concentrated with people who struggle with things they can't be blamed for (their parents, where they're born, etc.)
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Around that time welfare laws were written that only provided benefits if the child was born out of wedlock. Before that blacks actually had just as high of rate of marriage as whites in the US. At the time it was thought that welfare should only be for families where the father couldn't support the child and the cash was set to follow that idea. You only got the cash if you didn't have a family, the results of which have been widely documented.
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I'm black.
And yet, regardless of the rest of the content, you have no problem with a post that starts w/ the "N" word. You're black, and I'm the Queen of England.
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And yet, regardless of the rest of the content, you have no problem with a post that starts w/ the "N" word.
Chris Rock said it best. There are black people, and there are niggers.
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And yet, regardless of the rest of the content, you have no problem with a post that starts w/ the "N" word.
So, what you're saying is, you know that all black people feel a certain way about something...
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So, what you're saying is, you know that all black people feel a certain way about something, your majesty...
FTFY, you dirty peasant.
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Re:Mod the parent up. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm black
No, you're not. You're a racist AC, probably visiting from Stormfront. But if there's one thing people love, it's for an anonymous "black" guy to tell them that their racism is justified.
This is low, even by Slashdot standards.
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But if there's one thing people love, it's for an anonymous "black" guy to tell them that their racism is justified.
This is low, even by Slashdot standards.
It's "racist" to say that most sorting results in racial sorting? Even when that is very obviously true? (Have you seen the NBA, for example?)
WTF? (Score:3)
I'm black
No, you're not. You're a racist AC...
Actually, you just assumed he was not black based on the idea that a black person would never say what he said. You're generalizing and stereotyping, and while it's admittedly *unlikely* that a black person would say what he said, it's incredibly insulting and demeaning to blacks to say that someone *isn't black* because of taking a particular position. Kind of like saying you're not white if you claim to be, say, a contractor describing his white privilege.
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That is what we call a "Cosby-nigger"
Hey Anonymous Coward, Bill Cosby was one of four boys. His mother was a maid and his dad was a seaman in the navy who was away a lot of the time.
He got where he was through hard work, and through a mother who raised him with values. Cosby talks a lot about how he didn't misbehave in his youth because he was worried about not embarrassing his mother.
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Oh yes.. I forgot that getting an education instead of going to jail for petty crimes or even - heavens beware - having success is considered treason on tghe black race....
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Biologically, 19 is a good age to get knocked up. When would you prefer women to bear children? After menopause? No wonder birth rates are declining.
Young adults have no income because they can't find jobs. They're on welfare because they can't find jobs. They're doing crimes because they can't find jobs. They're on drugs because they can't find jobs. Here's a thought: give a nigger a job. Give a nigger some gainful employment. Give a nigger something to do. Moving in the right direction is that s
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... on a computer. (Score:5, Insightful)
Once again, let me look around for something people have been doing and go to patent it "on a server" "based on online behavior" or "using a smartphone"
I can't blame them for abusing the system, I can only blame the idiots who won't fix the system.
Shopping whales? Damn you! (Score:5, Funny)
Now I can't get http://www.peopleofwalmart.com... [peopleofwalmart.com] out of my brain.
The Economics of self driving cars (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a really cool thought experiment. Frankly I've always thought the rise of self driving cars would just make a world of taxis. You call a car on your "smart device" get in, it takes you wherever, you get off and it goes on to its next customer. Should be ultra, fantastically cheap and efficient, and you just make the interior able to be power hosed down every four hours. Or maybe a nicer automated cleaning for the "better" services.
I wonder if gas stations will disappear because of that. After all why have your own car when hopping in an auto taxi will be just as fast, and involve no insurance, maintenance, or anything else that comes with a car, thus making it cheaper too? Meanwhile the auto taxis fill up back at "base", whether that's electric or gas or whatever.
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What'll really make the news is the legal fight over liability. Car manufacturer blames manufacturer who made the self-driving system. Manufacturer blames the software company who wrote the software, or the manufacturer of the subsystem that failed. Software company/subcontractor blames "hackers," government blames "terrorists," and in the end, the guy with the least amount of money for lawyers gets the bill - and that'd the be the passenger.
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Exactly. Just like we hold airline passengers responsible for crashes.
Wait, I forgot that we're all pretending there's no analogy for liability and accident investigation for automated vehicles. Because planes are still controlled by WWII vets yanking on cables.
Re:The Economics of self driving cars (Score:5, Insightful)
What you describe is not much different than taxis today. And yet, in most places, everybody has their own car. Self-driving cars are cheaper, sure, by the cost of a taxi driver, but that's not that big a savings, really. The reason people don't rely on taxis now is that you don't "call a car on your "smart device" get in, it takes you wherever." It's "call a car on your "smart device," wait until it arrives get in, it takes you wherever". That missing part is the big one. Particularly if the self-driving taxi service is for-profit, giving a considerable incentive to minimize costs (which is to say, number of vehicles - keep every one of them working 100% of the time). It will not be just as fast. Hell, today, you can book a taxi days in advance, and you can't count on them being there on time.
As for cleaning, would you really want to ride any distance in a car that can be "power hosed down"? I'd rather have something a little more comfortable.
And for everything you don't need - insurance, maintenance, etc., you have an increase in cost in the taxi service, because those things still have to be done.
So your high tech utopia is, instead of jumping in your jalopy and going where you want to go immediately, will be call for the taxi, wait for it to arrive, pay fares at least as high as a taxi now, and probably have to pay extra to keep from having to share it with someone else going the same direction.
No thanks.
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When more people use taxis, it will make more sense to provide more of them, so there is more chance that one is nearby when you want it. At peak times it makes more sense to use buses (where trains are not available).
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At peak times it makes more sense to use buses (where trains are not available).
No, at peak times, when all the traffic moves slowly, a taxi driver with extensive knowledge of alternate routes and the quickest route to your destination will flatten a bus that has to make scheduled stops.
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You'll most likely spend more time waiting for that taxi at peak times than you saved by the taxi driver using rat runs to avoid the traffic.
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This is why cab stands near bus and train stops can make good money. When you've missed a bus, a cab to get you to the meeting on time, or in which you can use a cell phone without bus noise, is invaluable. I used one yesterday.
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I think you may be underestimating the impact of a human driver on the cost of a taxi. Let's conservatively say the taxi gets 20mpg and pays $4 per gallon for gas. If it averages 30mph (very aggressive, given it's mostly city driving with a lot of idle time), it's burning $6 in gas per hour and at, say, $0.55 per mile in wear and tear, you have about $22.50 per hour in marginal costs from the car
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Take it from me - living in a country where the taxi system pretty much originated that way - you don't want that. The results:
An ultracompetitive market where taxi drivers drive like absolute maniacs just to earn enough to survive becoming the number one accident risk on our roads, and still being broke at the end.
Everybody lost (and for a great many people what they lost was their lives).
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Not that big of a saving?
Lets assume that a taxi driver wants to earn £10 an hour. That'd be a good but unambitious wage. For a 15 minute drive in day time in my town, I'd expect to pay...maybe £6 or £7. So let's call that £20 an hour in revenues, less the dead time between fares.
So, by removing the driver's salary from the equation, you could cut taxi fares in half. I'd consider "half" a big saving. While private car ownership might still work out a little cheaper in the long run, s
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So your high tech utopia is, instead of jumping in your jalopy and going where you want to go immediately, will be call for the taxi, wait for it to arrive, pay fares at least as high as a taxi now, and probably have to pay extra to keep from having to share it with someone else going the same direction.
No thanks.
And that's the transit utopia.
Transit for the masses involves much more crowding, inconvenience, dirt, and crime.
I'll keep my car, thanks ... maybe hide it in my uncle's country place that no one knows about ...
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You're forgetting one crucial factor - I won't say I know the total impact of this but it's big - namely if ALL the vehicles are self-driving then the self-driving taxi will get to you in a quarter of the time it does now (assuming all other factors remain the same - such as number of taxis per company) because self driving cars can move at maximum efficiency, there need never be a traffic jam again (research has pretty much proven that traffic jams are caused by human error NOT the amount of cars, having m
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That's a really cool thought experiment. Frankly I've always thought the rise of self driving cars would just make a world of taxis. You call a car on your "smart device" get in, it takes you wherever, you get off and it goes on to its next customer. Should be ultra, fantastically cheap and efficient, and you just make the interior able to be power hosed down every four hours. Or maybe a nicer automated cleaning for the "better" services.
I highly doubt self driving cars will become like taxi's. Definitely not in the short term because people will still own their own self driving car and organising a municipal fleet is expensive and fraught with bureaucracy (especially if it's done by the private sector, the politics of it will be even worse than city/state politics). Maybe in the long term but it would require a significant shift in the way we think about transportation in our society or for individual cars to become so expensive that ownin
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The theory would be that the number of taxis would be basically the same as present cars during peak traffic (give or take), since they are replacing private vehicles, and they will be distributed appropriately.
I'm not convinced of the "world of taxis" theory. I'm not even sure it will lead to reduced private car ownership. You can in principle have a private car for young children at an age where today we wouldn't trust them with a driver's license but we would trust them to bike to the store. It can dr
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I'll give you one rock solid reason that many people on here don't give 2 shits about and will probably flame me over but it's a practical honest answer. I am a smoker. I know I'm not the only smoker on /. so there are others here who feel my pain. You cannot smoke in a taxi, bus, train, or even the freakin sidewalk these days. I can go several hours without smoking if I have to so it wouldn't affect me too much, but my wife smokes every 15 mi
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Solution a) reduce addiction to a sicially accepted level
Solution b) have smoker and non-smoker cars
This is not a plane or a train compartment where smoke would fan out to hundreds of people.
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I can imagine a market for self driving car taxis that cater specifically to smokers. Part of why you can't do it in taxis now is that there's a driver to consider, and another part is the lingering effects of smell etc.. The majority of autotaxis would be nonsmoker but there would be smoker vehicles as well, and your wife could refuse to ride the nonsmoker autotaxis and call the smoker taxi company.
Another thing is that even in the "world of taxis" theory, I don't think private cars are outlawed. A smok
Should? (Score:5, Funny)
Should self-driving cars chauffeur shopping 'whales' for free? Well I don't know if they should. However, I am absolutely certain they will. Unless some topples the powers-that-be, discards the Constitution and imposes the necessary rules to prevent it, that is.
When a whale car shows up it "should" have a piping hot meal ready for consumption as well. Also, as the whale car proceeds to and from the mall it "should" be careful to avoid blighted neighborhoods to prevent any whale discouragement or whale hunting.
Now the only question is; "should" the whale car meal include alcohol? Or perhaps marijuana, if it's a Colorado whale car?
So, who wants to fund my new startup; Waylz, Inc.? Our e-business analyzes neighborhood disposition based on property values and crime rates to compute optimal routes; neighborhood navigation for retailers.
God I hate our patent system. (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of rewarding people for innovating, we incentivize people/companies to patent trivially simple ideas to lock their potential competitors out of new markets and actually stifle innovation.
Patents are supposed to drive people to come up with ideas that would be cost prohibitive if they were not given some kind of incentive like a temporary government enforced monopoly. Giving out these monopolies in exchange for for such obvious ideas (i,.e. they would be invented regardless) is a shitty deal for society.
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Patents are supposed to drive people to come up with ideas that would be cost prohibitive if they were not given some kind of incentive like a temporary government enforced monopoly.
Patents *were* supposed to do that. There have been a bunch of amendments since, and now their sole purpose is to make a lot of money for big companies. Which is arguably good for the economy of countries that have a lot of big entrenched companies, and bad for the economy of the rest of the world.
Giving out these monopolies in exchange for for such obvious ideas (i,.e. they would be invented regardless) is a shitty deal for society.
I agree 100%.
The kind of offer managemet described ... (Score:2)
... in the summary ...
"Google also describes how advertisers will be able to use a customer's profile 'to exclude a customer from being considered for an offer based on exclusion criteria identified by a business,' such as age, job title, purchasing history, clothing size, or other 'desirable' characteristics."
Nest tie in (Score:2)
Google also describes how advertisers will be able to use a customer's profile 'to exclude a customer from being considered for an offer based on exclusion criteria identified by a business,' such as age, job title, purchasing history, clothing size, or other 'desirable' characteristics.
For example, if you're at home when a football game is on, then obviously you're a fan of the sport.
No thanks, I won't be buying anything off Nest.
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Yes, because that's really working out well for Abercrombie & Fitch.
Blech.
Why? (Score:2)
So it's basically a concierge, which has existed for thousands of years?
Good job, patent office.
Ah, Google being evil again (Score:2)
I'm sure this has already been said, but Google's positive index on the evil scale seems to be higher (or lower). Once again, they seem to be bordering on true neutral from a D&D sense; I guess that's not too bad considering they are a huge public corporation (that I don't think I'll work for any time soon). ~ Keenan
What a seriously stupid question. (Score:3)
"Should Self-Driving Cars Chauffeur Shopping 'Whales' For Free?"
It's a just PATENT APPLICATION, for criminy's sake. They're not asking for anybody's permission. It's not going to come up for a vote on Slashdot. Nothing like a rabble-rousing headline to get those hits up.
Why SHOULDN'T merchants be allowed to underwrite the use of a self-driving car? Why shouldn't a high-end merchant offer to pay for the taxi of (or send their own car for) a big-spending customer today (would that be prior art)? Some do. It's their call.
It's not like there are no other taxis for the rest of us, and it's not like if there are SOME self-driving cars out there, underwritten by merchants, there won't be others out there for the rest of us, if we're willing to pay.
Prior Art (Score:3)
a system that arranges for free or discounted transportation to an advertiser's business location that will be more or less convenient based upon how profitable a customer is deemed.
Strip clubs in Vegas and brothels in Nevada already give you free rides to their respective places of business.
I'm pretty sure they also are more or less convenient, based on where they will be picking you up from...
I'll do you one better (Score:2)
Why the hell would I want a free ride to walmart? Why can't I sit on my ass in my house, click on all the crap I want and have the car show up with it a few minutes later? Now the car doesn't even need seats.
Free ride *TO* the business location (Score:2)
"Now that we've picked you up and driven you across town, it's best that you be thinking of spending a few thousand dollars. You'd like to get back home sometime today, wouldn't you?"
Finally, the rich get a break. (Score:2)
I'm reminded of the mortgage company where I worked where loan officers pulling in monthly commissions of $10,000 a month and higher were "incentivized" by awarding the top sales every month perks like a $500 gift certificate for a golf shop, and the people who did the most work (hourly and salary employees) were incentivized by the knowledge that, if the owner ever needed to make a payment on his BMW SLK and his finances were tight, the money the company and owners saved from firing any of those employees
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[Marxism]
It's be nice to see what would happen if one of those Loan Officers brought in all that "new business", but there was no-one around to do the work for them. A salesman might seem like he's the one making the money, but he'd be worthless without the factory workers giving him things to sell.
[/Marxism]
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Damn right. These corporate assholes and the executives wouldn't have shit if it weren't for all the REAL workers doing the real work.
Most can't even figure out how to print a simple document to a printer...
Patentable Subject Matter? (Score:2)
Really? (Score:2)
"Google also describes how advertisers will be able to use a customer's profile 'to exclude a customer from being considered for an offer based on exclusion criteria identified by a business,' such as age, job title, purchasing history, clothing size, or other 'desirable' characteristics.""
Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are licking their lips and lawyers are lining up for the discrimination lawsuits...
Incentive to shop (Score:2)
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What prevents you from going up to a hotel, going in their elevator, waiting until you were alone, and taking a dump in their elevator? What prevents you from going up to a bank, signing up for a vault box, waiting until you were alone, and then taking a dump in the vault box room? I'm sure you could imagine any number of other semi-private locations owned by private entities other than yourself that you could imagine people taking dumps in, and the answer is the same for all of them: the fact that they pro
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Not to mention the pervasive turds in those automated trams at airports. Won't someone think of the children?
Seriously though, why is this meme so pervasive? The exact same thing came up when Personal Rapid Transit was proposed. It was all over the place. There were even YouTube videos of badly animated homeless people puking in PRT capsules.
I can only conclude there is some segment of the population that somehow knows how to use a computer while simultaneously failing to be toilet trained. I know our
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If I had to see that that often, I'd consider moving.
You don't happen to have a friend called Taylor Durden?
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I don't know if you've heard, but there's a condominium complex in, I think it was, Texas that decided to go after dog owners who didn't clean up after their dogs. So they genetically sequence each dog, and each turd that is left. And then they send the bill to the owner of the dog.
Perhaps you had better reconsider your planned activities.
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The major difference is that with computer-driven cars, it should happen a lot less. At least, unless we decide that a computer-driven car killing a kid is so much worse than a human doing it that the payouts should go up 10x.
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A) We already have that in many places. For example, toll roads and pay-to-use-carpool-lane systems. Such things have existed for a long time. You might not think they're a good idea, but they're hardly a new trend.
B) You're assuming it's not possible to build "enough" infrastructure to provide basic transportation so travel will be impractical without excessive usage fees. That doesn't reflect the status quo, and it's not clear why changing the way vehicles are piloted would reduce the amount of road infra
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Huh? The poor stand around waiting for busses already. Many drive junkers
So they wait for busses in the future, or drive a junker with a robot brain.