Shutaru's comments

A long time ago I worked for Amazon, coding on Kindle in various platforms. I'd been using ereaders like Kindle for years, but I'd never once electronically purchased a book and had no interest in doing so. I was amused to find that at Amazon it was taken for granted that the only way to use the reader was to buy a book. When I mentioned all of the stuff I'd put onto Kindles over the years, my colleagues blinked at me and said, "You mean you SIDELOAD?" as though that were the oddest, most puzzling thing imaginable.

There are endless legal sources of non-DRMed ebooks online. They aren't hard to find. I don't recommend anything else.

Please note that Mr. Clark only said that it was insulting -- he didn't refute Oliver's information.

-- disclosure: disgruntled former Amazon employee, believe that breaking up Amazon is a no-brainer, would like to see Bezos brutally impoverished (no one should have a billion dollars, just as no one should own an H-bomb).

I've seen this sort of argument many times before, most notably from Francis Fukuyama. The common thinking on the subject seems to be a deeply inaccurate decoupling of longevity and health.

Yes, we fear death, but we also fear the image of ourselves spending the final years of our lives bedridden and in pain. What we don't seem to understand is that patients in such poor health don't survive very long (despite the inevitable anecdotes about relatives who survived far too long in feeble condition, more a matter of perception than fact).

In other words, unhealthy people tend to have poor longevity.

I honestly don't know if I would enjoy living forever, but I'd like to give it a try, just in case.

Please note, I currently write self-driving car code for Cruise Automation in San Francisco.

If you haven't tried to solve the self-driving car problem in a practical environment, there's a powerful tendency to get caught in edge cases. The vast majority of situations encountered by an autonomous vehicle involve complex but conventional problems, and yield relatively well to rules-based coding.

If someone builds a snowman by the side of the road, my AV may mistake it for a human and start calculating possible paths it might take. But then the same thing can happen for utility poles, mailboxes, or piles of garbage. We find that if the potential human remains stationary, moving around it cautiously is usually a sufficient solution.

On the other hand, if someone builds a snowman in the middle of the street, the initial response of an AV and a human driver will be the same: stop and analyze the situation. No responsible human is going to drive through a snowman, so that's not an option for the AV either. Since the snowman will always remain stationary, however, the AV is likely to treat it like other road-obstructing obstacles (such as double-parked vehicles, another significant but more common problem) and eventually move around it.

Don't get me wrong -- it would be great if we could imbue an AV with "common sense." But I would argue that you can solve at least 99% of the problem without it.