There is a large difference between asking someone to name a price and asking someone to donate. In the first case you are forcing them to pay for a product (even if they pay $0). In the second case you are hoping they feel charitable.
The Humble Indie bundles come to mind as a nice way for people to name a price, given their popularity I'd guess they are doing something right.
If you had a human driven car, would a malfunction in the car causing a crash be your fault? [1] I can see that if you hadn't updated the firmware of the car then maybe it could be claimed that you had not performed adequate maintenance?
Vehicle integrity is the responsibility of the driver for human driven cars, I assume it would be the same for autonomous vehicles. The problem comes when you are driving a 15 year old car because you can afford new. For non autonomous vehicles mechanical safety is dependent on powertrain, steering, and brakes, all of which are under manual control. Maintaining the integrity of autonomous system--its computer, its sensors, its radar/gps, the accuracy of its maps, will be even more important than the maintenance of those manual system.
I don't know if 'bitcoins are being created every day' is the right way of looking at it? Bitcoins are more discovered as opposed to created. It would be like if every USD ever was buried and people were gradually digging them out of the ground and everyone knew exactly how many were buried? The amount of bitcoins in circulation is increasing but the total amount of bitcoins that will ever exist isn't increasing at all.
It's also increasing at a controlled rate. To make your analogy more complete, it'd be like all the diggers are aware of each other and whether they've found a USD or not. If too many are being found at once, everyone switches to using their hands. If still too many are found, everyone uses their tongues. If too few are being found, shovels are allowed. If still too few are being found, backhoes are allowed.
Can you give this analogous type summary of how this works from a technical perspective? I assume it doesn't rely on everyone coming to some sort of an agreement?
Relatively few linux users might have a gtx 680 but there are a large amount of windows gamers that have a card similar and may switch to linux if it had steam. Given that 60fps is all that's required it also means that you don't need a gtx 680, a $200 card will probably easily get you 60fps, a lot of the nvidia laptop cards will also probably be enough.
I find it interesting that people's main concerns are the privacy laws. Isn't anyone concerned that there is a need for gunshot detection? I would have thought that the main issue was that there was enough gun related violence to make this product viable? As much as I love to see an innovative solution to a problem this seems a lot like its treating the symptoms and not the cause.
Won't somebody think of the children? The problem is that there's always a good justification for reducing rights. It makes law enforcement easier. We need to fight terrorism. We need to stop child rape. Etc, etc, etc. But if you let your rights be stripped away, even for a purportedly good reason, you aren't getting them back.
