Actually, the Eli System is pretty much all they had in the past. As in, "Hey Eli, match up the all these chess players, will ya?"

Now Elo, on the other hand... :)

I beg to differ.

Shit you're right! God damn it, I was so happy to type the word "queue" I forgot it was the wrong word. And it's worse because I have actually cued things in the recording sense. Now I have to deal with the Spelling Nazis and the Smelling Nazis...

I mean, yes haha, fart fart fart toot toot toot.

But once we're all done laughing, I think we should take a sober look at the real scientific explanation: the Four Corners is host to a phenomenon known as Intermittent Fulminating Atmospheric Rancidity Tempest - Extended Duration.

I think it's an admirable goal to get your kid interested in computers and coding. But it seems like /. gets this question every week, sometimes multiple times a week. You can't swing a dead cat around here without hitting some variant of "How can I teach my [son/daughter/nephew/[2-/3-/4-/5-/6-/7-/10-]year-old/3rd grade class/nation's kindergarteners] how to code?" Can we just sticky this to the sidebar somewhere?

I was recently reminded that LEDs are not just good for consumer and business fixture applications.

At the trainstop by my work, they just replaced all the old lights (constantly broken and dark) with these super bright LED panels. Ceilings in the station are so high that you need a scissor lift to get to the bulbs, it was a big multi-day production to put them in. You can imagine how any improvements in consistency, efficiency, and duty cycle would be very welcome.

Not sure if the "you" in your post was me or the Googles of the world making self-driving cars. If it's me, I'll just point out that I never proposed that handwringing over decisional ethics was the one thing holding SDCs back.

My point was that questions like the one in TFS are matsurbation. The question ought to be, are we at a point where they're safer (aggregate) than humans, driving in real world conditions? You and I both agree that currently the answer is no. For optics and liability reasons, they'll probably have to be an order of magnitude safer than the average human driver before they gain wide traction. I think that day is closer than you seem to, but that's just fortunetelling.

I disagree about rushing to a blanket ban, and I don't grok your main complaint about jackasses with half capable systems. Is there a big mod/DIY community out there outfitting their Suburbans with hand-rolled CarLinux or something?

FWIW I agree the whole "don't worry the driver's gonna be right there to take over at a moments notice" line is absurd. I buy it for these early test runs where the drivers are paid to make sure no one gets flattened by a Google logo, but a real self-driving future actively discourages engagement and driving skill.

1) Cars are not technologically at a point where they have omnipresent awareness of the constituents of every vehicle around them and the locations of every pedestrian (add in crowded street-facing cafés, structural members for buildings, and everything else you could possibly think of). Neither, for that matter, are people.

2) The most brilliant philosophers still disagree over the ethics of choosing who dies when someone's gotta go. See also the Trolley Problem, most other ethical dilemmas, and generally the eternal struggle between various consequentialist and deontological systems of ethics.

3) This precise scenario is highly contrived and seems (1st approximation) to be vanishingly rare.

Given the above, maybe the question shouldn't be if a robot can make a perfect (or any) ethical decision. Maybe for now it should just be if the robot can do better than a human at not killing anyone at all in these sorts of situations. Maybe "I did my best to protect my owner from death and just happen to average out safer for everyone" will have to be ok for now.

Turn both cockpit seats into toilets. Call them Craptains Chairs. Problem solved!

On this side of the pond, we'd spell it "gamours."

Cheers!

Kill or be killed.

Ooo hey I like making up arbitrary tests too!

The Bach-Dell Test
A movie is not pants if, at any point, two characters named Del Bachman are in a dell listening to Bach on Dell laptops.

The Bake 'Til Test:
A pastry passes this test if it was baked by bakers, for bakers, for a number of minutes equal to the number of bakers involved.

The Beck Tell Test:
A joke is only funny if it's about the musical artist Beck, and told by Beck to himself.

tl;dr: it's basically a yo dawg gag

+2 funny AND informative!

While Slashdot's speculation is that "autocorrect gone horribly wrong" may be at the bottom of the submitter's odd new phrase, it is a safe bet that at least some of it has to do with a series of small aneurisms known as "Uruguay Syndrome."

Steve Jobs may very well have been an habitual reckless driver, but parking in handicapped spaces and driving without plates meets neither the legal nor commonsense definitions of "reckless driving."