That's certainly a concern, but the GP was positing a conspiracy to protect the people from the dangers of tech we aren't "ready" for. I agree that liability is a problem, but it's not an insurmountable one. Autonomous vehicles *are* coming. They won't be approved for public roads until the government is convinced of their (relative) safety, but they are coming.

No one is avoiding this research because of liability concerns.

Maybe, but I doubt it. Sensors are precision instruments and each one has to be calibrated and tested to within an inch of it's life. That process only becomes "cheap" when you can afford to massively parallelize it. If you sell ten of these sensors a year and each one takes a week to be tested/calibrated properly by a trained engineer, they certainly cost a pretty penny. But you can't just pump out 10K and expect the engineer's time to suddenly get cheaper.

8^) For obvious reasons, we couldn't do very extensive testing with pedestrian detection. Suffice it to say that HR felt compelled to convene a meeting with the engineers regarding the proper usage of interns...

From what *ahem* testing we were able to perform, out system detected pedestrians just fine. We were using a laser-based detector from whose data we used to create a 3d mesh of the world in real time. The mesh was then compared with camera images to determine the location of obstacles and roads. If I recall correctly, I believe Stanford's solution only used lasers to determine "flat surface" vs "non-flat surface" and mainly relies on their cameras to determine the location of the road. So it may have trouble detecting a narrow moving obstacle ahead of (or just on a collision course with) the vehicle.

As for "the most part, anyway" we did have some situations in which our detectors failed. Chain-link fences were tricky (we almost always detected them, but not 100% of the time) and - though other types of vehicles presented no problems - our VP's new Mustang was consistently invisible. :)

Yeah, we have the tech now for cars to drive themselves. I used to work for a robotics company and we made a number of vehicles that could drive themselves safely (for the most part, anyway).

Anyway, the main thing keeping autonomous cars off the roads today is not some secret government conspiracy, but cost. We built a car for the Darpa Urban Challenge which was capable of driving safely in normal traffic conditions at speeds up to 40mph (and several of our engineers felt confident that it could have handled itself safely all the way up to around 100mph!) The final cost of the car was a little over 1.5Million dollars. A good portion of that cost went into the varied and *extremely* expensive sensors the car required. Our main sensor sensor alone cost about $600,000!

We don't need society to "be ready" for autonomous cars - we need mass production of parts which are currently very, very specialized and costly.

Just so you're aware, the word in the bible which has been translated into English as "day" actually means "period of time" in Hebrew. A better translation might have been that the Earth was created in six "stages" instead of "days."

In other words, it's only been since the King James version of the bible that the world was created in 6 days.

I don't know where you got these ideas, but as someone who was home schooled, let me assure you - they're wrong.

I usually started school around 10am (after eating breakfast and finishing whatever my household chores were) and finished by 2pm. After that, I'd usually either play with my siblings (hardly anti-social) or read a book (okay, it's a solitary activity, but hardly harmful) until the neighborhood kids got home from school. After that, I'd often go play with the other kids - just like anyone else.

Did your parents lock you in the basement after school? Why would you assume that school is the only possible place for social activities?

Gahhh! Don't remind me. I carried that stupid gnome all the way to the Ant Lion caves. I had to set it down for just one second to use the gravity gun to smash some grubs... and I hit the wrong button. Instead of gently dropping the gnome at my feet, I launched the little bastard right out into the depths. of course, then I panicked and hit the Quick Save button instead of Quick Load.

...I can still see his cheeky grin as he tumbles end over end into the darkness. :(

Sure, it's slow, but I imagine the inconvenience of being in a wheelchair (faster, but you can't reach anything) isn't much better. I'd imagine it's faster on the stairs than dragging himself up them, anyway.

Plus, you saw how happy that guy was to be standing and walking, even if he was walking very slowly. Don't underestimate the psychological benefits of being able to stand upright, even assisted. People will respond much more positively to someone in an exoskeletal support suit than someone in a wheelchair.

Ah yes, the N64 gamepad. The first gamepad to require three hands to operate. :)

Amen! Moving that damn cursor around with the d-pad was horrible!

Hasn't seemed to to do Microsoft any harm...

It will be if you wait a little while - language being what it is.

Whoa! Hardcore, man! I thought it was tough enough just going to one college!

Fine, so in software, they disable the switch that enables the heated seats/AC. You still can't use the feature you paid for.

Also... Where is this "porn market" for android? I've been using Android phones since the G1. I can remember when there were few enough apps on the market that I was literally able to examine them all. I've never seen or even heard of anything like a porn market for Android. Steve is involved in libel here, plain and simple.