Exactly. Situations humans find easy will sometimes be hard for software to recognize -- a human directing traffic is a great example, or when a construction crew puts up cones but not a clear indication of which side of the cones are going to be worked on, as well as other similar temporary markings. Traffic lights with a burnt-out bulb, or a stuck sensor that won't turn your lane green, old lane markings never properly cleared off before new ones were in place, or even just parking in the right place when a friend is having a party and all the regular spaces in their driveway are taken up. Driving off-road where there are no roads to follow (Sure, you'd drive yourself for fun if we're talking duen-buggies and desert sands, but not so much when trying to get to a remote herd on a large ranch.) Even things like snow, ice, and really hard rain shouldn't faze a robust driving system, but a poorly-marked detour through a parking lot like I had to take this morning? Those will probably need human intervention or similar for a while, though I doubt it will take long for even the extreme edge cases to be covered.

A big problem with the perception of cars unable to deal with snow/ice is that a lot of people leave all their traction control gizmos on even in slick conditions, and the car just won't move. This is because at least elements of traction control systems need to be turned off in some situations, something an auto-driving car is well aware of and presumably just bypasses when its driving in such conditions. I've seen cars abandoned in the middle of a 4-lane highway on a gentle slope because they didn't know that all they had to do was hit the button to turn off that feature.

Because when, inevitably, someone kickstarts a nuclear war, releases a 100% deadly disease, or we're all turned into computronium by our new AI overlords, having an offsite backup, even a primitive one, seems like a really good thing. Sure, it won't be self-sufficient at first, but if we never start, we'll never get there at all, and then it might be too late.

I know a few techs who decided, upon living the US a few years, that the arranged marriage waiting for them back home was a crap deal, and made arrangements to stay. In one case, a woman I worked with, her father confiscated her passport and refused to let her return for a month until the arranged wedding collapsed when the groom also declined to marry for someone else's benefit.

Great idea, lets start with land mines, ban their production in the US (US-based companies build and sell more land mines than any other country, most without auto-deactivation or other features that let them stop being a problem after the war ends), sales, and shipment through US controlled territory. Oh, wait, that would impact profits, nevermind.

Too late to make the primaries for Warren in most states, so unless she wants the VP slot, she's not even in the running.

It's a great idea, but then a greedy factory-ship captain decides nobody's looking, and goes in and cores out your sanctuary, gets away with it, brags about it, and the next thing you know you have to have your navy shooting foreign ships out of the water to keep them out. Something like that happened in the Grand Banks, and Canada still, despite a naval presence, says that the banks cannot recover for the foreseeable future due to incursions by illegal foreign factory ships.

Well, I have a working The Tabulating Machine Company card punch from 1901, s/n 58634, still punches cards, though I don't know if card reading systems are still in use anywhere. Would that count?

Yet. We can't do this, or blow up stars, or set up colliding black holes *yet.*

Exactly. We also, though we could, don't create firestorms in cities anymore, nor do we engage in unlimited civilian target bombing. We seem to, as a species, decided that these things are off the table, both due to adverse reactions to civilian deaths, as well as the possibility of nuclear response ("You burned my capital to the ground, we don't have the air superiority to do the same to you, but the NORKs sold us a little bomb we've sent over in a cargo container.") As most "tactical" nukes are more powerful than the original strategic WWII-era nukes, it is pretty clear that their use, no matter what they are called, would be as city burners, as that's where the modern battlefields are.

Not to mention that if the fallout is encountered by even one citizen of another nuclear state, let alone an embassy or crosses a border into a nuclear armed country, they may well consider that an attack and retaliate. Nuking Daesh should be safe-ish in that one regard, but even there you have Israel (still denying they have nukes), would they show restraint if, say, fallout from a Russian nuke contaminated their northern territories? How would Turkey, a member of NATO, respond if their country was irradiated? If a Chinese embassy was rendered uninhabitable by fallout, what would they do? Best to leave that can of radioactive worms unopened.

I work for a large hosting/datacenter ISP, and most of the work on the equipment in the datacenters is done remotely. All we really need on-site is some semi-competent remote hands to unbox, rack, and plug in the various pieces of gear into the racks, some security guards to keep the riff-raff out and escort customers into/out of their cages, cleaning staff to keep the dust and debris down, and maybe an onsite engineer who knows all the power, network, and cooling setups enough to fix them when they break, though usually even that last position is remote. The remote-hands folk do all the physical work. Everything else is done by contractors or people working in an office somewhere -- I'd say about 90% of the engineering/admin work is done this way. So a massive datacenter, once it's operational and filled with customers, doesn't usually have more than a dozen or two local employees. There are some exceptions, of course -- a high-churn center will need more people for escort and remote hands, and some centers are completely unmanned, just a locked room or building that's only visited when things go really wrong. If you want jobs, insist they buy office space for their techs and engineers locally, forget about the datacenter.

Calling this Bainite is confusing, as the time/temperature charts show that you only really get bainite when you hold at above 400C after quenching from above critical temperatures -- which does not match the described process. I suspect it's not really bainite, but some sort of martensite/ferrite/pearlite mix. When making knives with a bainite structure, the resulting blades, usually from a high carbon tool steel such as L6, are very springy, and do not exhibit plastic deformation before breaking (i.e. they do not take a set when bent, and tend to break before taking a set unless taken to an extreme or heavily tempered). That said, it sounds like a great step forward for sheet metal working.

Sure, but what are you going to make your drigibles out of? There's only two sources of nonvolatile raw materials on Venus, and if it's not to be found in Venus's atmosphere, you're either going to have to import from Earth (or elsewhere in the System) or go down to the surface and mine it. The first is prohibitively expensive just in terms of energy costs, and the second is undoable using current technology. The idea of a colony is to be self-sufficient enough to be able to establish an settlement and expand according to your needs. We'll need some significant technological development before that's even possible on Venus, but Mars and/or the Moon seem doable with just extending current engineering capabilities.

Still no support for hd satellite feeds. When the new high speed internet connection arrives in a few weeks, I think I'll just switch to downloads-only for tv watching, and scuttle the dish.