The reason there are not more accidents has alot to do with luck. People on average get to their
destination safely because the route and the other cars are predictable. This is the same reason
that texting while driving doesn't get you immediately killed. But given an unknown like the car
in front of you slamming on it's brakes and people are not very good at responding (even less so
if they are distracted by a phone or something else).

Why was this flagged -1? Bill Gates is president of one of the largest organizations helping to fight disease in the world.
He has as much validity as the president of Red Cross or any other large relief organization. This is why his opinion
matters. He's also uniquely positioned where he can help bankroll what is needed if necessary where most other large
relief organizations would have a much harder time changing their focus.

This is exactly what the summary is talking about. We have "high-quality mobile units ready to be deployed quickly" for military but
we don't have the equivalent on the medical side. It was insane that we did not have deployable quarantine units that could be sent to
the location so instead we attempted to fly them to a quarantine unit elsewhere. To add to the insanity, the only plane that was
capable of transporting an ebola patient could only transport ONE passenger at a time. I'm pretty sure that's the definition of being
grossly underprepared for an epidemic when the solution is to fly people halfway around the world one at a time.

Yeah, but if you register with them for 100 years, their prices are only $9.99 per year.

My guess is that they are going to learn what causes accidents and what doesn't cause accidents.
We humans are really really bad at driving. You're basically stating all the bad things that we do.
That is good input for a computer because it can see what causes accidents and remember not to
do that and compare it to what doesn't cause accidents. I'm not sure I would trust a system like
this to drive a car but it could easily be used to grade a computer (or a person) on their driving
style.

There is no need to buy a piggyback program when it's much easier to just detect and block it.

Even if you COULD get a script that responds almost exactly like you would, who would want to talk to it?
While it might be interesting to talk to your great grandparent or someone famous, you said this would be for someone without children or any other legacy.
Noone is going to want to talk to the dead you unless you have a some other sort of legacy that makes you interesting.

No if it could respond to responses for you while you're still alive and schedule meetups with the people you want and politely decline the
ones that you would decline and ignore the ones that you would ignore, this might be something useful but don't count on it being very useful
once you're dead.

You wouldn't need 100% agreement and also stopping an asteroid is in some ways easier
than stopping climate change. Stopping an asteroid is mostly technical while stopping climate
change has a fair amount of political. Stopping climate change requires some amount on consensus
to make it happen. Also, stopping climate change has alot of people who make money from
polution wanting to resist doing anything about it. Stopping an asteroid on the other hand
would have alot of people with money potentially profiting off of it. Mainly, the aerospace industry
could potentially profit quite a bit as well as the insurance companies while very few people
have any incentive to try to resist attempting to prevent an asteroid strike.

IF we can detect one that is in a collision course for earth and we have a decade to do something about it then we could develop the technology.
Sure, there would be the "asteroid deniers" but if the evidence was good enough that people could calculate the trajectory themself and show
that it had a high probability of wiping us out then we could do something about it.

My experience has been the exact opposite. Having gotten use to google voice search on android, I find siri very lacking.
Now that I own an iphone, I still find myself getting very frustrated with siri not giving me the right answers so I open google
on my iphone and ask the same question and get a much better response from google.

Why is that important? Placebo is placebo. For the placebo effect to work it has to be as convincing as possible to the patient.
Homeopathy accomplishes that quite well for it's followers and is pure water by the time they are done diluting it so is almost the
perfect placebo. I don't see the problem with homeopathy if it works as water is about as harmless a placebo as you can get.

I think requiring them to pay prevailing wage to the worker plus put an equal amount into a fund for STEM scholarships would work decent as well.
Even if they fudge the numbers (which they do) and say it's only a 40k position, requiring them to pay an additional 100% premium to a scholarship
fund should minimize the abuse that we're currently seeing.

This could also work for other industries like truck drivers where the complaint is there are not enough drivers when the reality is that there are
plenty of people who would be willing to drive if the pay was higher.

The odds of another tourist stealing your camera when you ask them to take a picture is pretty much 0%.
The odds of a someone (especially a poor local) who asks YOU if you would them to take a picture of you
stealing your camerais pretty much 100%. This is the same advice I give my kids. If you get lost, don't
wait for someone to approach you, instead walk up to the first person you see and ask for help. Most people
are normal law abiding citizens, if you play the odds and pick someone randomly then your chances of getting
a criminal are very small. If instead you let them approach you then they are picking you which makes the
odds of them being a criminal considerably higher.

Someone who is paying $10 for 5 stickers is not doing it for the stickers. They are
doing it for the hopeful chance that it suceeds. As they are basically doing a donation
there should be no problem with the "low stakes for high odds". For the 10% off retail
then it better be an amazing product ("good return") or a high chance of success otherwise
you need more than a 10% discount to account for the risk.

This should be the approach taken for any risky venture on kickstarter as well.
Assume that you might lose all your money. If you're only giving $10 then this isn't a big deal.
Yes, traditional investors do take risks but kickstarter does have the potential to take even
bigger risks as it can get 10k people to all give $10 to something that has a high probability of
failing but each person's risk is minimal even if it does fail.