I wonder what Coca-Cola gets out this partnership?

Paramount Studios (owners of Star Trek, and a US company) would be affected.

The Slashdot fortune had a good response: Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue. - Seneca

Maybe more apropos: Once again prosperous and successful crime goes by the name of virtue; good men obey the bad, might is right and fear oppresses law.

Except that just a few vehicles out of the millions that are on the road. That's an insufficiently large sample size to say how automated cars from different manufactures with different levels of maintenance under varying road contritions will interact. You can't assume competency from the limited, though still impressive, testing Google has done.

If anything you are demonstrating the author's point, assuming that what Google has accomplished will be true of all driverless cars. Each of Google's automated cars is effectively a student driver with Google's engineers, technicians, and drivers shepherding the vehicles through the hazards of everyday driving. How will that record hold when one of those cars are twelve years old and hasn't had a tuneup in three?

How can “The scientific community now accepts to some degree that this contact may occur in the next 50 to 100 years.” be true if we haven't even established that there is life outside of Earth!

Then you have this tripe: "'Further, by means of self-consciousness, man becomes capable of treating his own mental states as objects of consciousness. The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is, as its name implies, a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe,' De la Torre writes in a study published in the journal Acta Astronautica."

I am very disappointed in you Slashdot.

I thought the title read "European Space Agency Picks Pluto Planet-hunting Mission". My first thought was "They already found it!"

I don't know about tourism, but I definetly see a market for flying from New York to Tokyo in a couple of hours. If you need drop everything to meet with executives halfway around the world before a multi-million dollar deal tanks, a couple hundred grand is pretty cheap for a ticket.

Low orbit satellites are not going to carry a continent's worth of network traffic. On top of that you still need backhaul at your ground stations. All those cell towers, they need something for backhaul. Microwave repeaters are only going to carry you so far. On top of that fiber simply has the highest available and future bandwidth with the lowest latency of any available technology. Sure wireless may dominate the immediate future of Africa, but eventually they'll exceed it's limits and move to a wired infrastructure.

I thought he was either digging up the sidewalk or digging for sidewalks.

I have a trademark on the United States. No one can publish any pictures of the United States with out my express permission.

Does Prozac come with your post?