Immediately following the end of the article, I found this:

Log in to Medium and "recommend" this story.

[infinite facepalm]

The 1970s represents a nadir in the quality of US manufactured goods in general, and cars were an exceptional representation of that. Detroit saw itself as having a captive market, innovated nothing, and let stuff leave the factory that never should have. I'll agree there are some examples of interesting design (Chrysler, especially, produced some absolutely beautiful machines through the 70s) but they were poorly executed, built by an apathetic and self entitled workforce, and outside of the "cool" factor involved, I doubt you would actually want to drive one.

I'll agree that the average car of the 1980s was ugly as sin, and nearly as bad from a quality standpoint.

Of course this may not really be a Windows 10-specific issue since they slipped a "Diagnostic Tracking Service" into previous versions (such as Win7) through Windows Update earlier this year.

According to this, that particular update was 3068708, which is "recommended" and thus (as far as I can tell) not automatically installed under default settings.

(Note: please correct me if I'm wrong! Also, feel free to list any other malicious updates which should be avoided, or other strategies to harden Windows 7 against Microsoft snooping. I just reinstalled and would like to make sure I get all that stuff right before I start using sensitive data.)

That's a fair point, which is taken.

This, however, was the point I was trying to make: brand loyalty is a thing (even in fleets, which is bizarre and should result in someone getting fired, but it still exists) and that, for many (even most?) people, buying a car is NOT the rational transaction that it should be, but a purely emotional one. I have no data to back this up, but I'm willing to bet that, in the US, that emotion favors the big three for a variety of reasons.

In the 1970s, all of them were selling absolutely awful products by the metric shitload (10% more than a normal shitload), so it's not exactly without precedent. FWIW, I agree with you in principle that Detroit actually has some life in it, but making that point with sales numbers isn't actually convincing proof.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but I'm curious what relevance your "when I was a young man" story has to the GPs statement about the current corvette? Stating that something was not good in the past, and thus will never be good in the present, or the future, is not really a good argument.

Okay I stand corrected on that. But, you have no evidence ABC edited with the intent to make her look foolish. They may have done it to simply keep it short. TV news does that a lot.

Just require ISIS show up at court.

Yes, but that's not the point. She cited it as her foreign policy experience when asked about experience.

To save fuel, Obama should have made Sarah Palin the US's ambassador to Russia. She could walk to work.

Perhaps somebody just got news they were being replaced by automation.

And then on their way home spotted the robotic hitchhiker. The rest is history, including the robot.

That was a douche move. Thanks, Philly, for showing the world how classy we are.

The all-eggs-in-one-basket per company isn't so much a company strategy as an investor strategy. The investors in public companies prefer if the companies divest any non-performing asset, as they themselves don't end up with all the eggs in one basket, but are instead free to move in and out of companies and sectors without getting a lot of overhead in the deal.

Whether it's good for the companies themselves is of course another issue...

When the signs and lane markers are covered by snow and ice it will just default to using the same markers everyone else is using; the crashed cars driven by idiot humans who thought they could see the lane markers.

Seriously though, no autonomous vehicle would be dependent on lane markers as the sole feature for positioning, you need to use a multitude of inputs ranging from using markers to using LIDAR to map geometry of the area, through projection of probable trajectories and even to using prior knowledge or map data of the road. You have to have a multitude of independent systems cooperating, validating and agreeing on the most likely model for the current reality. Any autonomous vehicle deemed safe enough to actually operate autonomously should be significantly more capable of reliably assessing the situation than the average human. If any climate presents a difficulty for the detection and navigation part (as opposed to purely physical performance limitations) for an autonomous car it should not be allowed into traffic as it's obviously nowhere near capable enough to trust with human lives.

For that application, I'd be more excited about Project Tango. I'm not sure exactly how good it is, but that type of technology has the potential to be used to (for example) detect the deflection of failing structural members, etc.