..and by the way: How is anything I've said FUD? Do you not read the news? Have you not heard what these and other Islamic religious extremists have said about the U.S., and seen what they've done to U.S. citizens they've captured? Have you not heard the numerous stories about schoolgirls being brutally attacked and maimed or killed for having the audacity to go to school? Can you not see that it doesn't take any imagination at all to see what they'd do to us all given carte blanche to do as they please? Is your head really buried that deep in the sands of denial?

I'm not 'conservative' by any stretch of the imagination, but I can see the writing on the wall. Apparently you can't.

Tell you what, buddy: You think your grasp of world politics is so awesomely genius? Write down all your ideas and send them to the Secretary of State and to the President and let's see what happens. While you're at it please write them all down in detail in this thread so we can laugh at you, too.

Sure thing buddy, great idea. Let's see how you feel about your own ideology when you wake up one morning to find Islamic Jihadists pointing guns at you and informing you that you need to convert to Islam, immediately, or face execution, or that you are now subject to Sharia Law whether you like it or not, and that your daughters will have acid thrown in their faces for having the gall to actually go to school to learn to read, write, and do math. As distasteful as it may be, you have to face the reality of the fucked-up world we're living in: There are people out there that hate you just because you exist, they don't care what your opinions are, they don't care what your politics are, they want you, your family, and everyone you know dead because their interpretation of their fucking religion (or their using religion as an excuse, you decide which is which) says that you're an abomination in the eyes of Allah and as such they have a duty to wipe you from the face of the earth. Of course I'll be shouted down now by a thousand assholes here on /. with rhetoric like 'it's all about money' or 'it's all about oil' or whatever, but the fact remains: We can't go back now. We abandon our allies based on idealism? We'll be abandoned in turn, hated even worse, and left to be destroyed. Sorry buddy, there's no turning back now.

For cryin' out loud, people, did some idiot politician with no idea how tech works in the real world come up with this idea?

Here's the problem:
Simply put, any tech can be hacked. As you'll note from the last several decades, copy protections, DRM, what have you, can and have all been hacked to circumvent them, and in some cases it took a fraction of the time to hack them than it did to create them in the first place! You design some sort of technology to 'remotely disable' weapons of war and two things will happen:
1. The 'enemy' will hack them at a critical moment so you can't use them, and
2. You leave them behind, they'll hack them and use them anyway.

You want to 'disable' weaponry you're forced to leave behind? The best way is the tried-and-true old-fashioned way: You rig them with explosives and destroy them. For bonus points, you booby-trap them so that the enemy sets them off when they come to take posession of the aforementioned weapons left behind, so that you not only destroy the hardware, you destroy as many of them as possible in the process, and in the case of these 'Islamic State' assholes, the more of them you can take out, the better. Congratulations, you've made the world a better place through the use of demolition charges.

This.
4chan's fate was sealed as soon as it became mainstream; it was just a matter of time after that.

I second the motion; fuck that. We're already 'tracked' in enough ways we (apparently) can't control, I'll be damned if I do it willingly. As is I'm getting fucking sick and fed up with feeling more and more every year like we're animals in a zoo or criminals in a prison.

It's a very common page from the playbook of every dictator and oppressive regime. Keep the people in the dark as much as possible, or better yet in the case of religion, demonize other, non-church-authority sources of information, insist that if you use them you are committing a sin, and that only information from church leaders is valid and right. The only good thing in this story is that moves like this just highlight how desperate these people are to maintain power over the people, and how much that power is, year by year, slipping through their fingers like so much sand, as they grip tighter and tighter.

I don't want to live forever, but for this one reason alone: I'd be pleased to live long enough to see humans, as a race, finally evolve beyond this silly need for 'god(s)' and 'religion' and finally realize they've been relying on themselves all along, and that it's a Good Thing to be that way. Then power-hungry and/or deluded people like this 'Grand Ayatollah', and the Pope, and anyone like them, would no longer hold sway over people. Then we'll really have a shot at having a civilization to be proud of.

Agreed. And this decision is utter and complete bullshit. The DA's office should all be fired over this. Cop needs to go to jail, plain and simple: Distracted driving, vehicular manslaughter.

Sure. Just like broadband Internet, right? Because everyone in Kansas has broadband now, right? Oh, wait, that's right, they don't! There are suburbs I've lived in where there was nothing but dialup..

The fact of the matter is: The entire highway infrastructure will have to be completely overhauled, at enormous expense, before 'self driving cars' could be a reality, or even have a chance at being prevalent. Even then there will always be roads and places where there is no such infrastructure, and people will have to operate the vehicle themselves to get where they want to go. Also, what do you do about situations where you're not even sure where you're going? At the very least, the puzzle of real, full-on human-level artificial intelligence has to be solved, I think, before anything like this can be practical. There are too many variables, you can't program an 'expert system' for all of them, something will come up it doesn't know how to handle.

I thought of something else that will be a problem with 'technology' like this, with regards to criminal activity. I've made the argument before that hacking a system like this will be as easy as hacking any other computer system, and criminals will use it to steal vehicles, or to carjack/kidnap people. Imagine this scenario: All you'd need are two or three 'attacking' vehicles, to surround and restrict an autonomous vehicle in such a way that is has no choice but to slow down, in order to avoid what it perceives as an imminent collision. From there it becomes a trivial matter to continue slowing down, and forcing the vehicle to pull over and come to a complete stop. From there extracting the passenger(s) becomes exceedingly trivial, and voila, you've either kidnapped the passenger, stolen the vehicle, or both. There's no way they're going to code an 'evasive maneuvers' routine into the vehicle, or even come up with a reliable way to have it detect that it's being gamed like this. Of course someone will say 'Nobody is going to do this!' or 'That'll never happen!', or 'All cars will be autonomous so it won't be possible', but that's as complete a fantasy as saying (in some people's dystopian future) 'guns are illegal so where would anyone get a gun?'. At best I think we'll have an advanced 'autopilot' system, as an option, of course, but people will still be driving their own cars, at least for the next, say, 50 years or so.

Moto Razr V9. Before anyone calls me a Luddite: I don't have sufficient use for the features of a smartphone to justify the cost of purchasing a smartphone in the first place. I barely use a phone as a phone for that matter, it's only even turned on a few minutes a day unless I'm actually using it to make a call. Seriously, I don't understand how it is so many people treat a cellphone like it's a lifestyle, especially with what a dataplan costs from wireless companies. Yes, I understand you can use wifi instead, but still: why the obsession? I've got any number of other things to do than sit there an obsess over a telephone, regardless of how much processing power it has, etc.

I'm an amateur athlete, so it's usually more like 'come home from work, am kind of tired, need to do training, decide to take a short nap, drink or eat something with caffeine in it first, nap for 20-30 minutes, get back up, get up to speed again, get ready, go out and do training, feel much better than if I just pushed through it'. Can do this at work, though, too, especially at lunchtime.

I've done this for years, and didn't even know it was a thing. Seems to work.

You're in the middle ground between myself (always have manual control available, unimpeachably) and the guys frothing at the mouth for fully automated cars with NO manual controls of ANY kind (who I think are so stupid they must be trolls), and you're reasonable sounding enough that I'll address you rather than get in another shouting match with them:
Be honest with me: Would you ever feel 100% secure getting into a box on wheels that has nothing more than a big red button marked 'EMERGENCY STOP' to control the vehicle in an emergency? Here's the Nightmare Mode version of that question: Would you feel OK putting your own children in such a vehicle, programming it's destination, and waving as they roll away? Myself, I cannot see how anyone with a lick of common sense could possibly be OK with such an arrangement, and I also cannot believe that I'm in such a tiny minority as some would have me believe.

A 'warning system' to supplement the drivers' own sense of situational awareness would be fine. However: No 'taking control of the vehicle from the driver' for any reason. Anything that facilitates drivers to drive more safely is good thing. Similarly I'm all for better driver training and better driver testing.