It's a self-service check-in, it's already a mindless robot.

Though I fail to see how replacing the dumb kiosk with a more intelligent avatar will really make anything better, I don't really want the kiosk to ask me how my day is going, or tell me I better bundle up because it's going to be a cold day in Chicago, I just want to check in as quickly and easily as possible.

To be fair, even humans aren't always great at choosing what another human will like, based on some of the horrendous Christmas presents I've gotten from close family members over the years.

The automatic trucks can be stopped miles away from the snow, patiently waiting for many hours without getting tired or running into problems with rules about allowed hours behind the wheel. Then when conditions are better, the automated trucks can form a train behind the automated snowplow/salt truck and trudge through the roads at 10mph for hours while remaining 100% vigilant at monitoring road conditions and the truck's reaction to the road -- to the point where any slippage of any wheel on the truck or trailer can be detected and compensated for. A professional driver might be able to do better in some conditions after a good night's sleep, but not when he's already exhausted from spending hours sitting in the truck waiting for the roads to be open, then hours more trudging along slowly in the snow.

For chains, many roads that have chain restrictions (at least in California) already have chain installers waiting on snowy days to help motorists that don't know want (or don't know how) to chain up their own car -- these same crews could be used to chain up trucks.

Or automatic chains can be used.

Why do people keep using that flawed analogy, Google didn't open any doors, not even unlocked ones, the Wifi signals were broadcast in the clear for all to hear -- including bad guys. They captured only plaintext, they didn't break any encryption, not even WEP.

What Google did is more akin to photographing the contents of the papers you left sitting on your desk... which you left sitting out on the sidewalk for all to see. If you didn't want other people to see your private documents, you shouldn't have left them sitting out on the sidewalk.

rm ./--

NoSQL technology did not falter or wither, it's stronger and more popular than ever and works quite well in certain circumstances. NoSQL didn't replace relational databases, but when used appropriately, it does exactly what it's supposed to.

It's too bad that the police don't have access to the same advanced technology that normal citizens use to make recordings.

There is no excuse for police not having body-cams and dash-cams that signs and dates all recordings and are unalterable by the officers. (and they should have enough recording space/battery life to stay on during an entire shift so you don't end up with a situation like "Oh gee, we shot someone by mistake, but none of us remembered to turn on our cameras)

Then when a citizen's camera shows the police in a bad light, the police can counter with their own camera footage.

If increased competition is the goal, then give the smaller companies preference in spectrum auctions.

Multi-billion dollar spectrum auctions are a scam anyway, just a hidden tax that we all pay through higher cellular bills.

In the past 10 years, I have never turned on my water tap and had no water come out. In the past 5 years (which is as far back as I have log files from my UPS), I've experienced 2 power failures lasting longer than a few minutes (I recorded 7 outages lasting less than a few minutes, but some of those were when I unplugged the UPS or turned off a breaker to do some electrical work), one was a regional power outage, and one was caused when a car accident took down a utility pole.

However, I experience regular internet outages, the last one was last week, and lasted for 3 hours, cable TV was fine, but internet (for me and a neighbor down the street) was out. It took 30 minutes to get someone at Comcast to realize that there was a problem, but they had no idea what was wrong, nor any ETA for a fix.

So I *wish* my internet connection was managed as well as water and power.

I think you mean a 10-mllion-a-year-aire with a net worth of $150M:

http://www.celebritynetworth.c...

Well i guess the same thing that happens when the datacenter that my 1U server is colocated in goes down -- I either bring up the server n a DR region (which I can set up nearly for free with AWS), or wait until the datacenter problem is fixed. In the past 2 years, haven't experienced a single multi-AvailabilityZone outage with Amazon, and only 2 short single AZ outages that resulted in no loss of service since my servers are split across multiple AZ's. I've never had to fail over to the warm-spares in a separate region (other than during testing).

Coloc space is not cheap, so don't forget to factor that into the costs. Running a datacenter in the office is even more expensive due to the costs to add the needed redundancy (power, cooling, internet) to an office tower.

The point only stands if you pretend that there's no real difference between an unimmunized person and a immunized person with 0.3% chance of catching the disease, and if you ignore the science behind herd immunity.

Because no vaccine is 100% effective, even if you're immunized, you can still catch the disease.

Further, some individuals are unable to be vaccinated due to underlying medical conditions (allergies, compromised immune system, etc).

Millions of people fly in airplanes every day that rely on computer controls (since there is no mechanical linkage between the pilot and the control surfaces). And 30,000 people die each year at the hands of human drivers.

While the real time image recognition may not be quite ready for prime time, it will get there and when it does, computer drivers will be safer than human drivers. Google's driverless cars have already racked up 700,000 accident free miles in autonomous mode (albeit with a human ready to take over). Their car has already surpassed my own record, it's only been about 150,000 miles since my last accident (a car changed lanes into me, while the accident was not my fault, if I'd had computer-like reflexes and perfect awareness of my surroundings to know that the lane beside me was open, I may have been able to avoid the accident by sudden braking and/or making a quick lane change)

Then why is Google spending so much money on fiber to the home? As RF frequencies increase (since there's only so much bandwidth available at the lower frequencies - a 100Mhz channel at 900Mhz takes up relatively more spectrum than a 100Mhz channel at 10Ghz), cell sizes decrease due to lower propagation and penetration of the higher frequencies to a point where it takes a Wireless access point at every house (or possibly in every room in the house) to provide equivalent throughput to wired infrastructure.