A model of a pedestrian is a data structure that represents the state of the pedestrian - its position, velocity, rough shape, detection accuracy (e.g. whether the face was detected). It also includes behavioral flags. A Google self driving car is essentially an intelligence gathering machine that would make NSA, CIA and FBI simply melt if they had access to the data.

Given that it's rather easy to use a credit card with an assumed name, and also a fake billing address submitted while paying, I really don't see why the people who wanted to stay discreet/anonymous didn't do so.

In case anyone wanted to know how to do it, at least in the U.S. it's rather trivial:

1. Add an authorized user on your credit card account. The name can be fake. You'll get a card for that user.

2. Add a throwaway billing burner phone number on your account. Can be a $5 Tracfone from Walmart. This is optional only if the billing processor demands a phone number.

3. When registering/paying for AM, use the fake authorized user's card, and enter your address with a wrong name of the street. The ZIP and house number must match, the street name doesn't have to. The phone number should be the burner phone.

If the hackers get your data, all they have dirt on is a fictional character. This is 21st century, I thought every guy who knows how to use a bank account and a computer would know this shit?

If we wanted to swing or do it with other people, both me and my wife would simply sign up on AM or a similar site, with full knowledge of each other. Perhaps most people "cheat" without their spouses knowing about it? I thought the whole point of rational adults being married was that they talked and shit? Sigh.

This is very different from what happened in the Google accident. The car behind the wife was slowing down. The car behind the Google car was acting as if the road ahead was clear.

Fucking no. You are not minimizing all these things. It's a zero sum game, to a first approximation. The impactor will exchange some energy with your car, and the more energy you can redirect to brake friction and crumpling of the crumple zones, the better you are. Whatever energy is left is used to stress your musculoskeletal system, and accelerate your car.

You are trading off less damage to your vehicle to higher occupant accelerations and higher trauma to the occupants. You are an idiot. I fucking mean it. Stop with the nonsense.

You are crazy. And I mean it. CRAAAAZY.

In a rear impact, the impact energy is redistributed into: 1. Braking friction, if brakes are applied. 2. Crushing energy. 3. Inertia of the car. When you reduce #1 - apply less brakes - more energy gets redirected towards #3. Assuming a slow crash with no significant incursion into the passenger compartment, the injuries scale with accelerations. The more energy you pass to your car's inertia, generally higher the accelerations will be. The braking force is replaced by inertial forces, but these are simply proportional to acceleration of the car, and its occupants - meaning you.

In a rear impact, if you release the brakes, you will experience higher impact acceeleration and deceleration than if you didn't. This directly translates into the trauma your neck and other body parts are subject to. All that in the name of what? Less damage to your car? Yes, you are crazy, unless your car is worth more than human life ($10M+).

Not everyone is like that - in fact, majority of people are not like that. If you can't train this effect out, you might be in a group of people who have an inability to sufficiently context mask your peripheral (fast) vision's input when it's undesirable/out of context. This also negatively affects your regular driving. You're not aware of how much your central vision is snapped from under you by various things that move in your field of view when you drive - it's "distracted" way more than most people. This has negative effects on contextually important visual target acquisition, since you're constantly overloaded with targets that are irrelevant. It might be a strong thing to say, but you may well be one of the people who are functionally visually impaired in spite of having 20/20 vision when tested using normal methods. You probably shouldn't be driving.

A Google car does that too. Out to 300 feet in all directions. It can track a hundred+ moving objects in its field of view. Imagine a city block situation - it'll be looking at pedestrians and cyclists that are a block ahead of you. It is able to do things that human drivers won't ever be capable of achieving with their limited sensors and processing capabilities.

That would make sense if everyone drove cabrios, in summer, in daytime. When I drive, I very rarely look at drivers unless they are in front of me and somewhat facing me. There's no body language when you're behind someone and the most you see is their headrest.

That "someone" is driving 10,000 miles a week. They drive as much per year as an average U.S. driver drives over half a century, for crying out loud.

You assume that the driver was braking. Had you paid attention, you'd realize that at no point prior to the collision did the other driver apply brakes. They didn't need any additional space to stop, since they weren't stopping. They were on their fucking cellphone, or asleep, or high, or what the fuck ever.

You really must be out of touch with what Google is doing. They are already correcting for the mistakes of other drivers, even these of bicyclists and pedestrians. They literally had multiple cases of bicyclists who made life-threatening mistakes and horribly took over others' right of way and have been detected and protected by the self driving system. They also protected stupid drivers who had poor lane control, didn't check their blind spot, etc. They drove through hundreds of not-at-faults close calls where a human driver would allow an accident to happen even while not being at fault, but the self driving system has modified its behavior to avoid the otherwise inevitable collision.

Let me get this clear to everyone reading this: a current Google self driving car tracks all cars and pedestrians visible to it in a ~300 foot radius, and also maintains the models of temporarily obscured vehicles and pedestrians. It won't actively plow into a bystander, even if that bystander is a drunk that has stumbled onto a road, unless it'd be physically impossible to stop in time. In fact, the current behavior of the system seems to be sacrificial: it will sacrifice to a rear-end to save a jaywalking pedestrian.

People who think that such feats are "decades" away or out of reach of current technology have no idea what they are talking about.

This is what everyone forgets about. Media and the gullible will try to hang on to every once-in-a-blue-moon "butbut the bridge was collapsing" kind of a scenario where the car might fare a bit worse without a human in charge. Still, in the average case, you'll be much safer in a self-driving car, and the more of these cars get on the roads, the less likely we will be to die or get injured on the road - whether as passengers, bikers, cyclists or pedestrians.

No, without training they won't. It's completely impractical to train human drivers for this. Thus it's as simple as: it's not gonna happen. The self-driving car has vastly more data available, it tracks dozens of cars at once, like an AWACS plane would. No human driver is physically capable of that, in a regular car.

If you can't drive without being distracted by the world out there, then seriously you should not be driving. That's all.