It may be surprising, but the icy/rainy slippery roads are a walk in the park for a computer controlled vehicle. Current anti-lock/stability controls do show excellent reliability already. It's reacting to unknown/unexpected conditions which can be tricky: road constructions with messed up road markings, cities with unpredictable pets/small children. Those I'm far more worried about

MMm, both the German ICE and the French TGV work just fine, allowing one to quickly travel large distances in comfort. Comparing that to Great-Brittain, it seems that railway systems fare better in 'socialist countries with strong government.

And if I read the pages correctly, NASA's probe still works, while India's stopped working after a year. thank you, come again...

Transmission is nice for small servers (it has a web-interface) qBittorrent is good for the laptop/desktops

Also dolby digital has a "self-clocking data-mode", in which case the PC is still the clock source, and the PLL story is relevant. Your comment applies when the D/A converter uses it's own clock source. Since S/PDIF has no return channel, this requires resampling of the audio, to match the (very close but slightly different) clocks of the PC and D/A converter. Just as for the PLL, there exist high-quality solutions, whether or not you particular D/A has them, can be hard to figure out, though.

It's somewhat surprising since even though the digital audio is sent bit-perfect over the S/PDIF cable, the audio quality can still be less than an obviously not-perfect analog cable. Apparantly you have good systems knowledge, a typical non-electrical engineer does not / should not have that, and for those, the "24bit/96khz digital can be worse than analog" can be suprising.

The surprising thing is that digital audio introduces it's own kind of noise:
The D/A converter derives the clock from the S/PDIF interface, which requires PLL filtering for a stable clock. PLL design is surprisingly difficult, so there are systems out there where the optical S/PDIF connection introduces clock-jitter and give worse quality than a halfway decent analog connection.

Iran does understand the need for manned aircraft, ever since they were able to capture a drone bhy messing with it's GPS reception

My nexus S is rooted, and all data survived the gingerbread->ICS ota upgrade..

All phones blink alike in the shop, and I assume there are actually a fair number of people who don't even bother what OS is on their phone. (or even still call all smartphones Iphones)

So we still beat them at map-reading ? nice ;-)

There's most definitely a difference. Motion estimation for compression does not find motion vectors which describe the real motion very well, they just compress very well. It's a world of difference, most TV's nowadays do motion estimation themselves to convert to >=120Hz. Which, especially for panning motion is a huge improvement over 24 Hz. Note that you only see the difference if you track objects/people with your eye. When you focus your eyes statically at the center of the screen, 24 Hz is enough

Actually,
that's the one point the article misses. Although 48 kHz is enough to contain all audio information, it does require very steep digital filters, which are not easy to make. 48 kHz can reproduce up to 24 kHz. Making a filter which goes from 1 to 0 in just 4 kHz is difficult and does lead to ringing and phase distortions.

I once drove a crown vic from '89 for six months. It leaked engine coolant, needed more oil than fuel, left front wheel was a bit loose, windows would get stuck if totally dialled down, heater wouldn't work in cold, heater would automatically come on when driving uphill in summers, gear kick-back didn't always work, the 'coast' buttons sometimes caused acceleration, door locks would not unlock, handbrake was broken. trunk would occasionally pop open while driving.

But otherwise, it was a perfectly fine car, which just ran 250k miles.

Aren't Fords made in the US ? The ford focus is quite a nice and fairly popular car.
And the Crown Victoria is awesome of course, just a bit expensive at the gas station :-)