As long as the truck can pull over if there is a problem, which it would need to even in your three trucks in a convoy solution, then this problem is easy to solve. You even mention the solution in your post: AAA. A commercial trucking version of AAA would have drivers to come fix any of these failures and get the trucks to their destinations. Who knows how many of these truckers they would need when this technology becomes ubiquitous, but its likely to be a very small percentage of the current trucking industry.

The only reason to need a consistent development environment is for upgrades and maintenance. If they never need to debug errors or add features then there is no reason to have a development environment at all. Just pass around binary executables.

I assumed when the AC said new compilers alter the output of their algorithms, he meant the actual output of the functions, RPCs, services, etc. Optimization algorithms of the compilers shouldn't affect this unless they are broken. Or at least that would be my assumption. I would love clarification on how these compiler optimizations can cause different outputs from someone who has done this professionally though.

It does make sense that changes to math libraries would alter output because of differences in precision. Any other libraries, such as those which handle concurrency, would also open up possibilities for different behavior. I just don't see how compiler optimizations should make any difference.

While the summary is trying to make this some kind of huge rebuff of the President by democrats in Congress, the only serious problem with this bill is it was for too long of a time period. Obama is only in office for another 18 months, and this fast track authority would have extended years after he is gone. This vote had almost nothing to do with democrats not trusting Obama; it was them not trusting the unknown President who will take his mantle a couple years from now.

You are quite correct that not all technology will be used just because it exists. A better statement would be that all technologies which can be used to improve someone's utility will be used. Using nuclear weapons does not benefit a country when their opponents have them or if the political fallout would be too severe. And there are plenty of conventional weapons which are just as effective for most warfare requirements.

None of this has anything to do with consumer and corporate face recognition software. Augmented reality devices and consumer data mining are simply too useful to hold back. The entire lobbying industry would be a disgrace if they couldn't stop these regulations from impeding this progress because they will certainly be well funded.

An interesting side effect of this would be to give even more advantages to large companies. If this technology actually provides value, and small companies cannot buy this data from third parties, then only companies large enough to amass their own huge data sets have this advantage.

I am almost convinced the best route is to force large companies to open up their data (for a fee), similarly to how we forced certain utility providers to rent out their physical infrastructure. This lets a local grocer have the same data Walmart has. It also allows entrepreneurial AI companies to have access to the huge data sets companies like Facebook and Microsoft have access to.

If this ever became a trend, the device makers would just start IR cut filtering their cameras.

Of course there would be no shortage, because 80% of current United States CS-related jobs would be off-shored to countries without such outrageous salaries. If you inflate wages above what the market will bear (taking into account the international market), then any industry will suffer the same fate the US auto industry suffered last century.

Saying that NSA surveillance cannot prevent a 9/11 style attack is silly, although saying it most likely will not is far more accurate (IMHO). The New America Foundation think tank published a report claiming that of 225 investigations performed since 9/11, only 1.8% of them were initiated based on NSA bulk metadata surveillance and 4.4% of the cases were assisted by the NSA spying program. These are obviously low figures so by shear odds it is likely the next huge terror plot would not be caught by NSA metadata spying.

But considering PRISM allegedly cost $20 million of a total US intelligence budget of around $75 billion annually over the past few years, the NSA program could still be considered a bargain. Although probably not once you factor in $35 billion in lost GDP because of a new found lack of trust of USA companies abroad.

And once again, I was only playing devil's advocate and trying to explain the other side of the argument. I personally believe the costs to personal freedoms dwarf the benefits of all enhanced security related programs since 9/11.

First off I am not defending the NSA's actions; I am just trying to give an honest answer to this question.

Since the stated goal is to protect America from attacks, looking at the financial costs of the 9/11 attacks is a good way to find the costs on the other side of the argument. According to the New York Times, the successful attacks on the World Trade Center had an immediate economic cost of $178 billion. This includes $24 billion for the value of life lost, using similar actuarial tables that insurance companies or wrongful death lawsuits would.

The $35 billion figure is over a 4 year period, so thats about $9 billion per year. With this reasoning, if the NSA PRISM program could prevent one 9/11 scale attack every 20 years, it could be argued that it is worth it. This does not count the actual cost of running the NSA operation though, but that allegedly only cost about $20 million so it barely factors in.

If you accept the argument that war is inevitable when the US is attacked like we were on 9/11, then the total cost of 9/11 could be closer to $3 trillion. If American was safe enough because of NSA spying that it didn't "need" to fight foreign wars, that would be a huge economic cost saver.

This obviously does not factor in the cost of our loss of freedom, but I am trying to play devil's advocate here.

Perhaps I don't know my history very well, but isn't the US the only reason Germany isn't part of Russia right now? The Berlin Wall was in Germany, right?

The Ukraine is probably the best example right now of what happens when you don't have a large enough army or at least powerful allies. If the Ukraine was part of NATO there would be no warmongering in that country right now.

Getting an art history degree does not cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Certain art history degrees do, but that doesn't mean society should pay for any expensive educational endeavor a 20 year old wants to try. Education is an investment, even if your only planned returns are self improvement. And if that is the case, it should be treated as more of a vacation which you should make sure you can afford before you venture off.

Regardless of what has happened to social mobility in the last 30 years, it hasn't affected the author of this article because he is 57 years old. He went to college in the 80's when college was not nearly as expensive. I went to college at the turn of the century and even then it was cheap enough you could pay over half of your college expenses by working part time at minimum wage.

This guy is simply a sociopathic asshole who is just being provocative to get page views. He stopped paying his bills because he is an entitled prick, not because of the federal loan apparatus he is complaining about in the article. I have real sympathy for the problems younger millenials are having because of the rising price of college, and it is shameful for this author to exploit them like this.

Obviously science has not progressed far enough to know how to model the human brain in a computer, or else we would probably be doing it already. So I guess I concede that we can't transfer the human brain yet, but I never said we could. But it is silly to believe we won't figure this out eventually. I would be surprised if it takes us 50 years.

I was only responding to the idea that if you transfer your brain to another medium, the old you dies. This is potentially true, but very unlikely. People can lose large portions of their brain without dying, and if those portions were replaced with synthetic computing devices I don't think anyone would think the old them has died.

Worse case scenario would probably be like what happens to someone suffering from multiple sclerosis (MS), where their personality changes to the point where they seem like a new person. In this case they would likely become more capable instead of less (like an MS patient), but their personality is still likely to change considerably.

This is very easily solved as a concept, although the implementation will obviously be insanely difficult. As another poster mentioned, your brain cells are constantly dying already. You still feel like you probably because it happens so gradually. So the answer to replacing your brain is the same; do it gradually. Conceptually you would be hooking your brain to a helmet filled with electronics that slowly replace your brain functions. At the end of the process your brain is completely electronic and you are still you. This is the theory anyway.

If you consider this scenario to be the same as you experiencing death, then you have already died perhaps hundreds of times in your lifetime so far.