> what's the point of a self-driving car if you can't relax or do something else while 'driving?'"

It's early days yet, give it time.

There was no point in cars AT ALL when they first were introduced: they were slower than horses, you needed to bring a mechanic along with you 'cos they broke down every mile. Some cities you had to employ a guy to walk ahead of the car with flags to warn people. Utterly without practical use, they were.

They got better, laws adapted. You have to start somewhere though!

Been rewatching "Max Headroom" (one of my all-time faves) lately and have been so impressed with how much they foresaw. Sure, today's cameras are a lot smaller and several details about society and industry were a bit off-base, but the idea that information is more valuable than money, the rise of corporate power while governments decline in relevance, and a lot of other things they got spot on.

That said, the live telemetry from "satcams" is something which has been missing. Google made a big leap forward with Maps and Streetview, I just wanted it to all connect together in realtime like at Theora's console... nice to know we're still making progress!

I've obscured the name of the company so as to avoid a messy copyright battle, but this is the photo selected for the "Security Threats" chapter of my networking class: http://goo.gl/R67PWF

Takeaway message: be wary of inter-dimensional black guys in dungarees...

You don't need to reach for SF to get a great project management lesson, just look at the Apollo program.

A triumph of the human spirit, of technology, of ingenuity, sure - but mainly, an overwhelming triumph of project management. Who says the government can't handle any big jobs, eh? (well, anyone who's been watching for the last 40 years maybe...)

I have to wonder, did you leave the U.S. because you had no friends?

I moved to Australia 7 years ago and I still have friends back in America. Although I can get a lot more things here now than I used to, I still occasionally have a friend help forward things to me. There's no reason to go with a service, just Paypal them the postage.

Maybe you can send them things they might enjoy too - my friend's wife developed a taste for Tim Tams (cookies) and so we have a regular exchange going, as my Aussie wife misses the "graham crackers" she could get in the U.S. which are unheard-of here...

FWIW I can confirm, having experienced hospitalization in the U.S. - with top-tier Blue Cross coverage - and later in Australia as well - the ordinary everyday Medicare system - there is no real difference in the quality of care.

The equipment, the people, and the access are all very good in both countries - assuming you have insurance in the U.S., and I'm comparing major cities to major cities here of course.

What's dramatically different is the cost, and the level of paperwork. In America we were snowed under for years with insurance company statements and bills from a dozen providers - we ended up just sorting them by color and then weighing them... and we had to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket after Blue Cross was finished.

In Australia, you pay maybe $80 for a doctor visit, and get some of it back from the government Prescriptions average $10-$20. If you go to the ER and get admitted to a room, you have to pay $6 a day if you want the TV to work. And I think you sign like one form on your way out. You never hear from them again.

Whoops - I misread the post - they're not asking for your private KEY, just private data... ah well, most of the suggested sentence structure still holds.

If you don't have the social skills to phrase a polite question, Slashdot is perhaps not the ideal place to go looking for advice...

Technical issues with giving anyone your private key aside (I can't think of any reason to give it out to someone no matter how much you trust them) just explaining things clearly should work for any reasonable person:

"I have no problem with you having my personal key, but I am concerned about the integrity of the data while in transit. I would appreciate it if you can supply me with a public key for your organization, then I will be able to encode my key so that only you can decode it. This will ensure that our mutual privacy won't be at risk due to using an insecure communication system such as Email. Thanks very much!" etc

I wrote about the CSER last year at http://www.thisiswhyweredoomed.com/2012/12/europeans-will-doom-us-all.html - if you take this and combine it with the news that the EU is building the world's most powerful laser, you'll wonder why the movie version of Skynet even bothered with a time machine in the first place...

(oh yeah, they already HAVE a Skynet - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet_(satellite)

Oh and hey - that picture was taken BEFORE I turned ugly!

Never said I was coming, sorry if I misled anyone... it's too long of a drive for me now that I no longer live in the city, and too much time taken away from the family now that I have one.

I do know what it's like to be the only one showing up at a gathering, though - usually it's me!

If you're the first to arrive, set your phone's SSID to something relevant and let people triangulate on it.

I have a 6-yr-old and a 3-yr-old. So far the smaller one is happy enough with a few kid-friendly games on mom's iPhone (very sparingly, a few times a week at most) but I'm finding the 6-yr-old very engaged with online casual puzzle games. He's not quite ready for escape-the-room-type stuff, but there are quite a few kid-friendly puzzlers out there - check JayIsGames.com, you can search by tags and I use "kidfriendly" and "puzzle" (and "flash" because I'm not downloading anything, even if I did have Windows around)

While others may disagree, I'm happy to let the local schools teach the basic 3 R's; later on I'll supplement the history and geography and science. Right now I'm more interested in making sure he has analytical skills, including skeptical thinking and inductive reasoning. He's not the math/science geek I was at his age. So I'm trying to make sure he learns as much as possible about puzzles and different ways of solving them. "Rubble Trouble" is a current favorite, but that's only after we've gone through most of the Bonte stable (especially "Factory Balls"! he solved virtually all of them, not bad for (at the time) a 5-year-old)

As for the 3-yr-old, he loves Angry Birds first and foremost, but is just as happy tossing the birds to the left as to the right. He's developing differently and takes things at his own speed, so we're kind of feeling our way forward. (by contrast with the older boy, who's basically a carbon copy of my wife's personality) If he ends up more like me there'll be no keeping him away from the more analytical, strategy-type games - violence-based or otherwise - and he'll be wanting to modify the games as soon as he's finished with 'em... I'll certainly be showing him puzzles of every shape and size until we find a genre he likes.

Kids can only be steered so far. But there's enough out there that you can find something that you and the child can agree on for almost any combination of "you" and "the child"!

I was at the 10-yr event too. But back then I had a lot fewer calls on my time - now there's 2 small kids and a fulltime work AND school schedule to contend with. So I'm afraid I'll only be there in spirit...

Just when I think I live in a remote corner of the world, something like this shows up - this guy came within a few hundred meters of picking up my SSID...

And it's just about exactly one year after the "Craig from Windsor" notes began showing up all around where I work, and went viral online.

Wonder what'll happen next March?