Not at all. Airline statistics tell a big story. They are incredibly safe now. Not too many computers are flying the plane into a mountain.

Wow, I lol'd at this... How could you possibly compare these two? Airspace has an incredibly consistent, standardized and mostly centralized air-traffic control system. you have ~7,000 aircraft simultaneously in the entire US Airspace. We have over 242 Million registered vehicles in the United States. I couldn't find data on how many are in operation simultaneously, but I think it is safe to say you can find over 7000 in operation simultaneously during rush hour in any average city on the interstates there alone.

Add to that the room/flexibility to maneuver in a vehicle on a road system, parking lot, parking garage, shoulder, dirt road, etc. compared to "air space".

Both have weather hazards, granted. Except that often when weather is rough, planes don't fly there (route around it). Motor vehicles don't work that way.

I'm sure I have BARELY scratched the surface here. Maybe we should instead be debating what I meant by "quite a long time". I'd say a significant number of autonomous vehicles in operation in the U.S. is at least a decade away, maybe two.

While they may go for years without addressing serious problems and safety issues, or doing complex things like resurfacing roads...

Why can't they have autonomous vehicles resurface roads? That seems like an ideal situation for efficiency... controlled environment since the lanes are usually blocked off anyway, repetitive and standard task, etc. Its always been something done at a bad time of day for humans anyway and you might reduce union problems (once you get over the obvious initial ones to implement it to begin with)...

These cars have logged hundreds of thousands of miles, with ONE accident. That's far, far safer than the average human driver.

Where are you getting that the average human driver has an at least one accident every few hundred thousand miles? I wouldn't call this "far, far safer" yet. It has the potential to be.

Also, most of the tests have been in still fairly controlled environments. Meaning, the car wasn't woken up in the middle of the night to get a pregnant woman to the hospital quickly over dirt roads, past nighttime street-racers, etc... Loads of "special cases" exist in the world of cars. It will be quite a long time before we have a really solid understanding of their viability. Right now, a "typical commute" is probably the safest use, or even for standard-route delivery vehicles without a high time sensitivity. Even better if certain roads / routes / lanes get set aside for autonomous vehicles only, which would make them even safer and more efficient.

if you are going to quote Iranian officials saying that they will erase Israel from the map, you'd be a fool if you do not place it as verbal showcasing intended as something to gather support from Arabic populations.

Well, that is another mass stereotyping of "Arabic populations"... But the mere fact that this is perceived as a viable strategy across such a large population (calling for the violent annihilation of another population) kinda makes me lean towards none of "them" having a bomb.

To be frank I'm surprised nobodies 'stolen' a car at defcon or black hat yet for one of the demo's.

It would have been highly amusing if Gen. Alexander's car had refused to either arrive or depart Defcon this year... Or whatever car he was being chauffeured in.

...Angry Birds: Cruisin' Down the Highway.

I prefer a multi-player FPS type game... imagine an augmented reality interface where you can see the virtual turrets mounted on your hood and aim them at other cars logged into the game. You could see those cars taking damage and then eventually being "destroyed". Of course, you also have to watch your six and consider your shield levels as well. If you had passengers in the car, maybe they could man the rear guns or monitor system health and repairs...

I think I just made family road-trips much more fun...

The as-yet-unpublished research was presented to the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Electronic Vehicle Controls and Unintended Acceleration, established to investigate the safety and security of automobile electronics following the large-scale recall of malfunctioning cars in 2010.

LOL... or, one manufacturer might use such exploits to create a series of improbable events labeled "malfunctions" which damages their competitor's sales and forces large scale and costly recalls. Hmmm... Industrial Espionage just moved up a tick in the automotive industry... distributed industrial sabotage.... trademark pending?

The self-driving car is laughable. Google is not going to become an auto manufacturer. Google is not going to become a technology provider to an existing auto manufacturer. The existing manufacturers suffer from Not Invented Here Syndrome worse than almost any other industry. They're the very definition of hidebound, and it's no surprise, as they've been exposed to the kind attentions of the aforementioned institutional investors for generations now. I give Google's project another year before they pull the plug, and that's optimistic.

Google's objective isn't to become an auto-manufacturer or to become a supplier to them. Their objective isn't to directly make money on this at all.

Their objective is to free up the billions of eyeball-hours spent on driving so they can be used for something else....

Simce when do black hats respect privacy? See? Shared values.

+1

Yes, I think both communities generally agree... the privacy of *my* information should be respected but *your* information wants to be free!

just imagine a NSA phone lost at DEF CON ... :)

That sounds almost as bad as an iPhone prototype left at a bar... But I'm sure Apple will take precedence on government resources to "recover" their device...

I treasure my privacy too much to break my anonymity (and no, I'm not part of that "anonymous" movement either)

Nice low UID there... I would assume they identified THOSE first... ;)

What type of "value" they really think they truly share with us? ... Keep track of every-single-thing on every-single-person on earth?

Well, they did say "...the fact that information increases value by sharing..." -- Just think how much value they are creating by sharing all information about every single person on earth with every federal agency who needs/wants it?

I apologize for not stating up front that I was referring to the English-speaking market.

Actually, it sounds like you are referring to the male 12-25 year old U.S. Windows-based user demographic. (maybe you meant that last part by "PC"?)

I was referring to games that people in my family play. I wasn't suggesting these markets are LARGER than the violent games market, but you seemed to imply they don't exist. Have you been to the game section of an Apple store lately? How about the Mac App store? Any idea how much Zynga brings in on non-violent games? Facebook games? I noticed you ignored several examples I gave as well.

Maybe you meant the "gaming market consisting of games I like"?

What genres are there on PCs other than FPS (violent), RTS (violent), and MMORPG (violent and spiritistic more often than not)?

Puzzles come to mind... Ever play Myst? The series did quite well.

How about the multitude of pinball games?

SimCity? The Sims? Railroaders? Civilization (I suppose you could say that one has violence, but I mean to highlight the "building" style games)

Solitaire? Minesweeper? Mahjong?

Augmented reality HUD glasses combined with a few other devices for analyzing the environment around you and then connected to any massive and fast database would yield some interesting things.

Read Daemon and Freedom by Daniel Suarez for some of the best use of this technology I have seen in recent fiction. Noting, of course, that Google was credited on the project (along with others)...

This page also discusses the technology used in the books.

This page and this page are examples of the sort of dialogue ensuing from these books. Everyone I have suggested them to is now dreaming of life in D-Space. ;)

What is amazing is that he wrote the first book in 2004 and saw so much of this coming... It reminds me of Ender's Game and its predictions of the common use of tablets, web forums, anytime/anywhere connectivity, adaptive learning systems, etc... even though it was written in the 80s.