it's very cool you are a pilot (at least that is one take away). I've done small planes, but nothing major. And yes, I realize the cockpit is incredibly complex.

But let's be honest. So many of the crashes we have today come from one of two sources: mechanical failure (not software related) and pilot error. And frankly, the former is getting far less common (barring the 787 issues,but all new jets have teething issues).

Many of the big wrecks we have suffered in the last few years (air france 447 is a great example) have been specifically because when a pilot had to take over for the computer he fucked it up. And it isn't single examples, as they are now suggesting one major issue is pilots have basically lost their skills at flying a plane manually.

But it's odd you think driving a car is more complex. Driving a car, especially on city streets, where video analysis is quite easy, is not just simple, it's basically a solved problem. They already have fully automated cars that can outperform human drivers in many tasks, especially safely navigating complex situations because they can watch everything at once. Basically beyond edge cases, I can't think of many times a computer wouldn't do better than me (ever changed lanes on a 3 lane highway and not noticed that someone in the far lane was changing simultaneously?)

that is possible. but more likely in a few years autonomous cars will cover this by simple video analysis. it's not like instructions are quite so random, it's just a much harder problem than cruising down the road looking for obstacles and staying in your line.

only one of your hypothetical situations aren't already being handled by cars at an equivalent level to humans. In fact, detouring around debris they are far superior at than humans, because they have access to every road way possible. In fact, a good car computer could, via radar, better understand that there is a pothole with brackish water than I could in low light conditions. Automated cars have access to (both already and in theory) far superior sensing equipment than humans. All I have are my eyes and ears. And they are good, but incredibly limited. Especially vision, which can't check my blind spot without losing sight of the road.

The hardest thing is following manual instructions from an emergency responder.

you could be and you would be right. There are in some small rollouts automated vehicles already on the road and they outperform a lot of human drivers.

Hell, flying a jet liner, already far far more complex than driving a car, is almost 100% automated. Literally if the pilot died, you could instruct someone on how to direct the plane and have it land safely even if that person had only minimal training. I think they would have to hit the brakes when the plane touched down, but I've never brought a jetliner in on ILS in cat 3 (or in any weather for that matter).

People seem scared of letting a computer do something they (wrongly) consider themselves competent at. But they are happy to let a computer fly a plane.

And like we are seeing with planes, once automated cars get common, it would be foolish to allow people to manually override the system. Just like pilots who are not used to manually controlling a plane anymore, you are more likely to fuck it up.

interesting this is your experience. My experience is the exact opposite (and was educated in a public school in the US, in central Florida so not a well monied district). My experience was that language barriers existed for those who came here randomly at young ages and they struggled at US history because they spent their time learning the history of their own country, but in mathematics, Americans were regularly 1-3 grade levels behind those educated abroad. The worst gap was against Indians at young ages, but in general it was just gaping by late middle school and then high school.

The gap got a lot wider at the high school level though, where most americans don't ever touch things like calculus and it seems like everyone in those countries does by 11th grade.

Like wine, or food, or music, if you do a double blind study you may very well end up with very different preference rankings. It doesn't mean the outcomes are equivalent though. Even dishes that are usually simple are made with very different spices and ingredient balances by different chefs, and frankly, very different ingredients. Even sushi, one of the simplest foods available (literally, slice raw fish, put it on rice which has some sugar and vinegar added to it) can be markedly different. And usually, the difference is the chef being able to pick out the higher quality cut of meat (I'm assuming traditional sushi, not the westernized version with 25 ingredients and crazy names). Even the same chef can't reproduce the same outcomes, as there are factors that are beyond his control (the drink I pair the food with, the temperature it ends up being at when I eat it, these things matter).

The argentinian Chef won't mess up the sushi because he is argentinian, he will mess it up because he isn't as sensitive to the exact ingredient balance and isn't as knowledgable about the cuts of fish that are best when served raw. And most likely, he will also mess up because he doesn't have a good understanding of the order in which to serve the sushi if it is a chef plate. But this is the equivalent to me writing stat software. Of course R will be better, I'm nothing more than a 2-bit coder who hates error handling. I would get the code flow wrong, would probably do things in horribly suboptimal ways, etc, etc. It doesn't matter that I understand statistics quite well.

at least on the consumer tech side, what has HP done in the last 20 years? I can't think of a single thing they made in the mid 90s that made my mouth water, but then I was young and only really looking at computers. I always thought the printers were incredible ripoffs, with horribly overpriced ink (and this has only gotten worse). Hell, even back then, their computers were just off the shelf parts put together. You could build the same thing yourself. It wasn't like they were Intel or voodoo, fabbing groundbreaking chips that helped change out we interact with computers.

But as I said, I may be being unfair. For me, the last HP tech that was revolutionary was the HP-12C, and that is more than 30 years ago. I'm not sure it's the MBAs fault. I always felt HPs engineers/sales/management top to bottom stopped offering interesting tech at the consumer level ages before it finally started it's death spiral.

the cost was his point. Though I'm guessing his accent may have thrown you.

If you are going to be 100k in debt to become a STEM grad, his point was many many qualified, smart, capable people will not pursue that route. This means we don't get the best of the best in our STEM grads, we get the best of the relatively smaller population who can afford to get the degree.

Whereas in a place like India (or many European countries or Asian countries) where higher education isn't stupidly priced, everyone is competing for those STEM seats, and those seats may very well be limited. So you have a much, much larger population of people competing for those seats and you don't lose qualified individuals because tuition was too expensive.

Anyways, I always say the proof is in the pudding. For all that a small number of US tech employees complain about this, the companies are now going to India and hiring grads to work in India for salaries north of 200k USD a year (out of college). That is "living like a king" money in India for a young, bachelor(ette). So obviously there are enough qualified people to be commanding envious salaries in India.

I know this is hard for most people on slashdot to believe, but not all H1B visas go to programmers and the 5 million cough is tech jobs not including tech manufacturing, NOT STEM jobs. A civil engineer is part of STEM, your math and science teachers are also part of STEM degrees (and this probably includes all the high school and middle school teachers of these subjects).

I don't really have a horse in this race. I have a lot of extended family from India that came to the US taking high tech jobs, but they are able to get family based green cards as the moment the first person in the extended family had a green card they started applying for everyone else (brothers and sisters, and therefore, nieces and nephews get it on a family basis on rush delivery).

I don't know if they are needed at all. I do know though, recruiting in finance, it is miserable trying to find a native born and educated person who has the basic math and computer skills needed for my area. And we will pay you 100k out of college year one and you can expect that number to double in 3 years and quadruple by year 6 or 7 (if you are good), even with the massive contraction in finance salaries. So when tech firms say they have trouble finding qualified talent, I can commiserate. And I'm pretty sure it's not a pay issue considering there are very few other jobs in the US that can offer you can that kind career pay progression.

Well , just to respond to some of your points (and why, for me at least, they aren't unreasonable, but I can understand why for the majority use case, some of your points are):

The price of a model S is not what you quoted. I was surprised and went to look, the base model, after California rebate and Federal tax benefit is 59k (so you were right, just I guess you figured another 10k off that price). Unfortunately, the federal tax credit is not a refundable credit, so for me in my current lifestyle, it isn't very useful. Of course, this is me, not 99% of the target audience. The prices, MSRP btw, are 70k, 80k, and 94k (and that top end performance one looks quite awesome).

I chose the audi A6 because in my opinion, it is similar, with certain benefits beyond the Tesla and certain drawbacks, and it depends on your preference. I love going off driving in the mountains, and so the AWD makes the Audi massively higher performance for me relative to a Tesla. I understand if for you, the Tesla is your car. It has a damn cool interior and console, and I have to say it turns me on a bit. But then again, it's also why I can't (yet) get an EV. I commute on my feet or on a bicycle or at worst, public transport. My car is for longer trips, which I take a lot of. I'm looking forward to the IBM battery tech that gave massive power density increases so I can take these long trips and leave my car charging all week while working. I'd be in heaven when they get this up to 1000 miles so long distance trips are manageable.

YMMV, but I've never had a car that is still in a condition I would prefer to use go north of 250k miles. Financially it made more sense to buy a new one around 200k. But then, we are talking about nicer cars, not beaters.

As to electricity, last time I paid it in the US was in NY, and I ran an estimated ConEd bill. The marginal cost in NY is around 20 cents KWh but your average is much higher because of set fees that are added in. Namely, ConEd tells you to expect to pay 66 USD for 255 kWh in 2010 (I'm sure that has gone up, but not so much to matter). Why does this matter to me? My family and I live a lifestyle that makes being off the grid completely feasible once battery storage (or one of a number of other storage methods) becomes slightly cheaper. Solar panels are already more than efficient enough on my target home to provide the power, but I need storage to shift it around. This means my target case (hopefully in the next couple of years) is I care about the average cost of getting power, not the marginal cost. Here is an example coned bill (http://www.coned.com/customercentral/threebill_D19_ResDual.asp)

The last time I did timing belt maintenance (wasn't on an Audi) ran me 500 bucks. Not cheap, but not the end of the world for something I may replace every 100,000 miles if I'm unlucky. I'd be more worried about needing a new transmission or even just a clutch, as those can be nasty depending on the layout and labor involved. But again, my point was merely every time I see someone comparing costs, it's idiotic. They act like electricity is free, like maintenance doesn't exist, etc, etc. All of it matters and my big point is gas vs electricity is not even that relevant of a switch depending on the car and your driving style.

Is the prius full electric? I thought it was only hybrid and I'd bet given the amount of charge/discharge they have per mile driven, the battery will last longer. If the battery is used for 40% of the driving load, which seems reasonable as it gets about 50 mpg instead of 30s for similar gas cars, I'd expect the battery to last quite a bit longer.

But it's irrelevant, all these numbers pushed around are ridiculous both because they ignore so many other running costs that make the electric engine almost always more expensive.

For example, electricity costs in the US are about 37 cents / kWh. Obviously, this includes a lot of surcharges and taxes and isn't just the power cost, but this is what US households seem to average. ConEd, on an example bill, shows 250 kWH running you about 63 dollars. Let's assume, as your power draw will be much higher, you average in at 30 cents for your car.

For a Tesla Model S, they claim 4 miles /kWh. Let's assume you get about 3.5, as it seems every manufacturer assumes you will drive much more calmly than anyone actually does. This means you will pay about 8 cents a mile. An Audi A6 qattro, a much higher performance car than the model S, gives you 30 mpg so at 4 bucks a gallon, we are talking about 13.3 cents. So the running cost gain is 5.3 cents. If you want to make back 15,000, we are now talking about over 300,000 miles to run. But we need to include the cost of an oil change at least in an ICE. If that runs you 50 bucks per 5000 miles, it's about 1 penny a mile. So we do a bit better, but not much, of 250k miles to match. So on running costs, you basically will never make it back.

But the ICE has a lot of other costs if we are going to run it for 250,000 miles. How many spark plug changes, throttle plate changes, etc? what's the chance of needing to replace a major engine part? I'm sure we could run these numbers by just seeing what an extended warranty would cost. It's not like these machines run forever, they have thousands of tiny contained explosions going on every minute.

I'd love to see a good run down of this, but I doubt we ever will. Too much in the way of politics.

even then you can't, it's not like every animal (and we are limited to those with extensive bone structures) gets fossilized. If that were the case, fossils would be much easier to come across and much more complete.

but that isn't what everyone wants. I regularly travel internationally and it is damn expensive receiving an SMS in some countries on roaming because apple couldn't just hold it's horses until I connect to wifi. The problem is when you go down these routes you mess things up for other people and make it easier for some, this is why it's a tough engineering problem.

Granted, you could just change the settings to make iMessage not bind to your cell number and have people with iPhones next your email address (it will show up as messagable last I checked) if you are worried about this.

it's similar to the far more annoying issue in the google play store where you can't control you region and sometimes gets region locked to a region you are no longer in. So when I bought my phone and went abroad for a trip, the play store bound itself to that country and when I came back refused to unbind, even going as far to wipe the phone, wipe all address and credit card info in google wallet, and reconnect.

Instead it took a week of back and forth with google help for them to just change a setting in the background that force bound my phone to the country I wanted. Of course, now that I have moved to a different country, I have another host of issues I'll have to go through this again.

Both systems have idiotic limitations, for no good reason (and no, limiting which store I bind myself to based on copyright restrictions on a limited portion of the store is foolish, that should be at the app level with a quick IP address location check).

Oddly, this is one of the best parts of the apple store. I can freely rebind myself to any store I want, regardless of my current IP. I just need a method of payment valid for that country and have no balance in my account.

actually, my contacts are across standing, reasonable universities (those universities that have been around for a long while). And every single one of these schools is HARDER to get into now than they used to be.

To be specific to a given school, we have kids at UF where the entering SAT score has moved higher by a large margin, the average raw 4 point scale GPA is higher (raw, as in no bonus points for honors or AP classes) but the entering level is bad enough to require remedial classes. Note the math required for the SAT is so remedial (I covered all relevant topics before high school, took exam circa 2000) that it isn't unreasonable to see higher SAT scores and lower preparedness. The problem though, is really acute at the community college level. My home state (Florida) has a unpreparedness rate of >50% at that level, where enrollment does surge as more people attempt college. So even as we need more people to go to college to get the skills to be able to provide a decent life for themselves, the average American high school isn't pulling it's weight. Sure, back in the 50s when you would go work on a factory line or do other work that required no education beyond middle school, they were doing great. But then, they didn't actually have to do anything.