Beyond the official announcements, I strongly recommend reading Monty's comments on the issue.

I'm pretty sure the EULA will say that the car is only really good for going 5 km/h in your driveway and that going on public roads voids your warranty.

I always assumed the astronaut would be ripped apart by tidal forces long before reaching the event horizon.

Actually, in relativistic physics sense, the trades in Chicago where outside of the light cone of the Washington event (neither in the future cone nor in the past cone). That being said, since Washington and Chicago do not move at relativistic speed with respect to each other, the trades are still at a later time than the announce, even if there's no possible causality.

Except that the message this sends is "you're less likely to get a ticket if you wait for the green light before you start texting". Sure it may be against the law, but the problem I have with this sort of thing is that the focus is always on the least dangerous behaviour. Just like in my neighbourhood where the cops will stop people speeding on the big street where it's least dangerous while ignoring speeding in the residential area where you can have children crossing at any time. Enforcing the law where it makes the most money rather than where it's most important doesn't help safety.

The problem here is estimating the probabilities of failure. Assuming failures are independent and considering there's probably (I'm guessing, feel free to plug in other numbers) been somewhere between 10 to 100 similar incidents with one case where 3 safety mechanisms failed, then we can say that the probability of failure of any one safety is between 14% and 30%. From this, the probability of all four failing would be somewhere between one in 100 and one in 3000. That's way too high considering what's at stake here. I assume it's been fixed (hopefully not just patched) because there would probably have been an actual accident since then.

The vast majority of those diseases cannot be eradicated because they can infect other animals too. So unless you want to vaccinate every bird/pig/monkey/... (depending on the disease), the only thing that can be done is to keep vaccinating humans. The case of smallpox (which AFAIK only infected humans) is very rare.

They're called "weapons of collateral destruction" (WCD).

But you need to understand. They really needed that money so they could commemorate the 1812 war.

I really thought oil companies were funding more than a mere 3% of climate science papers.

I think the "insurance" here is mostly historical, nothing more. An actual insurance (public or private) would never pay for your yearly health check-up or for your regular meds. If you tell your insurer that you're planning on having a minor car accident in May of every year, I doubt you'll be insured for very long.

That would be an improvement, but at the same time it creates another problem. Having an industry where only the buyer is allowed to use information is complete nonsense too. I know this opinion isn't popular around here, but for health insurance, the only thing that makes any sort of sense is a public system. It's just sad to see that the US is among the last to realize this.

The card you see is an undergrad engineering project. The PhD is the software that goes with it. You can read all about is here. Trivial localization of a single sound in a quiet environment is one thing. Tracking many simultaneous sources in a noisy/reverberant environment while separating the audio for each of them is a different thing.

You mean like this card? It's indeed designed to use cheap electret microphones. In terms of number of microphones, it's effectively limited to 8 because finding acquisition cards for more than 8 mics is hard. It could probably be tweaked to run on a table using some approximations, but I'm not quite sure how useful it would be on a tablet.

Don't know about this particular project, but back when I did my PhD, I open-sourced my sound localization algorithm. Tracks up to ~4 moving sound sources in real-time using 8 microphones.