Driving directions to the nearest pig farm or rug store?

Von Newmann machines.

They can make more robots from the plastic they collect. I'm sure any machine intelligent enough to do this will never turn on it's creators.

This and other myths of autonomous cars.

Roads will still be the same, no 4 way intersections at 100 KPH (in fact 4 way stops are a terrible idea in general). Autonomous cars work best when they have to make the least decisions, high speed roads are already designed so that drivers have to make as few judgement calls as possible.

The problem with your way of thinking is the same with any computing cluster. You need to have a quorum, so either each car must have a powerful enough system that they can establish a local cluster in real time and decide who goes first or they have to hand this off to a remote system... In the either case, a loss of communication or an unexpected road user (cyclist, manually driven car, dog, pedestrian) is going to cause a huge problem, if not an accident.

So because each car has to make it's own decisions, high speed roads will continue to be designed with limited access and simplified decision making.

Also, cars wont be more tightly packed, they'll be programmed to keep a safe distance (and not the minimum safe distance either). All the information in the world wont affect braking distance (cap'n, ye cannae break the lews of physics).

Quite right, but so is the GP.

Most people will just read the key words and have their brain fill in the blanks. So we look at the title and see "swap... Foo... Bar..) and most people's brain will assume the operator is with and we're replacing Foo with Bar. I did the same, then realised the entire sentence, in context didn't make sense so I re-read it properly (a lot of people wont pick up on that and re-read it).

So you're right that the headline is technically correct... but the GP is right in that the headline is bad form and people will get confused (not that /. has particularly high journalistic standards to maintain).

More over, which commonwealth law (that would be a federal law for the Americans playing along at home) are they enforcing?

As yet, there isn't a criminal code for copyright infringement, it's a civil matter.

As the parent said, universities have the ability to make their own legislation that is enforceable. Most universities use it for things like parking (which is at a premium), vandalism, plagiarism, smoking on campus and other acts that are too minor to get the police involved in. Although universities are legally permitted to chase people though the courts for this money, its much easier just to withhold their results until all fines are paid.

Can a new Nintendo play all my old Nintendo games. Say from my 64 or SNES (yes I have games that old). Yeah I do replay old games on a regular basis, some dating back to 1992 (hello Star Control II). If I want a console to play my old Nintendo games on, I need an old Nintendo console.

Even backwards compatibility for a PS1 or PS2 on a PS3 was shoddy at best. Unlike the PC, if your game stopped working due to an OS or HW change there was no way around it.

Also remember that Sony removed the PS2 emulator from the PS3 (ostensibly to save money).

Australia is pretty much the same.

Personal cheques are a thing of the past. No one even needs a "we dont accept cheques" sign any more as no-one uses them.

However we have bank cheques where the bank holds the money in escrow until the recipient cashes it. Basically its a cheque with it's value guaranteed up by a bank. If you buy a car in Oz, often you'll use a bank cheque as direct debit can take up to 3 days here (still).

And this is why anyone in the UK or an understanding of the UK isn't worried.

No need to do a chargeback, just go to Trading Standards.

However having some understanding from the other side of the desk, hotels have a serious problem with fake reviews on sites like Trip Advisor (not helped by the fact Trip Advisor will put bad reviews at the top unless you pay them). In time this will devalue sites like Trip Advisor to the point where no-one even reads the reviews but there are still a lot of idiots who blindly trust it.

Not defending this mind you, I just understand why they're frustrated (also, it's in Blackpool... that may be half the problem).

Actually, the credit card company rings the hotel and says "Did Mr A Cowards stay there on the 3rd of November", the hotel will say "Yes, we have his signature and footage on the CCTV" then the credit card company will turn around and say "Righto, sorry for bothering you" and cancel your card.

It is actually quite hard to fool a bank.

Besides this, if enough people start playing funny buggers with credit cards, hotels will just add a 30 pound surcharge for accepting your card. You think you might avoid it by going elswhere, but it'll be everywhere soon enough.

Vastly superior gaming platform demonstrated to be vastly superior. Next up, water proven to be wet.

Seriously, is this a surprise to anyone. A PC with more modern and more powerful hardware is faster and more detailed than a gaming platform with older and less powerful hardware...

It's like someone who drives a VW Golf complaining that it's not as fast as a Nissan 370z.

Those aren't rock-star developers. As another poster said, you likely have never worked with a rock-star developer.

Nope, worked with them, dismissed several of them because their behaviour was detrimental to the team (one got sacked because he went and told the book keepers that he was more important than they were and should do what he said).

The ones who actually make the team better dont consider themselves to be rockstars. There is a correlation between humility and talent (otherwise known as the Dunning-Kruger effect)

They are rare, but it's awesome when you see somebody that inspires others around them by what they can do.

This is how they like to imagine they are, but not what they're like in reality. In reality they are childish and petulant. If their authority and awesomeness is not recognised they will make everyone else's life hell until it is.

You sound like you work in a big company, on big teams.

Wrong again.

Largest organisation I worked for in that capacity was 80 staff with 20 developers (most in a consulting capacity). In fact that's why I ended up managing the dev teams, we didn't have enough of them to justify their own manager so it fell under my jurisdiction as IT manager.

I had a pair of senior devs who could keep the team together and moving and were great at it, I considered it my job to keep things out of their way so they could do their jobs.

This, 1000x this.

I hate managing with "rockstar" developers because they're always too arrogant and full of themselves. They detract from the team, argue and refuse to listen to others. As soon as I see anything remotely "rockstar-ish" in an interview they immediately go to the bottom of the pile.

Senior devs are the antithesis. They help the junior devs and often their time is better spent doing this than banging out code even though their code is a lot better than the juniors. Someone who can manage a team is valued for more than just their coding skills, if they've got people skills they are definitely a force multiplier.

You need all the team to be involved in the development of the product, letting one "rockstar" do their own thing means when they leave you've got an codebase no-one has any knowledge on and it's always a matter of when (people win lotto, go on sabbaticals, change career or move to a nicer climate).

Rockstar devs dont need agents, the concept of rockstar devs needs to die.

However the value of you to an agent is how much they can get out of the company for you.

This is how recruiting and head hunting currently works. The company puts out an ad or contacts a recruitment agency, basically they make their intentions known. Recruiters approach the companies on the behalf of the perspective employee and set terms that if the employee is hired they get money. If the employee lasts longer than X months they get a bonus.

All an "agent" will do is double dip. They'll still get the recruiting fee and bonus from the company and then they'll turn around and charge you for their services again.

In this scenario, the money they get from you is just icing on the cake, their working for the company, not you and because of this the recruiter has a vested interest in getting you in the door as cheaply as possible.

Exactly, it's "shut up and go away" money.

If it were a serious study, it would be 3 or more times that given to a university with an ethics board and peer review would be done... But universities have better things to do.

Because people like to have a whinge about their favourite things. Any mention of the F word on /. brings the "woe is man" crowd out of the woodwork.

At the risk of flame-baiting, in Australia we'd call them a "big girls blouse".