Bullshit. To all the conspiracy theorists out there, why is the destruction of the car like, in Joan Claybrook's words, book burning? The value of a prototype would only be in tearing it apart to see how it was built. Much more valuable would be the blueprints and mechanical drawings, the design documents. Most of all, how about all the footage of all those crash tests which show how the car performed in the frontal, front offset, rollover, etc. I'm sure citizen advocate Joan made all that government funded information public and shared copies of it all with the auto makers, the press and the public in general. Joan was the NHTSA administrator under the Carter administration and had control of all this information. Where are all those fruits of my tax dollars? Someone needs to perform a FOIA request to get all this precious research in the public. Are you listening out there Consumer Reports? Perhaps a grand jury investigation into Joan and her cohorts is in order here.

yes but Claybrook's car probably weighed three times as much as the 2400 pound Accord due to the weight of additional structural steel to make it safe, as well as the weight of additional airbags, etc. Accords of that era were smaller and lighter (and much less safe) than a current Honda civic. And it's not too hard to de-tune an engine to get good fuel economy at the expense of performance. just restrict the throttle from fully opening.

The average slashdotter just can't get it. This is not for you, the technogeek power user. This is for the 80% of the population of the developed world that does not have the inclination to install arbitrary OS's or OS patches, concern himself with viruses or continual signature file updates. This is a relatively bulletproof appliance they can hand to their kids and not fear the software configuration being irrevocably scrambled. This is something grandma can use with impunity and not concern herself (or you since she won't be calling you so often to fix her netbook) over continual maintenance of the software. To many neophytes, closed and limited is good.

If two different ground control facilities could not raise the pilots over the radio for several minutes and ATC was in the process of having fighters scrambled, there was a little more than a minor distraction here. If the pilots had said "we took our headsets off and went to sleep" then the FAA would have prohibited that activity. But if just playing solitare means you miss repeated radio calls, then that activity is obviously excessively distracting.

Except that Apple has no monopoly in mobile phones. Or even smartphones for that matter. So to compare Apple with less than 10% of the smartphone market with M$, that has 80+% of the computer OS market makes no sense whatsoever. There is healthy competition in the Smartphone space with Android, iPhone, Blackberry and Palm all vying. If Apple is really anti-consumer here they will fail. If Adobe is really anti-consumer here they will as well. No litigation required here.

yes the iPad is locked down and you can't do a thing to it yourself. But wait a minute. While I was waiting Saturday morning for my UPS man to deliver my new iPad, I read an article on the procedure for replacing those non-replacable batteries in your iPad. Thing is Apples are all serviceable. But like the lock on your front door that keeps honest people honest, apple hides the screws and does not invite the non-technical person to void their warranty by opening their shiny new appliance.

Apple may surprise you. Apple only got into the Safari business when Microsoft stopped supporting IE for the Mac. There is no real profit in browsers per se, hence only OS developers and open source projects are doing anything with them. If they are smart Apple will see more popularity for Opera as another blow to IE and MS dominance, both of which are good for to Apple.

Suprise! There are many more iPhones, therefore more money in developing software for it. And whether the developer's perspective of the iTunes store is that it sucks, I think the vast majority of iPhone owners find the store polished, well organized and the software there to be of superior quality to that of the wild west of other smartphones. Nobody yet has come up with a compelling example where android or windows mobile or palm OS is flat out superior to what is possible in the iPhone ecosystem. Until then, the developers will follow the users.

This will be popular with the granola's that haven't a clue of the value of great tactile feedback in a properly designed steering and braking system. Those Atari joysticks are just as good to them. Even better will be when the car drives itself and they can blissfully text and email. Just like if they were riding the bus.

Exactly. The leadership at apple (Scully/Spindler/Amelio/Kawasaki)made several tactical mistakes in the late 80s/early 90s that doomed the macOS, such as pricing mac way above the competition, betting that cooperative multitasking would be the next thing in OS's (remember Copeland?) and so on... Remember, the OSX you see now has much more in common with NeXt OS than the old macOS. A big distinction today is Apple/ATT are price competitive with palm/RIM/win smartphones/plans. And soon as Apple sees it to their benefit, you can be sure there will be no more "carrier exclusives" for the iPhone. Remember, Creative/Dell/MS and the rest were all going to surpass the ipod "any day now" What ever happened to that argument?

Metro Pittsburgh: no problems. Spotty service near Wilmington, NC and unuseable in carolina beach. Yet Jacksonville, NC is great. Had issues in past with spotty service in mid Long Island but ATT must have upgraded there. Service was good on last trip. Queens/JFK area is also OK.

Funny you would call diesels gutless. Why would GM, Ford and Chrysler rate their biggest V8 Gas pickups at ~10,000 lbs maximum towing capacity when their 6 cylinder Diesels are rated at up to 18,000 lbs? Why do 18 wheelers use diesel engine instead of gas? Because they're gutless?

The problem is less about the concept of drones and manned aircraft in the same airspace than it is about the absolute explosion of drones circling to monitor traffic for the TV stations and traffic speeds by the highway patrol once the cost of doing it falls by an order of magnitude by removing the labor cost and weight of the pilot from the aircraft. Unchecked, there will be five times as many aircraft in the air around big cities. This kind of traffic level is totally unmanageable. And drones will fall out of the sky just as manned aircraft do. And when they do, the sheer quantity of aircraft in the sky will mean they likely take other aircraft with them. That's what has the FAA scared shiftless.

Time to launch a new initiative: "One Warranty per child"