Once you get autonomous cars driving safer than humans on average (and I would be surprised if we haven't already passed that point, because humans get themselves into an awful lot of trouble operating motor vehicles), a manual override would be one of the worst possible things you could add. Think about it: when is a human driver most likely to override the car's AI? In a situation that they perceive as an emergency, say a pedestrian jumping out into the street, getting cut off at an intersection, so on and so forth. And when would the ultra-fast computational abilities of a computer be the most important? You guessed it, those same situations. If you give humans the option to take control, you can be sure that more often than not they're going to use it at the worst possible moments.

If the people were left unscathed, then they'll be free to cancel the alert. It's a problem easily enough solved with a "Don't send the paramedics, please" button.

They don't just blindly follow GPS directions, that would be absurd. They're equipped with sensors and cameras that collect more than enough data to let them detect and avoid dangers like railroad tracks. When you look at the immense amount of injuries and property damage done by human drivers on a regular basis, it becomes pretty well apparent that one of the best things we could possibly do for public safety is to get humans out from behind the wheels of cars as soon as possible. Will there still be some freak accidents? Sure there will, but they'll be a heck of a lot less common than distracted, impaired, clumsy, or just plain not-fast-enough human drivers getting themselves into wrecks.

You can do that with any free software license, and I would assume anything approved by OSI as well. Being allowed to redistribute binaries isn't a unique feature of the GPL.

Yeah, going to college on GI Bill money is far superior to government aid!

The analogy doesn't hold. When you take out a loan for a car, you put the car up for collateral. That's an arrangement between you and the loan issuer, in which the car dealer has no stake (unless, of course, they're the one issuing the loan). A more correct analogy would be the car dealership repossessing the car even though you don't owe them any money and they have no claim to it. Of course that's also a flawed analogy, though, because there is no proper analogy between a service provided by an educational institution and a physical good, and it's not possible in any meaningful sense to take a college degree from somebody.

In effect, what this means is that even though you've completed the educational requirements to hold a position and you're perfectly qualified, an arbitrary third party is allowed to step in and prevent you from getting that job because you owe another third party money. This is not only detrimental to you, but also to the employers missing out on potentially productive employees, and in the long run the loan issuers who aren't going to get paid back when the students can't find a decent job. It's a drag on productivity for the entire economy, and it's not in the public interest to allow practices that forcibly underutilize skilled labor.

It was an agreement not to cold call. The distinction, however, is one of how unethical the agreement was, not whether it was ethical or not. Either way they're conspiring against their employees to keep wages down.

It's still an illegal agreement, and it still harms employees. Poaching employees isn't being a dick, it's a perfectly legitimate business practice: if your competitor is hiring someone you want, and you think that offering them a higher salary to come work for you will result in a net profit, the only economically sensible course of action is to make the offer. Those prohibited cold-calls could have driven developer wages up significantly, and that would apply to all developers being hired, not just the ones being poached. The basic idea is this: you can either make sure you keep your wages and benefits competitive enough that your employees will want to stay (obviously best for the employees) or you can make an agreement with your competitors not to poach employees so you don't have to worry about keeping them from wanting to leave if given the chance (obviously bad for the employees, and also illegal). These companies made the latter, unethical choice.

I'll just leave this here. The much publicized cases you're thinking of are parents starving their children and then trying to blame it on veganism, not children just spontaneously dropping dead because vegan diets are inadequate (they aren't).

Can you quote me a single study showing that properly supplemented vegan diets are inadequate for dogs? I'm guessing not, because there are none. Don't let minor details like lack of evidence stop you from passing judgement on others, though...

There's nothing non-vegan about taking nutritional supplements. There's also nothing wrong with vegan diets in general, your single anecdote and hasty post-hoc reasoning notwithstanding. But of course, leave it to Slashdot to mod up utterly inaccurate nonsense when it comes to veganism...

Have you read anything about the case?

No, but being on the phone in a vehicle, someone who neither knows nor cares that you exist is not a threat.

Yes, he was carrying a gun; what do you think he shot Trayvon with? He chose to leave the safety of his vehicle to pursue an unarmed teenager while carrying. He then provoked a confrontation by, you know, chasing down an unarmed kid. None of these facts are challenged by Zimmerman or the police. At this point, whether Trayvon threw the first punch isn't terribly important. He had every right to feel threatened if Zimmerman was pursuing him, especially if he noticed the gun, and to defend himself from that threat. You can't just provoke a fight and then invoke self-defense when the person defending themselves from you gets the upper hand.

If paying attention to the safety briefing were the issue, they'd ask people to put away paper reading materials as well. And yes, I'm inconvenienced, and no, taxi, takeoff, landing, and the ascent to cruising altitude is not just "5 minutes." Is the inconvenience major? No, but it's also completely unnecessary. My kindle is no more likely to interfere with the plane's electronics than the guy next to me's NewsWeek, so there's no reason I should be stuck without anything to read because of a nonexistent danger.

Right, I'm sure that the problem is just that all those young peoples' music sucks, and literally no one appreciates classical and other forms of acoustic music any more. That's why no one can distinguish the difference, and it has nothing at all to do with the difference lying entirely beyond your ear's range of physical perception.

Multiple inheritance is supported in some form or another in just about every OO language in existence. It's just that most prefer to restrict multiply-inherited traits to methods and call them "interfaces" instead of "base classes." IMO, that's entirely unnecessary. If I want an "interface" in C++, then I write a pure abstract class without any member variables and use it the same way I'd use an interface in Java. If I want true multiple inheritance in Java, I'm just out of luck. MI can be used in some very nasty ways, but if you tried to remove each and every feature that a programmer could possibly misuse from a language you'd pretty quickly find yourself with an insanely verbose toy language that no experienced developer would ever want to touch.

Regardless of the outcome, I think secretly recording and broadcasting someone else's sexual activities should absolutely get you jailtime. It's difficult to even imagine a worse violation of privacy.