Well, I'm not a true neckbeard, but merely a unix beard. But I question anyone's commitment to the Unix way if they are not using Traditional Vi. But I'm rather torn on the issue of facial hair and operating systems because a man I deeply respect has no beard at all!

So when some random loud mouth on India's side decided to post Mohammad jokes, is this going to devolve into a shooting war with Pakistan? And would the US and EU side with India, and the League of Arab States side with Pakistan. And next thing we're all fighting a multi-theater war triggered by something disproportionally small?

ps - I'm an American and was raised to believe the right to free speech is sacrosanct. But India's neighbor's aren't quite as friendly as the US's, and there can be serious repercussions to what would ordinarily be a purely domestic issue. While Pakistan's current government (the PML-N party) is fairly stable and has generally been interested with cooperating and trade with the US, EU and China, the PML-N has always been at odds with India of Kashmir, and the current PM was the same individual who escalated the nuclear tension in the region by ordering the first nuclear tests in Pakistan.

You don't need a license plate reader to discover vehicles with expired registration or that are uninsured. The insurance companies already report to the DMV, as required by state law. And the DMV really does know who has been renewing registration or at least filing the proper PNO forms (planned non-operation), because they've fined me on being late in the past and threatened to suspend my driver's license if I didn't sort it out by their deadline.

Cheaper than a vasectomy and you can watch Star Trek on it. In a future version might even be able to do an augmented reality of the bridge of the Enterprise, with that you really can make women obsolete. All you need is the soothing voice of the Enterprise computer.

"it makes every floppy drive into a HARD drive"

She keeps wanting me to write a new operating system called PENIX.

It's not so much a brogrammer thing as a controversy between us low brow folks and snooty people who pretend that our dick jokes and fart jokes aren't hilarious.

Perhaps, but as a counter example, I never received any formal CS training and I'm a senior engineer at my company (SW architecture actually). Maybe that doesn't mean anything to you, but I do feel that I have the respect of hundreds of my coworkers and that I provide a valuable technical contribution to my company. (a fabless silicon vendor)
But that said, I read CS papers voraciously, and dig in deep in a few of the CS topics that interest me. (operating systems & concurrency)

Hey, I had to start at the bottom and work my way up. It's a lot easier to grok CS when you can code up a few functions in some language.

The two are closely related. I consider one to be an activity and the other a professional job. But unsurprisingly, I do program frequently when I'm working as a SW Engineer.

My High School offered BASIC and Pascal in the 1990s, and I found it tremendously helpful. I'm a Software Engineer today, and I doubt if I would have gone in this career direction if it wasn't for the classes and mentor I found at my high school.

They belong to my employer. And I would violate the terms of my employment if I reveal them.

I wonder if NZ could do much if corporations applied pressure to them. NZ's GDP and Apple's revenue number is nearly the same at $183B (in USD).

You first have to give a shit about the world around you.

Good luck legislating away apathy.

We can prove if software is reliable. But humans are very unreliable. You already have people going 85MPH in Utah while drunk as a skunk. Your feeling of safety is already unjustified, and doesn't agree with the real risk you face.

There is a lot that can be done with image recognition and sets of rules for the correct behavior in every driving situation. And when I say every, I mean every single one. That's because we are able to categorize every event, and work out the right reaction for those categories.

Most of the reactions are really simple.
Tornado? stop the car. UFO landing in the middle of the highway? stop the car. Car in the turned over in the middle of the road? stop the car. Huge grass fire covering the road? stop, turn around, inform the local authorities of the situation. Person in a wheel chari crossing the street? yea, stop for them, then proceed when safe to do so. Jack ass passed you through a 4-way stop (that happened to me)? proceed slowly until safely out of the flow of traffic. As a human I barely knew how to handle that one at the time, it wasn't something in driver's ed. but hindsight it seems obvious now. But please don't criticize my examples too harshly, they're only examples not based on any real car firmware implementations. It's presented rhetorically to demonstrate that we can think through the problems and work out rules on how to handle situations, even ambiguous ones.

The rest of the every day situations are basic rules of the road, which hopefully we already are familiar with. Getting enough data to reliably detect the situations is the hard part, making the decision is not nearly so hard for the SW. Lots of sensors and image processing is done, and we're only scratching the surface right now. Eventually the car's awareness of the road conditions will vastly exceed a human's awareness, and in some ways it already does exceed average drivers.

As more devices become connected, and the processing power increases, we'll see some sophisticated capabilities for every common things like cars. The barrier to autonomous driving won't be technology, but rather a social resistance to the change. Something you're already demonstrating. I'm not saying we shouldn't be cautious about radical changes to our lives, especially where safety is concerned. But there is a level of rigor in the engineering for autonomous driving that isn't present in the driving test that Americans are taking today, so the assumption that humans are safe or more safe than a computer is on a shaky foundation.

You can keep telling yourself that when you're sitting in a Nazi Grammar Prison.