Nerdy men get hot women? I think that this thread has taken a wrong turning somewhere.

So you can see what is ahead of the train if you face forwards? You must be the driver.

In what neck of the woods is that ? Do the locos you see burn logs and have big conical funnels ? Try upping that by a factor of 3 or 4 for elsewhere.

In the UK, it staggers me how many people are quite ignorant about railways, having either never been on a train in their life, or only on a preserved "heritage" line doing about 20 mph. The only time they see a railway is when driving over a level crossing and it does not help that the road sign for an ungated one of those still depicts an ancient steam loco.

Following your "Parent" link, the claim you refer to seems to be this :-

I think you missed the part after the comma. The military aircraft I have been in certainly did not have panels with displays like we were going the opposite direction to what we were. In fact they did not have any interior decor whatsoever :-)

An old etiquette on trains is for the ladies to face backwards and gentlemen to face forwards. I guess it dates right back to the 1840's when passengers sat in open wagons and the forward facing ones got soot in their eyes.

In the UK, many commuter trains and much of the London Underground have longitudinal seating, just one row each side facing inwards and the rest of the area for standing.

That explains something. I am in the UK and have an American car. The VIN is visible in the windscreen, the first car I have ever known like that, and it puzzled me why. I thought perhaps to save opening the bonnet (sorry, hood) to quote it when ordering spare parts?

Perhaps because, in the USA, don't you physically change the licence plate every year? In the UK the licence plate is permanent and is all that the police nornally need to know. You could physically and illegally change the number plate for a false one, but so you could change my VIN in the windscreen - only looks like a strip of metal stamped with the characters.

Yes, but there are a lot of potential thieves who fall between those ends of the spectrum.

No, it is because people would soon get bored if every road accident received as much coverage as, say, someone killed in a mountaineering accident (not to mention how voluminous the coverage would need to be). Generally, public reaction goes up exponetially with the number of people killed at the same time. In the UK, a railway accident that kills 10 people (about the number killed every day on the road) will get national headline coverage for about a week; but one person killed in a road accident will just get a few column inches in a local paper.

Another reason is that people hate the idea of being killed by an entity rather than by another person. They think being killed by another person driving a car is in some way "democratic", whereas being killed by a train, lift, ship, crane is not. Or put another way, when they read of a road accident they believe that if they were there (either as culprit of victim) they could have influenced it differently, whereas they know that in a train accident they could not have done.

Something like this would, of course, never happen in the code controlling these cars.

So what would be different with self-driving cars? Come on, give it some spin!

Their commutes take 8 hours each way?

1) I am in the UK where trains used to go within about 5 miles of just about everywhere except in the Scottish Highlands, and the railways operated local delivery trucks for the doorstep delivery of goods. Places that warehoused, produced, or consumed bulk stuff were located near to railways and had their own sidings for loading. There were vastly fewer trucks on the road, and what there were were quite small. Roads were pleasant places for people living by them, children playing in them (yes), cyclists using them, horse riders using them, and motorists using them.

The system worked well until the railways were all but crippled by poor maintenance by the ends of both WW1&2 (co-inciding with the knock-down sales of ex-army trucks to de-mobbed soldiers setting up road haulage companies), followed by nearly all but the railway main lines and main stations being closed in the 1960's.

2) Trucks are subsidised in the UK by paying vastly less in road tax than would be proportional to the road wear they cause, the distance they travel and the strength to which bridges need to be built. They are subsided by the road tax on cars, especially ones like my wife's, who only drives about 600 miles a year.

Thanks for the laugh.

Insurance companies take any technical change whatsoever as an excuse to raise premiums.

If it is a design fault, the manufacturer. However, the application of brakes is vastly simpler both in concept, and their physical implementation, than an entirely automated car. Just consider that the brakes of an automated car responding to an "Apply" command is just a small sub-set of what the whole automation would be.

For one thing, the car/brake manufacturer is not involved in the decision of when to brake, and that is the hardest part to arrange.

So do I. The picture of Gates was like he was in his 30's and I once suggested that they update it with him looking older with greying hair, as the company was likewise no longer the bright young thing that many people supposed it to be.

With Gates virtually gone, what icon should there be instead of the bland MS trademark (for which I am suprised MS do not sue /. like : these takedowns) ? I suggest the Titanic, or King Kong (nothing to do with Balmer of course).

Google maintain Android. The Android software is free for anyone to use and to sell loaded into hardware. Only if you want to attach the trademark "Andoid" to it do you have to pay Google a licence fee; is that what you mean by "ripping off"?.

As for people "donating their time and code" to the Linux ecosystem, I do that myself in a small way. Feel free to use it, I don't mind. That is the point.