This is pretty much exactly how autopilot works in aviation. The pilot sets the autopilot, and it flies so long as it can understand and react to the conditions it can sense. If it detects bad input, or a condition it isn't programmed to handle, it hands control back to the pilot. Generally planes don't fall out of the sky just because the pilot has control again when he didn't expect it.

It's not just faulty parts that will make super-close driving dangerous, regardless of reaction time. The tire composition and tread, the weight of the vehicle, and the strength of the brakes all affect stopping distance. Fundamentally an SUV can not stop as quickly as a sports car if it's going the same speed.

Might want to check your math on gun ownership numbers there, USA is number one by a large margin. Even Canada has higher gun ownership per capita than Iceland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_country

You aren't forced to buy it. You will not go to jail or even be arrested for not buying health insurance. You will pay an extra tax, which the government has the right to levy and enforce.

Looking at the picture the size of the keys, the horizontal and vertical spacing between keys, and the way the keys are tilted all look identical to the BlackBerry Bold keyboard. Given BlackBerry's obsession with both keyboards and patents I suspect some of that would be covered.

Lots of important documents travel by snail mail, which is why tampering with someone else's mail is a pretty serious offense. And unlike Internet crimes you'll actually need to be physically in US jurisdiction to screw with US mail, so your risk of ending up in jail is pretty high. It happens, but someone doing enough to actually matter to an election results would be taking a massive risk, it may be easier to stuff the ballot box or get the dead people to vote for you.

Unless the pavement is wet or you're in a tunnel or any other situation where your headlights can reflect. Lots of truckers drive at night, do you see them going out and getting piss-off-any-driver-that-passes-me level headlights?

I got to the bottom of the comments and no one had suggested 'The C Programming Language'. Slashdot, I'm not sure I know you anymore.

Saying they're your property most likely just means that you retain copyright. In order to store, backup, and display the messages you must have granted some license to the site. Otherwise you could just issue dmca takedown requests for all your posts.

I thought California had it set up so property taxes are set when a house is purchased and never change?

My landline does text-to-speech on any SMS sent to it, which works fine for the 2-factor schemes I've run across that use purely numeric codes. Have you tried sending an SMS to your land line to see what happens?

That's pretty much how Linux does it as well, for libraries that do backwards compatibility at all. You provide a file that tells the ELF linker which version of an exposed api method links to which internal implementation. The linker embeds the library version linked against into the executable and voila, your program can run against a newer version of the library with no expensive, bloated vm infrastructure required.

If you have committed a crime depends on where you are. Around here fuel oil is a hazardous waste and it is illegal to put it into the sewage system - it needs to be taken to a waste station.

This is bullshit. Even if they did have some dirt on every member of congress unless you only elect rapists and murderers there is no way that that kind of mass blackmail would work on the people holding the purse strings. The NSA continues to exist because they are useful. They provide information intelligence your leaders want, and this sort of mass surveillance means that they can provide information on anyone, even someone they didn't know would be interesting a day ago.

No, not at all. If you modify GPL software you don't have to contribute anything. If you distribute the changed software then you must make available the source code to the people you have distributed the binary to, and you must license it in a way that is compatible with the GPL. So if I take GCC,fix some bugs, and sell it I must give my customers the source code I have created. I must license it to them with terms that allow them to distribute it freely, so long as they continue to follow the GPL when they distribute it. I am under no obligation to give it away to the world for free, however I can not stop my customers from doing so.