Sure, but they're the 1%ers, not the 99%ers, because just getting a license is much harder and the German Police will bust your ass for things like tailgating or not signaling before they will for speeding.

As for the AC's worry about an auto-drive car hitting somebody. I'm sure it will happen, but will be incredibly, incredibly rare.

So rather than 'hit by a drunk driver while crossing the street going to Church Sunday morning', it'd be more along the lines of 'failed to stop in time when pedestrian unexpectedly darted into the road and the car couldn't stop fast enough due to black ice'. Which, like the real world, generally ends up with the pedestrian being considered at fault for darting into traffic, especially during bad weather.

Still, the manufacturer of the auto-drive system will probably end up taking at least some of the liability in that case, but there's an equally good chance they'll be let off the hook because the owner/operator of the vehicle modified it somehow (or grossly failed in maintenance like replacing bald tires). I predict that once the systems are good enough, congress will pass some sort of limited liability law so that those killed by malfunctions only get something like $1M, which helps with predictions so the manufacturers know how much liability to bake into the price of their systems. Remember, it's saving lives on the whole, we don't want to drive them bankrupt.

As you mention, reduced insurance rates is a reason to buy the new vehicles, and that ties in directly with reduced car accidents. The other stuff is bonus.

Though when I figured it out, valuing people's time at $10/hour NOT spent driving, that was the biggest factor.

15k miles/year average per vehicle, figure an average speed of 30 mph, that's 500 hours/year. Or $5k. Even if you only value your time in the car at $5, perhaps because you get motion sickness if you're not driving* so you can't read/watch TV, that's $2500. Given that I only pay ~$1k/year for full coverage...

Anyways, a self-driving option is a dead simple choice at $5k, and would still be attractive to many at $15k. Note: This would be for a 'Johnny Cab' level AI that doesn't require you behind a wheel to operate correctly.

*It's a thing, many people who become motion sick if a passenger in a vehicle don't if they're driving. It's probably the control thing. They know that some disruption is happening.

Huh, actually had to google what Botts' dots are. FTL: rarely used in regions with substantial snowfall, because snow plows damage or dislodge them.

Wouldn't do much good up where I live if they can't take snow plows. Instead of dots to provide 'rumble' we put notches in the pavement.

Now something that you can sink into the pavement, sort of like a concrete screw? That might work.

Trust but verify - IE while you trust other cars for providing road condition information, you also don't trust it enough to let it put you into a crash condition. IE it maintains proper following space.

The communications are more for things like 'road obstruction ahead; expect slower speeds and find alternative route if possible', and information that the car can use to figure out that if it slows down 3mph it'll be able to cruise right through a section vs being forced to stop.

It's a two-step process. The first is a chemical that dissolves the proteins (still in their "cooked" folding), and the second is some sort of centrifuge or similar (they don't go into details on the device in the article) that subjects the proteins to very high sheer strain, effectively mechanically unfolding them so that they can then relax back into their natural state.

Not exactly a spice you can sprinkle onto your steak, but still pretty neat. :)

I'm still reminded of what I've read about the Wright Brother's attempts at powered flight, up against dozens of other teams, some with national support.

I look forward to seeing them, because with efforts taking place in Germany, Japan, and the USA to just name the 'big 3', somebody is probably going to succeed in fairly short order(still years though).

Car accidents cost us enough to more than pay for it.

Nope, Beta was not far, far superior. You're totally forgetting that Betas could only store 1 hour of video. (They later fixed this, but by then it was far too late.) Who wants to change tapes in the middle of a movie? VHS tapes could store a whole 2-hour movie, so they easily took over. Not having Sony's stupid licensing costs helped too. And by the time Beta was on the way out, VHS had caught up to it video-quality-wise too.

You want <ecode>:

if (x<5) {
  printf("Works for me!\n");
}

Now, boy, we can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way.

Which is a trap. The only way to defeat evil is to force it to reveal its true face. Intelligence agencies would very much love to have everyone pretend having their mail opened and read is okay; it's when people refuse to go along with the lie when the ugly truth comes out.

And it will only get uglier from here.

Well, they could be imported in (very) small numbers as a utility vehicle. They wouldn't be allowed on the highways, but golf-cart type vehicles are allowed on many residential streets.

Milking aging infrastructure for maximum profit, desperately defending old business models.

Now get off my lawn before I take my buggy whip to you.

You are correct. Angry mob with tazers is the way.

That just raises another issue - why are you services and utilities so unreliable in the US? Here in Iceland we get hurricane-force winds several times a year on average - I've had gusts over Cat 5 on my land. Winter isn't incredibly cold but is super wet (all precipitation forms), windy, and lasts a long time. Up at higher altitudes you get stuff like this (yes, those are guy wires... somewhere in that mass). I lived in the US for a long time and had an average of maybe two power outages a year from downed lines and such - sometimes lasting for long periods of time. I've never once had a power outage here that was anything more than a blown breaker in my place.

It's really amazing what you all put up with - your infrastructure standards are really low.

I want the penis drones from germany to come to the USA and end up in congressional debates...

They also found some very high tech surveillance drones made from some high tech composites made to look like common folded notebook paper. It seems that these high tech spy planes also use a printed circuitry that looks like words on the surface.

The secret service is still researching these severe breaches of security. While they let a crazy guy run across the lawn and enter the white house in broad day light.