I don't care that it's only 25 MPH. I'll likely be buying one as soon as you don't need to have a drivers license, or soon after. My last DMV renewal I had to take the eye test again and I just barely passed. The next time I might not. The only reason I need a driverless car is when I no longer qualify for a license. Otherwise I can just drive myself.

We know the NSA eavesdropped on Merkel, it's been admitted, essentially. The more interesting thing to ponder is, was it just one instance of listening to a single call, or has the NSA been listening in on pretty much ALL her calls? I think we know the answer to that. And, is Merkel the only world leader, person of importance, etc., being monitored? I think we know the answer to that, too. Pretty much EVERY world leader, and person of importance is being monitored as long as they are able to, and there's little doubt anyone they can't listen in on is particularly interesting just for that reason alone and gets extra attention. In any event, those who can't be monitored are few and far between.

When a new US President enters office, he's briefed by the intelligence community about all the interesting things known around the world that are not common knowledge. Of course, some of those things are probably bogus because anyone with any brains figures they're being spied upon and the best way to deal with that is to make use of it by feeding it with disinformation. Be that as it may, any President thinks he knows far more about the goings on in this world than the American public (and he probably does, that's not really saying much). The President undoubtedly knows enough to have a jump on the stock market, if he wants it, by knowing what moves world leaders are about to make. And the American public is then expected to be knowledgeable enough to vote intelligently? No, this excess information has turned the American government into a cynical paternalistic and tyrannical force, that more accessible health care, a little bit of social security, lower taxes, television and ready access to guns is supposed to fix. Sorry, but that's just not enough to make it any less cynical, less paternalistic, or less tyrannical.

We all know that Global Warming is a hoax and conspiracy, so this just has to be BS. No amount of evidence could ever contradict that well known fact.

The problem is, the system is now optimized to narrow it down to two. Sort of like the game of Risk. You start with several players, and as soon as one of them starts to get big all the othere gang up and whittle the upstart down to size. Any time there's a third party, it only undermines one of the "two" in favor of the other. And neither of the two will allow anyone else in the debates so they can frame it like there are only two sides to each question and you never hear about the issues where they agree which is usually where the problems are.

Not retrieving memories is what causes them to decay. Ever hear of refresh?

Examples like this don't guarantee the results you suggest in practice. They presume someone has perfect knowledge of the situation, which is generally not the case. What if the person was too inebriated to recognize that the button push would save the drowning person? What if one thought the drowning person was just joking until it was too late? What if the decider arrived at a different conclusion as to the best way to save the person and spent a bunch of time looking for a life preserver while the person drowned? Intent is important here too, not just outcome. So is awareness. But the ability to assess intent and awareness in a real world scenario is rarely so cut and dried. At best the scenario is a hypothetical but one where the subtle real world characteristics of such an actual event could change the answer completely, making an answer not so easy.

The answer would undoubtedly be to do whatever would be most likely to protect the car company from liability and/or bad PR.

I'm rather amazed that anyone is still using a desktop to do their browsing. I haven't for like, 5 years now. For any solution to work it needs either a mobile app or proxy server implementation. A browser plug-in? Welcome to 1996.

Yes, I think it's clear the next gen of CPUs really needs to have the machine language removed entirely. What a security hole!

If it's not a problem, then she shouldn't mind the proposed fixes, since they should have no appreciable effect. But the fact she is making a deal of it is a sign there is something going on to be cncerned about.

Don't forget to show her the Mona Lisa printed out on the line printer...

And probably more important, who gets to decide that, and why?

Yeah, insider threat-- it's called incompetence. Things like building a reactor on a fault line, building a reactor on the Pacific rim shoreline (need the water, right? Hello Tsunami). We thought we could build a steamship that couldn't sink, too, but we were wrong. The fact there's been a significant nuclear accident every couple of decades. They're usually connected with gross incompetence of some form or other, in either the design or operation. How many Chernobyls and Fukushimas do we have to have before we prove we can make reactors work, but we can't make them safe enough to risk it?

Using off the shelf components to clone existing functionality is boring. What would be much better is to build a secure mesh network phone. Sure, it would take a bunch of them to be very useful, but you have to start somewhere. Start with local capability that would work in your college dorm or something. And make sure it's end-to-end encrypted from the start. There's something that could be world changing. Kickstart it if necessary.