Not at all. The amount of power used by CMOS hardware is basically proportional to the number of transistors that are being switched, and how frequently they are switching. So each time you capture a frame you have to:
  - reset the sensor's pixels
  - read the sensor's pixels
  - amplify the signal
  - debayer the data
  - possibly compress the data
  - store the data somewhere
Each of these steps will take a certain amount of energy. Obviously the more frequently you capture a picture, the more frequently you have to do all of the above and so the power consumption increases. There's a reason why your laptop or phone puts the CPU to sleep between operations, and it's the same reason why your computer gets hot when asked to do more work.

Open source and public domain are not the same things - most open source data is copyrighted and made available through a suitably permissive licence. Break that licence and you can be sued just as easily as if you were breaking a closed source licence.

It would also seem reasonable for the 30 second prebuffer to run at a reduced frame rate to save battery.

If the author wants to get paid, they can surely produce a product that can sensibly be used without breaking the law...

I'm not a big fan of copyright infringement, but I do wonder why you would pay good money for something you're going to have to break the law to use rather than just breaking the law to use it without paying first...

My purchasing decision makes no difference to other peoples' purchasing decisions - if I decide to be selfless and buy a self sacrificing car and everyone else buys a self preserving car then the only people better off are the people who aren't me. I would want the things I can make decisions about to improve my chances of survival - I can't control what other people's decisions are (but I think its reasonable to assume that, given the choice, other people would also choose a self-preserving car too). This is basic game theory stuff - this is every man for himself, the only way you're going to get everyone to make the selfless decisions is if you force them to do so.

If a car shoots out from a blind junction at speed and you can't stop in time, that's an unavoidable accident - the car could not be seen in advance, so the autonomous program couldn't have avoided the accident even if its paying attention the whole time. You could argue that you should be going slow enough that your stopping distance is short enough to avoid the collision, but on a lot of roads this would seriously hinder traffic flow - at some point you just have to trust that other drivers are following the rules of the road and accept that the risk can't be completely eliminated.

Similarly, mechanical failures can't always be predicted - you're overtaking someone and their wheel comes off causing them to swerve into you. Impossible to predict so now you're left trying to reduce the seriousness of the inevitable accident. Hell, your own car may have a mechanical failure that the computer couldn't detect.

The g forces of retro rockets is probably going to smear the driver over the inside of the windscreen rather less than hitting the tree at full speed though :)

Don't forget that the computer must make sure that the bit of the car that gets crumpled is the highest profit margin component for the dealer to replace :)

Networking cars seems like an excellent idea until you consider the security problems - its pretty hard to design a system that can pass enough information around to be worthwhile, without also allowing untrustworthy systems to pass misinformation.

Also, I think its unrealistic to expect cars to agree on a "globally best" course of action, since the public isn't going to want to have an autonomous car that doesn't have some sense of self preservation. In an accident in which a fatality is unavoidable, I don't want my car to agree with the other cars that its best for me to be the fatality.

Well, part of the point of that thought experiment is to demonstrate that people usually have more problem with bad stuff happening through their actions than through their inactions.

The first thing that springs to mind is that whoever wrote that was intentionally trying to make the numbers look big and scary. Quoting "Bq/Kg" in a situation where you're talking about nanograms of material seems pretty disingenuous.

As for the "what aspect of coal comparest to this" point - the fact that coal fired power stations are *all* *routinely* chucking toxic particulates and gasses into the atmosphere *all the time*, compared to a whole 2 major radiological disasters relating to nuclear power.

So sure, you can quote big numbers demonstrating that traces of radioactive materials are detectable a few hundred Km from the second biggest nuclear disaster, but its quite another thing to determine that they have more detremental effects than the tons and tons of crap emitted from fossil powerstations globally on a daily basis.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that nuclear power is all rainbows and unicorns, but I am saying that we have to get our power from somewhere, and all the other feasable power sources seem to be far worse in the long term.

How about "both"? The planet could easilly take 20,000 years or more to recover from a runaway greenhouse effect caused by burning fossil fuels. The thing you haven't accounted for is that we routinely reprocess nuclear waste and contain what's left (well, everyone except the US seems to be doing a reasonable job at this anyway), whilst we don't do the same for fossil waste. Sure, in a few thousand years, if someone/something stumbles across a stash of vitrified nuclear waste they're probably going to have a bad day, but at least it isn't all floating around in the atmosphere to affect the whole planet.

Which, as mentioned, isn't feasable everywhere (due to geography) and wipes out vast areas of land. If you're in a good location for it then sure, go for it, but you can't expect everyone on the planet to use something that only works in certain locations.

Not one I've ever driven. Of the vehicles I regularly drive (1998 VW Transporter, 2003 Toyota MR2 Spyder, 2005 Peugeot 207), not one of them has such an interlock, nor have any of the (more modern) courtesy cars I've driven.

Its certainly good practice to do so, but nothing forces you to.

Why the hell do we have to have these obscure geastures like "turn on the ignition while holding down the brake" and "turn on the ignition while winding down the window" to do various things instead of having a simple multiposition switch (possibly a key switch)?

Car designers seem to be taking cues from computer UI designers - hide away options so they are completely non-discoverable instead of making them obvious (have you noticed that a lot of software no longer tells you the short cuts in the menus? They just expect you do know somehow).