3. Dangerous

What's dangerous is 3,000 pounds of metal being controlled by a driver who is impaired by alcohol, drugs or messing around on their phone. Around here the greatest impairment is age. A good third of the people on the road around here can barely see. Self-driving cars don't have achieve some lofty safety record to become the standard, they only have be better than humans and that's already within easy reach compared to the technical hurdles already overcome.

4. No one controls when and where I go

That may be the dumbest excuse to oppose technology I've ever read. If you fly, ride the bus, train or cruise ship, other people control where you go.

I remember people in a video forum in 2004 telling me they'd be shooting film the rest of their lives. That was just 11 years ago. In just that short time span video has not only rivaled film but surpassed it. Long before video surpassed film in terms of quality, video displaced film on the basis of cost and ease of workflow. The technical hurdles in 2004 for video to replace film were huge and it happened in less than a decade.

Cars are not only going to rival human drivers but surpass them, and definitely a lot sooner than you think. It won't be that long before people who insist on driving themselves become the hazards on the road and I don't think your right to seize the steering wheel is going to trump the lives of other drivers.

Air France 447 was one of those incidents.

But who's to say a remote pilot would have done any worse? Everyone died on that flight, so how much worse could the remote pilot have done? Air France 447 isn't the only crash to take place because of clogged pitot tubes. There was also Birgenair 301 and a couple others.

There seems to be a perception that a remote pilot would somehow do a worse job than someone on the flight deck. Until there's actual experimental data to support that claim it's not a valid argument. Right now you're all going on your perception as someone sitting in the passenger seat. The airline pilot's union is hardly a disinterested third party, it's their jobs on the line.

And what about accidents cause when the flight crew was distracted or confused? That's a long list there.

Automation shouldn't need to reach some ridiculous extreme in safety to be considered the superior alternative. It should only have to be +1 better than human pilots. Anything else is irrational.

With the push for autonomous vehicles what I can't understand is why cargo ships still have a crew? It seems like shipping would be a far better candidate for automation than cars. You'd need a harbor pilot to steer into port, just like you do now, but it seems like the other 98% of the time cargo ships, with the proper tracking technology would be a slam dunk for automation.

Still, when it comes to cars. If a self-driving car was available I'd definitely buy one.

SpaceX reaches for the sky and they manage to stretch their budget to work on a reusable booster.

If NASA is anything like the gov projects I used to work, there are too many people billing time on too few projects. But I noticed a tendency for people to reflexively defend NASA instead of asking hard questions about the budget, contract costs and staffing.

Full sentences harder. They verbs.
That why liberal arts and humanities important, otherwise sentences would no verbs.

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Isn't Florida supposed to be underwater ?

Since you obviously haven't been here for a while, many parts of Florida are underwater at high tide. In Palm Beach and parts of Miami storm drains flow backwards and boat docks are underwater. Just across the inlet, West Palm Beach has a massive project going on to raise sewer lines so toilets will confinue flushing and there are several similar projects in Miami. They're also spending hundreds of millions to reinforce the well casings in the wells Miami gets its freshwater.

Florida is fighting that losing battle quietly. It's not like an area dependent on tourism and investment can announce they're sinking and there's no way to stop it but that's the reality.

Climate deniers are the most ignorant fraction of our society.

NEW SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY!
For n equal to one million, an O(n^2) algorithm is slower than an O(n) algorithm. Even when the O(n^2) algorithm is run in RAM, and the O(n) algorithm is disk writes being buffered and optimized by the operating system.

I'll take my Nobel Prize now, thank you.

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There are an incredible number of obstacles that a person can instantly recognize that even today, a computer can't.

And that list gets smaller and smaller all the time. When you look at the progress that's already been made, the last mile of automation is totally achievable. Around here a good third of the drivers on the road are old people who can barely see past the hood and another 10 percent are functional alcoholics. The handful of relatively competent people are texting or talking on the phone while they're driving. As someone who commutes by bike in this metallic soup of human incompetence, the transition to self-driving cars can't happen fast enough. I'll take my chances with machine intelligence and machine reflexes any day.

The underlying assumption to your comment is that human drivers are competent. That may be true in BF Nowhere Utah but, here in the civilized world, human drivers are fucking idiots. So, sure, go ahead and drive your pickup to the market. Around here I'd rather see a computer at the wheel than grandma.

If this magma reaches the surface it could result in lava flows.

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Any form of discipline against the students would be illegal.

That may qualify as the dumbest comment I've ever read on /. and, considering the competition, that's quite an accomplishment.

Or.........
as a computer scientist you could look into the field of evolutionary algorithms, discover that evolution is an applied science used by half of Fortune 500 companies, discover how evolution does work, and write your own code and witness first hand that evolution works.

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Let's say 30% of the population are creationists.
Let's say 10% of Engineers are creationists, because creationists are less likely to pursue the field and/or because their education convinced them to no longer be creationists.
Let's say 1% of scientists are creationists, because creationists are less likely to pursue the field and/or because their education convinced them to no longer be creationists.

Result: Any creationist claiming to have a "science degree" has something like a 90% chance of turning out to have an engineering degree.... even though engineers are unlikely to be creationists.

That's the Salem Hypothesis. Creationists claiming science degrees tend to be engineers, even though engineers tend not to be creationists.

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Which only goes to prove that the negative health effects of placebos can be as severe as the negative health effects caused by EMFs.

We need a law banning EMFs *and* banning placebos.

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If you think organisms can't get rid of solid waste products, you must be full of shit. Chuckle.

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Thank God he did this. If the GPS system had been launched we'd all be dead by now.

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