Yep, but not until enough insurance companies paid out and they realized it was an actual problem. I don't think we are really disagreeing. I don't think that autonomous cars change the landscape that much from what we currently have: people's insurance pay for accidents and when the problems are seen to be not the fault of the insured, the insurance people go ofter the responsible parties to recover costs. The same thing will (and does) happen for non-auto insurance when visitors get killed by your Roomba running amuck.

Good points, but I expect there will not be a transfer of liability to the "taxi driver" unless you are actually hiring the ride from someone else. You bought it, you hit the start button, you end up "paying" and let your insurance company fight it out with the manufacturer when things go pear-shaped (what does that even mean?) Software is already making a huge number of decisions for you (when to shift, when to employ the air-bags, etc.) and when that is "at fault" it is your insurance company for the most part that takes care of laying the blame on the builder - I figure the same will be true here.

I suspect that overall we are only going to get to the autonomous vehicle stage when they are better than the "average" human driver by a factor of ten or more, so the cost of having to re-examine "who pays?" issues are probably going to be equally reduced.

I don't see why it would not be handled the same way hardware defects are right now: the manufacturers hide the problem until the death toll is high enough or someone spills the beans, then the insurers and victims go after them in a class action lawsuit.

But how common are these occurrences? A bunch of autonomous cars in communication should all be able to stop safely without crashing as soon as one of them sees the toddler step onto the roadway. Yes, the toddler might get wiped out, but there should be no cascade of rear-enders because all the cars apply max braking in unison, and none were following closer then their reaction time and braking distances would allow.

Car buyers are not willing to invest in protecting themselves either, unless convinced by advertising, government regulations, and other incentives - basically it is hard to imagine that "I" am going to have an accident, so spending an extra $50 for seat belts rather than using that extra $50 for a fancier sound system never had much success in getting people to put seat belts in their cars until seat belts were made mandatory. Then we had to give out tickets to make people wear them....

Maybe. How much of your spare change have you devoted to rescuing those all over the world dieing from hunger, disease, natural disaster, etc? I don't know if I would all all of us who are "killing someone by inaction" every day, murderers.

I don't disagree that failing to do something like press the button to turn off the "automatic drop a tonne of bricks on the schoolyard" device would be murder, but somehow as the inaction and the deaths get farther away from each other, the moral certainty seems to fade too.

Neither, that's what mandatory insurance is for.

I recall a bit from some medical drama way back (St Elsewhere perhaps? All TV shows are just dreams - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) where the doctor is sewing up some mean tough looking biker dude and asks what caused his injuries. He explains that he was driving his motorbike along when a cute furry animal darted across
the road (a squirrel, bunny, or cat; I don't recall) and the crash happened "when I swerved". "Did you hit the cat?" "No, he got away." Leaving the viewer to understand that the accident was caused by the rider trying to HIT, rather than avoid, the animal. The delivery made it pretty funny as I recall.

Just because people THINK that pressing the elevator button more times will make the elevator come faster, does not mean that it actually does. I have no doubt that politicians themselves think that more money -> winner, that does not mean that winner->more money.

There is some good stuff at http://freakonomics.com/2012/0...

There is a nice bit at the end: "These findings may be surprising at first blush, but the intuition isn’t that hard to grasp. After all, how many people do you know who ever change their minds on something important like their political beliefs (well, other than liberal Republicans who find themselves running for national office)? People just aren’t that malleable; and for that reason, campaign spending is far less important in determining election outcomes than many people believe (or fear)."

That may be true, but it might not be causal. It is also true that the person with the best chance of being the winner finds it easier to raise money - people tend to want to support the winning side, and are not as enthusiastic about being involved with the side that they think is going to lose.

There are certainly MANY candidates that are unelectable no matter how much money they raise and spend in comparison to their opponents.

Is kitty porn a large problem in your local? Meow.

Good point.

Good point, but since I was talking about a height of "about 10 metres" for water (not the most accurate of heights) and the internal fluid tension supports I would guess less than a centimetre, I figured the internal fluid tension was more of a rounding error than anything that needed to be explicitly stated. But epine is correct, the internal fluid tension does add some (small for water at least) height to the effective max for suction pumps and siphons.

Which is, I guess, an indication that being "consistent with the comics" at best can be understood to mean "consistent with some group of comics picked from fifty plus years of inconsistent storylines, restarts and re-imagings".

The Marvel movies are not completely consistent with the huge comic "continuity", in fact the published comics themselves do not always maintain continuity. I don't know that trying to be thusly consistent is a good goal.

At best, the Marvel movies have been fairly self consistent with the movie storylines. Certainly the trailer for "Guardians of the Galaxy" does not look like it is going to be very consistent with the published comics.