Great... Next we'll be told that it's a "transportation appliance" with no user serviceable parts inside..

Next up: the sensor that attaches to your willy so you don't need to take your hand off of your joystick to control the mouse.

No, Linus needs to use his finger.

May the schwartz be with you!

That's because the existence of other universes is purely hypothetical, just like an AC's girlfriend.

This is why the idea of remote overrides of pilot controls is a particularly BAD idea.

A trained, qualified pilot must always have last resort authority, over any automated system and preferably even over any "assisted" system, whether it be fly by wire, hydraulic, etc. If control can be taken out of his or her hands remotely, because someone (or something) on the ground doesn't agree with the pilot's judgement, I guarantee we'll see more disasters, not fewer.

The instances where intentional pilot misconduct or hijacking occur are few, but notorious. But the instances where human pilots in the cockpit handle minor emergencies that could easily have turned into deadly ones occur regularly and we seldom hear about most of them.

Case in point: Do you think an autopilot on the ground could have heard a stowaway baggage handler?

This is an achievement. Take it from an old rocket grognard, a veteran of Amroc, Orbital, and others: just getting this far is an accomplishment.

And it's smart of Musk to append a test operation onto a paying mission. The launch fee for the ISS delivery offsets a major portion of the cost of the test.

And in a test sequence, close does count, because all data gathered is useful. And often, data from a failure is more useful than data from a success.

"Success is a lousy teacher; it seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose." —Bill Gates

I wonder if anyone tried designating attractive female passengers as male...

"I'm sorry, ma'am, but you'll please need to step behind this screen and remove your blouse..."

So let me get this straight...

They are okay with the deaths being politely described as "mass killing" but calling them "genocide" is too much? So they're upset about the negative connotations that "genocide" brings to the table?

Yeah... OK... They make all kinds of sense.

``How often do you see a photographer holding their dedicated-to-photography camera vertically?''

All the time if they're at, say, a sporting even and they know anything at all about composition. I've been doing sports photography since the '70s and have taken many tens of thousands of photos and the vast majority of my work is in the vertical format -- I specialize in track and field and other running events but I do hit the occasional high school foot/basket/baseball game. Yes... you can crop on the computer but, IMNSHO, it's a waste of pixels.

I once worked on the camera portion of a semi-autonomous weapon which, once a target was designated, would continually analyze the live image to maintain, track and intercept that target. A key part of the system was a human in the loop abort, which would cause the system to veer off target before impact should the operator see something he or she didn't like: not the intended target, high probability of collateral damage, etc.

The point is, all judgements about selecting the target and aborting the mission or changing targets were in the hands of a human. The automated parts were vehicle operations, corrections for terrain and weather, tracking an operator-designated object, etc. — all things that required no risk assessment, moral judgment, ethical considerations, etc.

That's the difference between autonomous and semi-autonomous: A human identifies the target, and monitors the system to issue a stand down order as new information becomes available.

(It's also the only weapon system I ever worked on, and it caused me great conflict. Though the intended use had merit, the possible unintended uses made me very uncomfortable. No, I can't be more specific.)

``Romans knew to let there be games, to keep the masses busy from free thinking.''

Yep. We have our reality TV, March Madness, the Super Bowl, the World Series (heck, professional sports in general), lotteries, celebrity worship, and so on and so on. There are already plenty of distractions to keep the American public from concentrating on, or even learning about, how their freedom has been taken away from them.

We'll see.

It's absolutely wrong that I am proposing a 'stealable' ID. No, it's not that at all. Like NFC (ApplePay and others) you don't send out your ID, your bracelet will engage in a two-way conversation that uses generates unique identifiers every time that prove that it's you without giving the system communicating with you the ability to impersonate you. It's not hard at all; we should have been doing this years ago. This is described in Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography twenty-fucking-years ago. Chapter 21(Identification Schemes) describes "zero-knowledge proof of identity". Curiously, researchers Feige, Fiat, and Shamir submitted a patent application in 1986 for this, but the Patent Office responded "the disclosure or publication of the subject matter ... would be detrimental to the national security..." The authors were ordered to notify all Americans to whom the research had been disclosed that unauthorized disclosure could lead to two years' imprisonment, a $10,000 fine, or both. Somewhat hilarious, as the work was all done at Weizmann Institute in Israel.

That said, I do think that groups like the NSA and FBI have been quite successful in keeping people (like Jeff4747) remarkably uneducated. Banks, credit card companies, and groups like Google that make gigabucks tracking people have held back from doing things right as well -- and they're paying for it today.

To say again. It is easy to build a system that would securely verify that you have authority to do something, without giving the ability for somebody else to impersonate you. It's somewhat more challenging than printing number in plastic on a credit card, but only a tiny bit more challenging.

This will happen. Once it does people will wonder why it took so long.