Yea Snowden really took his thunder away.

Being that the autonomous automobile (the Auto-Auto) will probably be released when its safety ability exceeds that of a person, and each generation will get better. Being that the algorithm may be designed to Protect Passenger, vs. Max Insurance liability, or save most amount of people. In essence really doesn't matter as they all try to avoid accidents all together. And these algorithms will only come up in a world of decreasing rare possibilities.

I would expect protect passenger algorithm is the easier one to maintain as it has the most information available. The Insurance Calculation may be the next best, but how do you know if there are a lot of people in the bus or is it empty?

Exactly,
Technology can be used for good or for evil.

That rock that Ugg used to start a fire to keep his family warm, also worked really good at throwing at his rivals to kill them.

Why do all the sites feel the need to have a message board. Slashdot is OK, but the message board discussion is its thing. But for many of the news sites, these message boards are poorly managed and offer little to no insight to the articles. Just political rambling.
You don't want trolls, get rid of the message boards.

The problem is trying to figure out when a Troll is just a Troll vs. Free Speech of an unpopular idea.

Slashdot is a prime example of this. While a lot a trolls are actual troll, there are times when someone hits a few emotional points to the viewers that will get them flagged as troll.

Pro Religion, Pro Microsoft, Anti GNU, Anti Linux, Pro DRM. Posts unless extremely well explained will get modded down to troll.

But there are other areas where opposing views are considered trolls and meant to be kicked out vs. stated as an open opinion.

My rules for trolls, are posts that are overly negative, without any logical basis.

The AI in master chess computers, in essence try as many combinations as possible to find the best outcome. However it still takes way to long to process all the possible games. So there is a degree of trimming involved. Meaning not all combinations are in play. So there is a particular degree of randomness based on what future actions we choose to predict and not.

I personally stink at chess and can barely see 2 moves ahead of me.

There is the State University of New York at Albany example.

The design for the campus was designed by an architect to be used in a Desert location rumors have it in Saudi Arabia or Phoenix Arizona. It was designed to Chanel the winds to keep the campus cool for those hot Desert days.

However SUNY Albany to save tax payer money out and bought those designs, and put them in Upstate NY. Where the bulk of the school year is during the Cold winter months, thus giving the campus a bitter cold windchill in winter.

The Architect did a fine job, it was the stupid politicians who just cheap out and put a good design in a bad location.

It comes down to economics 101. Supply and demand.

The reason why their is inequality is because not all people are equal. Some people have skills and attributes that are needed/wanted more then others.

So the Sports Hero, who is physically superior to most people, is rare compared to the average person so he will be more desired and be placed on a higher status then people who do not.

The CEO or Politician is willing and able to deal with a lot of crap and take risks that most of us do not want to take. So they get paid more too.

Us Engineers and IT guys tend to get paid a little better than the average guy because we have skills that are in more demand.

So that is the supply side.

But if you are the smartest person in the world but in a field that no one really cares about or isn't much demand for say Expert in some obscure author of the 1800's, or say a top performer in an instrument that no one uses. Then the demand side of the equation will kick in. So this guy while smart isn't going to get much pay or status.

As well like in the 1990's during the tech bubble. They was a glut of "Web Developers" AKA some guy who knows how to use Front page who were getting paid a lot of money because there was such a demand to get web pages.

No matter what sort of economic system. Supply and Demand kicks in and forces inequality.
   

Well there will be a point where SSD are cheap enough for people to decide to pay a little extra to get them.

As magnetic drives get cheaper per storage, they are sold at around the same price but with more storage. It isn't uncommon for someone to get a PC built with a few Terabytes of data in a magnetic drive. Or for the same price you can get a SSD rated in hundreds of Gigabytes.

At a particular point the faster SSD drives with be affordable enough to offer the space that they need at a cost they want to spend.

Being that you probably have shelled out a lot of money for the Motercycle. You might as well spend some more for a good helmet.

How much more does your automobile cost you for its safety equipment.

That is why I preference my statement with "It isn't uncommon"

Yes you can get cheaper ones. But your $23.00 case isn't that much cheaper than $30.00. Espectially if like me you keep the same case for years.

I would be happier if you could easily and cheaply replace broken parts.
It isn't uncommon for these cases cost over $30.00. Now if I could say replace the glass pain, that is most likely to break for $40.00 it may still be a good deal as you don't always break your phone.

Well beyond hardware, Software reliability over the past few decades has shot right up.

Even Windows is very stable and secure. Over the past decade, I have actually seen more kernel panics from Linux than a BSOD. We can keep servers running for months or years without a reboot. Out Desktops,Laptops, and even mobile devices now perform without crashing all the time, and we work without feeling the need to save to the hard drive then backup to a floppy/removable media every time.

What changes has happened sense then on the software level.
1. Server Grade OS for the desktop/mobile devices. Windows XP on uses the NT kernel, Macs and iOS use a Unix Derivative. Android and GNU/Linux are Linux based system. All of these OS's were designed for Server based useage with proper memory management and multi-tasking as well support from SMTP. Causing a lot of those silly crashes of Yesterday a thing of the past.

2. Understanding and prevention of buffer overflow. While we knew about buffer overflows for a long time. But it was found to be a security issue in the late 1990's. So newer languages and updates to existing compilers are designed to try to prevent them. Plus the OS now randomizes the memory segments to help reduce the risk.

3. The "Try" "Catch/Except" commands. It is nearly impossible to try to break a complex program during testing. The Try/Catch idea in modern languages while many old schoolers claim leads to sloppy code, it does attempt to deal with the fact that the world isn't perfect and people make mistakes, and allows a clean way exit your program or procedure on error conditions. Meaning your program will still run when things are not perfect, as well once it quits your data is in a clean state to prevent further data corruption.

4. The rise of Server based programming. We go threw cycles of who should do the work The Server or the end use device. How often do you actually need to download a program any more, I bet most of you don't remember Software stores back in the 1990's where you had to buy a program to do everything. They were cheap $10 programs, or you can get a collection of shareware. But in general everything you needed to do on your computer needed a program. If you wanted an electronic Encyclopedia you needed to get one and have it stored on your computer. You wanted a program that had some forms and did some calculations you needed a program.... This created a situation where you had a lot of programs on your computer with DLLs/Shared Libary versions conflicting each other. Today a lot of these small program are now done over the Web, On the server, with Javascript to make the UI clean. But that means there is less stuff running on your desktop that could be conflicting with each other.

5. Rise of Virtualized Systems. If you had a server, you needed to put all your stuff on it, on the same OS, with a complex set of settings which made them more suited to mistakes. Virtualization allows you to have a bunch of custom settings designed to do one job and do it well. Vs. one server to do many things.

6. The rise of the interpreted and virtual machine languages. Most stuff done today doesn't require compiling straight to machine code, but to a virtual code (Java/.NET) or it interprets the code in run-time (Python/Ruby/PHP). That give the developer separation from the hardware. Yes it slows things down, but it also prevents a lot of oddities that happen when you make a program on a 32bit vs 64bit OS. Or even the minor difference between a Core i5 and a Core i7.

7. The fall of easy to use languages. Back in the Old days, there was a lot of languages like FoxPro, Visual Basic (not the .NET) which were designed to be used by Non-Programmers. These type of languages are not being used as much any more, that means the programming is happening with people who know how to program and not from people who just know how to use a computer. This means the programs wrote in these hard (By hard meaning there is some design and though behind it) to use languages are designed better and not as cobbled together.

8. Inexpensive database. Back in the old days, a Relational Database costed thousands of dollar or more. Too much for most peoples usages. Now with MySQL, Microsoft SQL, PostGreSQL and the others, having a Relational Database to you program isn't going to break the bank, and you have a tool that allows for better collection organization and retrieval of data.

9. Google Search/Widely available broadband internet. Back in the old days of coding, you had to use your reference book, or help in the software. However most programmers write programs that do something different than what the compiler makers had in mind, so you need to figure out a work around. Today if you hit something that seems overly complex you do a Google search and you can usually find out a better way to do it. The old way you just did it the bad way, it worked so you kept it.

10. Fast Processors, Lots of RAM. The old days everything needed to be optimized. This first added more time to your programming, and opened your code for a lot of bugs, because you needed to strip out as many checks that you can get away with. Also you need to keep an eye on the RAM you are using and write methods to store data and retrieve it over an over again. Today you wouldn't think twice about storing a few megs of data in RAM process it, than just save the output on disk. Easier code, less errors.

We like like the idea of the IQ score as a measurement. It is a number to say I am better then someone else.
However people are complex and their IQ is only part of the overall person. Very successful people have average or even below average IQ's as well. They can compensate it with Physical abilities, strong influential personality, or just knowing who to ask for answers and good guidance for better decisions.
A person with a High IQ and they know about it use it as a crutch to make them feel superior to others, while actually inconveniencing themselves by disregarding advice from people with experience and skills they they have not gotten.

Microsoft's dominance was in the Desktop. In other areas Mobile, Video Games, Servers, etc... Microsoft was just a major player, perhaps being #1 in the market but but not by the the huge margins it had on the Desktop.

With the traditional Desktop/Laptop market moving to Personal Computers that are more in a tablet small form factor, combined with the rise of development with non-platform particular languages, HTML 5, Java Script, Java, and Server Side processing. It is creating a fairer playing field for consumers to choose a platform.