This is why "no fault" insurance was invented. Even with people, the liability in traffic accidents is often complex. Require no-fault insurance, you insurance is responsible for you, mine is responsible for me, and you are basically done - at least as far as car insurance is concerned.

What may be left is civil liability. If a manufacturer produces a genuinely faulty product, they can be sued in a completely separate action. The laws are already in place for that. The problem I see is the exact opposite of what you are worried about: People will sue, regardless of the quality of the product. Because bad things aren't supposed to happen, and if they do, someone must be to blame.

So someone without insurance t-bones my autonomous car, and I want compensated. The other driver is broke, so I sue my car manufacturer. Stupid, but entirely possible under US law. Loser pays would be the simplest solution: if you file a stupid lawsuit, you'll be paying the other side's legal costs. In the case of class action suits, the attorneys for the class should be liable for the loser's legal costs if they lose.

Before any company brings autonomous cars to market, the US tort system has got to be fixed.

I expect the number haven't been publicized, because they are still to limited to have any significance, and also because the cars have been running under fairly tightly controlled conditions.

When there are a few hundred cars, running in all kinds of weather and traffic conditions, with millions of miles - if the numbers are still good, you can bet that they will be plastered all over the internet

Is there really a need for new regulations? Or are government bureaucrats just feeling their oats?

Endangering a commercial aircraft? There are already laws covering that. Spying on your neighbors? "Peeping Toms" are nothing new. Flying over other people's property? Existing trespassing laws can be applied, since people have rights to their airspace immediately above their property. As other posters have pointed out, there are also all of the old rules for model aircraft and model rocketry.

"The new rules are almost certainly require RC pilots to have full FAA pilot licenses in order to operate them. That's just outrageous"

Yep, that's outrageous. But it's not really the fault of all the idiots out there. I mean, sure, they are idiots - but they are already violating existing rules. There's no need for new rules. The more serious problem are the bureaucrats who take every opportunity to create even more regulations.

" let educational professionals decide how best to invest that money"

That's a bad idea if there ever was one. The quality of schools in the US has been steadily declining ever since the federal government started sticking its nose in. More and more bureaucracy, regulations and administration. Less and less effective teaching.

You know, if federal control of schools were any good at all, the schools in Washington D.C. would shine. Instead, despite their huge budget (second highest in the country), D.C> schools are the worst in the country.

Send all of the "educational professionals" to flip hamburgers. Return schools to state and local control. Hire teachers who hold degrees in the subjects, instead of in education (this might be important). Some places will be disasters (but they already are). Others will finally be able to do something about fixing their schools. Without all the federal regulation, it'll probably cost a lot less, too...

I suppose there is some justice in the Prenda principals* living this trainwreck for years, as a sort of additional punishment before their inevitable jail sentences even start. However, I can't help but think that it shouldn't take this long. They spent years scamming people, before a court finally had the balls to actually take action against them (one somehow suspects special treatment for fellow lawyers). Now they are spending more years wasting judicial resources and time, meanwhile they may well be running some other, new scam to finance their modest lifestyles.

* Note to editors: it's not "principles" - those are what the Prenda principals failed to live by.

Organizing a deliberately provocative event is a clear statement of support for free speech. A clear statement that allowing potentially offensive speech is essential to a free society. Other reactions to Charlie Hebdo - how we have to tread carefully and avoid offense - are utterly wrong.

Terrorists are barbarians, and are a direct threat to civilization. Apparently, the Texan reaction to barbarism is "bring it on".

More power to Texas. I hope other places find the courage to hold similar events.

Um, you write: "[CA] could issue a bogus certificate in your name whether you work with them or not" and also "Your CA being in the US isn't a risk".

That's kind of a contradiction. Ok, so where my CA is located isn't the issue, but given "National Security Letters" and all, I'd say allowing any CA in the US to issue certificates is a risk, at least for non-US domains.

HTTPS is all well and good, but the certificate situation is just a mess. Currently, essentially any CA can issue a certificate for any website anywhere. That means that every time you surf, you are placing your trust in literally hundreds of CAs.

Meanwhile, self-signed certificates bring up horrendous warnings, or are simply refused. The chance of verifying a self-signed certificate (for example, getting the fingerprint via another channel) are a lot better than the chance of verifying that some random CA hasn't been bribed or pressured.

Can we please fix this mess, along the way to making HTTPS standard?

Pardon my cynicism, but...does this make any sense at all? Or is it just about a subsidy for big publishers, plus some stupid political games?

Provide ebooks? The problem this is supposed to solve, according to Obama, is "low-income children lag below their grade level in reading skills and lack books at home". There's a reason for that, and it isn't lack of access to books. It's parents who don't read and don't encourage reading.

And how are they going to read those ebooks? Why...on the upgraded "Internet services for schools and libraries". You know, if you can get those kids to a library, be it a public library or a school library, you could just let them read some of the books that are already there. The thing is: you aren't going to get them into the library, because - see above - they are being raised in families and in an urban culture that doesn't value reading.

Fix the urban culture problem. Get the parents to care about their kids education. Everything else is noise.

Isn't this a free-speech issue? Or, even more fundamentally, freedom of opinion?

There are people in the Southern US who refer to the American Civil War "the War of Northern Aggression". From their point of view, that's what it was - slavery was just the excuse. It's not a widely held opinion, but it's theirs to hold.

Russian history books present a very different view of WWII and the aftermath, as compared to Western history books.

If the Turkish government and people believe that what happened does not qualify as a genocide, that is entirely their right. I do not understand the pressure to acknowledge the events of 100 years ago. It's like the XKCD cartoon: someone in the world is wrong! It's history, it's past, and a formal acknowledgement by today's government isn't going to change what happened.

Ok, so someone educate me: what am I missing here?

"If the professor was at all smart, he would have identified the worst offenders built a solid case for them and crucified them before an expulsion board to send a message to the rest of the students, and any one taking his class in the coming semesters, that he isn't to be 'fucked with'."

Exactly this.

It sounds like Prof. Horwitz did just about everything wrong. He wasn't objective, he didn't grade students individually, and he blind-sided the school administration.

You do get crappy classes once in a while. I had a class a couple of years ago - it's a class that I teach every semester - but this particular group of students was just special. The social leader of the class hated the subject. He convinced most of the rest of the class to follow his lead: skipping lectures, or coming to class only to surf or game, not doing assignments, etc.. He was a total pain in the a**, and most of the class followed his lead.

Fine. You buckle down and teach. You focus on the students who aren't being idiots. At the end of the course, you write a final exam of exactly average difficulty, make extra sure that the questions are clear, and that the grading criteria will stand up to a formal review process. You warn the administration of what is coming. Then, you fail everyone who deserves to fail, based on absolutely objective criteria. In my case, it was 3/4 of the class.
Importantly, those students who resisted the peer pressure - they did just fine on the exam.

"The option of "pay ransom" is really a sign that you've failed yourself (and your customers, if you're a business). You can't stop data exposure, but to have to pay to get your data back, that's just stupidity on your part."

The victims of ransomware are companies too small to have a full-up IT department. Since lots of /.ers are in the US, look at the stats on company size. The vast majority of companies have fewer than 10 employees. Those are the companies where the IT was probably set up by a friend or neighbor.

It's all well and good to say that you should have a full backup tested and ready to go, but only larger companies actually do. At best, what a small company has is a hard-disk that some employee takes home on the weekend, which is supposed to contain a backup of all critical files. Most won't have anything beyond a local file synchronization, which the ransomware may be able to overwrite.

Most small businesses run on a shoestring: they can't afford to pay an IT person to run a professional network for their 3 PCs and 2 laptops. Heck, one company I am currently working has one employee using their workgroup server as their normal PC. Win-XP with full administrative rights. That's how they saved money when they started six or seven years ago, and only now - when the hardware is end-of-life - is it finally going to change.

If there is an offsite backup, it will be days or possibly weeks old. It's certain that no one has ever actually wiped down the server and tried a full restore; they don't really know if the backup is complete (or even readable). Some critical file somewhere won't have been backed up, or they won't be able to find all the license keys, or... Figure it will take days, maybe even a couple of weeks to get the company running again. Lost time, lost business, plus the lost data (since the backup won't be current), plus paying consulting fees for an expert to do all of the work.

Likely as not, the company will pay the ransom and hope for the best.

Would this be published?

Ralph Jones writes in an op-ed piece in the YN Times that he looks with despair at estimates that only about 14 percent of teachers in elementary school are men. But there may be a solution to the disparity that is much simpler than targeted recruitment efforts. "An experience here at the university, where I teach, suggests that if the content of the work itself is made more objective and scientific, men will enroll in droves," writes Jones. "That applies not only to elementary school but also to more traditional, equally female-dominated fields like nursing and kindergarten."

"It is not just about gender equity - it is about doing better teaching for us all."

I'm sure those cameras will be able to look through windows into cars moving at speed, and detect thing like this...not.

TFS refers to TFA which refers to another TFA, and all of them are pathetically written. Here's a link at CMU discussing the competition. This is the second link in TFS, but it's not clear that all of the other links in the first paragraph are just trash.

In any case, a couple of points and/or musings:

• 1500 hands per day, 6 days per week, for two weeks running. I only play at a hobby level, but...isn't that a whopping lot to expect of the human players? Any serious players out there who can comment?
• One of the pros expects fewer "mind games". But mind games are part of the game - if this is a decent AI, shouldn't he be in for more mind games?
• The hands are "prepared". On the one hand, this bothers me, because we must assume that the researchers do not (even subconsciously) select hands that their AI can win. On the other hand, the reason for the preparation (only discussed in the CMU article - all of the "journalists" failed to understand this point) is so that they can play duplicate, in support of better scientific results.

As a final note: may I please encourage submitters and/or our illustrious editors to not fluff up submissions with links to crappy articles that miss most of the important points? Just the source link would have been enough - it's a good article with real information written in actual English.