One in a couple dozen strips has a fair bit of research behind it ... on the other hand stick figures.

The kind of jokes he makes on those research strips is fairly unique, but overall the amount of work he puts into the strips isn't anything special.

Who cares if they are moderate? They won't be able to run the country after a civil war ... and after it collapses in on itself the warlords will take over and the extremists will float to the top any way.

It's an act of trying to reinstate the regional power balances ... Saudi Arabia's mental image of Iran as the big bogey men (which the US loyally spread to the world) has been shattered by reality.

They thought they could fuel Sunni uprisings without it endangering themselves, they see now how fucking moronic that was now given their own cushy positions and popular image. So all hands on deck to reverse the course set with Islamic spring and bring some stability back, including the stalemate between Sunni and Shia, strengthening Iran a bit is not a problem and minimizes costs.

"Hacked emails appear to show Hotchin secretly paid bloggers Cameron Slater and Cathy Odgers to write attack posts undermining the Serious Fraud Office, its director Adam Feeley"

The blogger takes money to tell only one side of the story in the first place, you say the hacker has is ideologically inclined to tell only the the other ... how is this not slightly balanced at least?

Can it swerve across the side walk when necessary? Can it make a blind turn past an obstacle just having faith that opposing traffic goes slow enough so they can stop in time? Can it turn on a single lane road in unison with lots of other cars when the road is blocked, judging the sides of the road accurately so it doesn't get stuck?

I can go on and on and on, just like any normal person who often drives in urban environments. Even the motorway isn't safe from the sort of shit which would make anything we could program today barf. Something simple like temporary lanes indicated by obstacles and traffic wardens can occur in so many different ways that it becomes impossible to handle. Or lets say we get directed through narrow bits of the shoulder for road works or an accident and the car decides to stop because safety margin aren't met, lets just make hundreds of people wait. Best not have a small car, or some very helpful folks might park your car in the ditch for you once they understand the cause of the hold up.

It's a pipe dream until we have human level AI.

He said you would need AI with human levels of improvisation ... he didn't say that kind of AI was impossible. I for one agree, anyone who thinks anything short of human level AI could succeed on the road either doesn't drive much or has no concept of how AI programming works.

You're talking like the car stopping isn't a problem ... just stopping the car where you aren't supposed to is dangerous.

When I hear someone call that a hologram I instantly know their use of language rules out any possibility they could accurately convey technical information.

Outside of the US the fast reactors keep leaking and fuel can only be reworked once for only a fractional reduction in waste. Ignoring pie in the sky reactors significant volumes of nuclear waste are still a necessary by-product of nuclear power.

Worked so well for Argentina.

Current account has gone down the shitter though, but can't blame Labour for North Sea gas decline any more than you can praise Thatcher for it's rise and the consequent results.

I find it funny how much all that sounds like the UK exit "plans" from the EU.

Sure, when you have to race to the bottom.

The standard Surface line, or in other words the "we want to be Apple line" is the problem.

I'm not sure if this is true.

Definitely not for the coherent bit, trying to setup a second equally long beam path to be able to do interferometry would be an absolute pain and a half (needs to be pretty much exactly as long, coherence length of lasers is never going to be large enough to be able to interfere it without path length matching). Much easier to just intensity modulate the laser and measure the doppler shift of the modulating signal.

Not sure about the angle either, the window won't have much diffuse reflection ... but it will have some.