A company that got started by cheating and lying, then prospering by illegally abusing their monopoly, then losing their momentum altogether, has trouble building something that's great or inspiring, What a surprise :-)

Windows 7 can even crash without a blue screen, it just abruptly stops. As if you pulled the plug on a desktop.

Wow, what a compelling argument, it supports not only the truth of what you say but also your credibility. Bringing in any facts (such as Visio was _bought_ by Microsoft) to support a contrarian view would be futile. Maybe some of their stuff do not suck as badly as the alternatives (esp. where they successfully cut off their competitor's air supply), but "great software" and "Microsoft" in one sentence???

The developers must have not thought of that, and just assumed that their cars will be driven in perfect worlds. Probably whatever output the AI gives will be used to turn the wheels, irrespective of confidence measures, speed, driver intention etc. The developers should have clearly come here to Slashdot first, asking for advice.

The new system will assure that they *will* be perfectly between the lines.

You should also signal to those drivers you're not aware of. Maybe traffic code says things for a reason. But if it's "invent your own traffic rules" day, then I guess anything goes :-)

1. Write a program, and offer it for a price
2. Have it shared on a torrent site
3. Sue

Finally, we got the Pixel Qi

I take the challenge not to convince you. but as an opportunity to think about the subject. You said you are correct so many times I start to believe it myself :-) Also, I think a lot of progress can happen, so the focus is on where it might get traction.

Where? It might be a place like Nevada, or the USA in general. Pros: long stretches of highways; very limited permissible top speed (usually 55-65mph, very rarely up to 80mph); mostly disciplined population with respect to speeding, tailgating, driving speed variations, aggression, DUI etc.; good quality wide roads, generally OK weather conditions and generally young and reliable cars. Cons: lawyers.

Type of road: your suggestion (HOV lanes) seem to imply mostly suburban traffic. While I agree with the HOV lane approach, and indeed it has economic benefits (much smaller distances among cars mean higher throughput, therefore higher speed at the same or lower fuel costs). But the suburban setting may not be the first area: there is rush hour traffic, bumper to bumper traffic and urban settings (otherwise there wouldn't be a HOV lane). Google started autonomous driving on the highways, and I think that's the most likely type of road where it all starts. It's boring and it gets dark (unlike in the city where most driving is during the day, and/or roads are well-lit). Drivers are prone to fall asleep. It's for a reason that highways are worth the investment of roughening the road sides to wake up the driver. Highways are rewarding from a technical standpoint too: the traffic patterns are much more predictable and much less ad-hoc, and if it IS ad-hoc (e.g. accident ahead of you) a millisecond-level steering or braking action may just save lives. So much so that the technology is being built continuously: sensors to keep track of the lane and warn you; sensors to monitor driver alertness; sensors to avoid hitting the preceding car. There's a lack of pedestrians and cyclists, and the rare crossing animals are best handled by a processing unit which does not have a 1000ms lag (or longer, if tired) or which cannot see sideways in the darkness. The consequence of an incapable driver is very bad (due to high speeds), while the technical feasibility is close (e.g. the safe stopping in case of the driver having an attack). Also, the transfer of control can be well-timed; it's unlikely that a city just pops up suddenly. So my bet is highways rather than HOV lanes. It is unlikely that the initial version will have convoy forming abilities, or that new lanes will be added for the autonomous cars exclusively. We need the network effect, and changing cars is easier than changing infrastructure. First there will be lots of cars that can drive themselves, then infrastructure will slowly adapt.

Alternative road types: self-parking cars in dense urban plazas, hotels etc., replacing valet services in controlled environments. Or war zones for transport (where it is probably happening by now) - essentially no liability issues. Or restricted areas of urban traffic (e.g. areas for the use of public transport only).

Type of vehicle: it may not be passenger cars initially. Maybe utility vehicles that slowly traverse long segments of the highway in the emergency lane, or trucks (which are in many countries have limited top speed and may be prohibited from overtaking vehicles or use any of the lanes except the outermost.

Alternative use case: maybe a sufficiently advanced car will be indistinguishable from a self-driving car. I.e. the person is legally driving the car, and the car - at many levels of planning and abstraction - modifies the driver's actions. ABS, traction control and engine controls already provide lower level overrides. For example, initial versions of higher level utilities may beep if you were to cross into the other lane while there is a car in the blind area. A next version may steer back. Volvo has some technology to measure car distances ahead and apply brakes if needed. So a drunk person may sit in the car and, importantly, the rest of the society would become somewhat more protected from this guy. He just pushes the gas pedal and drives erratically, while his car mitigates his actions, keeping him in lane or braking for obstacles as needed. Navigation technology may also become multimodal: it may gently steer the wheel toward the lane you'll need, just as a signal. Such things would be more assertive if there was some sign that the driver became asleep or out of control. So in some sense, pushing the gas pedal stops moving the rod that opens the engine air inlet (as it did in the past) and starts signaling the intention of the driver to go ahead.

It is more likely that cars will be eventually mandated to take control from humans in case of an immediate emergency, rather than the other way around, so there is no need to worry about returning control to man. Humans do as well as they can but the responses are very poor in emergency situations. Since it is not practised by drivers, the outcome is very stochastic. There is lack of attention, long reaction time, incorrectly applied brake, oversteering etc. On the other hand, cars may have ever growing situational awareness: cars may eventually form ad-hoc networks (including human-driven cars), sending speficic notifications; their sensors and reaction times are superior; their attention constant; their strategies communicable.

Technically there is a very small difference between a very safe, intelligent car that assumes/overrides controls as needed, vs. a fully autonomous vehicle. The really interesting question (besides the technology) is how it will change society, habits, urban landscape and interactions.

I recommend watching videos like DARPA urban challenge and Google's self-driving cars, which racked in hundreds of thousands of autonomous driving with very occasional intervention in highway and urban settings. You can try and understand a bit of how they work, including how they combine sensor data, detect obstacles and form plans on the go. Can they be tricked? Yes. Can they be more effective than an uncapable (inattentive or shocked) driver in making choices or bringing the car to safety? Most probaby, we are about there now. Are they bound to be superior in all important regards of driving safety? Absolutely. There is no such a thing as THE fundamental thing to solve, and it's not clear what you mean. It's lots of small, tedious steps that usher in this "manifest destiny".

When there are about 3 mainstream browsers, even the third place is one of the fastest :-) Google brought the browser speed wars to the market, so in some sense they are leader even if they were to lose some of the current benchmarks _at this instance_ to Mozilla or IE, and IE is the laggard, being utterly defeated by Chrome for a long time, even if by now they managed to pour enough money on the problem to catch up with the thought leaders. MS would have been the loser of the browser speed wars even if they had had a somewhat faster JS engine (which I don't know about) - Google's intention was to make the Web a viable application and interaction platform, and they managed to kick MS in the @ss to serve their goals. Also, while Chrome was for a long time about an order of magnitude faster than IE, it is unlikely that IE will ever command more than an incidental minor lead in some of the semi-realistic benchmarks. It would never occur to me to move from Firefox to IE for JS performance, because I've been a Chrome user since it came out, and because I wouldn't want to support a Johnny-come-late convicted monopolist, which has the history of "choking Netscape's air supply", curiously the former browser market leader that got crushed mostly by criminal activity.

If you look at MS behavior now, even with the mandatory selection ("ballot") in their operating system, they do their best to disgustingly hinder competition: they list a huge number of alternatives just in order to make e.g. the Google alternative appear off the screen. Many are not interested in their JS engine even if they can finally compete on technical ground.

As much as I respect MIT and their - unique for the time - OCW initiative, which is a major pillar of free online education along with the Khan Academy, the current MITx announcement oozes of "mee too":

1. Timing: the seminal three Stanford courses just finished, and more than a dozen for early next year introduced
2. Spring start: could mean anything between March and May; i.e. they were probably caught off-guard by the Stanford initiative
3. No details announced: no list of courses, let alone lecturers' videos; only a lot of disclaimers that make it look half-hearted

Comparing the recent Stanford classes (I did 2 out of 3) with the OCW courses (I did some of those too):
A. It's refreshing that half an hour of a lecture isn't spent on minutiae interesting for on-campus students
B. The certificate is valuable in and of itself, but we do it for the knowledge, and the constant quizzes, homeworks and especially the programming exercises put us on rails and made us continuously engaged, while the OCW courses feel like abandonware in comparison, as if you were eavesdropping (no personalization whatsoever; very erratically available video and course materials; lots of image removals due to copyright)
C. Interestingly the Stanford courses felt amateurish from a technical production standpoint; e.g. low quality yellowish webcam filming Andrew Ng (who was the most prepared lecturer); only left-ear sound in one series of AI vids; limitations (and differences) of the video playback tools; often very imprecise or confusing wording on the AI class; the filming of white note papers, which seemed inferior and idiosyncratic next to the digital blackboard with Khan Academy).
D. The Stanford videos were often very inspirational: while Andrew Ng gave the most thorough and consistent education, Sebastian Thrun was very inspiring especially when showing DARPA challenge videos (what the car "sees") and when demonstrating particle filters.

So kudos for MIT for OCW, though its persisting limits and lack of serious cultivation gave takeover opportunities to incumbents such as the Khan Academy and the Stanford courses. Hopefully they'll try to leapfrog those who leapfrogged them.

For this joke: "If you switched away from Firefox to IE [...] for improved JS performance"

When I saw your post and the GP, I thought you guys are meant for one another. Then I saw the identical user IDs. Your opinion is popular but fundamentally wrong. Technology moves on by the time all the navel-gazers (incl. you and me here) finished these 'sports bar' like discussions, where everyone is an expert of a sport they might not have ever played.

In the meanwhile Sebastian Thrun's efforts and a myriad other initiatives may see this as an engineering problem: a) lots of people die and get injured, and b) there is so much information and context a human driver can process, even if not drunk. Also, incremental and inevitable progress is not considered, only maybe a few of the initial transitions (ABS and airbag analogies such as the car stopping itself safely if the owner got a seizure; industrial vehicles in warzones or semiautonomously monitoring an autobahn from the emergency lane etc.).

Sensors:

Machine wins hands-down. All your sensors are on your head (I'm simplifying) while a car can be wrapped in sensors. Yes, including cameras that look to the side and including processing that may detect an aggressive, or non-alert driver or a police car next to you. Generally if you can make up examples of what wouldn't be sensed by the car and therefore why it would fail, you just invented something that can be measured and maybe researchers are not your average idiot either. It's not just that the sensors are placed in blind spots: an automated car has effectively a continuous 360 degree multimodal vision (laser range finders, cameras etc.) that work in unison.

Processing:

Even though, for the moment, humans excel at poetry, sense of humor, empathy etc., for car driving, not all layers of our mental faculties are exercised. I'm willing to bet that Google's car already identifies pedestrians with a higher likelihood than the average human. The human driver is good at judging subtleties, e.g. telling a human apart from a wax figure in Madame Tussaud's, but in reality pedestrians are killed when they have right of way in a crossing, because the driver didn't notice for one of a million reasons. The human of course can recognize another human, but on the road it's not a controlled classification experiment in a lab - you have speed, A-bar occlusion, rain, darkness, screaming kids, too much substance or lack of alertness. Also, in the case of an accident-prone situation (driver ahead applying full brake or someone crossing into your lane) the machine driver can avert the accident by the time a human reaction time (many hundreds of milliseconds) elapses.

Trends:

A guy made the very valid but imprecise comment that once you fix a bug, it's fixed forever, while new inexperienced/irresponsible/tired drivers hit the road every day. The point is that with humans, everyone needs to pick up the skills individually and there is no effective transfer of knowledge except on the very basics. With machines, 1) the "brain" can be trained once and rolled out into millions of cars; 2) the steady progress will surely not avoid this single area of technology, so it is bound to improve.

Creativity:

I think we can do better than single out high occupancy lanes for initial use. There are a billion creative ideas for the use of autonomous driving that may be early adopter areas. Can you make a list?

Statistics:

What matters is not whether there will be cases where a machine is inferior to a human, or whether there will be a machine-caused accident or not. The question is whether the loss attributed to machines is significantly lower (besides the existence of other benefits) or not. If this is the case, there is a huge economic imperative to use the technology, making the transition inevitable (it's not a naysayer's slashdot post that will halt progress).

Self-parking cars lead to automated valet errands. Volvo's traffic monitoring will lead to highway autopilot. Etc. etc. Maybe the first autonomous car that you buy will not be advertised as such. Maybe it'll be advertised as a car that can safely stop with you (whatever traffic situation you happen to be in) if you get a heart attack, while it just informs you of stuff in normal operation. It's an inevitable march, and by the time those who say "the question is not technology, but society's acceptance" have the chance of analysing the heck out of the subject, all of us will essentially sit in self-driving cars. By the time we reached conclusion on urban impact, climate change etc., as a method of transport, cars have pushed aside horses and their loyal fans.

Except if that other traffic is also an Airbus.

SAP has been doing it as a matter of course. I don't even see how IBM got into this ERP like task, but I didn't RTFA.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR2ydWY3YNM&feature=youtube_gdata_player