Stupid angle bracket removal....

The trick is that to use your device in the corporate network you need to install the company's CA-certificate. You need to do that or you can not use . Now as it just happens the gateway router is also a transparent HTTPS proxy that issues certificate for the domains it MITM using that said CA-cert. You can't do much (in the US), since you agreed to the usage terms, that included "monitoring for anomalous behavior".

I am not so sure about that. Most suburbs would probably work with a bus service in half hour intervals. The problem is that the people that want to live in the suburbs are also the people that want to own a car. Basically "the american dream", your own house, your own car and your own debt. These are the people that will not use a bus service even if it was available and efficient.

How does that differ from the current situation? The Sate already basically regulates that you are only allowed to drive on regulated roads. Try to drive on the median of an interstate and see what the sheriff thinks about it. The only exemption here is private property, but here the insurance companies chime in and most will have claims that your cover is void when of road. Basically that has nothing to do with driver less cars.

What about flash the warning lights, send vehicle to vehicle warning/distress signal and carefully slow down to a stop? No different a mechanical failure on the car. Then you call for assistance and the car gets towed and fixed. Chances are that these are adverse weather conditions that you probably should not be driving in anyway. In addition that with IR cameras rain and snow will have less of an impact than human visions... so...

Although I will chip in the "not there yet" camp, but I will add that the failure states of humans vs robots is different. Problems in robotics are systematic, certain circumstances lead to failure states. Something that needs to be understood and remedied through the application of refined and extended techniques. Current technology allows autonomous driving in a well maintained car on a well maintained road with fair weather (lane assist + adaptive cruise control + forward sign and light recognition). It is perceivable that engineers will overcome the remaining problems in around a decade.

Although humans are able to adapt to many unforeseen conditions, it does not mean they are actually good in all conditions. This added with a high variance of individual skill. This makes that, under conditions that robots perform optimally they will do so consistently, individual humans may not. In the long run I will trust robots more than humans.

In addition, car manufacturers have a relative solid record when it comes to integrating computers into cars. Think about it almost all cars sold today are drive by wire. If you can trust a computer to reliably and consistently apply your throttle input into acceleration and switch gears for you, there is no reason why you should not trust a computer to drive your car, once the sensor technology is sufficiently developed.

So you think the NSA can not get a certificate issued from Verisign for any domain?

I don't get it. I have seen the health care system in the US(before obamacare), France, Germany and the US (now with obamacare) and can conclude, socialized health care is always cheaper. Free market self corrects* many things, but health care is not one of them. For example in Germany, I am above the highest income bracket and I pay less than I would in the US. That is less than when I would be single, but I am not my insurance covers my child and wife. You may pay less, because you are young, but wait until you are older.

* In the case of healthcare there is no free market, it is an inelastic market. If there is treatment that can save your life, no mater if it costs $7 or $70000 you will find the money to pay for it. As a result normal free market dynamics do not apply. With socialized healthcare the insurances negotiate on your behalf and they have leverage because the span the entire population or large parts. They pit different providers against each other, which reintroduces free market forces.

I think we are VERY FAR from robots that really autonomously make a kill decision. This is the basic AI fallacy that imply that we will soon have systems that can "decide on their own". But that will probably happen never or not very soon.

You need to look at real practical implementations of weapon systems (i.e. killer robots). Any weapon system will be integrated into the command and control structure of the army. The system will have different operational modes (simplified), such as stand down, engage specific target, engage all non friends and engage everything that moves. The key here is a robust friend / foe detection systems, something that is already almost perfectly solved for aircraft. Sure you could try integrate an effort to include combatant / civilian detection mode, but since that can probably be easily fooled, it will be an optional feature that will be disabled once the enemy tries to fool it.

This philosophical pondering "can a robot make a kill/no kill decision" is as you point out meaningless, since humans can not make this decision either reliably. The real question is, can we design a robust friend / foe system? That is a solvable engineering problem.

On what is there exactly consensus? That the climate is changing? That pumping huge amounts of CO into the atmosphere has an effect on the climate? That is the only thing they can agree on. But even then consensus is meaningless. If there is no "consensus" on the nature of the universe, why do we need consensus in climate science?

The things that they can agree on are the obvious things. The climate is changing, as is obvious if you look at an aggregate of historical weather data. Pumping huge amounts of CO into the atmosphere has an effect on climate, is simple physics a rise from 300ppm to 600ppm has approximately 1.2K rise in temperature. Most skeptics also agree to these basic facts, since anything else would be nonsense.

The things that climate scientists don't agree on are the how feedback mechanisms behave exactly and on how to model them. The IPCC report aggregates multiple models that are widely all over the place. That is why we get predictions all over the place ranging from +6K (catastrophic) to +3K (mild) (300ppm - 600ppm). In addition to the seemingly inability to actually predict the climate. The current slump was totally not predicted, let us hope that the revised models fare better.

When divergent hypotheses (e.g. cosmic rays) are denied publication, because "consensus", then we really have a problem. Divergent hypotheses should be published and discredited based on data and peer review and not clout of the professors favoring the leading theory. The current state of scientific publishing is somewhat broken, where conflict of interest is not money, but possibility of loosing face. That there even was this half bogus* 97% report and that it keeps being parroted over and over tells you almost all you need to know.

* half bogus, because the sample and sample size where very biased. It's like asking if Windows is awesome on the Build conference.

Except that you are missing the fact that a nuclear battery is not the same think like a nuclear reactor. You can build a nuclear battery with something around a cup full of material, whereas a nuclear reactor needs a significant larger amount of material. Also it is funny how you mention Fukushima, the health effects in this incident where rather minor. There are chemical industrial accidents with significant higher casualty rates than that. If you mentioned Chernobyl you may have had a point, but not with Fukushima.

As far as I remember the North Sea has some of the highest tidal sway. Granted looking at this table Denmark comes at to low end, but 1-2m tidal sway is not a little bit of water moving, especially if the topology is rather flat.

First there are limited provisions AND the police does not only operate open in public space. Probably most of the juicy bits are taken on private property, such as during an arrest.

I rather doubt that people will actually react to electric prices changing. Unless there are discernible and predictable patterns most people will not notice a change in the price. Even if there is a big fat indicator of the current price visible, do you really think people will turn of the TV and turn down the heating?

Except that with a high solar power capacity in the network, it tends to be inverted. At night little capacity is available and the price tends to go up and at daytime with high capacity the price tends to go down. The good news is that basic demand follows the same curve as solar capacity over a day. The tricky times are during dusk, dawn and early evening, where you still have relative high demand but little capacity. Then again, I don't think solar power (fotovolatic) is a good idea.