O_o

The car will react about half a second faster than you. Which, at 65mph, allows it to stop a full 50 feet earlier than you. It will also brake with full ABS, whereas you will tend to brake timidly at first for another half second before panic braking, which probably saves the car another 30-50 feet.

So it will generally avoid the entire situation that would require moral judgements over orphans versus self. Situations where it must swerve to avoid a collision are ones that occur too close to the car for you, human, to have even reacted to.

You misunderstand. I'm not saying you won't get "economy plus" if you pay for "economy plus", or "business" if you pay for "business". I'm saying that there's no guarantee what that means. Show me on your ticket where it says "minimum 34 inch seat-pitch guaranteed".

I'm saying if you look at the price of two airline tickets for the same class on the same route, one is $500, one is $550, which one has the most legroom? The $550? Not necessarily. There's no information given by the airlines on what sized seat you are buying which allows you to compare. Your original comment said, paraphrasing, blamed the consumers for buying the cheapest option, but the airlines don't give the information I need to chose between them. How do consumers influence the quality of a product if they can't differentiate between products before buying?

In reality, most casual fliers actually over-pay for their tickets because it's so difficult to untangle pricing information, even without getting into differences in seats sizes between different airlines, different aircraft within an airline, different seats within an aircraft. I'm a book-keeper and finding the best value ticket for a given trip is harder than filing my employer's monthly payroll taxes and employee superannuation. Airlines have made an art of obfuscation.

[It is possible to work it out using third party sites, but trying to use them to compare, say, three airlines on a particular route based on price-versus-seat-pitch is extremely difficult. There's no easy comparison system to say "I want to go from A to B, over this approx period, what is the price/seat-size comparison across all airlines?"

There are local airlines where the pitch of "Premium economy" (economy plus) seating is the same as another airline's more expensive "Business" class seats, if they fly the right model aircraft on that route, on that day. If they fly a slightly different model, their "Premium economy" seats are shorter than the "Basic economy" seats on the first airline. Four inch variation between aircraft.]]

I had that thought too. It shouldn't be hard to put entire columns of seats on rails (adjustable for each flight according to the seat-pitches ordered by customers), without adding significant mass.

However, the seats would then be out of alignment laterally across the aisle, making evacuation much more difficult. That wouldn't be allowed. [Hell, even getting up to piss would be harder, it the seats next to you are out of line with yours.]

I still think bunks are the solution. But evacuation is still an issue. During an emergency evac, everyone is falling over each other as they get out of the top bunks. Plus getting in and out of bunks, particularly for fatties and infirm, would be difficult. But there could be solutions with clever design. And bunks would be a lot more comfortable, IMO.

Fully upright seats are designed with evacuation in mind, not comfort. That's why you are asked to raise them during take off and landing (the two riskiest times for aircraft.) It's the reason airlines haven't just bitten the bullet and installed horizontally stacked bunks.

The semi-reclined position is intended for the bulk of the flight. "Fully" reclined for the bulk of the flight during night flights. Basically, we're all supposed to recline our seats back as soon as the "fasten seatbelt" sign is turned off.

So it seems to me that all seats should raise automatically during take-off/landing/turbulence/emergencies, then lower automatically to a fixed recline during flight. All at the same time, all at the same angle. It wouldn't solve all the problems caused by shrinking seat spacing, but it would at least solve the recline-vs-non-recline disputes. But this would require more hardware per seat, hence more mass, hence won't happen.

Alternatively, accept the added risk and make all seats at 10 or 15 degrees further reclined than the current "full upright". Then lock the seats. By removing the variable recline, you should be able to make seats as a single shell, which should allow you to save mass.

Yes, you have to use a third party site to determine basic information like product size. That's a bad thing.

Imagine buying other products like that. Neither the manufacturer and the store tell you the basic size of your TV, won't show you a demo model, instead you have to get that information off of a third party site, and they can arbitrarily change the model they sell you, even after you've paid.

But no guarantee what that means. There's a local airline whose "Premium economy" class has seats which vary by several inches in pitch and an inch in width, depending on what aircraft they assign to a route. And what aircraft they assign can change between booking and flying. Oh, and unless you are paying full fare (which is over three times their typical "discount" fares), you can't swap flights. There's no "guarantee" that I'll get what I thought I paid for. Nothing on my ticket that says the minimum size seat I'm guaranteed, even if I paid extra specifically for that size.

That's within one airline. Good luck trying to comparison shop on price and seat-size between airlines.

When you have to use a third-party service to find a basic description of the product you are buying, the market has failed.

But there's no guarantee that paying an extra $50 will get me that extra space.

If seats were being sold "per inch", as you've priced them, you'd be right. They aren't, so you're not. Hell, they don't even tell you the model of aircraft you're going to be on.

[Unless I pay to bump up a class. But even then, I still can't compare that class between airlines.]

Actually a driverless class would probably be more interesting than Formula E.

In Soviet Russia, Yahoo does YUI.

"for a founder of a failed finance firm then facing..." Can't make "investigation" work. Although that "V" might be close enough already. "Official fact-finding"? Doesn't really carry the same meaning.

[Aside: The headline is misleading. It implies that a hack somehow interfered directly with the election mechanism. The hacker revealed corruption, it's the corruption which will disrupt the election chances of one of the major parties. "Hacked revelations threaten NZ National Party re-election bid". It's not like the hacker sabotaged a party's campaign site, or got into the ballot-printing or e-voting system. The difference between someone poisoning your company's products and someone revealing the poison your company puts in their products. In one case, they are the cause of the disruption, in the other they are just the messenger, you are the cause.]

Connick v. Thompson. Prosecutors withheld proof that the defendant was innocent. Defendant spent 18 years in prison, 14 on death row, before his lawyer accidentally found out about the suppressed evidence. Thompson sued the city, was awarded $14 million. Various appeals courts upheld the award.

Multiple courts, including the Supreme Court, ruled to be a clear violation of the defendant's constitutional rights, but the Supreme Court overturned lower court upholding the award and instead ruled, 5-to-4, that the city couldn't be held liable for prosecutorial misconduct. (The prosecutor already holds individual absolute immunity.) Clarence Thomas wrote that the city could not be held liable because the fact that its prosecutor blatantly violated the Constitution was not enough to make the city liable, unless it could be proved that its own specific policies had violated the Constitution.

In a similar case, they extended police immunity by ruling that a police officer couldn't be held liable for violation of a defendant's rights unless "every reasonable officer" working for the city would be aware of the issue, regardless of how gross the violation was. This continues a pattern of such bizarre rulings by the 5 "conservative" justices. (And a growing pattern of other court rulings. "Conservative" justices on California's supreme court just ruled that exercising your right to silence can be used as evidence against you, specifically a judge can use it to increase the severity of your sentence, unless you announce specifically that you are invoking the 5th Amendment each time you don't speak. Even if "exercising your right to silence" is simply not talking to the police until you get a lawyer, this can be used as evidence of your "callous disregard" by the court. (Note that this specifically goes against the argument behind the original "Miranda" ruling, which was based on the idea that people couldn't reasonably know their right to silence/lawyer/etc unless it was spelled out.))

Not really.

In the US, police are responsible for at least 400 deaths per year, about 2/3rds of them of black men. We're not sure about the exact number. There are no official national records of police shootings, and efforts by civilians to create such a national record has been continuously hampered by officials, including the FBI which is normally tasked with tracking this stuff. The FBI claims about 400 "justified homicides" of civilians are reported to them by police, but the FBI doesn't actively track shootings and specifically excludes unjustified or suspicious homicides. They also don't track other deaths in custody. (Like the guy in Louisiana who "committed suicide" by shooting himself in the chest... while his hands were cuffed behind his back, shackled in the back of a police cruiser, after having been repeatedly searched for weapons.)

http://www.fatalencounters.org/

FiveThirtyEight tried to estimate the total number of police homicides and worked out that it could be anywhere up to 3000/yr. The "Killed by police" Facebook news aggregator has tracked about 1,100 per year.

By contrast, last year, in the UK (population about 1/5th the US), police did not cause a single shooting fatality, and, across the whole country, officers fired their weapons in just three incidents. Proportionally, they should have 200/yr. Similarly, Australia should have 60-70 fatal police shootings per year to match the US rate, but averages about 6.

Something is very very wrong with the police in your country.

Actually most police shootings don't get reported widely. On average, using only the official statistics, police in the US kill a black man every 28 hours. Did you read about all 300+ of them? Such as John Crawford in Ohio, who was shot and killed by police in a Walmart while leaning on a BB-gun he was buying? Happened in the same week as the Michael Brown shooting. The Ferguson killing only made the news because of the outrage it provoked in the community, boiling over after years of racially driven brutality by police.

Doesn't it give you pause when things have gotten so bad that even paranoid anti-surveillance nerds are crying "yes please please record all my interactions with authority! Document everything!"

Agreed. Whenever my employer issues me with a gun and badge, they should issue me with a lapel camera.