The Romans didn't know how to make cement. They knew how to make concrete by using a specific volcanic sand from a particular area, mixed with lime.

They didn't know why it worked, nor how to identify other sources, nor how to make it from less pure sources. They were cooks who knew how to use flour, but didn't know how to make flour once their initial supply ran out. Cut off the trade in magic sand and the concrete made from other sources was weak, worthless for building.

Plenty of communities across post-Roman western Europe knew how to make cement mortar. It just wasn't anywhere near as a strong as Roman concrete because no-one else had the right magic sand either, nor knew why less-magic sand worked, or didn't work, hence the right way to cook it to make it more-magic. So it tended to be restricted to things like mosaics, not entire buildings.

Food yes. But it will be years before we use up the housing and clothing we already have.

Housing and clothing are issues in a disaster that physically destroys housing/property in excess of casualties, leaving people alive but homeless. Floods, quakes, etc. Regional disasters, not global civilisation killers.

They don't need to. By merely switching to silent mode when they detect (somehow) that they are in a car, they are still usable to passengers to make outbound calls/text, play games, or check their incoming. [This means they can also still be used by drivers, but I don't believe the intent is to stop drivers from initiating calls/texts. Just to stop incoming calls/texts/alerts/updates/etc which people have trained themselves, Pavlovian style, to always respond to.]

Screens and radios are apparently much less distracting than phones. Driver's can choose when it's safe to glance. (Presumably TV's would be more distracting. And modern car-radios with dozens of tiny little black-on-black buttons are probably worse than your granddad's chromed push-button car-radio, but the audio itself is not that bad.)

As for GPS, there was research by... BMW?... some years back that showed that voice-guidance (spoken turn-by-turn nav) drastically increased crash rates. Probably for the same reason that phones are so distracting, the device shouts for attention regardless of what the driver is doing. Yet in most (all?) units, voice-guidance still can't be turned off at all. (Nor is it banned in any country.)

Judge just says, "First to permanently fix it for us wins the case."

Dude, no-one is a "developer" straight out of high school. Kids who learn basic web-hosted programming skills in high school are still going to do a college-level course before even the most entry-level coding job.

How exactly is that disagreeing with the parent post, or with Bloomberg?

Laws have comments. Things like introductions, framing statements, etc. In fact there's an art to reading laws in order to separate the "code" from the "comments", in order to get to the stuff you need to know. And then the specific laws have whole libraries of case-law, regulations, and other dependencies which you need to know in order to apply the "code" to a specific situation.

Technical people make terrible politicians. Some can become good technocrats, in a non-democracy, but generally not good politicians.

Oblig

OTOH, people who studied programming/CS are likely have intelligence in the top few percent. That makes it easier for them to pick up any new, similarly technical subject, even after they are outside the high brain plasticity age bracket. Which makes them a poor model for the general population.

"Coal miners", or equivalent, generally aren't in the top few percent, or even top ten percent. So once they are outside the age of rapid learning, retraining is going to be extremely difficult.

I put "coal miners" in quotes, because today mining is a high pay, high skill job. [At least it is in this country.]

Indeed. And one of the ways of doing that is not destroying their parents' livelihoods faster than society can adapt. Children of the long term unemployed (or underemployed) have a much lower chance of reaching an education level (and hence work) commensurate with their true capability. That reduces social mobility, resulting in multi-generational welfare dependency.

Ideally you'd want the combo printer-scanners that are starting to come out, combined with something as simple and intuitive as SketchUp (but volumetric "clay" instead of shell/boundary) to let users modify the model by stretching, patching, or copying elements. That might have been something that Jobs' Apple could have done, but Jobs is dead.

A number of patents exist for metal sintering 3d printers that have restricted development to a few licensees. It means that they haven't had the same cost reducing competition that plastic extruding printers have had recently. Some patents are approaching expiry (the biggest one just expired this year), and everyone's hoping...

The devs are rolling out a patch for an issue where an external hardware crash caused a loss of system integrity. While no personal data has been lost to date, the vendor apparently wants to reduce the recovery time and inconvenience for early adopters.

Fanbois coo admiringly. Critics snipe cynically. Nihilists whine about the story appearing at all.

And the beat goes on...

Manufacturers receive detailed scores on individual tests as part of the report, including comparison with other vehicles. The Tesla scored higher than any previous car.

[Then Musk, being a nerd, did what any of us would do when give two data-sets converted by an unknown factor, he back-calculated from the detailed test scores the conversion factor for the "star" rating, in order to decimalise the "star" rating. Then he tweeted it, and everyone went stupid.]

I think a Ford Mustang has since tested higher, and is the current record holder.

If you want to go, you pay for it.

If you want me to pay for it, then you need to offer me a fuck of a lot better reason than "because it's there". Which ultimately is just another way of stamping your feet and whining "Because I want to!"

Worse, it's not even because you want to go. You just want to have an exciting Apollo-moment in your lifetime, even if you have to send someone else to their deaths to get it. And you'll throw a tantrum if anyone says you can't have it.

It won't advance human spaceflight. When the stunt is finished, we are back to where we are now.

It won't advance science. Any science it is capable of doing is more cost-effective as a robotic mission. Worse, it will harm some science, not only by diverting resources away from more useful missions, but by biologically contaminating the landing sites, making it harder to prove a positive result for native Martian bacteria if it is even discovered in the future (by a real science mission.) And discovering Martian bacteria would be a huge breakthrough in understanding the formation (or transport) of life, not just in the solar system but galaxy-wide.

It won't bring forward colonisation, nor guarantee species survival. Mars is a crappy place for colonising anyway, but these kind of stunts don't contribute to colonisation anyway. Any more that the Apollo program led to permanent cities on the moon.

So what is the purpose?

Because right now, particularly looking at whining childish tantrums like yours, the only reason so far is "wah wah, because I want to!"

Etc etc. And this is why spaceflight has progressed so little in the last 50 years. If anyone questions someone's whim, they are shouted down as being "against space", "Luddites", etc. Those aren't reasons.

I've been advocating for human settlement of space for about 30 years. But that doesn't mean I support stupid pointless stunts.

Wasn't quibbling over the claim that small aircraft are more dangerous than driving (see my reply to immerman). Only with the claim that weather isn't a danger to road users. It's clearly a major factor in road crashes, just as it's a major factor in air crashes.