In middle school, I loved chess. Not that I was great, but I enjoyed it and studied it and became middling. Later in life, once I had a job that required concentration for 8 hours a day, chess totally lost it's appeal. A moment's lapse on concentration costs you the game in chess. It just wasn't fun at the end of a work day. That is when backgammon became my game of choice. Strategy, similar to chess, but the dice make it pointless to plan more than a couple of moves out. Within a broad strategy, you play the probabilities. A moments lapse of concentration or even a glass of wine don't kill you, especially if you play a short series of games for points..

Yes, indeed. One time I owned the entire lowest-rent side, hotels on all. I down-built to houses when other players were getting ready to build. They looked at me like I was looney. Shortly thereafter, once they understood the rules, they paid me to build hotels again.

Were this any other country, I'd give this about 48 hours to get reversed. Since this is the Indian bureaucracy we are talking about, in may be more like two weeks for this to trickle through the system. But when you the take the fastest growing industry in the nation, that pays the best wages, and is your only hope for keeping the best and brightest from emigrating to greener pastures, and basically torpedo it, somebody is going to notice.

Roger Moore, Roger Moore,
Riding through the land....

While the economic case for a driverless truck makes huge sense, speaking as someone with experience both building robots and driving heavy, articulated vehicles, I think trucks are a while off. Cars are much easier. The huge mass and articulated connection from tractor to load make a truck a much more difficult vehicle to control, with some rather catastrophic failure modes that cars just don't have.

Large straight trucks will come first, and they have a lot of applications. For instance, mining operations, or grain wagon. A driverless grain wagon shadowing a combine until it is full, and then a driver can take over and drive it to the grain storage facility to be unloaded would be a great app, for instance.

Absolutely. My blind friend could live farther than walking distance from his job. My blind uncle could actually visit his friends.

But heck, a lot of us could actually get some work done on the commute to/from work.

Now, if you had said "uneducated rabid idiots", I'd be with you. But when you paint all republicans with that brush, you are simply being "uneducated and rabid" yourself. Little in your post is about propagation scientific fact. You key point is that you want to piss off people who don't think like you. By your behavior, I judge you to be more of a fan of Alinsky than Tyson.

Actually, there were a lot of "Messiah" cults in that period. The people of Judea were not to fond of their roman rulers, and wanted a solution. Of all the "Messiahs", one just had better P.R. front men.

Riiiight. That's why we still use FORTRAN for so much new code.

New programming languages succeed when they:
1. Provide compelling beneifts to some group of developers.
2. Are freely licensed (Java tried to break this rule for a while).
3. Are well documented with both reference and tutorial information in many forms.
4. Are delivered with a stable reference implementation.
5. Are correctly marketed.

I'm old enough that I did CS homework on punch cards, and I've probably learned and forgotten more languages than most Slashdotter's have ever used. I learned something from every one I tried, whether I became fluent or merely dabbled. Don't dismiss the new just because it is new. In this business, that will be the end of your career. Try every new thing that looks like it has a chance of succeeding. Then, dismiss the ones that truly suck. *That* is how you become a successful grey-beard curmudgeon sitting on the other side of the design review table.

Hmm.... not sure I totally buy this. Insulated, iced, box cars were being used to ship meat and fruit in the USA before 1900. My recollection is that pretty early on, the various express companies were operating ice manufacturing plants where it was impractical to harvest natural ice. Southern California, for instance -- places that grow oranges well, and are naturally semi-arid, don't have many opportunities for harvesting natural ice.

Toitally agree, though, that it is an economic decision. It's a classic case of shipping costs dominating the cost of the product. I remember an Econ 101 lecture where the example was ready-mix concrete plants. Wet concrete can not be shipped far because it is outrageously heavy, and therefore costly to ship, and secondly it is highly perishable -- if it sets up in the truck you have neither a product nor a truck :/ (And you *especially* don't have a truck if you let the Myth Busters clean it for you....)

Narrow minded? Wha??? All I said was that this is a great test precisely because there is a very good alternative to the battery swap. Have you ever designed a meaningful experiment for *anything*? Have you looked at how quickly the Tesla super charger can bring a Tesla up to 80%? Knee jerk much?

Tesla already has a fast charger at the Harris Ranch location. Which, if you are driving Sili Valley to LA, is a good place to stop for a lunch break. If I had a Tesla, the thought of a battery swap would not be compelling, since I'd be thinking of making the lunch/recharge stop anyway. OTOH, this is a good test -- when at the same location you have the choice between a battery swap verus a rapid charge plus good lunch, do people still go for the battery swap? It is an interesting marketing test precisely because the competing option is compelling.

Roger Moore, Roger Moore,
Riding through the land, ....

You are quite right. It's because most parents don't involve their daughters in workshop and construction projects, but they do involve their sons.

Not every girl is going to groove on helping assemble a new set of bookshelves form Ikea. Neither is every boy. But both can benefit from being taught about fasteners and tools.

More to the point, we are talking about why girls fall off the tech track, not what gets them on the tech track in the first place. Girls simply don't get appropriate mentoring at a young enough age, and my contention is that appropriate mentoring is training in hands-on bench skills (defined loosely to include code monkey skills) that will reduce self-doubt when they end up getting surrounded by people who do have the bench skills.

Girls drop off the tech track (CS, engineering, etc) because they are intimidated (wrongly) by the boys who come in with "bench skills" already formed -- the boys have been tinkering and taking things apart and building and coding and have their own toolbox (literal and figurative) already. The girls see that, and don't think they will be able to compete -- an inaccurate conclusion, because success in engineering school does *not* depend on having the resistor color code already memorized, nor on having memorized the API's to three dozen Python libraries already. Success comes from the deeper analytical skills.

Girls need tinkering opportunities that will build their bench skills. When they have their own toolkits (literal and figurative) then the boys will no longer intimidate them.

Math is a different issue. The critical years for developing the self-perception that you belong with the math crowd is the same years that girls are trying hard to fit in. The population density of girls in the USA (and it seems to be a problem for us, not for other parts of the world) who enjoy math is low enough that it is hard to fit in socially and be "mathy". For my daughter, we found a math camp (Mathpath.org) where the population of girls was high enough that she found a peer group of girls where it was *cool* to like and be good at math. That made a huge difference.