Very different situations.

Siri is more comparable to the Google Maps release-- both were beta, and both had no competition with the same features. And in both cases, the launch of Siri and Google Maps did not take away any functionality you already had-- you could go right back to using MapQuest if you wanted, or simply not use Siri. Because of this, nobody's frothing-at-the-mouth mad that Siri is still pretty rough. It's new, it's labelled beta, and we didn't give up something else to get it.

Apple Maps, by comparison, replaces Google Maps. There's no way to switch back if you need missing functionality, and it was launched as a finished product, not a beta that we all understood we were helping work the kinks out of.

To be fair, I have TomTom, and it has many of the exact same issues I have with Apple Maps. The data is outdated in places, and searching produces really wonky results. But more importantly, it produces the same wonkiness. You can blame at least some of the Apple Maps issues directly on the TomTom data.

And you're a corporation who builds a car with a 360-degree lidar, radar, video, and audio-capture system, GPS data, and a log of vehicle telemetry. It's a hell of a lot harder for a little old lady to cry her way out of something when there's hi-resolution panoramic 3D recordings of the entire event.

Of course not. If we get serious about licensing and permitting these vehicles, I suspect the standard will be to compare them with the vast body of statistics we have from human drivers. As long as a company's cars are averaging fewer accidents per mile than humans do, it would be hard to argue that they're not safer, even if they still get in some accidents.

People are terrible in all the ways you mention above and then some. Strokes, seizures, heart attacks, sneezing, blinking, stray eyelashes, muscle cramps, and aural migraines are just a few of the hardware failures that already cause plenty of accidents-- and that's before we get into the self-inflicted things like drinking, fatigue, and distraction. Toss in our limited sensorium, narrow field of view, crap night vision, and sluggish reflex loop, and we're really not looking good compared to hardware-- even if that hardware still has some failures and makes some mistakes. And as you point out, it certainly will. The only really important question is "does it fail less than people?"

Now I've seen everything... a post on slashdot that makes the "save the buggy whips" argument.

I agree-- it would be nice to see a full comparison. I manually spot-checked a couple of the not-founds, and they were all on Google's map-- but a complete comparison would be much, much more informative and useful.

A friend of mine is in the same boat as you. We're constantly looking for co-op games to play online, and there's precious few that have everything we want. Borderlands hit all the right gameplay notes. An FPS/RPG with simple enough gameplay that we can jump in and out of sessions but enough complexity to keep us from wearing it out in two days. After messing around for 30 minutes, he said "as great as this is, I just can't deal with the graphical style." I love it-- but there's no explaining personal tastes-- it just is what it is.

> Not one of them realized it was the old iPhone 4S.

Did that really happen? It isn't mentioned in your link-- I suspect that like a lot of these segments, they canvas for a while until they have enough idiots, and then edit the footage down to just the idiots.

I'm not saying it's impossible, though.

Nah, I bet the Cray wins. The iPad is probably both denser *and* more aerodynamic.

"Cray Outperforms iPad in Crucial Terminal Speed Tests"

Your R is not C. Carmack put the iPad 2 at roughly half the performance of the 360, which puts the "Retina iPad" right in the ballpark of the 360, although with twice the working RAM.

"This? It's a pool."

This is a valid concern-- but until we run out of houses, wal-marts, and parking lots to put them on, it shouldn't be an issue. We have plenty of already-spoiled scenery that can do double duty. ASU is all over this-- their campus parking garages and parking lots are all growing solar covers. Intel's fab on the south side of town has solar panels on top of all their shaded parking.

The problem is that photovoltaics have a limited lifespan.

Well, yes-- everything does. Off-the-shelf consumer photovoltaics typically come with 25-year warranties guaranteeing 80% of original capacity at year 25. They'll gradually degrade at about 0.5%-1% of original capacity per year-- they'll last more than four decades.

What's the energy input to replace a panel?

Depends on the type of panel and how much sun it gets when you hang it up, but construction energy payback is generally 1-2 years. Given the above lifetimes, you'll typically produce somewhere between 10x and 50x the input energy needed to make the panel.

20-year life.

Standard warranty is 25 years at 80% of original capacity. More likely, they'll last for 40+.

The life span of a solar panel is 15-20 years with a denigration of efficiency of about 25% over that period.

This isn't accurate. The standard warranty for consumer panels is for 25 years, guaranteeing 80% of nameplate capacity at the end of that.

That's under warranty, so it's guaranteed. The panels themselves will likely last more along the lines of four or five decades, with a yearly degradation in performance between 0.5 and 1%.