Well it is interesting in so far as knowing when the companies think they need to have human operators still.

Actually, having a licensed human operator ready to take over is a legal precondition for putting an autonomous car on the road (in all US states where they're legal at all).

I always wonder when I see code like that, which is focused on optimisation, why they use divide and modulo? Aren't they slow? Why wouldn't the coder have used >> 3 instead of the divide by 8, and & 7 instead of the modulo 8? Genuinely asking because these strike me as obvious further speed boosts. Does the compiler automatically make the changes?

*nationally

What a bizarre summary, with all the talk about Pearl Harbour and how the Virginia Tech shooting date has greater significance locally than naturally.

The fact is that this was a clearly-made threat, whether genuine or not. Law enforcement took appropriate steps to investigate. It's not even an IT issue, just because someone used their phone (?) to post the threat on a public forum, or whatever you want to call Yik Yak.

Prepare for another culture-shock, my dear passport-less American. Tokyo has competing privately-owned subway lines. Japan's wonderful highspeed trains are privately-owned too.

Which shock would this be, exactly? Major American cities used to have competing privately-owned commuter rail lines as well -- mostly torn down in the first half of the 1900s in favor of the highway model. This is by no means a surprise to anyone who knows even local transportation history.

If a government is doing it, it can not be smart...

You lecture me about fallacies, and then pull out that?! I find it hard to believe that you're actually interested in making a good-faith attempt at a meeting of the minds.

(lest see, how liberals who like to say that "you have rights for your opinion" and then mumble "but only, if we agree" assholes are going to react :)

Since you asked -- having a right to an opinion doesn't mean having a right to be protected from social consequences from your actions taken in airing that opinion.

Which is to say -- you're allowed to be an ass in public. Other people are allowed to be an ass to you in public as well; such is the market of public ideas. Mistaking people who don't want to be friends with you / listen to you / do business with you in response to your positions with people who would censor you (that is, invoke government action in response to your speech or act to make make that speech illegal) is a mistake.

You might ponder what it means that you believe in what you're saying enough to shout it from the world only from a position of anonymity (or, in Cito's case, pseudonymity). If there are people you respect for holding their convictions, did they do likewise?

You're not kidding about iPhones (or rather iOS) becoming less stable.

I've got an iMac, Macbook Air, iPad Mini 2 and iPhone 6 Plus, all in daily use, and it was a godsend to me when Yosemite and iOS 8 introduced handoff and full AirDrop support. Except... it only works randomly. One minute the iPhone can see everything but nothing can see it. Then it can only see the iPad but now the iMac can see the iPhone.

I regularly need to transfer screenshots from my iPhone to my Mac and I used AirDrop for about a week, but then it stopped working and hasn't worked since.

When it first stopped working, I started using Cloud Share and uploading all the screenshots to the cloud so I could then download them on the Mac... but there's always one file missing. No matter how many screenshots I transfer, if n>1 then only n-1 turn up on the Mac.

Honestly over the past couple of months I've lost confidence in Apple. There's no point adding these great features if they don't actually work. And in my experience, Apple features that don't work never get fixed. New features seem to be more about marketing than actual usability.

So, in addition to "affordable" housing, in your ideal world, the poor will also be provided (by someone) with "affordable" Priuses?

Perhaps you've heard of this thing called "transit"?

Which, when done right, gets used by everyone, not just the poor. It was not so long ago a culture shock for me, as a Texan, when my (New-York-based) CEO would take the subway; now, as a transplant to Chicago, I'm very much happier not owning a car at all; my work is a 10-minute walk (hooray for urban high-rise living!), Costco a 20-minute bike ride (hooray for cargo bikes!), my more distant friends in town (or the corporate office, if I need to visit it for some reason) a $2.50, 40-minute train ride, during which my time is free to read, make notes, or otherwise do as I please.

Back to point -- no, setting up your urban environment in such a way that the poor need to drive expensive-to-maintain, expensive-to-fuel vehicles a long distance is not a necessity. Transit systems are subsidized at a higher rate than roads, but not by as much as you might think -- use taxes on highways are under 50% of their costs -- and adding capacity to a roadway system in an urban environment is prohibitively expensive -- particularly compared to adding capacity to preexisting urban rail. And if you look at the economic payoff from that subsidy -- by way of increasing folks' access to jobs -- it's an extremely clear win.

Smart urban planning -- to avoid the need for commutes in the first place by making housing as dense, and nearby to shopping and employment, as possible -- is, of course, even better.

(Back on the "expensive" part of long commutes -- you might find The True Cost of Commuting a worthwhile read, in terms of putting some actual numbers into play).

Just seems like a decent thing to do.

And before that due to the British Empire which covered a third of the planet.

What is curious is that small children almost always regularise verbs. In English, I've heard children say "buyed" instead of "bought", for instance. The only other language I know is Spanish, and my Spanish friends have told me that the same thing happens there too - kids saying "sabo" instead of "sé" for example.