If the car has a way to let the passenger take manual control and override the autopilot, then the passenger has become a driver and should be properly licensed.

While I don't discuss the licensing issues, my book The Reticuli Deception (set about 100 years from now) has several scenes involving both completely autonomous (sole occupant darkens the windows and takes a nap) and not (driver overrides the computer to deliberately cause a collision with the guy tailing someone, then escapes by having arranged for a rental car to drive itself to the next block and be waiting for him). (That's only a minor spoiler, most of the book takes place off-Earth. Caveat, it's a sequel to The Chara Talisman, which come to think of it has one scene with an autonomous taxi.) </blatantplug>

>40 hz of current?

Sure, at a frequency of 30 mA for about 0.5 volt-hours.

Who says memory retrieval is non-lossy? It's an organic process, of course it's lossy. Our brains just make shit up to fill in the gaps.

The stuff we retrieve frequently is slightly less lossy because it gets refreshed (somewhat) when we remember it (sort of remembering that we remembered it).

And our brains are very good at making shit up to fill in the gaps, almost too good.

As the legendary Henry Spencer said, "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."

Clearly the folks behind systemd do not understand Unix.

If there are things you don't like about systemd, you should write up coherent bug reports or feature requests,

That doesn't work if it's the whole design philosophy you don't like. Whatever happened to the Unix philosophy that tools should do one thing, and do it well, and be easy to integrate with (not assimilate, borg-like) other components?

Me, I'll keep SysV init. How often do you need to reboot a unix or linux box anyway?

+1 nostalgia if I had the mod points. Heck, there was a time (about 3 decades back) when I was being paid to teach APL (or APL, as properly rendered).

Mind, the bit-arrays used in ElasticSearch filtering strike me as a very APL-like idiom. You never know when something you learned back when will prove useful again.

PCs were surprisingly common in 1983. Consider the Apple II and various CP/M machines had been around for quite a few years at that point.

Sure, they were still struggling to gain entrance to big businesses which were bastions of the mainframe (although more like with 3270 type terminals than card decks by that point), but small businesses loved them. Businesses were buying Apple II's as "Visicalc machines" in huge numbers, let alone the number of Wordstar boxes out there. Sure, it would be another few years before everyone and his dog had one, but by 1983 there were plenty around.

what happens when you have a very long incline for miles, such as found on I-84, I-76, I-80, I-70, etc. and your batteries run down? Granted most of it isn't steep, but very long distances.

Even the long stretches on say I-70 going up to the Eisenhower Tunnel or Vail Pass aren't more than a couple of miles ... and you get an equivalent downhill to recharge those batteries on the other side.

(As for speed, I once had the turbo control cable snap on my (relatively new at the time) Daytona Turbo-Z while climbing from Silverthorne up to the tunnel. 2.2 L just doesn't do a heck of a lot without a turbo assist, especially at altitude. Fortunately traffic was light. BTW, max speed limit in the mountains is usually 65mph.)

People can (and some do) brew their own beer too, or buy from local microbreweries.

But I don't see Coors or Anheuser-Busch going out of business anytime soon.

Come now, Ian Fleming wrote a documentary on it, On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

[...] As he spoke, Carson noticed a slim green ribbon ripple out of the jungle canopy ahead. It glided toward them and settled on Gupta's shoulder. A jade ribbon snake.
Carson reached over and flicked it to the ground, then stomped on its head, hard.
Gupta flinched, then looked down. "A flying snake is only mildly toxic to humans, there was no need to do that."
"Flying snakes on Earth, perhaps," said Carson. "This is a jade, its venom compares to that of a krait or a taipan."
Gupta paled. "That deadly?"
"Only if you let them bite you. Come on."
Gupta looked up at the branches above them, then down at the body of the snake. He brought his heel down hard on its already flattened head.
Carson looked at him, an eyebrow raised.
"Just making sure," Gupta said.

-- The Chara Talisman, 2011.

Well done, sir. I just posted something similar, being too offended at TFS to have read all the posts first. You did it first and better.

Let's face it, humans aren't cut out for ocean voyages either.

We certainly can't swim for any great distance, so we need boats or ships. Sea water is toxic to us, so there's nothing to drink. Days, weeks or months at sea means constant exposure to sunlight, with all the radiation damage that brings. Humans are prone to seasickness -- the illness is named for the sea for Pete's sake! Similar long times without access to fresh food can lead to deficiency diseases like scurvy. I could go on...

No, clearly humans are not cut out for sea travel. The idea is folly.

It depends.

I'll agree with you where management of said private corporations is less than usually psychopathic or where regulatory inspections are frequent and/or the cost of doing it right is not dramatically more than taking shortcuts.

Where there's more money to be made by taking those shortcuts, and management doesn't care about public consequences or thinks the risk of getting caught is low, then government can (not necessarily will, depending) do a better job because there's no profit bottom line to worry about. Indeed, doing a proper job may well mean a bigger staff and budget which is a plus to bureaucrats.

If you want to limit it to PCs (which the original quote did not), then you might as well rule out Apple too.

They build (or rather, subcontract offshore companies to build) phones and tablets, neither of which by any stretch could be considered general purpose computers the way PCs could, and an increasingly shrinking line of computing appliances, ditto. Of course that's pretty much true all the way back to the original Mac, except for a brief period when Jobs wasn't around.

Indeed, arguably Apple isn't around either. They got assimilated by Jobs's NeXT which then changed their name, same way Southern Bell is now AT&T. The original AT&T isn't around. (Of course, the Jobs Reality Distortion Field was such that Apple paid him to be assimilated.)

On the flip side, if you want to talk about companies that are still around which made PCs back in the day, then add Radio Shack and Texas Instruments. Arguably, TI still does make PCs, given what some of their hand-held calculators are capable of.