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Comment Re:Hype (Score 1) 289

What he wrote was:
"Our self-driving cars have now traveled nearly 200,000 miles on public highways in California and Nevada, 100 percent safely. They have driven from San Francisco to Los Angeles and around Lake Tahoe, and have even descended crooked Lombard Street in San Francisco. They drive anywhere a car can legally drive."

I like how you left out the fact that, clearly, they didn't need special roads.

Comment Re:Needs more infrastructure (Score 1) 289

" entire highway infrastructure will have to be completely overhauled, at enormous expense, before 'self driving cars' could be a reality"
since they are using them everyday, and taking them on trip in CA, on normal roads, I don't think you are correct.
Of course are road infrastructure could use a few smart changes anyways.

It's trivial to kidnapped some in a car today.

"There's no way they're going to code an 'evasive maneuvers'"
Oh, I see. You think you would be able to do some Die Hard esque driving to get away from kidnappers.

Comment Re:Stop being so impatient.... (Score 5, Insightful) 289

"It is to counter Google's skewed data that make it look like autonomous cars are just around the corner."
Google has never said that. And this guy doesn't have all the data, nor does he know whats in development.

"why come out with a vehicle that has no steering wheel if it is not viable for another 5-10 years (by your estimate)?"
The same reason worlds fair showed tech that will be coming out in 5-10 years. Its' fun, it's cool. It also show they are thinking long term and not quarterly. It also shows a company spending money on RnD.
I consider all of that a good thing.

"Do you ever see a Google press release mention any of these limitations?"
Yes.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com...

" All you hear from Google is a rising tally of miles driven and the fact that there have been no accidents. "
Which is pretty important.

"The fact that the miles are driven on carefully selected, heavily scanned roads under optimal conditions never seems to make it into the reports."
That is the smart way to start, but they are moving past that.

" Driving down the same roads thousands of times is not progress."
Of course it is. Same roads, different traffic. The same rods can have 10's of thousands of changing variables at any given time.
The team members are using them. A team member took one from Google campus to Tahoe on a trip.

Do you lay awake at night just trying to think of ways to hate cool new things?

Comment Re:can it get me home from the bar? (Score 3, Insightful) 289

You'r post tells everyone everything about you: You are a pretentious hater.

" google cars should never be allowed on the road."
Not: " until they can reliable detect bicycles, driver-less cars shouldn't be sold to the public.

Have you contact Mercedes to tell them they need to stop selling there cars that can automatically follow the car in front of them? do you rally against self parking cars?

I'm sure you ancestors railed against fire.

Comment Re:RIP, you cold cypherpunk (Score 3, Insightful) 40

Yes, he was cryopreserved.

On the plus side, knowing your own death is coming and being at a hospital already gives the best chances for cryopreserving the brain before it begins to degrade. You can get a "standby" watch as the time approaches.

On the minus side, ALS is a neurological disease. It affects the motor neurons, not the ones responsible for cognition, but that includes the "upper" motor neurons... including the ones in the brain.

Maybe we'll be able to repair ALS-damaged neurons before we figure out how to safely reverse cryopreservation. Maybe we won't, but life support systems will be good enough it'll be worth bringing him out anyhow. Maybe we'll achieve brain uploading and ALS will be irrelevant. Any which way you look at it, though, he's going to need some work.

That's actually one of the (many) problems with cryopreservation research. We can't bring people out of full suspension right now, so cryopreserving a living person is legally considered killing them. Thus, it can only be done to people already legally dead. Legally dead people tend to have died *of* something. There just isn't any point to bringing people out of cryonics until we can repair (or replace) their bodies.

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