Which is why Googles system (lowering the parcel on a rope, the drone never comes even near ground) is superior to Amazons (land-and-release) system.

In general, though, I do agree with you.

The main problem with traffic is not delivery vehicles, but single-person private cars. For them, more efficient transport options (car sharing, public transport, bikes) exist. For delivery, the truck is often the most efficient solution already.

You are wrong about that. I cannot legally build my house right over your house, even if it never touches the ground that you bought.

Clearly, airlines are flying above without considering property rights below, so somewhere "your" airspace ends, but just because it's in the air doesn't mean it doesn't touch property rights.

Sorry, that makes no sense whatsoever. Statistics take the number of vehicles and driven kilometers, etc. into account and they are still clear as day. If anything with more autonomous vehicles, the existing ones will become more safe, because there is less unpredictability.

A spectacular failure, for sure, but still FBW has become the standard today. Yes overrides exist in most airplanes, just like autonomous cars have steering wheels and pedals. I fail to see your point, especially considering that AF 269 was not the "introduction to the world" of FBW, there had been numerous other aircraft with it before. It was just the first time it was used in a series civilian jet.

I don't expect them to become the majority of cars within five years or anything. But continued development work is exactly how all the problems will be solved. Driving, on the other hand, is not really all that difficult when you recall how many idiots manage to do it. It's just that our roads right now are designed for human drivers, from signals to line markings to unwritten rules.

Dumbass.
The most terrifying moment in history was Nagasaki, because they already knew what happened in Hiroshima.

While I completely agree, subjectively, I also understand enough psychology and statistics to know that a) the feeling of control is mostly emotional, not rational. It's why your mother in the passenger seat is scared in situations where you as the driver are completely cool - you are in control, she is not. That she's more easily agitated only makes it more visible. It's a well-documented fact that experiencing the same situation once in control, or even just seemingly in control, and once not in control is experienced very differently.

Statistics, on the other hand, show that even at this early stage, autonomous vehicles have a better-than-average track record. So while you may feel less safe, the numbers say that you are actually more safe.

Which is why autonomous or semi-autonomous (assisted driving) vehicles do not rely on one input source alone. V2V is not intended to replace all the sensors and stuff, it's one more input source.

Humans are really, really bad at paying attention to monotonous tasks for extended periods of time. The sooner our cars drive themselves completely, the better.

...it could be that drivers systematically overestimate their abilities and underestimate the dangers. Given that we've evolved to live at walking and running speed, moving only our own bodies, it's not a big surprise that our brains don't give us the correct clues at 180 km/h or even 50 km/h when driving a one ton metal thing.

Subjective driver comfort is not something I would use as a measurement for safety.

Yeah, because V2V has about 300 m range. Posting my location to people within view range is really a massive "privacy concern".

We complain about patent trolls getting trivial patents for non-inventions by taking something totally normal and adding "with a computer" to it, but sometimes we do the same. Licence-plate reading cameras are a privacy concern because they can enter your location into a global database in near real-time. Telling people electronically what they could see with their own eyes? Hardly a privacy problem. If we were talking about a system to intercept these signals and update some global database, yes - but that is just the license-plate-reading-camera problem with a different technology. The problem in either case is not having a license plate or having V2V, but the people turning local information into global information.

And other than license plates, it's easy to solve it. Your car could automatically generate a new random ID for itself every time it stops for more than a minute, for example. Pseudonymity is quite cute when you understand it.

Are you fucking kidding me? This is so plainly in the "if it's not illegal, it ought to be" category that it's really difficult to think of a more clear example.

It's a direct attack on a competitors system, intended to deprive them of their ability to deliver their service. In IT security terms we'd call it a DOS.

If this rumoured playbook exists, someone ought to go to jail for it. To me it's bright as daylight and even asking the question seems stupid.

Really? They now put severed heads back on?

It may be your favorite charity, but frankly speaking, if you are looking for organisations that are opposing ISIS, the Iranian Army is a closer call than the Red Cross.

Because instead of holding corporations to their promises and showing them who owns the tanks, governments in the west have spent the past 10 years selling themselves to the cheapest bidder, with treaties allowing corporations to sue governments if they dare pass laws that impact profits.

Sometimes I wish we had a king with a big ego, who'd on as much as the proposal of such a treaty arrest all those corporate bigshots and hang them publicly.

With you on this one. Adam and Jamie are the Mythbusters and for everything they've done, all the others (there was one other woman for one or two seasons and a few temps for a few episodes) never seemed to be more than additionals.

Also, did everyone notice how little interaction there was between the teams for a long time now? I remember it was higher in the beginning. But for a long time now, it seemed like two similar shows edited together, not one show.

Mythbusters has been going downhill for a few seasons, I have hopes this move will reverse that trend.

But yes, it's probably not a very popular position.

This 100 times. I am amazed again and again that big government projects are almost guaranteed to be over budget and late, and I don't mean 10% in either case. After having this 5000 times, which idiots write the contracts that still don't contain massive penalties for those cases? Grab them by the balls when they promise you the heavens and tell them to deliver or shut up.

Nothing short of corruption can explain this, because I refuse to believe that someone can be this stupid and at the same time still remember how breathing works.

Bingo. Deleting pages is not only evil by itself, it also fundamentally breaks the "wiki" part of "Wikipedia".

Deletion in the Wikimedia software is intended for vandalism and mistakes. But hey, you and me we are among a large crowd who have decided to not contribute to WP until the idiots in charge understand some of the basic concepts of their own system. This is just one of the most blatantly obvious.

addendum: /. -

WTF? It used to be 1 minute. Are we now pandering to people whose mental processes and typing skills don't allow to post more than one comment every 3, 5, 30 minutes?