To be fair, the A-Wing only got through AFTER they brought down the bridge deflector screens and intensifying forward batteries so that nothing could get through didn't really work out for them.

This is reason 363956 why you don't want to use GoDaddy to host your name or accounts.

Sure. But gliders are hardly practical as replacements for cars.

He's a salesman as much as anything else.

He's been a successful entrepreneur, no doubt. But he really doesn't have the background in actually building safety-critical systems to fully understand the complexity of the problem. Sorry but I'm going to go with actual engineers who have done the actual work instead of the flashy business guy with no real experience actually building it.

That being said, I'm 100% in favor of him putting resources into developing the technology. It's good that he has many engineers working on the problem because the long term benefits of the work will save countless lives. It's just that he's wrong about it being an easy task. It's hard and it's going to take a lot longer than he thinks.

Yeah, I added that thought in the follow up to the first response to my comment. If we can get fewer accidents per mile driven than we get now, it's a win. The more we reduce accidents the better. Which is why it's good to see accident reducing technology showing up in cars long before the cars actually drive themselves. And even if that's all we ever really get out of the effort to have self driving cars, we're still better off

If it happens like the evolution of safety in aircraft systems, you'll see horrendous crashes that kill people being the impetus behind recalls and safety upgrades. There's simply too many permutations for anyone to accurately predict a complete set of potential hazards, much less find a way to get a computer to identify them all and come up with a strategy to deal with them. There will be some combination of issues that causes a crash where people die and everyone who has ever worked on autonomous cars will say "I never thought of that".

That being said, autonomous cars don't have to be perfect to be a success. They can still have some accidents due to unforeseen combinations of problems. But If we can get autonomous cars to the point where they cause fewer accidents than humans, we're ahead of the game even if they aren't perfect. And given how poorly so many people drive, the bar is lower than it should be. Nevertheless, the more accidents we avoid, the better off we all are.

Trouble with flying cars is that they consume more energy than ground cars for every mile they drive. And while oil is cheap right now, it' still quite a bit cheaper to roll along the ground than hovering above it. Granted, things like maglev trains technically are more efficient but they're a special case with a great number of caveats that account for their efficiency. Something as versatile as a car that can go (almost) wherever it wants will always consume less energy if it doesn't have to float over the ground. And that efficiency is really what keeps flying cars from really taking off (pun intended).

jalopnik article

'"It's much easier than people think" says Musk, outlining how most of the sensors and systems available right now can handle self-driving duties on the freeway, something Tesla showed off late last year with its AutoPilot features.'

As someone who has spent a career working on safety-critical real-time systems, I can assure you that it's not in any way "much easier than people think". Quite the opposite. Sure, driving a car down a well marked highway on a clear sunny day with little traffic and no system failures is easy. But if you obscure the lane markings in any of a number of ways, add inclement weather, throw out random obstacles, random system failures, etc. the problem gets monumentally harder. Throw in an urban environment with all sorts of other issues just keeps making it harder and harder. And solving all of those problems takes up well over 90% of the effort when designing an autonomous system. Hell, developing something that can recognize the problem in the first place is hard enough. Being able to differentiate between sensor failure and sensors indicating a failure is a non-trivial task. He's full of it if he thinks we're anywhere near having a self driving car that's ready for public consumption.

Sure, there are self driving cars out there on the road. But they have huge engineering and support teams using them as an evaluation platform. And it's good that we have made as much progress as we have. I look forward to seeing the work continue and advance the technology. But it's not an easy task. It's going to take probably decades before we're really ready for a fully autonomous self driving car that's ready for public consumption. We'll probably see some of the technologies work their way into cars between now and then. And that's a good thing too. But it's not going to happen overnight because it's much harder than people think.

It's not a bad idea to run HTTPS. It makes it inconvenient to hack connections and makes people work for it. But I found this quote to be amazingly ironic: "Unencrypted HTTP connections create a privacy vulnerability and expose potentially sensitive information about users of unencrypted Federal websites and services."

Which is why the rich can break the law with impunity since the fine has no real impact on them. So what if you get a $200 fine when you make more than that in an hour? That's not a punishment. Making the punishment actually mean something to everyone would make the punishment equal between everyone. Points on your license which lead to suspension are more meaningful, especially if you get jail time and extended suspension for driving on a suspended license. I don't like the idea of community service because the value of people's time is different. The guy working 3 jobs just to keep his head above water would be impacted more by community service than someone who is comfortable in a 9-5 job. The idea of targeting a fine based on daily spending money works well. Figuring out a fine that would be a noticeable inconvenience seems fair. A lot more fair than being devastating to some while barely noticeable to others.

So what about a fine that devastates a poor person while at the same time being not a measurable punishment to a rich person makes it truly equal under the law? If a fine applied the same level of hardship to both rich and poor, that tells me it's treating all people equally.

There's nothing in our DNA that drives us to avoid killing each other. If anything, our evolution causes us to want to kill "them" (of us vs them) over any number of reasons that are nothing more than clever disguises covering up that we're only try to gain control of limited resources.

Hell, many cultures let the old out to die long before they die of natural causes. If anything, that's the natural path that many species follow and we as a species used to share that model in our culture. It's only when you apply religious conservatism to the discussion that it all goes out of whack. Somehow, people got it in their heads that life is some "precious gift" and everyone must be forced to hang on as long as possible despite the suffering that you have to endure simply because that's what some preacher pushed into your head when you were a kid. It's an artificial construct that goes against the natural order of life.

It's time to let go of primitive superstition. It's time to stop forcing religious beliefs on people who don't want them. It's time to give people the real freedom of choice. If you believe and want to go through the suffering because of your beliefs, fine. Go right ahead. But don't take the choice away from others. If they want to end their life before the suffering really kicks in, that should be their choice, not yours. (Disclaimer: the "you" and "yours" is not directed at a specific individual but at those who are fighting right-to-die laws.)

I've never heard of that. All of the opposition I see comes from the right wing f'tards who want to shove their religion down everyone's throat. You can't kill anyone (whether they're a person yet or not) unless they've been convicted by our second rate "justice" system that seems to convict far too many innocent people. They don't give a flying rip about you while you're alive but they'll fight tooth and nail to make sure you suffer all the way up until the bitter end because "life is a gift from 'God'".

Absolutely. We should force people to go through years of endless suffering only to die anyway rather than let them make their own choice to keep their dignity. /sarcasm