Autonomous driving should be thought of as a tool to make operating your vehicle safer. Not a luxury that allows you to sit back and take a nap. Flying a plane is mostly autopilot (except for takeoff). But pilots are required to have rigorous training. Why would car autopilot be any different? You need to be prepared for the worst. And no matter how good the technology gets, there will ALWAYS be situations that require manual override.

And this is where the slashdot idealists come in and say "well if that's the case, we just shouldn't have automated cars. We should only have them if they're completely safe." But be real. What would you rather have: an automated vehicle that works 99.9% of the time, or no automated vehicle at all? I know what I'd choose. Besides, it would be easier to focus on potential hazards if you were able to devote your full mental capacity to it.

1,300,000,000 men to every 1,000,000,000 women!
That's three hundred million men!
BIG NUMBERS BETTER.

More money for me!

My CD collection features such gems as "Microsoft Windows 95", "Turbo Tax Deluxe 2003" and "The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis"

Filling the entirety of Death Valley with water would lower the water level by 1-2 millimeters, optimistically.

Even if there were hundreds of Death Valleys, it wouldn't save any cities from being destroyed.

This is NOT a big deal. The patent is very specific, to the point where it would be almost impossible to infringe (and equally difficult to find prior art). They didn't patent "take a picture with a white background.". They patented having a studio arrangement with a background comprising a white cyclorama, captured with an 85mm lens, configured with an ISO settings of 320 and f-stop value of 5.6, with an elevated platform positioned between the platform and background, with front and rear light sources in the longitudinal axis... and it goes on for several pages.

There is NO WAY anyone will be hurt by this patent. It's business as usual. I know you guys love getting mad at big companies, but cool it, you just look silly.

Doesn't EVERYTHING (as we know it) exist in the space-time continuum? Now excuse me as my space-time motor neurons move my space-time legs so I can go get some space-time coffee.

I thought this effect had been well-known for many years. It's basic psychology.

It's a bit more like "warifying gamefare"

Yes. That is what companies do, they make money. Astute observation.

Oh I dunno, there's the whole ".NET features like garbage collection, generics, and reflection" part. You might have missed it.

Those are exactly the problems I care about. Mainly information density; I want to see the same amount of information on the screen as I did before. Or at least 75%. It's more like 25% right now. Anyway, I'm glad someone is paying attention.

It would have been nice to hear this earlier though. Maybe you do have people *listening* to the complaints, but it would be nice if someone *responded* to them, and in a human manner.

It was designed by someone with a massive whitespace fetish who has clearly never actually used the site.

I will leave the site in a heartbeat if this is forced on people, it's just plain unusable.

The summary leaves out the whole point of the article.

"The observations neatly match theories about the formation of the solar system, which posits that bodies formed in warm environments would be found closer to the sun and those formed in cold environments are farther away... But a new analysis, this time based on 100,000 asteroids of varying sizes, tells a far different story."

No, not company-wide; it was just an experimental thing in a few places. They also experimented with the concept of "mobile workstations", where you don't HAVE an office, you just find a different desk to use every day. Which is nice for people who travel a lot and don't have stuff they actually need to STORE in an office. And strongly disliked by most everyone else.