Shit people, the Oncier experiment with the Klikiss torch was the beginning of a fucking mess with the Hydrogues. Some race or two, somewhere, are gonna get annihilated over that.

SpaceX got a nice chunk of the award :)

Just look inside of Dragon 2 and tell me, with straight face, that we'll be seeing anything remotely contemporary from Boeing within the next decade or two (by which time they'd be 2 decades behind times). I don't see that happening. I'm fairly happy to see that at least one aerospace company out there recognizes the value of industrial design, and of using modern UIs in the aerospace context. Their interior design is at least something to look forward to spending the trip in. Maybe to everyone here it's just form without substance, but I think it's important.

Let's not forget that at the end of the day, it's all done for us -- humans. The most hardcore astronauts out there can recognize the a beautiful design just as well as us "mere mortals" can. I'm frankly said tired of aerospace man-machine interfaces looking like if the 80s called. With the right team, they at least work on developing something that feels contemporary and seems like would be a joy to work on (as in: fly/ maneouvre/dock etc.).

I think that this is really the "famous last words", if there were any. Those "people who know more" have seemingly been wrong for more than a decade now. See the dot-com bubble, the housing bubble, the mortgage securitization fiasco, etc. All done by people who "know more". I'm almost inclined to start shorting MS.

And that's what's needed. My point still stands in all its irrelevant glory :)

The hard part is that the car must absolutely be able to read the horizontal markings on the pavement. This is not a trivial problem at all, since those markings are often of poor legibility in ideal circumstances even to a human, never mind a machine. I'm talking about the U.S., Western Europe is probably much better in that respect.

The only slight problem with that is that in order to react at all in time, you must be paying the same amount of attention as you would if there was no autonomous drive system at all. This is otherwise known as the human being in the loop. Removing the human from the loop in aircraft automation has been a source of unending problems, and only recently one could say that it's a reasonably well understood problem - if not quite solved just yet. Don't forget we're talking about trained professional pilots here.

So, when faced with a self-driving car, the relatively untrained non-professional driver will always be so far out of the loop, that there's no way for him to overtake control safely in real time.

Of course, the solution for that is simple: the car's control transfer must, by default, happen in a fail-safe state - with the car stopped, with emergency blinkers on, etc. Only if the control transfer is explicitly acknowledged in a preset time, would the fail-safe be bypassed.

s/revs at below WOT/revs at idle/

I hope that any reasonably modern transmission/transaxle electronic control software prevents that sort of behavior. Sure as heck my 14 year old Volvo behaves appropriately and prolongs the upshift interval when driving uphill. Eventually it seems that you need to be driving at no more than 30% power for at least 15 seconds for it to decide to upshift, unless the revs at below WOT go above 4.5kRPM or thereabouts. It seems to deal with mountain driving OK. There's initial hunting, but after 2-3 minutes it subsides as the control loops back off from the aggressive stance.

I think it is disingenuous to use the term "IP spoofing" to mean taking control over a part of the networking stack of another machine somewhere on the network. Because that's what a tor exit node software does. I think the real issue is that an IP address is not a personal identity, and can't be used a such.

You're just arguing with some obnoxious troll. I think by now we can all tell the troll, and we all know what the truth is...

I think the biggest issue is that Microsoft doesn't really have a simple symbolic logo for itself as a corporation. There's a perhaps widely-recognized Windows logo, and that's about it. The people at the marketing helm at MS are really asleep, and have been for ages. They can't even keep from fucking with their Windows logo. Say what you will about Apple, but they essentially had only two logo designs, and both are instantly recognizable. They had the foresight to design them for the long run. MS seems to think quarter-to-quarter.

My brakes actually can overpower my engine under all circumstances, and they do so admirably enough that I the braking distance difference between emergency braking with no accelerator input vs. emergency braking with the accelerator depressed all the way to the floor is 5% on dry surface. The ABS activates when I emergency brake, and does so whether the accelerator is floored or not, so obviously the brakes are working to their full potential. It's actually a rather simple test for adequacy of brakes: first test them on dry pavement, the ABS must come on. Then do the same with the accelerator floored. The ABS still must come on.

I also don't buy that in an emergency stop I'd floor the accelerator. What for? Why? Maybe that's a common "twitch" in some people, but I've just not observed it. Not that I emergency brake with any regularity - it only happened a few times outside of the track.

All this talk of engine or transmission wear on modern cars is I think a bunch of fairy tales. On a car with automatic transmission I don't think there's anything that you can do besides proper maintenance that would have any effect on the longevity of the drivetrain. Never mind that even if there was a small effect - who cares? If you need an engine overhaul at 750k miles when doing grandma driving, but will need one at 600k when driving hard - does it truly matter? Will you have the car that long, and if you do, will you care?

"I don't want my car to downshift three gears just to try to keep the car going the same speed up a large hill." What else would you want it to do? Set yourself up for being rear-ended? Downshifting when going uphill is precisely what you need to do, so I don't see what you're after, really.