This article says it will save (max) 15 deaths/year at a (min) cost of $132/vehicle. With 15.6 million vehicles sold in the US last year, that implies a >$137 million dollars per death avoided. That's way above the $6million you referenced.

At any rate, it certainly seems that if we're going to spend >$2 billion dollars, we should able to save more than 15 lives with it. But no... some mum went to Washington and proclaimed it should "never happen again", so we get this crap. (Granted, my analysis isn't including injuries... that could swing the balance.)

No, the security only has to be sufficient enough to blame you for the theft.

The salesman and customer are the least informed for making security tradeoffs, and the complications of having multiple security arrangements across a fleet of supported vehicle isn't worth the extra headache for the manufacturer.

The "balance" of this situation should not lie in the boneheaded territory of elementary security mistakes... if you're going to have a remotely accessible API, hire programmers who understand security and have them design the damn thing to be secure from the ground up. It's not impossible or mystical or some big unknown.

Yep... glad to see someone is learning from the Wii U's mistakes.

I wonder what other options they investigated... for instance, would it have been feasible to do a spacewalk and relocate foam to critical areas? I know this stuff is way more complicated than any simplistic suggestions from the internet, but NASA pulled hell and high water to bring Apollo 13 home safely. Imminent emergencies have a way bringing out the greatness in an otherwise bureaucratic organization.

AFWall+ does a great job of that on Android, but it requires root. Using it, I say which apps can use cellular, which can use wifi, and which are isolated completely.

I'd like to define some per-app sandboxes so, for instance, only selected apps can see my "real" contacts... the others would see my "fake" contacts and not know the difference. Ditto for GPS location and countless other things...

Existing laws against reckless driving are full of vague generalities... What exactly constitutes driving with "due care and attention"? As your burrito example indicates, there's a continuum, and reasonable people can reasonably disagree on what's legal and illegal under such statures. Those sort of laws are best reserved for the extreme cases that legislators never could have imagined up front (If that story had been real and if the guy had lived to see a courtroom). New, more targeted laws can set consistent expectations about what's legit and what's not, so that drivers, police, and judges are all on the same page. That's the opposite of "more complicated"... it's simpler because it clarifies what is and is not considered a problem for an extremely frequent set of opportunities (cell phone & texting usage).

(And no, they aren't going to pass a similar law for burrito assembly, because that's extremely uncommon. Sometimes the law is a little bit like code optimization: just as you target the 5% of your code that's taking the bulk of CPU time, so do legislators target specific behaviors that are especially vexing to their constituency/campaign contributors.)

Enforcement is difficult... I know a city jurisdiction that only caught one violator of its anti-texting law in the first year of operation, and it was only because the man admitted his usage to the cop. However, even with minimal enforcement, the mere presence of the law can subtly encourage the right behaviors: humans have a surprisingly strong instinct to follow the rules, especially when this instinct has been cultivated in their upbringing.

They close out "good" questions there too (examples)... came across one the other day (while programming), in fact. It's like the wikipedia notability police all over again. :O

I thought "Stack Overflow" was great branding for a website aimed at helping programmers solve technical problems. It's a distinctive, cheeky in-reference understood by its intended audience. (And honestly, it didn't hurt that most developers enjoy being made to feel clever about themselves.) That's what a brand is suppose to do, and it partially* explains their overwhelming success. And hey, much better branding choice than ExpertSexChange.com!

*Of course, branding is just one of many things they did right. They also filled a unique niche, understood their community (because it was started by programmers, for programmers), and made the site super-easy to use by (here comes the important part...) NOT crapping over the UI with a fake paywall that sought rent for years' worth good-faith user contributions. However, they are sort of starting to be dicks about subjective questions (such as help with API choices, etc.). That may provide a niche for a new competitor to fill...

Granted, but that doesn't entirely invalidates JDG1980's point... knowing that lives are on the line will make you a very paranoid coder or tester, but knowing that the code can't ever be changed (without a mountain of hassle) will you make you that much more paranoid.

[Side note: I use the term "paranoid" instead of "cautious" here because paranoid describes the mindset that drives one to examine, poke, and test their code exhaustively from multiple angles. The cautious mindset, by contrast, is the instinct to freeze up and make no changes (especially no innovative changes) altogether. I suppose they both have their place in life-critical systems, but the former is empirical and ambitious while the latter is superstitious and reluctant.]

Groundwater contamination, for one. Especially, flammable tap water. Perhaps you dismiss that as anecdotal, but it's not as if scientist have been given the access, data, and funding to run these claims to ground... that will take another ten or twenty years, by which point the perpetrators will have long since taken off with the profits while the general public gets stuck with whatever environmental catastrophes this created.

Don't get me wrong... I wish fracking was as safe and plentiful as proponents claim. And maybe it's worth some amount of contamination even if it isn't safe. I just wish these things could be determined objectively and scientifically in the best public interest instead of this same old sh*t where the powerful simultaneously exert influence over corporations, media, government, and public opinion to effect the fattest profit instead of the utilitarian good.

It's true with animals too... modern zoo design tries to take this into account by giving the animals places to hide, which benefits their mental health in addition to creating more immersive/meaningful exhibits. It's tricky though, because too much animal hiding => pissed off visitors.

Historically, mathematicians have resisted computer-only proofs. They want eyeballs end-to-end. Your ideas (independent implementations, hardware, etc.) are sound/feasible from a software engineering standpoint, but unsatisfying to mathematicians. (Not being a mathematician myself, I'm ill-suited to testify as to why that's the case, but so it is.)

Maybe one day that mindset will be abandoned, but what's more likely to happen is that mathematics will bifurcate: there will be the set of mathematics that relies on computer proofs and the "pure" subset of that that doesn't require computers. Probably, that's already considered the case. Regardless, this is how the field has dealt with countless other issues (such as not accepting negative proofs), often to great fecundity.

This doesn't make any sense, and for contrast, I'd like to offer the example of despot Bernabò Visconti. When the Black Death was sweeping Italy, he put Milan under strict quarantine, notably having city authorities wall-up any house where plague appeared (leaving both sick and well occupants to starve, presumably). As a result, the plague pretty much skipped Milan as well as Visconti himself.

When exhaustive exploration is not an option, you use what you know to prioritize your search, even though that knowledge is incomplete and imperfect. For SETI, it makes sense to use the profile of life as we know it to focus our efforts, even though there may exist lifeforms well outside that descriptive envelope. Doing so gives us (1) a much smaller area to examine, (2) concrete strategies for investigating such areas, and (3) better odds of successfully recognizing extraterrestrial life (should it fall under our surveillance).

No, laser light is very directional, and having it pointed at you during nightime flying is a very definite experience. Search youtube for "helicopter lasers" to see what I mean.

I know you asked sarcastically, but there are "soft-band" options that society may have to consider if the problem grows. For instance, using green lasers for stargazing could be outlawed (e.g., forcing laser makers to not use this as a selling point). Additionally, pen/pointer-shaped form factors could be prohibited. Gun-mounted green lasers could be forced to have a rail switch. Hopefully the laws don't have to go this far though.