That aliens would be vulnerable to our viruses and diseases?
Maybe our viruses wouldn't be able to interact with them at all. Which way does it go?
The way we have most experience with, a population exposed to and being decimated by a disease from elsewere ?
What about the alternative, a disease not being able to lock on to a population that is too alien? Is that possible?

Two things:
- the US has accelerated the development of malware and lifted it to a new level.
- the US has lots of advanced technology that's vulnerable to malware.

So if there's a cyberwar between backward North Korea and the US , who you'll think will lose?

You could give the other pilot a key so he could get back in after leaving the cockpit...

Sensible comment. There's a marketing story about how a toothpaste increased their sales by 15% just by increasing the size of the opening of the tube. Since then, they've all done that. And with they I don't mean toothpaste brands. Think about it the next time you squirt some detergent in the sink

But as small as the stakes might appear, highly specialized bots like this one, which can only do one thing (in this case, bring up to 10 pounds of stuff from the lobby to someone's door) are a better glimpse of our future than any talk of hyper-competent humanoids or similarly versatile machines.

Rule 34 has no minimal requirements for robot capabilities.

What kind of "females" are you hanging out with? Elderly members of the British Royal Family?

No one is approaching a random group of stranger "females" to tell dick jokes. There just happens to exist somewhere, in public, a place with lot of dick jokes. People going in there, men or women, are idiots if they think it's supposed to make them feel uncomfortable. If it does make them feel uncomfortable anyway, well, tough luck! The world is full of things that would make us uncomfortable if we sought them out. Hope you never have to deal with someone from another culture, if you can't even handle some crude humor from your own.

I agree. The moment everyone has a car with the autopilot option there will be pressure to enforce autopilot in some conditions. But that would be a later evolution. First everyone switches voluntarily to the option, then afterwards the use of the option becomes less voluntary.

It's easy to see that self driving cars will come if you look at it as a feature. Take a normal car with a self driving button that you can switch on and off at your own judgement. You don't have to use it, but slowly you start to detect situations where the self driving button comes in really handy, such as traffic jams. And then some slow city traffic. And as confidence grows you switch it on on a long highway journey.
So you end up with all the cars having the option but some never use it, others sometime, some as much as possible.

When I was in England, Ireland, France, Italy, and Greece, I found cash was essential. Sure all the big chain places took cards, but the small places didn't. If you stopped to grab a sandwich at a cafe, you probably needed cash.
In Canada even a small mom and pop shop always takes credit cards and debit cards. I found the same could not be said in any of the countries we visited.

You need a better bank.
I pay zero to send or receive email money transfers, and zero to withdraw cash from an ATM (not that I ever use an ATM any more...)

Interac (no "t") is why Canada is years ahead of the US on electronic payments. one type of card available to almost everyone (unlike credit cards which can be hard to get if you are poor, unemployed, or have bad credit) and which works at practically every retailer in the entire country, usually without any fees.

Any time I travel outside of Canada, whether to the USA or Europe, I'm always amazed at how far behind places are for electronic payments. I haven't needed cash in my wallet in Canada in years, you simply never find a situation where it's needed. Every business takes Interac, Visa, and MasterCard, and I pay the same price in the store whether I use that or cash, so I might as well do the convenient way, and every person can receive email money transfers. The only reason left for cash in Canada is for "anonymity" (and it's always debatable how well that works anyway)

So you value convenience over security.

I specifically avoid tap and pay and insisted the issuers give me cards without it to avoid the massive security hole it provides.

Chip and PIN takes approximately 10 seconds longer, and is infinitely more secure.

New York is another. Ultra-high-density communities may not be common in the US -- but the ones that do are exist are, well, kinda' a big deal.

But -- oh, yeah! -- we were talking about city planning as relates to lower-income folks. And the thing is, even though you and I might consider it impossible to get to work, buy groceries, &c. in much of the country without a car, there are still people doing that by necessity. My brother-in-law used to take his bicycle on the bus and sleep on a bench until his shift started, because the bus routes he needed shut down long before his shift started. When city planning is done in a way that assumes everyone is going to have a car, what you get is people left behind by the system. If you're lucky, they can manage to hold down jobs anyhow -- if you aren't, you have more folks who need safety-net features much more expensive than public transportation.

Don't know why I want to feed the troll -- and explicitly not accepting the assertions I don't challenge here, but...

You talk about "traffic flow" -- but think about this for a minute. You're proposing to take a very high-population, dense chunk of city -- plugged into the rest of that city's transportation network -- and move it out into the middle of nowhere.

Have you looked at the level of car ownership in high-density areas recently -- particularly in lower-income high-density areas? How exactly do you expect folks to get to work or school when they're suddenly no longer in an area with transit access? (And without that, how do you expect folks to work, or go to school to improve their circumstances? Would you rather be buying the same number of heads worth of homeless shelter, and getting no tax base at all)?

Hell. I'm in the rich part (financial district) of downtown Chicago, and less than half my neighbors if that own cars if that; being in walking distance from work (and directly next to a stop for every single L line) is why people pay to live in the Loop. Owning a vehicle is expensive in a city -- heck, parking wherever you're going to is expensive in and of itself, as is having a place to park that vehicle at home (in my building, a parking spot costs about $30k to buy, or rents for upward of $200/mo). You can't take folks who can't afford decent housing unassisted, move them away from their jobs, and expect them all to be able to buy, maintain and fuel vehicles -- and park those vehicles near their jobs in the city -- when they were only barely making ends meet beforehand. It's insane.

Clarkson has not announced new job yet.

Sadly, 985 of them suck ass, which makes this a meaningless statistic.

No, the statistics are still valuable, unless you make an argument that Windows has a higher percentage of shitty games. Absent any other information, it's reasonable to assume the percentage of awful games are similar on all platforms.

(But in fact, I think that the existence of more shovelware-friendly middleware on Windows means Windows has a higher percentage of bad games).