All data, no matter how seemingly innocuous, when ammassed, allows agencies to substantially abuse everything from subtle advertising, to obtaining private medical information, to downright spying. At this point, given all the breaches at every single level from government, medical, and business on down, and given that even major agencies/groups have sold information - isn't it a bit like trying to put the cat back into the bag? I mean it's a nice idea but I see it as trying to fix healthcare in America - there is no right answer we have built upon a foundation already and are entrenched. Not to mention that the NSA/CIA/FBI will just snoop any left over anyhow and likely still bungle security at some level as insane as that sounds. Or are we thinking of the children who have yet to have generated information to be stolen yet?

Quite likely true. However at least this gets them quite a bit of indirect exposure and may, yes may, eventually provide them with treatments (doubt we will have cures for genetic conditions anytime in our lifetimes). So I am going out on a limb and going to say it's not 100% bad for these people because without that interest they truly are 100% screwed instead of just 90%. If I was in that position I'd probably take those odds at a treatment.

Recoil is only really a problem after the first shot anyway. Further there dosent need to be asymmetry designed into a drone the force can be lined up with the center of mass so it only gets pushed back and there is little to no rotation.

Listen dumbass who wont use their account i said vehicle is over cautious and stops where humans would not which is exactly what the wiki says. Humans dont follow textbook rules the car does. Post using your id at least coward. Also you are a dumbass.

Ok mr coward here are the actual citations, I was quick to post and put the wrong post above. Too many hipsters with common place movie knowledge and not actual engineerinrg knowledge so here you go I hope someone actually reads this that will appreciate facts.

The number of miles that google cars have driven so far including its safety record as stated by google directly : http://venturebeat.com/2015/06...

This equates to an accident every 90.9 thousand miles though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... the wiki clams 14 accidents that puts this at 71.4 thousand - all of which are meticulously planed courses - none have left turns into traffic - none of which are in heavy traffic at all - none of which are in adverse conditions such as snow or rain which the car can't even function at all and which of course makes for more difficult human driving. So it is pointless to try and compare that to bumper to bumper rush hour driving on freeways, hundreds to thousands of accidents during large snowstorms, bad winter driving in general, rush hour in general, etc. This makes it extremely difficult to compare to actual human driving statistics.

Note the wiki even states google as saying the car will often revert to extra cautious safety conditions and cannot handle many situations which wont even be addressed till 2020.

Google admits its cars rear ended suprisingly often : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...

Given that google has not made more than one accident detail public this is hurting their image in all likelyhood. Its a pretty safe assumption that a slow plodding car that often stops, say like you are supposed to text book style, but no one does, for pedestrians, will cause motorists to rear end you.

Dear god I couldn't help but comment or I would mod this up huge - someone with points please do. The google car is about the best there is and yet without painstaking manual mapping of every driveway, every road sign, every lane, every curb, every traffic light, manual entry and review of every goddamn last detail along the route it's absolutely helpless and yet it still can't handle erratic human drivers, many obstacles, rain, snow, occlusions of nearly any kind, any sensor failures of any kind, it's very early in demonstrating the technology.

I just wish google would be honest with the masses what the actual state of the technology actually is.

You may want to see what actual autonomous vehicle experts from leading institutions have to say about it. It may open your eyes to the actual state of the art instead of the common perception of the masses: http://www.technologyreview.co...

Exactly I see you at least have a basic working understanding of the state of the art. Yes there has been some work on hand signals and even sign reading by google. But they can't even do as well as an average driver much less a decent attentive one. As you said you need to recognize the signs to spot them and these systems cannot do this reliably yet. I suggest you voulenteer on this course because I for one sure as hell don't want my children on public roads with jackass college kids and thier junk box project. Google at least is professional and city driving is still questionable.

No no its not it's awful. Yes it can do math much faster. But let's see what happens when you restrict the autonomous features and algorithms to use a standard car using only a humanoid form with dual three axis accelerometers, stereo vision, and stereo mics mounted in the head and haptic/sensory feedback on the same joints as a human. It would fail tremendously and spectacularly. Give a human the same sensor and assistance these "AI" have and you could easily outperform them such as modern braking and lane changing warning systems, traction control etc. You gain no points comparing a distracted texting teen to a automous car that can't even run in the rain or on side streets safely. Anectdotal stories are not evidence.

http://www.technologyreview.co...

citation given. MIT knows autonomous cars. I was suggestion google is the best car, which is ok on freeway but is not ready for unassisted neighborhoods and it's not even by google admission. Not for 10 years at least in my opinion. It's a total fail at a very very long list of things.

You don't need autonomous vehicles or v2v communication for them to be hack able and cause major disasters. All you need is manual vehicles with computers that control major systems and that get software updates over cellular. Given the security flaws exposed in many vehicles lately by spoofing cell towers and requesting fake updates to gain access to internal workings on the vehicles it's clear we are already on that path. It probably will take a mass casualty event to change anything.

Testing autonomous technologies in public areas is essentially irresponsible. It goes from Google, who is extremely professional, but still gets rear ended a lot because the vehicle is over cautious and stops where humans would not to Delphi on down where I don't trust a damn thing they do and they really shouldn't be allowed in public at this time.

It's hard enough doing simple things like straight line freeway driving that it's seen as a major accomplishment when no one dies and they can out do drunk and distracted drivers under all conditions but only under clear sunny free flowing freeway driving. These courses, akin to closed courses for learning human drivers, are a necessary first step in bringing this technology to practical use.

The real problem with autonomous driving is environment variability, like road problems, debris, construction, animals, children and pets, other human drivers etc. when a computer 'sees' a cyclist they may or may even not recognize its a cyclist (ie maybe it assumes pedestrian given its sensor history) and form some standard metrics about the expected behavior. When a human does you immediately see if you make eye contact (so you know they see you something no vehicle does to my knowledge today), if they are on a pricy bike and clothed in biking gear or in dirty clothes in a beater and looking drunk - this allows humans to more accurately predict the future using things computers can't do for at least a decade out. For all the "nanosecond" decisions in urban settings computers can do humans are light years ahead in path planning and pattern recognition. Anyone in the field gets an immediate appreciation of how their toddler far exceeds a supercomputer and 500k in sensors even in 2015.

Making astronomical observations plblic access and the algorithms used open source can fuel all kinds of research at the corporation, university, and amateur levels. That alone is a laudable effort. Too much science today is pay walled and locked up behind restricted access.

I suppose but of you tack that on the ass end of the drake equation its not very promising.

A better method is likely to build better telescopes, perhaps large space arrays, and do transit analysis of many many worlds. You could, in theory with better tech and observation time, pick up on all kinds of signs of life both non sentient and sentient. These signals would be carried by electromagnetic waves, just not all in the radio spectrum. It's not as sexy as ET phoning home but far more practical in many people's eyes and is actually a main focus of research for many reasons extending beyond detecting life as you can still do analysis from earth.