This would seem to be Airbus's long game. They already prefer the pilots just set the autopilot and handle the radio. It's not hard to imagine them attempting to build a fully automated airliner. Getting the FAA on board will be a different matter however.

A lot of people look at the AF447 disaster as a case study in not disconnecting the pilots from the aircraft quite so much because when they're suddenly thrust back into control unexpectedly, they end up with a ramp up time before they're fully aware of the state of the aircraft and know what they need to do. If this takes too long the aircraft will crash. I think Airbus took home the opposite message: In the event of sensor failure the autopilot needs to switch to a failsafe flight mode (throttle up 10%, pitch up the nose a couple of degrees, warn the pilots) instead of disengaging. Once they have the autopilot able to handle all airline emergency situations (at least you had better hope they get all of them) and work out any ATC issues then there's little need for human pilots.

Any non-military ideology didn't last terribly long inside NASA. The Space Shuttle only makes sense in the context of crazy cold war missions that the Air Force thought up where it would lauch on a polar oribt, make one pass over the USSR, and then land again on the assumption that any satellite that came around for a second pass would get shot down. Of course this mission profile requires a vehicle that's horrendously complex and expensive to operate which is why the Shuttle was never terribly good at its primay job of peaceful satellite launches and the occasional in-orbit repair. Well, that and every launch had to be man rated, even if the astronauts weren't terribly necessary for the mission.

Siri is not a good example of AI work. Once you've used the service a bit it becomes painfully clear how incapable it is of handling any requests that are off script. The only AIish part is the natural language recognition, and even that is wired to a fixed list of known phrase structures. You can't even define your own. The worst part is the service used to be better at offbeat requests, but then Apple dumped the Wolfram Alpha integration.

In some ways Perl 5 is getting the best of both worlds. 10 year old modules still work just fine pretty much every time, but really good features in Perl 6 get backported by people who are tired of waiting.

As long as they believed "in good faith" that the material was infringing they'll get off scott free. The bar for proving bad behavior on the claimants part is extremely high.

Github isn't going to drive out to the address you wrote in there to verify that you are who you say you are. They're going to hit "reply" in the email. To date I know of no entity that has been punished for fradulant DMCA takedowns more than a written admonishment. The law is utterly one sided because it was written by people who were intending to use it to send millions of takedown requests. They didn't want any possibily of suffering legal liability if they could get away with it, so the sender only has to hurdle the lowest legal hurdle (good faith) to completely indemnify themselves against counter claims. The law was written to be abused, and shock, people are abusing it.

Either that of you could read it as "Jesus Christ, an email? Why didn't you just hand type it and deliver it? You want to leave a paper trail?!?! Just how new are you to lobbying? Never leave a paper trail that the rules guys might find, they're total buzzkills. By the way, I'll be at the country club next Thursday if you want to discuss anything--it's not bugged."

Even more fun was when people entered the Unicode character that reverses the following text on the page.

That said, sanitizing problematic characters seems like a far more reasonable solution than throwing the baby out with the bathwater because Unicode is scary.

Ah, that makes more sense. I thought this was one of the TV viewing optimized tablets, not a set top box.

He must have left his Kindle plugged in constantly. Sucking down 80GB over WiFi every day is a sure way to kill the battery.

I did think it was weird that T-Mo was the one getting slammed for this when of the three carriers I've had, they were by far the best at handling it. AT&T and Verizon were way worse about having those stupid things appear and making them difficult to remove.

1TB of storage is 1TB of storage. I have several spinning rust platters that are older than that just because they keep doing their job and don't give me any trouble. Plus hard drives really stalled out there for a couple of years after the Typhoon hit and SSDs exploded onto the scene.

I bought an 840 Evo 1TB for $450 on sale a couple of weeks ago. Granted, this is a TLC drive and will probably fail early, but it broke the $0.50 price barrier and has been excellent thus far.

Well of couse the Solar guys were in trouble, they were in Portland. Solar doesn't work so well when it's always overcast.

It's built into getopt now I think, so anything that uses getopt should automatically support it.