"Please don't come back"? I made a sarcastic comment about how quickly the tread was going downhill, and that is the response I get? I am so very disappointed on so many levels. I offer this rebuttal, you filthy, Portland hippy:

Sir, the whole of your taste is in your mouth, your father only impregnated your mother because he was drunk at the time and mistook her for a overly portly circus clown, and you tip poorly. The Irish think you drink too much, and racists call you thick-witted but only behind your back, because they find you to be too violent and moody to deal with. All your dates with the opposite gender have occurred because of dares or pity, and your hair is more oily that Saudi Arabia. You dress like a pimp from New Jersey, and I would have a better conversation with a rotting stump than with you. I'd suggest that you kill yourself to improve humanity as a whole, but that would just waste an empty hole in the ground where someone would doubtlessly stuff your bloated hideous body, that could otherwise be doing something useful like storing landfill. Mail yourself to Tasmania, and stop lowering this website's name by posting your filthy opinions on it. Bits cost almost nothing, and yet I feel you are wasting Slashdot's money ever time you foolishly click 'post' in the vain hope that if you spew enough verbal fappery you might actually say something that somehow matters. Away, chaff, away with you.

Something interesting to note, A 'construction worker' is largely a bivalent obvious label. It is relatively clear cut if someone is a member of this set of people. "nerd' is a term that is much more loosely defined, and large portions of the general population would be able to distinguish between a 'nerd', a 'geek', and a 'gamer'. I thought it was telling that the GP post spoke of engineers and other nerds, suggesting that all engineers and programmers were automatically part of the group of people who were nerds. Programmer != nerd, I have meet many coders who aren't anywhere near the intellectual caliber to be called a nerd.

TLDR? - Please be more specific in your generalizations.

NAZIS! NAZIS! HITLER!

*Drops Mike, walks out*

It is unlikely. A car bomb is a cheap and simple way of killing lots of people. Drones are relatively complicated and incapable putting a six foot hole in the middle of a busy market. You may not realize this, but building a good, reliable bomb in a third work country with ad-hoc parts is somewhat challenging and dangerous.

Its easy to eliminate most terrorism with a simple thing called a good education and a job. But killing people is easy, and educating them means you have to actually talk with them so don't expect a change soon.

One spectacular and tragic crash will ignite class action lawsuits and lemon law backlash. I'm willing to bet their fear of litigation will keep them fixing things.

But that is the interesting thing: tickets and fines are intended to discourage bad behavior that is slightly antisocial. (as opposed to murdering people, which is highly antisocial). With the advent of autonomous cars, mission accomplished. If you ticket the manufacturer, you incentivize them into creating a better, safer, product.

There will still be plenty of tickets to write for a long time, as until we are at 100% adoption, people will still break trafic laws. Also, I 'm sure that hacking the robodriver software will be a popular thing for teenagers to do in the next decade or two. That should be worth a huge fine, if you did it with intent to speed, race, or run people over, since a speeding ticket is generally intended to be a "2nd degree reckless endangerment" charge. It would give you ample proof of intent.

...waiting for the 'Good Germans' line so we can just Goodwin this tread and all go home...

The whole Red vs Blue thing is missing the boat completely. You can bitch about Republicans all you want, but the problem is the Rich vs. Poor and both deomocons and republicrats are pandering to the wealthy. The only real difference I see is that Republicans are a touch racist on top of everything else. Doesn't matter what side of the ticket you punch in November, we are living in a plutocracy.

Religion is an excuse for people to be assholes. People were assholes before religion. The interesting thing about religion is it made sense as a way to convert 'savages' to your way of thinking, and get them to adopt your morality. by adopting your morality, you got them to stop 'being assholes', int the sense that being an asshole is doing something that you or your society doesn't like. (Such as murdering people in the street because they look at you wrong).

In the early days of humanity, getting people to follow rules, was tricky and religion worked well to this end. Now that we basically have everyone (basically) behaving, we are encumbered with all the outdated morals and thought tied to religion, and the very thing that advanced society is now an anchor that keeps society from moving forward. (Example most religions agree that stabbing people for no reason is bad, but a lot still have issues with homosexuality for really no good reason.)

There is an easy solution, re-target the NSA to spy the rats nest that is Washington. If you get a public office, it should be a given that you are held up to scrutiny. Spy on all these people, and when you catch them doing something wrong, throw them in the federal pen for 20 years. Once word gets around that relationships with elected officials are monitored and offering quid pro quo bribes will land everybody involved in federal prison, the practice will greatly cease.

Guns are dangerous because of the cultural media message. The message that the media presents people is, 'If you own a gun, you are powerful and safe.', Which causes people to purchase them for the same reason a lot of people smoked 50 years ago. Think about how cigarettes used to be portrayed in the movies and consider how guns are portrayed in the movies. Sexy, confident and charismatic movie stars were lighting up every other scene, so of course half the population was smoking. With essentially the same marketing, why wouldn't gun ownership in America be ubiquitous? Everyone likes to feel safe and powerful. The fact that a gun makes you neither safe or powerful is moot.

Guns are particularly dangerous to sell with this message because weak minded individuals who buy into the image can hurt others with a gun quite easily, since a gun is a tool designed to wound or kill its target, where as a cigarette is largely self-damaging. I suspect that guns wouldn't be nearly the problem they are if you removed the media message.

Just speculation but, when you propel something to mach 7, friction becomes a real issue. The SR-71 had a titanium body if I recall correctly, to help deal with temperatures it encountered at Mach 3. It is quite possible that the projectile is very hot and is igniting materials that have lower ignition temperatures.

Genetic distance is an interesting concept, since there isn't a single axis of genetic diversity, but many. I would imagine that you could probably graph a genome as an N-dimesional hyper point, where N is the number of distinct genetic characteristics. The math of higher dimensional space isn't that complex, but it's interpretation can get weird, because what is 'genetically far enough' apart? Also, the space may not be smooth and continuous, so how do you know that you have an 'adequate' coverage? While it seems counter intuitive, it might be best to just pick N random people from the gene pool, where N is large enough to be mathematically representative of the larger population.

Nobody ever discovered new lands by sitting at home and playing it safe. Every time a boat went out to sea in the Ancient world, there was a risk of death from numerous sources but that didn't stop them. The shipped out as fast boats were built.

NASA: grow some balls, you gutless bastards. People are going to die in space. Its going to happen and there is no way around that. Now get off you asses and put some people on Mars. Every person who goes on that trip knows that it is going to be a one way journey and the only person fretting over it is you.