That's a pretty nosy question if I've ever heard one. But since you ask, it smells pretty nosy.

Right... so... you want to be sheltered from the worst news from the unprivileged, because you feel powerless to stop it? Tell that to the people in that situation, with significantly less power to stop it! Yes! Let's not talk about the bad things in the world unless the newspiece has a button that you can personally click to solve that problem. That's exactly how problem-solving works. Who knows why the press never thought of that!

No, the downside is that the muddy seafloor is chock full of life. The energy absorbed by that seafloor churns the mud, continually stirring around nutrients, plankton, eggs and sperm, algae, etc. A huge amount of sealife spawns in this mud -- stop churning it, and you kill everything there. And as these things usually go... killing a huge number of species tends to open a door to noxious, invasive, damaging monocultures.

Hire and train real 13 year-old girls to seduce 'predators' online and lure them into an IRL meeting. Duh.

No. The program does not check itself. You rely on faulty humans for that part. Duh. There's gotta be some fault in the rigor or you'll never get your math paper published.

I'll undermine your 'proof by authority' by pointing out that the best you can possibly get from my assertion is a fallacy of false generalization. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that GP is correct. Some mathematicians are unsatisfied by computer proofs. Possibly most mathematicians. I've apparently gone on record calling the majority of mathematicians "idiots". Worse, I'm on the job market. Good thing my real name isn't on this account!

If I get tenure, I'll get to put my name to my opinions. If I'm a tenth as cranky and outspoken as Doron Zeilberger, I'll be satisfied.

You're the imaginative one, aren't you? Distributed proofs tend to duplicate work -- at least k contributors prove every claim, and each contributor should have some portion (maybe log(# contributions) or so, IIRC) of their work double-checked by an expert. Sure, it takes k times longer, but you can design it to take advantage of statistics to certify the proof more trustworthy than the average math paper.

I wish modern mathematicians believed the math that they prove day after day for undergrads. If they did, this wouldn't be controversial.

Maybe out in Granola Country. Where I'm from, we measure in Hummers.

Mathematicians are supposed to be able to think at a higher level of abstraction than most other folks. Any mathematician who claims that 'this is too much for a human to check' is an idiot. It's not too much. We understand how computers work. They're way less error-prone than humans.

1) Verify the proof that the verification algorithm works.
2) Obtain several independent simple, portable implementations of said verification.
3) Run said implementations on proof certificate on a variety of hardware.

Trust the math, and where it comes to the hardware and software, trust but verify. Too long to check without aid of a computer? Sure, I'll buy that. But you'd have to be an idiot to want to check this proof without a computer. Why is this news? (actually, the result in discrepancy theory is wonderful, and I'm very happy to see it here on Slashdot... but massive computer proofs are truly nothing new)

Funny thing about this. They've checked it. Actually, their "check" of this proof is many of orders of magnitude more rigorous than when, for example, a reviewer "checks" a math paper for errors before firing off a positive review. Nondisclaimer: I'm a mathematician.

No. This doesn't even make sense if there's only one car doing it. The idea of a human controlling such a drone is laughable... landing on an aircraft carrier in an open ocean is hard enough for experienced, trained pilots with hundreds of logged hours -- an untrained civilian landing on a car swerving around in traffic, while possibly controlling said car? With a rat's nest of utility lines, traffic signs, street lights, business signs and tunnels directly overhead? Bullshit.

Even assuming an AI that can land on a moving car every time, sensors and planning algorithms are decades away from being able to handle the overhead rat's nest.

So, the drone will almost certainly crash-land in its first few flights, and necessarily have a powerful enough engine to catch up to a car doing 80mph on the freeway. That powerful engine weighs a good 10 pounds at a minimum. Ever see how much damage a 3 gram pebble can do to your windshield? There is no way that this will ever get off the ground.

This idea: bullshit.

It's a simple matter of economics. You get the most honking for your buck. It's clearly an obvious no-brainer.

See, this is the thoughtless sort of legislation that makes the world an awful place to live. I immediately see your tax as an incentive to hardwire the horn on. I pay at most $.1 per trip in horn tax, and still get to use it as much as I like.