Just wanted to say that if you are careful to use a smart-pointer class (e.g. shared_ptr) rather than raw C-style pointers to hold dynamically allocated objects, 99% of your memory leaks (and other object-lifetime-managment related problems) will "magically" go away -- and without the overhead or random execution-pauses seen in languages that rely on a garbage collector.

YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! OH, DAMN YOU! GODDAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!

(this text brought to you by the Lameness filter, which wishes to remind you that using too many caps is like yelling)

Really, you're don't see the difference in added risk between (a computer taking over sole responsibility for the control of a 2500-pound, 65-mile-an-hour car, in all possible traffic conditions), and (adding a strip of reinforced fabric to the cockpit)?

When was the last time your seat belt stopped working due to a buffer overrun? Contrariwise, when was the last time your home computer did something wrong or unexpected?

Drone target-selection via popular vote on Reddit in 3, 2, 1....

First of all, [citation needed].

Did you know that the Christian Bible also "black and white demands" that anyone caught working on a Sunday be put to death? (citation). And yet somehow we don't see a lot of killings of Sabbath-breakers. So most clearly people can distinguish between the applicable and non-applicable parts of their holy texts. (Those who cannot we call "fundamentalists", and they are the problem; not every religious person in the world)

A union is most beneficial when workers are easily replaceable -- because if management can replace worker A with worker B without a lot of overhead, management can (and usually will) use that to drive salaries down, approaching the lowest salary that they can find at least one worker to accept.

The trick in programming is to make sure you are not so easily replaceable -- if the company knows that it would take 6-12 months to get a new hire up to your level of productivity, they will not be so quick to "value engineer" your salary and benefits. Then you don't really need a union to stand up for you, because you have leverage to stand up for yourself. (The right way to do this is to know the company's software inside and out; the wrong way would be to make the software so convoluted that only you can understand it... ;))

Of course if you take into account the energy expenditure it will take to pull the excess CO2 and other chemicals back out of the atmosphere, that number goes down a bit.

(Impractical to do, and therefore will never be done, you say? Okay, take into account the costs of living with a permanently impacted atmosphere, instead)

Why instead of? We can (and should, and will) do both.

What you don't know about fusion
Could fill a shelf of books
You are the type of man who looks
For new miraculous advances
But overestimates the chances
Of breaking-even on the power flow
You only have to open up your mouth to show
What you don't know
About!
Fusion!

The world's small farmers are already being driven out of business by automated mass-production farming that their labor-intensive, small-scale methods can't compete with, and that they can't afford to replicate. Cheap, easy-to-use small-scale automation could allow them to grow food more cheaply, making them more competitive, not less. I doubt that any of them enjoy doing back-breaking field labor for 10 hours a day for very little compensation; why wouldn't they want a robot that could do the tedious labor for them?

Not to mention that anyone with a sufficiently capable farm-bot could use it raise their own crops to eat, and would therefore no longer need to go searching for a menial job in order to feed their family. Win-win!

If you watch the video at the bottom of the article, you'll see photos of several prototype FarmBots that do, in fact, exist.

I think there's definitely a market for this. For example, I'd like to have a nice vegetable garden in my back yard, but I don't have the expertise or the free time to do the work necessary to keep it healthy and happy. If I could buy a FarmBot at the local Home Depot, set it up, press "Go", and not worry about it until harvest time, that would be a pretty tempting prospect. And once the technology got cheap enough and reliable enough for most people to afford and install, anyone with some land could easily grow their own organic produce, exactly to their own specifications. For people who don't have their own land, neighborhoods could do slightly larger-scale versions of the same thing in the community gardens. Peoples' ability to feed themselves (rather than rely on buying food from large corporations) would increase, which can only be a good thing.

I doubt it. Any company that wants to stay in business will instead concentrate on making sure the car does not get into a position like that in the first place -- because once the car is in a "no-win" situation like that, it doesn't really matter what choice it makes, the company is going to be hit with a big lawsuit either way.

Not to mention only in a society where energy was so plentiful that they could afford to waste 99% of it by sending it in all possible directions all the time.