As a motorcyclist, I'm deeply excited by driverless cars. It's probable they are much MUCH less likely to SMIDSY me than the typical inattentive phone using car driver.

On a point of pedantry, Concorde was fly by wire. It was the first airliner to be fly by wire (although an analogue system).

The highways (motorways) are actually the safest roads. In the UK only 4% of accidents happen on those roads and they are rarely fatal (while the absolute speeds are high, the impact speeds are often low because it's an impact between two vehicles going in the same direction, and there are safety features of the motorways themselves that try to avoid any accident resulting an a vehicle coming to a sudden stop). The same is likely true in the US.

I've lived in both the US and UK, and I can say that the reason the USA has 13.6 and the UK rate is less than half really is due to US drivers being *a lot worse* than UK drivers. Also there are other factors, such as the lenient treatment of drunk drivers in many US states, leading to people not really being deterred from driving drunk. I saw a lot of people driving obviously drunk in the 6 years I lived in the USA. In the UK, you get done for drunk driving you actually lose your license and have to retake the (very strict) driving test again, and you lose your license for a long period (e.g. 2 years) and a high probability of a prison sentence, and the ban really is a ban, no "you may still drive to your place of work", so there is a very strong deterrent against drunk driving. Second offence and you definitely go to prison as well as have an even lengthier driving ban.

Most new cars in the UK will have throttle by wire, and with direct petrol injection the butterfly valve will be gone too.

Not only that there are cars that now have steer by wire. There is a manual reversion mechanism (a clutch that is electrically held open, so it fails safe if electrical power fails, or can be engaged if the system detects a problem with the steer by wire system).

Well, if you're young enough, get used to the idea that you'll be spending a lot of time on public transport then. Because it's inevitable, the insurance industry alone will practically force it to happen.

My observation of the UK is that people do NOT run yellow lights (at least in northern Britain) and most people - especially on single carriageway roads - drive about 50 (the speed limit is 60 on those roads). With the cost of fuel I have also noticed that the vast majority are sticking to the 70mph limit and a significant minority do about 60. Britain is also infested with speed cameras.

It seems only about 10% of drivers or so play "fast and loose".

You have to do a ton of overtaking. When I go to the UK, I stick to the motorway speed limit because it saves a huge amount of fuel. However, there are so many speed limited (56mph) lorries that you're constantly having to pull out to overtake lorries. The worse is lorries overtaking lorries on the M6 between Manchester and Birmingham. You have one lorry with a speed limiter at 55.99999998 mph, and another with a speed limiter at 56.00000001 and the faster one is overtaking the slower one, and it takes about 15 miles to complete the manuevre, and in the right lane you have a van overtaking the lorry overtaking the lorry, but the van is only doing 60 causing all the speeding repmobiles to suddenly slam on the brakes and slow to 60, causing a standing wave traffic jam in that lane.

If we could get autonomously driven lorries that can communicate and agree on a speed to drive so they never overtake each other, then it'll hugely increase the capacity of the M6.

A wreck at 85mph is hugely more dangerous than one at 65mph. The energy that must be dissipated has a quadratic relationship with velocity. Although 85mph is only 130% faster than 65mph, you have to dissipate 170% more energy in a crash at that speed all other things being equal.

In which case send the cancellation in writing, along with the returned equipment, and send it signature required return receipt so they can't claim they never got it.

If you are going to be working with credit cards then read NOW and not later the PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry - Data Security Standard) standards and follow them, or the company could be liable to penalties from your financial institution. Firewalls are indeed mandatory, as is proper documentation, management and review of the firewall rules.

Download PCI-DSS v3.0 here: https://www.pcisecuritystandar...

I've nothing really to add, but why does the perpetrator in this case have a girl's name when it's quite clear he's a man? Is naming him Sharron a bit like the boy named Sue?

Unfortunately I've not had more time than enough to just dabble in Erlang and the related OTP, but it struck me that you could do a lot of things very elegantly with Erlang. In particular the very light weight share nothing threading model, years ago at university we used Jackson Structured Design where everything was designed as if it had its own process all to itself (no matter how trivial), and it seems that in Erlang you can actually implement it that way rather than flattening the design out.

I have a credit card but I don't pay a 7% or 30% fee on anything. The card is paid off in full each month. It costs me nothing but at the same time gets me buyer protection, I don't have to carry as much cash (so if I get robbed, less is lost and I can cancel the card). If someone gets hold of my credit card number and CVV, they can't drain my bank account with it and leave me with nothing to buy this week's food (and I get fraud protection and can dispute the charge).

Credit cards are stupid if you don't pay them off in full, then they become very expensive. But paid off in full they have benefits that paying in cash does not.