In the times of the internet it is easy to hide failure rates? There are entire website dedicated to the question "how fast does something break and how crappy is their tech support?"!

Also, please clarify: In the first sentence, was that supposed to be an "it's" or an "it's not"? Because the rest makes rather little sense else. If it was easy to determine the value (and hence the agreeable price) of something, price wouldn't be the single most tangible decision maker.

Actually, yes, I'd consider that a major display of responsibility. The very last thing I'd want a rocket to do when it goes out of control is to choose its own place to go kaboom. And yes, even for a manned rocket.

It seems to me only with TV can there be this really common "Let me demonstrate how I don't watch TV by telling you how much I know about TV."

Well, you gotta think most of that is the fact that 63% of all news on the Internet is about TV. Seriously.

You can learn a ton about what's happening on TV without watching TV. For example, let's do a little experiment. I'm gonna pick a popular web site at random, say, "Buzzfeed" and go there right now. OK, hold on....

I'm back. Of the six top stories on Buzzfeed, three of them are about TV. Now this is the front page, where all the stories are aggregated, and I just looked at the top six stories without scrolling down.

There's a story about "Where has Jennifer Aniston been?" which I assume involves a significant amount of cosmetic surgery and possibly rehab. Next is (I shit you not), "How The TV Version Of “Clueless” Ruined Everything". I don't know what that could possibly be about, but the headline is tantalizing. I mean this TV show fucking ruined everything! Finally, the #6 headline is another story about television coverage of #Ferguson, of which there have now been more of than actual news stories about #Ferguson. This is an interesting phenomenon of it's own, with the media loving to talk about how the media is covering something, especially some horrible thing.

I didn't look, but I assume that if I were to scroll down there would be more headlines about people who play this "Game of Thorns" (which sounds painful) or one of the ubiquitous stories about how that guy on the reality show you don't watch turned out to really be a horrible person in real life.

Is this you?

No, but I met him and kicked his hipster punk ass.

I'd have to agree. I get the distinct feeling this is a setup for a spinoff show. I just hope the "build team" is given a decent idea to work with.

You just reinvented the waldo.

Good luck getting a pro-homeschool country to grant your family resident status.

Found a bug in physics.c, those cars we mass produced last year will spontaneously explode after 367 days of exposure to an atmosphere containing oxygen, or when white lines are painted rather than vinyl, or when attempting a corner of a prime number of degrees when speeding on a cambered road.

Why wasn't this spotted sooner?

Because we hadn't expected to need chemistry or non-Euclidian geometry in a physics engine.

Then make the episodes longer. Or have one set of presenters on the first show (they're usually paired) and the others on the second show. Or eliminate redundant footage so that you can have two or three times the content. Or eliminate the advertisers, sorry adverts, and get three times the running length.

The assumption seems to be that as 90% of kids 15 years ago were diagnosed ADHD, 90% of the target audience now must also have ADHD. Except for Game of Thrones viewers, who apparently have other issues.

What is this, a TV show or something?

I love not having cable. It's one of the most liberating things I've ever done. With the time I saved by not watching TV for the past seven or eight years, I've learned to play jazz pretty well, and my eyes don't burn in the morning from staring at stupid television for hours. I'm not a great player by any means, but I'm good enough to play out at clubs with professionals. It's not that I'm at a high level, but I can hold my own, and people like it. Learning to improvise jazz as an adult has really lit up parts of my brain that were sitting dormant for decades, and that's a good feeling. All because I decided to ditch TV.

From what I can tell, the past seven/eight years have been nothing but reality TV, dramas with titles that are acronyms, and shows where you pay a subscription AND get commercials. Really high quality stuff, like Deadwood or The Wire, I'll get when it comes to Netflix or via other means, but I'd have to be so interested in it that I'm willing to go look for it. The thing that was the killer for me was when I found myself flipping through channels looking for something to watch. There just seemed something really wrong about that.

Anyway, if this is some big show for nerds where they confirm your bias about the world, I hope the changes turn out to your satisfaction. Back in the day, I was an avid TV watcher I seem to recall something about a cartoon about a family where the father was stupid, the son a smart-ass who road a skateboard and the mom had big blue hair. It's probably not on any more, because the guy who did the voice for the really old rich guy who owned the nuclear plant where the stupid father worked would now be almost as old as, what was his name..."Mr Burns", I think. I don't look down on people who watch television, it's just not for me any more. I suppose it's something of a social hindrance though, because all I can do is have a quizzical expression when someone mentions some show like "Iron Chef", which I assume is about a super hero.

Discovery got caught using fake footage in documentaries. No scientist should be working with a channel that is peddling fraudulent material. History lost a lot of reputation with their academically bogus Ancient Aliens stuff, but at least they didn't try to offer photographs and videos they themselves doctored as "evidence".

If the three have projects worth taking seriously, they won't be projects on Discovery. HBO has less of a credibility issue.

Maintain heading and come to a halt?

That's going to double travel times right away.

Real life is far more creative than any scenario designer.

Ain't that the truth.

This is why I don't see everyone in driverless cars in any of our lifetimes. I'm thinking it's at least 70 years out. And not least because a) who's going to pay for all the necessary infrastructure? and b) shared liability will make it a nightmare.

Maybe first let's see if we can have a driverless NASCAR race without crashes. And then I want to see the CEO of a driverless car company put his kids in the car and send them on a coast-to-coast road trip, including LA at rush hour, Chicago's Dan Ryan Expressway Southbound at 3:30am and on small roads crossing the Appalachians.

Let's see if...

Google writes the software for the car
Google writes (or pays someone else to write) the simulator
Google runs the test
Google reports the results

Seems like with simulations we would be somehow implicitly trusting google that their simulator sufficiently models reality vs only modeling what the self driving software expected...

Although simulation has its place to improve testability during training and development, how does this test against reality? The reason to test against reality is generally to cover the stuff that you *didn't* expect. It's generally quite easy to fool yourself (and others) that something is good enough if you remove this link back to reality...