1 - random Joes don't get to fly them anyway. "Highly trained volunteers" do. And they already do it that way.
2 - there is no light in the dark, rain, snow, fog... so windows would be useless
3 - people looking around don't drive the sub. And how would Joe feel about just before landing, seeing the copilot tie a rope around himself and walk out on the wing and start waiving hand and yelling "To the right. Right! NO! MY RIGHT!"?
Maybe that would help keep him calm? How about while taxiing before takeoff?

As for "cleared for visuals"... so?
Nobody said anything about blinding the pilots and having them fly by waiving their penises inside a bowl of sensor-jello.
The whole point of the system is to give them BETTER visuals, which incidentally can't be blinded with a $5 laser pointer.
And should their electrical systems fail during the landing procedure... they are fucked anyway.
It's all done through computers anyway. No pulling on that yoke will do any good unless there's power to run the controls.

And all of that is besides the point.

The point is that everyone is perfectly fine with world's nuclear arsenal being chauffeured around in a tube with no windows, but "OMG! They want to transport people that way!?"
And those protesters...
Last I heard they switched to saving whales. Or dolphins. Or some other thing you probable never even heard about.
Anti-nuke is so passe. Grandad.

They do NOT land "because someone thought a cool new gadget would be fucking flawless".
"Because someone thought a cool new gadget would be fucking flawless" is the answer to WHY they land at all. Instead of crashing and burning up in a fiery inferno of fire.

That "someone" is usually some institute or some other place full of eggheads doing pointless research.
And boy, they are researching so much pointless stuff, pretty soon they're gonna be out of things to research.
Stupid eggheads. They're gonna be out of a job then.

Nobody complains about all those people jammed into a metal tube with no windows powered by a nuclear reactor and dumped into the ocean(s)...

And no... Periscope only works for the last (first) 20 meters or so. They are buggering about on instruments and maps alone.
And did I mention nuclear missiles? Yeah... they jam those in there with the people.

I thought it was a fairly faithful adaptation, but I admit I got bored some time in Season 2. The pacing in the book can be slow at times, but when transferred as-is to a visual medium it's amazingly tedious.

Seriously? You want competent people and you advertise on Craigslist and Monster.com? No wonder you think there's a skills shortage...

This is exactly how they do it now for software in medical devices. Except that that 'private firms' are the manufacturers. It's ludicrous for them to claim that a certification process that basically amounts to asking the manufacturers to promise that they've tested it really well 'won't scale'.

Apparently the early script drafts had a more plausible explanation: that the spare brain capacity of humans in a dream-like state was used as processing power to run the AIs. One of the editors thought this was too complicated for a movie-going audience to understand and so replaced it with a magic perpetual motion machine.

Translation is like predicting the weather. If you want to do an okay job of predicting the weather, predict either the same as this day last year or the same as yesterday. That will get you something like 60-70% success. Modelling local pressure systems will get you another 5-10% fairly easily. Getting from 80% correct to 90% is insanely hard.

For machine translation, building a database of 3-grams or 4-grams and just doing simple pattern matching (which is what Google Translate does) gets you 70% accuracy quite easily (between romance languages, anyway. It really sucks for Japanese or Russian, for example). Extending the n-gram size; however, quickly hits diminishing returns. Your increases in accuracy depend on a corpus and when you get to the size of n-gram where you're really accurate, you're effectively needing a human to have already translated each sentence.

Machine-aided translation can give huge increases in productivity. Completely computerised translation has already got most of the low-hanging fruit and will have a very difficult job of getting to the level of a moderately competent bilingual human.

Underpowered? The Gameboy had a 4.19MHz Z80-like chip. You could happily emulate it on a 66MHz 486 without taxing the host. The ARM11 in the RPi is massively overpowered for this use! I don't really understand what the feminism you're seeing here is.

The power consumption of the RPi (especially if you're not using the GPU) is tiny in comparison to anything with motors in it. I'd rather trade a slight reduction in battery life for being able to use a rich programming environment than save a few mW and be forced into a constrained microcontroller development environment. It might be different if I were planning on mass producing a few thousand and needed to save costs, but for a hobby project or even a prototype I'd happily overprovision on CPU power.

You're talking to a species that understands math, chemistry, physics...
You share the same Universe. There's your context.

And simple 1+1=2 vs 1+1=3 (i.e. something like: .^.-.. .^.-...) is enough if you'd just want to match up two vocabularies of terms.
You got your TRUE and FALSE right there.
And then there are entire languages already constructed for just such a purpose.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

That's a non-sequitur. The cost is born by society. Government is the name of the body that we elect to represent society. If taxing an activity reduces it, which, in turn, reduces a cost that is born by society, then the government has done its job. The point of such taxation is to reintroduce externalities into the costs, so that the market will correctly adjust.