That's the nice thing about lists. The government says you're on it, and that's that. No proof required. No means to defend yourself or prove your innocence. Nope, you're on the list, and now we're going to bully everyone and cut you out of all the conveniences of modern life. Those who don't co-operate, well, you wouldn't want to be "aiding a terrorist" now would you?

The "free" world has gone insane, and I despair when I see a whole new generation growing up that doesn't seem to have a problem at all with this modus operandi.

Let's be a bit more specific about that.

If they're restricting the length to something like 8 or 12 or 16 instead of 128 or 256 then they are PROBABLY not hashing the passwords.

Which means that your password is PROBABLY being stored in plain text (or possibly encrypted). NEITHER of which are acceptable methods today.

Seconded on the different email addresses. And you don't have to own your own domain for that. Just make some random'ish gmail account and use that ONCE for more secure requirements (like your bank).

The trick is to prepare them in advance. And write them down in a PHYSICALLY secure location.

If you're using the same email account for your bank as you use on Facebook then your security could be improved.

Well because the mass amount of data that would be grabbed in the event of an accident would far overshadow a reasonable amount of capture memory during normal driving, which would utilize a lesser set of sensors and maybe lower grade video, which didn't have to factor into the explanation for the accident.

256GB of flash is just over $100 right now. Storage is not a problem. Even AIRCRAFT do not have a problem with storage and they have a LOT more data to store.

Step 2 would include choices such as hit the breaks if it would work. I just used summary steps to make it easy to understand.

Taking power from the engine is NOT the same a braking.

Taking your foot off the gas is NOT the same as stepping on the brake.

Seriously. Try it on a hill. You might end up going FASTER at the bottom of the hill than at the top.

Your plates store information about your car, hence you know from looking the number up, everything to know about the car via reference lookup.

Make/model/year/VIN/owner/owner's address. And maybe whether it passed inspection or not.

How will knowing the VIN tell you anything about hitting it?

Or the owner's address?

Or the owner's name?

Or any of the other information?

And what happens when the site you're trying to use to look up that useless information is slow?

Which of those steps covers engaging the braking system?

And how does the license plate "determine what would happen if you hit it"?

Why weren't the cameras and sensors on already if the car was operating autonomously?

If not, how will you avoid hitting him if he suddenly decides to sprint and jump infront of your car?

That would be "suicide".

And the sensor logs of the car should be able to show that it was suicide.

But more to the point, how would that situation be any different in a faster-reacting-autonomous-car than in a human-controlled-car?

Or are you postulating a world where there are no cars because someone might try to commit suicide by jumping in front of one?

To prove them, I expect large fleets sponsored by the manufacturer or systems integrator will drive many thousands of hours per-car to establish a baseline, similarly to how an MTBF is established for devices, and that rate of collision or other liability-causing event will factor into the insurance companies' rates for those cars.

I think it will be even easier.

The autonomous cars will be packed with sensors that record EVERYTHING.

If there is an accident then the insurance companies will know which car has a 100% complete record of the incident that SHOULD exonerate it. Such as staying below the speed limit. Keeping a recommended distance from the car in front of it. Staying in the center of its lane. And exact information on how hard the brakes were applied and when and how that affected traction prior to the collision.

In theory, the insurance company for the autonomous car should win ever time (except in cases of software/hardware failure).

It's even easier than that.

Do YOU want to be the person dragged into court because YOU wrote the program that INTENTIONALLY HIT AND KILLED someone?

No? Then write the code to be 100% neutral. The code will ONLY attempt to stop the vehicle as fast as possible.

If pedestrians are within X meters of the car then the car should slow to Y. If they get closer then the car should stop.

But the code should NEVER have the option "hit object X".

That only gets you to Anchorage/Fairbanks. Getting to Bering strait is something else entirely.

Those meters are all over the place. As the article mentioned, the majority of them only count the number of characters in each class, so they're pretty terrible at actually telling you how hard your password is to crack. Some of them are set to an absurdly high level too. The default Ubuntu meter for instance requires something like 16 characters before it will even consider your password good. I saw one where it wouldn't take your password unless it was at least 14 characters long, had all classes of characters in it (upper, lower, number, symbol), no more than two of the same class together, and "no patterns". At that point you just kind of have to accept that I'm going to stuff it in a password manager even though your site expressly forbids me recording my password elsewhere.

Or when you're on an older laptop where gesture navigation doesn't work, which is all the time for me.

The scrollbars on Gnome are so obnoxious now. You have to mouse over a tiny 2 pixel strip to get them to appear, then super precisely move your mouse to get to the part where you can interact with it, and one pixel off causes it to disappear and make you hunt for the invisible 2 pixel strip again. I'm sure they're great if you're on a tablet and just mashing your thumb in the general vicinity of the scrollbar, but for mouse users they're just outright terrible and enabled by default. If you have a distro like Ubuntu it's fairly hard to enable sane scrollbars again too, you have to know what esoteric package to install to fix the behavior, it's not installed by default.

It's 2015. We are surrounded with selfish bastards. I wouldn't be surprised if after investigating the wreck the copilot was taking selfies right before the crash.

Producing the alarm sound when the autopilot is turned off, which would have been heard on the recording.

Agreed. The problem is how do you prevent someone unauthorized from getting hold of this "foolproof" entry method into the cockpit by any number of means, including the low tech solution...