Oh, you're the author of that ?

Thank you, man.
I used your soft back then and liked it !

Which in European countries will very likely be considered as a very bad violation of the privacy of your medical information.

Also, in that, scenario, it wouldn't even that much make sense: you're not an unsafe driver if you're driving a car which is clearly able to compensate for you problems.

The way the laws tend to work in europe is that any problem, if compensated enough, won't prevent you from driving.

- "You have a bad sight? Well, if you can see good enough with your glasses (as measured by an ophthalmologist), then you can still drive".
Seems clear and basic enough? In most European countries, the same reasoning is scaled up for any other problem.
You don't pay a more expensive car insurance just because you need glasses.

- Epileptic person? Yeah, so what. Having a seizure while driving would be dangerous. BUT if the medication works well enough (as asserted by a neurologist), and you have no seizures, then you can still driver.

In your hypothetical future:
- If you have problems staying focused on the road (having sleep apnea as mentioned above in the thread by a /.er, or have some attention deficit syndrome) and your car's collision avoidance system can compensate for it (say, as a random example, you have a Volvo - a European brand that puts collision avoidance systems as a standard option in all their cars already today), then why shouldn't you be allowed to drive? If repeated test have shown that such cars can break instead of you in case of emergency, why not?

Personally, I will feel safer about the fact that the car behind me* breaks and doesn't rear-end me*. That's the important part for me. I don't give a fuck about who pushed the break. The driver, a driver instructor with a dual command, or a robot. All the same for me. I only care that the car stops and avoids an accident.

But unless you're a robot, the're no guarantee that you'll be able to keep your eyes on the road *every last second* for all the *decades in total* you're driving.
Nobody's perfect, error do still happen (to err is human, etc.)

But technology can does already help (I'm not speaking about replacing the basic need of attention and allowing everybody to text. I'm speaking about augmenting the attention to compensate for imperfection). And the good news is you don't need robots (or waiting that Google's car hit retail).
Collision avoidance systems are already available today, are standard with some manufacturer and are going to become mandatory in a few years in europe.

The only thing I don't understand is why is there a need to subordinate them to a "drowsiness" detector?!
They already work well enough today, when they are basically "always on" (that's their whole point. Unlike a human they can be perfectly always watching everylast second over the decades of driving) always automatically kick in, and require active command from the driver to be overridden.
(You can slam the accelerator for that 1% corner cases when you know it's safe and that it's just the safety being over paranoid and you don't actually need to break). But in my personal experience the "requires active command" works well enough, no need for an actual "drowsiness detector" (well, unless you're sleep waling and kicking the gaz pedal in your dreams).

Though I see other much better use for an in-car health monitor.

And had no single accident in these 30 years. Still better than all the drunken / texting teens on the same road. Despite the sickness, he's overall safer than you're average driver.

But I see your point about the ridiculeness of the airport security theater.

Yeah, but why wait on a system that only kicks in when it detects you're drowsy?!

There are already collision avoidance systems that are *always on*, and constantly monitoring the road, and ready to react and protect the car and you, unless you explicitely override them (you have to push on the accelerator stronger to force the car not to slow down. Might be useful for the 1% case where you know there's no risk but the collision avoidance system gets affraid of an obstacle and slows down).

Such equipment is standard with some manufacturer (Volvo) and this technology is going to get mandatory in a few years in EU.

And, this being KDE, by the time it's accepted in mainstream, it's going to be configurable, so you can make it paint the title bar of active application in neon pink, if you want.

Would you have preferred that it looks more like Gnome3 ?!

hug!

The main advantages of free/libre open-source software is:

- source is available to review and hack upon for a WAY MUCH LARGER audience. It's "a few security reviewers cherry picked by a government" vs. "virtually anybody who has the time and resource to invest in it".
So you have a bigger pool from which to pick somebody who "is going to understand everything at every layer", or at least understand big enough parts of it, at a large enough number of layers, with enough overlap with the other "somebodies".

- the whole echo system is open. You can review lots of other stuff (compilers, libraries, etc.) You can have deterministic building to check if you really have the code that really produced the official binaries (that's already something that Tor, Truecrypt, Bitcoin, etc. are doing).
There's lot of things that you can do to check every piece of software that you need to trust.

Well of course, that's a lot work required. So in the end, you'll end up having to trust multiplt other people anyway. But at least, with opensource, that's a choice, and in any case you can do the checks your serlf (or more reallistically: ask someone you actually trust to do it for you. As in the current ongoing review of TrueCrypt, for example).

Whereas, no matter how motivated, with closed source software you'll always hit a wall. (Well microsoft gives you a peek at the windows code, but not necessarily all the rest needed to check full security).

...And solutions against this do exist:

A. Deterministic building.
All software were security is important (Tor, Truecrypt, Bitcoin, to mention a few who practicise this approach) have clear procedures designed to compile a binary in a perfectly repeatable form. A rogue compiler would be easy to detect, because it won't create the same binary as everybody else.

B. Comparing compilers.
Use a small collection of different compilers (a few version of GCC, a few other of LLVM, etc) to compile a compiler whose source you trust (say, a security-reviewed and approved GCC 4.9).
From this point on, you can already compare the output of each of these "GCC 4.9-as-compiled-by-other" by compiling a few test code and see if they matches. Look if any of the test codes has backdoors injected.
- Now you already know which compiler you can trust

Then use that compiler (I mean the multiple versions produced by the various compilers of the first step) to bootstrap it self (you end-up with several version of "GCC 4.9 as compiled by GCC 4.9", each with a different starting point).
Normally all these last step compilers should be more or less similar (see "deterministic" building to reduce the amount of random differences). A rogue compiler will notably stand out.
- Now you have trusted environment, compiled by a trusty compiler.

Seems complicated, but as I've said, people in critical niches (Tor, Truecrypt, Bitcoin) are already doing exactly that.

That raises tremendously the bar of what the governments need to back-door software (virtually any modern compiled need to be compromised, as well as numerous tools around them. Forget one obscure thing somewhere, and someday a researcher or hobbyist will notice discrepencies)

Yup. The first most important thing is to determine a clear procedure how to take the official source and rebuild the same binaries that everybody is having.
(i.e.: you should be able to check out the source, hit recompile and end-up with an installation CD that is indistinguishable from the retail one. So you know you're actually check the real source, and not some decoy put here for you, while a different backdoor-infested version is getting distributed to your government).
And as you say that excatly NOT what microsoft is doing.

Also, having only 2 centers world-wide, where only government mandated devs are invited severly limits the research exposure of the code.
I'm ready to predict that the only real results will be.
- Big security people who don't happen to be sent by a government won't have a look at the code, and probably several shortcomings will never get seen. The end result won't be as secure as if you let the OpenBSD devs create a LibreDows(*) fork with a "Valhalla Rampage" treatment on it.
- Some black hat will manage to slip through the checks, leak the source. It will get passed around on under ground dark nets, and the next week you'll see an abominable explosion of 0-day exploits traded on the shadiest parts of the net.

---
(*): Only works when built on system with massive security counter-measures in their default C library. Like OpenBSD. Secured wrappers provided for Linux (those blissfully ignorant people). Go fuck yourself if you use some outdated os like old-school VMS (pre OpenVMS). Or if you use an outdated compiler like Visua... Oops. Damn!

Leave apart the fact that it is actually possible, but it would be a journey that takes several days and quite a few stops to change trains in european capital cities (these are distances where using air planes start to actually make sense). (Although I happen to have taken night trains across europe over long distance. But these are easier: instead of having to change trains, they switch the trains' cars around and so you stay in the same cabin until you arrive at your destination city)

Leave also apart the fact that we happen to have "geography" between these two points: mountains (Alps), sea (e.g.: the Mediterranean sea that you mention), etc. whereas your country is mostly flat (that's why the tornadoes happen much more easily, to go back to TFA's point. that also means that if anything, building a large-scale rail-road system would probably be much more easy in the US than in EU).

The main problem is: why in the first place should I travel such a long way ?

Answer A: for vacations.
Yup, why not. Go on, go visit Israel for you vacations. I've heard there are nice surfing spots there too.
And as said above, taking an airplane is the most sensible solution. (Though I've been on such long distance road trip across Europe by car, in addition to train as mentioned above). (And money-broken students take busses, that's the cheapest way around).
The thread was talking about cars, and driverless cars. Given the speed of current cars, such a long distance trip would take even longer by car than by rail. So "my country is bigger" argument won't actually work in favour of cars against trains, but in favour of planes against trains and cars.

Answer B: for work
And that's the biggest problem regarding transportation you have in the US: your society is organised in such crazy way that the biggest part of the population has to commute over such bat-shit crazy distance on a regular basis. Nobody in his/her right mind will live in Belgium and travel for work to Israel. Not even by car. Nor plane or trains. If you get a job in Israel, you move there, so you're living nearby your work place. And if you miss Belgium, you can always travel back there for vacation (refer to "A" above).

The main problem is not that train would be impossible. (They are possible), neither is the huge distance (it's flat. it would actually be easier to build train there than here).
The main problem is the distribution of the population (spread all over) and their travel needs (bat-shit fucking crazy distance, each individual travelling that distance in a completely different direction) so it's not easy to group those needs together and have the people travel together in groups (the basic requirement for any public transportation network).

Because exercising punishment is the best approach to bring back the deads ?
What about putting some technology that would have prevented the deaths in the first place... "Oh, noes! Me don't want a NANNY STATE!"

Over that century, the number of driving humans and their density on the roads has increased. The more cars in the same place, the higher the chance of two of them colliding.

When they started to be too many on the roads.
- People are stupid (even if every single person is average when singled out. But pack them together and they start doing stupid things). The more people you put on the road, the higher chance that some cretin will try something asinine and dangerous.
- Also by increasing the number of cars, you increase the level of responsibility and concentration needed for the same level of safety. A century ago, if you lifted your eyes from the road a few seconds, the most likely to happe is that you would crash on a tree on the side of the nearly empty country-side road. Now, the same behaviour in our modern over-crowded fast highways would result into a massive death toll.

And we put seat-belts into cars (requirement nearly everywhere)
And we put air-bags into cars (requirement in lots of places around).
And we put collision avoidance system into cars (standards with some manufacturer like Volvo, and soon a requirement in EU in the next few years).

all this are technologies that help diminish the death toll (proven by statistics).
autonomous cars are just the next evolution of features that can help diminish the deaths.

Just an additional tool. For when the driver is distracted, at least the AI can take care of the driving.

Yup, just tell the kids not to use the phone, your are 100% certain that every single one of them will comply.

People will always be people. Bring enough of them at the same place and they'll invent new way to behave stupid.
Hey, why don't we remove seat-belts, air-bags, etc. and just tell the people to be more careful ?
Even better idea: remove traffic lights, remove traffic signs, etc. and just tell people to drive sane and not to crash?

There's a point where you can't just trust that absolutely every single individual will behave perfectly.
The more redundant safety you put into the system, the less risk that when the driver fails something bad will happen.

Do not confuse:

- onboard I.A. that can react accordingly to surroundings.
(we're progressively heading this way as more anti-collision features are shipped on cars)
and doesn't rely at all on any remote access

- a car that communicate with the network and the mothership can issue "kill the engine" commands (which, if the cars happens to be on a fast highway, also boils down to "kill the driver" command). There's no need of camera. There's no need of any IA. A pure classic car can be made to remotely shutdown given the proper hardware.

Welcome to Europe. Let me introduce you to this wonderful technology called "TRAINS" that we have here.
We've scaled up your plan a bit (they also transport 100x the number of passengers).
We've also jumped on the "electrical vehicle" bandwagon while we're at it (very few are still diesel powered)
(also there's a human in front who can override the system just in case, though some metropolitan transport have gone 100% driverless).

Okay I was thinking that you were comparing with other RAID implementation (most fake RAID cards can't even *grow* the raid, once you've cycled the drives and that the "smallest disk in pool" is now bigger).

Yup, they would handle whatever you throw at them, as long as they can manage to fit the constrains you've asked.