Less than 1% is an understatement. You haven't even shown that it's more likely than a moose related fatality or a deer attack. (look up man killed by moose and see how many hits you get despite the extreme unlikelihood of the event).

Even when you do see a fatality related to a stalled car, it's a car that wouldn't re-start and where someone got out of the car.

I will point out that if we're down to the range of inconvenience being enough to justify a risk, we're already far away from the screeching about being extremely irresponsible that started this thread. It's very likely the author accepted a larger risk of an accident in the process of going to see Valasek and Miller than he did during the test.

To be fair, New Zealand is the country iconic for having flightless birds that are utterly incapable of surviving against species introduced to the island. It seems only appropriate that their drone situation should be similarly flightless and delicate.

Apparently we do considering all the multitasking devotees running around with an effective IQ of 80 or less.

Touché.

And experts in security have been warning them repeatedly that something like this was inevitable for many years.

I don't think the idea that hackers might have excessive fun with a computer controlled system is such an obscure thought to have in the 21st century. Especially since they have been REPEATEDLY warned in public and in private about the risk for over a decade.

This wasn't just ignorance, it was WILLFUL ignorance.

Hey, look out for that piano! It's about to fall on your head!!! MOVE!!!...RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!!!!!!!!!!

(5 seconds later) CRASH! Well, to be realistic, how could he possibly have anticipated a piano falling on him?

If you already have a devastating remote hack, why not make a virtue of necessity and just distribute the patch by mass-p0wning all your units in the field and rewriting the affected software? Nothing could go wrong!

Drugs are a huge business; but if you are in it for the cash you would be chasing male pattern baldness, obesity, limp-dick-itis, and other lifestyle problems of people who have money. Vaccines are a perennially under-performing item; and vaccines for diseases that mostly affect the dreadfully poor are even less promising. I assume that there's some Gates Foundation money in it, and Uncle Sam would probably pay for something that would allow troops to operate in malarial hellholes without the drawbacks of today's chemical prophylaxis options; but anyone hoping to get rich would be doing R&D elsewhere.

(In the medium to long term, though, a malaria vaccine might be worth a great deal of money, indirectly. One of the nasty things about malaria is that it doesn't kill too many people; but it weakens and debilitates the infected on a massive scale, so regions where malaria is endemic lose huge amounts of school attendance and labor force participation to malaria, which helps keep them poor.)

There are a variety of efforts(different organizations and programs involved at different times) that do just that. Especially in areas moist enough that you can't just do a 'don't leave stagnant water sitting in containers/gutters/etc' campaign to eliminate much of the mosquito breeding area, bed nets are the low-hanging-fruit in terms of reducing the average number of bites per person, especially when you consider how cheap they are and how long they last unless abused(the insecticide-impregnated ones do eventually turn into normal ones; but are still mechanically effective).

I assume that the vaccine efforts are partially a matter of "Well, I'm an immunologist not a field health/education worker, so what am I best suited to do?", partially a matter of protecting people during the time they aren't in bed; and perhaps also the hope of eventually making a sufficient portion of humans resistant and crashing the population of malaria causing protozoa entirely. P. knowlesi unfortunately has an animal reservoir(some non-human primates); but some of the other common plasmodia don't, so if you could increase resistance enough you might be able to hit the point of substantial additional gains 'for free' as the number of infected mosquitos drops and the population crashes.

Aside from immediate considerations, working on a malaria vaccine probably gets some additional interest because of its greater value(both humanitarian and commercial) if climate change should cause the current range of the disease(mostly ghastly tropical pestholes filled with people who can't afford expensive drugs) into wealthier areas of the world. There may also be a basic-research interest: unlike most pathogens, plasmodia are eukaryotic; so I'm sure that the relevant specialists find all sorts of fascinating differences between the biology of the pathogen/host interaction in malaria vs. that in infections by bacteria or viruses. You aren't going to commercialize a drug on basic research alone; but if you want research to happen it certainly doesn't hurt to be novel and interesting.

My pleasure. I'm always glad to see a discussion take a turn for the better rather than just sliding off the rails. Unfortunately, it seems as though the value of known-inaccurate simplified models is often enough poorly understood that some people treat them as "Haha, your model doesn't happen in real life, therefore Economics Refuted!" and others treat them as though their results can actually be trusted when talking about the real-world situations that they are intended to help analyze.

In this case, perfect information is obviously not happening(if nothing else, you'd be crowned God-Emperor of HR for all eternity if you actually found a way of objectively ranking an employee's expertise with enough precision to justify the difference between their salary and the category average down to the last dollar, or even the nearest $10k in a lot of cases); but it does seem like a pretty decent example of how a situation goes from being substantially not-'free-market'(information is both imperfect and asymmetric, with Google knowing all the salaries and each employee knowing only their salary) to one that is markedly closer to 'free market'(Google knows all the salaries, each employee knows at least a fair number of salaries; and is negotiating from a position of much better price information).

I admit that my initial post was pretty snippy; I get annoyed at the cries of "SOCIALISM!!!", especially now that the Cold War is over, all the 'communist' states have either collapsed or turned into crony-capitalist states of various flavors; and the closest thing you can find to 'socialism' is capitalist countries with comparatively cushy social safety nets; and whoever the AC was pushed my buttons.

That specific annoyance aside, though, I'm actually rather fascinated by how useful(across a wide variety of disciplines) models that we know are false can be, despite their falsehood. They are wrong; but by being wrong in well defined ways that are amenable to (relatively) simple analysis they can be such a good jumping off point for examining the real world and figuring out how it must be different in order to produce the results you see.

It wouldn't be so bad if they would place a proxy between the critical systems and the infotainment such that the critical systems were effectively read only (so long as the proxy was a separate box that NEVER accepts commands from the infotainment side), but HEY, what's a few fatal brake failures when they can save 5 bucks?

I find the 'esport' label irksome, mostly because I've never understood the big deal about watching sports; but if the defining characteristic of 'sport-ness' were physical rigor; coal mining and working in a sweatshop would be major athletic events and they'd force golfers to walk the entire course and carry their own bags.

Gaming is obviously pretty low intensity for most muscles, though the rigor of the mental drill is considerable; and the amount of carpal tunnel and similar injuries are actually alarmingly high.

The alternative would obviously be untenable(either forcing athletes to do without medical care 'for their own protection' or just banning every sickie who needs a drug that might be performance enhancing); but a therapeutic use exemption for psychostimulants is going to make the rule more or less a joke(not that I have a problem with that, personally). Getting a diagnosis for which one of the stimulants is the usual treatment is pretty trivial; and they are cheap, have lots of safety data available, and generally don't raise any red flags among doctors. It depends on where you are, of course; but they might actually be among the few drugs that are easier to get legally than illegally.

Scrabble is only a game about words at fairly low levels of play. If you have two otherwise unprepared people stuck in a room with nothing but scrabble for amusement, yes, the one with the better vocabulary likely has better options. Outside of the amateurs, though, memorization of the approved dictionary(starting with words chosen for good point values, the ability to dispose of letters that are usually tricky to get rid of, and other helpful features; but ideally progressing to all of them) supplants knowledge of the language and the remaining challenge is board control and optimizing the conversion of tiles into points over the course of the game.

There would certainly be additional prep time, even for the unusual characters who are really good at this; but the skills that the game demands for high level play should be transferable to any language(or even a nonsense dictionary) that works reasonably well with representation by a relatively small alphabet.