The thing is, those tiny little 4 bangers turn out not to be any more efficient than the decently sized ones (though substantially better than most V6/V8s).

All that changes is that the guy driving the little 1.1l 4 banger floors it all the time, because he needs all its got all the time; while the guy driving the 1.8T just uses a tiny bit of what's available.

Typical shotgun spread is around 0.5" per yard. Some are as low as 0.3" per yard. So the spread at 200ft is going to be around 20" across. A drone is also about 20" across. So if the shot was good, it's highly likely that almost all of the pellets would hit the drone.

I do think there are important differences with computers though
  Computers can potentially be much more efficient and accurate in their slaughter. Such machines may be used in ways not unlike hitler used gas chambers (wooo, godwin there we go).
  With current technology, computers can't make morality judgements like humans can, they can't think "you know what, my general just ordered a genocide, I'm not going to take part".
  With current technology, computers are much worse at distinguishing friend, foe or civilian. We ban land mines for exactly this reason - they don't distinguish who they're blowing up.

There's probably more reasons that they differ, but I can't be arsed thinking them up just now.

Not really, no. Current charge rates mean you can get about 100 miles of range in 20 minutes on a standard DC charger. If you're a tesla owner that's more like 200 miles of range in 20 minutes.

Big rigs typically get in the range of 8-10mpg, so they're roughly 4 times less efficient than cars. That implies that you could get about 50 miles for 20 minutes of charging on a tech similar to tesla's. Big rig drivers are required to take 10 hours of break in every 21. That 10 hours is enough to add 1500 miles of range, 11 hours is enough to drive roughly 770 miles.

It seems like even with Tesla's current DC charging tech there's *more* than enough ability to charge a big rig for all its current driving time.

That depends entirely on whether the item was designed to withstand people attacking it.

A bomb shelter is defective if someone drops a bomb on it (at the designed distance and explosive power) and it collapses.

A skyscraper is defective if it was designed to withstand a plane impact and it does not.

A car is defective if it was designed to withstand people trying to hack it, and it doesn't.

A car's design is defective if it was not designed to withstand people trying to hack it.

So you're saying it had a defect (the ability to exploit it), but it wasn't defective?

In general, companies don't tend to know about significant defects when they actually ship the item. That doesn't mean that they're not defects.

But anyone sane on the planet would rather have them sit a car in a large, private, open space and demonstrate that they can control all of the controls without endangering anyone's life, especially people who didn't sign up to have their life endangered and were just driving down a public road.

Uhhhh? Do you somehow think that making a function private in the source code means that it's impossible to jump to that location at runtime? That's really not how it works.

Prison is meant to be reserved for separating people from society who are dangerous until they're not dangerous any more.

The correct sentence for copyright infringement (which does not demonstrate that the perpetrator is a danger to others), is to 1) pay back the person who was wronged (though that's a civil matter), and 2) a fine or community service of some sort.

Are you saying that you don't need to eat food roughly every 4 waking hours?

Yes, yes it does.

a) it takes about 25 minutes to charge, not 4 hours.
b) 375V * 1.5kA * 2.8s = 0.4375kWh. That is, it takes less than 0.5% of the total charge of the battery to do this.

Yep, same here - drive to work, plug in, drive home; drive to work, plug in, drive home, ...

I never ever ever have to think at all about stopping at a petrol station, and I never dip below 70-80% battery charge, also, with a ~100 mile range on my car.

I don't really understand the necessity of this. Realistically, you're gonna be driving at most 70mph, more likely averaging 50-60 over a long journey. You can reasonably do 4 hours before you need to stop for lunch, and another 4 in the afternoon before you're going to want to eat dinner. Both of those meals are gonna take you half an hour.

That means that a range of between 200 and 280 miles is sufficient for pretty much any form of driving save for utter insanity driving all through the night, and frankly, forcing you to stop for half an hour every few during that time I regard as a good thing, not a bad.

That said, I do think the tesla's current ~267mile range (assuming 85->90kWh scales linearly) is a tiny bit on the short side. If they managed to get the thing to 300, that would be pretty much sufficient for all forms of driving.

You built bloodhound?