And soon we'll have self-driving vehicles in certain industrial applications where the environment can be controlled (if we don't have them already). Warehouses, golf courses, quarries, These are some examples of where self-driving vehicles can be useful without having to handle every conceivable obstacle that might be encountered in city or even highway driving. With an industrial base to fund further research the vehicles will get better. Griffin is right - it's just a question of when.

You can only learn from the mistakes if you have the courage to make mistakes.

Even if there were such a thing as "basic scientific fact" this wouldn't come anywhere close to it. This is complex theory based on many diverse data points with no possibility of controlled testing. I'm not saying it's wrong. But it isn't basic and unfortunately it may not be fact until it is too late.

I wish I were. But the fact is once you start working for other people they get to tell you what you're allowed to say on the job if you want to keep working for them, and sometimes restrictions are made that aren't good for society at large.

It will probably hold up easily so long as the restriction only applies while they're on the job.

As for beyond work, you might be surprised. I believe there are laws restricting federal employees from doing things like doing campaign work for candidates for federal office.

I won't defend it by saying it is a good idea. But I will point out that it isn't unique and that companies and government quite often ban discussion of certain topics and use of certain words while on the job. Sometimes it even extends to what you can say or even which political causes you can donate to while off the job. It's not like Brenden Eich never received any pressure to step down.

We ban so many things these days. Try discussing the idea that racial differences go beyond the cosmetic and see how long you last at your job.

Most states and corporations have rules about discussing promoting political views on the job.

Although it doesn't sound that different from some of the line's Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. "The economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century... The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of Humanity"

I guess it's possible, of course you would first have to commit genocide against everyone with normal human instincts. That pretty much sums up communism.

Under our current leadership America is becoming more and more like China everyday.

Sadly it is an open question whether China's present will become seen to more closely resembles Japan of the 1980s or Japan/Germany of the 1930s. Even if China does manage to maintain a somewhat peaceful course (which will be surprising given how they're threatening to annex territory from nearly all their neighbors and even threatening to completely annex Taiwan), a China that achieves the same level of prosperity as Japan won't be as weak as Japan. Japan peaked with a per capita GDP slightly larger than America's giving it an economy about half the size of America's (because Japan has roughly half as many people). China on the other hand has 4 times as many people as America. If China reaches per capita GDP parity, it will have an economy 4 times as large as America's, and larger than America Europe and Japan combined. They'll get their way. While America too often live up to its ideals, China doesn't even have similar ideals.

Ok, so China's past looks like America's past.

I've never understood how "patriarchal society" and "tolerance of rape" go together. I a culture where women are just used for one night stands and abadoned, I could see male police not paying much attention to rape.

But in a society where a daughter's virginity is highly important to her ability to get married, in a society where marrying a virgin is considered very important, in a society where traditional marriage is valued and infidelity a rightly punishable offense, how can rape be ignored? Surely the father brother and husband (including potential future husbands) of the raped woman have a huge interest in protecting her and should be allowed to do unspeakable things to the perpetrator.

I just don't get how that's not the case.

It sounds to me like this was a test to confirm that the technique gives similar results to what has been shown before. Being able to use computer games to test this stuff makes all kinds of variations cheap and easy to test. Want to see what other colors matter? Want to see if a different position, different lighting, different clothes, etc. matter? A few strokes on the keyboard and you have a new test with all the other factors unchanged. Want volunteers? The game can be distributed world-wide by the internet.

But suppose you go to the department head and ask for a lot of time and money to recruit people all over the world and run a lot of different variations and it turns out that the racism seen in other tests doesn't show up in the computer game at all. You've wasted time and money. So you start small with the people around you, who just happen to be white Italians. You get the response you expect and you've shown your technique is valid.

I'm pretty sick of PC stuff but I don't see this research as necessarily racist or anti-white. I see it as the beginning stage of a work in progress and as something valuable because it demonstrated the usefulness of a new technique.

What I see as potentially racist and anti-white is Slashdot's trumpeting of this incomplete work.

That is a very real possibility. Or maybe the aliens aren't civilized or even intelligent. Or maybe they're in one of the trillions upon trillions of places SETI hasn't had a chance to look yet. Or maybe they're using transmission frequencies SETI isn't checking, or the transmissions have been wave shifted out of SETI's range. Or perhaps SETI just didn't recognize the signals received.

The fact that SETI has found nothing tells us practically nothing about whether there is life out there. God may have created life (directly or indirectly) all over the universe. We don't have enough knowledge to say for certain yet.