Not to mention "perfect information" as used in theory basically means "everything communicated via instant telepathy", in practice nobody has the time for that. At best you sample just a little bit and hope it's representative for the rest.

What are you trying to do, create a buzzword black hole that'll consume civilization as we know it and leave nothing but a post-apocalyptic landscape of marketdroids and PHBs?

Well, from Norway the total figures for land transport of goods and people is 4,6% of the employment, though that may include related service like loading and unloading. However, there's also work in the primary industries (agriculture, forestry, mining) and many operating trucks and such in production industries that are also potential targets for automation. The biggest productivity boost is that people could use the time they spend driving for other things though. Limiting myself to personal cars (not taxis, buses, delivery vans, trucks etc.) the average driver's licence holder drives 18812 km/year. I'm not sure if there's some professional use of personal cars in there. But it's certainly hundreds of hours per year per year, just my short commute is 15 mins*2*200 days/year = 100 hours plus everything else in evenings, weekends, vacations and so on.

What's there to fix? There are at least two critical issues that no computer software can fix.

1. Confidentiality, it's impossible to prove there's no shadow system recording who voted for what. In paper elections I pick my ballot and fold it so nobody can see what I vote for, the election officials register my vote as used and stamp it and then I put it in the ballot box. It's practically impossible to track which paper slip is mine beyond that point so barring hidden cameras in the booth my anonymity is now secure. With postal votes the votes go in a sealed envelope wrapped in another envelope with the voter card, they open the outer envelope and register the vote and put the sealed votes in a ballot box. Nobody is supposed to see your individual, identified vote. Of course anyone who gets hold of it can tear up both envelopes to see what you voted for, but there's one-time seals and stamps to prevent it happening covertly so it's very hard to do in scale.

With e-voting, you really just have to trust the system that it won't keep a secret record of the votes somewhere. You can wrap it in as much techno-babble as you want but if you just keep all the information and don't throw any away you can map voters to votes. Open source is no magic bullet that makes sure there's no root kit or secret backdoor or screen grabber or snooping hypervisor or system sniffing the network traffic using the voting machine's private keys. With paper voting you can pretty much prove that information goes away through the ballot box process, with e-voting you simply can't. You really think the NSA can't rig an e-voting machine so it records your vote and nobody would detect it? Then I've got a bridge to sell you.

2. Integrity, since you can't prove a particular vote was cast a particular way - and for good reason - the whole system relies on the integrity of the ballot box. The initial state (empty), the inputs (votes being put in) and output (emptied and counted) is closely guarded to see no funny business is happening. You can't guard a memory location, nor could you guarantee the votes in transit. If you got 50 people voting Democrat and 50 voting Republican nobody will realize if the vote came out 51-49 because someone decided to flip a bit or adjust a counter. You can make all sorts of theoretical proofs that the value won't change but they all rely on the assumption that the system won't be tampered with. Which is a pretty bad idea, when you're trying to assess how hard it'd be to tamper with it.

All you need to do is have some sort of switch to make sure it only does that during real elections and not testing. And it doesn't have to be a huge number of votes to matter, if you did that people would start to question why there's such a difference between the polls and elections anyway. Being able to throw swing votes is huge particularly in first past the post systems like the US, for example you could easily have swung the Bush/Gore race in Florida. Here in Europe the limit for representation in parliament is huge, in my country 4,01% and 3,99% is a world of difference and being able to knock one out could totally shift the balance of power between the blocks. Voting fraud doesn't have to be a third world problem with cheesy dictators and despots, there's plenty money and power involved to make it plausible in free and democratic countries too.

That depends on what you mean by a "free" market, which is even more complicated than the "free as in speech or free as in beer" of software. One meaning is as the opposite to a controlled market - one where participants and/or prices are regulated and you don't have a natural supply and demand. Obviously the car industry doesn't have that (but it did in the past, like the development of the Volkswagen in Germany), so in that sense it's free.

A second idea of a free market is a functional, competitive market where there are realistic choices and practically possibilities for new entrants to enter the market. The first definition doesn't exclude monopolies, oligarchies, collusion and cartels, dumping, price discrimination, exclusivity deals, IPR (imaginary property rights) lockout or any other number of anti-competitive behaviors.

A third idea of a free market is being as close as possible to perfect competition, a mostly unreachable ideal where you have cutthroat competition that'll constantly underbid each other until they sell at marginal cost and no profit is made. Lowering barriers to entry might be one way of trying to "lube" the market into functioning smoother, or you could for example require stores to show prices per kilo/liter to improve price transparency.

A "pseudo-autonomous" car will probably never fail the basic operations on a road with regular markings and road signs, do everything by the book and pay full attention all around it all the time and it'll never panic, fumble or road rage. I think it will very quickly lull you into a false security where you're wondering why exactly you're babysitting this car because it's driving far more consistent and correct than you would.

The problem is when something unexpected happens and the car fails to recognize it or do something reasonable - that's a very fuzzy definition but everybody who's programmed computer software knows what I mean, no matter how many sanity checks and errors and exceptions you catch something unexpected happens and the software tends to fail spectacularly. I expect that at this point the "driver" will be totally blindsided and useless.

FTFY

It's not low level if it's in your own backyard.

Fast RAM is mainly important for graphics. AMD has a more powerful IGP, the Intel equivalent performs worse and so requires less. That is why Intel went with embedded DRAM on their best IGPs (brand name "Intel Iris Pro Graphics 5200"), though none of these are retail chips but only for laptops and AIOs. Personally I'm of the opinion that either you don't care about the GPU at all and it doesn't matter, or you should care enough to get a decent graphics card. Putting a CPU+GPU on a 65W power budget won't ever be great unless you want to play Dota 2.

The Romans managed 206 years in their "pax romana", it's not exactly proof MAD is working or everlasting. What we do know is that there's an awfully big boom when it doesn't work.

Enough to win if everyone else sees it as a madman's weapon that should be neutralized before they go all Hitler on us? Because when you pop outside that little bubble called global thermonuclear war everyone else who talked about killing hundreds of millions of civilians would be considered a genocidal lunatic. Could a rouge nuclear nation be stopped conventionally? How quickly could a global alliance against you gain nukes again? Will nukes get through rocket shields? How sure are they nobody else also kept some?

Don't forget that the "nuclear club" has a pretty solid double standard where they perfectly legitimize having their own nukes and last I checked the official NATO and Russian policy is that they can respond to any attack, conventional or nuclear with nuclear force while they strongly work for non-proliferation to prevent others from having the same weapons at their disposal. They trust it so much they very strongly don't want anyone else to join the "MAD club", why do you think that is? Because they know the whole thing is fickle as hell and someone might end up pushing the button.

Not unfeasible at all, unless they need actual identites. For example here in Norway all phone numbers must have an owner identified with our version of an SSN, even unlisted and prepaid numbers. So an easy way to have an "id" is to send a one time code to the cell during registration. That account is now linked to my phone number which links to my id. If they're hacked, all they have is phone numbers. Many discussion boards already do that to reduce spam and make bans more effective

I'd call a motherboard replacement for all essential purposes a new build. You need to fasten it to the case and all those annoying little case cables (power/reset/LEDs etc.), add CPU, RAM, power cables, all extension cards, hard drives cables and so on again so you're pretty much doing all the work just in the same case with the same parts. The rest I'd call upgrades.

Once we're stepping out of the realm of advanced cruise control and into active driving, it will clash even if they don't want to take responsibility. "I didn't expect my car to make the turn and fail to yield, you can't expect me to undo every mistake" "I saw it coming and could brake down, but my car didn't realize and speeded up and caused the accident" "I tried to hit the ditch and avoid those school kids but my car refused to go off the road, running them over."

And once you've seen the computer do a maneuver 99 times you'll assume it will the 100th too, even if it's got some kind of sensor glitch meaning that no it won't. It's one thing to see a situation in front of you and slam the brakes in a duel with the computer, but then you'd have to co-drive all the time. It's another thing entirely to see a situation in front of you, wait a few moments, realize oh shit the computer isn't going to do anything then hit the brakes.

And one thing that's important to remember is that accidents are generally not legally punishable, the driving must be negligent or reckless for that and being surprised and acting panicked is legal for a human driver. If the car is going the posted limit, obeying traffic regulations and hits the brakes it may meet the legal minimum even if there will be an accident and the result might be sub-optimal, unless we hold autonomous cars to a higher standard.

As the backup driver I'm certainly only human, my reaction could certainly be surprised and panicked. To roll that liability past the car and onto me there must have been some rather damn obvious reason why I had to intervene. It would have to be reckless or negligent of me to think the car can handle it better than me. If it ever got to court I'd argue that's just not true, in perfect hindsight maybe it was a poor split-second judgement but that's not a crime.

Or the TL;DR version: I doubt you'll ever be held legally liable for not taking over control, that you might or possibly should have yes but not that it was reckless or negligent not to. So in practice I think distracted driving will be legal, if not in theory.

No. The MagSafe connector was never designed to eliminate cable strain. It was designed to break away from the laptop should you trip over the cable, preventing the laptop from being damaged.

Cable strain can come from many sources. The cable can simply be bent in a funny angle repeatedly over a long period of time. A MagSafe style connector isn't going to protect against that. Yanking out the cable by gripping the cable and pulling (as opposed to holding the connector directly) also causes cable strain, and again -- MagSafe won't help you here (other than by ensuring you can't also accidentally yank the laptop with the cable).

Even the very ad you linked emphasizes this -- the whole point is that the "PC" is damaged -- not the PC's power cord. Apple has never claimed you can't damage the cable by straining it inappropriately, and MagSafe was never designed nor marketed to prevent such damage.

Yaz

I had never seen this done prior to a trip through the US earlier this year. Of course, it wouldn't accept my Canadian postal code (which is a six character mix of alternating letters and numbers). I had to cancel the transaction and go in and have the cashier run everything manually, and then go in after filling up to complete the transaction.

Not the end of the world, I suppose. I suspect we don't bother with doing that here in Canada due to a) stronger privacy laws and b) near global use of chip-and-pin for credit cards. At the time, my natural first thoughts were "why on EARTH would you need to even ask me that???". Now I know why, and will know better the next time I'm down that way.

Yaz