Keep in mind that the victims here are journalists... Maybe the computer system didn't register them as human beings.

Aw, did someone publish something less than flattering about your favorite demagogue again?

The reporting on this is very muddled, but at least one article says that the car was not in "self-parking" mode, so the pedestrian detection would not have been active even if this car had it.

So does this mean Volvo sells a configuration that 1) has a computer control the car in small, enclosed spaces and 2) doesn't hae said computer look for obstacles, and specifically not humans?

This ends a situation in which two companies that would otherwise have been competitive bidders decided that it would cost them less to be a monopoly, and created their own cartel. Since they were a sole provider, they persuaded the government to pay them a Billion dollars a year simply so that they would retain the capability to manufacture rockets to government requirements.

Yes, there will be at least that Billion in savings and SpaceX so far seems more than competitive with the prices United Launch Alliance was charging. There will be other bidders eventually, as well.

Someone used a hammer to drive a screw. We should consider using more useful tools for the problem at hand.

Meetings can be made efficient. My meetings usually are. I invite people for their topic to the correct minute. Yes, minute. Give or take 5, but it's patently USELESS to have someone sit in a meeting for an hour if all the matters to him is about 10 minutes thereof. I don't need the design crew to discuss security matters, even though I do need them in the meeting in general. The meeting has an agenda and it has a time slice for every topic to be discussed. If you think you need more time, tell me in advance, but during the meeting, you will have your time slice and what you cannot get done in that slice will either have to wait 'til the next meeting or you will have to discuss it outside.

It took a few meetings for people to get a hang of it and it was a VERY fierce uphill battle (and I'm glad I had a lot of support from higher up or it would never have had a chance to fly), but now we get more done in a single 45 minute meeting than we used to do in a 4+ hour meeting. Yes, that also means that people have to come prepared and that they have to be PRECISELY on time. But their benefit is that instead of sitting around for hours and staring holes into the wall 'cause things are being discussed that are of no interest to them they come to the meeting, can talk about their topics with everyone they need and be gone again within less than 15 minutes.

Plus I now need much smaller meeting rooms since few people are going to be around during the whole meeting.

What? No graphics? No vanishing effect? How 90s!

In the average ITSM it should be good enough for a B rating, and that's usually good enough, most other departments struggle to get to a B anyway, so we needn't overdo it. Hammer away!

But then we'd notice that about 90% of the managers are useless. And please consider that most of them can't do anything else than create Power Point slides, you can't even retrain them, they ARE already at the bottom of the usefulness ladder. What would they do, especially in this economy?

Won't someone PLEASE think of the useless?

I have a tool that's way better than PP at creating interesting, topical and informative slides. It's called "sharpie". It does need some skill to use it, though.

That must be the pinnacle of the art form of how to waste time while looking productive. You get to waste time hearing how to waste time. But how to waste time more efficiently!

As long as I may take my laptop to the presentation so I can get some work done while the markedroid, manager or other useless waste of oxygen is causing some pleasant background noise, I don't mind meetings that much. It's just like working in the office just with a different kind of background noise.

Consultant: Ok, engineers, what makes you unproductive?
Engineers (unisono): MEETINGS!
Consultant: Great, we have a start. Let's all sit down together and discuss the matter!

Their zeal to push their bullshit in a vain attempt to still appear relevant. Kinda like dinosaurs in a tar pit... how fitting.

Maybe someone should tell them that nobody outside the US even remotely takes that "controversy" serious? I do not know a single politician outside the US who would think that even remotely considering pushing an agenda as harebrained as creationism is anything but political suicide. Hell, even our ultra-conservatives would not even touch that shit with a 10 foot pole, knowing that they'd be looked at like they just claimed the tooth fairy existed.

I'm not sure that logic plays through. Frankly, for Microsoft, the real problem is that damned few people really even consider Microsoft mobile products at all. They're a niche player, competing with BlackBerry for who will end up pushed right out of the market.

Imagine you're Microsoft, you're faced with the possibility that you will never, even if you heavily subsidized a mobile Windows product line, be able to make any significant headway into the iOS-Android hegemony. What would you do? If it was me, I'd quietly admit that I'm never going to be able to dominate mobile platforms the way I do desktops and portable computers, and I'd leverage what I had by opening up my software to more platforms.

This isn't even a revolutionary idea for Microsoft. They once owned their own *nix platform; Xenix. Windows NT itself was designed a hardware abstraction layer so it could be ported to multiple hardware platforms. But somewhere along the line Microsoft and the x86 computer manufacturers welded themselves together. I can't say it was a bad decision, as it made Microsoft and Intel absolute shitloads of money for a quarter century, but at the same time it seems to have frozen Microsoft in place. It became a one-trick pony, only able to envision itself in a world of Backoffice apps and OEM licensing. Now it's got to be nimble again, and as it has already effectively ceded a large portion of the computing products out there to Apple and Google, it's got to make the best it can with what it has.