For the conference? If you only go for the women, then you should visit other venues which are better suited for staring at women.

This is totally true. No human ever was able to make a moral determination and act on it in an accident situation. Beside the fact. The pedestrian and the family in the car is quite simple. The family is protected by their car the pedestrian is not. It would be a different thing between one or a group of pedestrians. Most humans would freeze and hit who ever comes first. End of story. The car could try to reduce victims.

The thing is quite simple. They have tested such cars in Germany. Therefore, it is possible to do so. They can also test their shiny new thing in German traffic, as long as a human back up is sitting in the car. And testing it in a German or other European inner city should be challenging enough for now. However, they want to show how innovative they are and not get surprised by the Japanese again, as it was with the hybrid. So actually this is mostly advertisement.

First, this is outright cruel to say that. Second, this is only fear mongering of the car developers. They could test their cars in the US without any trouble and they have done the same in Germany. Yes they want to be allowed to put them on the road right now to show technology leadership, once, as they have been embarrassed by Japanese car manufacturers over the hybrid thing.

Humans are unable to make moral decisions in a few miliseconds. They would either freeze for a least one second and hit the next car or pedestrian depending on which comes first. If they have more time, they would try to avoid collision with the human and hit the car, because you cannot really see other people in there and you do not know how many persons are in there. Also people in the car are better protected. So the safest thing is hit the car. But beside that people know when approaching an truck trailer and they cannot stop, they should aim for the wheels and not the section in the middle. However, most people are unable to implement that so why should be cars be able to do these things?

Most media corporations are already useless sources of information. I cannot see any change in going into FB.

It is still a valid question, even though anecdotes are not a good source for quantitative measurement. The question is, who uses FB and to what extend? Many small shops, little labels, projects have FB accounts to promote themselves. However, I do not know how many of these 1.3 billion users fall in that category. xxxJonBoyxxx assumes that a large group of people in there are soccer mums. While this is a terrible US centric view of the world and does not apply to many other parts of the world with Internet, it could be true that they are a large group of users in the US. Anyway, I could not find good data on the topic so for now nothing more to do.

Great idea. Remote crash the plane switch. We do not want those. It would be actually a total overreaction on that particular topic. One incident and we want to fix the issue with more technology which will result in new possible scenarios to destroy a plane. It would be much better to find out how pilots can be supported in a way that such incidents can be prevented. However, we do not know why the pilot did it. They will try to find that out now. Give the police time so they can do their job.

It might be scary in the moment you think about it, but after some consideration and with a cool head you will realize that life is not safe. There are numerous thing which can happen to you all day. You could be overrun by one of those car drivers who hit people out of stupidity, heart attack, emotional distress etc. you may eat the wrong sushi (or other food), you might slip on a banana. On the basis of personal risk, any of those causes are more likely to happen than crazy pilot or terrorist attack.

BTW: I am not following this accident on TV. I found in interesting and disturbing that, as you describe, they showed such parts of the recording in TV. It does not help the families and it will not help to perform a calm analysis of the incident.

They sat already at the table with the defense guys. That law is the best they could haggle out. In democracy, you only can fix such things if you are able to alert the public to the topic. Scientist tried, but failed on that. So what they are now stating it the obvious. People who do not like that law will leave.

What about the EU? Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Poland, France, Italy? There are a couple of countries who look for talented scientist.

Instead of making their homework politicians try to control knowledge. Beside the fact that this ever backfired in history, it is also stupid in terms of the economy. Europe will rather sooner then later reduce its demand on coal and China is also doing it. Other natural resources are also limited and will not support the country for ever. You could see what happens to a country which has a ideological closed view of the world if you look at Venezuela. While it is important to give the poor schools and food, they messed it up, as they are totally oil dependent. In Australia this could go the same way, if the scientific community is frightened and leaves the country. By the way what do they think they can do about those Chinese studying in Australia, are their no longer allowed to take their heads with them?

I've heard those people in charge in AUS are Christians. Well recently, a British cleric stated that it is immoral to reject the gift of knowledge http://www.theguardian.com/env... and that is exactly that what they are doing.

Lets go to Europe.

In Europe we have great social security and we do not fight science (that much). Beside the Torys in the UK, we will not hunt you for your research. We have all kinds of weather and our food is much better. Ah yes, the content of your doctoral thesis belongs to you. Do you really need another reason to leave?

Someone should show time MacGyver. They will limit access to toilet paper, knifes etc.

There are different levels of stupidity. And it stretches out in different directions. For example, in Germany it is complicated to have public wi-fi and they had create a law similar to the UK as a web black list to stop child porn. However, the latter was never applied, as the public outraged and they dropped it with a new law. Presently, they try to do fix the first issue too. However, media industry is very much in it, so it might take some time until it gets away.