Indeed, any car autopilot that only took into account other smart cars would be a horrible disaster waiting to happen. Obviously.

The only way cars could use this sort of communication is as mistrusted advice, which it could use to strengthen it's own observations. The same way you treat another car's turn signals, basically.

They have that now. The collision detection system is the human who's driving. You can hack it by driving up beside them, and then pulling abruptly towards them. They're very likely to swerve right off the road!

The implicit question here is: you can already be a vicious asshole and try to kill people, but you don't. Why would you do so if their car happened to be computer-driven?

Also, frankly, give the computer driver a few generations, and it's responses will probably be much safer and more reasonable than a panicky human driver.

Remote hacking and viruses are a potential problem; preferably the car's autopilot will be entirely isolated from any network connection. You could still walk up, stick an ethernet plug in, bypass the security system, and upload malicious code. Or, you could cut the breaks.

Well, for a start, you could redesign the service so it's not just a mini-soapbox for each user...

I see his point, Twitter is designed in such a way that everybody does these little one-way bursts, and the only way to rise above the crowd and gain followers is to be more 'interesting' than everybody else, which will often take the form of being noisier, more outrageous, more controversial, more extreme.

OTOH, that seems to be what people want. I mean, there's already alternatives in existence. I'm talking to you in one now. People want a soapbox.

I think it helps that you don't have to think too hard about a tweet. Reading through a list of tweets every now and then is a lot less mentally taxing than catching up on a mailing list conversation.

There's certainly room for plenty more social network experimentation. The way Twitter and Facebook are designed shapes the conversation. What if you added common forums to Facebook? What if you just doubled the message size in Twitter? It would certainly change the way people used them.

Boy, it sure would be nice to have a free, open-source, distributed social network, so people could play with things like this more, huh?

I disagree. I suppose it depends why you're playing. If it's a 3D version of Pac-Man or whatever, and you're just playing for the action, then sure, you don't want any moral ambiguity thrown in. But that gets boring fast, to me at least.

I'm playing Red Dead Redemption these days, and there are a lot of moments where you're riding across the prairie and come across a shootout. What's going on? Should you intervene? Is it lawmen chasing a bandit? Bandits attacking a family? Just gangsters having a shootout? You have to sneak up and survey the situation, and try to figure out what the hell is going on. Moments like that make the game for me, I find them thrilling. Much more, actually, than the scripted moral conundrums you find in 'deep' games, which tend to be about 1.5D. Do you want to a) be a paragon of virtue or b) be a complete jerk? In these random encounters, all of a sudden you've got a whole platter of options. Try to figure out what's going on, and join the 'good guys'? Or join the bandits? Wait until it's over, finish off the survivors, and grab all the loot? Or, shrug and head in the opposite direction, since it's none of your business? The last one is interesting, 'cause it's easy, it's probably what most people would do in real life...and it flies right in the face of normal game logic, where of course you must get involved. It's kinda thrilling to have real decisions to make in a game.

Haha, neat, you can use that argument against anybody who ever complains about you, since your job is to make sure they have decent tools. If they complain, they must be incompetent, since they are ipso facto complaining about tools!

But seriously, I understand your POV, but I identify more with the OP. Maybe the healthcare world is different, but I've seen more cases where the problem is some useless bunch of MCSEs running a patched-together network, not really sure how it works, and afraid to touch a thing (or open a port) lest it all come crashing down. Invariably, they call everybody else incompetent and a security risk.

Whoops, kid, it looks like you're growing up! You're getting too big for your clothes. Don't worry, though, it's nothing a little surgery can't fix.

Most of the people who use PHP and SQL and python don't go around calling themselves computer scientists, in my experience. Graduate students and professors in comp sci are not making webpages and app games.. Heck, many of [the professors] couldn't; some haven't touched an actual computer in years. Many could probably more accurately be called mathematicians than scientists, if there's a difference. They deal with the theoretical bounds of computation, data storage and compression, encryption, solving or reducing the complexity of hard problems, inventigating the NP-complete problem, etc, etc.

IOW, what you're doing is not like pointing out that there's a difference between nuclear engineering/scientist, it's more like saying that nuclear science doesn't exist. When you get down to it, after all, it's all just banging atoms around with accelerators, you know.

To be fair, a bit of schizophrenia and the associated hypocracy is kind of a necessary side effect of democratic government. ~400 million voters and hundreds of elected politicians cannot exactly speak and act with one will. China has the luxury of a small, static group presenting a united front to the world. Even there that's slowly breaking down.

No, actually, the US imprisons a lot of people, relative to any other non-totalitarian country. That includes China.

Relative to their population, China does not execute anywhere close to that many people. That'd be a significant percent of their population.

Heh, well, that doesn't make them hypocritical, though. Hypocracy is saying one thing and doing another. China openly says they put stability and order over personal freedom, and that they censor the Internet and arrest troublemakers.

The US says it's the land of the free, and they put personal freedom above all, and then they arrest or censor troublemakers anyway, all while berating China for doing the same (on, I'll grant you, a whole different scale).

So they have every right to call the US hypocritical, and they're kinda right, technically.

You might be right. I suspect it must be a bit higher, but probably not a lot. Well, and the difference would be made up of people who paid for the game, and then 'pirated' it anyway.

But, regardless, you're hassling your legitimate customers, to no avail. All it takes is one single cracked copy to become available, and the piracy rate will be exactly the same.

Arg, yes. DRM schemes are...annoying, but understandable in the short run.

But how many times have I gone back to play some classic game from my youth, only to be confronted with: "Please enter your serial number to continue"? I've moved five times since I bought this game, what are the chances I can find the original CD case/box/slip of paper/whatever that the serial was printed on?

Even more frustrating: my wife asks me to reinstall XP, and I have to scramble to find a valid serial. For a product I must have paid for 6 times over, but never really used.

In Vancouver (BC), we have walk buttons all over. If you don't press them, you don't get a walk light. But the lights are the same length, anyway.

So lots of people forget to press the button, and when the light goes green...they hesitate, then run back and push the button, and wait through this green light for the next one.

"When selling to users who want their devices to just work, we believe integrated will trump fragmented every time."

Yeah, just look at how well it worked for your personal computers...

Does anybody else notice all sorts of parallels between Apple vs. Google + Linux today, and Apple vs. IBM + Microsoft in the 80s and 90s? Including the hubris?

This is unbelievable! Next you're going to tell me that "3.9G wireless" doesn't mean anything, or that 9 out of 10 doctors don't recommend Crest, or that most items in an "up to 90% off!" sale are not in fact 90% off!

Sounds pretty paranoid to me. If we can't trust company advertisements for unbiased information, what can we trust?