Though with a bit of luck, that could actually lead to people not driving in conditions where they would be much better off staying put

And if luck goes against us, the inclement weather lands mid-day, and everyone has to get home from work, or is halfway home from work when the car throws up its hands, pulls over, and gives up.

Me, personally, I can generally avoid driving on snow days, but a lot of people simply don't have that luxury. Walmart and McDonalds and the rest of the service and retail industry don't close at the first sign of snow and they tend to be less than generous when staff claim difficulty getting to work.

All of these tests and such aren't being done so they can release an autonomous car tomorrow, its an ongoing process and will take time.

That's understood.

It "passed"?

Would your or I pass a drivers test if we couldn't handle weather, road construction, roundabouts, "specific turns", and had our mom in the back seat reaching over to take the controls whenever we weren't sure of ourselves? Of course not.

When it passes a drivers test that'll be a big day. But that test in 2012 was not that day. There's much to celebrate, and as you said its an ongoing research project. But it didn't pass a Nevada drivers test. So why say it did?

It did very well, impressively well, for an autonomous vehicle even... but its still well short of being issued a drivers license, which is what an actual pass of an actual test would imply.

its a research project and the media seems to have an agenda to make autonomous cars into the boogeyman

Because the hype machine says it passed a drivers test, leading to the inference that its ready to be let loose on the streets, when CLEARLY they are no where near ready in actuality.

ISIS is a splintercell that has been cut off of support from Al Queda. Al Qaeda has publicly stated this. It was born of members that were based out of Syria, Iran and Iraq

All true.

. I believe that if Saddam was still in power, that they would most likely be worse then they are now, because they Saddam regime would have politically aligned themselves with their cause,

Assuming it would have existed as a significant entity in the first place. Which it wouldn't have. It would have just been some minor radical splinter with low membership, and no real influence.

You used the phrase "born" when you described it. And that is an apt metaphor -- WE are one of its parents. We planted the seeds that enabled it to grow.

You cannot tell me that you believe that a random sheep farmer with no internet access has the capability of teaching himself how to build a IED or Suicide Vest.

Of course not. If we hadn't been there he'd still be farming sheep. And his sons would be learning to farm sheep instead of joining groups like ISIS.

The majority of civilian casualties happened outside of the primary conflict,

And they wouldn't have happened if we hadn't gone there. You can bleat they were not our "fault" all you like, and I agree we generally didn't go around killing civilians on purpose or anything like that. But the reality remains that our presence there provoked that response.

The infrastructure we destroyed meant they couldn't get their kids to the hospital when they were sick, or led to the water being undrinkable or the food spoiling leading to the spread of disease which culled the older and weaker. And the survivors? What do they do? The economy is screwed, they've lost loved ones... the government is a shambles, the police collapsed, local power groups are de facto in charge, they are angry and they need to blame someone. They are ripe for recruitment and radicalization. To strike back at another religious faction and America and anyone else that is proximate that isn't "them".

Often times our actions aren't to just protect the interests and Freedoms of just ourselves, but to help liberate the innocent from a tyrant as well

It doesn't matter how good our intentions wee, we manufacture groups like ISIS, and Al Qaeda with our so-called 'world police' activity.

They had no trouble failing me for not being able to navigate certain traffic situations correctly on my first drivers test. Had I said, well "I can't do that yet" that would not have resulted in a pass.

So the car failed. Let it fail. Its no big deal that it failed. Constructing an illegitmate pass for headlines just stirs pointless controversy.

This test shows that there's lots of good progress, but that's it.

As for driverless cars actually being ready ? No where near close.

Requiring the driver to be ready to jump in while in action is absurd to the point of not even considering it.

Stopping the car, and handing the controls over is still going to lead to tons of problems. Cars stopping at railway crossings and round abouts and then just sitting there jamming traffic... because the driver fell asleep 30 minutes ago. (And why SHOULDN'T the driver fall asleep -- he's tired, bored, and not doing anything... what do you expect will happen)

Until self driving cars reach the long term goal of being responsible for driving in basically anything a human is currently expected to cope with they can't rise to being more than a novelty, or some limited highway auto-pilot cruise control system.

Because even if it CAN usually handle the daily commute, if it can't handle it ALL THE TIME its a bad idea.

Today when there's snow in a city that doesn't get snow that often its a mess. And that's with mostly drivers who drive every day, know the route they are going like the back of their hand, know where the tricky / problematic spots are etc, and know know how their cars handle at least in normal conditions. And its a mess.

Now, lets substitute that with a city full of drivers who only drive 3 - 4 times a year, are completely out of practice, have no real experience with their car, and only have a general imprecise sense of the route they need to take -- and lets do that on a day the self driving cars collectively decided they can't handle the conditions.

That would be like me driving my grandmother around every day everywhere she needs to go, and then when the weather is at its worst... "Hey grams, yeah, I know you've only driven this car a handful of times yourself in the last 5 years, but your license is still valid, so how about you take the wheel today?". And doing that accross an entire city.

Yes, that will work out well.

As long as its "within a library" it sounds like fair use. Its a public good for libraries to be full of books, digital or otherwise. The more availability the better.

If someone wants to go to a library to read books there instead of buying or borrowing copies, I'm fine with that.

The publishers and authors may object to the small loss of revenue it entails, but its a good trade off for society as a whole.

It is best to be cautious of who we let into the door for federal service.

Yes, god forbid the federal service be representative of the people. It should only have a certain brand of dyed in the wool pro-government fanatics working for it.

No... the opposite is true. "Snowden" would never have happened if there had been more people like him in government. If more people were willing to question government, and step up when they saw something wrong, then the oversight committees, and internal audit processes would have actually been working properly. There would have been people he could have reported the issues to, and genuine internal investigation and audits would have happened with genuine results.

If it had been working properly Snowden's revelations wouldn't have happened because the level of abuse going on wouldn't have risen to that level in the first place.

Its important to keep actual spies out of sensitive government jobs. Its important to keep people with easily leveraged liabilities -- gambling problems, debt problems, etc out of sensitive government jobs. But a healthy distrust of government is just that HEALTHY.

One of the reasons government doesn't function well, is that it self selects people who are convinced it does. You can't fix what is broken if you only hire people are convinced nothing is wrong.

We desperately need to staff the government with people who have a healthy distrust of the very programs they run, who GENUINELY recognize the potential for abuse, and who are genuinely receptive to reports of abuse.

But those people are systematically turned away.

Maybe you should try hitting an Apple store instead of wherever you're shopping now, because even the *iPad* charger is only $19.00 when you buy it there. [1] (Of course, Apple's chargers will also output more 'juice' safely than most of the $2 chargers.

And the cable is sold separately for another $20. Plus taxes.

because for example a good pair of shoes will last much longer than a bad pair that you'll have to replace much sooner.

Thing is there is no correlation between quality and cost.

I've had $100 runners fall apart within months. I've had $2 runners bought at the chinese night market last 4 years. (I had a belt bought the same night for under a buck fall apart the first time I tried using it. But I have inexpensive belts from inexpensive stores that have been with me since high school and are still just fine.

Like you I'm willing to pay more for better. But as often as not I'm paying more for same.

I can buy a car charger online for $2. I can buy another charger online for $10 and its just as good as the OEM one. I can walk into a local cellular store and buy their 'store brand' charger for $35 and find out its the SAME charger as the $2 one. Or I can pay $50 and get an OEM charger from Samsung or Apple etc and its just as good as the $10 generic online one but with a brand name logo and smarter packaging.

So I have to pay 25 times as much to reliably get a few nickels worth of resisters and slightly higher grade plastic? Because anything less, and I'm risking counterfiet goods or horrifically inferior product... but the difference between quality and junk is less than a $1 worth of actual parts/cost.

OK, perhaps not a "warrant" but surely the US has some sort of "production order" where the court says "give us the records you have" http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/c... ? Perhaps they don't, or maybe that is only in civil cases during discovery.

As it stands, to my knowledge, one only has to turn over any physical records / devices.

However, if those records are encrypted, and the password committed to memory, the witness can invoke the 5th amendment, and exercise their right to remain silent, and refuse to disclose the password. Of course, its not settled, and orders to decrypt data have been issued by the courts and are being appealed... for example.

http://www.cnet.com/news/doj-w...

As for Canada - a production order is typically issued to a 3rd party custodian of documents -- e.g. bank records, phone records, etc. And if they are encrypted the 3rd party is required to decrypt them as part of producing them. But the 3rd party isn't the subject of the invetigation, production orders aren't aren't issued against the defendant directly, that I can tell.

That is, the police cannot hand ME an order demanding that I actively produce my own phone records for them. Nor do i think a production order would compel me to disclose the password to my own phone or laptop.

Logging capabilities may be ubiquitous, but logs that would be useful in a criminal case, much less so.

There is another article on slashdot today about compelling parolees to wear bracelets that can determine if they fired a gun by using accelerometers and analyzing that information.

I can imagine all manner of prosthesis that might contain accelerometers where analyzing the diagnostic logs could be used to as evidence that you were moving or at rest, what sort of activity you were engaged in (walking, running, shooting, climbing, jumping, whether you got into a fight, or fell into a pool, got knocked down, picked up something heavy, swung it, or threw it...)

once they get a warrant for the password,

One cannot 'get a warrant for the password', at least in civilized countries :)

If the logs are so vital to the operation of the device

They would be like the logs on your car. They are not vital to the operation. But they do make troubleshooting a lot easier.

there are going to be ways of getting at them that do not depend on a security system that the user can forget or misplace

If the user forgets or misplaces it, it can be reset, but the encrypted history would be lost.

and if they are not vital to the operation, then the security minded will remove or turn off that feature

The security-minded will not necessarily have that option. Can you turn off the ODBII logging on your car? Not easily. Its not a simple end-user operated switch you can flick. The average person is completely unable to. Sure its possible and people repogramming and modifying cars for racing etc can probably do it.

But that doesn't mean the average person can do it, just because they want to. And what if your car isn't something modders are in... or lets set aside cars, and recall that we're talking medical implants ... flashing custom firmware onto your prosthetics ... that's going to be WAY outside the average persons ability or comfort zone.

or the maker would not put it in in the first place.

If the patient reports a problem, diagnostic logs will be absolutely invaluable information. Its doubtful any one making sophisticated electronic/computerized prognostics isn't going to have logging capabilities.

You could definitely walk seamlessly, using the keyboard, in Ultima Underworld,

Wow, you are right. I only played it years ago, and didn't get that far. I remember using really clumsy mouse controls. Apparently UW uses szxc isntead of wasd, with w as run, and a/d as turn.

You could also run and swim,

Swimming wasn't really that interesting though, it was surface only. Making it little more than viewport elevation change, with a sound effect.

It had inclines and leaning walls, also something Doom lacked.

True.

Ultima Underworld was not a 2D maze. Look at the first screenshot in the wikipedia article for instance.

That screenshot looks no better than Doom's '2.5D', but I agree UW was actually doing more sophisticated rendering, since you could look up and down, and had angles etc.

But despite being technically more true 3D than Doom, the effect was less impressive, overall.

Doom, by restricting the view angle, was able skip or precalculate a ton of stuff, enabling it to deliver full screen action with a decent framerate. UW was confined to like 1/4 of the screen. Add to that the tricks Doom pulled with lighting and skyboxes and it was just a lot more impressive.

Perhaps a bigger element of it being a 'revolution' was that Doom ep1 was shareware, so everyone had it. And it was multiplayer. So it was installed in high school computer labs, and in offices etc.

We used to think there would be a small amount with planets and that we were really unique. Now, not so much.

I'm not sure we ever really believed that. Now we just have proof.

I think a lot of us expected extra solar planets to be common, and that even extra-terrestrial life will prove to be fairly common. But for me, at least, the open questions are how common higher life forms are, and whether 'sentience' is a common evolutionary solution... or relatively rare / unique...

Ok, lets take a slightly different approach.

Would you submit to the government mandating that you wear a camera and other monitoring equipment or have it implanted, provided that they need a warrant to read its contents?

Can you think of ANY negative implications of that? What are they? (Assume for the sake of the argument that the implantation process itself is simple, painless, and complication free.)

What's the difference between that and a disabled person requiring a prosthetic to be made whole?

The solution, by the way, is simple enough. Mandate that the prosthetics encrypt the monitoring data, and require a password from the owner to decrypt. That effectively shields the cyborg.

The problem is the consumer isn't in a position to demand this feature. And the vendor is unlikely to feel competitive pressures to provide it. So it won't come about unless we mandate it.

But only a small minded individual lumps all of the good people in with the bad.

Or all the bad with the good.

The purpose of my post was to contrast the perception of police and soldier. One is revered the other reviled, but they are in many respects much the same.

We badmouth the police all the time, but anyone says anything even slightly negative about a soldier, and people come out of the woodwork, to fall over themselves to thank them for their service.

That's all I intended to say. Its as much an attack on soldiers as it is a defense of the police. I really meant it as neither. I just find the contrast strange. Undeserved adulation heaped on soldiers... undeserved scorn heaped on police.

I sat on the side of the road in Basrah and shared a bag of Skittles with a young girl, 6-7 years old

How many more young girls were left orphans thanks to our presence there? By most scientific estimates, the civilian casualties of the Iraq war greatly exceeded the numbers of people ever killed by Saddam. Did we leave the country in better shape than we found it? Are fewer civilians dying of violence each year thanks to our actions there or has it gotten worse? ISIS is killing children and burying people alive... would ISIS be what it is today if we hadn't gone after Saddam?

Its not the soldiers fault. I don't blame them. They go where they are sent and do what they are told.

But don't try and tell me they are "fighting to defend my freedom from censorship" etc when we've sent them half way around the world to a country that never posed a real threat, whatsoever, even in the slightest to my freedom.

EVEN if Saddam had nuclear weapons, EVEN if he had the ability to reach the continental US, hell... EVEN if he'd actually managed detonate one and level an American city, and as bad as that would suck beyond words, EVEN THEN with a smoking crater on the continental US, he STILL would have posed little threat to America itself, its ideals, independence, or its governance.

Attacking Iraq, was so pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-emptive to any real threat that you might as well pay the soldiers to sit in a swamp slapping mosquitos; and tell yourself your preventing an arnageddon plague, and thereby protecting my freedom.

To those serving and served, I thank you for volunteering to that vocation, and for being willing to put your life on the line to defend our freedom. But at the same time, not every tour you actually are assigned is really in that capacity. Most aren't. They're political shows, protecting corporate money.

I sometimes wonder how you really reconcile the work you are so frequently tasked with doing with the actual job of defending the country that you signed up for. Or do you really deep down believe that every tour is about American freedom?

I'm not saying Doom wasn't revolutionary, but 3D wasn't the reason. And saying it wasn't remotely possible is easily disproved.

Yeah. It was. Doom came out at a time when most 3D was little more than wireframe (Flight Simulator, LHX Attack Chopper, etc ), or still renders. (Links Golf), or various first person in a plainly 2D maze (Wolf3D, Ultima Underworld, Might and Magic 3...)

Then Doom showed up, and it was a revolution.

The moving platforms, the stair cases (and not just staircases away, but to platforms within the larger room, there windows between rooms, lights and shadow effects and the capper: the skyboxes -- you could see outside throw skylights, windows, even outdoor courtyards... it all combined to make the illusion complete --- it was still really a 2D maze at its heart, but the illusion of being in a 3D world was literally jaw dropping at the time.

Ultima online was impressive in its own right, but it had NOTHING on Doom. UO was claustrophobic, and it was very "square". It was an advancement forward, but they just are not remotely in the same league. UO was also still an Ultima RPG at its heart; it was much slower paced, the 3d viewport was confined to a small pane instead of being nearly the full screen, and the movement controls were odious (mouse click driven) which did not immerse you in being there. So in UO you still sort of stepped through it room by room step by step- click by click. That's how it was designed.

Doom was big open spaces, with loops, and corners, and obstacles to hide behind. The controls put you there. And you could RUN.

Nothing else was comparable.