Which us why self driving cars are better for all road users.... They won't drive at triple the speed limit.

I don't get why people think they wouldn't do that

In fact, in a world of self driving cars, I don't see why we would need a speed limit. The car can be trusted to drive within its own limits..

And if your dad had a self driving car, your brother could have helped your dad to the car and told the car to drive to the hospital.

and his brother could have told the car that it was an emergency (destination: emergency unit of hospital) and the car could have decided to drive at its maximum speed, broadcasting to other vehicles that it was doing so.

A journey such as this might attract some official attention, but assuming that the hospital corroborates the story of an emergency, then I don't see why there would be any charges..

This is not a lifestyle I want to live. I can't imagine a future population truly being happy with this either.

I can imagine being very happy that I don't have to own a car, or drive it around.
I can imagine that I will be very happy to just summon a car and tell it where I want to go, to be taken there quickly and dropped off and being able to walk away, not have to worry about parking that car, or maintaining it.
I can imagine being very happy that when I want to use my bicycle instead, I won't be cut up because some ignorant driver doesn't think I ought to be on the road.
I can imagine being very happy that when I want to walk somewhere I can cross the roadway safely wherever and whenever I want because the cars will flow around me.
I can imagine being very happy that when I get over the age that it is really safe for me to drive, I will still be able to get around just as well as I always have been able to.
I can imagine that a future population would think it strange that people like you wanted them to suffer with traffic jams and having to sit focused and barely moving while driving, and being penalised for letting their attention wander at the wrong time.

Am still shocked at this part... "Biologists have found them at altitudes of up to 4 km"

Well, life gets around it seems. Perhaps you would be interested to hear that I have seen small flying insects several hundred miles out at sea (that didn't seem desperate to land, on my small yacht).. also crabs out there, swimming on the surface, and the water was 2-3 miles deep. I don't know how they get there; presumably they don't swim up from the bottom.

People don't get it as children when it is a mild disease that has a death rate similar to riding a bus to school or high school football

The problem with that is, that the parents of the child who died now think the risk was too high.. In fact, oglaf is generally NSFW but this weeks comic is strangely pertinent..

25kW is a Fiat Punto engine - and here in London, an average house boiler thermal output. We have piped gas to every home in the UK

There are vast areas of the country that do not have piped gas. London is but a small corner!

Honest question, who uses NetBSD?

Well I do, and moreover I personally have written ~30 thousand lines of code for NetBSD which has been used in other OS projects (the other BSDs, and OpenSolaris at least - see Bluetooth code) in varying amounts, and I am certainly not the only one to have had code re-used. The NetBSD libc is being used for Android now, I believe.

Also, many companies do use it, though they don't always advertise that fact.

Seriously, after 25 years in the business I've never seen or heard about anyone using NetBSD in production ever.

The licence is liberal, and companies are not obligated to mention their usage.

They do this by asking for the receipt. They then look for items listed on the receipt, and verify those items are in the shopping basket. After a couple of checks to make sure different items listed on the receipt are in your basket, they wish you a good day and wave you on.

They are not checking you, they are checking that the checkout staff are not in collusion with thieves.. I worked in a large DIY store once, and their stated theory was that 90% of the thieves were customers but that 90% of the value stolen was staff, as the staff had vastly more opportunity.. so to keep the shrinkage down, the security watched the staff.

(they are a convicted monopolist after all)

I'm not sure that being a monopolist is any kind of crime, so being convicted of such a thing does not seem possible? However, I have seen such language here before and I would like to emphasize that they were convicted of being monopoly abusers, as in.. they abused their fully legal monopoly position. I feel that there are different possible PR angles around these terms, and it is important that we do not encourage that.

convicted monopolist: the implication can be promoted that its not really their fault that they are so popular that everybody uses their products and the EU really is unfair to penalize them because of that.

convicted monopoly abuser: this is much more difficult to weasel out of, as it has the negative word abuser in the phrase.

Personally, I prefer the latter phrase as it is more descriptive and correct, and I feel it is important to label such a company as this correctly, so that other people who would otherwise not know the details, are not as able to be misled..

Consider Google Maps reviews on restaurants. As a consumer I have found them highly valuable in avoiding restaurants that are poorly run and provide substandard food.

If you avoid them, based on bad reviews you found on the internet.. how do you know if the review is correct?

40kts sounds like a lot until you compare it to the speed at which a storm can move.

ORLY? Storm systems don't generally move that fast. The wind speed during a hurricane vastly exceeds that (Sandy was only a cat 2, with max sustained wind speeds of 110mph according to wikipedia, less than that when it hit the USA) but the storm itself does not move very fast, it will often dawdle around and my recollection is that it would be a pretty fast system to be doing over 30kts.. Hence my assertion that a fast ship with no reason to be in the area can (and does) get the hell out of the projected track.

We're talking about oceangoing and you want to talk about people tooling around a bathtub.

No, we are talking about a fancy private yacht built for Steve Jobs. Sure, it can go into the ocean but I am arguing that you can't compare it to a commercial vessel as it never will need to be in the kind of heavy weather that Runaway1956 writes of because a) it will not go where heavy weather is (far North, or far South) or b) it is fast enough to avoid the, comparitively slow moving and localised, heavy weather that occurs in more moderate areas.

Yes, more or less my point exactly...

Bounty

what were they doing out there in the face of a storm? They thought the ship would be safer at sea but they sure as hell weren't capable of running away from the storm track at 40kts. Even at 25kts, they could have been in florida the day before, or they could have gone the other way and been halfway to europe.

Titanic

They were on a scheduled crossing with beancounters in control (not in command) and the captain was all 'full steam ahead' when icebergs had been reported.. and note that RADAR had not yet been invented nor did he have access to satellite imagery

Fitz

They were out on the job going somewhere because they had to get there, in the worst storm the captain had ever seen! leisure superyachts have a different lifestyle, they don't do that.

Only a fool would go to sea aboard a vessel that isn't seaworthy.

Except that in these modern times, there are plenty of leisure vessels that are seaworthy for the conditions they are used in but not capable of withstanding a hurricane. Is every person who rows across a calm bay on a summer day a fool, because they didn't have a survival suit and an EPIRB on board? Every sailing boat does not need to be equipped for Cape Horn, when they are only going to Catalina Island for the weekend..

A ship? Fek - unless they run the damned thing aground first, it WILL have to weather a storm someday.

You speak of storms, sir, yet you also speak of destroyers.. note that the military ships you speak of will be standing on station, or going places that are a bit out of the way for various reasons (training perhaps, to ensure that the crew can take the worst of the weather when they need to)

But perhaps you don't have a grasp of the leisure aspect especially of the superyacht set? Those boats, like warships, can also travel at 40kts and have access to satellite images, wave height data and very good weather forecasting. They don't need to be anywhere near bad weather and indeed they usually run away when a violent storm approaches. They don't need to demonstrate how tough they are, and the people who own them really just like to lounge around in calm conditions in the sun. They can cross oceans in the calmest conditions, dodging around the worst weather and they usually do. The focus of design of such a yacht is not to endure terrible weather while carrying goods halfway around the world, nor to blockade a port in all weathers. The focus is that the owner is noticed, and envied for their wealth. That this boat is ugly is neither here nor there, it was custom built for 137 MILLION dollars and everybody knows it. The point was that people would look and say Oooh, that belongs to Steve Jobs, I can only dream I could be rich like him.

..but ultimately, how well does this help to get the next invoice paid on time, do you have to do the same every time?

In the UK at least, there is an EU Directive "2000/35/EC late payment scheme" in force which sets out a standard for business/business transactions.. at least you can charge interest on the outstanding invoices, not sure if that helps (as IIRC it is bank base rate plus 8%, meaning you can charge 8.5% after 30 days)

As far as I can tell there are like 4 datapoints available atm. Whoopdiedoo.

I thought that too since there is nothing showing in my town, but the wikipedia page says the project was started in 2005 and there should be a lot more than that..

By early 2011 the Wikispeedia database contained 28 million speed limit entries

Perhaps their database is slashdotted, or the website is just broken? For some reason the map API is slightly different from the normal google-map one..