Yeah, the more I think about it, the more they want to get rid of regulations for corporations. We, the little people, still will be heavily regulated for their benefit.

I'm glad it's at least difficult. I'm still disappointed that Net Neutrality is facing such opposition. I guess it's cheaper to kill Net Neutrality by buying senators than to actually improve the infrastructure and give people more bandwidth and lower latency.

Without net neutrality, would corporations be able to stop the underground p2p separate internet called Freenet? Would they be able to do anything about encrypted p2p communications? If so, they're just ruining legitimate and innovative business ventures like Hulu.com, which would ironically drive many people to use p2p to watch those shows. Unless they can kill p2p too. Maybe we should operate under the assumption that freedom of speech on the internet is doomed and focus on decentralized tools like Freenet that are hard if not impossible to stymie.

The last thing we want is governments deciding what is and isn't "contrary to public good" and therefore should be censored. Freedom of speech is far too valuable to allow any "extremist" to come along, say some nasty things, and have us lose our civil rights. Ahmadinejad exclaimed that they curtail access to porn because it harms society. Once government starts making these calls, these rights will never be granted again until we colonize mars and say "fuck you" to earth's governments.

What about kids? If a parent does not want his kid to go through the naked-scanner, will the parent then be forced to watch his kid be groped? They grab on to the buttocks now and go between the legs until they feel "resistance" aka testicles.

Supply and demand is fine. These people are greasing up the wheels of commerce. The real question is why aren't bookstores doing this?

Don't forget the elderly and people with severe disabilities. Someone I care about has a disability and after a LONG LONG time, she is finally about to get a $127,000 car that she can drive herself. Cars for people with more severe disabilities are extremely expensive, but obviously necessary for jobs, and just to enjoy life in general. This is a real problem for the most vulnerable in our society that can be solved with autonomous vehicles.

It is if you have musculary dsytrophy. Besides, robotics research will definitely help society in general in the future. Think big picture.

I am no expert on the matter, but I was under the impression that chess is a problem that would benefit tremendously from quantum computer computations. I've read many sources online that claim this is the case, though none are academic papers. The staggering number of computations does not necessarily phase me because of how quantum computers work. Such staggering computations are more of a problem for classical computers.

Well, whether the technology will arrive may or may not be hype. I don't know. However, once and if it arrives, they will be able to do these things. That part, at least, is not hype.

Quantum computers will bring an end to the competitiveness of AI vs Human chess games. They will be able to completely solve the game, meaning that they can produce a series of moves that will guarantee a win (or tie if the human player plays perfectly) from any position on the board. On the other hand, we will leap frog centuries of moore's law in bioinformatics algorithms. Goodbye protein folding problem!

150K is just way too high for people to afford. People who use wheelchairs don't represent a significant market force. Traditional capitalism will burn these people (see iBot). There needs to be a huge government investment in technology similar to this. Applying Laissez-Faire to this community is fucking cruel. Also, how much of the 150k is for parts? How many hours go into making one of these devices? What you're going to end up with is a lot of people who use wheelchairs are going to want one of these devices but are going to be SOL. We need one of these devices to cost no more than the typical car. Also, something about the video didn't makes sense. I suspect some not-so-clever marketing. People who use wheelchairs move the towels down to where they can reach them. If he uses this thing to fetch a towel, he has to get up in the morning and get into his wheelchair, transfer to REX, fetch the towel, transfer back into his wheelchair, and transfer into the shower. Why not just move the towels low enough to reach and save yourself a lot of time?

Great point, but there is technology out there that allows driving on the road with advanced machine learning techniques interpreting video from multiple cameras (including infra-red) that see things even we humans can not see to avoid accidents. I would like to see some of these devices make it to market.

Now, don't get me wrong because I love that Windows has some competition. Still, I can't shake the feeling that we look the other way too much when Apple does some evil authoritarian tactic to boost its sells. I for one, will vote with my wallet in the future and avoid the iPhone.

Something I find extremely frustrating when I read articles like this is why the delay in bringing products like this to market? If this car makes it up the peek and it is reproducible with a better chance of success than a human driver, and the same can be shown for regular driving conditions, then why isn't it being sold to people? Many older individuals who can no longer drive, or those with severe disabilities would benefit TREMENDOUSLY from this technology. Not to mention people like me who just want to reduce the probability of accidents on the road. I trust a highly optimized computer to be much more accurate at doing repetitive tasks like driving than I would a human in the same way that I trust the average computer to crunch numbers more than the average human.