Cheap and ubiquitous Self Driving Cars means

This is actually an argument for private ownership.

If they're cheap and ubiquitous to have one for everyone who wants to go to work at 8:00 (and there will be a lot of people going to work at that time) then they'll be cheap enough that they will be kept in most garages.

The problem you have is that everyone wants to go to work at the same time, but in order for a taxi-like system to be efficient it needs not to have hundreds of vehicles idle for most of the day. Depreciation, insurance costs, maintenance, cleaning and other costs on a fleet will eventually make sure that in order to cope with peak demand, prices will rise and in so doing make private ownership more attractive.

Above this, humans generally dont like to share. So Martin the middle manager can afford his own car, he would rather pay the premium for it than risk getting the same car that Danny the drunkard was vomited in last night.

I expect it to survive an accidental drop.

I've never had a phone cover, they've all survived trips to the floor without shattering... then again I buy phones that are built properly.

Also, I tend to be a little bit careful with my things. I'd be lucky if I drop my phone every six months.

Seems you need to take your own advice.

You should know that the $14 billion is for all Samsung Electronics products, everything from TV's to speakers to DVD players to car audio. It also covers things like sports team sponsorships (local and national). Of that $14 billion, only $401 Million was spent on phone advertising, Apple spent $333 Million in the same period whilst Samsung sells more phones, more models and across more segments. So on a phone to advertising dollar ratio, Apple spends a lot more.

Beyond all this, your article that you clearly didn't read demonstrated that this paid off for Samsung. Sure they tried to get an inflammatory "Apple pleasing" headline in but utterly failed as the content proved that Samsung's splurge on advertising worked. Also that article is 2 years old. The data is from 2012.

Besides, the GP was talking about hype, not advertising dollars. Apple whips the fanboys, like yourself into a huge frenzy over almost anything. The fact you need to cling onto little things like advertising spending shows how detached from reality you are.

So you really should check your own facts before showing /. how wrong you are.

See my sig.

The insurance company wont know.

Either they wont be permitted to (in places where there are strong consumer protections) or you'll modify the car to always report it's in autonomous mode.

Besides this, fully autonomous cars are decades away from real use. Even the third or fourth gen autonomous cars will have the fully autonomous system restricted to specially modified limited access roads. Suburban streets will still have to be driven around manually.

The "self-driving car" is a pipe dream shared by people with no idea about the complexity of the task. It's going to become the "flying car" of the 2000's. In 2040 you'll be in your retirement village shouting "where's my self-driving car" and shaking your withered fist in the air.

The GP is from the UK or Europe where there are significant artificial hurdles to car ownership. MOT inspections cut down on cheap used cars, insurance for a novice driver is stupidly expensive, living in the centre of London parking space is at a premium and there's a daily congestion charge.

The insurance alone in the UK is enough to kill it. It's not unusual for the insurance on someone's first car to be more than the cost of their first car.

This.

There's nothing wrong with people who live in large cities with good public transport systems that already dont need cars... but what these people forget is their city is not the norm.

Above that, people want to own personal transport. Not everyone wants to sit on a bus or train with everyone else, certainly people wont want to wait 45 minutes for the next Johnny Cab to become available when they can own their own car. Private ownership of cars will not change significantly with autonomous cars (fully autonomous cars are still decades away) because the same motivation for owning private transport will not have changed.

That is, if the human and computer are doing exactly the same pre-programmed job at the same time.

The problem with autonomous cars is that you cant pre-program every single scenario so it has to be capable of making decisions on the fly with limited information... that is where the human has a massive advantage over computers. When your laptop encounters an error it cant compensate for or even understand, it stops dead... this is not a feature you want in cars because stopping dead is often just as bad.

The thing is, a computer can put the brakes on faster than a human, but the human can determine why the brakes need to be on faster than a computer.

Driving directions to the nearest pig farm or rug store?

Von Newmann machines.

They can make more robots from the plastic they collect. I'm sure any machine intelligent enough to do this will never turn on it's creators.

This and other myths of autonomous cars.

Roads will still be the same, no 4 way intersections at 100 KPH (in fact 4 way stops are a terrible idea in general). Autonomous cars work best when they have to make the least decisions, high speed roads are already designed so that drivers have to make as few judgement calls as possible.

The problem with your way of thinking is the same with any computing cluster. You need to have a quorum, so either each car must have a powerful enough system that they can establish a local cluster in real time and decide who goes first or they have to hand this off to a remote system... In the either case, a loss of communication or an unexpected road user (cyclist, manually driven car, dog, pedestrian) is going to cause a huge problem, if not an accident.

So because each car has to make it's own decisions, high speed roads will continue to be designed with limited access and simplified decision making.

Also, cars wont be more tightly packed, they'll be programmed to keep a safe distance (and not the minimum safe distance either). All the information in the world wont affect braking distance (cap'n, ye cannae break the lews of physics).

Quite right, but so is the GP.

Most people will just read the key words and have their brain fill in the blanks. So we look at the title and see "swap... Foo... Bar..) and most people's brain will assume the operator is with and we're replacing Foo with Bar. I did the same, then realised the entire sentence, in context didn't make sense so I re-read it properly (a lot of people wont pick up on that and re-read it).

So you're right that the headline is technically correct... but the GP is right in that the headline is bad form and people will get confused (not that /. has particularly high journalistic standards to maintain).

More over, which commonwealth law (that would be a federal law for the Americans playing along at home) are they enforcing?

As yet, there isn't a criminal code for copyright infringement, it's a civil matter.

As the parent said, universities have the ability to make their own legislation that is enforceable. Most universities use it for things like parking (which is at a premium), vandalism, plagiarism, smoking on campus and other acts that are too minor to get the police involved in. Although universities are legally permitted to chase people though the courts for this money, its much easier just to withhold their results until all fines are paid.

Can a new Nintendo play all my old Nintendo games. Say from my 64 or SNES (yes I have games that old). Yeah I do replay old games on a regular basis, some dating back to 1992 (hello Star Control II). If I want a console to play my old Nintendo games on, I need an old Nintendo console.

Even backwards compatibility for a PS1 or PS2 on a PS3 was shoddy at best. Unlike the PC, if your game stopped working due to an OS or HW change there was no way around it.

Also remember that Sony removed the PS2 emulator from the PS3 (ostensibly to save money).

Australia is pretty much the same.

Personal cheques are a thing of the past. No one even needs a "we dont accept cheques" sign any more as no-one uses them.

However we have bank cheques where the bank holds the money in escrow until the recipient cashes it. Basically its a cheque with it's value guaranteed up by a bank. If you buy a car in Oz, often you'll use a bank cheque as direct debit can take up to 3 days here (still).