Freeway driving is trivial: you don't hit what's in front of you, you don't hit what's beside you. Basic sensors can pull off both of these feats. You get bonus points if you can stay in a lane, but plenty of shitty human drivers manage to pull it off following those two basic rules.

Getting off the freeway is where it starts getting difficult. Even google maps sometimes misses the exit and tells me to turn right while I'm doing 60 over an overpass.

All the highway autonomous vehicle projects got as far as freeway driving. BMW, Cadillac, and Mercedes have all demonstrated this level of automatic driving. Then it gets hard.

This is about as far as you can go before entering the "deadly valley", where the vehicle can drive autonomously but isn't smart enough to recognize when it shoudn't. Google is further along; they can drive around on suburban streets.

I can't be bothered to diagram the sentence for you, but I promise there's nothing grammatically wrong with it (not even the punctuation).

the extra circuitry for that could/would be found.

How? It would be built directly into the IC; you'd need an electron microscope to notice it (and who's going to bother looking?).

The chip or even die (black blob seen on pcbs) needs access to the outside world somehow. It would need a bus of some sort...

Every keyboard has such a bus -- the keystrokes have to get to the computer, after all! Just build the keylogger into the USB control chip itself.

The "at" makes that sentence unambiguous, you know.

Most of the technology needed to automate electronics manufacturing has been available for years, if not decades. See "The Macintosh Factory", showing Apple's factory in Fremont over 20 years ago. Robot assembly, mobile robots, very few people doing direct labor. Products were designed for cheap automated assembly. The Macintosh II family was noted for that - everything, including the power supply, was inserted into the case with a simple straight-down move. Everything snapped together. No wiring harnesses. "Design for manufacture" was big back then.

So what went wrong? Outsourcing for cheap labor. "If your orders decrease, you can lay off workers. You can't lay off robots." - Tim Li, Quanta Computer. It's not so much that people are cheaper. It's that they are disposable. So are subcontractors. Everybody in the supply chain is working on low cost margins with no guarantee of future orders, so they can't invest in automation.

This is not a technical problem.

Well, on the basis that malloc() and free() are opposites, and writing to free()d memory is delusional, delusional == free.

On the other hand, look at what America has been fine with imposing on other nations, then what it has been fine living with within itself. America has never been about upholding the standards it claims.

As for freedom, from pretty much the very beginning, Constitutional "rights" have been revealed as merely permissions granted to whoever those in power happened to like. (Hence the amazing numbers of prisoners promising to vote in favour of those in power at the time magically getting dispensation, and the amazing problems minorities with a habit of voting the wrong way have.) There are no "rights" in America, never have been. You can't remove, grant or even waive rights - they exist or they don't and that's the end of it. (On matters of rights, I can be complete Kant.) Permissions are the only things you can ever add or subtract, and since everything in the Constitution has been put on hold or removed at some point, everything in the Constitution is a permission.

But that's fine with Americans, provided it's some other person getting these pseudo-rights pulled, ideally if they're from the wrong political party or the wrong ethnicity, or (in this case) testifying for the wrong side. People want THEIR freedoms and the freedoms of "their side" defended, "the other side" gets whatever crumbs are thrown their way. And that is why Americans are generally elitist snobs of an order pre-WW1 Europe could only ever have dreamed of aspiring to. Even the worst of the empires treated "non-conformists" better than that. Admittedly, in many cases, by shooting them, but that's still treating them as equals of dogs. The US treats undesirables (ie: those who don't think the same) as closer to pond scum.

Judges have never been taken seriously, when decisions run against the government. There have been Supreme Court rulings awarding the Black Hills to the Sioux. The government, for 50? 60? years has managed to ignore the ruling. That covers a lot of Presidents in both parties. But it includes an awful lot more voters, who (by re-electing anyone at all) are active supporters of the Government's refusal to follow SCOTUS orders. You are putting people in power who you know, full well, will not obey judge rulings they do not like. The upshot of that is that I have bugger-all pity when those same politicians disregard (or creatively interpret) rulings that happen to affect you or your "side". You're discovering the price of giving them that power.

The only downside is that everyone in the world, free or otherwise, must pay the price for these games. You have robbed us all of what liberty we had, just so that the right people were oppressed.

every customer to call Comcast tech support

Who will lie to them and tell them it's not Comcast's fault. See also: Sandvine.

Netflix paying money to my ISP creates a new equilibrium in which the rates charged to me by my ISP may be lower.

No. It only ever creates a new equilibrium where your ISP's profits are higher.

Nope, the monopoly franchises have already been doled out. The only new entrants allowed by law are crappy wireless ones.

LOL, as if the exactly two providers (one cable, one DSL) in each market wouldn't "coincidentally" adopt exactly the same anticompetitive policies!

Meanwhile, it wouldn't hurt to have a bit of a side conversation with someone in legal (for a start), then escalate it to formal conversations with them via email (again, print those suckers off) should nothing get resolved.

You don't have to approach them as if you are blowing the whistle on your boss. Just tell them you are concerned about your personal liability should you get caught breaking the law.

Enlighten me, then. Explain to me how the banking industry executives -- who, except perhaps for a few fall guys, are very likely to be significantly wealthier now than in 2008, unlike average people -- were harmed by the crash they caused. Prove that I'm wrong to call it a real-estate-sector-wide pump-and-dump scheme.

Given that the truck bed is on the outside, I'm not sure that looking through it constitutes a search. Maybe if there's a tarp or something it is, but otherwise stuff just sitting there is out in the open.