Just my personal opinion, but given the track record in this particular industry, I think there should be demonstrable intent by decision-makers to follow good practices, not merely a lack of evidence of intent to circumvent or cut corners. This is expected in other regulated industries, compliance failures are a big deal, and for good reason. I see no reason why similar standards could not be imposed on those developing and operating autonomous vehicles, and every reason they should be given the inherent risks involved.

You would be surprised how little money it takes to make a big pile if you have time on your side.

There are a million websites that will do these calculations for you. Here's one that will let you start with $0 and save $50 a week for 30 years at 8%. It's not even the one that I used for my original quote. If you really thought that my numbers were faked then you should spend some time playing with one of these websites to get an idea as to what is possible. The really crazy thing is if you take that same $325K and leave it invested at 8% for another 10 years (without adding any more money) it more than doubles.

I drive a 1996 Honda Civic that my father gave to me brand new in 1995. It doesn't have air conditioning, and I am tall enough that I have never really fit inside. In recent years it has become sort of cool to people that like Civics, but that's definitely a new thing. The car is a piece of crap at this point, and it was never more than the most basic form of transportation, but it is still my daily driver. Sometimes I think of the money that I have saved not having a car payment for the last 30 years and it boggles my mind.

Saving $50 a week for 30 years would put you over the median net worth of Americans aged 45-54 (according to this article by Fidelity.

If you can afford to . I am old enough that I am probably not going to get another 30 years of growth out of my saved capital. You've earned yours, there is no reason to feel bad for being able to afford delivered meals. If you happen to like the restaurant experience you might want to consider not using Doordash, as its business model is burning traditional restaurants to the ground. I expect, over time, we will see more and more food preparation businesses that don't really have a place to go and eat. They will just have a kitchen and a place for delivery people to pick up food. Personally, I sort of like getting a restaurant quality meal and being able to eat it in the comfort of my own home. I tend to pick up my meals, but I live close enough to the city center that I can comfortably walk there, I feel bad when I tip poorly, and I am cheap enough that I try and avoid tipping situations altogether.

I still drive though. No sense letting the food get cold.

Carry out means, that I get the food I want, in a time frame that is convenient, and I don't have to worry about noisy restaurants or inattentive wait staff. If you want to pay extra to have someone deliver the food, that's your prerogative. No one is forcing anyone to drive Doordash or run a restaurant. They want you to pay them for these services. Why not take advantage?

Maybe this will be an area where the US simply gets left behind because of the pro-car and litigious culture that seems to dominate discussions there.

Reading online discussions about driving -- admittedly a hazardous pastime if you want any facts to inform a debate -- you routinely see people from the US casually defending practices that are literally illegal and socially shunned in much of the world because they're so obviously dangerous. Combine that with the insanely oversized vehicles that a lot of drivers in the US apparently want to have and the car-centric environments that make alternative ways of getting around much less common and much less available, and that's how you get accident stats that are already far worse than much of the developed world.

But the people who will defend taking a hand off the wheel to pick up their can of drink while chatting with their partner on a call home all while driving their truck at 30mph down a narrow road full of parked cars past a school bus with kids getting out are probably going to object to being told their driving is objectively awful and far more likely to cause a death than the new self-driving technologies we're discussing here. You just don't see that kind of hubris, at least not to anything like the same degree, in most other places, so we might see more acceptance of self-driving vehicles elsewhere too.

IMHO the only sensible answer to is separate responsibility in the sense that a tragedy happened and someone has to try to help the survivors as best they can from responsibility in the sense that someone behaved inappropriately and that resulted in an avoidable tragedy happening in the first place.

It is inevitable that technology like this will result in harm to human beings sooner or later. Maybe one day we'll evolve a system that really is close to 100% safe, but I don't expect to see that in my lifetime. So it's vital to consider intent. Did the people developing the technology try to do things right and prioritise safety?

If they behaved properly and made reasonable decisions, a tragic accident might be just that. There's nothing to be gained from penalising people who were genuinely trying to make things better, made reasonable decisions, and had no intent to do anything wrong. There's still a question of how to look after the survivors who are affected. That should probably be a purely civil matter in law, and since nothing can undo the real damage, the reality is we're mostly talking about financial compensation here.

But if someone did choose to cut corners, or fail to follow approved procedures, or wilfully ignore new information that should have made something safer, particularly in the interests of personal gain or corporate profits, now we're into a whole different area. This is criminal territory, and I suspect it's going to be important for the decision-makers at the technology companies to have some personal skin in the game. There are professional ethics that apply to people like doctors and engineers and pilots, and they are personally responsible for complying with the rules of their profession. Probably there should be something similar for others who are involved with safety-critical technologies, including self-driving vehicles.

The perfect vs good argument is the pragmatic one for moral hazards like this. IMHO the best scenario as self-driving vehicles become mainstream technology is probably a culture like air travel: when there is some kind of accident, the priority is to learn from it and determine how to avoid the same problem happening again, and everyone takes the procedures and checks that have been established that way very seriously. That is necessarily going to require the active support of governments and regulators as well as the makers of the technology itself, and I hope the litigious culture in places like the US can allow it.

People laugh at this sort of thing, but $50 a week for 30 years is $78,000. If you got an 8% return on that money (and over the last 30 years you would have had to work pretty hard not to get that) you would end up with $325,593, with $247,593 of investment returns. Not to mention the fact that if you are having trouble making rent you probably should steer away from spending 10% of your rent bill having food delivered to your house.

You would save even more if you don't eat at restaurants at all.

The most efficient version is a combination of gas turbines and steam turbines. The hot exhaust gasses of gas turbines are used to heat water in boilers, which then are used to power steam turbines. In this combination, you can get up to 62% efficiency. A standalone gas turbine has an efficiency of about 35-40%.

To the contrary, jet engines are quite efficient and better than internal combustion engines at fuel economy. They just really suck under partial-load conditions. That's why they never really caught on for ground based vehicles like cars and trains, despite numerous attempts in the 1950ies and early 1960ies.

No, I don't remember. And I've been alive at the time, and I know such obscure things like D2-MAC.

I actually like the car navs, because they are fed car data, and so they work in places without satellite coverage. In the U.S., this is quite seldom, but Europe has many very long road tunnels. Of the 100 longest road tunnels in the world, 80 are in Europe, and some of them (like Munich's Innerer Ring) have on- and off-ramps in the tunnel, which Google Maps, left to its devices, will miss.

Precisely. If you make mistakes like this expensive enough for the police station then the problem solves itself. The real problem is that someone promised the police and the school a magic new technology that would make their schoolyard safer. So far the system probably has zero wins, and one spectacular failure. If the political and economic fallout for the failure is high enough then the school turns off the crappy system, and it encourages other schools to do the same. Potential new buyers for the system disappear and the vendor of the system goes out of business.

And we all win.

Eventually the school might even end up with an effective system that does roughly the same thing, but it will likely be structured in a way that makes it less likely that Doritos wielding young adults get assaulted by the police. It's hard to argue against safer schools. In any system like this false positives are going to be a potential problem. If you make false positives expensive enough, however, then you likely get the outcome that you want.

That's what was supposed to happen, but the school's administration was not present to review the footage and cancel the alarm, hence the police came in force.

They re-adapted to a predatory diet later. Their neornithian ancestors however were feeding on seeds and insects. In fact, eagles (as members of the Accipitriformes), owls (Strigiformes), hawks (also Accipitriformes) are more closely related to the likes of sparrows and parrots than to most other birds, and the falcons (Falconiformes) are the direct sister group to sparrows (Passeriformes) and parrots (Psittaciformes).