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I'm a little puzzled at the ascertains to begin with, with reference to actives you would require a self driving car for....?

Per the article:

"Self-driving cars promise a future where you can watch television, sip cocktails, or snooze all the way home"

I mean....geez, aside from the sleeping part, that's not that uncommon now for REGULAR cars. The console screens are pretty easily bypassed to allow watching video anytime, and well...it isn't that big a deal to pour a cocktail for the road, hell, that's why folks try to catch as many of the plastic Mardi Gras cups here during carnival season, so that you have a sturdy disposable "to-go" cup to make a beverage for the road with when leaving the house......

Why does it matter? Alcohol and nicotin are both still way more harmful than weed, but we don't ban them outright.

That's a part of "space-like conditions".

That part is to guarantee success and have a thorough measurement of the process. For the natural process, it is reasonable to assume that it took many hundreds of millions of years before some place (and maybe more than one, over those years) happened to have all those conditions in it at the same time. The point here is that all the things that they've done and all the input materials are the kind that occur naturally. From there it's all statistics.

But aren't we close to 100% sure what causes smog?

I agree, and that's why I didn't say it should be 100%.

What are the power differences between, say, a brother and a sister?

If you think that time travel was off-topic in "Cat", I have to ask, what did you think the book was really all about?

I'm wondering whether you're confusing Heinlein's treatment of women with his characters' treatment of women. There's plenty of sexism in "Mistress", but I don't recall it being glorified or presented as desirable by the author. It is presented as normal by the character, yes, because it's part of his cultural background.

Heinlein certainly did have some strange notions about women, as evidenced by "Stranger", but they are of a different kind.

What's wrong with incest?

Sometimes it's better to do the right thing based on the best information you have at the time, than delay the right thing for decades so you can prove it in court against people with a financial interest to get the rules reversed.

But if your information isn't close to 100% complete and perfect, or if there's a reasonable chance the law will create unintended consequences, then the law should have a sunset clause. It's really quite irresponsible to pass a law under those conditions without one.

Already gone in Win8. "My Documents" is just "Documents" now etc. The only exception is "My Computer", which became "This PC".

The only OS I can think of that actually did it that way was BeOS.

Not saying that it's a bad idea, but it clearly doesn't stick around. The momentum of having to provide compatibility with everyone else is just too big to overcome.

Alternatively, you can say that file exension is metadata distinct from the name; it just so happens that the conventional name to record this metadata is as a dot-suffix to the name.

And yes, it is a crappy way to do it, but it's the one that became the de facto standard. Changing it now is very costly, and cannot be done unilaterally.

"The year of Net Neutrality"..... wait, we got that one!

Don't count your chickens before they are slaughtered.

You currently have no idea of what you "got", because only FCC commissioners have read the actual regulations they will be passing...

There are 300 pages of changes ready to change the internet you know today. Good luck with that.

What will make Windows Phone succeed is the same thing that will make OS X succeed and it mainly boils down to apps.

Microsoft already tried that though - they paid a lot of money to developers in order to bring many of the most popular titles to Windows phone from iOS/Android.

Even with that it will still not enough to track consumers...