Wow, am I unique in my views of automated driving? First, I think it will completely change things as we know it. 1) Wouldn't all cars go to be the same or even provided by the state? What incentive would there be to have a nice car if all have to drive the same? Maybe nice interior, but handling, performance, and the notion of "youness" in the car is gone if you are not driving it. Its just a box. 2) I would expect car pooling to increase. Why would the 1 person per car be needed if they can go around and pick up neighbors and pick up your kids for you and so on. Right now a husband and wife work at the same place and drive separate (gas guzzling) cars where I work. This silliness will end with automatic cars. 3) Kids. No driving licensense or anything anymore. No DUI, no checkpoints. None of the "routine traffic stops" gone bad. 4) Odds are better speeds and throughput. Traffic lights will be better optimized. Tailgating will be normal.

I look forward to this. The changes will be immense, and the transition will be interesting. I would love to not drive and do other things while commute in safety and not have to worry about my car and just have a car.

And I like it that way. Email can involve other people. Its offline communication and works in multiple timezones and odd hours. It can be referenced later. It is clear because it is written. I think email is the best thing ever invented. I've never worked without it, and I could not imagine work without it. You could throw away my phone, and I would hardly notice. Take email away, and I honestly could not function. I don't know how work worked before email. Could not imagine. The only thing negative about email is when you need constant back and forth, and then I switch to IM or phone, but email is and will always be #1 in my book.

Taking the best thing from a normal computer and using the worst things about android and what do you get???? hopefully they are not using swipe and having it crash all the time.

news at 12

Preface: I'm a white dude, arguably a pig.

Yes, I've found it strange that the lower intelligence/class people breed more than those in the opposite stance. But, doesn't it work out? Its almost like the latter group are a sub-species. To support my lifestyle, I have people in China and all over the world making stuff for me. Convenience store people, gas attendants, people that built my house, etc, etc. I need these people to continue breeding to keep my lifestyle going.

As an aside and on topic, I find the recent rise in things like autism to be interesting. I would say its more environment than genetics because evolution is usually a pretty slow process.

Its ugly enough and almost big enough that the wealthy Americans might buy it.

The largest filesystem I admin is just shy of 1/2 petabyte. And its one in number. Backing up everything on that filesystem is simply not feasible. To put it in perspective 1 stream @ 200 MiB/s would take almost 28 days to backup the whole thing. I would imagine a restore would take about the same order. Telling hundreds of users their files are unavailable for reading or writing for 30 days is not really an option, so I run fsck.

Backups simply are not really an option past 20+ terabytes of storage, and simply not feasible if the storage is volatile in nature. AFAIK everyone has gone to redundancy over backups at scale.

My point was that I didn't vote for Facebook, Google or Wikipedia nor for the MPIAA, et al that proposed such a thing. Who can I vote for? US government is not about the people. I have no problem with the opposition, but the position was not posited by a government official, but rather private enterprise, and this is not how I learned that the US government worked.

That when the radio was talking about companies like Facebook, Google, and Wikipedia protesting legislation put to Congress by the Motion Picture Industry that there is nothing that I can do. US government isn't much about people anymore. I have no clue how SOPA got this far.

Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.

I believe I read on the antipolygraph site about a guy that got a job at the CIA by lying. In fact, since they ask questions like "have you every done X" where X is something that everyone has done to some degree in one's life, then the only way to "pass" these tests is to lie and like well. Nobody in science believes that polygraphs are reliable or valid. But will certainly scare off certain people.

They are overpaid. Its by design. Its not a free market like programmers, engineers, etc.

Again, this is because doctors are not a free market. The AMA controls how many doctors are produced each year and which schools can make doctors. No other field in the USA is controlled this way. There is no inherent need for the cost of training to be a doctor to be so high, and no reason they are so scarce that they have to work 60 hours a week. In a repressed job market like there is today, I'm sure many, many people would be fine doctors if given the opportunity. Being a doctor is not significantly different than getting a PhD. On average, I would guess that MDs make 2x that of a PhD. That is overpaid.

For example, in China doctors don't make that much. And there are 4 year medical degrees where people work in pharmacies and dispense OTC medication where many of the meds are only by doctor's prescription in the US. Seems like a better system to me.

I'll chime in and say that if open source isn't a core part of your business plan, then why expend the time and money making your project open source? It costs you more to open source something than keeping the code to yourself _unless_ you have something compelling enough that people will want to help you with the code, which is very unlikely. Keep in mind that you can open source the code at any time, so the question is what is it compelling to you now to have it open source?

I would think this would be accurate, but everyone in this thread seems to be missing that TV has a 98-99% penetration in at least American homes. I gave up on it, and everyone thinks I'm nuts. Aside from the paper tv guide (WTF?), I agree with every point AC has put up there. Personally, I found TV an expensive and laborious task. And the content is not even worth just torrenting and watching. I just gave up, and don't miss it. I can't separate the content from the ads. Skipping through them with the PVR remote was just a chore. Most of what I watched was PBS that had no ads anyway, so I guess I could do that again, but why bother?

Oh, some more reasons to add to the pretty complete list:

- content never seems to fit my screen's resolution. Content always fit my screen before widescreen tvs came out, and now my tv is either too wide or too tall for the content.
- picture quality sucks. HDTV is a misnomer. Picture quality peaked when cable HD was new, and degraded after that.
- sound is inconsistent between channels and within a channel
- Annual or multi-annual contracts. I thought this was only designed for cellphones, but TV too? What is next? All of my monthly services having multi-year contracts that only potentially hurt me? No thanks.
- Its a time killer. And can be pretty expensive.
- Many of the ads actually make me embarrassed even when I am alone.
- To get "premium content" you have to pay out the nose with all the non-premium content as well.

thats all I can think of now

There is no way anybody can design a modern processor from scratch without reverse engineering. Think of how many man years is in a processor. Even with the reverse engineering they were only able to obtain 45nm technology which is a few years old. If china started today, it would take them 10-20 years to make a processor 10-20 years out of date. What good is that?

This machine is impressive nonetheless. It uses good power 1MW. Only uses off-the-shelf networking (Infiniband). Only uses 9 racks of space. If they put those on the market, they would sell quite well (at the right price).