I loved the Terminator TV show a few years back, awkwardly titled "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles". Summer Glau's portrayal of the stilted robot trying to blend in was inconsistent, but I enjoy the actress and the mythology is enjoyable. I found Shirley Manson's Catherine Weaver to be an amazing character with very intriguing possibilities. And then it was cancelled.

I really enjoyed Terminator: Genesys. Scratch the bullshit about the End Of Days being some strange merging of Android and Facebook and some new AI, it had action, time travel, interpersonal relationships with characters we know. Tons of fun.Emilia Clarke was fun and refreshing. And then the two sequels were cancelled.

I wonder if Terminator suffers from having too many cancellations and reboots. Let's see a few more things through, shall we? I also wonder if Terminator could benefit from some lower budgets. Lower expectations, see what you can make for $20-$30 million and then if it makes only $50 million, it's a success.

I have a 2019 Honda Pilot. It came standard with this technology. There are a number of conditions where it drives me crazy.

* Curves in a road. There's times when it just flashes a warming on my dashboard, but there's times when it beeps and flashes. This alarms my passengers. I've taken to talking down to my car and attempting to verbally "sooth" it because that seems to put my passengers at ease that my car has false alarms. My kids actually think it's funny at this point. My coworkers less so.

* Cars turning ahead. If I'm on a 40 mph road and the car ahead of me turns on the left turn blinker, and I see no oncoming traffic, I'll let my foot off the accelerator increasing the distance, and the car ahead can brake when it wants and execute its turn. I can see a clear path to their car following the turn, and if it had to unexpectedly brake, it would still be out of my path. But my car sometimes freaks out, and will occasionally brake for me (which I override with the throttle). Just don't. If anything, it's going to get someone to rear-end me.

I live in a rural area. All kinds of tractors, horses, pedestrians and bicycles. The lane keeping assist system doesn't like it when I deviate from my lane without using my blinker so I can give these fellow travelers additional room. When I've taken too much time to get back into my lane, it flashed at me a few times, and I think it once applied brakes for me. I turned that system off immediately.

Good for these authors! They agree with the author of the laws!

In Robots and Empire, the laws failed so hard the robots decided they needed a human to come step in and provide some guidance. Alternately, it allowed the robots (R. Daneel Olivaw if I recall correctly) an "out" whereby it was not at fault if things didn't work out.

Does this include the energy storage needed for night and/or windless days?

You know full well this excludes energy storage.

Part of the incredible power of renewables is that there is plentiful energy during some times. I remember 15 years ago when the first overnight cost of electricity in Texas went negative due to the overnight wind farms overproducing. Of course, a weakness is the lack of power during other times. During the plentiful times, there can actually reach negative cost of power. Those negative costs really change the landscape of the cost of energy. It's an inherent subsidy for anybody who knows how to shift their loads or who can store the power and deploy it another time. This subsidy will / has been doing the same thing as renewable power subsidies do, it will increase the economy of scale for energy storage and load shifting.

There's a lot of R&D put into lithium batteries (as well as a wide variety of other chemistries), and a lot put into utility scale gravity storage (everything from water to trains) and even some air pressurized caverns. As we size the renewable portion of the grid up, there will be more and more times when the cost goes negative, and even more incentives to figure storage out.

I have been an AT&T customer since 2006, when it was still independently Cingular.

I put the spam blocker ("Call Protect" "powered by Hiya") on my phone nearly a year ago I think, out of frustration from the spammers and scammers. It started off okay, making it easier to block individual numbers (my area code - my prefix - "7890"). And then that cut down on my problems for a good while. But then they started coming from random numbers in the same format, but randomly scrambling the last 4 digits.

If AT&T can find a way to severely de-rate numbers that I haven't called or haven't successfully called me before (that I don't successively mark "spam"), I don't see this being a real panacea of success. At best, it's a better interface for blocking. I'd like to see AT&T deploy something like Spam Assassin. Give points for different activities, take points away for others, before determining to connect or if it connects, if a warning applies.

Of course, the next iOS version will have the ability to block (send straight to voice mail) people not in my address book, so it's not like I care that much anyway. It's almost "too little too late" but any additional effort to combat the scum of the telemarketers is welcome.

But if I'm on my Windows machine? I think I'm SOL... by design?

Since you are using Apple Pay, you have an iPhone. You whip out your phone, launch Wallet, tap the card you want to use, and then (new interface stuff is necessary, so we are guessing based on what Apple told us) you hit the "..." for more information, and then hit a button to generate a CVV, expiration and number for you. This isn't lock-in, per se, but it is an incentive to remain in the Apple ecosystem.

Same reason most people mow their yards, whether they know it or not, to keep mice and rats away from the home. I'm in an area with a lot of hay fields, so a lot of unchecked rodents. It's not perfectly effective, but keeping a big buffer from the main home, the detached garage and the pool is important to me and my family.

I've got a 6 acre plot, 4 of which is mowed. Generally this takes me 3 hours every Saturday during the warm months. I would love a robot mower. So far, they have all been random paths, except for some prototyping in Ardumower. Random paths are great for suburbia but they just can't cover large open spaces.

This market could really use someone who can handle straight paths. My kind of yard doesn't mind some radio beacons to help with DGPS signals, but fence type transmitters far from the home will be tough. In-ground wires aren't too much of an issue.

Right now, the only automatic mowers I can find that can handle more than 2 acres are more than my zero turn mower. Not that that's a deal breaker, but I would need to buy two to cover my whole yard -- which is the problem.

metal-to-metal friction is lower than rubber to concrete

But isn't that the problem too? Rubber is good at acceleration. Metal wheels aren't. For sufficiently long tunnels where the metal wheels can get up to speed and just cruise, I think you're right. But for the first few "proof of concept" tunnels that are supposed to be pretty small, only a mile or two, I don't think metal wheels give a significant friction advantage compared to the "wow" factor of being able to accelerate and brake faster.

For a 10 mile tunnel, I'd hope a car could park on a skate in some sort of loading zone, have the skate go through the tunnel at higher speeds and with lower friction and then decelerate into an unloading zone where cars can exit their skates.

You can always buy a truck from an American manufacturer

AC, I fail to see how it has any relevance to any discussion involving the proliferation of electric vehicles, or the segue into the support infrastructure that will need to drastically change for them to make them relevant to urban drivers, but I bought #6 on the list of cars that will have the biggest impact on the American economy. Of course, with such a throw-away comment, you may have a horse in the game. Are you also embarrassed at how few "American" cars made the list (Ford, GM, Chrysler, Jeep, Buick, GMC, Cadillac, Dodge, etc)? 4 of the top 10 are "Japanese", for whatever that actually means anymore.

Re your needs. I think it's going to be a while before your needs are met. Maybe as much as 5 to 10 years at a competitive price point. But it's fairly unusual as a usage pattern.

I don't disagree, but I expect there is a pretty big percentage of people with what could reasonably be considered "fairly unusual usage patterns". Not that everybody has to do what I do, but just not fit in the standard "commute 10-30 miles to work twice a day" or "run 30 miles of errands" per day buckets. I also think there's a huge mental block between "does what I need it to do 360 days a year" and "I could reasonably rent a car to make up 5 days a year and still come out ahead".

Customers in the suburbs and rural areas have decent access to plugs. With a little infrastructure work, level 2 chargers could proliferate and this could be good for a lot of reasons.

For urban life where on-street parking is the norm, what are you gonna do? It's not like it's practical to deploy level 2 chargers (or anything else) along the sides of the road. Many of them are on the driver's side, which means those plugs would be subject to additional splashing and kick-up from passing road traffic. Additionally, those huge L2 plugs are now going to stick out an extra few inches. How do you do that without creating tripping hazards?

I'm all for increased electric car deployment. I was shopping hard for a pure electric car that would serve my needs, and failing that, a plug-in hybrid. My problem is that I need to go for trips with the Boy Scouts where I can tow a trailer over 1500 pounds (which drops all plug-in hybrids and I think only leaves the Model X for all-electrics) and those trips average 2-3 hours away (range is a problem). Stopping with a carload of boys to charge for 2 hours along the way is ... not going to sell cars.

VW (and the rest of the car makers) have a lot of work to do to overcome those challenges.

When someone defends an incorrect belief as "opinion", it's not an "opinion", it's "wrong".

When someone's incorrect belief is touted as correct, it's not "a lie" and [s]he is not "a liar", [s]he is "wrong".

Too much of our society today is getting wrapped up in ad hominem attacks. From people needing to defend themselves with words they don't understand to people rising to their own cause and attacking the person, not the incorrect fact. Take a step back. It's not hard to say that 95% of climate scientists believe the theory of climate change is real. Nor is it hard to point out that gravity is still "a theory" but we still are pretty sure it's real.

Rise up.

Wouldn't avoiding eating ghosts mean it just never got smart enough to know that you could eat power pills and then pass through them? That new optimal paths would arise when the power pill was active? If their algorithm added score for lower time or for points, I think this behavior would change.

"IBM Researchers Teach Pac-Man to Avoid Ghosts Even When It Is Advantageous To Eat Them" might not have the same ring to it.