My fear is that once cars are fully automated, cops will still claim you need to be sober to operate them, and being near your car with the keys will still be worth $25,000 in fines and legal fees.

Your perspective is entirely valid. But equally valid is the perspective that life is better when we don't have to worry about being shot, so as a society we should take some simple precautions to prevent that. Obviously I lean in the direction that we should pool our resources to make life a little bit easier through the judicious application of government.

You say "proactive enforcement" like it's a curse word.

Proactively enforcing stair step standards prevents people from tripping and smashing their hips. It's a great thing. Thank God for building codes.

Respectfully, your post gives me the impression you make a habit of letting perfect be the enemy of good.

Yeah. You know, for when you need to kill 15 geese per minute.

Vlad pretends to be American. I suspect this is a straight-up Brit.

If MBAs really aren't taught "bad management skills," what is it that corrupts them and causes the disastrous short term thinking epidemic in companies these days?

It's not that the MBA training is negative, it's just not enough to be useful on day 1. So the process goes like this:

The guy who hires him is looking to fill a role, and he knows it's not going to happen without a learning curve, so he can never find an exact match to the job.

So you can hire someone who wants twice what you want to pay and doesn't have the exact skillset you need, or you can hire someone out of college who wants 60% of what you're willing to pay and, after some on-the-job training will have the skillset you need. So you take the cheaper one.

And it turns out he's an idiot. But by the time you find that out he's been working there for a year, and he's not so bad that you need him fired right now, and bringing someone else up to speed is going to take a year, so you make do. And 10 years later you realize you're still just "making do", so you put out an ad and replace him.

Rinse / repeat.

Forget about teaching your children not to do it, we`ll just create another useless device to offset parenting skills and common sense.

If your plan requires a large number of people to have parenting skills or common sense, or any other virtue, your plan will fail. If it requires people to be vile, stupid animals, you'll probably get get much better results. If it only requires that people breathe from time to time, it's a very good plan.

9.6 / 10 people suck. You know that if you've ever been in traffic. It's not fixable, and it never will be. Work around it.

(This is not an endorsement of this article's stupid system. It's stupid.)

It's not general, the summary is just dumb. As far as I can tell, it's a patent on a scrollbar that disappears when you're not dragging the view. If that's right, it's certainly a crummy patent, but not a general one.

When Rovio Ireland realizes that contracting Rovio Finland is more expensive than contracting Rovio Pakistan, the former employees from Finland will think it was very worthwhile.

But that's only the healthy ones. The ones who were lazy enough to get sick were already pretty much fine with it.

The problem here isn't transport energy costs as much as zoning regulations that ban home gardening.

That's absolutely ridiculous. You want 3 million people in Chicago, in addition to having 1 or 2 full time jobs, to also grow their own food. And be good enough at it to survive. In their 3 foot by 2 foot patch of dirt. OK, those 4 cucumbers ought to sustain them for lunch on August 6th. 364 days to figure out.

Nissan Altimas have the MPG meter, and I notice I do try to keep it as high as I can when I have it on (though I rarely do. There's more important info screens on there, and for some reason they decided to make the fonts on each one huge so you can't put them all on at once).

But I just wish we could get an accurate gas gauge. If people (me, at least) could tell that this trip used 2.168 gallons, they'd know it also cost $8 and they might think about doing things differently. For now, all you know is that your last ten trips used something like 3/8ths of a tank. And a tank in this car is, uh... 18.3 gallons? Maybe? Times 3/8ths is, uh... Fuck it. If I need gas I'll get gas.

A real-time meter that says your flooring it and slamming on the brakes every 10 seconds just cost you 0.2 gallons over 30 seconds (or whatever) might make people a little more conservative.

It's hard to feel such pleasure when you don't have enough money to eat.

How much money do you usually eat?

Obviously I have no idea what happened in your case, but it gave me an interesting thought. If you have thousands of stolen credit cards (or even just one) but are afraid of getting caught using them, making thousands of other people unknowingly use stolen credit cards by changing their stored data would make for some fantastic plausible deniability.

If you support humanitarian intervention then you can't very well condemn GWB for deposing Saddam.

But you can easily condemn him for being a dickbag about it. "We don't need a permission slip to defend ourselves," is a sentence that did an enormous amount of damage to the world.

Hitting the disk every 10m incurs a performance penalty.

Not necessarily. If nothing else is using the disk and you spawn a thread to do nothing but sleep 10ms, seek to a semi-random spot on the disk, and write "Hey, hard drive, what's up?" you will have no noticeable performance problems until something else needs the drive.

You could do nonsense math in a loop in a background thread, which in a multi-core system would heat the processor up good and toasty without any real performance hit as long as the other 3 cores are idle.

Neither of those would actually ever happen, but functionally equivalent operations implemented by incompetent boobs could do something similar. To a lesser extent, even a competent programmer, knowing that normally there's a ton of computational power to spare, might not give a dang that his function is sucking up 20% more CPU than it needs to.