With great power comes great responsibility :)

That is a fantasy. Humans don't work this way. It's simply an impossible thing to expect. I'm serious.

Ha ha ha. You know what will happen? In any large city, this scenario will happen every couple of seconds, and the law enforcement system will be simply incapable of coping with it.

That will never be a viable option. It simply doesn't work that way. It's well known from aviation and industrial control rooms that if the human is out of the loop, it takes much, much longer than a "split second" for the human to get back into the loop. Sometimes entire minutes are not enough, I kid you not.

The automation software has capacity to "see ahead", so to speak, and can and should get the vehicle into a safe state when it looks like a handover is inevitable. The split second taking over of a wheel is your fantasy, it's basically impossible unless you're paying full attention the entire time - at that point you might as well drive the car anyway, why bother with automation. If you pay any less attention than you would if you actually drove the car, there'll be no split-second handovers. I'm serious. You simply have zero clue what you're talking about.

My microwave and my fridge run my own code, you insensitive clod. The factory interface was too stupidly done for my taste, so I've replaced the installed OTP chips with their flash counterparts and wrote my own code from scratch. I'm thinking of doing the same thing for my dishwasher next, and then perhaps for the washing machine. And I do have a copy of IEC-60730, and am not afraid to use it, thank you very much :)

Taxis in, um, developed countries do just that. Perhaps the U.S. doesn't count as one in this respect - I wouldn't be surprised.

The car made especially for you should also come with manual ignition advance, manual choke/mixture ratio adjustment, a manual fuel flow valve with a dial pressure readout and, let's not forget a rheostat to regulate the alternator output. Probably also the manual braking force distribution lever. And an SRS button, of course.

What is so hard is that if you actually do measurements, humans are nominally piss poor at a whole lot of of manual things that relate to driving cars. The feeling of being in control and the car doing "what they want" trumps the reality that we're really bad at all that.

Just so that you know, it's quite possible to fly a statically unstable plane. I've had the opportunity on a simulator to deal with a pitch-and-yaw-unstable flying wing. It was done in a preliminary study of biofeedback for training "hard" control scenarios. The biofeedback was auditory, generated digitally in real time with a very small latency (1ms). After about a dozen hours I could actually take off and fly somewhat straight in it. Others who logged a couple man months could pretty much fly it like one would fly a regular plane - looking at the recording of the flight path, it looked "normal". Then you'd look at the stick deflections and you'd go "what the fuck?". The question is: do we really want to do what a hundred dollars worth of high-rel controller hardware, running about 10^5x more expensive software, can do for you?

geekoid's arguments are sound for his situation. What's wrong with that?

Huh? Regular was $0.95 back in 2000.

You know, I listen to fun podcasts while driving, and it's fun as heck. The driving part is boring as hell, as it should be. Now what?

For all practical purposes there's no way, I repeat, no way to "heat the whole apartment block" to eradicate bed bugs. It's a myth perpetuated by the eradication industry. It's physically impossible unless you'd raise the building off the ground, isolate from all utilities, wrap air-tight with an insulating air gap between the plastic cover and the walls, and then heat up from inside. That's how I've seen someone get rid of a horrible infestation in a trailer home, and it's about the only way to pull it off. It did work, too - a year later, still no bed bugs. For normal buildings - forget it.

You see, bed bugs scamper away from heat, and when you're heating a building up, there are always gradients that let the suckers find the way to the basement, the attached car garage, whatever. Good luck heating the concrete basement or other adjoining walls to 45C, as that would be necessary to really kill them. Never mind that most heat treatments do not isolate the walls from outside air, so the walls never get hot enough.

The way heat-based bed bug eradication is normally done is you bring in a high-power space heater system that heats the air in the building. This is about the best scenario for bed bugs: due to slow heat exchange between hot air and the walls, the latter heat up slowly and let the bed bugs get out of the way before anything bad happens to them. That method doesn't kill any appreciable numbers of bed bugs, they simply go away for a while -- all the way to cracks and crevices in the foundation, if need be. It's then only a matter of time for the infestation to recover, as the suckers simply come back. Yes, their numbers will be reduced, but they'll come back all right.

There is a big problem with how the heat-based methods are evaluated: the test methods don't address the issue of bed bugs simply relocating elsewhere.

AFAIK, there are exactly zero pesticides that are approved for non-professional use the U.S. and that work against bed bugs. I repeat: ZERO. None. Nada. You're not buying anything unless you're licensed professional. The "higher test stuff" is not some nebulous thing either. There is exactly one category of insecticides that do work against bed bugs: organophosphates. Out of a whole lot of stuff, only one category. One that's highly regulated and universally toxic to pretty much anything with a nervous system, including humans. For all I know, if organophosphates came to be widely used against bed bugs, it'd be only a matter of time until those suckers found a way to cope with it, or even becoming totally immune. Perhaps whatever mutations would be responsible for it would also be of some use in humans - one can only hope.

This guy very much double screwed at this point. Whether he knows it or not, he has brought the bed bugs back home with him. It's only a matter of time until his house will be infested as well. I feel for him.

You mean, the food would otherwise be so bad that added semen and cockroaches turs it back into something with nutritional value? Hmm....

But then the explosion is probably irrelevant. The Pu particulate sizes were already small enough to be carried out with the gas escaping the containment structure. I'd still like to see some experimental evidence to back up the claim that dispersing such Pu particulate in hydrogen/air mixture, and subsequently detonating it, would actually change the size of the Pu particles in such a way that they will spread farther (if that's what the AC implied). I mean, if the presumed vaporization is bad, there must be a reason why it's bad, and the only reason I see is that the particles get smaller and travel farther. Even that might be a wrong assumption - some particle size classes may have very long half-time of suspension in the atmosphere, so they may, counterintuitively, be less polluting in spite of traveling very far. They'd "never" get to the ground (or at least get there very slowly). The vaporization is besides the point, all that happens is that the Pu will recondense, as it necessarily will, on whatever condensation nuclei are around (whatever more-robust-than-Pu dust already in the air). Basically, the explosion might turn out to be a completely bogus thing to worry about.

I'm probably just temporarily dense, but what's wrong with =A1+C1+F1+L1+18? Yeah, you may want to put the constant 18 out there in a cell as well - is that what you imply? Or not using the SUM function? Or the lack of row or column locks ($s)? I'd be reluctant to generalize that such a formula is somehow always unkosher.