Which physical limitations are we speaking of?

As far as I know planes fly just fine, and batteries are only lacking in density (there are purely electric planes today, but the range is poor). If anyone can pull the maybe 3x improvement necessary to make this into a reality for short flights he can.

It is certainly not that far out there that I would call it a limitation derived from basic physics.

If it were anyone else, I would be a bit skeptical...

We are talking about the guy who owns the largest electric car company, is about to own the largest battery factory (employing many battery chemists and other specialists), and owns the most successful of the private space launch companies.

I think he is well aware of the tyranny of the rocket equation (as well as how it applies to aircraft as they burn their fuel), the limitations of a battery, and the differences between theoretical maximums and what you get in practice. More importantly he is advised by those who really are experts, and past success suggests that he does listen and understand.

Tripling battery density would make it viable on shorter flights, perhaps even cost effective. If anyone is in a position to make that happen, he is.

There are things which would kill it, but antibiotics are not one of those things.

The problem is that most of the things which would wipe out all of the yeast would also kill you.

That would certainly save a lot of effort, and I doubt anyone would object to that.

This is more like giving out free candy if you get into the car than working a soup kitchen.

What they are offering is not internet access, it is a place in his walled garden (or maybe fenced pasture is better). Wikipedia and such are the sugar that he was hoping would help them swallow the bitter facebook medicine.

There are a lot of secondary effects to allowing something like this, from crushing any local competition with facebook before it begins, to letting them choose and price what it takes to reach the populace. If he is only going for the betterment of everyone involved, he can straight up donate the money to do this, or allow all sites which meet certain bandwidth requirements.

If his motivations are entirely philanthropic in nature, there is an easy solution to their concerns:

Remove Facebook from the free list, and let the government decide what qualifies for the plan.

Mine would be easily circumvented if someone wanted to do that intentionally, but I consider my job done if it takes an intentional bypass of two safety systems to mangle yourself.

If it only decimates it I will be sorely disappointed, I expect automated cars to do much better than that.

Incidentally, I have programmed that robot in a cage. Mine stops moving if you trip an optical sensor on the way in (possibly damaging the robot due to the application of too much force in the process).

It will not drive off a cliff if it is aware of the cliff under any circumstances, it will instead come to a stop before the road ends.

If stopping in time is impossible as something was basically dropped into its path, it will end up hitting the object at the lowest speed it can achieve. It will never intentionally hit anything for any reason at all, and my expectation is that they will be very good at this. Accidents so far always involve the automated car being struck by rather than striking an object for a reason.

The "drive off of a cliff" vs "run over some kids" scenario is not something a car will be aware of at all, it is something humans with no programming experience relevant to this kind of project suggest in an attempt to make it something they can relate to.

This response is exactly what will happen.

If there is no way to avoid an accident, the car will attempt to stop in its lane as quickly as possible. There is no other conceivable way this could work due to the extreme liability any other decision would imply.

This will in most cases greatly minimize the forces involved in a collision as well.

I assume you speak at least two languages without error?

Other articles are usually pretty quick to point out the reason, but this one has an agenda.

The vast majority of accidents involving driverless cars are low speed rear end collisions. Most drivers will not report a 3mph collision with no damage, but google does.

The original suit filed by blizzard was in the US, but they cannot file suit using that law as it is criminal. They would need to get a prosecutor to take it up on behalf of the state, and it is likely not a big enough deal to do that (nor should they, this is better handled as a civil suit.)

They may have some difficulty in Germany, as while I am not familiar with German law it is usually required that the issue the court will decide has taken place in that country. It is my understanding that all of this took place in the US (the original suit, the settlement, and the location of the copy of source code in question).

As someone who was formerly a consultant I was asked to do illegal projects every once in a while (ranging from "go tap and monitor all telecommunications traffic to this address" to "build this sports betting site" to "crack this software" to "lie under oath as an expert" to "retrieve our competitors source code").

Vetting your clients and their projects is part of that line of work, and is the responsibility of the contractor or their organization. You fail to do this at your peril, it can and does end in jail time if you produce a program which breaks the law.

Now my position gives me final say in what our company produces as a product, and I regularly shoot down ideas which would not be legal (usually these are somewhat tame aggressive marketing schemes, but occasionally a product idea is blatantly criminal.)

Normally I would agree, but in this case Blizzard owns the server they accessed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

The terms of use may or may not be enforceable, but they definitely constitute what would be considered authorized access to the server owned by Blizzard.