A Mexican desert shark that robs trucks? That seems like a syfy movie of the week even before it gets ahold of the radioactive cobalt!

Except now the car can just take itself to a maintenance appointment while you are at work or overnight, so you never need to actively actually do anything. In any case, I think the cars will make the best estimate of the world that they can, based on a combination of sensors. It seems to be the case that you can drive a car optically (humans do it) so if the radar sensors go out, it's probably still perfectly safe to let it drive on lidar and cameras for a little while. It doesn't get scary until cheap econobox cars go autonomous without any real redundancies. But, they'll still be safer than human drivers.

The thing is that every "video news" website gets it wrong. Nobody cares about the talking heads giving bookends for the content, and nobody wants auto play. So, whenever you go to such a web page, it instantly starts playing some random person giving a banal intro. OTOH, an article saying "X happened" with a video that you can choose to play to see X happening would actually be valuable. If person X gave a speech to the UN or something, then having video of the speech is reasonable. But, yeah, I'll play it if I want it.

Why is that "reasonable"? Shouldn't they be focusing their resources of groups/nations that present some threat to us?

Why wouldn't military allies pose a threat? Seriously, this is an incredibly naive view of the utility of intelligence. You think that a relatively small number of terrorists trying ineffectually to lob a few bombs is really the only major concern? Or even "partner/competitor" nations like China that have a single second hand aircraft carrier? No state military power is realistically going to start a full on war with the United States by attacking the U.S. mainland, and no non-state actor has the resources to realistically do all *that* much physical damage.

But, military allies who oppose US preferences in trade deals can potentially cost the US economy billions of dollars. Massive unemployment and economic collapse is absolutely considered an existential threat to any state. And, yes, much of the day to day accomplishments of an intelligence agency revolve around knowing in advance what tariff rate an ambassador to a trade conference in going to support on potatoes from various parts of the world. Knowing who you can move a few percent, and who is a hardliner, is enough to change a deal. A few small changes in a trade deal can effect msaaive numbers of people, and the US is very aggressive about maintaining power through things like trade deals which seem incredibly boring, and often go unreported in the news here. In business, everybody is both a friend and an enemy. A potential supplier of customer, but also a potential competitor. The concept of "Ally" becomes very grey as soon as you take a broader view of international relations that "If we shoot at somebody, are we supposed to shoot at them?"

Ask again in 200 years. Then we'll know if understanding asteroids proved useful. It takes a long time for basic research and pushing the boundaries of human understanding to pay off, but some of it eventually does. You know, like the electron, or semiconducting, or liquid crystals, or imaginary numbers. All of that stuff was ivory tower academic fluff at one point. The whole value of "out there" research is that it is in areas that we don't fully understand yet, and therefore have no idea how useful they might eventually become.

You are assuming a more rational person than most of them probably are. Try "I'm obviously a better driver than any computer or most other people, but if they reduce my premiums, I'm willing to take on the extra risk in exchange for the extra money in my pocket and convenience."

Don't forget, you can buffer a YouTube video. Can't really get a 30 second buffer of an RDP session. The requirements are very different.

Well, it probably does real time encodes of 24 FPS content, but perhaps would struggle a bit more with 60 FPS+ Desktop content. Likewise, if the content is photographic, the compression artifacts tend to be less noticeable. Have some simple shapes and bright colors with crisp edges like a GUI in the mix, and you tend to need much higher quality than with photographic content. Even doing the encode in real time at adequate quality, you are probably encoding to a long GOP codec which has quite a lot of inherent latency. If the GOP size adds 1 second of latency, it doesn't matter how much CPU and bandwidth you throw at the problem, it would still be very bad for real time interactive uses.

* (Used to be an Engineer responsible for dealing with remote sites and technology for real time remote color grading sessions transmitted over the internet and over private WAN links using H.264 and JP2K based codecs mostly for TV commercials.)

Very few currencies are, except to other currencies. I mean, I suppose you could say the value of the US Dollar is attached in some vague way to the military power of the US, and thus their ability to force people to accept the currency, but that's hardly a useful conversion for daily use.

To the contrary, you can never be referred to as a professional. Having to work a job is for the little non Lord people.

And even if the driving robots don't work better than the sugary robots, just look for a robotic two-for-one deal and you are almost guaranteed to make it to your destination in one piece.

Question 1- a title is supposed to inform you on what the story is about. That makes option (a) a bad choice. The sun is in the story, but is not a central actor. Option (d) is also a bad choice, it would make a relatively unimportant part the theme.

I'm sorry, but that's fucking ridiculous The suggestion that a title is "supposed" to inform you in any particular way is absurd. Some titles are chosen because they fit in with a particular pattern of other works in the series. (Final Fantasy : Advent Children. Tell me anything about the story based on that title!) Some titles are picked purely for marketing reasons. (The Day The Earth Stopped. Named to ride the coat tails of The Day The Earth Stood Still.) Some titles are picked purely because they sound cool, or because of a pun of a character's name that is funny. Some titles are awkward translations (Try deciphering some Anime titles and tell me how informative they are.)

What the title of a story should be is absolutely subjective. "Which of these possible titles best explains what the story is about?" might be a reasonable question. But, absent a specified metric, there is absolutely no way to qualify a sample's success with regard to that metric.

Well then why not subdivide all time zones in 1/4 so people at the end of a current timezone can get an extra 45 minutes? Why is 1 hr granularity "correct" but two hour granularity "incorrect" despite all the simplification in offers? The hour listed on the clock is arbitrary. Don't want to get up in dark? Fine, schedule your work day however you want. I've worked real jobs where I went into the office at 1:00 pm or 10:00 pm.

Why would it matter in any sense if sunset happens at 3:11? Would it make you happier if we called it something else? You understand that the correlation between when we do things and what number is on a clock is completely arbitrary, right? We could go from 3:10 to HERBERT O'Clock and then to 3:12 every day and skip over the whole issue of sunset at 3:11. It would happen at HERBERT instead.

You're telling me that SCIENTISTS, actual scientists, are turning to COMPUTERS, to do their work?

What is the world coming to?