Should read: Bicyclist Strikes Waymo Driverless Car In San Francisco, Causes Minor Injuries To Himself

The fact that the cyclist immediately rode away says everything. If someone hits me, and I know it's their fault, I'm not going anywhere until I get their license and insurance information.

But if I hit them, and I know I'm at fault? I'm not going to hang around and make an issue of it, especially if I'm the one who is uninsured.

Indeed. Cyclist runs stop sign, gets hit. Happens every day.

Cyclists have been hit by cars twice in the past week where I live. In both cases, the cyclists were instantly killed. But note the difference in this case: After the incident, Waymo contacted the police, but the cyclist left on their own, reporting only "minor scratches."

That Waymo vehicle instantly went into full braking mode as soon as the bike became visible to its sensors, far faster than any human could have reacted. That's probably what saved that cyclist's life. Had this been a human driver, we wouldn't be reading this story. Yet another cyclist killed by a human driver isn't the least bit newsworthy.

But you're not getting into a place like Dartmouth with unexplained mediocre grades and great test scores.

Maybe not, but great GRE test scores can help overcome a mediocre undergraduate GPA, and they can absolutely help get you admitted to graduate school if you got your B.S. at a university no one ever heard of.

High school GPAs mean next to nothing, and likewise for a lot of university GPAs. Grade inflation is out of control, and no one trusts an admission essay that was probably written by ChatGPT.

Standardized tests like the SAT, ACT, and GRE are one of the few yardsticks left that can truly distinguish a student's potential. Everyone is finally figuring that out. Now that the Ivy League is returning to requiring them, and COVID is over, it will only be a matter of a couple of years before everyone requires them again.

I see Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles as a temporary step to allay the worries of "range anxiety" that new EV owners are experiencing. The scarcity of fast chargers on ALL long-distance routes has people worried that an example trip from Portland to Denver might be a series of short drives with plans and back up plans of where to charge, how to handle construction delays, overcrowded charging locations, and cold weather performance degradation.

We could install superchargers every 20 miles along every interstate in the U.S., and you're still not going to overcome the fact that even "fast" charging is slow compared to filling up with gasoline. I can pull into a gas station and add another 550 miles of highway range to my Prius in five minutes, as opposed to 200 miles in 15 minutes with a supercharger and a BEV. A plug-in hybrid is truly the best of both worlds.

I, for one, am really scared that the clock is pegged at 90 seconds before midnight.

I mean, really, really, really scared.

Does anyone have any idea what this means, that the hands are at 90 seconds before midnight?

I don't either, but I remain scared.

Like Zeno's Paradox, the publicity-whoring "Atomic Scientists" can only keep themselves in the news by pushing the clock in ever-decreasing intervals towards midnight.

I can see the headlines twenty years from now: "The Doomsday Clock is now 500 milliseconds before midnight!" It'll be just as meaningless as 90 seconds is today.

I've spoken at length to a couple of police officers about the Amazon Ring camera program. They considered it basically useless, for a few reasons:

(1) If police need camera footage, they just look around the area of the crime and knock on residents' doors. People who have cameras are almost always happy to provide video footage.

(2) Residents send Ring footage to the police all the time. The police are overwhelmed with voluntarily submitted video clips.

(3) Ring video footage is rarely of much value. Ring makes good video doorbells, but terrible security cameras. Most Ring users turn down the motion sensitivity to prevent random people and vehicles on the street from triggering the camera. So unless the crime takes place right on their front porch, nothing is recorded.

My assumption it that Amazon did a cost-benefit analysis and came to the conclusion that the program really wasn't providing significant benefit. I doubt very much that they had any sort of epiphany concerning privacy.

Anybody can set up a license plate reader on their property including an HOA, but it certainly doesn't mean the police will know about it or have access to it.

What the EFF refuses to come to terms with is the proliferation of surveillance technology that has absolutely nothing to do with the police, e.g. privately owned LPR cameras. To them, everything revolves around "How can the police abuse this?" when in fact the technology has grown far beyond that.

Right now you can buy a Wyze OG Telephoto camera that will legibly record license plates of moving vehicles from about 40 feet away in the daytime. This is a $35 camera, by the way. If Wyze wanted to, they could market a home LPC camera for less than $100. Eventually someone will if they don't.

Along the same lines, Wyze just announced a facial recognition feature in Cam Plus Unlimited for $99 a year, which will work with up to 99 cameras in your personal system.

Very soon, the police will become minor players compared to what you and your neighbors will be collecting. I predict in less than a decade that neighborhoods will deploy networked camera systems managed by AI "sentries" that will contact the police whenever suspicious activity is detected. People will embrace such systems in red and blue states alike. The horse has already left the barn, and the EFF wants to pretend otherwise.

Living in a very red state I know NO ONE who wants surveillance of any kind.

Excuse me? Living in a very red state myself, there are cameras everywhere - on the roads and highways, around businesses, around homes, you name it. Not to mention the multitude of people who pull out their cell phones to record and repost everything on social media.

It's the same wherever you go - people may pay lip service to being anti-surveillance, right up to the point where someone steals the package from their front porch, and then they buy a Ring camera. I've seen some extremely ardent anti-camera types suddenly have a change of heart when their own property is stolen and the police can do nothing.

Many people are anti-surveillance, until they decide that they can be the exception to the rule with their own cameras.

You can't trust the police because they don't have cameras. You can't trust the police because they have cameras. I am sensing an agenda.

When I talk to a responding officer to report a crime where I live, he or she will inform me at the outset that our conversation is being recorded by a body cam. I've sometimes wondered what would happen if I said, "I object to you doing that. You're violating my privacy!" It's not as if the officer can turn off the camera - they'd be disciplined for doing it.

The police I've spoken to are extremely supportive of wearing the body cams. There's been a huge decrease in complaints about police brutality and misconduct since they were deployed. Not surprisingly, both cops and criminals behave better when they know they're being recorded.

Ringworld exists !!!!

Those structures are far too large to be Ringwords. It's Stephen Baxter's Xeelee building cosmic megastructures to escape to a different universe.

I read a big opinion piece by some airline regulator guy who went on about his belief Southwest didn't make any significant changes after the disaster in 2022, so we'd see a repeat of the same service meltdown/dysfunction this year.

Southwest's management, of course, claimed the opposite, giving a laundry list of supposed improvements and changes they made to various things.

I'd say this is one of those events that "stress tests" the system they put in place, so it's a great learning experience for Southwest to avoid it happening again, IF they took heed and spent money appropriately to fix it.

It all depends on how committed the current Southwest management (and CEO) are to fixing things.

Southwest Airlines has followed a similar path as many other publicly-owned U.S. companies. The original founders, which included former CEO Herb Kelleher, made Southwest successful by paying attention to the details. Unfortunately, in 2008 Gary Kelley (an accountant / CPA) succeeded Kelleher as CEO. Southwest's slide started from that point as Kelley ignored infrastructure upgrades in favor of maximizing stockholder value. Employees and insiders pleaded with management for years to do something about the company's obsolete scheduling system, and were ignored.

It all fell apart over the 2022 holiday season, just a few months after Kelley retired as CEO. Bob Jordan, who took over as CEO in February 2022, began his career as an IT guy and undoubtedly understood how big of a mess that Southwest's IT systems were in, but didn't have the time to fix things before the meltdown occurred. Kelley is still chairman of the board for Southwest, and the question is how much influence he still has in the company.

If Jordan is actually calling the shots, then there have probably been substantive upgrades to Southwest's internal systems. But if Kelley is the power behind the throne then whatever has been announced may just be window dressing.

My colleagues and I have observed a marked decline in average mathematical proficiency in our students over the past two years. We attribute it to the consequences of COVID lockdown of public schools. Remote instruction in math concepts did not work out well for U.S. students, and it has been reflected in their performance as they've moved on to college.

My expectation is that we'll continue to see lower scores for a few more years, then a return to pre-COVID levels.

Wow, this is surprising. Anybody know what actually happened? The release is quite vague, which isnâ(TM)t surprising, but it leaves me curious.

Most opinions I've read is that is was likely due to Altman's involvement with WorldCoin, i.e. financial shenanigans or undisclosed conflicts of interest.

The problem with EVs is far greater than any supposed resistance from dealers. As an owner of multiple Toyota vehicles, including two hybrids, there is zero motivation for me to switch to an EV.

With a plug-in hybrid, I have all the advantages of an EV for trips around town combined with the ability to take longer road trips using existing gasoline infrastructure while getting nearly 60 miles per gallon.

The improved reliability of EVs is moot to me. Toyota vehicles are already extremely reliable. What does matter is that I can hop in my car and drive several hundred miles at short notice without stopping to recharge, which nowadays may even require waiting in line for the next charger to become available.

Except for Teslas (which are very much status symbols), I have observed very little enthusiasm for buying an EV. A plug-in hybrid can do everything an EV can do for 98% of use cases. If you want to subsidize a technology that people are willing to purchase, then subsidize plug-in hybrids.

FUSUS has partnered with our local PD, and has a website where you can register your cameras. In this case you're just telling the police that cameras are installed at your address, so that they can reach out to you to request footage in case of a crime.

The FUSUS boxes are pricey, and I doubt many residential homeowners would bother to install them. According to the officer I spoke with, it is mainly business owners in downtown and commercial areas who are buying them. There's a lot of late-night smash-and-grab property crime, and there's value in having an AI-powered system that alerts the police when people and vehicles appear in places where they shouldn't be in the middle of the night.