A fully autonomous system can only react properly to those situations which the programmer has anticipated. When something unanticipated happens, chaos breaks loose.

Even with non-autonomous vehicles, chaotic situations can happen. But at least there's a better chance of a real person being able to respond properly to unanticipated situations and therefore minimize the damage.

How do autonomous vehicles fare when an oncoming drunk driver zones in on their headlights, veers into the lane and tracks the autonomous vehicle as it tries to avoid the collision?

How will the autonomous vehicle avoid the T-bone collision from the driver that fails to stop at the red light on the cross street? Does the autonomous vehicle have peripheral scanning that will detect a cross-traffic vehicle that doesn't appear to be stopping?

How about four fully autonomous vehicles that approach a 4-way stop from four directions at the same time? Who gets to go first? Will they communicate somehow?

Pretty much every site has an option to reset your password by sending a unique code to a previously registered email account or phone. There's really no need to remember or store a password; just reset it every time you want to log in.

Of course, that implies that you will still need to know the password to your email account, unless you use a disposable email address such as those offered by mailinator.com . (Hint: use a different disposable address for each site to maximize security.)

I've seen a few cars in the cloud. Unfortunately, the cloud was blue.

If the government has backdoor access to your car's computers -- and how do we know they don't? -- so will the hackers.

Oops, I meant recycle bag.

To get out of the car, you'll have to sit in the litter bag.

So many of these articles that proclaim how inexpensive it is to produce things with 3-D printing technology completely misrepresent the true cost.

That 30 cents figure is probably just for the materials. It doesn't consider the development cost (which in this case may be donated, but in many cases must be amortized across every piece produced), the cost of production equipment (also to be amortized), employment of production labor, distribution costs, marketing, overhead, and any number of other real business expenses above and beyond materials costs.

Realistically, I would expect this to have a market price in the low 10s of USD, not "30 cents." That puts in the range of pretty much every stethoscope available. The typical third-world MD isn't going to have a 3-D printer at her disposal.

The "cleanness" of energy is determined by political expediency, not actual impact on the environment. And even if it were based on environmental impact, the negativity of those impacts would be debated. So really, there is no truly "clean" energy.

Liberties are of utmost importance, whether it be for digital data, sexual preference, religion, property, or any other activity that does not INJURE others.

When you demand the right to control how your neighbor uses his property, you give implicit permission for him to control how you use your property. And that expands into every other facet of life.

I don't like the flooding of historic neighborhoods with huge boxes any more than you do, nor would I want my neighbor to build an asphalt plant, but the loss of liberty is of even greater concern to me. If my neighbor did choose to build an asphalt plant, I would complain loudly, but I would also defend his right to do so. I do not have a "right" to not see, not hear, or not smell that which offends me provided it does not injure me. There is no right to not be threatened; no right to "feel safe." And I have no right to guaranteed property value at all. But I do have the right to move somewhere else, and I have the responsibility to accept whatever that costs me.

Everyone is assuming that the spent fluid is being dumped overboard. Do we know that to be the case?

It's only necessary to expel the spent fluid externally if you want to reduce overall rocket mass while doing so. If that's not necessary, you can still use an open loop system but have a recovery tank to receive the spent fluid, thereby preventing environmental contamination. That's really the only reason to contain it; the cost of lost spent fluid is probably minimal.

Tape media's greatest benefit is its long storage life. Providing you have the equipment to do it, you could read a tape created 25 years ago.

Tape media's greatest liability is its long storage life. Will you be able to find equipment to read it 25 years from now? If not, you have what we call write-only media.

I think that tape is going to disappear as a viable storage medium, at least in the small business sector. The equipment and media is expensive, and most small businesses don't have the resources to employ someone trained in proper media management.

The replacement is going to be offsite storage farms, whether from a third-party cloud provider, or farms owned by the company that needs the backups. As the per-byte cost of disk storage continually and rapidly falls and wide-area network (Internet) bandwidth increases, offsite/online backups are becoming more and more feasible. Data deduplication and image management software technologies mean that a company can have daily backups completely automated and available as far back as they want. Restoring a file or two from these backups is quick and easy. My company already supports several small businesses using this backup technology; as existing tape drives fail they are seldom being replaced with more tape hardware.

The downside of offsite/online backups is that bare-metal recovery of a failed system from those backups is still extremely time-consuming. Eventually the bandwidth will become available to make it viable; until then tape still seems to be the best option for bare-metal recovery.

No. You are being sold AS a product in the name of 'profits' and 'growth'. You are not the customer. The article is not the product, it is the medium by which the product (your eyes) is delivered to the customer (the advertiser).

You have to listen/read carefully what Clinton said. The popular press reported it as "I did not have sex with that woman -- Monica Lewinsky." I believe what he really said was "I did not have sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky."

Notice the subtle difference. In the second analysis, he is not referring to Ms. Lewinsky, but in fact addressing her. Which opens the question: then what woman did he not have sex with? Hillary? (I couldn't blame him for not.) Then from whence Chelsea?

At least the way I read the article, the flaw allows a charge of 999,999.99 in ANY unit of currency, not specifically US dollars, or UK pounds, or Euros, or Dinars, or Rubles, or whatever.

I imagine the pilots find the windows useful, too. Sure, they can take off and land totally on instruments, but the instruments won't tell you everything you need to know about what you're about to fly into.