"A human driver could easily..." Bullshit. Human drivers are the worst. A drunk monkey could do better than most humans who are distracted by their pretty phones.

Your comment is excellent. I don't have any points right now, so just thought I'd thank you. -CNTOAGN

https://www.amazon.com/Mars-Pa... Excellent book about managing a project of unknowns. Well written and concise.

I have a leaf - it beeps when it backs up. Going forward, at 3 to 4 miles per hour, you can hear it - like you would hear any couple thousand lb object moving. Any increase in the number of pedestrian accidents is because people are now walking with their heads down looking at their phones.

There's no excuse for a pedestrian to be hit by a vehicle unless the vehicle is somewhere it shouldn't be - like a sidewalk.

Keep your head up, its dangerous out there.

Leasing for 180 a month, gets roughly 60-70 miles a day put on it between me going to work, my wife going to see her horse, grocery store, pet store, book store, etc. I love driving it. Spacious and very zippy, it is our preferred vehicle for 95% of our needs. We also have a truck to pull the horse trailer, so it does the long hauls when needed. Maybe 2 cars isn't normal everywhere (LA, NYC), but growing up in Kansas and now living in Texas - everyone has 2 vehicles - one of them should be an electric. We have filled up the truck maybe 3 times this year, and I personally haven't been to a gas station this year. I also had insulation and a radiant barrier put in when we moved into this house. New windows and replacing the ACs have cut my electric bills in half, so I don't see any additional electricity from using it. It is the perfect solution for me.

I like Unity - it is a powerful tool and helps to put all the pieces together. I used XNA to write a single person game modeled after the board game Pandemic and when I wanted to take it to multi-player, it became quite a chore. Unity has built in networking (RPC style messaging and also object sync), so I ported my game to unity and was able to get the networking pieces done in days. It uses c#, but can also use javascript for the scripting language. Finally, the asset store is amazing. Filled with quality free assets (and even higher quality paid) - everything from full 3d models with animation, to scripts that you drop on your project that make the camera function exactly like the camera in Civilization.

Lastly, there's a "game" you can buy through Steam - called GTGD (Gamer to Game Developer) - some Aussie walks through creating a first person shooter with teams and multiple weapons. There's a S1 and S2 and after about 12 or so of the videos (out of 20+ in S1) I had enough to start programming my own game. He's writing it all in c# and explains the code decently.

Probably not very popular here, but I've been having a lot of fun lately with Unity using c# as my scripting language. Writing a networked game, and the RPC hookups and message passing is all pretty cool. State machines are such a different animal than business event driven programs (my normal job).

This. I wish I had mod points. Most of all the car should be able be take commands and execute on them immediately. Oddly enough, Demolition man (the movie with Sly Stallone) gets it right - let the car do the easy stuff, but allow for an override configuration. I recently got stuck in traffic in Dallas, bumper to bumper on a 4 lane tollway, sitting, move a foot, sit. I'd have loved to have my car take over and just freaking follow the guy in front of me. And I know it'll take some bumps and bruises - but when there are no longer human drivers as primary, the roads will be safer. Bottlenecks happen because of wrecks caused by inattentive humans. Or they happen because some human thinks he needs to get in front of everyone else because he's late for a meeting and swerves in and out of traffic. That all goes away. And that is probably why it won't ever happen - because it is the alpha jerks that'll say, "you'll get my steering wheel when you pry it out of my cold dead hands".

I've always considered legacy code to be code that isn't under any sort of unit testing. A well tested, thoroughly vented library will always be "production ready" for the tasks and behaviors that that code was intended for. If you are writing code (in whatever language) that isn't unit tested, then you are writing legacy code.

I normally don't respond, but are you sure we are all adults? Far too often it seems decisions are driven by greed, selfishness, or a religious self-richest goal that they now longer seem to be "grown up", much less even humanistic I wish everyone would "grow up", but frankly I don't think grown ups know what the fuck they are doing.

Does bombing funerals count? It doesn't happen often, but I remember it happening every so often during the first couple years of occupancy in Iraq (where one sect would hit a funeral and then when all those people would have a funeral there'd be a counter strike by the other sect). That's pretty mocking...

Or is all fair in war?

Will 3D printers help move open-source hardware circuit design to the next level? I know that they have great potential in helping the open-source ecology project (http://opensourceecology.org/), but that is mostly in the reprinting of complex parts for repair or initial construction of larger pieces. If more EEs / home enthusiasts could print out complete modules along with printing out testing nodes - little snap-off diodes whose sole purpose in the print is to prove some inner working of module, would circuit design explode? Just curious about what you thought.

But what if the cost to fix the failure is deemed to high? It is an acceptable engineering practice to just plan on something going wrong x% of the time. Now if 1/9 is the maximum failure rate, and you can still get to orbit (meaning you design in the possibility of an engine exploding - can you imagine!), and the probability of 2/9 is astronomical, is something that is "forseen" have to be mitigated? Now granted, I hope the engine failure is truly something anomalous, given that even the smallest fracture can cause problems, and you have to test the engine at least once before use...

Will space travel ever enter the "good enough" phase of manufacturing? Being an A.E. I applaud the design of the falcon engine system. Just like most large aircraft can land with 1 out of 4 engines being functional, a system that can take a full system failure on one of its parts and still perform is quality engineering.

Ok, I respect old people, but I don't trust them - not one bit. This lady is 80 - how is she qualified to be a judge on a case that involves technology? The RIAA must have convinced her that "downloading" somehow stole their copy and they had to get them back... Anyways, I'd be curious to see the list of songs - just to see where those songs are in the charts / profit margins.

Someone else mentioned that it would be nice if apps gave justifications for their various access rights - like "full internet access" - this would be a perfectly good reason, and it would be pretty cool if all apps would tell you, when you are installing - "this app uses internet access to send which functions get used, if it is uninstalled, and the ability to rate the app - no personal information sent."

Of course a baked in analytics service for all apps, that could be disabled, would be pretty cool too... Maybe an android level API?