This isn't as hard as you make it out to be.

If your driverless car hits another car, your respective insurance companies pay for it unless it can be shown that you showed negligence. There is no liability for anyone. It goes from a case of assigning blame to treating it like getting cancer. Your medical insurance doesn't assign blame. It just pays out. You pay enough so that the insurance company always makes a buck. End of story. If a car company showed gross negligence, maybe someone could take legal action against them, but if occasionally shit happens and that is life, the simple and easy solution is just to have insurance be no-fault unless someone did something stupid, like modify the software. This is how most insurance works. Car insurance just starts to act like normal insurance.

In the case of your car killing someone, again, it is simple. Your insurance just acts like normal insurance. Your insurance company just pays out unless it can be shown that the pedestrian did something stupid and is own their own (like dive in front of the car). Again, if the software really bit the bullet, maybe you could try and hit the car company, but for the most part your insurance simply pays out and that is the end of the story.

The real change would be in insurance price. Your insurance price will probably swing based upon how good the car is at avoiding accidents. A car with a slow stopping speed and 5 year old software is going to be more expensive to insure than an agile car that can stop quickly and has the latest software. It is a boring numbers games that actuaries will have a field day with. You will probably have lower insurance rates regardless because the cost to insure for insurance companies will bottom out. You will have fewer accidents and blow less money on trying to determine liability. It will mean that they can score the same profit doing a whole lot less work, It is a win for everyone.

People are over thinking this trying to apply a world of liability to a world where there is little to none. If you break the speed limit, the cops might pull you over, but it will be just to check that your software and sensors are not screwed up, and maybe a warning to get your car checked out, not to give you a ticket.

...and get drugs. Seriously. BitCoins have value. So long as they work as an exchange medium that is more or less untraceable, they have very real value. You can decry it as glorified monopoly money, but so long as you can covert from dollars to BitCoin and back to dollars with dollars in roughly equal to dollars out, BitCoin has value.

I wouldn't invest my life savings into BitCoin, but so long as "and get drugs" works, it has value.

Um, money well bet? When you use the Google voice features it asks if it can build a database based on your voice so that it responds better to you. You can say no and it will just default to a standard attempt at voice match. Say yes, and it will start learning... like what most voice software does.

The charge is stupid, but you kind of have to be a dumb ass to run from 1 year of prison in Sweden. Sweden is not exactly known for their harsh prisons, and a year in jail sounds a lot better than being forever on the run.

I can only assume that you are from Britain or the US (or some nation with a similar system of law) if you think this matters. Sweden's legal system is different. If he was on the run from the US instead of Sweden with the exact same charges and they held the same legal weight, he would have an arrest warrant out and have been charged. The US, Britain, and other similar legal systems charge someone formally and then try and capture them in most cases. The suspect is rarely present when charged. The Swedish system captures them and then charges them. Successfully running when they initiate the "capture and question" part of the Swedish system doesn't mean a get out of jail free card. It is of the same severity and holds similar legal weight to being charged in the US or Britain and having arrest warrant issued. This isn't the voluntary phase where you can talk to the police or not. He is in the "we are going to hold you and question you" phase, and there is a legal warrant to detain him which he has run from, which is why Britain is willing to extradite him.

Whether or not the charges are legitimate and is this a secret plot by the US to snag him, I'll let other people argue. I'm happy Wikileaks exists regardless of whether or not Assange is a douche bag.

I don't think that there would be much to lose if computers took over which shit was going down. When shit hits the fan you have a second or two to respond. Your response is going to be pure instinct. It is probably going to be wrong.

I live in the north east USA. It snows a lot. People should be good at handling a skidding emergency, yet I watched a 30 car pile up a few years ago because a dozen drivers did the exact same thing when they hit ice on the highway and realize that the brakes were doing literally nothing. I watched a dozen cars blink their brake lights a few times, realize it wasn't working, realize that they were going to hit the cars that were stopped or already crashing in front of them, and then proceed to do literally the stupidest thing you can do. They braked and turned on ice. This is a surefire way to put your car into a spin, and spin they did. I got through a massive accident because I was one of the few people that could get a hold of myself long enough to realize that as much as I wanted to both stop and turn, only turning was going to work, and I gently steered my way through the accident without touching the breaks.

A computer would have handled it vastly better than most people. A computer would have realize that breaking was stupid, and then tried to coordinate gently moving out of the way. At worst, the computer would at least realize that if all else fails, a straight rear end impact as vastly safer than going into a spin.

People can't be trusted. As soon as computers can do it better (which shouldn't be all that hard), we should surrender control and let the computers do it. If that means that every time you hit ice and break the computer steals control, so be it.

Oh! I have one! You are driving peacefully down the road when a driver blows through a red light, crashes into your car, and kills your entire family and leaves you a paralyzed from the neck down. It turns out that the drive that plowed into was drunk. He decided to drive home anyways.

I'm going to leave it to you to decide which is more likely, terrorist assaulting your car and only your awesome human driver skillz saving your life, or random drunk crashes and kills you.

I always liked to call them the radioactive pr0n scanner. You can opt out of going through them and instead get some freedom fondles.

AC Wrote:

Holy shit! AC is right. You are one fat fuck. Not only are you a fat fuck, but you also also appear to believe in magic. Don't breed dude. Not only are you physically unhealthy, but your belief in magical forces and spirits pretty well disqualifies you as a person who should be breeding.

Fat fuck wrote:

Again, you appear to be a fucking moron. It is pretty easy for a gay to breed. You just need a womb. There is no shortage. Granted, it costs a little more than when two hillbillies fuck in the woods. You also seem to be under the delusion that people who have gay sex are confused about what naughty bits they posses. They aren't. They fully recognize that the sex they are having isn't for the purpose of reproduction and purely for fun. Most sex humans have isn't for reproduction. Well, in your case it might be. If you sucker some woman into having a relationship with you, I imagine she would only be letting your lard ass roll onto her if she was looking for a baby. You don't look like you have it all going in the "sweet loving" category, if you catch my drift.

In fact, I think this explains a lot about your bitterness towards gays. It must gal you to realize that there are people out there having sex purely for recreation. You, yourself, unable to sucker a woman into letting you enjoy regular recreational sex, have turned your cognitive dissidents to 11 and rationalize that sex is evil unless it is for procreation. You also appear to have picked up a belief in a magical sky man who gives a shit about you.

Here is my advice. Drop the belief in the magic sky man and accept that the world is as it appears to be and that there is no magic, holy or otherwise in it. Go to the gym and eat better. Do this for a year or two. It will feel good after a time. I promise. Work on being a less bigoted and shitty human so that you can attract people who enjoy life. You see, you are such a miserable fuck to be around that only people who believe in a magical god can stand to be around you, and only then because of their shared delusional belief in magic. What you need to do is work on being a less miserable fuck so that you can be around other more fun and interesting people. If you work on improving the health of your body and being less of a shit head, you will be able to hang out with people who have fun and are merry. Through such friends you might be able to find a lady who is okay with your now improved body and personality. With said lady, you can do the rest of the world a favor and get laid... laid just for fun. Once laid, the last vestiges of your miserable fat fuck personality will vanish. People around you will be happier and you will be happier. Win win.

That, or you can cling to your belief in a magic sky man and run around foaming at the mouth about how the gays are going to eat your children. Honestly, it doesn't really matter to me because I am going to go enjoy some recreational sex.

Eh. Who cares? Google trying to make really good ads for me rates pretty damn low on my list of concerns. Hell, if they actually manage to get me to click on a link, it means they found something that I actually care about. I call that a win. I will happily take a good book recommendation that I actually would like to know about over a dancing baby trying to sell me a better mortgage.

Targeted advertising just isn't scary. It is good. Google having that kind of information doesn't scare me.

Where Google and the like become scary is when our own government steps in. I don't care if Google tries to sell me stuff that I want. That is a service. I do care if the government can track down my various aliases and I run into trouble with the law because I vocally declare drug laws and the TSA dumb. Google isn't the problem, it is when my government forces Google to divulge information on me that we have a problem.

Facebook is little worse than Google. Their targeted advertising is perfectly fine, but their constantly shifting privacy settings that desperately want to share private drunk pictures with my boss is fucking annoying.

Cool story bro.

You don't have to blame the national entity. I mean shit, if you did, the Germans, Japanese, and Americans would be on the permanent shit list. That said, it is your duty to learn about what a dick your nation has been, and to not just merrily celebrate your glorious historical triumphs in a vacuum. A little humility in the face of your cultures past failings is healthy and helps prevent you from making those same mistakes.

So I can then I assume from your comment that you will hold fast to your beliefs that only the intelligent should survive and will yourself refuse to breed? Shitty bigots like you are the reason why Turing died. If Turing had been living in Boston today, he would have merrily continued with his work, gotten married to someone he loved, and if it tickled his fancy, have had a kid. The kid could have been from his very own sperm if that is so fucking important to you. It is kind of hard to breed when if it leaks out that your partner has the wrong naughty bits, the government castrates you. I suppose you think the Jews that got dumped into gas chambers in Auschwitz are also assholes for not breeding?

The bigoted British government of the 50s robbed the world of Turing passing down a legacy, not his sexual orientation.

Except for that... you know... that whole Android thing. You can drop a couple million here and there on dead end projects if one occasionally turns around and suddenly becomes the largest OS on the fast growing type of device (mobile). Google sucked the air out of the room for anyone doing maps, e-mail, web browsing, and now mobile devices. That isn't to suggest that there are not worthy competitors in all fields, but Google is a god damn gorilla in each and makes its competitors fight tooth and nail.

Google dumps money into pie in the sky R&D. Most of the time it fails miserably as that sort of things tends to do, but when it wins, it WINS. Google is clearly thinking ahead. They saw mobile coming and got their shit together in time to claim the lions share of the market, something Microsoft and Nokia utterly failed to do despite being in a vastly superior positions to do it.

Google's history in R&D is a jerk off fantasy for anyone who does that sort of work. Mobile is an excellent example because Google wasn't just doing mobile. Google was also doing ChromeOS. Why ChromeOS? Google was doing ChromeOS because it covered its bases, didn't truly know what the "next" thing was, and so had plates spinning for everything. If netbooks had ended up being the next big thing, Google would have been ready. It turned out that the answer was mobile, and ChromeOS faded out. That doesn't make ChromeOS a failure. A failure would have to have picked netbooks over mobile and watched as mobile won. A failure would have been to pick mobile and see netbooks win. Victory is picking both, having one of those investments be a minor waste and having the other investment consume market share like it was their job (which I suppose it is).

I am sure that Google is going to slip from their throne and fall someday when technology takes one hard right turn or another. It is inevitable. Everyone fades or fails eventually. That said, I wouldn't be one to bet against Google any time soon. I for one know I would be doing a lot more browsing on the 'tubes if someone offered me up an autonomous car and then used a pile of dark fiber to line the roads with data connections...

Hate crimes make a lot of sense. It modifies an existing crime. Why the modification? The reason is because you did extra harm to other people. If I beat a relative, for the most part, it doesn't effect the people besides the victim and the person who knew the victim. It might make my neighbor uneasy if he knows about it, but it probably doesn't go much further than that. For a normal crime, I get the normal punishment.

Now, lets say I go beat the shit out of someone in my neighborhood who is black because I hate black people. I victimized the victim and effect his friends and family, as in a normal crime. However, I also just scared the shit out of everyone in the community who is black because they now are worried that there are psychopaths targeting them specifically because they are black.

Motivation matters in law. Killing someone on accident while driving recklessly, is different from killing someone due to road rage, is different for waiting for someone at a specific time to leave work so I can run them down. It makes sense and we do it all the time. Hate crimes are no different. We modify the sentence because your motives were different. Hurting someone with the intent to terrorize them is a different motivation from hurting someone with the intent to terrorize an entire group of people and sow distrust and fear in the community.

Finally, it should be pointed out that hate crimes don't "treat people differently". If a gay guy is beating up straight kids because he hates straight people, they too could be charged with hate crimes. Hate crimes just pick out classifications, they don't specify that it needs to be a minority. It just so happens that most of the time nasty hate groups beating the shit out of people tend to be straight white dudes, hence they eat the majority of hate crime charges