Since two of the accidents happend while human drivers were in control of the cars, I would argue that they weren't "autonomous vehicles" at that moment even though they had the capability built in. That cuts the 8.3% figure in half. There's also the question of whether the 6M accidents each year count all the minor fender benders that don't necessarily get reported.

But really, the whole point of allowing autonomous vehicles on the road at this point, is so that they can be tested in the real world and improved. Even if the autonomous vehicles aren't safer now (though they probably are), that doesn't mean that improved versions of the software/hardware won't be safer in a few years.

As someone who had the chance to try VR in the 90s, and who has used Oculus's DK2, I can say that the difference is staggering.

Most of the VR headsets that I remember from the 90s where significantly bigger than anything Oculus has put out, however I don't doubt that with a quick search one could find examples of smaller headsets from the 90s. But what all this glosses over is the difference in what the user experiences when wearing the headset. Part of this is simply due to improved rendering capabilities on the PC side, but I suspect that lightweight high resolution screens with very high refresh rates, and small but accurate motion sensors plays a big part as well.

With the hardware that I remember from the 90s, the user always felt the need to turn their head with very slow unnatural motions in order for the sensors/rendering to keep in sync. Contrast this with Oculus's devkits/prototypes where the head tracking is natural and fast enough that some people can forget that they're even wearing a headset at some level.

I do think that the resolution is still lacking (thought it's far better than anything I tried in the 90s), and the size/weight may need to some down a bit further. But overall I'm optimistic that VR can be successful this time around. I know that there were people who were optimistic in the 90s as well, but I wasn't one of them. It just didn't seem like the technology was ready yet. Perhaps it's still not ready, but in my opinion it's much much closer.

With an HMD the internal screen is close enough to your eyes that the field of view can be 100+ degrees even with one screen, so it can certainly appear that light is hitting your eyes from multiple directions (and the lenses can also affect the field of view). I don't see any reason that you couldn't in theory simulate a (very large) 4K display even when the physical internal screen in the headset is a lower resolution than that. But the virtual screen would probably need to be too big to provide an ideal viewing experience unless you wanted to exercise your neck.

I'm doubtful that the first consumer version of the Rift (or the HTC headset that Valve's involved with) will have enough resolution to be useful for coding, but I've still got my finger's crossed that something like that will be possible a few years down the road.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. I wouldn't really describe Virtual Desktop as "3D Windows". It just shows your 2D Windows on a virtual screen (or screens if you're running more than one monitor). It doesn't make any attempt at creating a 3D UI for Windows.

With future versions of the headset, if the internal screens get hi-res enough, something like Virtual Desktop could be useful for simulating multiple large displays for increased productivity even if you don't have multiple physical screens. But at the moment, both the hardware and the software support are a bit lacking. I think the current use case for Virtual Desktop is that you can launch a VR game without having to pull the headset off to see what you're clicking.

But realistically, taking two years of a foreign language in high school isn't going to be enough for most people to strike up with conversations people in that language. That's not to say you can't learn a language to fluency in two years - just that you'll need to put in more that a couple of hours per week.

I agree that coding is very different from learning a foreign language, but I do think that the question in the summary makes a valid point. Why is learning a foreign language so important that we should dedicate 4 semesters to it (especially when most people don't learn it to the point where it could become directly useful in their daily lives)? IMO, coding brings up the same question - how useful will 2 years of programming classes be for the average non-programmer?

While I wouldn't equate learning a programming language with learning a foreign language, it doesn't seem unreasonable to allow students to replace once class of questionable usefulness with another class of questionable usefulness.

Supposedly they can already handle hand signals from cyclists. I'm pretty sure I read that there are other cues involved as well allowing it to predict turns by cyclists who don't signal.

Most of the jittering in the video is due to the head movements of the user and is not actually noticable to the person wearing the goggles. In fact, if the jittering weren't present it would probably be a very uncomfortable experience for most people.

It's kind of like when you're looking at a physical monitor: As your head moves around slightly, the position of the monitor's projection onto your retina would also jitter, but it doesn't feel like the monitor is moving because your brain subconciously compensates for these movements based on data from your vestibular system. At the same time, if you had a camera strapped to your forehead, the position of your monitor would look jittery to someone observing the video stream unless the camera or the playback device was compensating for it.

Watching this video on YouTube is the equivilint of watching someone work at a computer from the perspective of a camera strapped to their forehead.

My post was just meant to be a humorous twist on the paradox of tolerance, but perhaps it didn't come across that way.

I agree that the world would likely be a better place if more people were tolerant of other people's beliefs. I do happen to think that more people basing their beliefs on evidence would also make the world a better place, but I wouldn't try to deny someone the right to believe whatever they want.

You seem to hate religious fervor with a religious fervor.

You say that the world will be a better place once it is free of such people, but is that assertion based on a careful controlled study or is it an article of faith?

And here's a more compact Java version:

class Maze{public static void main(String[] args){while (true){for(int i=0;i<40;i++)System.out.print(Math.random()<.5?"/":"\\");System.out.println();}}}

A bit verbose perhaps, but it's really not that much different than the version in the article. It's not the Java language that leads to the kind of verbosity that you see in enterprise code, but rather the conventions (and often the frameworks).

When people suggest that non-Latin characters should be allowed in passwords, I sometimes wonder how familiar they are with the common methods for inputting these characters.

Consider the Hanzi/Kanji used in Chinese and Japanese writing. Because it isn't practical to have a separate key for each possible character, an IME is used to make it possible to type these characters on a standard keyboard. Chinese and Japanese keyboards to generally have a few extra keys for switching between IMEs and/or between modes within an IME, but this doesn't really affect my point.

Entering a given character often involves a series of key strokes followed by a conversion command (invoked either by a special key or sometimes just with space/enter). The problem with using these characters in passwords is that when it's time to do the conversion, there's usually more than one candidate string to chose from. The order of the candidate strings doesn't even necessarily stay the same between invocations of the conversion command, so if you're entering text into a password field and are unable to see what you're typing, it would become difficult to enter the desired characters.

Of the GUI toolkits that I've used recently which have a special control for entering passwords, none of them even allow IMEs to operate while entering text into the password field.

The parent's claim was actually 26^6 * 6. This is technically correct if the attacker happens to know that the password is 5 lower case letters and 1 upper case letter. The attacker does NOT need to know where the upper case letter is.

You say that it would be 26^6 if the attacker DID know the exact location of the upper case letter. So what happens if the attacker assumes that it's the first letter and runs the attack? Then they assume that it's the second letter and run it again. And so on with the third letter..

In the end they only need to run the 26^6 attack 6 times. Hence the "26^6 * 6" claim.

Of course, it might seem unlikely that the attacker would know the search space so precisely (6 letters total with exactly one upper case letter). Then again, if you assume that most people use far fewer upper case letters than lower case letters, the search space can certainly be reduced to well below 52^n.