Citation needed.

Google doesn't even have self-driving cars. Maybe you're thinking about Waymo (which is part of Alphabet, not Google).

Regardless, no, to the best of my understanding, they cannot be driven remotely at all, at least by any normal person's definition of the word "drive". When intervention is required, the remote operators get a dump of camera images to review, and then they draw a proposed path on a map. The car then tries to follow it, and aborts if doing so would result in hitting anything. This may have to be done more than once to get it out of the problem situation. When the vehicle says that it is comfortable proceeding on its own, the remote operator tells it to go ahead, and it takes over path planning again.

At no point is any remote operator in direct control over the vehicle. All they can do is propose an alternative path when the vehicle's path planner gets stuck trying to figure out how to safely extricate itself from some situation. At all times, the vehicle's software is the driver. The remote operator is just hinting that it should go to the left of safety cone A, to the right of cone B, etc. (or whatever the situation happens to be). This is why it takes so long to extricate a stuck car. If there were an actual remote driver that could take real-time control, it would take just a few seconds.

From what I've read, when a Waymo car sees emergency lights, it stops driving and gets out of the way. I do see one (presumably) recent video where a Waymo stopped in a place that actually delayed an ambulance from getting past it on a narrow street, so unless that's an old video, I'm guessing there's still a bit more tweaking required in terms of recognizing whether the right choice is to stop or to move out of the way. I'd imagine someone is already working on making sure that particular edge case doesn't happen again.

What I'm not seeing is evidence of some widespread problem with autonomous vehicles in general. There's an edge case here or an edge case there where something didn't work as expected. And they'll complain about it, and the AV company in question will figure out why the car did the wrong thing, update their training sets, and that specific scenario won't happen again.

(This, of course, ignores Tesla, because the emergency vehicle drivers can't tell if the vehicle is being driven by the car or by a human, making any sort of reporting problematic at best.)

So realistically, I suspect that the answer to a vague demand from a government agency demanding to know what AV companies will do to prevent bad interactions with emergency vehicles will always be "exactly what we're already doing", because apart from coming up with new simulated situations to test (which they're always doing), there's really nothing they can do to prevent the car from behaving the wrong way in some vague unspecified future situation that nobody has thought of yet. And the answer to what they're doing to prevent a specific situation will usually be "We've already updated our training sets and that won't happen again."

To that end, I'm really not sure what they're trying to accomplish with sending a letter like that. Seems more like political posturing than any actual attempt at solving a problem. *shrugs*

There are a couple of alternatives. The problem is that there are only a couple.

Whilst I'm no fan of the uber wealthy (I'm not at the point of saying we should eat them, but we do need to tax and control them better before we are at that point) this is actually a more sound business move. Most large airports have a "hidden" private terminal that the wealthy can use to avoid the hoi-polloi. London Heathrow has one, it costs £2,500 a person and that's just paid to the airport. In effect it ends up subsidising the other airport operations (better than having overpriced restaurants and LHR is one of the few airports where eating there doesn't cost an arm and a leg).

LHR doesn't handle GA so that's 2,500 quid for getting on a commercial flight. Private aviation in London is served by other airports like Farnborough.

With SFO, I suspect the problem is that they don't have a lot of room to expand.

However back in the real world, in the US deistically the rich count far more than the average person, when it comes to the government, hence why so many in the government kowtow to them.

They might only get one vote themselves, but enough money means you can buy the votes of others, by hook or by crook if necessary (The whole reason for Fox News' existence is to control who people vote for by limiting the information they receive). At that point, they also get to dictate policy.

Could it please implicate every member of the federal government in whichever party I choose, so that I can throw the next election to whoever promises to fix the inefficient traffic lights near my house? Thanks.

I'm not convinced those people exist. Rather, the people with 5-figure income can afford to take a car, so why would they willingly walk for ten minutes to the nearest bus stop and then spend an hour on two different modes of public transit to go somewhere that takes fifteen minutes by car?

I'm also not convinced that very many people exist who would pay $5k a year to go through a different entrance to the airport just so that they don't interact with anybody who isn't in the six-figure club.

That said, I'll admit that having someone drive me to the gate would be nice, assuming it is efficient. Unfortunately, realistically, it won't be unless they build the private terminal on top of or under the main terminal or otherwise provide a cart path that doesn't interact with pedestrian traffic in the main terminal).

I can only assume that the food would be free and readily available like in an Admiral's club (though I suppose you're paying for it, so not truly free), so having something like this at connecting airports would be great, but far less useful at either endpoint.

If they include prepaid valet service for your car as part of the cost so you can just drive up and they'll whisk you to the gate straight from your car with only a brief stop at the security checkpoint, it could have some value — not enough value to spend an extra fifteen to thirty minutes and fly out of SFO, mind you, but some value.

I can't imagine it being worth $5k a year, though, so what I'd expect is that honeymooners will do it as a once-in-a-lifetime way to be treated like they're important, and all the people with money will continue to do their usual.

Thats the thing, people are buying consoles thinking it'll be cheaper... well at least they think they are.

With Consoles, you pay less for the hardware initially but then pay through the nose for everything else. Pay for multiplayer and online access, pay for replacement controllers (Sony can fix the stick drift, they just don't want to lose the extra revenue from £60 controllers), you pay more for games.

PC is the opposite, you pay full price for the hardware as no-one is subsidising it, then your savings start immediately, games are cheaper and go on sale more often, hardware actually lasts (I've a £30 mouse that's approaching it's 10th birthday and still going), you don't pay for online access and what's better is that we have actual competition, not one gatekeeping corporation.

If you play games, the price difference between a PS5 and a mid range gaming PC is made up in less than 2 years... and it's only that long if you don't play a lot of games.

However people are stupid, so they get suckered in by the low sticker price. Even when they're outright told this will be more expensive in the long run (years ago, UK stores had to put "per unit" pricing on the shelves, so £ per 100ml or similar, people still buy the more expensive option).

This, sometimes I am looking for cheap, no-name products. I really don't care who made my bin bags as long as they fit in the bin and aren't a total PITA to open. It's going to be the same terrible quality as you get from the supermarket but saves me a trip.

What I'm concerned about is, is that Panaphonics TV I'm buying a genuine Panaphonics TV? That's when you have to check it's not being sold by Dongfeng or XSFCDWS.

Yep, could easily be a count of users running some kind of privacy extension like Privacy Badger or NoScript.

Also I certainly hope they're not basing this on the user agent string, that can be made to say anything. Also Android seems conspicuously absent.

However any decrease from the 99% Microsoft used to have is a huge improvement and any increase in Linux adoption is also worth celebrating. With Steam running Windows games on Linux I suspect I'm not the only gamer looking to move full time to Linux.

Apple wouldn't license Broadcom ARM cores. They have their own. I could see Apple using Broadcom ASIC cells for Wi-Fi, but that wouldn't be a Broadcom part at that point; it would be an Apple part, because it being a Broadcom part would imply that Broadcom can make the part available to other companies.

It's an out-of-court settlement. After ten years, if they lock down repairs again, it's not a breach of the agreement, so the government will have to care enough to file a lawsuit.

I feel like the real way to solve this problem is to wait for the all-electric Chinese-made tractors to get good enough, then let John Deere shrivel on the vine. They're only able to pull this stuff because there isn't much competition.

You missed my point, which is that if Apple is designing them, they're Apple chips, not Broadcom chips. That's the part that didn't make sense.

This article seems nonsensical to me. If Apple is designing the chips, how are they Broadcom chips? Either Apple is designing them (or has designed them), in which case they're Apple chips, and Apple is paying Broadcom to build and maintain fabs for them, or Broadcom is designing them, and Apple is paying them to make them in the U.S.

Depends on whether I want to wait for the longer shipping.

For me, there are three classes of products:

• Need now - Something I'm actively working on is waiting for parts, and I need them quickly and/or food is involved.
  • For name-brand stuff, Walmart is my top pick, because they can deliver same day. (Amazon occasionally can, but rarely, and only in big cities; Walmart can deliver same day even to my mom's house in Tennessee.) Amazon is my second choice.
  • For things where quality doesn't matter, Amazon is more likely to have it than Walmart, though if the price is high enough, I'll compare with Walmart.
• Need exact specifications - Something I need to buy must meet specific requirements. Time may be important, but is of less importance than meeting the requirements (and if it is time-sensitive, I'll do without rather than buying something that doesn't meet the requirements). These searches are the essence of hell.
  • I'll try Amazon briefly first. Their Alexa engine occasionally produces usable results. (Their search engine is basically worthless for this category.)
  • 99% of the time, I end up using Google search (not product search) with site:amazon.com and a whole bunch of quoted terms and "-undesirable" terms, then opening each possibility in a new window and closing it one right after the next until I get something that actually meets the requirements
• Things where cost, rather than speed, is the primary concern. For these, I do a combination of Google shopping, AliExpress, and Alibaba. I'll glance at Amazon, but 99% of the time, they are not competitive. By item count, 98% of those purchases come from AliExpress. By dollar amount, 75% of those come from AliExpress, and the rest come from Alibaba.

That last category has been the largest category of my purchasing for the last year and a half or so. For example, my Chinese-made contrabass flute (Alibaba) saved me probably about $15,000 over a name brand. So even though I'm still trying to get the middle section to stop leaking, it's playable, and it is totally worth the extra minor repair work to save ~80% off of such an expensive purchase.