Not to mention that IBM provided the source code for the BIOS in the extended manual kit, so Compaq had a good idea of what they were not supposed to copy...

This is entirely about politics. It's about who gets a vote count benefit from being perceived as being compassionate to Hispanics attempting to enter the U.S, thus garnering support from the legal citizen portion of the Hispanic population. If Hispanics didn't tend to vote Democratic, the Democrats would be the ones campaigning to build a wall and the Republicans would be running government-sponsored shuttle buses between the border and the farms that would employ most unskilled laborer migrants.

Then again, my 4 year old MacBook Pro is soldiering along just fine with the latest software, so maybe we've just reached the point where most computer technologies are "good enough".

CPU technology is approaching a plateau; hopefully, in the long run, it's not an endless plateau, but over the next several years we will hit the known limits of process technology without a major revolution in how silicon chips are made. We've already seen a slowing CPU speed growth curve, and GPUs/etc. will catch up soon, so measuring "new" by the traditional metrics of CPU speed and cores is going to become pointless. Hopefully we'll still see a bit of growth in number of cores, co-processors, etc., but the same limits will apply there; there's only so much heat/power/cost you can deal with in laptops and home systems.

I know statements like this have been made before (I remember the "1 micron" barrier :-) ) but this time I think it's much more real.

One thing needs to be clear: Autopilot does NOT navigate. It has no idea where it's going. It's just super cruise control, and if the driver tries to use it any other way then they are an idiot. It doesn't take more than five minutes of using it to figure that out; there are sketchy road markings and road construction zones pretty much everywhere, and if you can't pick up on its shortcomings after a few minutes of using it then you probably shouldn't be driving any type of vehicle.

That's actually a good thing, IMHO; if it was a lot better then I would be tempted to rely on it while I took a nap (I drive a Model S to work every day). As it is, it's a very helpful feature that takes a lot of stress out of the typical 20mph stop-and-go commute driving that I do every day; it excels at that so I can relax a bit and tune the radio.

Meanwhile, there's usually some idiot in a non-autopilot car next to me who is trying to drive and text his girlfriend at the same time; we'd all be better off if he had autopilot features, even if they aren't perfect.

I dunno - are they sure JJ Abrams was not involved in taking the photograph?

The barrier at the intersection in question is quite hard to see from far enough away; it's the vertical edge of a concrete highway barrier contrasted against some concrete highway infrastructure. If the gore point barrier had been in place the Tesla probably would have easily seen it and avoided the crash, or at least braked. (I've driven past the intersection many times, including a drive just two hours before the crash in question.)

A local news station also reported that the human driver that destroyed the barrier two weeks before the Tesla crash was confused by the lane markings on the road, which (still) visually lead you to believe that you are in fact in a lane when you are actually between lanes and on a collision course with the barrier. The lane markings leading to the barrier are supposed to be cross-hatched but they are not, or at least they weren't the last time I went by.

That's a demo of the full self-driving capability, which is also the title of the web page. That is *not* AutoPilot, and it is not currently available. Neither is self-parking after you get out of the car, unless you use the phone app to move the car into a tight space, in which case you have to be standing next to it or it won't work.

Just switch back to LTE; China doesn't block foreign internet access for cell phones with foreign SIM cards. When I go to China I just turn my wi-fi off for the duration of the visit and pay the $10-a-day AT&T overseas access charge.

Requiring gun owners to have some level of training is not a bad idea, and could probably be implemented even at a federal level once enough states adopt the idea (many states already do require this in order to purchase a gun). However, the problem is that such legislation has been used as a stalking horse for gun control policies far beyond mere education - all you do is pass the law requiring training, and then make training almost impossible to get ("oh, sure, we'll put on the wait-list for the gun class that starts two years from next Thursday, after you pay the $1000 fee"). This is not a theoretical risk; New York City is notorious for this kind of behavior with their gun permit system, for example.

Any federal legislation along those lines will have to have very clear fall-through provisions such that if the necessary education mechanisms are not put into place, the law would become void.

Would this be an "infringement" of the Second Amendment? Maybe, maybe not: "infringement" is a broad term in law but it has limitations, too. As long as the law is non-discriminatory (anyone meeting the criteria can get a gun) and the bar is not set too high (difficulty, cost, etc.) then there's a good chance that the courts would not consider it to be an infringement, given that many of the laws already on the books have passed that test.

Never mind all that about facial recognition; you can get _beer_ from a vending machine?

That, sir, is the finest rant I have seen on /. in quite some time. Well done!

Apple doesn't make hardware themselves?? Other than the microprocessors, NAND flash memory, and board design, you mean? They may not manufacture it themselves, but neither does anybody else these days; pretty much all computers and smartphones are manufactured by contract houses.

Just don't mix the potassium permanganate crystals with anything containing glycerin (some liquid soaps do, I think). Potassium permanganate + glycerin => spontaneous combustion.

I don't think it's that crazy. I did some robot navigation work for a thesis project, years ago, when compute power was abysmal and sensor capability was very limited as well. The lesson learned was that navigation and mapping is relatively easy regardless of the data source (we did nav and mapping with an original 128KB Macintosh), but spatial sensor processing is hard and unreliable (nothing that we had available could keep up, and the raw sensor data sucked too).

The key is reliability; you can certainly do optical/sonar/laser etc. sensors quite effectively these days, but it takes a lot of processing horsepower to unambiguously convert what you're seeing into a map. Note that the amazing flying UAV demos frequently posted on here are not doing the sensor processing on the UAV platform itself; that's all being done by offboard visual equipment against a clean white background.

Some combination of bouncing around and low-quality sensors is probably quite a decent approach.