I agree that a computer will certainly be able to react faster in the event of a sudden unexpected obstacle, but what about my human ability to see children playing near the road or someone who isn't looking my direction but hasn't actually stepped off the curb? I can preemptively slow my vehicle just-in-case. A human can quickly detect things about their surroundings that computers aren't yet capable of.

I always thought this was more about the baggage handlers having to lift heavy bags. After they charge you extra for an overweight bag they usually slap a "heavy" sticker on it - I believe airline worker unions require that those bags be lifted by two people.

I've never had them weigh a my carry-on, and they don't seem to have a problem with moving items from the large bag to a carry-on to get below the heavy weight threshold.

(white) Dearborn, MI resident here.

While the east side is predominantly Arabic, I haven't seen too much of the extremism I hear about in Europe these days. I know the population in Dearborn is typically Lebanese (and now increasingly Iraqi due to the wars) so perhaps it is a completely different sect of the religion. Headscarves are common place and the occasional burka is seen, but overall everyone seems very liberal and laid back. To me it is no different than any other large city with it's various ethnic "towns" within.

Honestly I think this is the case with most users. Especially those who would be considered power-users. Ad blindness on the internet isn't something that publishers and ad agencies are unaware of. The idea is "the right ad, for the right person, at the right time." I would extend that to "through the right medium." In a perfect world the adverts you see wouldn't be intrusive and would be something that you could even consider valuable. Truly good products and services need to generate awareness after all.

The funny thing about this highly targeted stuff is that as it becomes more advanced and the data they have on you becomes more reliable, they won't even target you with these things because they know you aren't a good candidate for their brands.

Advertising gets a pretty bad rap (some of it deservedly so), but the money behind it powers one of the greatest resources in the world. In other words, at least it's not derivatives trading.

Well I don't think drug abuse is equal to addiction. Getting excessively drunk from time to time doesn't necessarily mean you're an alcoholic... but it can have life destroying consequences. Same goes for recreational drug abuse.

To your earlier point about rich people getting addicted... Of course you're not going to completely eradicate addiction, but I'd be interested to see a comparison of drug addiction (say to something like crack) and socioeconomic status. I'm betting there will be some differences between rich and poor. Also I think human happiness is a fairly complicated thing to define. I think a rat park gets closer to an ideal life for a rat than a stereotypical wealthy person's life in our society of consumption, absent parents and compromised values.

Seems reasonable that when you lock an animal (including humans) in a shitty little box it's going to over indulge in activities that work on the pleasure centers of the brain. However, given freedom and a wide range of stimuli it might be less susceptible to addiction as we have defined it. See the controversial Rat Park study (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park) which showed evidence that when researchers gave lab rats a suitable and pleasurable living environment opiates were no longer addictive.

This is also why gauges are often times oriented in such a way that just a quick visual scan lets your brain know "everything is ok" or "something is seriously wrong with this one." This is especially true in race cars.

I believe the malpractice caps proposed were mainly related to noneconomic damages. Things like "pain and suffering" where people can be awarded millions of dollars based on a jury's judgement call. The medical bills you refer to would be direct economic damages and include past and future medical expenses, past and future lost earnings, domestic services, job loss, and lost business or employment opportunities. That would be unlimited.

You're absolutely right. My sarcasm didn't come across very well in my original comment. My point being that we've done everything to make anything alcohol-related something heinous. Kill someone with a car while sober, it's an accident. Kill someone with a car while drunk, it's a violent crime. Now I know this isn't always the case, but I agree with you that we ought to be policing the actual driving behavior.

What portion of accidents, and fatal accidents are _caused_ by alcohol impaired drivers? (I believe they categorize the incident as "alcohol related" if any party has any alcohol in their system).

No question that certain alcohol levels are severely impairing and dangerous, but shouldn't we be punishing all incidents of negligent driving with some level of standardization. If you run a red light, speed excessively (relative to traffic flow), or drive recklessly shouldn't you be subject to the same jail time and lifelong criminal record as someone who gets popped at a checkpoint or busted sleeping in their car while parked? This notion that _only_ drunk drivers cause driving deaths is completely misleading. Maybe if we start putting 17 year old kids in jail for 90 days and taking away their license when they get pulled over for texting, then we'll put all this stuff in perspective.

I'm surprised they don't mention the Aral Sea. Once the 4th largest lake in the world... the time lapse is pretty staggering to watch.

Well don't worry about the conspiracy. Here we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a month with AWS, much of that is reserved instances and nearly all of our US-East instances were affected. Mostly in the "east-1b" AZ, but it was not isolated to that. Anything using RDS in that region is still down.

You're right, and this is also why the pure electric car isn't viable yet. Our current infrastructure is designed around the idea that I put energy into my car and drive it until it is almost gone... then put more in and keep driving with no down-time. Whatever solution we come up with has to fit this or it is a step backwards. For this reason I'm a big fan of hydrogen fuel. Electric drivetrains have already proven to be successful in a number of vehicles. So lets start building hybrid vehicles... and I don't mean the battery-laden type like the Prius. Think more along the lines of locomotive style hybrids. Small efficient engines powering an electric motor. By making the drive-line standard we will have a platform which we can swap in the most cost efficient energy source available at a given time.

Then if Nuclear is widely adopted we use excess electricity to generate hydrogen fuel.