rare corner-cases

I don't think "stop if there is something in front of the car" is a rare corner case.

I want proof... but that won't be that hard to provide. Google's car already has a better-than-average driving record. That's not enough data points for me, but with sufficient testing, I'd be more than happy to let the computer drive. I can only see in one direction. I blink. I look at hot chicks. I sneeze. I get tired. There is no reason a computer can't be better than me-- it has a better sensorium, faster reaction, and higher uptime than I ever will. It can actuate more controls than I can-- individual braking pressure on all four wheels, for example. Test it out in more depth, and if it turns out to be better than the average human, it's good enough for me.

> that doesn't mean people who own tablets don't like them.

I'm about done with mine. It was a good compromise for a while... but phones grew up and laptops grew down (and got SSDs and high-PPI touchscreens), and I find myself no longer using my iPad for anything. I'm sure they'll still be useful for other folks, though, and it's good we have lots of choices.

Eh... like a lot of stuff, it may not be true for everybody, but it's true for some. If I was reading slashdot on it, and wanted to reply to your post, I'd set it down and turn on my computer. They're slow for text entry, and most content creation is still just text entry of one sort or another. I'm sure there are other things which they're great for-- but there are an awful lot of people for whom "that old chestnut" is true. If I do anything but read or watch movies on my iPad, I set it down and move to the computer.

"Content Creation" doesn't have to be anything as elaborate as coding or painting or musical composition. Your post and mine are both "content creation," and I don't know about you, but typing more than a couple of sentences in a row on a tablet touchscreen gets old quick.

I don't personally think tablets are going away, but I think the market may shrink going forward for a number of reasons. When the iPad first appeared, they did three amazing things that laptop users immediately noticed: they turned on instantly, they were small and light, and they had high-quality screens. Tablet UI considerations aside, those were areas in which the tablet absolutely trashed existing laptop hardware in user experience. If you just wanted to read or watch a movie, and you had a laptop and a tablet within reach, the tablet would get you there faster.

Fast-forward to now, and laptops have caught up. SSDs killed the boot advantage, and new form factors made possible by the same techniques that worked in the tablets have closed the size gap. If I can get an 11" laptop that does "real computer" stuff, boots instantly, and runs quietly and comfortably in my lap... I don't really have a use-case for the tablet anymore.

In short, it was worth the inconvenience of trying to type on a touchscreen when tablets had so many other advantages-- but those advantages have all either gone away or shrunk considerably. I imagine some folks will probably reconsider their tablet. Not all, but some.

Aren't you supposed to have your fine single-malt neat with a small pitcher of room-temperature water to add?

Very different situations.

Siri is more comparable to the Google Maps release-- both were beta, and both had no competition with the same features. And in both cases, the launch of Siri and Google Maps did not take away any functionality you already had-- you could go right back to using MapQuest if you wanted, or simply not use Siri. Because of this, nobody's frothing-at-the-mouth mad that Siri is still pretty rough. It's new, it's labelled beta, and we didn't give up something else to get it.

Apple Maps, by comparison, replaces Google Maps. There's no way to switch back if you need missing functionality, and it was launched as a finished product, not a beta that we all understood we were helping work the kinks out of.

To be fair, I have TomTom, and it has many of the exact same issues I have with Apple Maps. The data is outdated in places, and searching produces really wonky results. But more importantly, it produces the same wonkiness. You can blame at least some of the Apple Maps issues directly on the TomTom data.

And you're a corporation who builds a car with a 360-degree lidar, radar, video, and audio-capture system, GPS data, and a log of vehicle telemetry. It's a hell of a lot harder for a little old lady to cry her way out of something when there's hi-resolution panoramic 3D recordings of the entire event.

Of course not. If we get serious about licensing and permitting these vehicles, I suspect the standard will be to compare them with the vast body of statistics we have from human drivers. As long as a company's cars are averaging fewer accidents per mile than humans do, it would be hard to argue that they're not safer, even if they still get in some accidents.

People are terrible in all the ways you mention above and then some. Strokes, seizures, heart attacks, sneezing, blinking, stray eyelashes, muscle cramps, and aural migraines are just a few of the hardware failures that already cause plenty of accidents-- and that's before we get into the self-inflicted things like drinking, fatigue, and distraction. Toss in our limited sensorium, narrow field of view, crap night vision, and sluggish reflex loop, and we're really not looking good compared to hardware-- even if that hardware still has some failures and makes some mistakes. And as you point out, it certainly will. The only really important question is "does it fail less than people?"

Now I've seen everything... a post on slashdot that makes the "save the buggy whips" argument.

I agree-- it would be nice to see a full comparison. I manually spot-checked a couple of the not-founds, and they were all on Google's map-- but a complete comparison would be much, much more informative and useful.

A friend of mine is in the same boat as you. We're constantly looking for co-op games to play online, and there's precious few that have everything we want. Borderlands hit all the right gameplay notes. An FPS/RPG with simple enough gameplay that we can jump in and out of sessions but enough complexity to keep us from wearing it out in two days. After messing around for 30 minutes, he said "as great as this is, I just can't deal with the graphical style." I love it-- but there's no explaining personal tastes-- it just is what it is.

> Not one of them realized it was the old iPhone 4S.

Did that really happen? It isn't mentioned in your link-- I suspect that like a lot of these segments, they canvas for a while until they have enough idiots, and then edit the footage down to just the idiots.

I'm not saying it's impossible, though.

Nah, I bet the Cray wins. The iPad is probably both denser *and* more aerodynamic.

"Cray Outperforms iPad in Crucial Terminal Speed Tests"