You erect solar panels _over_ the road, which is wasted space anyway. This does a lot of good things:
1) Keeps the rainfall off the road to minimize the chance of hydroplaning 2) Keeps snow off the road to minimize skidding and road blockage 3) Produces a whale of a lot of power 4) Keeps the sun off the vehicle to reduce air conditioning requirements 5) Keeps the sun off the vehicle to minimize driver blinding
is to put the car on a rail somehow, and let the road control the throttle, and the driver programs the road about where he wants to go. Then he gets in the back seat and goes to sleep until the car arrives. Makes for a really low-stress commute.
OK, I liked Olympus Has Fallen and Whitehouse Down in the same fashion that I enjoyed Die Hard. The lone fly in the ointment is a lot of fun, and the story of a more or less average man thrust to greatness in a dangerous situation is a theme that makes me buy movie tickets to see the same show more than once.
Now, the NK's coming up with that sort of military hardware to do what they did... nope, ain't buyin' it, and that was a little annoying even while I was watching it. The right wing terrorists were slightly more believable, although they had hardware that would have been D difficult form them to get. But maybe.... But right wing terrorists were just a teeny tiny bit offensive from left wing liberal hollywood to make for me to see - I was a little annoyed at that, but not greatly so. Somebody has to be the bad guy. Would next like to see the same thing done by tree-huggers or vegans or gays or somesuch...
Now, I love good special effects, but c'mon, you have to have a story line that is at least believable. After Earth? Just how is everything on the planet designed to kill and eat humans, but there are no humans on the planet? Why haven't all these things starved to death? And of course you have to suspect that all the way thru it, the whole thing's purpose is not to entertain, but to set up a foundation for yet another stupid video game. Video game movies always suck.
The Zombie movie just made no sense it all. None. There was no cure put forward, only a way to become invisible to them, which in itself made no sense at all. Its hard to enjoy these things when you can't follow along with the thinking. Forbidden Planet made sense in 1954, and is a much better movie even with its primitive effects.
Pacific Rim? Walls to keep out the monsters? Really? And giant robots to do hand to hand combat without benefit of at least edged weapons except near the very end? Since these things are obviously not magically invulnerable like Godzilla, a much cheaper and more effective solution than either robots or walls would have been some big shore batteries - maybe 20" guns, maybe bigger. Obviously you can penetrate these monsters, and explosives were shown to work, sooo... build guns.
And the Lone Ranger was just a disaster. All he white people in the movie were evil except the LR himself, who was simply a buffoon. I was hoping for a genuine hero movie, but should have known that since Johnny Depp was in it, it would be his movie and no one else's.
RIPD? OK I guess, but do we really need grotesque body growths to make this work?
Superman was totally unsatisfying. What part of "invulnerable" do not these people understand? Fights between Krypton natives on earth are pointless, and no neck snapping is really possible even if they did show that. The whole Superman history was ignored, esp. the death of Johnathan Kent, who COULD have been saved by any Superman up to this point - Superman has ALWAYS been able to slip away long enough to change into his costume and save someone like Dad Kent. A superman that is not really super is not really worth watching.
And, BTW, this goes for every action movie for the last 20 - 30 years, could we please, please, please have an automotive chase scene where the streets are NOT wet, which seems to occur in the middle of Death Valley in July when there's not so much as a cotton ball in the sky. Boom! Wet streets! Where the H did they come from? And howcum they are suddenly dry with the bad guy finally leaves the road and goes over the cliff and is killed on the rocks below (or whatever?) Not a sign of moisture then.
Suspension of disbelief can go only so far. If you have to use magic, just say its magic. Don't conjur up a machine that can't possibly work, or would be such an obvious bad idea that we can't get into it. We need to believe that action x caused result y, and it was really clever, and the hero is a genius, etc. If x would obviously cause y only 0.001% of the time, and probably blow up everything in a 10 block radius the other 99.999% of the time, don't try to convince us that the hero planned it that way. Etc. etc. etc.
Just as soon as we can store enough energy in batteries or supercapacitors to run electric motors turning propellers, we can fly maybe 400 mph on electricity and not have to use flammable fuel.
They can't find enough skilled workers that want to compete with H1B people that are willing to work for "less." These guys aren't dumb, so when they choose to study something in college, do they want to study something that is getting salaries hammered by cheap foreign competition, has rampant age discrimination, and is famous for 80 hour weeks? Naw, better to study law, or medicine. There's at least some money there, and you can do either by marketing directly to the public, without having to worry about being hired by someone else after you're 40 years old. Sure, just keep raising that H1B quota until there isn't a comp sci course available in the USA, or if there is, it is populated only by foreigners.
...movie screens will be active LED screens, with no projector, and the theater will not need to be darkened. Then, the little gadgets will not be so disturbing to others.
Music industry? I don't have a thing to do with the music industry, beyond being an occasional customer. Naw, I'm just some guy that had parents that taught him that stealing is WRONG, and should be punsished. And 90 days would be insanely light punishment for STEALING - should be more like 1 - 5 in the state pen. But between that, and having my car broken into by thieves so many times I lost track, and losing 10's of 1000's of dollars of tools, ham radios, CB radios, and various optics, there's nothing that p's me off as much as thieves. Hate 'em. And you just try to picture yourself working 2 weeks per track on an album, and then recording it and polishing it and expecting to make maybe $5M on it, which would maybe be $800K per band member, and then a bunch of termites downloads the thing for free, and sales amount to $20K per band member, and you're getting paid less than auto workers for your time. Imagine that? Why would you make music for sale?
...to see such magic that everyone who acquires something of value against the wishes of those that created the value go directly to jail for, say, 90 days. Don't want to pay for movies or music? Then make your own. Oh, wait, whats that? You're a talentless slug that can't find middle C on any instrument? Well... that's the point - you pay people who know things and can do things to do them for your benefit.
It doesn't matter, because there's not one D thing that we can do about it anyway. Stop burning fossil fuel? Sure, if you want to kill millions of humans, because they / we all need the fossil fuels to get along. Casting people into abject poverty is not a valid solution, either, which is what happens when you deprive them of the cheap fossil fuels. That results in an average 6.5 years shorter lifespan, and if the poverty is experienced as a child, the life shortening is not reversible. Just get over it, whatever is going to happen will happen, and we'll either adapt or we won't. I'm expecting that if push comes to shove, some serious geo-engineering projects will be undertaken, such as dykes along key seaboard areas, and we'll just lose the polar bears - who needs 'em, anyway. When the choice is dead people or dead polar bears, I'll take the dead polar bears.
then we could actually take CO2 concentration back to before the industrial revolution. Just get prepared for the sort of winters that George Washington had to deal with at Valley Forge.
That's because... I think the drivers will be distracted anyway. I have a voice-controlled GPS that I was telling what to do and didn't even realize that I was distracted by it. Almost hit a mailbox. Nothing is foolproof other than devoting 100% of your attention to the road.
Anyone? I have an electric bill of around $82 most of the time, going to $150 for about 3 months in the summer. If those panels cost more than $82 / mo extra in the mortgage, then it doesn't fly, because they also wear out after a while and have to be replaced, resetting the savings clock, so actually the price is even more for solar electric.
Plus, there is maintenance for the stuff you own, especially the power inverters. Do you think they are going to last 20 years or more? No, they're going to get toasted from time to time by everything from excessive temperature someday when you aren't looking and your air conditioning fails, to some dark and stormy night when a nearby bolt of lightning sends a seriously large spike of voltage down some wires and into the vicinity of these power inverters, turning them into a molten puddle of slag.
I certainly wouldn't go to as much trouble as is required for installing a bank of solar cells on that scale to save the entire $82 / month. There would be just too much available to go wrong with the system, it'd be a constant worry, and when there's a problem with my $82 / mo. electrical power source now, I just call Dominion Virginia Power and it gets all better without me doing a single thing more. I can go to the flicks, come back, its probably working by that time. I don't have to go down to the basement, remove protective covers, spend whatever time it takes to troubleshoot the device, and then repair or replace it.
Just too big a hassle - and, BTW, I'd have to chop down 4 really, really large oak trees south of me to even have a remotely viable chance of making this work, which would make me a devil-demon of the neighborhood that seems to be composed of a bunch of druids.
I don't need that sort of expense any more often than I absolutely have to replace it because it is worn out, and costing me more in repairs than the new one would cost in car payments. The 2005 WRX finally got sold last year, and replaced by the 2012 WRX. I loved the 2005 WRX, and if it wasn't lunching things like the power steering pump ($525, plus $300 installation), timing belt and rollers at 210,000 miles ($1300), radiator ($400), and other stuff, I'd still have it.
The current car has an early start toward getting replaced early, tho. The power steering rack went west, developing a leak, which would have cost $1200 outside the warranty, but $100 inside the warranty - it should have been free but Subaru was all sideways about my having used the car in a road rally - which is really just normal driving down the roads on a Sunday afternoon - but they tried to use it as a get out of jail free card. Also have had the brake light switch go west - don't know how much that would have cost to get fixed, and now the Steering Wheel Angle Sensor is fried, causing the stability control function and the "hill holder" function to fail. Since it's outside the warranty now, those functions will be forever silent, because I'm not paying the $700 or so cost of buying a new sensor and having it replaced. Don't think I'll be keeping this car as long as the 2005.
Driving to California to spend time with a friend next month, then driving to Arizona to run a set of SCCA Road Rallies. I live in Virginia, so this will be a significant trip. Fly? I absolutely gave that up when they started using X-rays. Nobody X-rays me but my doctor and my dentist. TSA can go chase themselves. And besides, I enjoy driving, and will probably take several thousand pictures on the way, too. America is beautiful, and taking pictures of it is the right thing to do...
The difference is that the Republicans know that income taxes, in any amount, are absolutely toxic to business, and that raising them will harm the economy. The Dems know it too, but don't mind sticking it to the rich, nor creating more welfare dependents because they believe that those people will be grateful for the gov't assistance in the form of unemployment and welfare so that they will vote democratic. What we need is prosperity, but the Dems are against that too, because it screws up their modus operendi of impoverishing people, and then "helping" them.
My reaction to the display of Win 8 tiles home page has been the same as my reaction to the Office "You can't buy a CD & you can't transfer it between machines" nonsense - GFY. Now I hear that you can transfer Office between machines, and Win 8.1 is rumored to restore the familiar desktop and start button. I may get interested in Win 8.1, not sure about Office - I still don't like the idea of renting it rather than owning it.
The real answer to driverless cars is the same one as the answer to electric cars. Driverless cars are unlikely to have a human-intelligence computer any time soon, just as electric cars are unlikely to have the magic battery that will power it for 300 miles and recharge as quickly as refueling a regular car with gasoline any time soon.
The solution is to build an electrically-powered railway system that cars can drive onto. That is, the car drives _into_ a railcar that encloses it, provides climate control, creature comforts, and entertainment, while it navigates via electrical grid power to wherever you want to go, automatically switching the railcar to get there, and operating like a personal rapid transit, where loading and unloading is done off the main line, so the only time you stop is when you arrive were you told the system you want to go. If such a system were restricted to reasonable speeds such as 80 mph or so, it could be constructed in the median of interstate highways, and eliminate 99% of the situations that a computer driver would fail at, and 100% of the battery problems of the electric car.
The driverless car tech has to be a better driver than _me_ in all situations, or I'm not buying it. That's the bottom line, whether it will get me killed in a situation that I could have avoided by driving the car myself.
I believe that unless the driverless car is capable enough to allow me to crawl into the back seat and develop a hangover from the booze I've just spent 3 hours acquiring at the bar in the next city, it is worthless. Why? Because people will not pay sufficient attention to the driving task to suddenly intervene in the driving process to save the vehicle from a situation that the car's computers don't understand. Will the car swerve into the ditch to avoid a paper bag blowing across the road? How about if the paper bag is a baby toddling into the street? Will it know that it cannot hit a snowdrift on ice and not expect the variable density of the snowdrift to set the vehicle sldeways, and most probably into the ditch? Will the driverless car simply give up driving in such a situation, and strand you 3 miles out of town in 20 degrees below zero and a whiteout blizzard on the way?
Until the driverless car is better than I am, I don't want it.
Yes, and "cheaper countries" means more that their income taxes aren't the highest on the planet, by far, and less about the engineers getting a fraction of the salary of those in the US. The income taxes are the real enemy, and are destroying the USA from the inside out. Repeal the income taxes and tax something else, and especially do not re-institute any kind of corporate tax, and watch the US economy boom in biblical proportions. But until we start building things here other than just buildings and bridges, we're not going to need so many EE's.
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You erect solar panels _over_ the road, which is wasted space anyway. This does a lot of good things:
1) Keeps the rainfall off the road to minimize the chance of hydroplaning
2) Keeps snow off the road to minimize skidding and road blockage
3) Produces a whale of a lot of power
4) Keeps the sun off the vehicle to reduce air conditioning requirements
5) Keeps the sun off the vehicle to minimize driver blinding
is to put the car on a rail somehow, and let the road control the throttle, and the driver programs the road about where he wants to go. Then he gets in the back seat and goes to sleep until the car arrives. Makes for a really low-stress commute.
OK, I liked Olympus Has Fallen and Whitehouse Down in the same fashion that I enjoyed Die Hard. The lone fly in the ointment is a lot of fun, and the story of a more or less average man thrust to greatness in a dangerous situation is a theme that makes me buy movie tickets to see the same show more than once.
Now, the NK's coming up with that sort of military hardware to do what they did... nope, ain't buyin' it, and that was a little annoying even while I was watching it. The right wing terrorists were slightly more believable, although they had hardware that would have been D difficult form them to get. But maybe.... But right wing terrorists were just a teeny tiny bit offensive from left wing liberal hollywood to make for me to see - I was a little annoyed at that, but not greatly so. Somebody has to be the bad guy. Would next like to see the same thing done by tree-huggers or vegans or gays or somesuch...
Now, I love good special effects, but c'mon, you have to have a story line that is at least believable. After Earth? Just how is everything on the planet designed to kill and eat humans, but there are no humans on the planet? Why haven't all these things starved to death? And of course you have to suspect that all the way thru it, the whole thing's purpose is not to entertain, but to set up a foundation for yet another stupid video game. Video game movies always suck.
The Zombie movie just made no sense it all. None. There was no cure put forward, only a way to become invisible to them, which in itself made no sense at all. Its hard to enjoy these things when you can't follow along with the thinking. Forbidden Planet made sense in 1954, and is a much better movie even with its primitive effects.
Pacific Rim? Walls to keep out the monsters? Really? And giant robots to do hand to hand combat without benefit of at least edged weapons except near the very end? Since these things are obviously not magically invulnerable like Godzilla, a much cheaper and more effective solution than either robots or walls would have been some big shore batteries - maybe 20" guns, maybe bigger. Obviously you can penetrate these monsters, and explosives were shown to work, sooo... build guns.
And the Lone Ranger was just a disaster. All he white people in the movie were evil except the LR himself, who was simply a buffoon. I was hoping for a genuine hero movie, but should have known that since Johnny Depp was in it, it would be his movie and no one else's.
RIPD? OK I guess, but do we really need grotesque body growths to make this work?
Superman was totally unsatisfying. What part of "invulnerable" do not these people understand? Fights between Krypton natives on earth are pointless, and no neck snapping is really possible even if they did show that. The whole Superman history was ignored, esp. the death of Johnathan Kent, who COULD have been saved by any Superman up to this point - Superman has ALWAYS been able to slip away long enough to change into his costume and save someone like Dad Kent. A superman that is not really super is not really worth watching.
And, BTW, this goes for every action movie for the last 20 - 30 years, could we please, please, please have an automotive chase scene where the streets are NOT wet, which seems to occur in the middle of Death Valley in July when there's not so much as a cotton ball in the sky. Boom! Wet streets! Where the H did they come from? And howcum they are suddenly dry with the bad guy finally leaves the road and goes over the cliff and is killed on the rocks below (or whatever?) Not a sign of moisture then.
Suspension of disbelief can go only so far. If you have to use magic, just say its magic. Don't conjur up a machine that can't possibly work, or would be such an obvious bad idea that we can't get into it. We need to believe that action x caused result y, and it was really clever, and the hero is a genius, etc. If x would obviously cause y only 0.001% of the time, and probably blow up everything in a 10 block radius the other 99.999% of the time, don't try to convince us that the hero planned it that way. Etc. etc. etc.
Just as soon as we can store enough energy in batteries or supercapacitors to run electric motors turning propellers, we can fly maybe 400 mph on electricity and not have to use flammable fuel.
They can't find enough skilled workers that want to compete with H1B people that are willing to work for "less." These guys aren't dumb, so when they choose to study something in college, do they want to study something that is getting salaries hammered by cheap foreign competition, has rampant age discrimination, and is famous for 80 hour weeks? Naw, better to study law, or medicine. There's at least some money there, and you can do either by marketing directly to the public, without having to worry about being hired by someone else after you're 40 years old. Sure, just keep raising that H1B quota until there isn't a comp sci course available in the USA, or if there is, it is populated only by foreigners.
...movie screens will be active LED screens, with no projector, and the theater will not need to be darkened. Then, the little gadgets will not be so disturbing to others.
Its stealing, termite. You take something that doesn't belong to you, its stealing. Duh...
Music industry? I don't have a thing to do with the music industry, beyond being an occasional customer. Naw, I'm just some guy that had parents that taught him that stealing is WRONG, and should be punsished. And 90 days would be insanely light punishment for STEALING - should be more like 1 - 5 in the state pen. But between that, and having my car broken into by thieves so many times I lost track, and losing 10's of 1000's of dollars of tools, ham radios, CB radios, and various optics, there's nothing that p's me off as much as thieves. Hate 'em. And you just try to picture yourself working 2 weeks per track on an album, and then recording it and polishing it and expecting to make maybe $5M on it, which would maybe be $800K per band member, and then a bunch of termites downloads the thing for free, and sales amount to $20K per band member, and you're getting paid less than auto workers for your time. Imagine that? Why would you make music for sale?
...to see such magic that everyone who acquires something of value against the wishes of those that created the value go directly to jail for, say, 90 days. Don't want to pay for movies or music? Then make your own. Oh, wait, whats that? You're a talentless slug that can't find middle C on any instrument? Well... that's the point - you pay people who know things and can do things to do them for your benefit.
It doesn't matter, because there's not one D thing that we can do about it anyway. Stop burning fossil fuel? Sure, if you want to kill millions of humans, because they / we all need the fossil fuels to get along. Casting people into abject poverty is not a valid solution, either, which is what happens when you deprive them of the cheap fossil fuels. That results in an average 6.5 years shorter lifespan, and if the poverty is experienced as a child, the life shortening is not reversible. Just get over it, whatever is going to happen will happen, and we'll either adapt or we won't. I'm expecting that if push comes to shove, some serious geo-engineering projects will be undertaken, such as dykes along key seaboard areas, and we'll just lose the polar bears - who needs 'em, anyway. When the choice is dead people or dead polar bears, I'll take the dead polar bears.
Meanwhile, if we could get _this_ to work:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/07/solar-thermal-electrochemical-photo.html
then we could actually take CO2 concentration back to before the industrial revolution. Just get prepared for the sort of winters that George Washington had to deal with at Valley Forge.
That's because... I think the drivers will be distracted anyway. I have a voice-controlled GPS that I was telling what to do and didn't even realize that I was distracted by it. Almost hit a mailbox. Nothing is foolproof other than devoting 100% of your attention to the road.
Anyone? I have an electric bill of around $82 most of the time, going to $150 for about 3 months in the summer. If those panels cost more than $82 / mo extra in the mortgage, then it doesn't fly, because they also wear out after a while and have to be replaced, resetting the savings clock, so actually the price is even more for solar electric.
Plus, there is maintenance for the stuff you own, especially the power inverters. Do you think they are going to last 20 years or more? No, they're going to get toasted from time to time by everything from excessive temperature someday when you aren't looking and your air conditioning fails, to some dark and stormy night when a nearby bolt of lightning sends a seriously large spike of voltage down some wires and into the vicinity of these power inverters, turning them into a molten puddle of slag.
I certainly wouldn't go to as much trouble as is required for installing a bank of solar cells on that scale to save the entire $82 / month. There would be just too much available to go wrong with the system, it'd be a constant worry, and when there's a problem with my $82 / mo. electrical power source now, I just call Dominion Virginia Power and it gets all better without me doing a single thing more. I can go to the flicks, come back, its probably working by that time. I don't have to go down to the basement, remove protective covers, spend whatever time it takes to troubleshoot the device, and then repair or replace it.
Just too big a hassle - and, BTW, I'd have to chop down 4 really, really large oak trees south of me to even have a remotely viable chance of making this work, which would make me a devil-demon of the neighborhood that seems to be composed of a bunch of druids.
Yep, prolly would, if they weren't limited in number, but had to compete with 100 others everywhere they operated.
(Hand waving wildly) Me me me me me!!!
I don't need that sort of expense any more often than I absolutely have to replace it because it is worn out, and costing me more in repairs than the new one would cost in car payments. The 2005 WRX finally got sold last year, and replaced by the 2012 WRX. I loved the 2005 WRX, and if it wasn't lunching things like the power steering pump ($525, plus $300 installation), timing belt and rollers at 210,000 miles ($1300), radiator ($400), and other stuff, I'd still have it.
The current car has an early start toward getting replaced early, tho. The power steering rack went west, developing a leak, which would have cost $1200 outside the warranty, but $100 inside the warranty - it should have been free but Subaru was all sideways about my having used the car in a road rally - which is really just normal driving down the roads on a Sunday afternoon - but they tried to use it as a get out of jail free card. Also have had the brake light switch go west - don't know how much that would have cost to get fixed, and now the Steering Wheel Angle Sensor is fried, causing the stability control function and the "hill holder" function to fail. Since it's outside the warranty now, those functions will be forever silent, because I'm not paying the $700 or so cost of buying a new sensor and having it replaced. Don't think I'll be keeping this car as long as the 2005.
If we're lucky, it would work as well as Canada's private system:
http://www.navcanada.ca/NavCanada.asp?Language=en&Content=ContentDefinitionFiles%5CNewsroom%5CBackgrounders%5Cairtrafficservices.xml
They should cut 100% of air traffic control and TSA budgets, and privatize those functions. Works for me...
Driving to California to spend time with a friend next month, then driving to Arizona to run a set of SCCA Road Rallies. I live in Virginia, so this will be a significant trip. Fly? I absolutely gave that up when they started using X-rays. Nobody X-rays me but my doctor and my dentist. TSA can go chase themselves. And besides, I enjoy driving, and will probably take several thousand pictures on the way, too. America is beautiful, and taking pictures of it is the right thing to do...
Privatize airport security, privatize air traffic control, problem solved.
The difference is that the Republicans know that income taxes, in any amount, are absolutely toxic to business, and that raising them will harm the economy. The Dems know it too, but don't mind sticking it to the rich, nor creating more welfare dependents because they believe that those people will be grateful for the gov't assistance in the form of unemployment and welfare so that they will vote democratic. What we need is prosperity, but the Dems are against that too, because it screws up their modus operendi of impoverishing people, and then "helping" them.
My reaction to the display of Win 8 tiles home page has been the same as my reaction to the Office "You can't buy a CD & you can't transfer it between machines" nonsense - GFY. Now I hear that you can transfer Office between machines, and Win 8.1 is rumored to restore the familiar desktop and start button. I may get interested in Win 8.1, not sure about Office - I still don't like the idea of renting it rather than owning it.
The real answer to driverless cars is the same one as the answer to electric cars. Driverless cars are unlikely to have a human-intelligence computer any time soon, just as electric cars are unlikely to have the magic battery that will power it for 300 miles and recharge as quickly as refueling a regular car with gasoline any time soon.
The solution is to build an electrically-powered railway system that cars can drive onto. That is, the car drives _into_ a railcar that encloses it, provides climate control, creature comforts, and entertainment, while it navigates via electrical grid power to wherever you want to go, automatically switching the railcar to get there, and operating like a personal rapid transit, where loading and unloading is done off the main line, so the only time you stop is when you arrive were you told the system you want to go. If such a system were restricted to reasonable speeds such as 80 mph or so, it could be constructed in the median of interstate highways, and eliminate 99% of the situations that a computer driver would fail at, and 100% of the battery problems of the electric car.
Any dog owner letting that critter run free and out into the street in front of me is going to get sued back for endangering me.
I hold this premise to be entirely wrong.
The driverless car tech has to be a better driver than _me_ in all situations, or I'm not buying it. That's the bottom line, whether it will get me killed in a situation that I could have avoided by driving the car myself.
I believe that unless the driverless car is capable enough to allow me to crawl into the back seat and develop a hangover from the booze I've just spent 3 hours acquiring at the bar in the next city, it is worthless. Why? Because people will not pay sufficient attention to the driving task to suddenly intervene in the driving process to save the vehicle from a situation that the car's computers don't understand. Will the car swerve into the ditch to avoid a paper bag blowing across the road? How about if the paper bag is a baby toddling into the street? Will it know that it cannot hit a snowdrift on ice and not expect the variable density of the snowdrift to set the vehicle sldeways, and most probably into the ditch? Will the driverless car simply give up driving in such a situation, and strand you 3 miles out of town in 20 degrees below zero and a whiteout blizzard on the way?
Until the driverless car is better than I am, I don't want it.
Yes, and "cheaper countries" means more that their income taxes aren't the highest on the planet, by far, and less about the engineers getting a fraction of the salary of those in the US. The income taxes are the real enemy, and are destroying the USA from the inside out. Repeal the income taxes and tax something else, and especially do not re-institute any kind of corporate tax, and watch the US economy boom in biblical proportions. But until we start building things here other than just buildings and bridges, we're not going to need so many EE's.