I seem to remember reading about compressed air for energy storage. I wonder if we couldn't re purpose old mines for storing compressed air. If nothing else we could use manufactured pressure vessels. Although I imagine making tanks large enough to hold significant amounts of energy would be very expensive.
It isn't that the document creator sets the classification as they are responsible for marking it appropriately. So if the memos would be counted as FOUO then another document or conversation regarding the contents or the same body of material would properly be classified at the same level. Yes, he could in theory strip out details to reduce the classification, but I have a hard time imaging that you could impart anything meaningful and it not still qualify as FOUO.
All of that said I'm not personally opposed to what Comey did. I'm just trying to point out the somewhat ridiculously broad ways in which the whole classification system works. Which is of course a large part of why the government has such huge mountains of the stuff to maintain.
It's likely that the contents of the memo are at the least FOUO, For Official Use Only. Transmitting FOUO outside of official usage is a violation. Whether or not something is properly marked has no real bearing on whether or not it is actually classified in whatever category. The original ownership of say a document is also not relevant to whether or not the government counts it as classified. For instance if tomorrow I had some kind of epiphany regarding manufacture of a new weapon to which the USA had no counter, that knowledge would be considered classified by the government. Even if I published that knowledge for all the world to see, it would still be counted as classified. For most people there is no requirement for them to give any thought to whether or not something is classified, but for anyone with a clearance there are extra laws which basically require them to avoid classified information in the wild.
PS. When I say classified above I am not specifically talking about the classification category called "classified" but instead to anything on the classification spectrum, from FOUO through the various flavors of TS.
You could argue just the same that we should deny clearances to anyone that is or was opposed to the invasion of Iraq because of Lawrence Franklin, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
If we tried to limit clearances to just people that espoused the most American of American ideals, based on someone's arbitrary opinion, much of the military, DoD, State Department, and the various intelligence agencies would be gutted of people. Whatever would be left of those organizations would likely end up being hyper homogenized. That might sound appealing until you realize that your own personal belief on some subject probably isn't represented in those agencies and in fact makes you a subject of suspicion.
Harvard owns a public group for a specific class year, which all these students belonged to as incoming freshmen.
Some of the kids in the group decided to form a separate private group wherein they could share meme's which they knew were not socially acceptable.
To earn entry to the private group a prospective member had to post an objectionable meme in the public group.
At some point Harvard took notice of the objectionable meme's in the public group. Harvard notified the applicable kids that their admission was now under review because of the postings and requested a response.
We don't know exactly what happened but it would seem that at least one of the kids spilled the beans about the private group. There are all kinds of possibilities from there but we don't actually know whether or not Harvard gained any kind of access to the private group. It is possible that all the kids caught up in this had posted to the public group and were rejected based on that and an allegation of their being a private group.
Did you read the article? Part of the criteria for joining the private group was to post the same kind of drivel in the public group. The public postings were reported and resulted in the admissions for some people being reviewed. As part of that review the affected people were sent letters asking to explain their public postings. Presumably one or more of them responded with information about the private group. It is possible that Harvard did not actually gain access to the private group postings, but instead is just giving the boot to the kids that were dumb enough to post in the public group.
Anyways, it is clear from the article that, the group members were not all that interested in expressing their vile opinions only in private.
From what someone else posted earlier, apparently if you wanted into the private group you had to post something in the public group, which the school had created. So what likely happened is one of the kids that posted in the public group was called in to answer why they had posted such a thing, which probably brought up the private groups existence.
Disrespecting politicians, even the sitting president, doesn't factor into whether or not a person can be granted a clearance.
Even siding with an 'enemy' on some issue or other doesn't matter all that much. You could actually publicly be a communist or an anarchist and support constitutional reforms to align it with those beliefs. The limiting factor is usually membership or real support for organizations that work to violently overthrow the US government.
Other than that the main emphasis of a clearance investigation seems to revolve around whether or not someone could blackmail you. Trustworthiness and obeying the rule of law are factors as well, but of seemingly lesser concern.
I think the only long term morally correct answer is to correct the behavior that helped provoke the jihad in the first place. We're talking about a decades long effort here. In the meantime there will be more deaths on all sides and we'll have to work through that and find ways to cope that don't involve inciting more violence. Essentially this is chickens coming home to roost that were released over the previous decades, centuries, and even eons. Is it fair, nope, but life isn't fair and if we want peace eventually someone has to be the better person and bury the hatchet instead of using it.
Currently I'm the kind that watches, though I suppose that actually makes me the product at some point. But I could also at some point be an advert buying customer, and seeing how hamfisted some of their efforts have been isn't encouraging.
If they aren't actively trying to match their advertisers to videos then their doing a disservice to their advertisers as well as shareholders. Otherwise they are essentially hosting the video as a public service. It's easy to see this issue and chalk it up as only a problem for people deliberately riding the edge, like neo-nazis. But this has been affecting uploaders that are far more bland.
For instance one youtuber I follow mainly does woodworking and homesteading stuff and occasionally discusses his rather main stream religious beliefs. I find his religious views uninteresting and usually skip to the next video when he gets into that. But apparently some people find it offensive and will actually take the step to report it as offensive somehow and get it demonetized for sometime until he successfully refutes their claims officially.
That kind of thing can have a huge impact on the content creator because frequently most of the views they get on any given video happen in the first few days if not hours. If you dis-incentivize content then you will eventually see less and less of it. And while I think that'd be nice in terms of hate speech, I feel that the brushes they are painting with, or allowing to be used by others, are far to broad.
That said I as a customer get annoyed when content serving companies start trying to actively discourage speech which isn't illegal. Stripping all monetization from videos outright is ridiculous. When someone wants to buy advertising space from you they should be asked to specify what kind of content they do or don't want their brand associated with. This all essentially comes off as people trying to turn youtube into a perfectly PC giant echo chamber, and that would honestly suck for practically everyone. I understand that it is Googles prerogative to do whatever they see fit with Youtube, it's just very disheartening to see it lose relevance because their too lazy to work out a better solution.
I obviously can't speak for that person, but I can theorize why that might still be a rational choice. There are quite possibly more factors at work. She could have had more expenses associated with being employed such as childcare that narrowed the actual benefit of that earned income. She could also have just decided that the extra cost of a higher rent made the work not worth doing. Even at that low level of wages taxes and such can easily chew up 25% of the pay check, and while some of that will come back at the end of the year as a tax return that's a long term factor. The rent going up cuts the real gain from being employed in a big way.
I know in my case I've seen job offers that would have resulted in slightly higher pay. I turned them down because if I'm going to jump ship it had better be for a significant raise. When it comes to my free time I value it even more than my work hours and am willing to pay others significantly more than I earn per hour to do tasks I hate. I can easily see how someone might have enough income from passive sources to not require working for more, even if it might provide for an improvement that you or I might say is worth it.
The important thing though is how many libraries of congress this would represent... or cow farts. Honestly I'm not sure what the proper silly reference measurement would be appropriate here. I mean solar mass should be it, but that is what is actually being used already. I'm so confused.
Screw Kubrick! He took a nice short scifi novel and turned it into one of the worst movies I have ever forced myself to sit through. In his attempt to make an art movie he made the story unwatchably bad. The only redeeming bit was HAL's monotone delivery, and the special affects which were amazing for the time. By the same measure I suppose we should heap accolades on Michael Bay.
I actually had the chance to go watch a movie this weekend, which I rarely get due to having kids that don't do well with baby sitters.
When I looked at what was available the two movies mentioned at the top were the two I considered. I ultimately decided to just stay home and watch some Netflix. I missed the fourth pirates movie because it hasn't hit Netflix yet, and so going to see the fifth one seemed silly, plus the wife would probably want to watch it as well. Baywatch looked funny as hell if possibly a smidgen too juvenile, but when I considered the cost and effort to go see it I just couldn't muster the necessary fucks.
I'll watch them both eventually I suppose when they make it to Netflix or Amazon Prime.
There is a big difference between having a smart phone and having the newest version of the make with the highest profit margin in the industry. And really people by and large don't need smartphones, it's debatable enough whether or not they even need cell phones.
As others have pointed out though the whole blame game over one generation screwing another is tired and pointless. If you want to fix things by all means run for office, start a lobbying group, go carry a sign in a protest. Just don't be surprised when half the people or more, that support you come from one of those generations that you gleefully deride.
Work opportunities will of course affect property values but it is only one factor among many. Where I live work isn't necessarily plentiful but it's not very difficult to find either. Many people I work with live up to 30 minutes away from the office. Within that range there is everything from $20k houses in bad parts of town to multi million dollar mansions, and everything in between. Personally I bought a home in the just over $100k range that is about a 10 minute drive from the office all on residential roads with six stop signs and one light. I live in a mid sized city of which there are dozens in the USA. There are only a few places in the USA that I can think of where property is so restricted and prices high that buying property would be an unwise burden. If you do happen to live in one of those areas though it just highlights the importance of saving.
Or give advantages to those properties through various methods like tax breaks and free permits. There is all kinds of creative ways to give someone a gift and owning commercial properties in their area of control makes it that much easier. There is also of course the opposite possibility where it opens you up to having that property leveraged against you, threats to seize property and such.
Perhaps the author is thinking of conception as being the sexual act, and not actually the fertilization of the egg. It takes awhile, and sometimes longer than you might think, for fertilization to happen after intercourse. So it is conceivable that you could have sex, and then some time later take something to prevent fertilization from happening.
I think paper pushing, or virtual paper pushing is one of those jobs that has actually been seeing steady increases for decades now. Just today I was doing some work that a customer had requested, and I easily spent 90% of my time virtually pushing paper instead of actually doing the simple requested work. And I'm just the front line peon. There are four local levels of management above me here and collectively they probably put in just as much paper pushing time for it as I did. I'd definitely like to see a lot of that automated and or just done away with but it's all usually tied in closely to someone in powers oversized ego.
But yeah I look forward to the, hopefully not mythical, day where I can be paid to do something more fulfilling with my time.
It's a matter of complexity. Tic-tac-toe is simple enough that it is trivial to write a program in a procedural fashion such that the computer will always either win or come to a draw, but never lose. I did this myself in high school for a class project. That was possible because the board is very small and the rules only allow for a maximum of 9 moves between the two players. The computer doesn't have to do any prediction about future game states but can just refer to a small lookup table of game states and make the appropriate best move.
With Go the board is relatively large at 19x19 and the rules allow for pieces to be removed allowing for play on the same position again at a later time. The result is that the number of possible game states is immense, well beyond our ability to catalogue them. Chess faced the same problem though it has a much smaller set of possible game states. The solution in chess was to predict what the board would look like a few moves in the future and pick moves that would result in a stronger board state based on parameters specified by the programming team. Alpha Go is doing the same kind of thing but with a huge caveat. In the case of Deep Blue all of it's decisions were weighted by the programmers so that it would know which board states were stronger. In the case of Alpha Go the computer was pitted against its self in thousands of games so it could learn and assess it's own values for future board states.
The benefits of the Alpha Go approach have been made apparent by its use of moves that had never been seen in tournament play. Whereas Deep Blue seemed to play much more traditionally.
So long as the car is capable of recognizing that the road conditions aren't safe for it to proceed then the worst that will happen is a line of stopped cars. At which point they should turn control over to manual or plot an alternate route. I've been using a cheapo tom-tom for around 7 years now and haven't been able to update its maps successfully for most of that time. Thus far I've never had that GPS try to route me down a road that no longer exists or has moved. I suppose speed limits could be an issue but again my tom tom usually has the speed limit identified for whatever road I'm on and I've noticed it being incorrect, and in a future where cars automatically drive at whatever speed is appropriate for conditions road side signs indicating speed limits could rapidly become obsolete. I'm sure we'll see some panic from governments which obtain significant amounts of money from traffic violations as their revenue from speed traps and such dry up.
I don't know that interpreting road signs is going to enter in to the equation of automated cars, on a regular basis and at high speed. They will very likely rely mainly on electronic maps and GPS, with some kind of lane keeping scanning to ensure they stay on the roadway when the map is off or the GPS signal is interrupted. The only case where reading signs might be important would be for road construction or special events where the site is new and hasn't been entered into the systems that the cars get updates from. I expect that road crews will use some kind of new signage that uses radio signalling or something so that the car doesn't need to visually identify and interpret a sign.
Like I said the car has the capability to be just as or more cautious as a human driver, with a much higher reliability of maintaining that caution because it doesn't run out of patience, and on top of all that it can detect and react to a dangerous situation faster than a human can even recognize the danger. There was an article some time ago about a google car having trouble with a four way stop sign intersection. The car was basically waiting forever to take its turn to go because the human drivers at the intersection kept violating the rules of the road by either doing a rolling stop or going out of turn.
Caution is the way to avoid accidents but no human driver is capable of the level of cautiousness that a computer is. We glance at mirrors, instrument panels, and roadside distractions. We get tired and lost in our thoughts. Provided that the car doesn't BSOD it should easily outclass any human driver in safety.
I'm pretty sure being the best driver in America would have more to do with luck than with any kind of skill. Most drivers are average, and even those that are better than average statistically are only better as a result of having the good fortune to not have caused an accident while doing something stupid.
These days I actively try to be a safe driver. I don't use a cellphone or anything more complicated than my radio while driving. I obey speed limits generally, only speeding by 5mph on the interstates. I signal lane changes and turns well before actually taking that action. Ten years ago though I was a much more reckless driver, though you wouldn't know it by my driving record. Sure I had a few tickets, but I never caused any accidents. I chalk that up purely to luck though as there were innumerable times when disaster could have struck, even today with my much safer proclivities it would just take some bad luck to turn a second of inattention into disaster.
And that is the point of autonomous cars/vehicles. They don't rely on luck for safety, as they are on point every minuscule fraction of a second. An autonomous system can recognize a dangerous situation and start reacting long before a human driver can. They will be safer than the best human drivers by virtue of actually all following the same rules, but also by virtue of simply being faster to react.
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I seem to remember reading about compressed air for energy storage. I wonder if we couldn't re purpose old mines for storing compressed air. If nothing else we could use manufactured pressure vessels. Although I imagine making tanks large enough to hold significant amounts of energy would be very expensive.
It isn't that the document creator sets the classification as they are responsible for marking it appropriately. So if the memos would be counted as FOUO then another document or conversation regarding the contents or the same body of material would properly be classified at the same level. Yes, he could in theory strip out details to reduce the classification, but I have a hard time imaging that you could impart anything meaningful and it not still qualify as FOUO.
All of that said I'm not personally opposed to what Comey did. I'm just trying to point out the somewhat ridiculously broad ways in which the whole classification system works. Which is of course a large part of why the government has such huge mountains of the stuff to maintain.
It's likely that the contents of the memo are at the least FOUO, For Official Use Only. Transmitting FOUO outside of official usage is a violation. Whether or not something is properly marked has no real bearing on whether or not it is actually classified in whatever category. The original ownership of say a document is also not relevant to whether or not the government counts it as classified. For instance if tomorrow I had some kind of epiphany regarding manufacture of a new weapon to which the USA had no counter, that knowledge would be considered classified by the government. Even if I published that knowledge for all the world to see, it would still be counted as classified. For most people there is no requirement for them to give any thought to whether or not something is classified, but for anyone with a clearance there are extra laws which basically require them to avoid classified information in the wild.
PS. When I say classified above I am not specifically talking about the classification category called "classified" but instead to anything on the classification spectrum, from FOUO through the various flavors of TS.
You could argue just the same that we should deny clearances to anyone that is or was opposed to the invasion of Iraq because of Lawrence Franklin, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
Or the same for anyone with a pro-Israel stance because of Jonathan Pollard, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
If we tried to limit clearances to just people that espoused the most American of American ideals, based on someone's arbitrary opinion, much of the military, DoD, State Department, and the various intelligence agencies would be gutted of people. Whatever would be left of those organizations would likely end up being hyper homogenized. That might sound appealing until you realize that your own personal belief on some subject probably isn't represented in those agencies and in fact makes you a subject of suspicion.
Harvard owns a public group for a specific class year, which all these students belonged to as incoming freshmen.
Some of the kids in the group decided to form a separate private group wherein they could share meme's which they knew were not socially acceptable.
To earn entry to the private group a prospective member had to post an objectionable meme in the public group.
At some point Harvard took notice of the objectionable meme's in the public group. Harvard notified the applicable kids that their admission was now under review because of the postings and requested a response.
We don't know exactly what happened but it would seem that at least one of the kids spilled the beans about the private group. There are all kinds of possibilities from there but we don't actually know whether or not Harvard gained any kind of access to the private group. It is possible that all the kids caught up in this had posted to the public group and were rejected based on that and an allegation of their being a private group.
Did you read the article? Part of the criteria for joining the private group was to post the same kind of drivel in the public group. The public postings were reported and resulted in the admissions for some people being reviewed. As part of that review the affected people were sent letters asking to explain their public postings. Presumably one or more of them responded with information about the private group. It is possible that Harvard did not actually gain access to the private group postings, but instead is just giving the boot to the kids that were dumb enough to post in the public group.
Anyways, it is clear from the article that, the group members were not all that interested in expressing their vile opinions only in private.
From what someone else posted earlier, apparently if you wanted into the private group you had to post something in the public group, which the school had created. So what likely happened is one of the kids that posted in the public group was called in to answer why they had posted such a thing, which probably brought up the private groups existence.
Disrespecting politicians, even the sitting president, doesn't factor into whether or not a person can be granted a clearance.
Even siding with an 'enemy' on some issue or other doesn't matter all that much. You could actually publicly be a communist or an anarchist and support constitutional reforms to align it with those beliefs. The limiting factor is usually membership or real support for organizations that work to violently overthrow the US government.
Other than that the main emphasis of a clearance investigation seems to revolve around whether or not someone could blackmail you. Trustworthiness and obeying the rule of law are factors as well, but of seemingly lesser concern.
I think the only long term morally correct answer is to correct the behavior that helped provoke the jihad in the first place. We're talking about a decades long effort here. In the meantime there will be more deaths on all sides and we'll have to work through that and find ways to cope that don't involve inciting more violence. Essentially this is chickens coming home to roost that were released over the previous decades, centuries, and even eons. Is it fair, nope, but life isn't fair and if we want peace eventually someone has to be the better person and bury the hatchet instead of using it.
Currently I'm the kind that watches, though I suppose that actually makes me the product at some point. But I could also at some point be an advert buying customer, and seeing how hamfisted some of their efforts have been isn't encouraging.
If they aren't actively trying to match their advertisers to videos then their doing a disservice to their advertisers as well as shareholders. Otherwise they are essentially hosting the video as a public service. It's easy to see this issue and chalk it up as only a problem for people deliberately riding the edge, like neo-nazis. But this has been affecting uploaders that are far more bland.
For instance one youtuber I follow mainly does woodworking and homesteading stuff and occasionally discusses his rather main stream religious beliefs. I find his religious views uninteresting and usually skip to the next video when he gets into that. But apparently some people find it offensive and will actually take the step to report it as offensive somehow and get it demonetized for sometime until he successfully refutes their claims officially.
That kind of thing can have a huge impact on the content creator because frequently most of the views they get on any given video happen in the first few days if not hours. If you dis-incentivize content then you will eventually see less and less of it. And while I think that'd be nice in terms of hate speech, I feel that the brushes they are painting with, or allowing to be used by others, are far to broad.
You are absolutely right.
That said I as a customer get annoyed when content serving companies start trying to actively discourage speech which isn't illegal. Stripping all monetization from videos outright is ridiculous. When someone wants to buy advertising space from you they should be asked to specify what kind of content they do or don't want their brand associated with. This all essentially comes off as people trying to turn youtube into a perfectly PC giant echo chamber, and that would honestly suck for practically everyone. I understand that it is Googles prerogative to do whatever they see fit with Youtube, it's just very disheartening to see it lose relevance because their too lazy to work out a better solution.
I obviously can't speak for that person, but I can theorize why that might still be a rational choice. There are quite possibly more factors at work. She could have had more expenses associated with being employed such as childcare that narrowed the actual benefit of that earned income. She could also have just decided that the extra cost of a higher rent made the work not worth doing. Even at that low level of wages taxes and such can easily chew up 25% of the pay check, and while some of that will come back at the end of the year as a tax return that's a long term factor. The rent going up cuts the real gain from being employed in a big way.
I know in my case I've seen job offers that would have resulted in slightly higher pay. I turned them down because if I'm going to jump ship it had better be for a significant raise. When it comes to my free time I value it even more than my work hours and am willing to pay others significantly more than I earn per hour to do tasks I hate. I can easily see how someone might have enough income from passive sources to not require working for more, even if it might provide for an improvement that you or I might say is worth it.
The important thing though is how many libraries of congress this would represent... or cow farts. Honestly I'm not sure what the proper silly reference measurement would be appropriate here. I mean solar mass should be it, but that is what is actually being used already. I'm so confused.
Screw Kubrick! He took a nice short scifi novel and turned it into one of the worst movies I have ever forced myself to sit through. In his attempt to make an art movie he made the story unwatchably bad. The only redeeming bit was HAL's monotone delivery, and the special affects which were amazing for the time. By the same measure I suppose we should heap accolades on Michael Bay.
I actually had the chance to go watch a movie this weekend, which I rarely get due to having kids that don't do well with baby sitters.
When I looked at what was available the two movies mentioned at the top were the two I considered. I ultimately decided to just stay home and watch some Netflix. I missed the fourth pirates movie because it hasn't hit Netflix yet, and so going to see the fifth one seemed silly, plus the wife would probably want to watch it as well. Baywatch looked funny as hell if possibly a smidgen too juvenile, but when I considered the cost and effort to go see it I just couldn't muster the necessary fucks.
I'll watch them both eventually I suppose when they make it to Netflix or Amazon Prime.
There is a big difference between having a smart phone and having the newest version of the make with the highest profit margin in the industry. And really people by and large don't need smartphones, it's debatable enough whether or not they even need cell phones.
As others have pointed out though the whole blame game over one generation screwing another is tired and pointless. If you want to fix things by all means run for office, start a lobbying group, go carry a sign in a protest. Just don't be surprised when half the people or more, that support you come from one of those generations that you gleefully deride.
Work opportunities will of course affect property values but it is only one factor among many. Where I live work isn't necessarily plentiful but it's not very difficult to find either. Many people I work with live up to 30 minutes away from the office. Within that range there is everything from $20k houses in bad parts of town to multi million dollar mansions, and everything in between. Personally I bought a home in the just over $100k range that is about a 10 minute drive from the office all on residential roads with six stop signs and one light. I live in a mid sized city of which there are dozens in the USA. There are only a few places in the USA that I can think of where property is so restricted and prices high that buying property would be an unwise burden. If you do happen to live in one of those areas though it just highlights the importance of saving.
Or give advantages to those properties through various methods like tax breaks and free permits. There is all kinds of creative ways to give someone a gift and owning commercial properties in their area of control makes it that much easier. There is also of course the opposite possibility where it opens you up to having that property leveraged against you, threats to seize property and such.
Perhaps the author is thinking of conception as being the sexual act, and not actually the fertilization of the egg. It takes awhile, and sometimes longer than you might think, for fertilization to happen after intercourse. So it is conceivable that you could have sex, and then some time later take something to prevent fertilization from happening.
I think paper pushing, or virtual paper pushing is one of those jobs that has actually been seeing steady increases for decades now. Just today I was doing some work that a customer had requested, and I easily spent 90% of my time virtually pushing paper instead of actually doing the simple requested work. And I'm just the front line peon. There are four local levels of management above me here and collectively they probably put in just as much paper pushing time for it as I did. I'd definitely like to see a lot of that automated and or just done away with but it's all usually tied in closely to someone in powers oversized ego.
But yeah I look forward to the, hopefully not mythical, day where I can be paid to do something more fulfilling with my time.
It's a matter of complexity. Tic-tac-toe is simple enough that it is trivial to write a program in a procedural fashion such that the computer will always either win or come to a draw, but never lose. I did this myself in high school for a class project. That was possible because the board is very small and the rules only allow for a maximum of 9 moves between the two players. The computer doesn't have to do any prediction about future game states but can just refer to a small lookup table of game states and make the appropriate best move.
With Go the board is relatively large at 19x19 and the rules allow for pieces to be removed allowing for play on the same position again at a later time. The result is that the number of possible game states is immense, well beyond our ability to catalogue them. Chess faced the same problem though it has a much smaller set of possible game states. The solution in chess was to predict what the board would look like a few moves in the future and pick moves that would result in a stronger board state based on parameters specified by the programming team. Alpha Go is doing the same kind of thing but with a huge caveat. In the case of Deep Blue all of it's decisions were weighted by the programmers so that it would know which board states were stronger. In the case of Alpha Go the computer was pitted against its self in thousands of games so it could learn and assess it's own values for future board states.
The benefits of the Alpha Go approach have been made apparent by its use of moves that had never been seen in tournament play. Whereas Deep Blue seemed to play much more traditionally.
So long as the car is capable of recognizing that the road conditions aren't safe for it to proceed then the worst that will happen is a line of stopped cars. At which point they should turn control over to manual or plot an alternate route. I've been using a cheapo tom-tom for around 7 years now and haven't been able to update its maps successfully for most of that time. Thus far I've never had that GPS try to route me down a road that no longer exists or has moved. I suppose speed limits could be an issue but again my tom tom usually has the speed limit identified for whatever road I'm on and I've noticed it being incorrect, and in a future where cars automatically drive at whatever speed is appropriate for conditions road side signs indicating speed limits could rapidly become obsolete. I'm sure we'll see some panic from governments which obtain significant amounts of money from traffic violations as their revenue from speed traps and such dry up.
I don't know that interpreting road signs is going to enter in to the equation of automated cars, on a regular basis and at high speed. They will very likely rely mainly on electronic maps and GPS, with some kind of lane keeping scanning to ensure they stay on the roadway when the map is off or the GPS signal is interrupted. The only case where reading signs might be important would be for road construction or special events where the site is new and hasn't been entered into the systems that the cars get updates from. I expect that road crews will use some kind of new signage that uses radio signalling or something so that the car doesn't need to visually identify and interpret a sign.
Like I said the car has the capability to be just as or more cautious as a human driver, with a much higher reliability of maintaining that caution because it doesn't run out of patience, and on top of all that it can detect and react to a dangerous situation faster than a human can even recognize the danger. There was an article some time ago about a google car having trouble with a four way stop sign intersection. The car was basically waiting forever to take its turn to go because the human drivers at the intersection kept violating the rules of the road by either doing a rolling stop or going out of turn.
Caution is the way to avoid accidents but no human driver is capable of the level of cautiousness that a computer is. We glance at mirrors, instrument panels, and roadside distractions. We get tired and lost in our thoughts. Provided that the car doesn't BSOD it should easily outclass any human driver in safety.
Just don't go asking it foolish questions like "Is there a God?"
I'm pretty sure being the best driver in America would have more to do with luck than with any kind of skill. Most drivers are average, and even those that are better than average statistically are only better as a result of having the good fortune to not have caused an accident while doing something stupid.
These days I actively try to be a safe driver. I don't use a cellphone or anything more complicated than my radio while driving. I obey speed limits generally, only speeding by 5mph on the interstates. I signal lane changes and turns well before actually taking that action. Ten years ago though I was a much more reckless driver, though you wouldn't know it by my driving record. Sure I had a few tickets, but I never caused any accidents. I chalk that up purely to luck though as there were innumerable times when disaster could have struck, even today with my much safer proclivities it would just take some bad luck to turn a second of inattention into disaster.
And that is the point of autonomous cars/vehicles. They don't rely on luck for safety, as they are on point every minuscule fraction of a second. An autonomous system can recognize a dangerous situation and start reacting long before a human driver can. They will be safer than the best human drivers by virtue of actually all following the same rules, but also by virtue of simply being faster to react.