Here is a moron that does not understand the difference between carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. Just fyi genius... you exhale Co2...
..and hereis a 'moron' who doesn't understand all the other pollutants that come out of the tailpipe of a vehicle with an internal combustion engine. Also after reviewing the last few dozen of your other comments you're clearly just another one of those assholes who likes to argue for the sake of arguing, and to insult people, and as such you're really not worth anybody's time, so how about you just fuck off?
Explain to me why you need these things anyway? Also the major OTA networks run pro football so where's the problem, and I'm sure you can get Food Network or whatever is equivalent online for free anyway. Or maybe you should spend less time worrying about food and more time doing something else?
Netflix running out of discs
If you want to see it that badly and it's that old, then go buy a copy, it'll be cheap. Or maybe you preserve your monthly bandwidth for the things you can't get in other more normal ways rather than just streaming the shit out of your broadband connection. Don't be so lazy then complain about how you're getting ripped off.
Listen, dude, I'm not an 'alarmist' of anything so stop accusing me of shit I'm not guilty of, and how does your rant really have anything to do with what I'm talking about? We keep putting a band-aid on 100 year old technology and fooling ourselves that we're 'helping' when what we need to do is get away from it entirely, and by the way they keep cutting down the rainforests in South America (I keep hearing about this every so often) which is what converts CO2 back into O2 for us to breathe; how is this being an 'alarmist' anyway? We need to knock all this shit off, sooner rather than later, and I can't see how anyone can argue that it's a bad idea unless you're just too lazy to want to change things. Sure, change is always hard, but isn't it time we, as a planet full of supposedly sentient beings, stopping being big babies about all this and just move towards things that don't cause unnecessary pollution and waste? Can you really give me a rational, intelligent argument against this idea? I don't think you or anyone can.
After we start investigating every single motor vehicle manufacturer out there and find out how many of them (all of them?) have been cheating emissions testing to meet mandates, how much CO2 and other 'greenhouse gasses' humans are actually responsible for.
Oh, and all you climate change-deniers out there? Get yourself a CPAP mask, hook it up to the tailpipe of your car, and see how healthy it is for you to breathe that. Regardless of 'global warming' being a thing or not, isn't it time we started moving away from internal combustion engines? And burning coal? Even natural gas isn't that great in the long run. Time to grow up, everyone, and stop using these baby technologies that are poisoning us regardless. Redesign fission power plants so they're safer, operate them safer, build lots of them. Continue to develop fusion technology until it's practical. Better electric storage technologies so plug-in electric vehicles are more practical. Keep researching and developing high temperature superconductor technology, to eventually improve the efficiency of electric vehicles (and everything else that uses lots of power). Solar and wind to fill in the gaps while we're working on all the above (and by the way how would high temp superconductors improve solar?). Don't know about you but I'd welcome a motorcycle with a 500 mile-on-a-charge range and a superconducting powertrain, that would out-perform the best superbikes currently available.
If ABC doesn't want to show the engineering stuff on air
See, that's the problem. Who they're appealing to (obviously, so far as I'm concerned) is the same crowd who likes wrestling and/or monster trucks. If you start having people talk about the nuts and bolts and the process of building it, their intended audiences' eyes will glaze over, and they'll change the channel 'because of all that boring science stuff'. That's not what their target audience wants, they want to see machines tear each other to bits in 3 minutes or less. I'll be surprised if it lasts past season 2.
So did we let ourselves get suckered by clever marketing?
Yep, you did.
Streaming movies is so much better and more convenient than using physical media!
No, it's not. You're using tons of bandwidth watching movies in streaming 1080p all month, then you gripe about being throttled or charged for overage. Then maybe you screw up by having DVDs and Bluray discs, ripping them, and storing them in 'The Cloud', and again you whine about bandwidth charges. Yep, you all fell for it hook line and sinker. Stop using 'The Cloud'. Stop streaming everything. Get an antenna, watch free OTA HDTV. Use Redbox, or get Netflix to send you discs, watch them. You like something enough to watch more than once? Buy the disc(s). Stop making your phone your lifestyle, you won't use so much data every month. Don't play their game, take control of the situation. It's really not that difficult.
I remembered the original, which sprang from hobbyist competitions, so I watched this. Not only did I rather quickly start fast-forwarding through all the yakity yak yak tak to get to the actual competition, but I found it terribly predictable who was going to win. Sorry, but it's all mature technology now, there are a few designs that are more or less guaranteed to win, and the only variables there seems to be are whether they were competently constructed, whether the materials used were appropriate, and to a small degreee, how well they were driven. I'd go through a whole episode in less than 15 minutes.
More to the point, TiVo has Cable Card slots, which even supplied set-top boxes require for decryption. Otherwise the set-top boxes literally aren't anything special. Theoretically you could even own the Cable Card(s) and have the cable company do the configuring for their system.
Do you all REALLY WANT an app to drive your cars? Don't lie to yourselves.
I'm not convinced anyone is in denial here. What it seems like, is every time I get into a 'discussion' on here about this subject, they're just not considering all the things that can go wrong with the technology, which probably stems from how complex a task it is, and that people have been doing it for so long that they take it for granted. Case-in-point: I remember seeing some documentary (On PBS, maybe? Nova?) about robotics in general. Some University was trying to create a robot that could do 'simple' household chores. Specifically, they were trying to teach it to fold shirts. It couldn't do it anything like reliably. Tiny little changes would completely throw it off. The human brain is an incredibly complex thing. Consider how long it's taken just to build a robot that can stand and walk on two legs without falling over at the slightest difference in the floor, or an obstacle put in it's way, or (gasp!) trying to climb stairs. Or, as I mentioned elsewhere, how we still can't get an 'AI' to pass the Turing Test. In the category of 'denial', though, there is that people can't or won't realize that when they step into an 'autonomous car', it's not really the computer that's driving them, it's the programmers that wrote the software that's driving them. That fact alone scares the hell out of me. Couple that with how many things we're discovering that automakers have covered up because they were too expensive to fix? Disaster waiting to happen, if you ask me. No thanks, I'll just keep driving myself.
I wouldn't get too excited over this. They can make all the laws they want about something like this, but it won't be enfoceable. It would break the Internet, completely, for everyone. Someone would tap them on the shoulder at some point and explain to them how it's going to break the Internet, and that how because of that, it won't be enforceable. If you live in the EU and want to do something positive about crap like this, make sure people know how incredibly stupid the people on that commission are.
Nice to see someone on here who is thinking straight.
If and when the day comes that we really, truly understand, top to bottom, how the cognitive processes of the human brain works, then we might be able to create an artificial intelligence that can match, if not surpass, us. Of course that's an entirely different can of worms to open, one which I won't bother covering here because science fiction authors have already covered the what ifs of that more than sufficiently. Of course the problem with trying to discover how the cognitive centers of the human brain work, is because you can't dismantle the system and examine it's components, then be able to put it back together and still have it function, unlike non-living machines. So far as I know we've still only got the vaguest ideas how a living brain works at all, let alone how to build the equivalent of it, so as such real AI is still quite a ways off.
Anon, you're making a common, but understandable mistake: you're injecting common sense and logic into a conversation concerning business people and politicians, who habitually don't make a lick of sense at all. They'd probably have the National Guard raid Google's headquarters for doing as you say, if not have Google's board of directors hauled out into the street and shot like dogs.
It's OSS. They want a bug fixed so damned bad that they're going to start threatening the author? Tell 'em to go pound sand, and have their own gods-be-damned programmer(s) fix it. It's not like they don't have the gods-be-damned source code for the thing.
No, see, they're not: If you can't even create software that can think enough like a human being to have a casual conversation with someone, over text on a screen, which is a relatively simple thing with relatively few variables in it, then how the hell do you expect something as complex and dynamic as operating a vehicle in the real world, where anything can happen at any time, completely at random? You're expecting us, in a few years, to come up with the equivalent of the human brain, that took millions of years to evolve to the state it's currently in. At best this is still science fiction. I find Google and it's toys to be laughable at best, and I'm obviously not the only one. Better keep your driving skills up to snuff, friend, you're going to need them for probably the rest of your life.
There you go, assuming that every car on the road is magically going to be driven by a computer 100% of the time, meanwhile I keep telling you people: It ain't gonna happen. Dream all you want, friend, it's going to remain science fiction for at least the rest of your life, so please be sure your driving skills are adequate, you're going to need them.
Actually I think the effect of an ill-conceived law like this would be even worse: Since it's links, then all search engines wouldn't be allowed to list their sites; they would essentially disappear from the Internet almost immediately. You'd already have to know about the site in question, and be able to type it in from the keyboard from memory, as it sounds like even emailing a link to someone would be considered a violation. The effect would be almost comical, if it wasn't so sad: You'd have thousands, maybe millions of sites, suddenly panicking because their daily hits immediately go to almost zero.
Pretty soon just looking at a link without even clicking on it will be an offense.
Yep. Welcome to the dystopian future world of Minority Report, where computer algorithms based on the profile generated by all the data everyone allowed to be collected on them (from Facebook, Twitter, and other so-called 'social media') will be used to predict future violations of copyright and other laws, which you will then be proactively prosecuted for. Since trade agreements like the TPP and it's descendents will more or less allow corporations to do whatever they want to whoever they want, you'll just receive and invoice from the billing department of their legal division for your 'future violations', expected to be paid in full within 30 days, or face extradition to the country-of-origin of the corporation you're predicted to damage in the future, where you'll do hard labor the rest of your life.
We have too many humans on this planet already, we don't need more ways to make more humans! You want to raise a child? Go adopt one, there are plenty of children out there without families to take care of them, and you'll be doing human civilization in general several favors in the process, not the least of which is ensuring that one or more human children have a better chance of growing up to be well-adjusted and successful members of society, instead of being all screwed up because they bounced back and forth between foster homes.
Sure. But is it going to slow down or come screeching to a halt when some dumb cat or dog runs out into the road, and cause the vehicle behind it to rear-end it, or is it going to know that while squishing Fluffy is sad and regrettable, it's preferable to causing an accident in which property will be damaged, and more to the point, where human beings might be injured or killed? It won't, because it won't differentiate between a cat, a dog, a squirrel, or a human child, or some kids' balloon that drifts on the breeze from his birthday party into the roadway. Please don't talk about how this won't be a problem because all cars will be autonomous cars and never operated by a human being because that's about as likely to happen in our lifetime as practical and widespread use of fusion reactors to supply electricity is likely to happen in our lifetime. Also there will always be bicyclists and motorcycles, and you can't make those 'autonomous' so there's always going to be other variables in the traffic equation that you can't control and can't accurately predict the behavior of, and before you say it, claiming that we'll outlaw those things is at best unrealistic. Also, I don't want to live in a world where you can't 'drive for fun', and I know I'm far from being alone in that sentiment. Honestly, the whole 'autonomous car' thing is so completely overblown that I don't know how anyone can take it seriously anymore. It's just not going to happen anywhere near like some people think it's going to happen, and I don't understand why some people can't see that.
We can't even, after decades of trying, create an 'artificial intelligence' that can pass the Turing Test, and that's just text on a screen. What makes any of you so sure that 'autonomous cars' were ever so close to being a reality? Even then, as I've said in the past and will keep saying, there's always going to be a full set of manual controls, by law, and you'll always still be required, by law, to be fully educated, trained, tested, licensed, and insured in order to be behind the wheel of any vehicle, regardless of any so-called 'self-driving' feature it might have, because when all it said and done, when human safety and lives are at stake, a human being must be the final 'backup system'. Furthermore since we all know that any skill that isn't used often tends to atrophy, you'll likely be required to be re-tested by the government more often than you are right now, to ensure that you're still competent to be operating a motor vehicle. So get over it: You're still going to be driving yourselves around for a good long time to come, probably the rest of your lives, or at least until you're too old to be a competent operator of a motor vehicle.
Now, then, for all of you with all your complaints about 'other drivers' being so bad: Hush up already, you're probably at least as bad as the ones you're complaining about. That being said, what we need to do in this country is to improve driver training and education, and tighten up testing procedures and frequency to improve the overall competence of drivers on the roads, and exclude the ones who can't (or won't) show an acceptable and consistent level of competence. This should include tougher and longer-lasting penalties for individuals convicted of DUI. Furthermore any use of any kind of any mobile wireless device while driving should be strictly prohibited and punished severely; I think a six-month suspension of driving privilege with a hefty fine should be sufficient.
Meanwhile, auto industry, please do continue to develop and produce collision-avoidance systems that warn the driver when they're screwing up.
If the cord cutting continues, Comcast needs to make money somewhere, and that somewhere is increased data fees.
Personally, they're not offering enough to justify the added expense, especially since I discovered the Dirty Little Secret of cable and satellite: recompression of video to the point where it looks like total crap, even at supposed 1080i or 1080p. I paid once for an antenna I put on my roof, I get more than I have time to watch, and the video quality is as good as it's going to get. Getting OTA broadcasts has already paid for itself many times over. Never going back to cable.
Well, it's their fucking system. You play by their rules, or you go play somewhere else.
I recommend everyone do precisely that. Comcast is building a monopoly, and quicker than everyone thinks they are. Prices will just go up and up, and value and quality will go down. They need competition, so go to someone else.
That's what Comcast has done. Their network capacity has been so overbooked that if everyone actually tried to use what they think they're paying to get, the whole thing would grind to a halt. It makes me wonder how many network engineers tried to tell management that what they were doing was a really bad idea, and how many of them got fired for daring to explain it to them. Now they're painted into a corner, and rather than invest in expanding their network to meet demand, they'll just tell everyone who is paying them 'tough shit, deal with it, it is what it is' and hang up the phone in your face -- then badger you to death when you try to cancel their 'service'. They've painted themselves into a corner, and are denying it furiously. Meanwhile they're allowed to buy up more and more other companies so they can corner the market.
I got a better idea for how you can spend your time, Congress: How about you close all the 'loopholes' that allow our own gods-be-damned government from warrantless spying on our communications? IDGAF about 'robocalls', I'll just not answer the phone for numbers I don't know, but how about you stop the gods-be-damned NSA from watching us all like we're all gods-be-damned convicts?
Slashdot Mirror
First rule about Botnet is: You don't talk about Botnet.
Here is a moron that does not understand the difference between carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. Just fyi genius... you exhale Co2...
..and hereis a 'moron' who doesn't understand all the other pollutants that come out of the tailpipe of a vehicle with an internal combustion engine. Also after reviewing the last few dozen of your other comments you're clearly just another one of those assholes who likes to argue for the sake of arguing, and to insult people, and as such you're really not worth anybody's time, so how about you just fuck off?
ESPN Monday Night Football or Food Network
Explain to me why you need these things anyway? Also the major OTA networks run pro football so where's the problem, and I'm sure you can get Food Network or whatever is equivalent online for free anyway. Or maybe you should spend less time worrying about food and more time doing something else?
Netflix running out of discs
If you want to see it that badly and it's that old, then go buy a copy, it'll be cheap. Or maybe you preserve your monthly bandwidth for the things you can't get in other more normal ways rather than just streaming the shit out of your broadband connection. Don't be so lazy then complain about how you're getting ripped off.
Listen, dude, I'm not an 'alarmist' of anything so stop accusing me of shit I'm not guilty of, and how does your rant really have anything to do with what I'm talking about? We keep putting a band-aid on 100 year old technology and fooling ourselves that we're 'helping' when what we need to do is get away from it entirely, and by the way they keep cutting down the rainforests in South America (I keep hearing about this every so often) which is what converts CO2 back into O2 for us to breathe; how is this being an 'alarmist' anyway? We need to knock all this shit off, sooner rather than later, and I can't see how anyone can argue that it's a bad idea unless you're just too lazy to want to change things. Sure, change is always hard, but isn't it time we, as a planet full of supposedly sentient beings, stopping being big babies about all this and just move towards things that don't cause unnecessary pollution and waste? Can you really give me a rational, intelligent argument against this idea? I don't think you or anyone can.
After we start investigating every single motor vehicle manufacturer out there and find out how many of them (all of them?) have been cheating emissions testing to meet mandates, how much CO2 and other 'greenhouse gasses' humans are actually responsible for.
Oh, and all you climate change-deniers out there? Get yourself a CPAP mask, hook it up to the tailpipe of your car, and see how healthy it is for you to breathe that. Regardless of 'global warming' being a thing or not, isn't it time we started moving away from internal combustion engines? And burning coal? Even natural gas isn't that great in the long run. Time to grow up, everyone, and stop using these baby technologies that are poisoning us regardless. Redesign fission power plants so they're safer, operate them safer, build lots of them. Continue to develop fusion technology until it's practical. Better electric storage technologies so plug-in electric vehicles are more practical. Keep researching and developing high temperature superconductor technology, to eventually improve the efficiency of electric vehicles (and everything else that uses lots of power). Solar and wind to fill in the gaps while we're working on all the above (and by the way how would high temp superconductors improve solar?). Don't know about you but I'd welcome a motorcycle with a 500 mile-on-a-charge range and a superconducting powertrain, that would out-perform the best superbikes currently available.
If ABC doesn't want to show the engineering stuff on air
See, that's the problem. Who they're appealing to (obviously, so far as I'm concerned) is the same crowd who likes wrestling and/or monster trucks. If you start having people talk about the nuts and bolts and the process of building it, their intended audiences' eyes will glaze over, and they'll change the channel 'because of all that boring science stuff'. That's not what their target audience wants, they want to see machines tear each other to bits in 3 minutes or less. I'll be surprised if it lasts past season 2.
So did we let ourselves get suckered by clever marketing?
Yep, you did.
Streaming movies is so much better and more convenient than using physical media!
No, it's not. You're using tons of bandwidth watching movies in streaming 1080p all month, then you gripe about being throttled or charged for overage. Then maybe you screw up by having DVDs and Bluray discs, ripping them, and storing them in 'The Cloud', and again you whine about bandwidth charges. Yep, you all fell for it hook line and sinker.
Stop using 'The Cloud'. Stop streaming everything. Get an antenna, watch free OTA HDTV. Use Redbox, or get Netflix to send you discs, watch them. You like something enough to watch more than once? Buy the disc(s). Stop making your phone your lifestyle, you won't use so much data every month. Don't play their game, take control of the situation. It's really not that difficult.
I remembered the original, which sprang from hobbyist competitions, so I watched this. Not only did I rather quickly start fast-forwarding through all the yakity yak yak tak to get to the actual competition, but I found it terribly predictable who was going to win. Sorry, but it's all mature technology now, there are a few designs that are more or less guaranteed to win, and the only variables there seems to be are whether they were competently constructed, whether the materials used were appropriate, and to a small degreee, how well they were driven. I'd go through a whole episode in less than 15 minutes.
TiVo
More to the point, TiVo has Cable Card slots, which even supplied set-top boxes require for decryption. Otherwise the set-top boxes literally aren't anything special. Theoretically you could even own the Cable Card(s) and have the cable company do the configuring for their system.
Do you all REALLY WANT an app to drive your cars? Don't lie to yourselves.
I'm not convinced anyone is in denial here. What it seems like, is every time I get into a 'discussion' on here about this subject, they're just not considering all the things that can go wrong with the technology, which probably stems from how complex a task it is, and that people have been doing it for so long that they take it for granted. Case-in-point: I remember seeing some documentary (On PBS, maybe? Nova?) about robotics in general. Some University was trying to create a robot that could do 'simple' household chores. Specifically, they were trying to teach it to fold shirts. It couldn't do it anything like reliably. Tiny little changes would completely throw it off. The human brain is an incredibly complex thing. Consider how long it's taken just to build a robot that can stand and walk on two legs without falling over at the slightest difference in the floor, or an obstacle put in it's way, or (gasp!) trying to climb stairs. Or, as I mentioned elsewhere, how we still can't get an 'AI' to pass the Turing Test. In the category of 'denial', though, there is that people can't or won't realize that when they step into an 'autonomous car', it's not really the computer that's driving them, it's the programmers that wrote the software that's driving them. That fact alone scares the hell out of me. Couple that with how many things we're discovering that automakers have covered up because they were too expensive to fix? Disaster waiting to happen, if you ask me. No thanks, I'll just keep driving myself.
I wouldn't get too excited over this. They can make all the laws they want about something like this, but it won't be enfoceable. It would break the Internet, completely, for everyone. Someone would tap them on the shoulder at some point and explain to them how it's going to break the Internet, and that how because of that, it won't be enforceable. If you live in the EU and want to do something positive about crap like this, make sure people know how incredibly stupid the people on that commission are.
Nice to see someone on here who is thinking straight.
If and when the day comes that we really, truly understand, top to bottom, how the cognitive processes of the human brain works, then we might be able to create an artificial intelligence that can match, if not surpass, us. Of course that's an entirely different can of worms to open, one which I won't bother covering here because science fiction authors have already covered the what ifs of that more than sufficiently. Of course the problem with trying to discover how the cognitive centers of the human brain work, is because you can't dismantle the system and examine it's components, then be able to put it back together and still have it function, unlike non-living machines. So far as I know we've still only got the vaguest ideas how a living brain works at all, let alone how to build the equivalent of it, so as such real AI is still quite a ways off.
Anon, you're making a common, but understandable mistake: you're injecting common sense and logic into a conversation concerning business people and politicians, who habitually don't make a lick of sense at all. They'd probably have the National Guard raid Google's headquarters for doing as you say, if not have Google's board of directors hauled out into the street and shot like dogs.
It's OSS. They want a bug fixed so damned bad that they're going to start threatening the author? Tell 'em to go pound sand, and have their own gods-be-damned programmer(s) fix it. It's not like they don't have the gods-be-damned source code for the thing.
No, see, they're not: If you can't even create software that can think enough like a human being to have a casual conversation with someone, over text on a screen, which is a relatively simple thing with relatively few variables in it, then how the hell do you expect something as complex and dynamic as operating a vehicle in the real world, where anything can happen at any time, completely at random? You're expecting us, in a few years, to come up with the equivalent of the human brain, that took millions of years to evolve to the state it's currently in. At best this is still science fiction. I find Google and it's toys to be laughable at best, and I'm obviously not the only one. Better keep your driving skills up to snuff, friend, you're going to need them for probably the rest of your life.
There you go, assuming that every car on the road is magically going to be driven by a computer 100% of the time, meanwhile I keep telling you people: It ain't gonna happen. Dream all you want, friend, it's going to remain science fiction for at least the rest of your life, so please be sure your driving skills are adequate, you're going to need them.
Actually I think the effect of an ill-conceived law like this would be even worse: Since it's links, then all search engines wouldn't be allowed to list their sites; they would essentially disappear from the Internet almost immediately. You'd already have to know about the site in question, and be able to type it in from the keyboard from memory, as it sounds like even emailing a link to someone would be considered a violation. The effect would be almost comical, if it wasn't so sad: You'd have thousands, maybe millions of sites, suddenly panicking because their daily hits immediately go to almost zero.
Pretty soon just looking at a link without even clicking on it will be an offense.
Yep. Welcome to the dystopian future world of Minority Report, where computer algorithms based on the profile generated by all the data everyone allowed to be collected on them (from Facebook, Twitter, and other so-called 'social media') will be used to predict future violations of copyright and other laws, which you will then be proactively prosecuted for. Since trade agreements like the TPP and it's descendents will more or less allow corporations to do whatever they want to whoever they want, you'll just receive and invoice from the billing department of their legal division for your 'future violations', expected to be paid in full within 30 days, or face extradition to the country-of-origin of the corporation you're predicted to damage in the future, where you'll do hard labor the rest of your life.
We have too many humans on this planet already, we don't need more ways to make more humans! You want to raise a child? Go adopt one, there are plenty of children out there without families to take care of them, and you'll be doing human civilization in general several favors in the process, not the least of which is ensuring that one or more human children have a better chance of growing up to be well-adjusted and successful members of society, instead of being all screwed up because they bounced back and forth between foster homes.
Sure. But is it going to slow down or come screeching to a halt when some dumb cat or dog runs out into the road, and cause the vehicle behind it to rear-end it, or is it going to know that while squishing Fluffy is sad and regrettable, it's preferable to causing an accident in which property will be damaged, and more to the point, where human beings might be injured or killed? It won't, because it won't differentiate between a cat, a dog, a squirrel, or a human child, or some kids' balloon that drifts on the breeze from his birthday party into the roadway. Please don't talk about how this won't be a problem because all cars will be autonomous cars and never operated by a human being because that's about as likely to happen in our lifetime as practical and widespread use of fusion reactors to supply electricity is likely to happen in our lifetime. Also there will always be bicyclists and motorcycles, and you can't make those 'autonomous' so there's always going to be other variables in the traffic equation that you can't control and can't accurately predict the behavior of, and before you say it, claiming that we'll outlaw those things is at best unrealistic. Also, I don't want to live in a world where you can't 'drive for fun', and I know I'm far from being alone in that sentiment. Honestly, the whole 'autonomous car' thing is so completely overblown that I don't know how anyone can take it seriously anymore. It's just not going to happen anywhere near like some people think it's going to happen, and I don't understand why some people can't see that.
We can't even, after decades of trying, create an 'artificial intelligence' that can pass the Turing Test, and that's just text on a screen. What makes any of you so sure that 'autonomous cars' were ever so close to being a reality? Even then, as I've said in the past and will keep saying, there's always going to be a full set of manual controls, by law, and you'll always still be required, by law, to be fully educated, trained, tested, licensed, and insured in order to be behind the wheel of any vehicle, regardless of any so-called 'self-driving' feature it might have, because when all it said and done, when human safety and lives are at stake, a human being must be the final 'backup system'. Furthermore since we all know that any skill that isn't used often tends to atrophy, you'll likely be required to be re-tested by the government more often than you are right now, to ensure that you're still competent to be operating a motor vehicle. So get over it: You're still going to be driving yourselves around for a good long time to come, probably the rest of your lives, or at least until you're too old to be a competent operator of a motor vehicle.
Now, then, for all of you with all your complaints about 'other drivers' being so bad: Hush up already, you're probably at least as bad as the ones you're complaining about. That being said, what we need to do in this country is to improve driver training and education, and tighten up testing procedures and frequency to improve the overall competence of drivers on the roads, and exclude the ones who can't (or won't) show an acceptable and consistent level of competence. This should include tougher and longer-lasting penalties for individuals convicted of DUI. Furthermore any use of any kind of any mobile wireless device while driving should be strictly prohibited and punished severely; I think a six-month suspension of driving privilege with a hefty fine should be sufficient.
Meanwhile, auto industry, please do continue to develop and produce collision-avoidance systems that warn the driver when they're screwing up.
If the cord cutting continues, Comcast needs to make money somewhere, and that somewhere is increased data fees.
Personally, they're not offering enough to justify the added expense, especially since I discovered the Dirty Little Secret of cable and satellite: recompression of video to the point where it looks like total crap, even at supposed 1080i or 1080p. I paid once for an antenna I put on my roof, I get more than I have time to watch, and the video quality is as good as it's going to get. Getting OTA broadcasts has already paid for itself many times over. Never going back to cable.
Well, it's their fucking system. You play by their rules, or you go play somewhere else.
I recommend everyone do precisely that. Comcast is building a monopoly, and quicker than everyone thinks they are. Prices will just go up and up, and value and quality will go down. They need competition, so go to someone else.
That's what Comcast has done. Their network capacity has been so overbooked that if everyone actually tried to use what they think they're paying to get, the whole thing would grind to a halt. It makes me wonder how many network engineers tried to tell management that what they were doing was a really bad idea, and how many of them got fired for daring to explain it to them. Now they're painted into a corner, and rather than invest in expanding their network to meet demand, they'll just tell everyone who is paying them 'tough shit, deal with it, it is what it is' and hang up the phone in your face -- then badger you to death when you try to cancel their 'service'. They've painted themselves into a corner, and are denying it furiously. Meanwhile they're allowed to buy up more and more other companies so they can corner the market.
I got a better idea for how you can spend your time, Congress: How about you close all the 'loopholes' that allow our own gods-be-damned government from warrantless spying on our communications? IDGAF about 'robocalls', I'll just not answer the phone for numbers I don't know, but how about you stop the gods-be-damned NSA from watching us all like we're all gods-be-damned convicts?