bdamm

Well if people are stuck in traffic for hours due to a technical problem closing the highway then I think they have lots of time!

My main point, though, was that this idea of yours is great and that the legal structure would be compensation through insurance. The insurers figure out what is risky and what isn't (regardless of the company) and then pass that risk on to their rate payers. The rate payers know that trialing risky technology costs more and it is baked into the operational cost. Yes, people causing accidents should be liable for the time lost! It doesn't matter who causes the accident, Musk or just Joe Schmoe!

HOWEVER, what you'll find out is that one or two meltdowns on I880 is barely going to move the needle. Your average every day collision is going to just get a lot more expensive, with a small fender bender easily causing millions in payouts. The technology companies will still be a drop in the bucket and will happily pass on the risk to their eager customers, who are absolutely thrilled at the idea of cutting out a massive gasoline expendidure from their operation sheets. A 1% or 2% cut in freight cost is massive, and these new trucks are promising to be cost-competitive with RAIL. That is an absolute game changer, and shipping companies would be happy to pay more for insurance since a couple product development failures is absolutely nothing in the big picture of the world and where traffic slowdown comes from.

I love your idea, but if what you want is to punish progressive product companies, this isn't the way to do it.

Ground effect height is a function of the size of the wing. I'm guessing these are going to have to be massive to be of any use, otherwise you'd be so close to the water that you couldn't "fly" in choppy water, and with a strong headwind you'll need even more margin because I'm guessing that waves moving with the wind are going to reduce the ground effect.

This is the point of insurance no? It's the underwriter's job to figure out what the risk probability of insuring a specific vehicle is, and then to represent that risk in future lawsuits while paying out the named insured in the meantime. If you think the traveling public should be party to insurance from vehicle collisions in general, then that's a legislative framework change for all road users (and you can bet your behind that will mean higher premiums for everyone, which I'm personally ok with. We've externalized far too many costs. Let's ban writedowns for exploratory oil drills too.)

I understand where you're coming from, but until the math is accepted by a court and a procedure for validating authenticty is established within the society of judges, the burden for introducing this kind of evidence falls on whomever decides it is essential enough for their case to succeed. That's a very expensive proposition, so you can't really say that it is the process until a plaintiff or defendent with large enough pockets to afford the conversion of the legal society takes up the cause. Until then it's just random gibberish, and unavailable to the average person as a court admissible statement of authenticty for a digital artifact. The fact is that the "loose consensus" of "private societies" DOES determine acceptability, when that private society is the law society. Judges are only subject to the rules and regulations that other judges and prosecuters decide apply. There's nothing cosmic about it - it is very much rooted in the people who apply the law.

A court could care less about blockchain hashes unless the society of lawyers and judges decide it is legitimate. Did they? Last I heard blockchain hashes were as useful as any random bunch of numbers on a printed page.

Brake dust is at least mostly solved by EVs, because regenerative braking does the vast majority of the braking work, thus no dust. Tire dust is real, but is going to be there no matter what kind of powertrain a vehicle has. EVs have more wear, but it is marginal. A Tesla Model 3 weighs less than any new pickup truck for sale today.

Who's making the robots? Who's owning the bus? Who's growing the ingredients in the soup? Who's deciding when the bus needs to stop due to a security or safety concern? Who's flirting with the customers and recognizing the power brokers? Not the AI companies.

Just because robots can do stuff doesn't mean the human power structures or service preferences evaporate.

You're thinking that the entire economy will collapse down to just 3-4 vendors?

Human power and social structures just don't work that way. No AI company is making my sandwich, operating the bus, or serving soup in the school cafeteria. Real estate, human service, specialized expertise, and have-power influence isn't going away.

> high tech, high intelligence, high fertility sect

So, SpaceX?

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. The Shuttle requirements were absolutely modified by DoD's desire to ship military satellites and carry out operations. One of the many tug-o-wars that ended up with such a compromised design.

And since you brought up the X-37B, I have to admit, I absolutely love its dynamic flight capabilities whereby it literally banks off the upper atmosphere like a silver surfer to rapidly change orbits at perigee. Quite an interesting bit of tech that did evolve from the shuttle and is still doing work this very day.

Ah, but humanity is an expansive and consuming force, as is natural since most forces in the universe are entropy increasing ones. And since amino acids have been discovered on asteroids and tardigrades and fungus have been shown to survive space travel, we can't even say that Space provably lacks biological matter. Expanding (back?) into space is our manifest destiny, and good for the price of real estate too since all of earth becomes a luxury destination.

Even space telescopes have been built on the skeletons made for spying, and rockets in almost any form were weapons before they were carrying peaceful missions. That we have Russian, American, and European components communicating together at the ISS is kind of a lovely, if temporary, closure of the circle.

Yes. "UI Speed" should be a configurable thing, so that if the UI changes as you're choosing an item, it acts instead on _what was there_ at a brief moment in the past, e.g. 20-50ms ago.