speckledjim

Driverless vehicles won't prevent all deaths on the road. Pedestrians and cyclists account for quite a few.

OTOH, around 60 people die per hour in the US from cancer.

Just to put it in perspective maybe.

32,000 deaths a year from driving in US. 500,000 deaths a year from cancer in US.

If it was me investing, I'd put my money into solving the cancer issue. Even if you can shave 5% off that death toll, you've already done more than eradicating cars would.

The problem is driverless cars sounds like awesome fun. Solving cancer is the harder problem.

We have umpteen checks to ensure drivers are as safe as they can be. Deaths in the US from driving have come down from around 120 a day in 2000 to around 90 a day now.

In the UK, it's about 8 deaths a day from driving. The road network is now eight times safer per mile travelled than it was in 1966.

Just for comparison, around 400+ people die each day in the UK from cancer.

Instead of wasting a ton of money making robotic driverless cars because it sounds good, I'd invest that money straight into cancer research.

I don't think it's useful to include all countries in a statistic like that.

In that 3000 you're including countries without roads, signs, traffic laws, etc. You're including countries without speed limits, driving licenses, etc etc.

Wikipedia says the deaths in the US are about 90 a day.

The number of deaths is around 90 a day in the US. That's down from like 115 a day 10 years ago. Still more to be done, but I don't think it's as high as some think.

This is like saying "N people die from food poisoning at restaurants each year. Lets ban food created by humans, and only allow food created and tested by machines".

I don't really want to live in that world.

The car has certainly done far far far more good than bad. That's why we put up with the downside (a few deaths a day).

The issue is that there's a small minority of bad drivers who cause accidents. Removing everyones freedom to drive because of those few isn't very fair, and would result in a boring 'locked down' society.

That will never happen, and I'm glad it won't.

This is the reason why some beggars on the street make more money than a full time job (If they're in a really good spot).

Everyone thinks they're just giving them a little bit. But all those little bits add up to a lot. Without any visibility into how much other people have already given them, there is no way for people decide if they really need the money or not.

If you saw a beggar on the street, and knew that they'd already been given $1000 so far that day, would you still give them a dollar?

Seeing women with not much on isn't quite the same as making me breathe in your crap.

If people saw [ 528 ] as the vote count for that comment, they'd be less likely to upvote it themselves.

I agree @ difference between legality and morality, but would disagree about pot. It's an antisocial disgusting habit.

Smoking tobacco is legal (for now), but is increasingly being made illegal (public places, restaurants, etc). Which is a good trend IMHO.

> Why? Should "good parenting" also decrease the chances of a child drinking alcohol? Pot? Shrooms?

Yes.

Good parenting decreases the chances a child will break the law in general, or be in a self destructive place.

Parenting has a lot of influence on children contrary to some peoples beliefs...

It's not a black and white thing, but good parenting certainly decreases the chances your child will go down the drugs path.

Or, you could just teach parents to be.... good parents.

This sort of comment is more suited to Reddit. Or Youtube.

Programming is like building stuff out of Lego. Just grab a box of lego and start creating things. I don't think fun would be had if you had to think and design and plan everything before you built it.

The way to learn something, is to do it.

If it was that easy, wave or buzz would have taken off.

It's like 100 lines of code. Write it yourself.

The article is from back in 2008 so I'd firstly dispute its accuracy with modern JVMs.

It's not just speed (The speed obviously changes as you change number of connections - 100k threads isn't going to beat 100k NIO connections). It's also that it's more scalable, better code, more maintainable, less prone to bugs, and you don't have to worry as much about concurrency issues. I'd argue that the lines of code is likely to be less also. And memory usage is likely to be less.

"Most systems can handle 1K-10K threads efficiently. If you need more connections than that, buy another server, a cheap one cost about $500."

Terrible advice. Use NIO and do it properly. Creating 1 thread per connection is for unskilled programmers.

In my experience once you get up to about 1k threads in Java you'll be wasting most of the CPU up switching between them.

For comparison, it's trivial for any skilled programmer to use NIO to get up 100k+ connections without any real CPU usage.

I feel my life is infinitely enriched by watching TV and movies. (In UK, we have extremely high quality programming).

You wouldn't say "all books are bad" would you... Sadly people seem to take the worst TV (reality TV) and assume it's all like that.

Watch some good movies, comedies or documentaries. Heck watch "How it's made" for a few days.

Firefox 6 uses the latest spec. So it's active in the wild already.

I don't think reverse proxies are that big a deal personally, as you as a website owner have control of that part of the system. If the reverse proxy can't deal with it, fix it so it can or use a different one or write your own.

There's certainly ISPs out there that proxy all HTTP through their own cache/proxies and fallover with previous spec websocket. Of course the alternative is just to use HTTPS.

All 3 versions are reasonably successful, and in any event, it's not rocket science to try websocket and fallback on comet upon failure.

The latest version is probably the most robust if your ISP likes fiddling with your HTTP though.

You're high.

Employing someone who 10 years ago may have engaged in some, or known about dodgy journalistic tactics is hardly much to write home about.

Of course he had meetings with execs from NewsCorp. They own a bunch of newspapers! Blair and Brown did exactly the same.

It sounds like you'd like the government to fall. I don't think most people in the country would.

I think most people are thoroughly bored of this 'scandal' about a bit of corruption that happened 10 years ago. There's more important news out there. Like the collapse of the Euro.

The grauniad would.

From wikipedia:

"The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye.[109] This anagram played on The Guardian's reputation for frequent typographical errors, such as misspelling its own name as The Gaurdian."

> if Cameron is badly damaged enough, the Lib Dems could pull out of the government on principle leading to a snap election, although I would give that only a 20% chance of happening.

I'd say the chances of that are more like 0.2%. Most of the crap that went on was under Blair and Brown.

If you've written a line of code you've violated several software patents. The question is will anyone come after you.

That's why the system is so ridiculous and broken.

At the end of the day though all software patents are bogus, trivial, and stupid. (And I'm listed as inventor on a dozen).

We should spend energy abolishing them rather than debating how they work.

just my 2c