Also wondering what the threshold is for a technique to be ‘ancient’ ... in my book, neither a power hammer or rolling mill qualifies as ancient, but Perhaps the Chanbot’s sploidgorithms measure these things differently.

Gracefulness? What? Have you ever actually watched the original series? I remember buying one of the earliest “official” blueprints or tech spec books as a kid back in the 70's, and the common design elements were almost entirely based around funky and bizarrely proportioned and haphazardly slapped together…

Based on your (and others’) comments, I went and looked up this McQuarrie concept art ... I’ve never heard of him, never seen his Trek-related work although I’ve probably seen his Star Wars stuff without knowing who drew it.

The etymology is not certain, but I think it is derived from old slang from the first quarter last century in the U.S. ... the usage of the phrase generally means “successful”, possibly derived from the notion that if one was a ‘gang buster’, then one had been successful in busting a gang (breaking up or otherwise…

Let me join all the other respondents, but using slightly different words: the use of the term “beta” by Tesla is simply a marketing tool. It is a “branding exercise” (exactly like the practice first broadly used by Google) and NOT any kind of legally defined technical description. Drivers of Teslas are NOT beta…

Makes sense to me. I’m no audiophile, not a musician. I thought I could detect a slight difference in tone between those 2 guitars in the video, seemed to me the Martin was a bit richer, more expressive sound ... like the highs were higher, lows were lower kind of thing. But only to a modest degree.

*feign

He stepped on the “break” ... no wonder he crashed.

But yeah, maybe it will take longer till autonomous cars are able to go off roading or navigate tents at concerts, but those activities are not really relevant to that average commuter or the transportation of goods.

Though the self-driving thing will, hopefully, bring our insurance rates back to Earth.

I’ll add my two cents (although possibly worth less than that) ... I don’t care about the ‘legal’ aspects of the situation at all ... the McLaren driver is a complete douchebag for rolling the stop sign. Barring a fairly severe mechanical failure, nobody fucking “accidentally” rolls through a fucking stop sign at a…

I expect fully autonomous to be available in or around 5 years

I dunno how funny that part was but I did find it pretty funny when the narrator said “hard work comes down to will power and dedication, which mostly comes down to motivation and ability to create actionable plans” ... and the close captioning wrote “actual plants” instead of “actionable plans” ... lol :-)

oof ... that’s a bad example to use if your premise is that Exponent is junk science ... since the Toyota “Unintended Acceleration” problem was itself a full-blown bogosity completely proven to be a non-issue by every real scientific analysis performed on the data as well as physical examination of every car claimed…

Back in either ‘99 or ‘00, due to lordy knows what alignment of stars, I received from Chrysler Co, completely unasked for and unexpected, a mysterious promo card highlighting little details of an upcoming mystery car. It, shall we say, piqued my interest. Over the next year or so I kept getting little mailers…

You have not tried to hire an American for a manufacturing job, have you? It can be very difficult, despite the presence of jobs where 19-year-olds with 6-months of trade school skills can start at $50K/year. Is it a cushy, guaranteed career path with no downturns? No, of course not, what is?

The first 10 or 15 seconds of that sound clip sounds EXACTLY like any and every 20+ year-old beater 4-banger with a rusted out exhaust. EXACTLY. Loud raspy buzzing followed by the gurgle choke cough of a 4-pot running on 3 cylinders, where at least 2 of them are leaking compression.

Are you saying he was too thin skinned to put up with us?

Hmmm ... unless major American cell phone telephone carrier technology changed radically since I last checked about a month ago, Verizon and Sprint are both CDMA (not GSM) systems. No GSM phone, locked or unlocked, will work on a CDMA network. GSM is a different and completely non-compatible technology.

I completely do not understand where you get “TBB” from BATF. Ever since the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms became the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, it has consistently been referred to, both inside and outside the government, as BATF.