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Comment Re:Bad Timing (Score 1) 469

by aenea (#38551842) Attached to: Ford System Will Warn, Correct Lane-Drifting Drivers

It's already outsourced. Most of the electronics in cars comes from 3rd parties.

Bad timing for that feature, after Toyotos troubles. People now know that steering wheels, accelerator pedals, brakes are just interfaces, not the actual "controls". I think many people would prefer for cars to be less automatic and give them more control from that perspective.

What happens when Ford, like Toyoto, outsources some component to a third party who fucks up? You are driving along one day when you car decides you aren't driving properly and decides to ram you into a tree.

Comment Re:And (Score 1) 272

by aenea (#37749788) Attached to: Iran Tried and Failed To Launch a Monkey Into Space

I'm actually wondering why launch a monkey at all. Or even a chimp. I think we're pretty sure at this point that no one is going to die from the space vapors or the orbiting hordes of vacuum leaches. What sort of telemetry do they get from a monkey that you can't get from a sensor package?

Comment Re:No, that's not it at all (Score 1) 2058

by aenea (#33810142) Attached to: Firefighters Let House Burn Because Owner Didn't Pay Fee

It's not win:win. It win for most homeowners who never experience a fire and would not feel a need to pay a yearly fee. It's lose for the fire department that doesn't have an income stream while they are waiting for your house to burn down.

It's also probably not good public policy to pay a fire department on a per fire basis.

Comment Re:Summary is retarded (Score 1) 2058

by aenea (#33809304) Attached to: Firefighters Let House Burn Because Owner Didn't Pay Fee
They responded because the neighbor DID pay for fire protection. Which is why they put out the fire on the neighbor's property. I'm not sure what you point is: the home owner lives outside of the town. The town can't tax him to pay for fire services. The town voluntarily allows people to pay $75/year to be included in the town's fire protection services. The home owner didn't pay. The neighbor did. Everything pretty much worked the way it was supposed to.
Science

The Fruit Fly Drosophila Gets a New Name 136

Posted by timothy from the hope-you-used-pencil dept.
G3ckoG33k writes "The name of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster will change to Sophophora melangaster. The reason is that scientists have by now discovered some 2,000 species of the genus and it is becoming unmanageably large. Unfortunately, the 'type species' (the reference point of the genus), Drosophila funebris, is rather unrelated to the D. melanogaster, and ends up in a distant part of the relationship tree. However, geneticists have, according to Google Scholar, more than 300,000 scientific articles describing innumerable aspects of the species, and will have to learn the new name as well as remember the old. As expected, the name change has created an emotional (and practical) stir all over media. While name changes are frequent in science, as they describe new knowledge about relationships between species, these changes rarely hit economically relevant species, and when they do, people get upset."

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