Month: October 2017

Enlarge / The self-driving car from the Volkswagen Group was developed for autonomous driving. (credit: Volkswagen Group)

In some Australian states, it’s illegal to start a car with the intent to put it in motion while you’re drunk. The rise of autonomous vehicles complicates things though. Sure, you’re three sheets to the wind and want to put the car in motion, but you're unlikely to hurt anyone by directing a car to taxi you through the Taco Bell drive-through a couple of times before you pass out in a cloud of tortilla dust.

An independent panel pulled together by the Australian government released a report this week trying to hash out the difficulties that governing bodies will face in rewriting laws for humans engaging self-driving systems. That panel, called the National Transport Commission (NTC), wants to develop a clear set of laws by 2020, and its paper (PDF) solicited feedback from key industry players as the panel moves forward.

Though it may seem obvious that a drunk person should be allowed to be taxied home by a fully autonomous car, the question is less clear if you have to determine just how autonomous an autonomous vehicle needs to be for a drunk person to operate it. The government should want drunk people to engage a high-level autonomous driving system if the alternative is driving themselves home, but if they’ll be penalized for being drunk while they’re “in control” of an autonomous vehicle, uptake of self-driving systems may be slow.

Apple

Apple released iOS 11 barely a month ago, but emoji lovers are eagerly awaiting its first major update. Apple revealed a bunch of new emoji that will come to iOS devices with the release of iOS 11.1. The new characters are adaptations from Unicode 10, which added 56 new emoji.

A quick look into Apple's new emojis shows a triad of new "genderless" emoji with various skin colors and age differences. The release also brings a group of new clothing emoji, which include a hat, scarf, gloves, and trench coat.

Enlarge / Vice President Mike Pence speaks at Thursday's meeting of the National Space Council in front of a space shuttle. (credit: NASA)

President Kennedy, of course, got it right when it came to NASA. He established a big, bold goal for the nation's new space agency, provided ample resources, and then let the engineers get to work. This led to one of humanity's greatest achievements of all time—walking on another world.

Kennedy had ulterior motives, naturally. From a policy perspective, going to the Moon wasn't really about human exploration so much as it was demonstrating the technical superiority of the United States to the rest of the world during the Cold War. As space exploration hasn't quite aligned so neatly with national security goals since the 1960s, funding levels have shrunk. And this has led to NASA being confined to low-Earth orbit for human exploration, first with the space shuttle and now the International Space Station.

For a time, low-Earth orbit was enough. After Richard Nixon greenlighted NASA's development of the space shuttle in 1972, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were content to let the space program play out more or less in the background of their administrations. Although Ronald Reagan set NASA on the course to what would eventually become the International Space Station, he too was content with staying near Earth. Yet since Reagan, most presidents have looked longingly, and fruitlessly, back toward deep space. In light of the Trump administration's goal of returning to the Moon, we offer a review of other presidential space plans.