While Boeing totally screwed the pooch on this one, and I won't be choosing to fly on one if I can, the public having more confidence in a system than its creators/domain experts isn't exactly uncommon. Would you trust your medical record privacy to Windows XP running AVG?
It could use an AVR but you don’t save much and the world is on ARM. You would “need” an ATMega 32u4 anyways for hardware USB support. A purposed KB IC probably wouldn’t handle split halves.
Well if the goal is to fund everyone, the pressures that ensure it “ requires years of post-secondary education, has long, shitty hours, and pays peanuts” will likely reduce.
Not true. It is much, much more energy intensive to run an RF link up to a tower or WiFi than to sum 2000 rows of 10 column wide data. RF works by emitting energy into free space, and there is absolutely no way it is cheaper for this type of thing (especially if it takes the transmitter out of sleep mode, like if you’re really out there and in airplane mode).
So you give your users the root password so they can change the password them-self....oversimplification often solves just a small portion of a bigger problem.
Ben Franklin once said that the best argument against democracy was a discussion with the average voter. But I think there is an equal risk there of members of a society being unwilling to read what experts put out, and evaluate it themselves as well. Once people start saying I don't know anything about this and I can't make any determinations, democracy starts to make a lot less sense. At the end of the day science is basically critical reasoning backed by fact collection. If you can go read up on the facts, you can reason based on them. If someone can explain to you why you are wrong that may be one thing, but simply assuming you can never reason anything out is very dangerous.
I won't comment on the rest of your post, but I'd like to point out that there's no evidence Ben Franklin said that. That quote is commonly misattributed to Churchill, but that seems to also be a misattribution [1].
To add to this, Phillips screws are designed to cause the screwdriver to cam out. This is done so you can’t over torque the screw hole. This also makes them really annoying sometimes.
Because the original parent comment is using an analogy to aviation terms, and depending on a more than cursory understanding of the limits of an aircraft autopilot. I am willing to make a monetary bet most members of the population do not understand the precise limitations of an aircraft autopilot, though I admit I have not conducted a poll to verify this. I also think Tesla likely named it this to differentiate it from the competitions systems, and in my eyes it is pretty obvious what distinction they were aiming for most people to make.
It's the same thing as putting "fat free" on the Twizzlers. It's technically true which means they can get away with it. Except that that probably kills more people than "autopilot" ever will.
There are a hundred ways to say that something won't cause you to gain weight. They chose the one that sounds like it means that even though it doesn't, because it also has a different meaning which is technically true.
