Self-driving cars  Tags: randomthought, other, real life.
How much would you pay for a self-driving car? I'll let you think about that for a minute. Myself, I'd pay about all the money I could spend on it. The idea fascinates me and it really seems like an awesome future.

Not only will self-driving cars get you from A to B without having to drive, it will also prevent about a million deaths every year due to car crashes. It will likely solve all our traffic jam problems. It will make traveling by car faster because we no longer need speed limits for our slow human reflexes.

32.6 bits  Tags: randomthought, networking.
33bits.org/about
"The title refers to the fact that there are only 6.6 billion people in the world, so you only need 33 bits (more precisely, 32.6 bits) of information about a person to determine who they are."

32.6 bits, that's not a lot. My unique identifier could be N&1A+ and it would more than enough to uniquely identify me if you gave every person on the planet a code of the same length.

Did you know that IPv4, the protocol

Smileys  Tags: randomthought.
I'm fairly positive that at least 67% of the smileys were invented when inputting regular expressions.

Humans suck  Tags: other, randomthought, webdevelopment, real life.
Lately I've been working on two 'private' projects. Both failed due to human imprecision.

Firstly, I thought of something which might identify which song is playing in your head. You can't play it back (Shazam won't work), and most people don't want to sing it in front of the microphone on websites like Midomi. My system would recognise the tap pattern from a song. You'd drum your fingers on the desk or whereever, and it was supposed to search in all records for one that matches your drumming pattern.
Before I really got far with it, I discovered the drumming pattern was too variable to ever work.

Movies  Tags: real life, randomthought.
I went to Mission Impossible 4 with some others lately, more for their sake than because I wanted to see the movie. I knew it was going to be some standard action movie without plot or thought behind it. And indeed, there weren't ever 2 minutes in a row where I hadn't thought "Oh come on, things don't work like that". Of course that's why it's a movie, but there is a difference between a plain stupid action and thought-trough impossibilities. I'm still trying to find a good way to explain this, but