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Occam's razor suggests that your sample size is too small to make any generalizations about what a typical white American would think about anything. Occam's razor also suggests that the nationality of posters depends a great deal on where in the world it happens to be working hours.

Slavery doesn't come up that often on HN. Responses in those threads are biased towards users who care enough about the subject to want to engage in conversation about them. And I would be willing to bet the comments you're describing don't account for the bulk of thread contents. So you're making an assertion about white people and Americans based on a sample size of, what? Maybe a dozen posters, if that? Bear in mind that posting on HN at all is atypical.

I've got no issues with your plea for empathy but you're not making a strong argument that the comments you're talking about (whatever they are) necessarily defend slavery, or that the people making them necessarily believe that slavery is acceptable, or that they're evidence of what what white Americans believe about slavery as an institution, in general. You're literally arguing from the premise that the racism of white Americans can be taken as a constant.

Really?

You have a nagging feeling that a sizable chunk of white Americans feel slavery is OK?

Based on what you interpret as an implicit acceptance of slavery in comments on HN, which I guess you just sort of assume must be made by mostly white Americans?

Hate to break it to you but that makes you a racist and nationalist bigot. If I were to say I had a sneaking suspicion that Indians were for the most part lazy and incompetent, how would that seem? Or that American blacks seem to be disproportionately violent?

I'm not entirely sure there's any large and complex C/C++ application which would be considered 'clean' by any generally accepted standard.

And in any case, i'm not sure that requiring anyone who wants to put up their own webpage to know how to write an OS level application necessarily leads to a web with freer expression than exists now.

Yes, by all means, let's take the web, written in human readable languages which anyone can study, and write, without much if any cs knowledge * and a compiler, and replace it all with closed source, probably proprietary, binaries.

That would be so much better. God forbid the web remain free when it can be clean.

* excepting javascript, but that's not exactly difficult, and hardly necessary, as opposed to having everything written in, say, python.

The entire point of driverless cars is that the software of the car is superior to the wetware of the human. Humans cannot be trusted to determine what the car does, directly, under any circumstances, even an emergency.

So the answer is, you don't. The sort of fine-grained, always on surveillance necessary for driverless cars to work would be applied outside the cars as well as inside. Pedestrians are dangerous, with or without a gun, and as soon as you walk outside and attempt to interact with the urban environment without the safety of a self-driving car, someone would be alerted. Your identity will be confirmed, you will be tracked and every self-driving car for miles will know about it.

So in your scenario, the proper authorities have been called before you were even aware of his presence, simply because there was a human near traffic.