I should actually correct myself slightly: Wal-Mart (and others) have some in house drivers and some outsourced.

BTW, in discussions of the transport industry, don't get distracted/lied to by the companies. Some drivers think they are owner operators, when in practice, they aren't. They will lease/buy a truck from (as an example, all of the bigs do this) Schneider. As part of the lease terms, they can only accept loads from Schneider. It should be obvious that the 'owner' is an employee who has assumed much of the risk that the company would usually take on.

ShanghaiBill has a decent reply, but he misses a point: if the automated truck is cheaper, the big companies will drive that change in a heartbeat. The trick is that someone has to be convinced that they will be cheaper. They are unlikely to automatically accept that an automated truck is safer, faster, etc. One area where they are likely to be impressed is the possibility of 24 hour operations, rather than the 10 hour per day (rough) limits of human operated trucks. In addition to (possibly) being cheaper, this will allow faster shipments for more mundane goods (there are already plenty of ways to have fast shipping, but it is cost prohibitive to do for everything) which would offer them a competitive advantage. I suspect this last point will be the thin edge of the wedge.

In my defense, I did a google search before I posted. And I usually keep an eye on fark, though this week I've been busy.
Thank you for the actual links.
I do have a question for you- are you one of those sorts who finds every criticism of Obama to be coded racism?

Typically the booth babe at RSA's booth at the RSA show is Rivest (I don't think I've seen Shamir or Adleman there.) Usually he's been working on something interesting and is having fun showing it off, but he's also there for fanboi value.

They were a really clear indicator that the occasional companies that hired them seriously didn't understand their audience, and hadn't brought anybody who knew anything technical to their booth, probably not even any marketing people who understood the product, so you could pretty much skip them, because they were pretty much always useless as well as unprofessional.

On the other hand, you can totally bribe us with chocolate or especially coffee, and we might sit through your silly magician act for a raffle ticket for an iThing as long as there was technical content at your booth, and we'll pick up blinky tchotchkes with your logo on them. The woman I'd rather talk to at your booth is the one who developed the cool product, or can explain it well.

When my company's been at trade shows in the area, about half their staff are booth-running professionals, rather than product-related, from the people who set the thing up and make sure all the marketing content is there to the people who herd customers in, figure out what they're interested in (even if it's just at the buzzword level), bring them over to the right part of the booth or find the right person if they need to, scan your contact info, get the speakers on and off the stage, etc., and about half are either main-office or local people who know something about whatever we're trying to sell. They seem to do a good job on the mechanics of it (I've occasionally ended up as local booth staff), and they're seriously good at respecting the audience.

They're the ones over in the NSA booth, showing off the cool Enigma machine, and handing out other spook agency trinkets. Sometimes other groups of Feds are there (Homeland Security or whoever), and they don't understand that, unlike the NSA who are evil but cool, they're evil but not cool.

'5, Interesting' is a high score for bullshit.
I know you leftists hope and pray that every new mass murder is a right-wing terrorist attack. You must be constantly disappointed that nut jobs with leftist sympathies and Islamists are doing the actual killing.

Most large companies outsource their transport to JB Hunt, Schneider, etc. Sure, the big letters say 'WalMart', but in smaller, DOT minimum sized font, it often has another name.

Sorry, should have put up a warning first. But that leads to another question: is it the actual overweight, butch lesbians in flannel shirts, sweatpants and Birkenstocks that trigger you, or seeing the phrase "overweight, butch lesbians in flannel shirts, sweatpants and Birkenstocks" in writing that triggers you. And if so, how would you give a trigger warning for that?

they aren't misandrists, they're misanthropes. They hate everyone, including themselves.

He missed the point, but he did not mean well. That's why we can't have nice things.

Then that will have to be banned as well. All you get is overweight, butch lesbians in flannel shirts, sweatpants and Birkenstocks! And if that turns you on, they'll switch over to information kiosks narrated by an asexual monotone computer. And if that turns you on, well, I don't know what they'll do.

The fact that no attack occured gives the talking heads leeway to claim there was no "terrorist attack."

A terrorist is a person who attempts to bring about political change by "illegitimate" (i.e., non-state) violence.

Mass murder is only terrorism if it is an attack on a political entity, or is an attempt to scare a nation's population into something.

Unless someone says, "We're going to keep crash your planes until you do such-and-such", this isn't terrorism. There's no attempt to bring about political change involved, only murder, motive unknown.

Where do you get this crap about Iran being "crazy"? Fox News? Israeli and U.S. government propaganda? Iran is not "crazy" and U.S. intelligence analysts have said that there is no evidence of an active nuclear weapons program in Iran.
Even IF Iran had a weapons program, they are not "crazy" enough to use a nuke against the USA or Israel and doom themselves to complete annihilation in the inevitable counterattack.
If oil was my only major export, I wouldn't want to burn it for domestic power production either.
The real reason is that the USA government uses a ridiculous and short sighted double standard in its foreign(and domestic) policy.

I think people should be able to do that.