I expect someday we may have truly autonomous cars, but everyone is acting like it will be in the next 5 years. Maybe 30-50 years out I will believe it, but a lot of the wild claims of "sooner than you think" are a bunch of hot air.

So one car racking up double the total miles you would have put on two cars? So double the gas usage and tire wear to boot. And you get to replace that one car twice as often.

Why will insurance become too expensive? If mixing in autonomous cars doesn't make the road more dangerous rates should stay the same or even drop for non-autonomous cars, not go up. Insurance is about aggregating average risk and taking a bit of profit, not some grand morality play.

And when you are late for work, they will happily chug along at the speed limit no matter how much you yell at them. Fleet operators might also decide to tweak maximum speeds to save gas money when prices rise (like airlines did for awhile), maybe even giving you the ability to select to go at the full speed limit for an extra fee. I think of the airlines as to how very cool technology can be completely made miserable once in the grasp of the invisible hand.

I know a lot of people who really dislike being passengers, and that won't change when we are all asked to become passengers.

I fully agree.

There is also a false statistic in the summary implying that since cars sit idle 90% of the time that we will only need 1/10 the number of cars. Even if all these wild assumptions come true about having a fleet of fully autonomous Johny Cabs, the morning and evening rush hours will dictate that peak utilization is a far better metric than average. All the miles a Johny Cab would have to drive in between destinations would also come right off the bottom line. A car sitting in a parking space depreciates, but does not gain wear and tear from driving. A Johny Cab is going to last a lot fewer years, though probably somewhat more miles, than a personal car.

Similarly most folks don't buy the minimum car for their needs today, but often end up with a Lexus or some SUV to feel safe, or show off status. Most folks could readily buy a lot less car than they do and be just fine, but they choose not to. So the basic premise is already flawed. By the logic stated you might as well predict the doom of all luxury cars simply because their cost per mile is higher than the cost per Chevy mile.

Owning your own car lets you have your seat already in the right spot, your preferred music stations already programmed in, you stash of coins for tolls, books for your kid, as well as your stash of "just in case" gear. In winter I keep an umbrella and a spare rain jacket, as well as gum, flashlight, etc in the car. Calling a Johny Cab means that I have to skip that stuff or lug it with me. A fleet of autonomous cars will have to make a profit, meaning they will be driven hard and you may find that the previous occupants was a slob who ate their lunch in the car, some sweaty person returning from a workout, or a couple who took advantage of there being no driver watching them (or would you prefer to have every commute recorded?).

After all, why don't we just all live in hotels? We can easily add a spare room with just a call to the front desk, no pesky on-going mortgage payments, etc. Pure bliss according to experts in the new sharing economy...

I expect that cabbies and long haul truck drivers to be threatened, but the personal automobile is not likely to go away any time soon

You sir, are the exception.

I see folks in meetings (and my wife under many different circumstances) time and again get all jittery and distracted after getting a text. Usually it is less than 2-3 minute before they just HAVE to check before they can calm down and resume focus. Counting down till the phone slides out under the table is almost as much fun as playing Buzzword Bingo in a meeting.

I know I am just as bad, so I tend to keep my phone on truly silent, and often don't take it with me to meetings unless I am expecting something important.

Similar to how you don't pay to receive a call on your land line, the laws around cell billing need to be changed so that advertisers must pay for their bandwidth usage rather than the user. If I don't ask for it, I should not have to pay for it (radical concept...).

Wasting cell data is not a bother to your provider, rather it just lines their pockets. More transparency on the real cost of data might show how big their incentives to let this crap go on are.

Yep. Once you have thousands of parts all designed to trade off as much strength for weight reduction as possible it doesn't take much of a manufacturing hiccup to cause an expensive "excursion". Vendors end up having to rigorously test every widget, and custom design it just for you.

Before long $10k each for a batch of a half dozen toilets seat that are space rated to not outgas funny chemicals that foul optics, handles 10g's, has 6 sigma of de-rating for the bolt hole strength, weighs under 500g, and is non-flammable starts sounding like a deal.

Many families have multiple cars. Ours has 3, all different manufacturers, and I frequently drive all three in any given month. It is fairly maddening to go between cars and to deal with different controls that require additional attention just to remember where the turn signals are without ending up with the wipers flapping.

Our Ford and Toyota put almost everything from the column on opposite sides. Even adjusting the air conditioner settings requires a conscious mental shift to get remember how to get the desired result.

It creates a lot of needless distraction.

Equivalent Xeon's get roughly a 2x multiplier for cost, as do the motherboards for them. My work machine is a 6 core Xeon (E5-1650 v2) that can be bought for about $650 compared to about $330 for an i7-4790k, which is also what is roughly expected for the i7-6700k when it arrives with its piddly little 4 cores sitting next to a vast wasteland of third rate GPU.

So either I would like a cheaper i7 without an on-die GPU, or more cores and cache in an i7 in place of the GPU.

With AMD continuing to gasp for life, I think it is fair to ask questions about what the hell the dominant monopoly in town is doing and why they seem to be stalled out. I am not in favor of breaking them up, but it is appropriate to scrutinize and control the pricing and behavior of companies that are in a monopoly position.

Performance per watt is wonderful and all, but we have had a lot of years where only the denominator has made significant improvements while clock speed and throughput per cycle are excruciatingly stagnant. I am complaining because I want a faster fricking machine, and it appears that Intel has either by willfulness or ineptitude has failed to deliver better speed in a any meaningful way in the last several years.

Wait till we have 10 year old first generation autonomous cars on the road from now defunct manufacturers. Or just as likely, 10 year old autonomous cars where you are told you are out of warranty and have to pay for ongoing security and compliance updates at dealer prices or they will remotely disable HAL. If updating my maps is $300, I am fearful as to how much I might have to pay to keep my autonomous software up to snuff.

I really want an answer to the revenue question. It really is starting to feel like a free hit from a drug dealer. Sounds too good to be true, so what exactly is their long term plan for my computer?

My optimistic side does note that they currently get most of their revenue from new PC sales, and not from average Joe's upgrading OS's. So perhaps they are writing off the last ~10% of revenue to reduce the headache of XP and 7 users holding out when they try to cram a steaming pile of brand new MS UI's down our throat. Maybe now Metro will just show up as an update during the night and we'll have no option except to live with it.

I don't know why anyone with Windows 7 would want to jump on the "Free" download immediately. At a bare minimum you would think that waiting at least a few months for the dust to settle would be prudent. Just the fact that a nag message to opt-in came from an update should be enough to scare away anyone with half a wit.

Meant to say 10% per year, my bad.

Don't joke around, Hydrogen is very flammable!

Oxygen is a known oxidizer, so be sure to eat lots of antioxidant's when living or working around sources of oxygen.

All joking aside, Gallium-Arsenide as a compound is not all that dangerous. I wouldn't go eating it, but I have handled it many times and it does not require any special safety procedures. You already have GaAs parts inside of almost every cell phone. Virtually all output amplifiers to date are GaAs, with a minority of the low end phones using CMOS power amplifiers.

I am not sure why there is anything more on wasted on desktop processors given the last 6-7 years of only ~10 percent gains? We are expecting almost zero improvement in desktop performance with Skylake over the 4790K processors, and barely a power reduction. Billions were spent to get us almost nothing tangible.

Laptop machines have come a long way, but the desktop is stuck at 4 cores and no hint at anything but maybe 10% performance gains per year for the foreseeable future.

We are instead getting integrated crappy GPU's in flagship processors that will mostly never get utilized, and that crappy GPU is half the die area. I'd rather have the same die size with 6-8 cores, or more L2 cache, or almost anything else that I might actually make use of. Sadly, intel reserves those kinds of features for their much more expensive Xeon or "Extreme" branded lines.