I've replaced all of the switches in the downstairs of my house with Leviton brand smart switches (most are dimmer switches).

I linked them to a 6 button controller that is conveniently located both near the stairs and the front door, and set up scenes for each of the buttons (like "all lights on", "movie night", etc with varying levels for each of the lights. I did this linking through the switches and 6 button controller themselves, no external controller.

Works very well, press a button on the controller and the corresponding lights come on at the preset dim level, but each lamp can be overridden with the wall switch. Another nice feature of the switches is that they can be set to turn on at a preset dim level (which can be overridden with another press of the button), I have a 5 light chandelier in the dining room which is way too bright at full light level, so I lock it at about 75% brightness by default, but can set it higher if I want to.

At night, I just hit the Off button on my way up the stairs and all the lights turn off.

I've tried a couple automation products to let me control the lights from computer and have *not* been happy with them at all -- bad UI, hard to program switches, etc. Fortunately, I don't care so much about computer control and am happy with the 6 button switch.

Printing is probably the worst option for confidential data unless you have a private printer or it supports secure printing. The HR director at a former company had to get his own printer after he printed salary information several times before he realizing that the printer was out of paper. After he went to lunch someone replaced the paper and the salary docs ended up spread out on the printer table for everyone to view. Oops. He could have used the secure-print option, but apparently didn't know about it.

Plus there's the fact that the print server is likely not very secure so the document could be intercepted there, many office copier/printers these days have on-board storage and might hold a copy of the document for who knows how long, and, printers are rarely patched in most offices and are often riddled with vulnerabilities. Plus, cloud-print from mobile devices goes through unknown servers so you may as well just email it in plain text than cloud print it.

That only helps you until the 30 petahertz processors start shipping and they begin emitting X-rays. Then you'll need a lead vault.

You seem to have misread his situation, it's not that he *wants* that situation, it's a situation he wants to avoid. Yet, he also wants to prepare for it.

I'm sure the 5 people that actually have heard about and want to use Elementary OS will appreciate your work.

Anyone that watches TV knows they just need to put some it into the analyzer and they'll have the source of the ash in minutes. I don't understand why don't they just do that?

How do they define "Cyber Attack"? My home firewall fends off thousands of "cyberattacks" every day if you include port scans, and my webserver gets hundreds more vulnerability probes.

We won't have "apps", instead we'll have mini websites that kind of function like apps, but not really. But we won't call them apps so you can't complain that there are no apps.

Why can't it be simple? If the car is unacceptable, press the Reject button on your phone, and the car drives itself back to the depot to be cleaned, the person that left it a mess is billed for cleanup, and they send you a new car -- if you leave a messy car, when you're done with the car you press the "Clean me" button, it goes back to the depot to be cleaned, and you're charged some nominal fee (but less than the clean-up fee if someone else reports that the car is dirty).

That's exactly why we're in this mess -- the roads have been free and numerous for so long that people expect to be able to drive whenever and wherever they want, that was the promise of the 1950's car age, and for a while, it worked.

But now, we have sprawling cities and suburbs that are hard to serve with transit, and building new roads is not only expensive, but there's little room to do so in many cities (building double, triple or quadruple decked roads is even more expensive, with diminishing returns, adding a double decked lane does not double throughput because you need room for extra entrance/exit lanes to get to the second level).

Los Angeles tried to build enough roads to accommodate traffic, but even after devoting about 30% of their land area to roads they still have some of the worst traffic congestion in the nation.

Every time a road is built or expanded, it quickly becomes congested as people move to take advantage of the new, uncongested road which of course causes more congestion, so another expansion is needed, and the cycle continues.

A freeway lane can accommodate 1000 - 2000 cars per hour. A train line can accommodate 30,000 passengers per hour at 2 minute headways.

Because the last thing the government should be doing is encouraging people to ride on worn tires when the taxes on new tires are more than the price of the tires themselves. And people would gravitate toward harder compound tires that last longer, but have less road grip.

They are trying to move away from an imperfect system to determine usage taxes, moving to another imperfect system seems like a waste of time and money because they'll have to scrap that system as well after manufacturers learn how to build 100,000 mile tires.

Because they are commercial vehicles, subject to special rules and oversight. It's like asking why people driving public roads are required to keep a detailed log book of their driving time -- which commercial drivers are also required to do.

Heavy commercial vehicles get a break on road taxes -- they pay much more than cars, but heavy vehicles cause much much much more (to the 3rd power) road damage than cars.

No he wasn't, he was implying that self-driving cars were "the" solution -- your proximity to a car rental counter no longer matters if you can summon a car with your smartphone when you leave your office and have it waiting outside when you get to the sidewalk.

Then another poster objected that no one will gamble on getting a car that someone has smoked in or left a mess, and my point was that people are *already* taking that gamble with rental cars and car-share cars.

There's a lot of logistics that need to be figured out to make this convenient enough to rely on, but that's ok, there's decades of work that needs to be done before fully autonomous self-driving cars are a reality.

I didn't mean *you* in particular, but with car rental fleets of over a million cars and $20B in revenue in the USA, plenty of people are willing to rent a shared car that someone else may have driven just hours before.

Car sharing may not be usable by everyone but Zipcar is already operating in more than 30 USA metro areas.

There may be vast areas of the USA where transit, car sharing, etc won't work, but 80% of the USA population lives in designated urban areas, so most of the population may be able to take advantage of them.

Of course, the problem (at least where I live) is that there is not enough transit infrastructure in place to replace the car entirely -- I live a 15 minutes walk from a train line to the city where I work, so transit meets my needs for commuting. But that train line is very limited so if I want to go somewhere that's not served by the train (or want to take my dog somewhere), then I need a car.

Perhaps someday car share will be widespread enough to be practical, but it's not there yet. Renting a car from a traditional car rental place is out of the question due to the 10 mile distance to the nearest rental car agency (plus it wouldn't take many full-price car rentals to exceed the cost of owning a car)

So for me, I can remove insurance and depreciation (except mileage based depreciation) from the cost of commuting with a car, so my costs really are only gas & maintenance. Over the 9 years I've owned my car, maintenance averages out to around 8 cents/mile (this includes routine oil changes, two sets of tires, and one major $3000 engine repair)

If I included insurance and depreciation, that would add around 35 cents/mile to my costs.