Quite... it's just N T-junctions off a small circular road. (Sometimes so small, there's no island, just a road marking.) How hard can it be?

In Britain, some busier roundabouts have part-time traffic lights for that very reason. (And, yes, the lights are used at busy times only... :)

Well, that would explain it! It would be a terrible decision to drop network transparency, unless they're just interested in converting Windows and Mac users...

With future Ubuntu, are you saying that e.g. in a secure shell on another machine (ssh -Y me@othermachine) I can't run a graphical application using my X server? Perhaps I have misunderstood what you meant by network transparent. I thought any graphical environment was built on X11 and so just worked over the network...

Marty: Whoa, this is heavy.
Doc: There's that word again, heavy. Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull?

Better to be prepared...

(Based on my highly limited knowledge of the subject) it enables observations about the earth to be compensated for non-uniform gravitational pull, so you can get a better idea of what is really happening and stand a better chance of explaining why. For example, now we know where water is effectively flowing uphill and downhill, we can better estimate the actual ocean current forces from the observed currents, so start to guess at what is causing them.

I suspect that these auto-driving systems would only have a simplified view of the world, increasing the scope for misinterpretation and making invalid assumptions about what it 'sees'. (What the computer thought was a leaf blowing in the wind turned out to be the flag of a recumbent cyclist...) The more controlled the environment becomes, the more you can safely make assumptions about what your sensors tell you. (For example, consider the atmosphere and systems used in aeroplanes.) I suspect safety cases for auto-driven systems would lead to separation of auto-driven traffic so that assumptions that a computer makes are valid. (Perhaps it would be ok to mix modes of transport if e.g. cyclists had electronic beacons to identify themselves to the sensors on cars.)

We're all individuals and safety is handled rationally by individuals! Even if the overall number of people dying would go down, when I devolve my safety to a machine like an autopilot, I want to make sure that I am just as safe as when I drive myself. That fact that I am safer than hundreds of thousands of other people is no consolation and irrelevant to me. An argument about the benefit to the masses may hold for e.g. ants but is likely to fall down for people. Of course, people always have an irrational view that nothing could possibly be a better driver than themselves...

but to really foul things up beyond your worst nightmares, you need a computer driving a car.

for the +1 operator: succ. It's unfortunate that we feel the need to verbize everything these days because I just wouldn't feel right succing people because they're succing me, in a sort of mutual succing arrangement, just so we feel better about ourselves.