Exactly. Those are great examples.

And that's why I started writing the book. The secondary and tertiary effects are going to be fascinating. Why put up signs if computers will use GPS to know where they are? There will be so much more freedom for everyone young and old. It's going to be a big change. Almost bigger than the Internet.

You're right about problems with rentals and shared things but the problems are slowly being solved. I've had great luck with Zipcars. People who abuse the cars are kicked out of the program. The cars of the future may have a video camera watching them at all times and the car company may just dig it up if there are questions about smoking or abuse. The privacy will suck but maybe people who want a clean car will choose to have the camera running.

The other sharing systems are doing a good job policing the issue and so I'm pretty sure we'll see workable systems.

Exactly. Google is putting plenty of miles on their cars and they're finding quite a bit of success. The DARPA Grand Challenge cars are almost a decade old. We're switching over from science to engineering. Marketing won't be long.

Yes, you're right. Boston and NYC are nightmares. But then again computers can do certain things better than humans. They handle scale up more gracefully. A human might be able to process a number of pedestrians and dangerous items, but the human brain maxes out pretty quickly. If a computer can track one pedestrian, it can probably track 10,000 too. The scale up is just linear. You just add a bit more computing power. If the Google car can handle SF with a certain number of processors, I'm pretty sure it can handle Boston or NYC with twice as much computer power. At least that's my off-the-cuff guess.

And we can create even more tools that offer a gradual evolution. We already have a database of all of the roads. With a bit more precision, we could build a device that could tell whether you're following a common path that others have taken before or if you're drifting into the way of oncoming traffic.

There are some, though, that suggest that gradual evolution may be more dangerous than jumping directly to fully autonomous vehicles. As the humans have less and less to do behind the wheel, their mind drifts elsewhere. They start texting more, working on their nails, or occupying themselves with other things. The car is usually doing a good job taking care of things. But the problem comes when the humans are called to do one of the few things they're supposed to do. If their mind is elsewhere, there could be a crash.

Yes, scale up is a big question mark. But on the other hand, computerized cars should be able to communicate with each other. They can ask permission to change lanes or at least warn each other with better regularity than the humans I see on the road. They will be able to swap plans with each other and that should help them do a better job than humans. They'll have more information.

Unrepetant, Wikipedia justifies the decision to reveal the ending of the play.

It's bad enough when a corporation tries to pretend it is one person with one consistent opinion, but can the Wikipedia even be said to have a single, consistent opinion? Yes, the edit wars usually end when one party gets tired and they find a way to convey both sides of the matter, but that's not what's going on here. The information is either revealed or its not. There's no compromise and compromise is an integral part of converging on a particular choice of words.

Thanks for both responses. I had a feeling it wasn't that novel an idea.

Several years ago, I was thinking in the same general vein and decided to experiment with an Invention Disclosure . I wonder how Apple structured their patents-- if they did-- because it's a pretty simple idea. I'm surprised that more cell phones haven't implemented it. Maybe they have. Does anyone know if others are experimenting with it too?

You can convert .class files with a tool called dx and you don't need to do it by hand.

But let me explain what I was thinking when I said "It won't look pretty". That could mean a text line output or some other Android interface. I think I should have been more specific and spelled out just how much work it will be if you're trying to duplicate some of the code that isn't available.

Yes, a fair point. I shouldn't have used "all", although I think you could probably get Swing and even AWT working with a shoehorn.

But it's got a JVM and JVMs take byte code...

And while I wouldn't want Derby or some other serverside process gumming up my phone, I do like the ease of using the same packing and unpacking routines on both platforms. They're just more likely to work a bit better together.

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/01/13/surveillance-secruity-and-the-google-breach/

The older I get, the more I appreciate the hard work of the editors who fix most of my errors and the sales team that collect the money from the advertisers and subscribers. They create an environment that helps me, the nominal creator and the only one who gets a byline, produce something that's better.

Now it may be that the market will decide that they don't want to pay extra for these layers. That's a decision that all of us will make consciously or unconsciously when we decide what content we want to consume. But there's no doubt that they do something.

Let me first thank everyone who's submitted an article to Slashdot with a link to something I've written. The comments are almost always a great gift and I look forward to reading most of what people write, especially the ones who RTFA.

My only request is for everyone to be open to new ways of paying for the synthesis of information. It is very difficult for humans to compete with the robot link farms and the casual content created on places like Facebook. If we want people to synthesize we have to find some way to come together as a society and fund them.

I realize that it's attractive to look at the almost non-existent distribution costs of digital content and imagine a world where information can be completely free, but this avoids dealing with the costs of creating it in the first place. We need to find a good way for everyone who consumes content to effectively share the costs of creating it. If we don't, the information ecosystem will collapse.

Please be open to the writers and publishers who are going to try out more mechanisms for distributing the costs among the consumers. Try them out and reward the ones that deliver something of value. Ignore the ones that aren't worth your time. But please don't dismiss them out of hand.

Finally, I want to point out a piece I've written about some of the downsides of the free ecosystem for information. Perhaps this might suggest that there are some advantages in embracing a paywall, at least occasionally.

http://www.wayner.org/node/67