A similar motorcycle acts as a delivery van. covered with drawers, each of which can lock or unlock independently. It goes to a destination, sends a message to the people inside the building and waits ten minutes. after the person inside authenticates with their cell phone (maybe by taking a picture of the drone) the drone unlocks the one drawer, and waits for the person to remove or add a package.

Groceries and package delivery (UPS/Fedex/etc.) These will be the biggest things affect by self-driving vehicles. Groceries: it's far more efficient (and green) for someone to pick out your groceries, put them in a truck with other orders from nearby people, and drive to you, rather than having each person drive to the grocery. Packages: While they wouldn't be able to hold as many, they also wouldn't be beholden to the shipping company's schedule. So if you have a package you don't want left on your doorstep, you can pay a bit extra and have it stored in a self-delivery vehicle and "call" it when you are at home. Doesn't matter what time, you just call and it works its way towards you.

There will be some problems with theft of/from the self-delivery vehicles, but I imagine that will be taken care of quickly with cameras added (that can also be used for identification of customers and the self-driving.)

the driver-less stuff will be relegated to delivery vehicles and DUI offenders

Also buses (unless you were counting those as part of delivery vehicles; in which case, sorry.)

But the thing is that the auto-driving car that becomes ubiquitous will not show up fully formed. Over the years new vehicles will add more and more features that lower the burden of the driver; between adaptive cruise control and lane keeping assist, cars can already handle 80% of distance highway driving by themselves. We also have various forms of automatic parking already. A ton of different collision avoidance options.

We'll slowly get new features like signal-change monitoring that will stop for red and go for green, stop sign recognition, merge assistance, etc. The tech will eventually cover 95% of use cases, and the remaining 5% will be edge cases that get worked out slower (the "long tail", so to speak). I think it will take 10, maybe 20 years to get to that 95%, and at that point the new vehicles will likely have everything they need for full self-driving, only downloading firmware updates for the remaining 5% as it gets tackled.

Sort of: it's a Dicevertisement. Nerval's Lobster is the sockpuppet that Dice uses to post its own stories to Slashdot (without any disclaimer that Slashdot is owned by Dice.)

shared between a number of individuals (like one car per family, once the father has reached work he sends the car back home so that the mother can take the kid to kindergarden, etc).

My personal prediction is that, once self-driving cars become a majority, the desire to own a car will be reduced drastically (especially in urban areas.) Instead, people will belong to "auto clubs", which will maintain a fleet of the vehicles. With a monthly membership fee you get X rides/miles; the fee includes insurance, and since insurance rates will drop drastically for those who allow their car to primarily auto-drive, I think that some auto insurance companies will actually be the ones to start these auto clubs (perhaps partnering with a car rental company, maybe even some of the mechanic chains will join in, like Big O Tires or Jiffy Lube, since electric vehicles will eventually be the majority as well and they'll start to lose a lot of business in regular maintenance visits.)

You can pay an extra amount to reserve a particular car and/or pickup time. Otherwise, you use your phone app to order a car to your current or a nearby location, and the car sends you a text when it's outside.

There will also be non-auto cars, and there will be people who own cars (both auto and non), but these will become collectors/upper class things. I can see a larger family, like a generational household where you have kids, parents, grandparents, maybe an aunt or uncle, with their own, personal auto or two.

Perhaps we should consider changing the university system so that when someone goes in, they choose a "focus" and a "study". The "focus" is the normal degree, something that has fairly direct application to jobs, like Mechanical Engineer, and guides their "technical" classes. The "study" is something that interests them, like your Medieval French Lit, and guides their non-technical classes.

Unlike a Major and a Minor, this system wouldn't require more classes for the Minor/"study", and the ratio would be 60/40 between them.

Welcome to April Fools Day. I regret to inform you that not all attempts at humor are successful, and even those that are never succeed at humoring every single individual. From your low-digit ID I assume you've been around a while; that Slashdot does something on April Fools should not be a surprise to you, so you should know to either avoid Slashdot (since no real news will be posted today) or just deal with the jokes they put in place.

Okay, I admit it, this one made me laugh (mainly because I expected a different direction when reading the headline.)

I mean what's the chance he's going to be productive those two weeks anyway?

This is actually a great way to test how an employee's absence will change things. Ask him (or her) to spend a day or two cleaning up their own stuff both physical and digital, then being "on call" the remaining time, checking his corporate e-mail once or twice a day. Have the remaining employees go ahead and start dividing up his work and see where things come to a screeching halt, and sending him questions via e-mail. This way, he's still on payroll if they realize that they need his help, and you can slowly remove his account's access to see if any process somehow got tied to it. Once he's formally gone, it will be a lot harder (and likely more expensive) to get his help.

Seems like a win-win-win to me. Sure, you can have him write up how-tos and manuals for stuff he thinks others will need to do that he once did, but trial by fire would be much better at identifying gaps while you still have a proverbial fire department sitting right outside.

As a youngin' in the early-mid 90s, we would watch these slide shows *BEEP*
These had corresponding audio tapes, that would tell to change the slide with a *BEEP*
Can't remember what topics, and they were always boring as *BEEP*
Only useful for taking a quick nap or being amused when the teacher didn't change the slide *BEEP*
Just changing to video over slides doesn't fix the underlying lack of interactivity or entertainment to keep the students stimulated. *BEEP BEEP*

Of course, terrorists are well known as the most law abiding citizens on the planet.

To play devil's advocate: By outlawing encryption, the amount of "law-abiding citizens" that use it will drop precipitously. Then, when the NSA intercepts an encrypted signal, it becomes far more likely that both ends are $BOOGEYMAN, and their resources won't be spread as thin. Even if both ends are decidedly not $BOOGEYMAN, they are either foreigners, citizens with little regard for the law, or a combination of the two, and so need to go on one of the myriad of watchlists anyway.

So even though outlawing encryption won't end encryption, it will make the NSA/FBI/Europol/etc.'s job of getting leads much easier.

That's my loose take on it. (Raised Lutheran, pastor's kid, but now lazy atheist.) Paul, formerly Saul, who directed much of the early Catholic Church co-opted Jesus (or the story of Jesus) for his own means. There's a lot said in books ostensibly written by him or sourced through him that are a bit counter to Jesus's largely "peace and love" rhetoric. All from a man who started out as a persecutor of disciples of Jesus.

I think that Saul figured out that it was easier to control the budding religion by spearheading it, rather than spearing heads. So he had his "vision", used a local believer (was he said to be a prophet? Can't remember) as a patsy, was "cured" of his blindness, and turned to "following" the teachings of Jesus Christ and leading others in the same. Worked out very well for him, I'd say.

That's all assuming at least some of the Bible is factual, though.

I have a history of depression, and there's a common survey that medical offices use to get a rough feel for a person's depression and/or anxiety level. In fact, it is so common that in the four states I have filled out the survey, I'm pretty sure that every single one was a generational photocopy of the same document. In many cases it has a slight "right" lean and offset that is recognizable; in others there's a "blur" along the left side, as though it was copied with a stack of papers on top of it or from a book.

The same thing happened in the military with "official" forms that were readily (and sloppily) photocopied.

Not that a letterhead should be what makes something legitimate, but when I'm paying a few hundred for a 15 minute visitation it would be nice if the photocopies looked decent...

Because the American citizenry apparently has no limit with incompetence, seeing as how often it's elected into office.

I don't know enough about Canada to say for sure, and I don't know how familiar you are with American states, but would you say that Quebec is Canada's reverse-Texas?

Standby mode can be convenient because (I think) all of the consoles will download updates/newly purchased games while in standby (maybe a slightly elevated level).

But, if you are truly concerned with power usage from consoles (and other devices) on standby, here's my advice: Get an outlet adapter that has a remote. These can be had for super cheap shortly after Christmas, as they're mainly used for switching external or Christmas tree lights on/off at will. I have one between the outlet and my entertainment center's surge protector, so my TV, media center, and consoles are all 100% off while I'm not using it. I don't know how much power the switch draws, but I reckon it's far less than even one of the consoles on standby.