Not quite, but we're getting there. This is part of the reason why lots of people are moving to smartphones and tablets as their primary computing platforms: something with the computing power and memory of a laptop from 5 years ago is ample for their needs. If it can browse the web, play back music and video, send and receive emails, and edit basic office documents, then that's enough for a massive chunk of the population. It's not enough for everyone, and some of the people that it's not enough for have very deep pockets.
I was recently talking to someone at ARM about Moore's law and how it applied to different market segments. Moore's law says that the number of transistors that you can get on an IC for a fixed cost doubles every 12 months. In desktop processors, that's meant that the price has stayed roughly constant but the number of transistors has doubled. In the microcontroller world, they've been using about half of the Moore's Law dividend to increase transistor count and half to reduce cost. A lot of customers would rather have cheaper microcontrollers than faster ones and getting ones that are a bit faster and a bit cheaper every generation is a clear win (faster reduces development costs, cheaper reduces production costs). I just got a Cortex M3 prototyping board. It's got 64KB of SRAM, 512KB of Flash, and a 100MHz 3-stage pipelien. That's an insane amount of processing power and storage in comparison to the microcontrollers of 20 years ago, but it's nowhere near as big a jump as mainstream CPUs have made. It used to be that a microcontroller was a CPU from 10 years earlier (that's about the time for the Z80, for example, to go from being a CPU in home computers to being an embedded microcontroller), but the M3 isn't even as powerful as the MIPS chip from 1993, by quite a long way. The M0 has the same transistor count as the very first ARM chip back in the early '80s.
I'm sure I'll have to do something major to it eventually, but for the last decade or so, it's cost me less than 100 dollars a year
I think the USA is pretty unique in that regard. Here, if you intended to drive it on the roads, you'd need it to be taxed and insured (third-party, at least), which would make the cost per year far more than $100.
The people who think that self-driving cars and not owning cars are a good idea tend to be people who live in dense urban areas and know little to nothing about the rest of the world.
I grew up in the countryside and now live in a small city where I can cycle verywhere, so I've seen both sides of this. The problem with this argument is that you forget how population density works. The people who live deep in the countryside are basically noise, statistically speaking. If a solution works for everyone else, then no one cares if they're going to keep needing private cars - it's just one more expense to counter their very low property prices.
Like it or not, any self-driving highway is going to have to make accommodations for human guided vehicles.
Or some people are going to have to flip their switch from manual to automatic when they get near populated areas.
In addition, I somehow don't think that police, fire, ambulance, politicians, etc. would be willing to use self-driving cars
Politicians already have other people drive them. Ambulances and fire engines would be a lot safer if they plugged into a control system that made other cars get out of their way, rather than relying on humans to react sensibly to a siren in the distance. Police would almost certainly want a non-networked version with a manual override, as they are very likely to have an active adversary.
You can't remove my State's direct democracy by simply believing we don't have it
The only places I am aware that practice direct democracy are the Swiss Cantons and some parts of Israel. Which state do you live in the I should add to this list?
What good is a ticket to the good life, if you can't find the entrance?