Yeah, I almost bought a surplus PDP-11 from my college surplus about fifteen years ago. Held off because I'd have had to unplug my stove to power it, and my small apartment was not suited to having a minicomputer in it. It would have cost me less than $100 for two racks worth of equipment.

I could commute with a Model-T. I live ten miles from work and while I usually take the freeway, I could drive on surface-streets the entire way and add no additional distance to the drive and probably only take another ten minutes to make the trip. I wouldn't even be impeding the flow of traffic either.

A Model-T would serve my driving needs 200+ days a year without any significant change to my routines. It could probably serve me another 50-100 days a year if I'm willing to take a little longer to get to places further away than work that I normally take the freeway for.

He's snarky, but there's a point when 'additions' start to harm the machine rather than to improve it. Neon tubes with their associated high voltage and extremely high cycling rate draw a lot of power for not real benefit and introduce electromagnetic noise into the computer. Spinners on car wheels mess with the rotational and steering dynamics of the vehicle and remove one cue to other drivers as to what the vehicle is doing as they can no longer look at the wheels to see if the car is starting to pull forward or not.

There are tradeoffs between aesthetics and functionality. Sometimes the majority of the population feels that those aesthetics are worthwhile and sometimes they don't. Personally I want the indicators on my computer to actually convey something, so having a huge light behind a large transparent open panel in the side that's on just because the computer is powered on doesn't help me while individual indicators for fans and disks could. On the other hand, if I spent considerable time and skill dremelling-out a logo through the side panel, then perhaps the powerful light might actually add something to the experience.

If someone wants to reimplement some antiquated hardware for their own kicks that's fine. I've got dumb RS-232 terminals on my desks at both work and home, so I am not immune to this either. I don't expect others to find it cool either though, as there aren't that many people that grew up pre-GUI or in the BBS days in this hobby anymore, so I do it for myself, not for anyone else's approval.

Or you could change the way the cockpit door lock works.

If what I've read is right, anyone in the cockpit can lock the door such that it cannot be opened from the outside even if they have the code, but only for a five minute stretch. If a two-person rule is put into place, also put into place two switches further apart than arm's reach that have to be pressed in-sync or in very close succession. If the flight attendant occupying the second position disagrees then the door does not prohibit a code from opening it. This way, even if one person in the cockpit kills the other, the door cannot be code-blocked to the cabin.

That lease and exclusivity scenario completely destroys ShanghaiBill's argument about owner-operators if they are indeed at the mercy of the company to whom they're contracted.

I expect lower operating costs could come from simply not having to operate as many trucks. If man-operated trucks usually only operate 5/12 of the day, it's conceivable that autonomous trucks could operate much closer to the full day, less maintenance, refuelling, and load/unload or hookup/unhook, and those latter tasks might count toward the ten hours that a human operator is allowed to work. Depending on routes a trucking company might only have to operate half as many tractors to pull the same number of trailers around, so capital costs and insurance costs could go down rather dramatically. Even if there are scenarios where trucks are organized into convoys and a human-operated pilot car or lead truck is necessary, it still might be possible for 20 loads to be operated by a single driver, or if 24-hour service is wanted, three drivers working in shifts on the convoy, trading off the pilot position.

Labor costs are usually the biggest expense to an organization. They're always looking to reduce labor costs, so I fully expect this to come.

Actually I think that a corporate death penalty would go a long way toward making things better. Corporations are already willing to close-up shop in a given area and dump thousands of people into unemployment to save 20% by moving operations to foreign countries. Revoking a corporate charter would now affect shareholders too, so that those who own the company would know that if they allow their compny to go too far then they risk losing essentially everything.

I think that the fine in this scenario should be the cost to implement the service.

only if you polish the ends too much. Then you cut off the connectors and reterminate, and hopefully polish it right this time.

Oh yeah. I get that most Americans, myself included, are accustomed to working in fractional units, but there are times when one should simply bite the bullet and work in SI units. Hell, I'm no mechanical engineer but I have nearly as many metric tools as fractional tools, and I can work in millimeters and newtons and cubic centimeters when necessary.

It blows my mind that aerospace engineers haven't converted to using SI for design and implementation on projects that are global in scope.

Yep.

What really saddens me is that Perkin-Elmer still exists. If there was ever a justifiable reason to revoke a corporation's charter, something this monumental to mankind is it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... It was the biggest space-science story of 1990...

...who ground the Hubble mirror wrong because the primary measuring instrument said it was right, even though two independent test instruments said it was wrong...

JB Hunt, as an example, is who is contracted to move goods. They have close to 50,000 trailers. It appears that they own around 12,000 trucks. Even if they own zero trucks now and are entirely dependent on independent owner/operator contractors and those contractors' trucks, they could start purchasing their own self-driving trucks and no longer contract-out for drivers and their trucks.

Large companies like doing business with other large companies. If JB Hunt, Swift, Allied, or any of a slew of large trucking companies stop using human drivers then the big players like Walmart, Costco, Target, all of the department stores, will simply continue to use JB Hunt et al. because they're not going to contact thousands upon thousands of independent owner-operators. They care about selling merchandise. If they're not already running their own fleet directly then they'll continue to sub that out to whoever can.

Cars are very complex machines that can have loads of things go amiss with them without rendering them undrivable, and can have loads of other things go wrong while in operation. You're correct that it's safe to assume everything will be recorded, but I expect equipment failures will plague first-generation autonomous cars once they're old and the tolerances have loosened up. Steering, tires, brakes, suspension alignment, all things that will lead the computer astray as it's attempting to self-drive.

I think that only a fraction of the employed drivers could turn to providing service or operating pilot trucks if there's an interest in using automated convoys with a real driver or two to babysit. It's one thing to change a wheel when a tire blows (even that usually requires existing service companies to find the truck to assist) but dealing with other problems requires trained mechanics. Driving, by contrast, is much easier than that.

I expect that some human drivers will remain for odd jobs, like weird oversized loads that are poorly balanced, or routes with poor or unimproved roads, or the logging industry where the trucks are operating off-road, but there's going to be a whole lot of people looking for work.

I stopped using Groklaw back in the day because they started requiring excessively complex passwords. They seemed to feel that their forums were rather important, when in fact the only really important part was what people could read, not what they would post.

I'm sure that most of us would be upset if our accounts on various forums or bulletin board systems were compromised, but it wouldn't be life-altering for the vast majority of us. Social Media that's designed to avoid anonymity like Facebook would be worse but still ultimately doesn't affect one's bottom-line, but things like banks and e-mail services where everyon's stuff ultimately consoldiates are much more important.

I wish that we could trust central ID systems, where we could create an account on a forum site with a unique user ID and then link that user ID to a central authentication database so that our central credentials give us acces via that unique user ID, but I just don't trust the authentication databases. I'm already leery enough of Active Directory that I don't use work passwords anywhere else to begin with, but companies providing such a service don't necessarily know what they're doing, and they're probably too willin to hand over information for what sites people would need authentication to as well.