Driverless electric cars that don't go faster than 20 mph don't need to be very aerodynamic. Parts of people's routes are often shared, or park-n-rides wouldn't work. Driverless cars could slowly go to assembly spots where they link up into trains, and then the trains go fast on predetermined routes to other spots where they disassemble back into cars that slowly travel the last 1/8 mile to individual destinations. It'll enact the functionality of public transport for people wealthy enough to own personal pods. The big problem is the space consumed protecting against impact from human driven vehicles.

Sure, buses without bus stops. There will be a phone app instead.

What if your drone just sprayed silly string onto the other drone's propellers from above?

The notion I had with the ballot reader was to make it with no moving parts. Even the button could be a spot with a capacitive sensor.

The thing I like about live-print, is that the person can verify with confidence their choice, as the names of persons for whom no vote was cast need not be printed. Also, with live print there's no question about how close a person's mark is to a check box. The reading machine always gets to read the predictably formatted print of the other machine. Any person at any polling place ought to work fine, and so could voting and printing at home and bringing in the printed ballot to be scanned and dropped off, almost as if vote-by-mail was used.

However, I don't expect this to be used. As you said, getting things right and extending the franchise isn't of interest. The voting fraud laws in WV are especially delightful, as they provide a penalty to the person who commits voting fraud, but require the fraudulent votes be kept and counted, so long as they are accompanied by even one properly recorded vote. This way, the "suicide bomber" approach to voting fraud is almost guaranteed to be successful.

If there was concern about people using someone else's card, a hybrid system could be used. On coming in to work, a person could pick up a random RFID bracelet, put it on, and "clock in" at a station that does a biometric check and assigns that bracelet to that identity for the day. Design the bracelets so that removing one causes it to signify that it has "clocked out," and needs a visit to a clock-in station to become valid again.

Hoppers shouldn't be necessary for optically acquired data these days. There's plenty of digital camera sensors that can image a ballot at good resolution. Just place the camera above a platform and have the voter put the ballot on the platform, hit a button and watch for the green light. Then, the voter can personally put the paper ballot in the ballot box.

Another thing I think would be a good idea is to use two machines, one for printing the piece of paper and another for scanning. It should be easy for the first machine to print a piece of paper that is readable both by the person and the second machine.

The $37 billion from Yahoo's investment in AliBaba is more significant. It's what's funding this, after all.

This is an olive branch he's extending to the Republicans. Think how much more money they'll get from the cable lobby because he said that.

Are you sure that's "they were weak and allowed the minority republicans to bully them" and not "they were politicians in DC and took money from the insurance lobby?" I feel pretty confident that "their own principles" are about equally for sale.

Harassing speech looks all the same, so it should be easy to model fairly accurately. Just automatically filter it and have a switch that turns the filter off so that people can check the filter and see if anything they like has been filtered out.

Once people are happy with the filter, they'll want to filter out more stuff, and instead of just having a switch, comment systems all over might get some sort of sliding scale where one doesn't have to look at comments below a certain level of quality.

I could write words on this topic, but these words are better than mine would be:

http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2012/11/28/amazon-and-margins

http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/9/4/why-amazon-has-no-profits-and-why-it-works

For investors, understand that not getting dividends from profits is not the same thing as not getting ROI. When you own stock in Amazon, and Amazon builds more of itself, then you own stock in more Amazon, and so your stock becomes more valuable. Also, that increase in value of the stock is considered to be capital gains, whereas money that would come from dividends is considered to be income, which is taxed at a higher rate than capital gains. These words may serve to illustrate this better than mine:

http://www.stocksplithistory.com/amazon-com/

I wouldn't feel scared now of stock sales that were commented on in December 2013. If they were indicative of a problem, that problem would have already happened. That graph shows a trend of steady improvement over 10 years with a nice steep slope for the last four. It makes a stronger impression on me.

I typed this long argument against that, but I'll spare you. Take care.

I visited that second link. When I look at the slope of the graph showing revenue growth, I can see why investors don't care.

There is to another way to distinguish "shitty driver guy" from non-shitty driver guy. Shitty driver guy gets traffic citations and has accidents. Privacy guy might well get shitty driver prices if he's 19 and has no driving record to speak of, but if he's got 10 or more years without citations or accidents, insurance companies tend to respect that.