A system like this will be written by a team of programmers, some of them very experienced, backed up by quality assurance folks and thousands of hours of experience.

On the human side, you're only as safe as the least safe driver. Older people with slower reaction times and diminished sight, brand new drivers with only a few weeks of experience behind the wheel, intoxicated drivers, and the whole slew of distracted drivers out there on their cell phones. Stand at an intersection sometime and count the number of drivers using cell phones, it's horrifying.

I believe that people who think computers will never drive better than humans are today's version of people that thought a computer would never beat a grand master at chess. It may take awhile, but it will happen, believe it.

US companies want it both ways, though. They want to sell Windows to the US for one price, and to China for a different (lower) price. Right there, that's fine, but if a guy in China wants to sell his Windows copy to me for slightly more and make a profit on it, it's illegal.

Arbitrage is apparently fine when investors do it, but illegal when the rest of us want to balance out the crazy price differences that exist in the world right now.

The coal power plant is still more efficient than your tiny internal-combustion engine. Even with power losses from lines, etc, the electric car is still more efficient overall. So, that's present state.

For future state, if we had mostly electric cars for commuting, running to the store, etc, we could replace coal plants with wind turbines, for example, and suddenly our cars are green. If all cars are internal combustion engines, we're stuck with using oil, or using up valuable farmland to grow vegetation for bio-gas. Just because electric cars aren't 100% green right now, doesn't mean they're not better than what we have. We have to start somewhere.

Cable is getting real competition from Over the Air and streaming content. They know they have to offer something compelling to get me to stay. If they can get me the basic channels + all of the science channels that are hard to find on streaming for a reasonable cost, I'll stay. If they can't, then I might leave. OTA is free, and free almost always beats better.

You can bring matches, though. Go figure.

http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/airtravel/prohibited/permitted-prohibited-items.shtm

Is Wikipedia running out of disk space all of a sudden? Why do topics have to be "notable" to be included? One of the great things about Wikipedia originally was that it wasn't limited to a certain number of pages, so finally there were articles on topics that never could have been included in a paper encyclopedia. Why is it the standard that topics have to prove themselves "notable" or die, given that it angers people that spent time and effort adding information to Wikipedia and often removes topics that people were interested in reading about? In effect, it seems like the Wikipedia organization is working hard to make Wikipedia less useful to many potential users and actively pushing away potential contributors.

From your post it sounds like you have inside knowledge about Wikipedia, so if you can help me understand this, I would greatly appreciate it.

Garbage collection. GC makes people angry for some reason, but I'm personally happy not having to malloc memory all the time. Also hardware and OS independence. It's nice to just open a file and read and write from it, and not really care what the OS is, or what filesystem it's using, and so forth. Same with inputs and outputs, memory management, thread handling, etc. You could add all of these things to your hypothetical intermediate language, but in the end you'd just be recreating the JVM.

A fair number of languages besides Java run on the JVM. Others have been "ported" onto the JVM. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_languages

I think the JVM is here to stay. We're moving more and more towards high-level, interpreted languages. Hardware is fast enough, and with things like JIT there's no real performance loss anyway. Why not write on a JVM, which does so much for you?