Now there's a contradiction. A car certainly starts on your schedule, but after that your schedule is determined by traffic. And places with heavy traffic would probably see driverless buses long before places with nice suburban 5mph over the speed limit the whole way commutes. Then there are costs:

Look around you: That's actually not that big a problem, since it describes a small and shrinking percentage of the population (in the US, at least). Most people won't be able to afford a driverless car until quite a while after they are introduced. Ditto for driverless-Uber single passenger type services: too expensive for the daily commute. Most people will be choosing between sitting in traffic playing games on their smart device in a public or private multi-passenger vehicle, or driving their own car and not playing games on their smart device. Really the big problem with buses (driverless or no) is that it's hard for local movers and shakers to get rich off of them. They are purchased from another state/country, there aren't many big construction projects involved, and most of the money goes to labor and admin. I.e., city employees that probably won't even vote for the movers'/shakers' pet politicians, let alone give them kickbacks. Compare that to a subway or light rail: HUGE sums of cash going to local consultants/real estate interests, HUGE sums of cash going to the construction companies that "win" the bid, HUGE sums of cash going to the investment bankers that write and sell the bonds, etc. Rich people using them is pretty much irrelevant at that point.

The transition I see happening first is fewer families having multiple cars. Partial conversions, if you will.

For quite a few cleanrooms the common case is the logs are used for QC and for compliance with federal regulations. Also, people in clean rooms are generally wearing safety glasses, masks, bonnets, etc, so figuring out who is who would be a pain.

As AC pointed out, the same components offered in a modular setup will be more expensive, but not just in terms of space. To keep the same profit margins all of the modules will have to be marked up significantly compared to what you would pay for them all packaged together. If third parties are also selling modules, then the entire profit margin has to come from the frame.

Step one: propose bonds that would pay for last mile fiber networks, with rollout decided primarily by neighborhood population density.

Step two: ?

Step three: Money goes to municipalities which in turn put network installation and management projects up for bid. Municipalities choose to provide service as a utillity or allow private ISPs to compete to sell broadband services.

Except give up 3% of every transaction to credit card companies, which quickly dwarfs the cost of a new terminal.

Particles about one billionth of a meter in width are smaller than the antibodies that are supposed to be coating them. Even an ScFV (useful fragment derived from an antibody) is over 3 nm.

In other words:

"WHY THE FUCK AREN'T YOU JUST TAKING A SAMPLE??"

And I think I know the answer: avoiding all of the intellectual property surrounding running the exact same tests after taking a sample out of a human being. The number of patents on diagnostics based on these types of binding events is astounding. But they are almost all in vitro, not in vivo.

The same research that found the percentage of women in majoring in CS plummeting in the '80s -90s found that they held steady at about 46% of math majors. But I'll agree on the life/work balance issue.

Replace most of the volunteers with one roller conveyor: one end in the truck, one at the counter. One volunteer in the truck loads ice, one at the counter just takes money and never even touches the bags.

Not really, no. You can completely change the experiment (new primary and secondary endpoints, etc.) without getting the subjects consent. The samples and data collected for one experiment can be used for unspecified future experiments, so long as that possibility is disclosed. The legalities are getting tighter, but unless you are related to Henrietta Lacks (HeLa cells) blanket consent for use of samples, complete with intellectual property rights, is still the norm.

Ok, I'll bite. What exactly did Holmes, or even the other folks as Theranos, invent? Microfluidic blood tests, DNA based tests instead of ELISAs, All that stuff was invented in the '80s and '90s.

Have a look at her list of patents. Which actually present new ideas instead of combinations of well established technologies?

http://patents.justia.com/inventor/elizabeth-holmes

Musk took existing technology, improved it and recombined it until it could support real business plans.

Holmes took existing technology, improved it and recombined it until it could support a real business plan.

Good on both of them.

Now that's an interesting distinction to make. If a marketing strategy was actually injurious, would it still get a bye? Also - this research was still ultimately aimed at getting people to use a consumer product (Facebook) as profitably as possible. So shouldn't it be eligible for that exemption?

But scientists in marketing research do A/B advertising, etc, all the time without a hint of informed consent. Amazon and other retailers don't ask for informed consent when they study offering you discounts on items languishing in your shopping cart.

Nope! When subjects volunteer for a specific study or survey, sure. But most consumer research doesn't require informed consent unless there is direct interaction between the researcher and the subjects. A/B advertising research, OKcupid's experiments ... informed consent is buried in the boilerplate or completely absent. That's even partially true for some medical research: you aren't required to give informed consent for each research project that uses a sample taken from you if you gave a blanket consent when it was taken.

But Facebook is just doing the same things other consumer product/service providers do to their customers. It was only newsworthy because it was Facebook.