You may be defining the best application, SDCs in places well-understood. I think that they would work best for public transit, cabs, or well traveled commute corradors, not rural or off-road applications.

I don't drive due to poor vision. I also hate the bus and other forms of public transit and most cab services are far too expensive, but imagine a city in which cars were discouraged and a fleet of SDCs served the function of local mass transit, removing the need for bus and cab services. You could order a ride to and from particular locations, use the car one-way, and free it for someone else to use and order another one for return trip, but it would cost only a little more than a bus ride and far less than a cab. A city run like this could remove most of its parking and narrow its streets, making a great deal of land to redevelop. If we could get people to let go of owning a car, the savings alone in land values would more than finance the cost of the fleet. This idea is for those use cases within reach, the choice of paths is well-known, well-mapped and the problems cited by the OP are minimized.

Their use for Interstate Highways might be more problematic due to road condition problems cited in the OP, but one possibility, convoying and running at high speed, like high-speed rail, might be used. Imagine getting from the San Francisco Bay Area to Los Angeles in 90 minutes in a convoy that can go 250 MPH?

Actually, I have evidence that not only is emacs and vi are very much alive, but that lisp, which is what emacs is written in, is not only very much alive, but very possibly moved to the top of the list of "new" solutions to programming problems. Go follow the developments with Clojure and Clojurescript. Clojure is lisp with a few enhancements that might solve some nasty problems in newer languages with persistence and concurrency. It runs on top of the Java Virtual Machine and its scripted version translates to Javascript. It can use libraries available to Java and Javascript and yet it addresses the need of functional programs to use immutable objects and not complex locking mechanisms. It uses namespaces but allows for separate copies of objects between them in a memory efficient way. The only worry I have about Clojure's immutabiliuity is wheather its garbage collection scheme can destroy data prematurely while it is being handled between namespaces. The more common problem of threads treading on each other's data needing locks may return.

I haven't addressed the Vi vs. Emacs issue except to say that it is the learning curve and muscle memory that determines which one a person adopts, not that one is basically superior. I learned emacs first and use it to this day, but if you have ever been a system administrator in single user or recovery mode on a *NIX box you had better know at least some minimal Vi and even Ex, the line editor form that underlies the screen editor. (I had one case where I couldn't boot a workstation in screen mode and had to edit a critical system file with Ex, or what used to be called Ed, )

Something to note is that Emacs was an integrated environment long before there were GUIs. You can still run a shell, a REPL, a file manager (dired), and numerous other applications for mail and IRC and netnews, all within a single emacs instance using multiple windows. I have tried this recently and am amazed at how useful it still is, and you can have as many buffers open as you want.

The only issue I have is that I need to upgrade my OS to get Emacs 24 running on it so that I can dive into lisp and Clojure, as Emacs 23 is not fully ready for Clojure. But I know some common lisp and have delved into a little e-lisp, and am obviously interested in Clojure now, is reason enough for Emacs.

It is just that people are not critical enough to avoid age-old ploys to cover up lies. Constraining human nature and deceit isn't going to make them go away, nor is sticking your head in the sand and demanding everyone be nice-nice. Instead, see to it that the design of media helps you manage human foibles so that you can answer these assaults. The design of social media and blogs in particular magnifies the power of distractions like changing topics and abuse like trolling. You are not going to be able to remove these tactics but you can do something to reduce their effectiveness.

I have been advocating a return to the USENET-style of newsgroup for discussions now done on blogs. We have some of the features on slashdot now, these include the ability to quote from another article and reply in context to it, and the ability to change the subject line. The only thing I would change here is to make the neutral categories richer and more prominant than the headlines which are chosen by an editorial board. Promotion of topics by voting or "likes" is actually determental, especially if the bias in introduced by a controlling editorial board.

Sub-threads are the best way to deal with the two main abuses of blogs, the change in topic and the troll. Trolls do not last if called personally to account. They are cowards, really, who post hit and run assaults with no desire to see the consequences, or to get their charge out of the initial shock. What sub-threading "Re: TROLL Alert..." does to them is to expose the ridiculousness of their statement to public exposure. Facebook should allow for the use of the Markdown editing language to support quoting, something they won't do because they want to squeeze every last byte out of the flat text blocks they need to give to their business partners' reg-exp engines for data mining. The engineers are not smart enough to deal with quoted text. The other thing they need to do is to allow for conversation owners to fork sub-threads to handle the abuses cited above. The reason Facebook is such a banal self-censored medium is because the blog model, the one Mark Zuckerberg things is "Simple", is a failed idea unless all you are after is the banality. I think there are signs that many people are getting tired of that.

This raises the question of how peer-reviewed literature, scientific journals, stack up in gender biased terms? Women has been doing science for a long time, they may not be demographically represented, and maybe, as the article suggests, the reason for this may be that women want more immediate acknowledgement of their ideas from their peers that they can get on Facebook and other social media that is withheld on Wikipedia because of the review process. What about sites that hold comments for review? Do these discourage female participants?

Facebook seems to thrive on empathy between friends, even though that has nothing to do with the company's business model, which is to spy on its users and develop profile information useful to marketers (and others?). I have been a sharp critic of Social Media because conversations really go nowhere; but I want a style of communication that is analytic and a little contentious. Maybe that is the very thing that turns women off. I just think there is too much of this empathic yes-man, or is that yes-woman? :-) kind of communication with social media and blogs, particularly. But clearly this issue is the other side of the story. Maybe something like Google+ is also more appealing to women as a result, and the banality of social media generally is more appealing to women, too.

I have been saying that social media and the blog is a muzzle on effective communication driven by a commercial motive. That creators of web pages and blog posts want to control conversations and not have distractions and change of topic and trolling. People have been persuaded that arguing in public is a bad thing and the reason may be that the design of media doesn't support it, but I would argue that we need to have argument, disagreements and contentiouslness to have quality citizenship and that discussion forums of which wikis are a form are necessary and that blogs and social media generally are detrimental to civic if not civil discourse as a result. This is somewhat the obverse of the issue presented in the OP which was that Wikipedia discourages female participation. Maybe the truth is that social media in general discourages reasoning and argument, that our critical muscles are underexcercized because in the aftermath of the idea of "Political Correctness" that we mistakenly think that arguing in public is rude and people have learned to avoid it. One reason is that people are out of practice in reasoning and debating and theat they need to get back in the game as if their very freedom depends on it. I have no doubt that quite a few politicians and business people, especially those who want to perpetuate the fallacies of public relations and advertising, don't want this to happen; that included the social media corporations in the main.

Yeah, I hear Bangladesh calling!

Actually, that should be an unwritten rule for anyone who dares to call himself "engineer" or "scientist", and if he has a manager who wants the spend the energy micromanaging, a cat and mouse game of "find me not doing exactly what you think I should', will exhaust that person. Most managers I've seen are too lazy to actually know exactly what their employees are doing, so I've known people who have been able to do pretty much whatever they wanted within reason provided they did what was asked, The trick was to appear to be busy. The mistake was to appear to not be busy. But many people lack personal motivation, or they mistakenly believe that they need permission to do what they want. Not really, most of the time no one notices and as long as the task is not playing Candy Crush, maybe it is seen as value add.

Not to mention that finance is fiction, an accounting shell-game, a non-productive exercise that only serves the exercise of flimsy agreements,

Go take these old PCs and give them a second life as a Linux server.

I knew a guy who'd once been in the U.S. Navy aboard an aircraft carrier who had learned the art of doing whatever he wanted to do and please the bass who was more interested in asses in seats than quality work. He did what was asked of him and quickly, but because he never appeared to be not busy he was able to do much more of what interested him than was also related to his role and was never questioned by the boss. This takes an attitude that most don't learn that what you do at work can be self-motivated and not micromanaged because micromanaging would exhaust the boss who really wants to be satisfied that you are busy weather or not what you are doing is strictly within the mission of the group or not. The other thing is to keep your mouth shut and be careful what you say.

I can still rail ( no joke) about how stupid Java is. I worked at Sun until 2004 and haven't worked a day since, now at age 67, but I used to be pissed off but I am not as much as I used to be. About six months ago I became enamored with Python, which I still respect. I am very impressed with the concepts of Literate Programming and reproducable results as I started off linking FORTRAN code with math and statistics libraries as a so-called scientific programmer. Now the researchers are able to do all this by themselves using ipython notebook and numpy and matplotlib and a host of other libraries. That is a road I still want to progress further down, but I got destracted in the competition, emacs org.mode. Now I have used emacs pretty much constantly over the years but never really did everything in it. but was really impressed by org.mode which rekindled my interest in emacs and lisp. I had looked at Common-lisp a couple of years ago, and being quite interested in contrapuntal music, I was interested in lisp off and on as the platform for music composition.

But what is amazing to me, as an old man , is how things are coming around, and not only just that but how old things are addressing the weaknesses of things that have had quite a following in the intervening and being told as a result "Your skills are out of date, old fashioned" when the young fools who were interviewing were enamored with Java or PhP or Javascript, all of which make me grumpy to some extant. I am amazed how lisp is now at the center of the Universe both for addressing failings in object oriented programming with side-effects, but offering real solutions to long standing issues such as concurancy and functional verses imparitive programming, and how old these issues are. Relearning elisp and learning something like Clojure really is now center stage for using Java and Javascript and other languages to address their very failings. How Ironic.

Even though I understand the intellectual progression of the evolution of programming represented here, and it is very fun to understand, I don't have much illusion that I could be a productive programmer ever again because even if you understand some useful concepts from computer science and can go back and read Knuth and Dygstra, if you can't type very well due to failing vision, your aren't going to get very far. Like the grumpy programmer I have aspirations as a writer reveraled in what I have written on the Internet over the years even though it is scattered about.

What is the very first thing you have to say to write a Java program as required by Sun's Class Libraries?

It is:

public static void main(String[] args)

This has to be shown to a complete and utter novice in the very first program he can write, and it is "biolerplate", as you put it, which that person will not understand at all without knowing quite a bit about object hierarchy and method prototypes. The design of acm.jar hides this nonsense, behind an object console. The interface for the novice is much simpler.

Java has been taught as an introductory programming language, and not necessarily to CS majors, only. It is widely used, especially by business, and I think that the way it was designed and sold to them was as a language that was intentionally designed to be hard to learn; only for people who could tough it out through a steep learning curve; lots of up-front concepts and details to learn before you can write your first useful program. I know, I took Sun's Java courses in the 1997 time frame. The most difficult part is not the language design, you can eventually learn the rationale for the way main is called, it is the complexity and number of class libraries. As proof of that note how fat the Java in a Nutshell book from O'Rieley is. Last time I looked it was close to 600 pages of dense text, Like PL/1, I think the language was designed to be obscure and to select for an elite that worked for a bank or financial company in their Glass House, and it was sold that way by Sun as a form of security by obscurity. Java will be used for a long time, but if you note the number of other languages with totally different syntax that use the JVM, that tells you that others think they can readily design a better language. The alternative interface in acm.jar, written by the ACM in 2006 should inform you as to how much it needed improvement as soon as Sun open sourced the class libraries.

One should be very suspicious of monolithic applications that purport to do better than a debugged pile of tools cobbled together with shell scripts, I mean SysVinit. This is similar to the disaster of Gnome Unity in Ubuntu, and much of the problem with Linux distributions seems to come from young business oriented people who have thinly vailed agendas to create captive markets, even though they are using FOSS to do that. I really don't want a Linux in which I can't use vi from the console with no gui to edit the startup scripts by hand. Nor for that matter do I like a distro that needs to be reinstalled every 18 months or so putting /home on the root filesystem so that a novice is forced to deal with gparted to save their files before they can reinstall, Either do away with the complexity of filesystems are make some install choices readily obvious that work around the pitfalls. Often what happens is that monolithic "easy" applications leave important stuff out and to fix their oversight you have to learn the underlying complexity anyway. Such an install (Ubuntu) should advise the user that it is safer to create two and possibly three new filesystems in the free space, one each for /, /home and swap, and not hide the choice. Either that or make upgrading an install much more robust or remove the filesystem dependancy altogether,

Don't agree. There seems to be even more of a disconnect between what market analysts say and how well an industry or company is doing. This is made worse by financializing, paying too much attention to quarterly bottom line and discouraging strategic vision. It is very much possible for management at a company to pay too much attention to what analysts think. It may be that if a significant number of a company's customers are banks and financial institutions that the management is much more vulnerable to the whims of the analysts. Apple has a much stronger consumer base than any similar computer companies that depended on sales to the finance sector. Maybe this listening too much to analysts is not a cause but just a sign of the real problem which is lack of imagination in the management of the company. If I contrast Steve Jobs with John Scully, it seems that the latter, being primarily a marketer, was more inclined to want to please analysts and industry pundits than think creatively about what he can persuade consumers to want. Steve Jobs had a vision of what his customers wanted and went about selling them to buy it. He was a rare combination of technical and marketing ability that would be hard to match in the run of the mill business school graduate who is outer directed and short on creative thinking. I do not know if Tin Cook is resting on Jobs' laurels or has good ideas of his own. Apple seems to be doing OK so far,

The value measured in about 1 CM of rise over the Western US. In Places which were covered by continental glaciers as recently as 12,00 YA, the change in elevation can be measured in feet and it is uneven. The evidence is that drainages have been reversed in places like Canada in historical time as the crust rebounds. Ice and water are relatively dense, so that the weight of a mile of ice can sufficiently weigh down the crust which floats on the plastically deformable mantle. Although rock seems rigid to you and I, its so-called rheology, over large distances and times makes it behave like putty. Putty and clay can be used in scale models of geology to study effects like faulting and folding because of this. Years ago an important contender for explaining mountain building was gravity tectonics, before active plate motions were found to be the main cause.