You have a good point about trusting strangers (I did not mean to imply danger on every corner), however I believe that the whole point of the article is whether we/society should permit children under the legal driving age to ride alone in one of these vehicles? It is fine to say "trust the parents judgement" to a point, but there will be stupid parents, and we need rules that permit us to hold them accountable. Think of the parents who wants some time to relax, and rather than hire a babysitter, puts the child in the car and programs it for a three hour tour of the area. This would be OK for a child at 16, dubious (at best) at 8, and criminal at 4. I suspect that there are laws are already in place. In my state, you are not permitted to leave a child under the age of 10 unsupervised for any length of time, and then only for a few hours until 12.

I think there is a difference between letting a 6yo walk to school, and take a long trip alone in an autonomous car. In one case there are familiar sights and people all around. The child likely knows where to go for help, and whom to trust. In the other case they possibly don't, and trusting strangers for help becomes more dangerous.

Not all doctors actually practice medicine and may not be licensed by a governing body. Since most states seem to keep the names of the individuals who participate in the process a secret, we cannot state with certainty that ALL those with a Doctor of Medicine degree (or equivalent) refuse to support the application of the death penalty.

This has become a problem because doctors are generally refusing to involve themselves in the process. From what I have heard from professionals, it can be difficult to properly insert a needle into a person. It becomes easier with practice, but the people administering this are only doing this a few times per year so there is little experience with the technique. Plus some drug companies are refusing to provide the tried and true cocktails, so states are having to find different drugs, again with little or no help from medical professionals.

I thought the same thing. I would love to see more analysis on that $300k figure of annual revenue per officer. Is that uniform across the country, or are there a small number of communities with aggressive enforcement? How many police hours are dedicated to ticket enforcement vs. other duties, and how does that change in urban, suburban, and rural areas of the country? My guess is that urban police don't spend as much time enforcing speeding laws as their suburban and rural counterparts. However something else to consider is parking tickets, which do generate a lot of revenue for many urban areas. Since my driver-less car can drop me off at the curb, and find parking anywhere, or just drive around until needed, there will far fewer tickets written here too.

I am going to guess that the workstations that allow sailors to use email are difficult to remove and carry off the ship. I believe that the intent of these e-readers is for them to be mobile, possibly allowing them to go ashore. Since they are read only, their value if stolen is low. They contain no information about the ship/sailor, and have little resale value since they have limited capabilities.

I don't know much about this subject, but why does the FAA need dominion over all thing above the ground? If I am flying a device under a certain altitude (250 ft?) under a certain mass, at less than a certain speed, more than a certain distance from an airport, why does the FAA care? Are they worried that there will be too many drones in the air? Seems a bit far fetched for the near future, and you can begin to regulate when there is a problem. Are they worried that my toy drone will fail, and fall on a house? I would be just as liable if I threw a rock at the same house, and as long as the drone is not too massive, the potential for serious harm is not all that great.

I agree that they have become that over time, but that is not how they started out. The first mobile phones were dumb and were tightly linked to the network technology. So it made sense for the network operator to provide the phone. Then an arms race to pack features into those phones started among the network operators. Now they are mostly interoperable among the networks, and can even operate independent of them, however the network operators are entrenched, and rely on the revenue the phones produce for the company. It is a hard model to break.

The Internet and the laptop were developed separately, and one does not require the other to function. The same thing for the automobile, early autos could use one of a few sources of fuel, and the fuel was useful, even if you didn't own an auto. When the first telephone lines were installed you needed a phone/handset to be able to make use of them, and you had to rent/buy your phone from the phone company.

We need to bring back those days of long compile times: xkcd - Compiling

Some friends and I had found a copy of The Oregon Trail for the Apple II. We played it so much that we wore the disk out. Good times!

I recall that Win95 came with a crazy number of floppies, on the order of 15-20. Or was that NT that I am thinking of? Thank god for the invention of the CD-ROM.

I agree, there is way too much over thinking going on here. Many states will issue second birth certificates. I ordered duplicates when my children were born. I now keep one copy at home in a fire resistant box, and the second in a safe deposit box. An insurance rep. recommended to me that you keep your fire resistant box next to something large, like a washing machine, the reason being that large steal items will be easier to locate, especially if the structure around it were to collapse. This would hopefully expedite the return of your important papers.

Similar to my experience. We replaced most of our machines with 5 1/4" in 97 I recall. We did keep one lab's worth of machines around with both types, so you could use/transfer your older formats. I recall many students coming to the help desk with bent, folded, otherwise mangled 5 1/4" disks (and 3 1/2" for that matter) who wanted us to fix them. They were often SOL. I felt bad for most of them.

I think that is the point the OP was trying to make. The more casual litigants would simply drop the case, either because they don't have the will power to go the distance (however short it my be) with EULA, or they are truly dumb and believe that "Like=signing a document".