Human effort is the only thing that requires compensation.

Careful there. Raw materials cost in proportion to their rarity and difficulty in digging them up. Service providers (Banks, ISPs, Telecoms) routinely charge inflated BS fees, which, if charged rationally, would amount to billionths of a cent.Government licensing fees, fines and taxes also have little relationship to reality outside of what the market will bear. In commerce, the relationship between real value and dollar cost is a matter of power politics (CEO vs worker wages).

In a competitive environment, those companies that don't adopt the latest tools to keep costs as low as possible for a given level of quality are eventually driven out of business. Even boutique manufacturers such as Lamborghini and Rolls-Royce have crap-tons of automation.

"Penny?" knock knock knock. "Penny?" knock knock knock. "Penny?"

Time to eat a fly...

Also: How do you keep a 30 kW laser, at any frequency, from blinding everybody in the general direction of the target?

Some of these things work in IR so scattered/reflected light might burn your head off but it won't blind anybody.

Here's a question: if self learning were possible to the extent we're talking about, why haven't we seen it yet?

On the one hand, an SF writer wants to challenge the reader's beliefs, but if you take things too far, the characters become unrecognizable. How do you write dialog, for example, between beings with digital RF implants instead of speech? And let's face it, with advanced technologies, the human body itself will likely become obsolete in a century, tops. Stories like this are not only a huge challenge to write, readers won't know what to make of them. People read for escapism, and to have their perspectives stretched, but they're also looking for morality tales where good triumphs and order's restored. They want characters they can relate to, even to a small degree.

What the US Can Learn From Canada's Internet Policy

One good lawsuit would give Zoosk some motivation to cut the crap.

Yeah, but every time you engage the manual mode, your insurance company will ding you 500 quatloos.

The continued collapse of the middle class will mean fewer and fewer will own cars outright... the self-driving aspect means you can tell a car to pick you up and take you to destination X, maybe with less hassle and delay than with present-day cabs, for those few occasions you really need one. Less car ownership means less revenues to the state, which means they'll REALLY have to jack up the fees to make up for it. Electric and hybrid cars have already given states fits because of less fuel taxes paid, and now they're trying to come up with per-mile-driven schemes.

why would anyone pay the fine?

If you're a student, guess what? The university can suspend your grades and privileges till you cough it up.

Like how much should I have paid for a movie when it was just released or how much should I be paying for it now, 20 years later.

Check out the $1 videos at any garage sale.

Sorry, the "red scanner" was Gort, also from Day the Earth Stood Still. At least Larson watched movies...