Self-driving cars might lower accident rates, but they won't do away with them completely. Equipment, especially complex equipment, does malfunction, and there are limits to what equipment can do. There will still be unexpected icy spots that the computer can't compensate for, and blowouts, and road debris, and so on.

And then there are the drivers of the OTHER cards on the road. Even if self-driving cars became a reality in 5 years, it will take years, maybe decades, for the cars to become economically priced. And then there are all the existing cars on the road. The average car on US roads is 10 years old, so we have to add at least another 15-20 years before the number of human-driven cars drops to negligible numbers.

Self-driving cars will do nothing to change the need for comprehensive coverage, such as hail damage, or theft.

Insurance coverage and pricing will change, but it won't be going away.

HIPAA imposes fines for each patient's record lost through security breaches, even if the medical provider "did not know (and by exercising reasonable diligence would not have known)" https://kb.iu.edu/d/ayzf that there was a breach. These kinds of punitive rules have scared the entire industry to death, and yet the open secret is that nobody is safe from breaches, or these fines. This story illustrates how the law has done little, if anything, to actually protect privacy.

Most providers react to HIPAA in one of two ways:
1) They over-react, creating stupid policies like refusing to tell even a patient's own spouse the details of a patient's medical condition, unless the proper paperwork has been filed, or
2) They under-react, blissfully ignoring any privacy concerns.

If we're going to try to regulate privacy in the medical industry, how about let's focus on the device and software makers with certification programs, and let hospitals and physicians get back to doing what they do best: treating illnesses.

It doesn't work out like that in practice. I spent a decent chunk of time in the Bering sea on the Carl Vinson during Pacex '89 and the primary constraints for flying were not ice on the deck.

The problem with this idea is, they would take your money and and give you privacy...for a while. But eventually, the lure of big bucks would make them cave, and they would sell your data anyway. All this would be allowed by unannounced changes to the TOS document, which would be hidden away on the site somewhere.

On the very, very rare occasion a longer trip is needed; just rent a car.

That's handwaving the problem away. Why should I have to rent a car if I want to hit the road? Even the Chevette I had as my first car (purchased used in 1989 for $400; sold new for about $5k in 1980) had no problems getting me to my first year of college 1900 miles away. It's been 25 years since I've gone that far, but I live in a part of the country where 250-300 miles (one-way) to get somewhere is nothing. If you're going to spend the kind of money the average electric car costs, it damn well better be able to do everything the car it'll replace can do, or else you're wasting time and money.

Yep. I havent seen a fixed code DIP-switch remote for 20 years.

Maybe not for garage doors, but the gate remote for my neighborhood has a block of 10 DIP switches inside. IIRC, the first two or three are flipped one way and the rest are flipped the other way (wow! such security!). Mine was issued in 2000, but the system probably was installed in '97 or '98.

A pixel is just one dot, or as Wikipedia puts it, the "smallest addressable element" of a digital display. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... If each of the 32x32 elements can be turned on or off, then they each constitute a pixel.

In the 1940's, my grandfather ran his rural house and dairy farm on 12 volts DC, because utility power hadn't yet reached his location. Now we have utility power everywhere, but we don't like it any more, so we're going back to batteries. Funny how things go in cycles.

Lollipop is to Android what Windows Vista was to Windows: Nice looking, but slow and buggy. It lags a lot, sometimes to the point of entirely freezing up. If they speed it up and clean it up, I'll be very happy.

What is missing from the discussion is Musk wanted to make a "home, but not home-home" school for his kids and decided to rope a few other parents along for the ride.

http://www.businessinsider.com...

I am not sure if this is partial reaction from his youthful years being bullied in South Africa, or the private school his kiddos were going to did not live up to Musk's standards, but I would be critical of educational coverage and results.

Interest rates have been so low that nobody wants to invest in bonds or other interest-bearing funds. Where else are people with money going to invest? Once interest rates start coming up, the picture is going to change dramatically.

It doesn't seem as bad as it was in the late 90's, when investors were throwing money at anyone who could do something "on a computer." At least this time around, most of the companies with high valuations actually do something valuable, even if they don't yet know how to make money. Still, there are a lot of crazy stock prices out there.

Even in California where we're paying $0.15 - $0.20 per kWh of electricity, electric vehicles save so much gas that they almost pay for themselves.

Only because you're getting ass-raped on gasoline as well. When I topped off the gas tank here in Vegas before driving down to LA last weekend to visit my nieces, I paid $3.04. I pulled over in Baker for a snack. The gas station next to the jerky place wanted somewhere around $4.50! Granted, Baker's never been the cheapest, but gas in Barstow was still around $3.70. I think it was $4.something around LA, and by the time I was running on fumes Sunday morning (driving down to San Diego to make everything worse), I ended up paying right at $4 per gallon ($3.999, if you want to be pedantic) for a full tank in Carlsbad.

Gasoline is sent to Las Vegas from California by pipeline, so how is it we're paying considerably less for the same fuel after it's been pumped through ~300 miles of pipe?

You are generally safe with Nexus devices, since you have the best chance of upgrading to the latest OS.

A device with an unlocked bootloader is also more likely to be more future-proof. I have a newer version of KitKat running on my Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 (4.4.4) than on my considerably newer Moto X (4.4). The tablet's running Cyanogenmod...have no idea if Samsung ever got around to spinning a KitKat build for it, and don't particularly care at this point as the only thing that doesn't work under Cyanogenmod is the IR blaster. My phone, OTOH? Motorola has pushed newer versions (maybe even Lollipop now), but the bootloader is locked and you can't even root newer firmware versions (rooting 4.4.4 requires an unlocked bootloader first).

That new phone that Asus introduced earlier this week sounds interesting, and there's already an unlock for it. The only downside is the ginormous, almost tablet-sized screen. The Moto X is barely larger than the iPhone 4 it replaced, but it seems hardly anybody wants to build a full-powered phone that'll still fit in your pocket anymore.

It is a clever trick to equivocate "insurance" and "access". It is possible to self-insure - a completely rational, actuarially-sound, choice for many young people.

QFT. There were a couple of time intervals in my 20s when I went without insurance, but that didn't stop me from hitting up the quick-care clinic and the pharmacy on the couple of occasions that a cold (or flu or whatever it was) wouldn't go away in a reasonable amount of time with OTC treatment.

Too bad 404care makes that illegal now. Perhaps some "Irish democracy" is warranted as a response.