The last time I frequently used a US bus system -- about 15 years ago, in Pittsburgh -- they used a zone system, with the fare based on your origin and destination zones, and most bus routes crossing at least one zone boundary. The last time I used a public bus -- about 5 years ago, in Japan (Yamanouchi, Nagano Prefecture) -- riders took a numbered ticket when they boarded, and their exact fare to the next stop was displayed on an LCD panel. I would guess that US cities avoid exact metering in order to subsidize their passengers who live far away from their workplace; these are the most frequent riders, and tend to be lower-income.

Yes, and you have effectively described Uber's concept for driverless transport. It won't look anything like today's buses, and the only real similarity is that strangers share road vehicles.

If you go from ten single-occupancy cars to a ten-passenger bus, you've eliminated 90% of the vehicles at the (relatively low) cost of adding one more driver. Eliminating the bus driver gets you from eleven people in the bus to ten, which is probably not as important as other efficiency improvements. Also, buses are awful unless you have quite high population density -- lots of areas don't have enough prospective trip endpoints to justify mass transit.

And in your world, how do you deal with unicorn overpopulation?

When you have one district that breaks down mostly into two significantly different constituencies -- whether they are based on race, class, rural versus suburban, or whatever else -- the way politicians react in reality is that they focus their appeal on one of the constituencies, try to increase turnout for that constituency, and discourage turnout for the other one. It's just gerrymandering of a different kind.

What is a camera if not a glorified light absorption meter?

District-drawing very much should recognize communities. If you can avoid it, it does not make sense to have districts that are half suburban and half agricultural, or half high-end gentrified downtown and half working-class and poor. Unfortunately, as you point out, the judgment involved does make it easier to slip in some degree of gerrymandering.

The US is even better in that respect. If our federal government went out to lunch for 18 months (which might be a reduction for some of our Washington politicians...) we would still have 51 governments plus the territories.

Jean McKenzie has been Executive Vice President of Mattel since September 2012. She was named President of American Girl Jan. 1, 2013. Prior to re-joining Mattel in 2011 as Senior Vice President-Marketing, she was President and CEO of Gateway Learning Corporation and Senior Vice President for The Walt Disney Company. From 1989-1998, Ms. McKenzie served in various executive positions at Mattel working on the Barbie brand, most recently as Executive Vice President and GM of Worldwide Barbie for Mattel.

Not sure if this makes the screw-up better or worse...

A lack of sufficient auditing capability is what has kept CACert out of most browser CA bundles.

StartSSL.com provides free entry-level certificates with some level of verification, enough at least to satisfy the major browsers.

Presumably there will be a collision detection mechanism that nixes the old certificate and alerts you to such changes by e-mail.

Yes, there are ways around it, but that's true of any CA.

There shouldn't be just one organization with those two jobs. There should be an open, well-funded office in, say the National Institute for Standards and Technology that searches for vulnerabilities and has a responsible disclosure policy for everything it finds.

The Government has had this problem before - there used to be one body that handled both promotion and regulation of atomic energy in the US, the US Atomic Energy Commission. In 1974 it got broken up into two agencies, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (the regulator) and the Energy Research and Development Administration (the promoter).

Your "status card" is essentially recognition of the marriage by the government by another name. I have also barely scratched the surface of the issues. If the government doesn't recognize a marriage, then presumably it treats a "spouse's" inheritance as taxable income -- the US Supreme Court's first case on the question was over that very point (a lady in NY state died, the federal government's policy was to not recognize her state-recognized marriage to another lady, and thus the IRS wanted to tax the inheritance as income to the second woman). Maybe all inheritances should be tax-free, but a lot of people already seem sensitive over estate taxes now.

Government recognizes marriages for a lot of reasons, many relating to how much the two people are expected to rely on each other in case of hardship, and most of the rest relating to raising children. Even very good roommates are unlikely to share burdens in the same way, so it doesn't seem quite right to extend the current benefits of marriage to simple cohabitants.

So doctors should ask your estranged sister instead of your soul mate about what extreme measures you would approve of? Your retired parents should get all your worldly goods, and the person you made a life with should be left to beg them for money so that he or she can feed your children? In those cases in particular, most people would prefer that a spouse get precedence over blood relatives, and the law currently recognizes that priority.

My last hypo is this: Andi and Sam have a kid. They split up, and are now shacking up with others. Which of the adults are allowed to pick the kid up from school, or authorize field trips, or review medical records? Saying "family" doesn't cut it: there are two parents, who are perhaps unlikely to agree on major decisions, and two other step-parents (except that, in your proposed world, the law doesn't recognize such a relationship because it doesn't recognize either Andi or Sam as being re-married).

Legal recognition of "marriage" includes a lot of useful side effects that make it hard to get government out of recognizing marriages. Who should a hospital consult if a person is incapacitated but needs a medical decision to be made: a roommate, a blood relative, or someone else? Who inherits belongings if the decedent did not leave a will? If the parents of a child no longer live together, should their current cohabitants be regarded as legal guardians of the child?