I've appointed myself spokesman for all those who don't want to talk to their cars. We still don't want to.

MyDash carried on a phone, however, I can really get behind. I get to keep my interface regardless of the car, and it can look like anything I want. There could be a variety of customizable "themes" available. I like it. Makes driving my car to the store and back while I stay home easier.

Yep. I was just thinking of how convincing a villain was Gene Simmons.

If patents were only assigned to citizens and could not be transferred to but other than another citizen. Only licensing to corporations for time periods of a year at a time would be allowed.

Sounds like conclusions from big utilities, GE, and Westinghouse. Nuclear fission will not grow to be that big a part in that short of a time. Wind and solar will continue to grow exponentially, and will supply a large percentage of our electricity. We'll still be using natural gas, but coal usage will be chiefly metallurgical. There'll be a lot of electric cars on the road, but it won't be 100% battery powered. 99% might have batteries or capacitors with some capacity, but many will have another power source on board, and many of them will be some type of ICEs. Maybe many will have fuel cells with sources of hydrogen on board (via a chemical reaction that releases it from some type of room-temperature liquid or solid-liquid combination). More than anything else, to cut back on CO2, there'll be higher energy efficiencies in buildings and vehicles. There'll be very little soot from man-made sources, and man-made surfaces will be more reflective. Burning petroleum will be far less common. Liquid biofuels will play a significant part. Much to my chagrine, though, most all of this will be under the control of large entities, not individuals making their own power. The big guys won't go away, they'll just switch business models and products.

A few years ago I read that some were working on systems where people's personal data is never decrypted yet some types of analytics can be performed on it. Has this work died or is it still ongoing and does it lead to anything useful from a privacy perspective?

One question per post... OK, so, Where are automotive interfaces headed?

Most of the recent changes I've seen to driver controls seem wrong-headed. So many require the driver to look down at some screen or closely-spaced identically-feeling buttons. Only a few decades ago, car makers began moving functions to stalks to put them within easy reach, but the makers' usage is so different that it's more confusing than ever, particularly in this day when people are more likely to drive several different vehicles in a single day. I like steering wheel-mounted buttons, but now there are so many it has again become confusing, and again, makers refuse to adopt any standard placements/usage. Can we have programmable controls that follow a driver from car to car, always working the way that particular driver prefers? Must we resort to voice control? I despise talking to my car or any other device, including my phone. Is there no solution until cars can be controlled by thought?

To those who modded this one: Whoosh!

I can think of a couple of of important differences off the bat...

1) spewing oil wells very quickly displace hot oil with cool oil, while a forest fire fuel just sits there, remaining hot

2) burning oil gushers are very compact, while forest fires are generally spread out

Reminds me of Idiocracy, Robocop, and a number of other films featuring dystopian futures.

I was going to argue that in the 70s things were moving in the right direction while in the 80s the reverse was true. But then you brought up Disco. Oh well.

as much as

True, but it does matter. Profits flow to headquarters and to the owners, and HQ employees and residents of their locations are affected by that. There are good reasons communities bid against one another to become the locations of corporate headquarters. "Prestige" isn't the only reason.

Sounds about like what kind of boxed-in thinking I'd expect from a bond manager. Maybe he could stretch himself a little and suggest golf carts.

Tesla's success in making very good cars surprised me, given how many failed to build cars in the past. But there's an important difference—most of those who failed were originally from the automaking industry. Looks like having that experience is more of a negative than a positive.

While giving $100M for such a cause sounds great, I would either study the issues or hire someone I trusted to study them and direct my money where it would do the most good.

Rewarding teachers for results is one of those things that sounds good until you start looking at how you're going to measure results. The standardized test craze of this millennium has done far more harm than good, focusing attention on those things easy to measure rather than those that are the most important. Good teachers recognize other good teachers. Students recognize good teachers. Sometimes parents do. But administrators only do if they know what a good teacher is—if they were once a good teacher, and many education administrators were not.

Tire manufacturers in the US resist tires having expiration dates. Why would they mind, since that might increase demand for replacements? Distributors and retailers might mind since it means their inventory loses market value quicker than it would otherwise. Supposedly the manufacturers fear that having an expiration date will imply to consumers that their tires should last until that date. The lifetime might be set at 6 years, which is longer than most tires' tread lasts.

To some degree I'd expect this sort of thinking to apply here.