Yeah... note to self: All the good engineers are going to leave, so all of GM's future cars are probably going to be well-described by all the forbidden words.

It could also be a grid engineer's best friend. You just have to change the way you think about it - the cars would be a *massive* local storage resource. The VAST majority of people are just going to be plugging their cars in overnight at home, and starting with a full "tank" every morning. I could imagine a system where, once electric cars are ubiquitous, most parking lots and cars would be designed so that when you park, your car just automatically gets hooked into the local grid. You set some parameters on the car for min/max charge levels and buy/sell price limits, and suddenly you don't have to worry so much about demand spikes. Demand goes up, the price/kWh goes up, and once it starts passing the "sell" threshold of the local automobile population, they start discharging into the grid. You just tell the car "keep at least X% charge so I can get home." If I show up nearly empty, and there's 1000 other cars in the lot mostly full, they could charge mine without ever making demands on the grid.

Actually, no. The problem is, they race by, stop, and then are in your way as you cruise up to the green light, causing you to have to slow down/stop anyway.

Well, if you're encrypting, it means the keeper of the data isn't supposed to know what it is, which means they can't do any data mining, selling, etc. of it anyway, which would be where the ability to do queries on the data would be useful. If you're encrypting everything, then all you need is to be able to find the records, and you could use hashed account names or something to index those.

So yes, it would be difficult to search/sort on the encrypted data, but then that's sort of the whole point...

I imagine they'd do something similar to how some of the new suspension bridge cables are designed. The main cables are actually cable bundles, and they're made so that individual strands can be replaced if necessary.

HP has been notorious for doing things like you describe... just proves the GP's point, I think. :)

Exactly... Could be the government or private company, but we just need a law that says no single entity (or parent, sibling or subsidiary entity) can own more than one of physical infrastructure, connectivity, or content generation.

Well, the metering *sort* of makes sense, but really the problem is that ISPs lie like crazy when they sell you a connection.
What they say is "50Mbit for $49.95/mo! **"
** (that you can't use at 50Mbit all the time because it's way oversubscribed)

What they *should* be doing is selling various combinations of guaranteed/burst, so people know what they're actually getting. I have a feeling that "unlimited 50Mbit" really means something more like "512kbit guaranteed, 50Mbit burst."

Actually, it went like this:
Win 95 - crap
Win 95 OSR2 - OK
Win 98 - crap
Win 98SE - OK
Win ME - crap ...

The question is, why the heck not? And why limit it to workplaces? It would be a great incentive for businesses to provide charging hookups.
Just make it so that both the cars and the chargers are smart. I can charge my car at home at night (maybe with one of those, "free nights" plans that a few electric companies have) when the rates fall below a certain point. Then I set the car to sell up to X% of capacity, if it can do so above Y price, or charge if it's hooked up somewhere below Z price. The businesses can just tell the charging stations "buy as much as you can at 10% less than what I'm paying for grid power right now", or whatever.
Once there are enough places like this to plug in, you can park anywhere, plug in, and know that the car will try to maintain enough charge to get home, and make a quick buck if it can.

I was thinking more along the lines of "decorating" my house with balloons on wires (kind of like the navy did in WWII), and if any of these flies over my house, there's a good chance it will end up "crashed" in my yard.

Some modern ABS systems can detect snow, and will actually add in a "lock the wheels for a second" every so often just for this reason if they think they're on snow.

Or change the way you check out. Put RFID tags on stuff so I can just bag stuff as I shop, then pop the bags on a reader and swipe my card on the way out. That would actually get me using my own bags.

You can't forgive yourself, because there's nothing to forgive. I haven't had to go through this with a family member (thank God), but I have with my cat who had cancer. When there's nothing more than can be done, and your loved one is doomed to suffer terribly and inevitably die, keeping them alive because you don't want to lose them, or are afraid of what you'll feel like if you allow euthanasia is ultimately quite selfish. Realize that what you're doing for them is actually a great act of love - you're accepting that you'll live with the memory of what you're doing, because you're doing what's best for *them*, not what's easiest for *you.*

It means throwing it in the car and taking it back to the store to demand a refund, and if I don't get it, calling the credit card company and doing a charge back.