Planet Money did an analysis of the issue awhile back, and discovered that the habit of people to let coins collect in jars & drawers, while it would benefit the government, would alter the math and not end up saving us if we made the switch.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/11/29/166103071/no-killing-the-dollar-bill-would-not-save-the-government-money

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/04/19/150976150/should-we-kill-the-dollar-bill

Whoever has invented a perpetual motion air compressor has a Nobel in Physics coming their way soon.

I've never understood why this issue is never discussed. You're taking energy out of the system, and wind from people downstream. Local weather patterns aren't closed systems.

Might want to check this out: https://opendesignengine.net/ http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/10/open-hardware-needs-a-sourceforge-of-its-own-by-mach-30-kickstarter.html

Teachers submit students' papers to turnitin, those papers are checked against their database of essays then added to the cache of essays to check future papers against. Given that they make people pay to increase their stockpile of documents to check against, I'm not surprised they're playing both sides. It's a pretty simple way to make easy money off other people's work.

Well if you're creating a db of measurements or values, like dimensions of various objects, or automobile specifications, there's much less bickering to be done. If the nature of the DB isn't open ended && subjective, you avoid lots of landmines.

I've had some ideas for wiki-like databases for awhile now, if this were open people could create some really cool open information sets

In bigger cities/metro areas, they'll use those cameras to keep tabs on traffic from a command center, but oftentimes the speed data is collected by antennas near the cameras that track the times that people with EZ-PASS/EZ-TAG/RFID toll passes go by each point.

Anonymized RFID data is analyzed to see how long it takes for a vehicle to move from one sampling point to the next, giving avg speed for each segment, and this data is aggregated to give average traffic speeds.

Where do they think the information on real time traffic speeds for various commuter routes comes from? People also complain about governments not addressing congestion issues at certain locations, this sort of data, along with average speeds is how municipalities make determinations on what sort of road construction to do "The sat-navs in TomTom's Live range all feature built-in 3G data cards, which feed location and route information back to a central server, which allows TomTom to create a map of congestion hotspots. It's now emerged that this data, however, along with a user's speed, is being made available to local governments and authorities."

At least not yet, it doesn't. But there are many aspects of it that are emerging that come closer to approaching the rate of progress you see in the tech industry. The pace of technological advancement in recent decades has been facilitated by Moore's Law. Only recently has the medical community been able begin taking advantage of this. Now there are advancements like imaging/MRI systems doubling the number of "slices" they can scan simultaneously, every so often, use of microchips to detect cancer markers, etc. Andy Kessler wrote a book about this convergence called The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (and Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/17/1623217&from=rss http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/006113029X/andykessler-20