Just don't bring the green orb with you.

But I like toast and jam.

Was this a Fareed original, or yet another of his pieces of plagiarism?

Pretty sure it means 'return on investment' in this context, but as they don't supply the cost of the investment, the location these salaries are drawn from, the number of years after the degree, etc, etc, etc, it's just another bit of Dice-tastic link bait.

I'm too sexy for my hat, what do you think about that?

This open source policy is open for comments. :)

Yeah. Like I'd ever be caught DEAD or ALIVE in Arizona. Life is too short for that.

There are some owner operators as described, but most are beholden.

The problem with swapping drivers has to do with hours of service requirements. A bit too much detail to get into right now, unfortunately.

I should actually correct myself slightly: Wal-Mart (and others) have some in house drivers and some outsourced.

BTW, in discussions of the transport industry, don't get distracted/lied to by the companies. Some drivers think they are owner operators, when in practice, they aren't. They will lease/buy a truck from (as an example, all of the bigs do this) Schneider. As part of the lease terms, they can only accept loads from Schneider. It should be obvious that the 'owner' is an employee who has assumed much of the risk that the company would usually take on.

ShanghaiBill has a decent reply, but he misses a point: if the automated truck is cheaper, the big companies will drive that change in a heartbeat. The trick is that someone has to be convinced that they will be cheaper. They are unlikely to automatically accept that an automated truck is safer, faster, etc. One area where they are likely to be impressed is the possibility of 24 hour operations, rather than the 10 hour per day (rough) limits of human operated trucks. In addition to (possibly) being cheaper, this will allow faster shipments for more mundane goods (there are already plenty of ways to have fast shipping, but it is cost prohibitive to do for everything) which would offer them a competitive advantage. I suspect this last point will be the thin edge of the wedge.

Most large companies outsource their transport to JB Hunt, Schneider, etc. Sure, the big letters say 'WalMart', but in smaller, DOT minimum sized font, it often has another name.

G'day has always been the rendering - since at least Regency times, when t'was spoken aloud as such. ;-)

My one rule of robotics (and pointed sticks, cars, crackpipes and umbrellas) is this: my stuff ought to perform in accordance with my wishes.

There might be additional laws ("weld here and here, but nowhere else," or "use the rules in /etc/iptables/rules.v4" or "don't shoot at anyone whose IFF transponder returns the correct response") which vary by whatever the specific application is, but these rules aren't as important as The One above.

There are various corollaries that you can infer from the main law, but since they can be derived, they don't need to be laws themselves. (e.g. if my interests conflict with someone else's, then my robot and my umbrella ought to serve my interests at the expense of the other person's interests.)

With regard to harming other robots, that also can be derived. If I desire to kill a knight on a robot horse, then my robot ought to turn them into a pile of bloody gore and shredded circuitboards immediately. OTOH, if I don't desire to kill a robot, then my robot should not do things that incur unnecessary liabilities.