There will always be a market for status. What form that status takes is another thing entirely.

And in the same spirit. Companies really like seeing 30 second movies about themselves on TV regardless of return on investment. Internet Ads are nowhere near as fun as TV ads or magazine ads you can put in a frame.

I might buy that line of reasoning if I couldn't fire up the Facebook website on my phone and tablet and compare the speed with the app.

They're having trouble returning a few hundred lines of text and 10 photos. Methinks HTML rendering speed is not even remotely their problem.

I can't develop on it without Windows. Same beef I have with iPhone (although the iPhone has an installed base to make be bother buying a mac).

Android is easy to develop on using pretty much any OS. This is the same reason that PHP and Java have more mindshare than C# and Visual Basic. Devs can run any OS they want and still get work done.

I thought his "popularity" was due to his anti-war, pro-drug, and pro-racism stances. Although generally not all 3 in the same Paulite.

True. But my hunch is that wouldn't be that much of an increase (although that hunch may be completely wrong), since the routing should be able to optimize so that drive to pick up worker B is a short optimized trip rather than an entire trip back to the suburbs. But even so you'd be adding contra-flow traffic so it shouldn't have that much impact.

I have two kids. We've used a diaper bag. We have two cars and switch it between them. If we need a stroller we put it in the car.

Who said banning human drivers? More likely we'll see the cost of insuring a human go up as people move to automated vehicles. As the insurance pool shrinks the cost will make it something only affordable to elites.

And you would still have the option of buying a private automated car. The potentials of an automated taxi fleet is obviously more exciting for those of us who don't like the expense of a car, then those who do.

And I think we're really getting away from the tax savings. You wouldn't need public transportation. You could just subsidize the service for low income residents. You could reduce the number of lanes on roads. You could eventually remove traffic lights. You wouldn't need police for traffic enforcement (although that one might lead to higher taxes).

A taxi fleet would be refreshed more often and it would be easier to switch out vehicles to use whatever technology is new and cheap. Also a taxi service would be less interested in any of the "features" that make current vehicles so inefficient and would program their vehicles to drive to get the best mileage possible.

My point about the tipping point is that people might be presented with the choice of pay some sum of money to convert their vehicle, or have to buy a new one, and might go with a subscription service instead.

We're at a point right now where the cost of gasoline has the potential to make a lot of people look for an alternative in their next vehicle. That might be a natural gas powered car, it might be electric. Or it might be a service.

I think people avoid the math on cars. If your entire family could go everywhere they want in a month, with no auto insurance bill, no gasoline bill, and no car payments or repairs. How much would you pay for that? If a car service could provide that for $500/month would that make you consider moving? How about $200/month? What if gas hits $7/gallon?

People love their cars. But cars are a recent invention. And while they love them being their personal space, people are also cheap. However this plays out it'll be interesting.

Wouldn't work is a bit strong. Currently there's pretty much one car for every person in the US to get to work. That's a huge fleet. Even if you you did simplest blocking you could have 6:00am, 6:30am, 7:00am. 7:30am, 8:00am, and 8:30am slots. Most commutes are less than 30 minutes. With that incredibly simplistic system you just replaced 6 cars with 1. But by dividing the number of cars by 1/6th you've reduced cars on the road, so you've reduced traffic. And by reducing human error you've reduced traffic. So perhaps it'll only take 15 minutes to get those passengers to work. Now you can have 12 slots.

Add on top of that economic incentives to move your commute to a less popular time (perhaps $1.00 extra per day if you want to leave at 8am), and the numbers start getting very, very feasible.

That only seems like a problem until you realize how error prone humans are. This only has to be better than humans. Which shouldn't be hard. At the very least you can be assured the robot isn't going to actively attempt to run cyclists off the road. Which is not something that can be said for human drivers.

Plus taxes for roads, plus gasoline, plus insurance. Cars are very pricey. And note I said for most people. I believe there are going to be holdouts. People who really love cars and germaphobes will probably hold on to them for quite a while.

I think this will be mostly the end of private cars for the majority of us. It seems ridiculous now, but once people start looking at the cost of owning a car versus a well priced car service I think the transition will be fast. Especially among the young.

We'll probably be able to get by with a fleet of super-effecient driverless taxi cabs. I image paying a couple hundred bucks a month to have car come and pick me up whenever I need one.

You could get even more efficiency by offering a reduced rate for those willing to share a car. The system could efficiently route, pickup up multiple passengers and dropping them off.