It's pretty easy to get to a point where 99% of cars on roads are self-driving - you just reach the point where it's cheaper to subscribe to and use a low end car service that takes you door to door, than it costs to maintain and gas a beater car.

That, frankly, is an impossibly high bar. For a significant percentage of us (far more than 1%), even public transit subscriptions to get most of the places we want to go (ignoring the fact that it doesn't go everywhere we want to go) costs more than maintaining a car. Personally my car costs average $100/mo, while the combination of transit passes across counties would cost at least $130/mo. Taking the driver out of the equation isn't going to make a rideshare company anywhere near as efficient as a fixed route bus or train that carries hundreds of people.

The present and future of rideshare companies is in big cities where parking is difficult and expensive. There's no rural or even suburban future I can see for it. So until 99% of people live in cities (good luck), your idea seems implausible.

> I remember reading some studies on this, and the
> reduced cost of Uber/Lyft has indeed dropped drunk
> driving.

More than that, I'd wager that, if you were to run the numbers, Uber/Lyft would also be shown to be good for bars and nightclubs. That same $8 Uber home from the Castro used to be a $45 taxi ride. And that's if you could successfully hail a cab in the first place; because their dispatch number is something between an exercise in futility and a sick joke. With Uber and Lyft, I go out a lot more because of the ease and convenience of getting home. And the remainder of what would have gone to the taxi company versus Uber/Lyft? Well, that's 3 or 4 more drinks... profit to the bar or club and tip to the bartender. Everyone wins... except perhaps my liver.

As for the trip out, why not just use MUNI, or AC Transit, or whatever? I do. And, while I do have my complaints about it, it's perfectly fine for the trip out. You don't *have* to be so snooty as to refuse to set foot on mass transit, after all. And that $6 you save, taking transit versus a rideshare is most of another drink. :)

Do you even understand what actuaries do? You pay based on your risk of causing damage. You risk has not changed when there are self driving cars around. Why would they charge you more?

Seriously? Leading an article with Trump Derangement Syndrome? You know you people are a minority, right? It's not healthy to stay in echo chambers, you get the idea that everyone thinks like you do and deliberately inflammatory rhetoric is noncontroversial.

My theory is that it's more "security related", as in certain systems are monitored and other's aren't on the same scrutiny levels. As his activities where enough to trip up the psychics...

Um, actually, anonymous pamphlets were a thing when the Constitution was written.

"so the author can suffer the consequences of their speech" is literally what the Left used to call "chilling effect"

Not that I'm disagreeing with the advertising critique, but HPE has a pretty decent line of "local storage" called 3Par. They are one of the few DoD approved storage systems on the market.

They're not exempt from mandatory liability insurance. If Google is telling anything remotely resembling the truth about their Waymo division; once the data finds it into the hands of the insurance companies' actuaries, it will quickly become prohibitively expensive to drive human-operated cars, except perhaps occasionally as a hobby.

True. But when I point this out to leftists, that they are demonizing "Trump supporters" as a way of dealing with their own psychological problems, they don't seem to listen ...

Just illustrating the problem here. Who gets to decide what is "misinformation/disinformation"?

"Not to worry; we'll only censor bad stuff" is not reassuring ...

Cars are the absolute reverse of Sam Vines boot theory. The more you pay for a car, the more it's going to cost you every year to maintain it. If you buy a cheap car you tend to find it's cheap to maintain -- because it doesn't have all the fancy parts like power windows or self-driving to break, and because parts are easier and cheaper to find. Manual transmissions are the cheapest of all to buy and maintain, of course.

Personally, knowing I drove about 5K mi/yr, I spent $4000 on 10 year old (at the time) Ford Escort that had 45K miles on it with the knowledge that it should last me 10-20 more years. Your ideal option may vary.

Most things don't obey boot theory. Cheap stuff can actually last ages, if you take care of it. Cheap PCs can last decades, a cheap flip phone can last decades. Even cheap boots can probably be repaired to last quite a while -- I've made $10 walmart shoes last quite a few years with shoe goo.

The way in which being poor is expensive is almost entirely debt. If you're low income but have savings (like me), you're okay -- if you're higher income without savings, your money is going to burn from the loans you take out.

Speaking of fictional data storage, I want to know more about the crystal storage and the data blackout that happened years before the story being told in in Blade Runner 2049.

It used "fluidics" IIRC, and was prone to misplace some data. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... And in Gordon Dickson's Tactics of Mistake there was an aide to a major character who served by being able to recall data he'd memorized. Arguably no big deal but it is a SF novel that dealt with people with exceptional abilities. If we're going to mention mentats (who were more about interpreting data) then I guess we can mention this guy.

Prove it.

You mean like when the federal government wanted to bring people in with horrible wasting diseases, a few years back? And deliberately did so?

The CPU doesn't mediate or process all IO. Half the components on the motherboard can pass for full blown computers unto themselves now, with their own memory and io, and many of them can talk directly among each other without involving the CPU. Then you've got stuff like IME as a who 2nd computer running the first one.

The architecture is totally different now. It's just convenient to still think of it the same way, and the software is designed to make that the old metaphor logically applicable... again for convenience.

But its also why we have certain classes of vulnerability now. Because we _don't_ usually think about all these bits as first class computers in their own right but they _are_, and they can steal or modify data or run malicious code and the thing labelled "CPU" has no real control over any of it.

It came to us from the movie War Games.

There was an early James Blish novel where he uses DNA for memory (although i can't remember which one, ironically). The programing needed to run a military aircraft was stored in anaerobic bacteria so that if the aircraft was shot down, the containment vessel would rupture and the bacteria would die.... taking with them the secret programs. At least i think it was Blish. Been 40 years at least since i read that; seems some of my anaerobic bacteria may have already died.

Your redefinition of 'free speech' to mean "whatever you personally tolerate" is typical of left wing totalitarian doublespeak.

No, my definition of free speech is whatever the society you happen to live in will tolerate.

All rights are conditional. All of them. Nothing exists without context. Your "creator" did not endow you with a goddamn thing.

exactly, cracks for that sort of stuff are unlikely to pop up in a pwn2own competition, they are too valuable to give away so cheaply.

My '98 Escort really isn't in demand and never will be, so no, I'm poor. There are tens of millions of us in the USA, and tens of millions more who simply don't have any interest in buying another car until they have to. Any politician who proposes banning us all from the road would be writing a ticket to instant humiliation and early retirement.

There are also the rich people you mention with classic cars, but those aren't a problem for self-driving since the owners have plenty of money to pay for a retrofit. Some of them are even paying to have electric engines put into their classic cars.

"The problem isn't with the self-driving cars, it's with the cars that aren't self-driving, cars that are driven by idiots like me."

I've been saying for a while now that real adoption of self-driving cars will not be driven by early adopters, or even legislation. If Google/Waymo is even half right about the reduced accident rate of self-driving cars, the watershed will be driven by actuaries. Because a reduced accident rate also means a reduced insurance payout rate. Once enough of the data are in, the insurance companies will do the math and start raising the rates on human-driven cars. Once that drives a few more people to self-drivers, they'll have even more supporting data. And the insurance premiums will wind up set such that it will be prohibitively expensive for humans to drive their own cars; except, perhaps as a weekend hobby. But certainly, once the actuaries do their thing, none of us will be manually driving for our daily commute or errands.

It is my opinion that our human race is either on the brink of greatness or of self-annihilation.

If greatness was that likely wouldn't there already be somebody great, and wouldn't they have visited us?

I don't mean like Trump. I mean spacefaring aliens.

Wow. Someone got their Apple fanboi rage nerve tweaked there.

Not all companies are "computer companies". (And what is YOUR definition of a computer company? A company that produces microprocessors, software, boards, embedded systems, workstations, software, cloud services, IT support, Network security....?)

Not all companies outsource their products.

Not all companies offer a product as they offer services. (Some may even be "computer companies".)

Not all companies that offer services do not outsource the service to other companies.

Your argument about Apple being a "computer company" (whatever that is) and that all other "computer companies" are the same is not part of what I said at all. Also, since there is at least one "computer company" that does not outsource their products or services your argument null and void. Keep your hasty generalizations to yourself and try to keep up.

Stuff like that takes time. Time that could be used drawing up codes of conduct for acceptable pronoun usage.

Also, it's very very boring.

Which is convenient, given the great font of that disease that is South Florida.

The hard border in Ireland or the North Sea

I wasn't aware that the Good Friday Agreement
involved Denmark.

Looks like we found the yank!

Fortunately, I only use Google Voice as the recipient of my voicemail, which lets me do things like having separate responses for separate call groups (such as the " This number is no longer in service" message that telemarketers et. al. get.)