This is not a lifestyle I want to live. I can't imagine a future population truly being happy with this either.

It is a lifestyle I want*, and I suspect quite a lot of other people also want. And as the cost of a manual car go up; as you are stuck driving the same pace as all the strictly law-abiding autonomous cars; and as you stare out in traffic instead of surfing the web or throwing birds at pigs like the people in the cars around you, that lifestyle will appeal to more and more people who may not like it at first.

And soon you'll have a new generation of "drivers" that grew up with autonomous cars and used them when they were still too young to drive. Most of them will never see the point in spending a bunch of money and time learning how to drive manually. Once autonomous cars are out there, it will be only a matter of time until "driving" is an expensive, somewhat eccentric hobby you do mostly on a driving track.

* I already live that lifestyle in a way, as I don't have or need a car at all where I live. I only keep my license for use as an ID.

Not when the insurance companies artificially jack up the rates for human driven cars.

If humans are the cause of more accidents there's nothing artificial about it.

More realistically, I expect most people a generation from now will find the higher vehicle cost to be easily offset by not having to get a manual driving license, freeing up driving time, lower fuel consumption and using the car even when disabled, too young or otherwise not able to drive manually for whatever reason.

My local government granted Verizon an exception to the common carrier rules that allowed them a monopoly on ISP provision on fiber rather than requiring the free choice of ISP as with DSL in the same location.

Yes. Government is often bad when it comes to regulating telcos.

>Why not make physical connectivity a municipal service?

What part of 'corrupt government officials' don't you understand?

Bullshit.

The routers and fiber cost no more nor less if they are being used or not used.

Usage based billing is just another attempt to kill Netflix.

I'm surprised there hasn't been more mention of standards here, although I've had variable success with standards myself, and good success with open non-standard systems.

Good chioces: Qt, VTK, OpenGL has been extremely long-lived.

Mediocre choices: XML, wx (I moved to wx from Qt when TrollTech went insane over licensing, but have been slowly migrating back in recent years as wx support has decayed on platforms I'm interested in.)

Bad choices: XSLT, VRML

I still use XSLT for some stuff, but VRML was a mistake. Apparently you should stay away from four-letter-acronyms.

Summary: although I prefer standards over non-standards, open vs closed is the fundamental divider between good vs bad bets. Not everything open will survive, but nothing closed will.

PLoS has had comments for a long time, and the result is - mostly no comments at all. I suspect the problem is that you're posting in your professional capacity, under your real name. That means you can really hurt your reputation with an off-hand comment; on the other hand, they count for nothing as far as your CV and employment prospects are concerned.

Posting a comment is really a losing proposition, with no upside (you can always contact the first author directly with questions) and potential downsides. So people, rationally, don't comment. Unless PubMed has figured out a way around it, I suspect this will be the end result this time around as well.

Although I agree this is a fruitful and valuable approach to these problems, it seems to me to side-step the fundamental question, which is, "Why is there a classical world at all, or why is it only the classical world we are conscious ofl?" That is, why is consciousness in particular restricted only to the awareness of one particular entangled state, when all of them exist at the same time?

Decoherence approaches don't actually address this question. They simply take for granted that the only way we can become aware of the existence of quantum physics is via interference phenomena, and once coherence is lost due to entanglement with external sources of entropy, the possibility of awareness of the multiplicity of states necessarily vanishes.

But why is this a necessity? That is, why aren't we consciously aware by means other than interference phenomena of the underlying quantum-mechanical laws that govern the world of our experience? Is there something about the physics of consciousness that makes it so relentlessly classical? (I take suggestions that there is anything particularly "quantum" about consciousness, from Penrose to Chopra, as being obviously wrong-headed: the brain is a highly dissipative system.)

Basically anythin calling itself a guidline or framework. Some of the 'security recommendations' are also mush.
There are plenty of clear documents, but there are a lot more that are mushy

http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP.800-130.pdf
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-144/SP800-144.pdf
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/PubsDrafts.html#SP-800-161
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/PubsDrafts.html#SP-800-162
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/fips/fips140-2/fips1402.pdf
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/fips/fips190/fip190.txt
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/fips/fips201-1/FIPS-201-1-chng1.pdf

I haven't touched the CC stuff, because it wouldn't be fair.

While it may be unsurprising that a government contractor can't get security right, expecting anyone to adhere to government security specifications is unreasonable. Take a look at them, they are a vast mess of poorly written hand waving. There are some with specifics (E.G. some of the crypto algorithm stuff), but the balance of it is 'framework' crap.

You can make an honest job of adhering to federal computer security specs, but it's always possible to dig up another spec somewhere that contradicts it.

It's a real stretch to call a one-line proxy announcement that fits in the subject a "newsletter", though. It's quite the special case. The presentation he refers to was about a much more general situation with traditional, actual newsletters.

In his specific case he could put the information in the body of the email, thus forcing people to open it; or he could offer alternative delivery mechanisms through SMS or other channels alongside email for those that get caught out by spam filters.

You have a newsletter and problem being misfiled as spam? Put each new issue online (you probably do already) and offer an RSS feed with it. Some people greatly prefer RSS to a periodic email, and you can point people to it if they tell you the emails are getting blocked.

Likely is a subset of certain, so we're both right.

Oregon Voter Initiatives are often controversial, but if they try and push this legislation through, It seems likely there will be a voter initiative to ban such tracking based taxation and it will pass easily. People don't like this sort of thing.

Osaka (where I live) and Tokyo both have multiple subway and local train systems, by multiple companies and none of them have chosen to lengthen or shorten sets in response to demand. Local and rapid trains may have different number of cars and the frequency will vary throughout the day but the set length is always the same. I guess the extra work and complexity is not worth it.