You don't need land, you need space with light.

You do need water, which often falls from the sky (or can be teased out of the air). It doesn't have to be drinkable water.

And you need nutrients for your plants, which can be made from recycled plants plus bacteria (which are free), aka compost.

The biggest problem is space with light. And I see a lot of parking lots around here that would be perfect if we switched to Johnny-cabs and don't need parking lots any more.

I live in a universe where food and shelter grow on trees.

Seriously, though, if you have a hard time imagining what an economy with free subsistence could look like, read _Diamond Age_.

Basic, bland, subsistence-level food and shelter are not difficult to create from infinitely recyclable materials once you can remove labor from the equation. There is still an energy cost of course, so maybe the price of your house is 1000 kWh on a stationary bicycle. Yes, it's a grind. But you can play video games while you generate, so it's actually kind of fun.

Just don't think about what was recycled in order to make your dinner...

Build up. Dig down. Viola, built real estate. Robots can do that.

I live in a high-rise in NYC, built by human hands in 2009. It leaks like crazy, and I sincerely wish it had been built by robots. If we wait long enough to fix it, it may be fixed by robots! At least a robot would follow the engineer's specifications.

Who do you suppose owns these tracts of land, now? I guess I'm just assuming that the 250 acres of woods wasn't literally your back yard, but maybe it was.

Anyway, there should be property records for all of the fields "discovered" in the LIDAR map. When the farmers abandoned their farms, were they purchased by the state as watershed or open space, or by developers who never did anything with them, or what?

And if you take pictures of your kids with that phone, you're a pedophile terrorist.

But why bother with the charade? In other police states, people disappear with no reason. There is no secret court. There is no "process". They just do what needs to be done. Opposition politicians, investigative journalists, enemies of those in power, and, in many cases, friends of those in power are arrested one day and never heard from again. That hasn't been happening. Stupid cowboy shit like bugging the phones of world leaders, yes. Compelling the secrecy of secret surveillance, yes. But as far as I know, the Feds aren't shredding the Bill of Rights (outside of airports, but that's a special case of its own--you can fly anywhere without being searched, just not on a major carrier).

So are we at the end of a 12-year transitional period that spans two administrations? OR is all of this cloak and dagger stuff considered genuinely necessary by a law enforcement apparatus that really really wants to operate legally but feels that tipping off criminals will make them impossible to catch?

Gag orders are as undemocratic as it gets, and way too blunt an instrument for a society that can and should have come up with a more refined successor to the PATRIOT Act by now. But there isn't anything reported so far that is inconsistent with the law -as written-. Declaring the Constitution null and void based on the actions of the NSA and FBI to "Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism" is a bit premature, given that they are doing so with the blessing of Congress.

No, you can't sue the government.

Because if you could, we could shut down NSA wiretapping in a heartbeat by bringing a massive class action suit against them, where every victim of a crime that could have been prevented by NSA surveillance between 2005 and 2013 would be a member of the class.

If you ever watch "Person of Interest" that's exactly the kind of crimes I'm talking about -- the "irrelevant list" of criminals that are ignored because they don't touch national security.

What the hell good is a police state if we still have violent crime in our everyday lives? The government should be held accountable for not enforcing the law if they have the ready means to do so.

And yes, this is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, because of course that kind of society would be *monstrous* without real reform of many areas of law. But the fastest path to reform is when rich, powerful people (and their children) are arrested with the same frequency as poor, powerless people. Wealth and power provide the means to hide from traditional law enforcement, but not from the kind of data mining that the NSA is (theoretically) doing.

Then again, imagine how much safer it will be to skate, skateboard, cycle, fly kites, walk the dog, or participate in just about any other form of exercise that happens to take place on or near a roadway. If cycling deaths drop with the same rapidity as automobile deaths, cycling will become A LOT more appealing to risk-averse people. Walking/cycling/etc to music will also become safer, and music encourages more strenuous activity.

There is also every chance that you'll get more casual exercise, just by having more free time and less stress.

This is a really interesting point.

But the fleet could simply drive itself back out of lower Manhattan to areas with cheaper parking/storage facilities. After all, the "reverse commute" is usually pretty light. Also, a large percentage of driverless cars would make multiple inbound trips since people's workdays start at different times. The problem is not dissimilar to what already happens with the taxi and limousine fleet.

Now, if you wanted to own your own driverless car, then it gets interesting. Since you're going to pay for parking for the car, you have an incentive to send it back out of the city to your home garage, or at least to a cheaper parking space across the river. There is absolutely no reason for you to park your car, er, have your car park downtown just because that's where you work.

This seems really complicated. Why not just track the RFID signature generated by the various parts of the car which are tagged? Tires, replacement parts, items in the trunk, ID badges on the passengers....

Except for the part where if you control the domain registration you can have a new SSL cert issued within minutes.

Oh, and I get it now, duh. The idea is that if GRC's server sees the same fingerprint you do, then you're good. Nice hack, and something you could do yourself with your own cloud server.

But what if it doesn't, and the reason is that Google is using different certificates for different regions?

Well okay, but someone could build a *much* better version of that. And mirror it out to other sites. How do you know you can trust the certificate of grc.com?

But as a proof of concept for what all secure site operators and their Certificate Authorities should already be doing, yeah.

Yes, there is a simple solution.

Google should post, in a permanent, obvious location, a list of the SSL Certificates they are using along with the certificate fingerprints.

This list should be mirrored by other parties and the issuing CA to prevent the problem where someone with a forged cert can post their own list. They could also mirror the list in DNS TXT records.

This should be standard for every well-known site that uses SSL, and it should be a service provided automatically by every Certificate Authority.

I'm sick to death on non-transparent CAs. Publish the certs you sign. Publish your revocation lists. Stop assuming that no one understands what you do or that you don't have a responsibility beyond lining your own pockets.

I was in my early 20s when Myst came out. The visual design turned me off, it looked like someone's coked-out New Age fantasy come to life. Like a wine bar on steroids, all brass rail and ferns and bubbling water. No thanks.

Now, "The Neverhood", on the other hand... that was like being dropped into the middle of a Gumby adventure. That game rocked.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neverhood

I know, off-topic since not an open world game. But it was puzzle-solving and on CD-ROM, so...