Total zeroes certainly favor AND.

Nobody? We vintage programmers can not only make our C++ look like it was written decades ago, we can even make it look like FORTRAN!

You kids goto off my lawn!

Are you kidding? Version control is invaluable if you collaborate with co-authors. Most science these days is done collaboratively.

It started in 1988, but was definitely in production during the 90's.

I remember it, and loved it! A friend who invested heavily in Improv-related technology told me he found out (after losing his shirt) that Lotus had shut Improv down because it was eating into 1-2-3's market share, and they considered the latter their bread and butter product. So they ditched Improv, stuck with 1-2-3, and got their clocks cleaned by Microsoft.

when they can outdo the competition by going to ELEVEN!!!

Truth? That's easy! Truth is that which inconveniently refuses to change in order to conform to your prejudices.

Wow, that statement reeks of absolutism!

Yeah, and on top of the observation that this isn't a binary choice it should be noted that "equality" can be assessed along many dimensions.

It goes without saying that as a corollary I'd like to both have the means and live sufficiently long to accomplish this.

Reminds me of a conversation I had with a student about a dozen years ago. GPS was all shiny and new in the civilian world, and he was an ex Army Ranger. I thought he'd be really gung-ho about GPS, but he said he preferred a paper map. When I asked him his reasons, he said "A GPS unit with a bullet hole through it is a door stop. A map with a bullet hole through it is still a map."

Ever since then I've operated in the belief that robust technologies trump cool technologies.

Python libraries are simultaneously advantageous and disadvantageous. Yes, they give a lot of leverage to solving a broad variety of problems, but last I checked many of them remained available only in Python 2. The success of the Python library ecosystem has actually interfered with the adoption of Python 3.

Oops, forgot for a moment this is slashdot.

Pilots have a joke about the cockpit of the future. It will have an experienced pilot, manual override controls, and a German shepherd. The pilot is there to take the controls if necessary, and the dog is trained to bite the pilot if s/he reaches for the controls, thus ensuring that the pilot will only reach for the controls in a real emergency. In a pinch, you could replace the dog with high voltage running through the controls, eliminating the need for walkies.

I'm not trying to imply anything, I want to proclaim it boldly! Trains are not point-to-point. They don't go from your door to a destination, and don't generally provide direct routes. They don't depart at your convenience, and in the US, at least, they don't depart every ten minutes. In fact, there is virtually no reliable subway/tram/train service throughout the US except for a relatively small number of cities - more on why below.

Even where trains are available, it's not what I meant by point-to-point. When I lived in Boston, I took the subways/trams everywhere. However, the system is laid out as spokes, and to go to some destinations I'd have to ride all the way in to city center and then out another spoke. It made what would have been a 10 minute trip by autonomous vehicle into an hour to hour-and-a-half trip (depending on how the trains were running that day) with transfers. I chose to commute to a summer job by bicycle, 20 minutes each way, rather than lose 3-4 hours out of each day by having to ride the spoke system, transfer to buses, and then still hike a kilometer from the nearest bus stop to the job. However, biking wouldn't have been viable in the winter, nor would it be viable now that I'm older and missing the cartilage and half the ligaments from one knee. But part of my argument here is that the public transport solution wouldn't be viable for me now either - hiking a kilometer on ice and snow both ways daily would now be both painful and dangerous for me.

The fact that one end of the system is tethered to high-volume points of interest doesn't help people who live nowhere near any of the routes that go there.

The US is very large compared to Europe, and most folks here don't have access to transport systems comparable to those in Europe. Building the infrastructure isn't viable for most of the country because we have much lower population density. For better or worse, these are the reasons why the US has a more car-oriented society. I think autonomous vehicles can potentially have a huge impact here via pooled usage, reducing the need for individual ownership while still providing the point-to-point and on-demand benefits that are currently only available with privately owned cars.