I don't trust the "qualified people" ie the government to tell me the truth.

I miss Ms. DOS.

She was my first. OK. Really my virginity was lost on a cheap 8 bit Atari. But she was the one I really fell for. When we first met, she was at version 2.1. We were inseparable all the way through 6.22. That is 11 in Microsoft years! Sure I played around with Slackware and OS/2. Who didn't in those days? But it was her that I always came back to.

When we first met, she didn't even have a hard drive. She lived on floppies and we did the floppy shuffle together. We eventually got a huge 20 meg hard drive and with the help of Desqview and QEMM she learned to multitask. We ran a bulletin board together for many years. I loved to play with her batch files and her command line interface was something to behold. C:\ ! She would tease me with Bad command or file name when I touched her the ways she didn't like.

Then came that fateful Comdex. All the new stuff was running under windows. I knew it would soon be over for us. I installed win 95. But you could edit the msdos.sys file to make win95 boot in DOS. So she was still around but I saw less and less of her until she was just a pleasant memory.

But every once in a while some antiquated machine that is running MS DOS breaks down and someone will call me and I will go to her and remember the old days.

Now I have gone and got all sentimental. You kids get off my lawn!

Terry Pratchett forsaw this with his hex computer that ran on ants.

The logo was Anthill Inside!

They used bees for long term storage and it was secure. If anyone tried to get into the hive, they would be stung to death!

I'm part liberal and part libertarian. I want the government to provide me with all the services that I want and need. I want them to leave me the hell alone. And I want them to tax the hell out of corporations and regulate the hell out of them.

We already have them. We call them museum, planetariums, or colleges.

It could be low because it doesn't get very cold here in California.

Free will is a strange concept. If someone does research and predicts that there will be 30,000 suicides in the US next year, and then it turns out that he is correct, what does that say about free will? The 30000 people had intense personal reasons for their decision. But did they have free will?

How do you solve the problem of people intentionally trying to harm the system? Pranksters, hackers, terrorists, people who are pissed about automated cars, etc. would have a lot to gain if they had the ability to disrupt the transportation system. A few of them would have the necessary skills.

There are too many ways to hack the system. Law enforcement needs to have a way to signal the car to pull over and stop. This signal can he hacked.

Or a prankster manages to send a signal to all the cars on the freeway telling the computer that the freeway is closed ahead when it isn't. All of the cars exit the freeway and clog the surface streets.

The software will need to be updated from time to time. How will this be done. Typically by the dealer but I imagine that hackers will want to introduce their own creative modifications. Evil people might want to program the car to crash.

Suppose 100,000 automated cars are manufactured in 2015 (optimistic aren't I). Five years later it is discovered that this car could has a safety issue which requires a couple of additional sensors and a change to the computer. How is this handled? The manufacturer isn't really interested. The car is out of warranty. Do we make it illegal to drive it? Force the manufacturer to upgrade it? Raise the insurance bill?

The problem is not the computer crashing. You can solve that with redundant computers and sensors. The software can be designed for reliability. Windows is designed to work with a very large array of hardware, drivers, software and configuration options. This is a recipe for frequent crashes. But software to control cars would be single purpose.

One issue is what to do in the case of trouble. What if the car doesn't respond to commands? What if several of the redundant computers indicate a problem or a critical sensor stops giving intelligent input? What do you do? Stop the car wherever it is? Pull over to the side? Try to get off the freeway? Wake up the human?

I would like to see automated cars happen. But there are tremendous challenges to accomplishing it.

I used to read the posts on Yahoo but they are so full of garbage lately that I had to give it up. One in twenty comments actually has anything serious to say about the subject. Most are trolling, spam or someone ranting about a subject that has nothing to do with the topic.

One thing they could do is to make it easier to flag messages. On NPR, you can flag a message with a couple of clicks. Yahoo wants to know your life history.

I don't put my real name on these thing. 99 + % of the people who read it are harmless. But I don't like the idea of posting my real name in this world of identity theft. I'm not paranoid, it just seems a sensible precaution, like locking your house when you go out.

We have included Iran as one of the three members of the "axis of evil". It seems to me that paranoia is a reasonable response to the United States.

I don't know if the hikers were spies or innocent students. I don't know if stuxnet was designed to target Iran's nuclear facilities. But I don't blame them for being suspicious.

If the United States were less dictatorial and militaristic in it's policies, I think we would have a lot less trouble with foreign governments.

What else would they run? I doubt there is a Linux or mac version of the software to program Siemens PLC's.

I find that to really understand a book, I have to read it several times. Not every book is worth multiple read.

What about the people who read and reread only one book. In thinking of the very religious here.

Here is a video of Douglas Adams (of hitchhikers fame) talking about the kakapo and why they are endangered. The Kakapo part starts at 3:00 into the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3HR6mtkPP4&feature=related

We in the army were taking LSD a lot during the long, boring guard duty. So when we saw thing hovering in the sky, we just figured it was part of the trip.

Yes, I do know this from personal experience!