Well, on the plus side, 90% of them are already dead...

There are schemes like ZipCar that give you access to one of a fleet of cars for short periods. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to extend this to self-driving vehicles. I don't see taxi companies that have human drivers competing with ones that don't - the driver is a significant part of the total cost.

Yes, I too find it difficult to believe that a vehicle using sensors with centimetre precision on nearby obstacles and penetration through rain and fog, direct feedback from the wheels as to current grip levels, the ability to control the angle of the wheels to a single degree or better, and sub-millisecond response controller times, could possibly be better than a human.

Every morning, I turn on my shower and let potable water run down the drain while I wait for the it to heat up. The fact that I have hot running water, and can afford to let potable water go to waste like that without much thought places me not just in the wealthiest 10% of people currently alive, but in the wealthiest 1% of people who have ever lived. Spending a moment pondering that in the morning makes you feel very lucky to be born into a society that can take such things for granted.

Microsoft's ad business is a tiny fraction of their total income though. They could easily afford to lose it. Google couldn't.

Most pizza delivery motorcycles have a large enclosed box on the back that can hold a stack of pizzas. It's thick, insulated, plastic and so keeps them warm. You seem to be missing the grandparent's 'like the rest of the world' comment when you say that motorcycles 'just wouldn't work'. They do in a lot of places...

Given the amount of effort that Microsoft puts into killing competitors, and the hostility between Apple and Google, I'm surprised that IE and Safari don't come with ad blocking out of the box. Making sure IE users never saw Google ads would would hurt Google's revenues a lot more than anything else Microsoft has done.

As I recall, the FDIC limit protects individuals, not accounts. You are insured up to that limit as the total of all of your accounts, not per account. You'd need to split your money between different banks. Even then, the FDIC payout isn't immediate, so you still have the problem of companies losing liquidity.

Most people don't, but most companies do. The FDIC limits are pretty low and it's quite easy for a month's payroll for a medium-sized company to be over it. How many people would have suffered if their employers had suddenly not had enough liquid capital to cover their salary? How many businesses would have closed if they'd been unable to purchase anything for a few months?

Most cybersecurity jobs are in the private sector and don't require security clearance. They're related to ensuring that commercially sensitive information stays private (employees don't wander off with copies, competitors don't hack in, and so on). A lot of it is the same sort of task as the non-cyber variant: checking that the systems you think are secure really are, investigating when they're not, designing policies to make sure that they remain so if they are.

If you're asking an art professor about HCI, then you're doing it wrong. Try looking over in cognitive psychology for people who can give useful input.

Last time I had a story accepted, it was edited. By which I mean they deleted random bits and introduced a typo. If they're going to modify things, they could at least improve them...

Have you ever tried breathing in a city like New York or London? If I lived in either, I'd be advocating socialised buying of EVs for anyone who wanted one...

New York has both state and city sales taxes. Sales taxes are generally regarded as regressive, so poor people definitely do pay tax there...

Stopping in the middle of the street in NYC is largely impossible, as the precondition - moving in the street in NYC - is almost never met.