Self driving cars on the Highway are on the way, if the pun is excused. There are quite a lot of experiments and development. There is an EU program, etc. Sure, to get them on the roads (and integrate their systems with highways etc) will certainly take at least another decade.

The point is, the subject is not a joke, as the article insinuated.

That said, I'd not trust Kurzweil's claims on e.g. economics or cancer research. I might give some credibility to experts in those areas.

"He concludes that social media promote social 'weak ties' which are not strong enough to motivate people to take big risks, such as imprisonment or attack, for social change."

Call me a cynic (-: cheap flattery works :-), but I can't imagine anything that would motivate me for that much of social change. Mostly because most other societal systems are more or less as good/bad (inside a factor of two) as the where I live.

And if I did get motivated to change society, I would support (or maybe even join!) a political party and try to get into the parliament. Since that is allowed where I live.

Sounds like good news for female boxers?

American climate weapons fits in a bit too well with:
Dictators must have external enemies. And people in non-democracies tend to believe in conspiracies -- after all, they live in one.

Let us hope this is a crank, or we should be sad (and scared!) about where Russia is going... :-(

I assume it is the Russian oil's fault. Countries with too much of their export income from natural resources never become democracies, if they weren't one already. (See "Resource curse".)

Linky linky?

He, you beat me ... with a decade. :-)

But that type of naivité which I mentioned is typical here. I'm not certain which place is worst, the difference might just be in style; a result from size differences and the Swedish' tendency to be group oriented.

You are probably right, because it would need a conspiracy to hide research results. But... remember the tobacco companies' bought research.

A while ago, I learned a new expression which I've never seen in my native Swedish media -- which do say something about at least Sweden's political trustworthiness:

Regulatory capture.

Can the Nook handle password-protected PDFs? (Some publishers sells ebooks like that.)

Funny you should say that.,,

I quite like this reference from the Perl world about understanding large systems: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=788328

If you've written a million lines in 20 years, that means 50K lines/year. Which (with vacation, Xmas, Easter) means about 5K lines a month. Divide that by 22 for number of work days and we get about three pages of code a day. (220+ lines).

I write more than three pages of code/day -- but you beat my daily average for any year in my life (meetings, refactoring, tests, configuring/sysadm stuff, handholding newbies, etc). :-(

I don't understand these complaints about the response times for the screens on e-readers.

I want to browse, at least when not reading literature. Also, I want a full A4 with note taking for browsing code (my own and others).

Thanks, that was informative. No mod points just now.

Well, the e-ink ones aren't cheap. I'm a consultant these days and earn enough not to be that price sensitive, but I hold out anyway.

I wait to see if the PixelQi screens delivers in a quarter or so, mostly for faster screen update times. (Then I get a full page of code with Emacs at the beach! Just have to move to someplace with better weather, so I can go to the beach.)

Quite a funny combination:

I'm the biggest Linux fanboi you'll ever meet [...] most of the time, if I just need to jump online, I boot to Windows.

The IE standard support can't be beaten, I guess... Pity you don't have support for Firefox or anything on the OS you're a "fanboi" for. :-)

Not a single on of their "sins" is immoral or unjust.

Thanks for the deep insight into monopoly economics and behaviour, like actively destroying standard compliance as a business practice.

I thought I was quite obviously ironic to what I commented on. Sorry for the confusion.