"Rush hour" will become an anachronistic misnomer, as driverless cars could move at open freeway speeds, even with (increasingly rare) high traffic density. This will make its first appearance in formerly-HOV lanes. I imagine watching cars travelling 65mph -- even when they're nearly bumper-to-bumper -- will make many logjammed drivers in the human/slow lanes think twice about their insistence on being in "control".

As if the chasm between haves and the have-nots wasn't wide enough already... now lucking into a wealthy family will get the "born on 3rd base" advantages amplified by an order of magnitude.

Specific consequences are impossible to predict, but I susect the kind of permanent, intergenerational inequality this would engender would not make for a more peaceful planet.

As a cancer survivor (grade 4 GBMO), I am a natural mutant with a lot at stake. But altering genes to prevent disease is not the same thing as optimizing your progeny's IQ or height.

Have you _ever_ been to the south of the US? Racism is very strong there, not just anti-black but anti-you-aren't-exactly-like-me. Try it sometime.

Lots of tears over Usenet, but what about Fidonet??

If a technology or mode of communication means soo much to us, then, given that Usenet is not owned by Comcast, what is to stop us from cooking up a free and useful solution that does work? If geeks created Usenet, why do we have to let Comcast "kill" it?

I know it is not an option everywhere, but I do know that where I live, we have more than Comcast as an option for ISP... if someone wants Usenet here, they can just vote with their feet and get a DSL line from Verizon or one of the local telcom providers. Speed may not be the same, but it is up to use to decide what is important - not Comcast. They can say, well we dropped Usenet, but speed is more important anyway... and we can say that, no, Usenet is more important, and switch ISPs.

None of us has enough information to be sure, but I'm a betting man,
and I bet it's the same lying cheating frauds who handed Bush two consecutive ill-gotten "wins"
that are behind this.

The Republican machine stands to gain from a Clinton nomination,
because national polls show that while Obama would handily beat any Republican nominee,
Clinton would likely lose to any Republican candidate.

Here's hoping Obama can win anyway, and more importantly that the system be corrected for once and all,
the long-term viability of our democracy is at risk.

Amen to the calls for a manual recount, and for eliminating diebold from the mix, and for paper trails, etc.

Checkout www.freenas.org the live CD runs from CD, with configuration in an XML on floppy or USB flash and all your disk interfaces (aside from the CD drive, sorry) are just that - for disks.

There are a couple of limitations, but hey, get your hands dirty and help fix them!