Since the US Constitution states that the purpose of patents is to advance the useful arts and sciences, and interoperability is key to that advance, all interfaces (whether human-machine or machine-machine) should only be patentable if they are FRAND. That should be a constitutional legal requirement for any US patent covering an interface or protocol.

Interfaces are important. Imagine if every car were forced to have a different interface by patents, with different pedals in different places and different steering wheels. That's no different from the slide-to-lock patent. We want to reward the creation of new and better interfaces, yet allow such interfaces to spread when they are proven to be better. FRAND is exactly the middle ground we want, as the success of GSM (a machine-machine interface) shows.

Is Google's search algorithm patented to begin with? I believe that nearly all modern search engines use conceptually similar heuristics (i.e. content that is often linked from important content is important).

I think it is a big leap to assume that the first autonomous cars will be owned by the rich who have money to burn. The first autonomous vehicles will be used to MAKE money. Driverless taxis and buses will carry passengers, autonomous semis and trucks will haul freight, and small ATVs will courier documents and urgent deliveries in cities. The speed limit might matter to the last, but not the others.

Refusing to put blame on the correct party is a form of partisanship. Trying to pretend both sides are equally at fault when one side is clearly wrong is precisely a "stupid partisan game". Being willing to call a spade a spade and basing debate and policy on facts, regardless of how it makes each party looks, is how one gets past partisanship.

I am an employee of DSTA, but I do not speak in my capacity as one.

The purpose of such contests is typically not to field an operational capability. It is very unlikely that the winning robot or a variant will actually be deployed. The main purpose is to encourage industry and academia to perform research in certain fields, such as machine vision, control systems, AI, etc. This is a long term investment. The secondary purpose is to gauge the state of the art in these fields while advancing it. This is the short term gain.

The contest is modelled after the DARPA Grand Challenge, which concentrates on outdoor navigation. Similarly, you will not see autonomous combat vehicles anytime soon. However, DARPA has certainly focussed interest and effort toward all the fundamental research questions needed to achieve such a feat. DARPA also now has a good idea of what is possible when planning acquisitions and upgrades, and is able to better assess the technical risk of new developments. If the US Army asked for an autonomous UGV tomorrow, DARPA would be able to give a good estimate of how much it would cost, how long it would take, and what is realistically achievable (then the politicians will come in and screw things up).

Such contests are an admission that the state of the art is no longer in the military or intelligence communities, but in the acadamic and industrial spheres. AES was developed outside the NSA, for example. More and more equipment is COTS or MOTS (commercial / militarized off-the-shelf). The days when you could get a national laboratory (Singapore has one too) to singlehandedly advance the state of the art are long over. Nowadays inhouse research tends to be focussed on either security-sensitive fields, or areas no one else simply wants to touch. This trend will only accelerate in the future.