We did have this in real estate for long time in this country. Even when it wasn't explicitly supported by law it was supported by the real estate agents and brokers and is called racial steering. This is why we have laws protecting certain statuses now. If you live in a small town and there is one baker who refuses to make your cake and the baker in the next town also refuses and the city with a baker who will make the cake is far away (think rural Texas or Montana or even the U.P of Michigan) then you are stuck driving 100 miles to get a cake. This may seem like small potatoes but it's not really cakes we are talking about.

Our president was raised on this kind of racism and segregation: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/us/politics/donald-trump-housing-race.html so what he is doing now is no surprise.

I don't know why this is news. Givedirectly.org has been doing this for years. (https://www.givedirectly.org/operating-model)

I think the self-driving cars will become ubiquitous eventually. The bugs in the systems will be ironed out, there will be a few major failures which make big news and scare people but these things will be much safer than people-driven cars. My thinking then goes to 'what/how will that affect car design, road design, traffic patterns, etc.'

Car design:
Cars will become less powerful as they are vastly overpowered for most needs now, and they will become fancy living rooms on wheels. The seats may all face each other, entertainment systems will become a major focus of design, built in beds, etc. You get in a car, tell it were to drop you off, it then self parks somewhere and you use your cell phone to tell it where to pick you up.
Trucks will become driverless vans, the same as all delivery type vehicles although some may still have passenger space for workers to help load and unload cargo. Pizza delivery vehicles won't even be cars, but little heated boxes on wheels.

Road design:
No traffic signs, guard rails, lines on the roads, probably many other changes would be possible as well.
In areas with pedestrian traffic the walker has to push a crosswalk button, which would then broadcast a signal to nearby cars to stop or be aware of the pedestrian in the street and the walker could cross with very little delay. Run into the street and get hit - it's probably your fault.
Cyclists would carry little transmitters which would let nearby cars know it's location and velocity, allowing the cars to give the appropriate allowance to them. This is if they are sharing road space.

Insurance:
Rates would drop by a huge amount and after a time of vetting they might even go away or become a small part of the purchase price of the car.

This is just a start, the changes to society would be huge, the number of deaths would probably be in the 10s or 100s per year in the US if all vehicles are automatic instead of the 10s of thousands. I know several people who have been killed or seriously injured by vehicle accidents and would be very exited if/when this technology comes to bear.

Why would a driverless truck need the capability to be driven and thus stolen? Why have a cab? Just and engine in an aerodynamic faring with appropriate controls. The problem I would then see would the control channel being hacked (you wirelessly tell the 'truck' to go to a location, this system could be hacked). if the truck needs to be manually maneuvered then you use a model airplane style remote control device.

I'd hate to be on the crew which has to remove the people at the end and do cleanup. Will the riders be required to wear diapers?

I live in Ann Arbor, I used to work for Borders, both in the retail store and then at corporate doing store support. This was back in the mid-90s, when life was good there, but they still paid crap. The Borders brothers had recently sold the company and the Waldenbooks aquisition was in progress, a whole bunch of the Walden employees moved to AA and we had two help desks for a while because the systems were so different.

When I started in the store, I helped open #63, Fairlawn, OH. That store has been closed for a while now. We opened every box and stocked all the shelves, which were all empty. It was a huge store for a mid-90s book store. People came in droves, everyone was trained to work in the coffee shop which was run by regular staff. If we didn't have a book the customer was looking for, which often they didn't even know who wrote it or the title, we had to help them figure it out, we could order it. This was all new. The music section was huge, the staff in there knew a ton about music and if they didn't have it, they could order it. This was probably the widest selection of music around. My section was the computer book section, I stocked the shelves there and learned the field was so much more than I knew about before. We had a Netware network, so I learned about that and took a CNA class at the CompUSA (remember those?) next door. I learned what IP addresses where and how they worked!

I then applied for and got a job in Ann Arbor on the store help desk. The building we started in was some offices in the front of a big warehouse, which was the main warehouse for the stores. The company continued to grow, constantly adding stores. I helped open the Bangor, MA store, beautiful city, nice store, I set up the computer systems there. With more growth we moved to a much bigger office which had once been a medical manufacturing building with a bunch of clean rooms. We didn't need the space to start and those stayed there for a while, along with a huge space next to the help desk area where we would take RC cars and stuff and play around. Borders liked to promote internally, which was nice, but that doesn't always work when you need experts, not low costs.One of our "DB admins" was from the help desk just like me and she didn't know much about being a real DB admin. She wound up deleting a ton of records out of a store's catalog, that had to get rebuilt and shipped out. I worked there when I heard about Amazon, thinking why would anyone want to buy books online (this was about '97 or '98). I left not much after that getting a 30% raise for doing the same work at Domino's corporate. I now make 4x from what I started at Border's corporate with another company and I don't see that stopping.

I used to shop at Borders all the time but started migrating to Amazon and B&N. It seemed like the store atmosphere declined over time, the staff knew less and less, decisions were being made for money only reasons, all signs that it wasn't really well run. I work for a company now which has hired a number of people from Borders during their recent decline but I am worried about some friends I have which still work there. This is just another piece of crappy news for this part of Michigan which has seen so much in the past few years and was just slowly starting to turn around.

When will you be able to buy an IR filter for this to disable this functionality?

Let me rephrase this:

This is exactly why I get frustrated to see a CS degree as a requirement when applying for a Network Admin/Engineer job. They're not the same thing. Although I see more frequently that it's optional as you can substitute experience for it, which makes sense. Only recently have universities and colleges started offering Networking type degrees/programs.

So who pays the early termination fees?

A Word About the New South Edition...

http://careers.yahoo.com