I mean, it didn't work the first time. Why do they think it'll work ~this time~. And now, PC's are a lot cheaper (comparatively speaking) than they used to be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4p-55a3WV8

Koenigsegg has had at least one car driving around with air/hydraulicly operated valves for a few years now. It's got tens of thousands of miles on the setup.

Now.. someone just needs to get the system to market.

I wonder if there would be a market for say.. an ITX based laptop case. ITX means you can use standard motherboards, and then the case is just a keyboard, monitor, and power. .... The most difficult part would be getting a decent cabling situation.

Airplanes can be registered to corporations. If you chose to, you can completely detach yourself from the airplane you may own. Also, most planes aren't privately owned. Your pilots license isn't publicly searchable. Neither is your drivers license. Neither is your license plate! The drone registration is a registration of pilots, versus UAVs.

The rules "aren't" the same.

So, how cheap is cheap? $50? $100? $200? Does it need to be a laptop? Portable?

Is the goal to have something that can do e-mail, web browsing, and writing papers?

I noted the suggestion of linux. Are you prepared to teach linux? Android has it's "mostly single tasking" thing going on, and it's cranky memory management, so I'm not so happy with android as a desktop environment.

As has been suggested, the HP Stream 11's are pretty good. They're a very capable laptop. They're available at Walmart and are about $200.

Going much cheaper sends you into some really strange territory. Annoyingly the Pi-Top is $300... Which is a lot less powerful than a Stream11. If android is vaguely OK, there's a ton of android based tablets and laptop-ish things on the market.

This bothers me in a bunch of ways.

First, is implementation.

I can think of two ways of doing this. First is local radio, or light based communications. All automated cars broadcast, and then a reciever determines who's where, so the officer can direct a specific machine to stop. Then that box has to transmit the right code to casue a car to stop. I can not see how that protocol will not be hacked and abused in weeks, if not hours of implementation. That's it's own little version of hades. If "anyone" can stop your car, you won't let ANYONE stop your car.

The second method, is with a database. Each automated car, sends it's location to a central database at all times. When a police officer wants to pull you over, he can scan the database and find your car, and tell it to do something. This method seems like it would be reliable. But then we have the database problem.

That database could be stolen. Now someone can track you, and knowing databases, now knows where your car has been for X number of days, weeks, or months.

Second, the police now know where you are at all times. Well, that's someone, but it's supposed to be someone safe. Third, now there's a database to sell, and a command that can be issued that stops your car. The slope gets VERY steep here... so lets tread carefully.

Lets say you have 50 parking tickets. The private agency in Chicago that covers parking tickets wants to boot your car. They pay the Chicago PD to have access to that database, and issue the signal to boot your car. ... anywhere. Lets say you're in ohio when they do their processing run, well you could be stuck there.

The same goes for registration. Lets say the state sees your registration expire, they'll tell your car that it can't drive legally. So it wont' drive. Sounds fine, until you look at the realities of where you can drive an unregistered car. Or transport it. GPS isn't accurate enough, property lines aren't drwan well enough, and many other factors would lead to disabled cars in legal places.

Finally, what if your car gets registered wrong? Someone else's car is the target of disablement, and instead your car gets disabled.

Sure, all of these things could probally be addressed with lots of time and paperwork, but nobody is going to pay me back or my time spent fixing their errors.

I really hope gesture mosaic comes back. I could keep up with touch typists using that input method.

http://www.pitecan.com/presentations/PenInput/gesturemosaic.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company

And they operated into the 1970's.

London is going to be a hard nut to crack, ti's already got several levels of tunnels under the city.

There are some real issues with underground tunnels, especially ones to small to be traversed by people. People are "universal power tools" and can get in there and fix unusual problems. If a rail car the size of a trash can gets stuck in a tunnel you can send a man down.. figuruing out how to get it out is going to be a real trial.

And this is with t-mobiles software installed. With a clean phone, the T-mobile "my account" software is the highest usage bit of software on the phone. Disabling it was worth hours of runtime.