"There was a time when I believed that self-driving cars should be held to the standard of airplanes."

You have boarded a plane and are awaiting takeoff. The flight attendant announces: We have pleasure informing our esteemed passengers that this flight is totally autonomous with not a single pilot on board. However, if you do not wish to avail of this experience, you are free to opt out and disembark. People who are okay with this, please raise your hand.

Go ahead, take a guess as to how many hands will be raised! And remember, this is more than 100 years after the Wright brothers invented something important ...

Any device having any sort of address (MAC/IP/Bluetooth/whatever), by design, opens up communication with its environment. That is where things start getting a little interesting :)

The most perfect example in recent times is the upcoming general elections in India. Every political party is trying to outdo the others by promising more and more freebies, loan waivers, and other sops, without having the means in place to fund these populist measures. Everything comes at a cost - increased taxation, increased printing of currency accompanied by inflation, and resentment among those who actually work for a living. Proponents argue that it promotes welfare, bridges the income gap, and brings money into the system resulting in increased spending on goods and services. I am not supporting or opposing any political party here, but as a nation, freebies can work only if there are ample avenues to keep the economy roaring even if everybody stops working - think oil, minerals.

Which brings up an interesting idea: How about posting a sign in a school area which says Speed Limit 100 MPH? Will the smart sensors and AI gear lookup my activities over the night, figure out how I painted that, and light up the road with an ultra bazillion-pixel projection that says: LOL ??? Or, will it (shudder) faithfully follow the sign? Or, launch a trunk-mounted missile to take out my zip code? :)

I think public transportation being inconvenient to most people is mostly true for cities in the USA where there is no public transportation to speak of in the real sense (except, maybe, cities like New York or Chicago). You might want to take a look at European and Asian countries where public transportation plays a major part in movement of people (and quite efficiently at that). I agree that a 30-min wait for a 10-min ride doesn't make sense, but then people organise their lives in sync with the system in place and avoid instant gratification unless in an emergency.

Don't mean to take away credit where it is due, but while on this, how many cars in Norway? Per carsalesbase.com, in 2016, it was 154.603 (yes, that is a decimal, but not meant to be a decimal :). As a comparison, Ford in the US sold 165,301(yes, that is a comma, meant to be a comma).. I guess it is pretty easy for a small country (population) like Norway to put in measures like this - somewhere it also helps that in a few years, Norwegians won't need to work at all, considering income from their reserves which are a mountain pile (err... where did that come from?).

As long as upgrading a browser or copying a file to a USB requires a degree in computer science, Linux will never make it to the mainstream. Now let us define "mainstream"... :)