"So imagine you have automated vehicles that take you to a location, you hop out, then it just drives down the block and picks up the next person and takes them where they’re going. Suddenly, you’ve alleviated a massive chunk of the congestion in a city"

That sounds a lot like buses and taxis to me. Which we already have. If people aren't using those now, then why would they use self driving versions of them in the future?

I guess that's it for the rodeo, now time to bring on the clowns...

As with the mobile phones themselves, if they limited the charge window to 80% or so of full capacity they would last years longer cos its cycling in the low and high extremes that kills the battery. But if they did that, they wouldn't be able to sell replacements every 2-3 years....

Not saying this is wrong, but QCS appears to be a husband and wife consulting outfit, looking at their website. Which raises the question - who checked over their research and OK'd this analysis of the statistics?

If some of the companies developing for Win 10 and MacOS were to start releasing Linux ports too, the era of the Linux Desktop would come a lot sooner.

Facing the inevitable switch from Win 7 to Win 10 in around a year, i've done an evaluation of my needs and in actual fact the only thing i need to leave MS behind is better photo editing support. I know there is GIMP, but a linux port of Affinity Photo would be a lot better for me (to use in conjunction with Darktable), along with Epson pulling their thumbs out their arse and writing linux drivers for their P600 / P800 family of photo printers.

I'm also curious about their definition of "household", as this number seems rather high to me. Are these people living at home with their parents? I've been living in Norway for 13 years now and i haven't had even half that level of disposable income. I'm sure some folk earn this much, but the average?

In the UK at least, you can go to jail for not giving up the decryption keys/password for data stored on your hard disk. As forgetting the pass phrase is not a legitimate excuse, i doubt they would accept the idea that it is someone else's data. So in the event that the police have any excuse to investigate your hard drives, this is a instant ticket to jail.

Yeah, but there comes a point where it is technologically easier to increase the amount done with each clock tick than it is to make logic that can switch faster. We reached that point about 10 years ago....

Acually, the EU was a fairly logical evolution of the EEC (European Economic Community), which itself was an evolution of the ECSC (European Coal and Steel Community). The foundation of these earlier unions was not so much to compete as a block with the US, but more to avert another world war. The premise for this being that if you are trading actively with your neighbour and have easy immigration back and forth between the countries, your incentive to go to war with them is somewhat reduced/impeded. That the first agreement was for coal and steel is extremely significant, what with coal and steel being important raw materials for waging war.

Paying to publish is not inherently a bad idea, but needs to come with a corresponding discount on purchase/subscription costs. By moving some of the burden of journal costs from library budgets to research projects you would discourage publishing of every bit of crap that people produce. The system is currently swamped with both journals and papers, many of them awful or of very limited scientific value and this is a major problem. The current system of free publishing encourages this as researchers can just blitz the system in the hope that some gets through, with no built-in limiter to stop them. Making them pay should encourage folk to at least publish less, and hopefully of better quality.

I would agree - i do wonder sometimes if the car makers have actually done any testing to evaluate the usability of their shiny new gadgets. 4.6 secs seems to me like quite a short time compared to some of the in-car distractions i've seen. At least they've stopped drivers from being able to watch movies whilst the car is moving...

If by "x-ray machine with microscopy" they mean an electron microscope with x-ray analysis system (EDS), i do actually know someone who has such a setup at home. He is a bit geeky though...

Definitely time someone with a bit of clout stood up to the scientific publishers. Their business model made a bit of sense in the days when things had to be typeset, printed and distributed, but with modern electronic distribution it is little better than a Mafia-style extortion racket. I'd love to know what they actually do for their money - researchers do the research, write the paper, review the paper and (at least in my field) act as journal editors. And they do these at no cost to the publisher because they are either publically or industrially funded. That the publisher is able to take the copyright and then charge the people who actually funded it to read it, is an ongoing disgrace and (i think) should be an embarrassment to an industry/community which generally prides itself on its open-ness and its "freedom".

I know a lot of academics are becoming annoyed by the publishers and their business models. Frankly its a disgrace that most research isn't freely available to the general public. More often than not they have paid for it via taxation and university fees (most research, at least in europe where i am, is taxpayer funded). Add to that the fact that the academics do the work, write the papers, review the papers (for free i might add) and mostly act as journal editors (for free again), and its hard to see really what the publishers are doing beyond hosting the PDF.

Oh and the best bit - when you submit your paper to the publisher, you also sign over copyright. So they even own all the taxpayer funded work. Actually i was wrong at the start, its beyond a disgrace.

A revolutionary rethinking of how we communicate will always take time to gain inertia. Real people have busy schedules, and you can't just tell everyone you are ditching email etc and moving onto the Wave: You have to get reluctant collaborators onboard and lineup a good project or two with which to get the hang of it at the start. This is never going to happen in 3 months, and i think google know this. I can't help but feel that they cancelled for some fundamental failing that they are not talking about.

Still, i hope it doesn't go away. It has so much potential that it deserves to be developed.