I'd like to know how self-driving cars operate in areas with pedestrians and bicycles.

For a real test, maybe Google should bring their test vehicles to San Francisco or onto the campuses of Stanford and UC Berkeley.

Correction:
A small part of the Pacific Northwest is rain forest.

All that said, though, the question remains: if the TSA were to vanish overnight, what would take its place? What SHOULD take its place? These are not easy questions to answer--if they were, we'd be on that path by now, but instead the Kabuki dance that is this "security theater" gets more bizarre by the day. The reality is that certain fundamental questions of how best to address and ensure basic passenger safety without infringing on essential personal liberties remain unanswered, let alone the question of how to do it efficiently (both in terms of financial cost and human resources).

Why not let each airline (or alliance of airlines) decide what level of security screening to subject its own passengers to, conducted by itself or whichever party it hires to perform the job?

The beauty of such a system is that every airline wants to keep flying safe for its employees and the public, and prevent loss of expensive aircraft due to hijacking or explosives.

On the other hand, airlines don't want to anger passengers with wasteful security procedures that don't really help the main goal listed in the preceding paragraph.

And people talk. If one airline's security got too heavy-handed, it would probably see some loss of customers, including the high-paying business customers who don't want to deal with too much shit. That would seem to prevent a lot of abuses we see from the TSA right now.

As I understand it, the DEA can go after any precursor of drugs.

Then let us abolish the DEA so we can all be freer!

Many of them may be immigrants, and their kids may come into school with low English skills.

It's not like the children of native-born parents can speak, read, or write English very well either.

Let airlines hire their own security. Each airline can determine the right balance of security and convenience for its customers.

If customers are too inconvenienced, the airline will suffer if competitors strike a better balance.

Next we can prove how pointless the FAA is, when Texas just tells them to fuck off too.

Tony Stark can buy back his own advanced technology.

You can see this in the movie Transsiberian.

If the company pays for lunch, why not? If not, we should all be free to bring something from home, eat whatever we want, or even skip lunch and do something else (sleep, exercise, etc.).

Recently the US created trillions of US dollars (google for Federal Reserve trillions) but rather than the money going into making most of the USA richer, those trillions went to bail-out cronies who lost/siphoned/wasted trillions in the first place.

Printing more money cannot make most of the USA richer. It merely means that the same number of goods and services are purchased with more dollars (higher prices), unless the supply of goods and services increases faster than the increase in number of dollars.

Wow. Did you see all those names in the credits?

Syria is a republic.

Unfortunately, since 1963, the Emergency Law has suspended most of the consitution.

Also, check out a very interesting book, Sex at Dawn, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá.

Yes, you would be amazed how human biology points to sperm competition.

And our closest primate relatives are not chimps. We are far more like bonobos. Read the book.

As Étienne de la Boétie put it, even dictators rely on the consent of the governed.

Tyrannical rulers must be generous enough to their closest advisers, military, and secret police to avoid having guns turned back at the ruler.

But even a small population of enforcers cannot keep the people under the ruler's thumb if they don't like the arrangement.

Ever notice how every ruler of a one-party state has his (always a male!?) picture all over the place with enthusiastic slogans and proclamations of the ruler's beneficence? Why spend the time and money if the ruler didn't care what the people thought about him?

And no matter what type of government you have, the schools always serve students the state-sponsored Kool-Aid. The young are brought up to revere their leaders (especially the founders or first anti-Colonials who brought the current government into power after the last assholes screwed everything up). Students learn to appreciate and respect the way the government provides for them through thick and thin, even if you are not allowed to openly speak about the negatives that inevitably arise in a society of fallible human beings, or even if the economy fails to provide for basic needs.

No matter where you live, and what type of government you live under, it will not last forever. . . One day, after the current assholes have screwed everything up, a new form of government will come to fix it. . . until they become the assholes that screwed everything up (in about ten generations, give or take).