I don't really disagree with you (some commandments reflect evolved/instinctive behaviors), but your argument is circular in that you're comparing the commandments with modern-day values, which are in turn heavily influenced by religion (and thus the commandments).
You can account for energy costs and still come out with a net increase in wealth if you consider yourself (in) a black box: you consume energy (food), material inputs (wood) and produce a material output (a tool). You exchange some of your wealth (A) for your inputs (B: air + water + food + wood), and exchange your output (C: a tool) for someone else's wealth (D). If D > A, that implies the value of C > B. You are now wealthier (D>A), but so is the rest of the world (value(C)>value(B)). For this to be a zero sum, there must be some other exchange happening through this black box valued at value(C)-value(B), which implies B is incomplete and A is misvalued, right?
If we could just infinitely create wealth out of nothing, then communism would work a lot better than it does, and we'd all be able to live like kings!
Just because wealth is said to be infinite (i.e., the potential to increase wealth is not bounded by the "supply" of wealth in practical terms), that does not mean that it is possible for anyone to become "infinitely wealthy", or that there is no work needed to increase wealth. You can't do an infinite amount of work in a finite amount of time. Sure, in the sense that wealth is usually defined in terms of material possessions, you can only acquire so much mass, but it's really the value of that mass to others that makes it wealth. If you increase the value of mass in your possession, you've created wealth because you've increased the mass's value.
You could say that the increase in value can be directly offset by the amount of energy received from the sun, but then that implies that there is a fixed value for a unit of solar energy, right? So if I choose to expend solar energy doing nothing but creating heat (as opposed to increasing the value of mass in my possession), have I "destroyed" wealth? Or is an excess of heat considered wealth too, even though my trading partners would assign a negative value to it?
Are you suggesting that I simply create mailing lists for every group that I want to communicate with? So, a mailing list for my family, a mailing list for people I knew from high school, one for "everyone I knew at Sue's party last Friday" so that I can share pictures with them, etc.? And when someone from the list wants to add or remove someone else to the discussion, what happens? When they want to see who got the message? Do I have to set up a web UI too? When does this simply become your own personal mini-social networking site/system?
I'd have to expect it would be protected from any changes every way you could imagine (TMP, signed bootloaders/OS, all of that). Or else some inept hacker/terrorist/total nutcase will screw it up and cause some huge wreck.
Agreed. Security is a hard problem, and a large fraction of vehicles on the road today are already vulnerable to these types of attacks. A sufficiently clever hacker today can completely take over your car's CAN bus many different ways (a team succeeded doing this via: dialing a car's OnStar number, playing a "mix CD" with malicious payload, and brute-forcing a bluetooth pairing).
So, how long until it's set up so that if the police want you for any reason, good or bad, any car you get in will take you directly to them, refusing to do anything else?
This implies that the cars will have a "forced self-drive" mode that prevents manual operation. This seems unlikely to me, at least for the foreseeable future.
Probably all of the cars will also keep records of everywhere they go, and maybe everyone who rides in them too. And all those records will be in the hands of Google or whoever, available to any police agency with, or maybe without, a court order.
For me, this firmly enters tin foil hat territory, sorry.
My GPS navigation already records my trips, and I enjoy that feature. I also trust the operator of that service not to abuse that information, but I accept that other people do not place the same level of trust in them that I do. There's no reason that these systems couldn't work anonymously, nor any reason to suppose that such a service can not exist that you also find trustworthy (as an extreme, could you not create such a service for yourself?).
That being said, I can pretty easily foresee a "traffic operations" organization that's responsible for making high-level decisions about traffic flow for a major city, advising autonomous vehicles of areas where congestion is anticipated, or where they want to schedule a lane or road closure, or divert traffic for any other reason. For that to be palatable, I imagine it would need to work anonymously and be sufficiently separate from the police force. (One likely non-anonymous use of such a service could be to turn your personal car into your own ambulance: you declare a medical emergency, get direct routing to the nearest hospital and get traffic lights turned in your favor.)
It will never happen in first-world countries, for one simple reason: litigation.
IANAL, but I agree in only one sense: jackpot litigation. Product liability litigation is essentially a cost of doing business. You get insurance and inflate your prices to pay the premiums. Where things get dicey is with litigation you can't really predict. If you can't predict that something you're doing today that seems reasonable won't spawn litigation that bankrupts you tomorrow, then (a) you're doing it wrong, or (b) the legal climate is too unpredictable for your product. Both causes are possible to change.
Once you get litigation predictable (even if you're hauled into court thousands of times a year), it becomes possible to insure you against that litigation, with you essentially paying a known, fairly constant amount in legal expenses. Your prices are relatively high to compensate for that, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, especially if it is indeed a real defect in your product that is causing injury or death to others (even if it's orders of magnitude fewer deaths than would happen in the absence of your product).
On the flip side, it should be possible to statistically prove that these things are safer in aggregate, and so there is a quantifiable benefit to society with these cars on the road. If nobody is buying them because the prices are too high because legal costs are too high, that's also motivation for government to (a) fix whatever inefficiencies in the legal system are causing the high costs, or (b) subsidize purchases (or the legal costs directly). I'm sure this will offend the "subsidies are bad" crowd, but in situations like this, it seems perfectly warranted if the costs of the subsidies are worth the benefits of having more of these vehicles on the road in less time than you would without them. Think of it as investing in any other bit of highway infrastructure.
This doesn't directly answer your question, but consider that a computer-driven car can do object recognition using a plethora of sensors that make the "dark clothing... at night" bits less of an issue. These cars have detailed laser scans of every area they drive, so they know what objects are on the side of the road that aren't normally on the side of the road. They can then focus their attention (laser scans, optical camera, radar, conceivably an infrared camera) at the object to try and decide what it is (or eliminate what it likely isn't) to gauge what kind of risk it poses (or the car poses to it). While a human may be better at the recognition task, a person in dark clothing on the edge of the road at night might not even be noticed by a human, but would be instantly identified as a deviation from the map by Google's car, potentially a great distance away. Recognizing what it is is useful, but recognizing that it's there (where it is), and how it's moving, is more likely to confer a safety benefit, and I'm not confident a human can do that better.
Different states do it differently. A permit is just a card that says "the government gives you permission". There is no requirement that every state must embody "permission" as a physical learner's permit card, or that a learner's permit is the only way you can get permission for an unlicensed driver to operate a vehicle on a public road.
Clearly they managed it here. They've documented the fact with a video, and acknowledged that they did it in cooperation with the local PD. It stands to reason that they had permission.
I believe Google presently relies on hyperaccurate maps (previously collected laser scans) of the route. It seems unlikely that they would go through the trouble of collecting this data if the route was inappropriate. In the future, it seems likely that they'll want the cars to adapt to roads that have never been traveled before, but how often is it that you happen upon a road that lacks Street View coverage (which seems like a great "vehicle" for collecting the laser scans)? Even if self-driving cars only work on (a) highways, (b) major arteries, and possibly (c) routes that you've manually driven before, that's still a huge net win, even if it means I have to take control whenever we leave the self-driving routes.
I would call that a true statement, providing that you include the earth itself in "we"*. We've found better ways to access and utilize the wealth we've got, but we haven't created anything new
While wealth is usually described in terms of material possessions, the sum of all material possessions on (in) the earth, while being essentially "fixed" due to the principle of conversation of mass, do not necessarily imply the derived wealth is fixed.
Let's say that you live in a cave, and have some trees nearby. The farmer across the street has food and you are hungry. You can point the farmer at your trees, but he has no need for trees, and so does not value the trees very highly and refuses to trade. But if you cut the trees down and fashion the wood into a tool for the farmer, he would value that more than the food, and would agree to give it to you.
In either case, it's the same raw materials, but by the application of work, you have increased the value of that wood. You have created wealth. Otherwise, where did the value come from? Did you deceive the farmer somehow? The material content of the earth is exactly the same as it was before, but a small part of it is reconfigured in a small way that makes it more valuable. That increase represents the creation of wealth.
Sure, if you reduce everything to thermodynamics, it's all "the same", but that's not what wealth is.
I think people are talking past each other here. "infinite wealth" does not imply anybody will ever become "infinitely wealthy". It just implies that the sum of wealth in human society is not fixed (finite). People are fixating on the wrong things in the arguments describing this. Here's my attempt:
1. A land owner has a bunch of dead trees that he values at $1. He sells them to a lumber mill for $10. Wealth is transfered here, but not created. 2. The lumber mill cuts the trees into lumber and sells it for $100 to a carpenter. The lumber mill has created wealth. 3. The carpenter takes his $100 worth of wood and builds a house with it, and sells that house for a profit of $1000. The carpenter has created wealth.
Wealth is created by doing work. It doesn't even require a transaction. The lumber mill is "wealthier" when it produces lumber from trees. The carpenter is "wealthier" when the house is built. (Indeed, some jurisdictions tax producers based on when the product was created, not when it was sold.)
Since there is no inherent bound to how many times the same physical resource can be transformed (think of precious metals) into something more valuable, the wealth that can be created using the same resources is essentially unbounded (therefore infinite), but each act of wealth creation requires work, and you are unlikely to generate fabulous wealth without a significant amount of it (much less "infinite" wealth).
I think the point is that content publishers would like to see a small set of standard/mandatory codecs, so that they don't have to keep a library of many different versions of their content, or go through the CPU expense of transcoding everything on demand. Think of YouTube's storage costs, for instance.
Does anyone have an app that can sit in the background and run thousands of random webpage searches, so that one's own "history" is so full of noise as to be completely useless to any advertiser? At least that way I could be entertained by the kinds of ads I'm forced to stare at just to do a search or read the news.
Given that the vehicles need to process an insane amount of data to effectively operate autonomously, it seems useful to allow them to send a snapshot of some of that data to the police if you push a "some driver is driving criminally around me" button.
The doctor is almost certainly weighing the risks here. If you really believe that his motivation involves fear of lawsuits from someone that can't get vaccinated, getting sick from a patient that is "voluntarily" unvaccinated, I submit that the risk of this happening is quite low, which implies that the doctor believes the risk for your nephew is even lower. This could come from, I don't know, many years of practical experience dealing with vaccinations of thousands of kids, many of whom are allergic to many of the components in a vaccine. I'm just guessing, though. Instead of second-guessing the doctor and assuming that he'd rather roll the dice with the life of your family, maybe you could just try talking to him so that you understand why he isn't as concerned as you believe he should be? You might learn something.
Sorry, but I question the accuracy of any quote that involves a doctor requiring that they knowingly inject a vaccine into someone known to be allergic to that vaccine. No doctor would ever require that their patients submit to being killed. So I have no reason to believe the rest of the story.
It seems quite likely to me that many parents make claims of allergies when they really just fear vaccines but don't want to tell their doctor that. Or, in this situation, maybe the doctor's office wasn't actually aware of the allergy, and the parents are tacking on a bit of hyperbole to their story.
Why do you want to transfer the domain when you can just give him/her control of the web site? You can continue to own the services on the domain that matter to you (mail) and they'd own the HTTP service on the IP address you point the domain to. This could even be an intermediate step to full ownership transfer once you've moved your identity someplace else and are comfortable with the new owner of the domain taking more ownership over it.
There are technical solutions to these problems, such as tracking language/BIDI overrides when embedding strings provided by users (and reversing the effect afterward). You could also do it the "easy" way and just filter out characters based on their Unicode property (e.g. disallow all 'other' characters, which would include these formatting characters).
You say you've done some "basic" testing, but one of the biggest challenges for me upon entering a "real" software development role was adapting to test-driven development. Even if you don't take this all the way and write up all of your unit tests before you start coding, you do have to completely re-think how you structure your software so that it can be testable at all. This means breaking up your functions not just into parts that make it more readable, but into parts that can be independently tested. Usually this means breaking out your dependencies into interfaces, so that they can be mocked out (oh, and learning how to mock things), avoiding side effects, that sort of thing.
Also focus on writing readable code. I usually make one or two passes after I think I've gotten everything written and refactor with an eye toward making everything readable and understandable.
So you're saying that it is cost-effective (and perhaps a revenue source?) to lay conduit and fiber alongside every rail track in the US? Does this include existing rail lines?
It was always my experience that remote rail equipment was connected to public networks (PSTN mainly, but cellular and radio also). Are you saying that this is not true? Could you elaborate on the reasons that the railway systems discussed in this article were connected to a public network, since you seem to be saying that your lines have access to a private network?
...yet. You're assuming that autonomous vehicles will always resemble the vehicles Google is currently testing. I can easily imagine a future generation of autonomous vehicles where manual control is only used for emergencies, and it's expected that people might be sleeping during their trips and might not be able to respond in a sufficiently timely manner to requests for things like pulling over.
It probably makes sense to have something like "traffic ops" that works like air traffic control, and can direct autonomous vehicles around manually as needed, which might include "pull over at the designated spot" or "go directly to jail". Keep this role separate from the police (or anyone else on the ground) to curb abuse.
SPDY is layered on top of TCP... **TCP** suffers from head-of-line blocking and therefore so does SPDY.
You are mixing up your protocol layers. Head-of-line blocking of TCP segments is a wholly different thing than head-of-line blocking of HTTP responses.
"Why not?" Cost, of course. It's far cheaper to connect remote nodes like this to public networks than it is to lay your own data connections down along every length of track. Just because other people lay down lines near some tracks does not mean it's cheap or free for the rail operators to lay down their own lines along all tracks.
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I don't really disagree with you (some commandments reflect evolved/instinctive behaviors), but your argument is circular in that you're comparing the commandments with modern-day values, which are in turn heavily influenced by religion (and thus the commandments).
You can account for energy costs and still come out with a net increase in wealth if you consider yourself (in) a black box: you consume energy (food), material inputs (wood) and produce a material output (a tool). You exchange some of your wealth (A) for your inputs (B: air + water + food + wood), and exchange your output (C: a tool) for someone else's wealth (D). If D > A, that implies the value of C > B. You are now wealthier (D>A), but so is the rest of the world (value(C)>value(B)). For this to be a zero sum, there must be some other exchange happening through this black box valued at value(C)-value(B), which implies B is incomplete and A is misvalued, right?
If we could just infinitely create wealth out of nothing, then communism would work a lot better than it does, and we'd all be able to live like kings!
Just because wealth is said to be infinite (i.e., the potential to increase wealth is not bounded by the "supply" of wealth in practical terms), that does not mean that it is possible for anyone to become "infinitely wealthy", or that there is no work needed to increase wealth. You can't do an infinite amount of work in a finite amount of time. Sure, in the sense that wealth is usually defined in terms of material possessions, you can only acquire so much mass, but it's really the value of that mass to others that makes it wealth. If you increase the value of mass in your possession, you've created wealth because you've increased the mass's value.
You could say that the increase in value can be directly offset by the amount of energy received from the sun, but then that implies that there is a fixed value for a unit of solar energy, right? So if I choose to expend solar energy doing nothing but creating heat (as opposed to increasing the value of mass in my possession), have I "destroyed" wealth? Or is an excess of heat considered wealth too, even though my trading partners would assign a negative value to it?
Are you suggesting that I simply create mailing lists for every group that I want to communicate with? So, a mailing list for my family, a mailing list for people I knew from high school, one for "everyone I knew at Sue's party last Friday" so that I can share pictures with them, etc.? And when someone from the list wants to add or remove someone else to the discussion, what happens? When they want to see who got the message? Do I have to set up a web UI too? When does this simply become your own personal mini-social networking site/system?
I'd have to expect it would be protected from any changes every way you could imagine (TMP, signed bootloaders/OS, all of that). Or else some inept hacker/terrorist/total nutcase will screw it up and cause some huge wreck.
Agreed. Security is a hard problem, and a large fraction of vehicles on the road today are already vulnerable to these types of attacks. A sufficiently clever hacker today can completely take over your car's CAN bus many different ways (a team succeeded doing this via: dialing a car's OnStar number, playing a "mix CD" with malicious payload, and brute-forcing a bluetooth pairing).
So, how long until it's set up so that if the police want you for any reason, good or bad, any car you get in will take you directly to them, refusing to do anything else?
This implies that the cars will have a "forced self-drive" mode that prevents manual operation. This seems unlikely to me, at least for the foreseeable future.
Probably all of the cars will also keep records of everywhere they go, and maybe everyone who rides in them too. And all those records will be in the hands of Google or whoever, available to any police agency with, or maybe without, a court order.
For me, this firmly enters tin foil hat territory, sorry.
My GPS navigation already records my trips, and I enjoy that feature. I also trust the operator of that service not to abuse that information, but I accept that other people do not place the same level of trust in them that I do. There's no reason that these systems couldn't work anonymously, nor any reason to suppose that such a service can not exist that you also find trustworthy (as an extreme, could you not create such a service for yourself?).
That being said, I can pretty easily foresee a "traffic operations" organization that's responsible for making high-level decisions about traffic flow for a major city, advising autonomous vehicles of areas where congestion is anticipated, or where they want to schedule a lane or road closure, or divert traffic for any other reason. For that to be palatable, I imagine it would need to work anonymously and be sufficiently separate from the police force. (One likely non-anonymous use of such a service could be to turn your personal car into your own ambulance: you declare a medical emergency, get direct routing to the nearest hospital and get traffic lights turned in your favor.)
It will never happen in first-world countries, for one simple reason: litigation.
IANAL, but I agree in only one sense: jackpot litigation. Product liability litigation is essentially a cost of doing business. You get insurance and inflate your prices to pay the premiums. Where things get dicey is with litigation you can't really predict. If you can't predict that something you're doing today that seems reasonable won't spawn litigation that bankrupts you tomorrow, then (a) you're doing it wrong, or (b) the legal climate is too unpredictable for your product. Both causes are possible to change.
Once you get litigation predictable (even if you're hauled into court thousands of times a year), it becomes possible to insure you against that litigation, with you essentially paying a known, fairly constant amount in legal expenses. Your prices are relatively high to compensate for that, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, especially if it is indeed a real defect in your product that is causing injury or death to others (even if it's orders of magnitude fewer deaths than would happen in the absence of your product).
On the flip side, it should be possible to statistically prove that these things are safer in aggregate, and so there is a quantifiable benefit to society with these cars on the road. If nobody is buying them because the prices are too high because legal costs are too high, that's also motivation for government to (a) fix whatever inefficiencies in the legal system are causing the high costs, or (b) subsidize purchases (or the legal costs directly). I'm sure this will offend the "subsidies are bad" crowd, but in situations like this, it seems perfectly warranted if the costs of the subsidies are worth the benefits of having more of these vehicles on the road in less time than you would without them. Think of it as investing in any other bit of highway infrastructure.
This doesn't directly answer your question, but consider that a computer-driven car can do object recognition using a plethora of sensors that make the "dark clothing ... at night" bits less of an issue. These cars have detailed laser scans of every area they drive, so they know what objects are on the side of the road that aren't normally on the side of the road. They can then focus their attention (laser scans, optical camera, radar, conceivably an infrared camera) at the object to try and decide what it is (or eliminate what it likely isn't) to gauge what kind of risk it poses (or the car poses to it). While a human may be better at the recognition task, a person in dark clothing on the edge of the road at night might not even be noticed by a human, but would be instantly identified as a deviation from the map by Google's car, potentially a great distance away. Recognizing what it is is useful, but recognizing that it's there (where it is), and how it's moving, is more likely to confer a safety benefit, and I'm not confident a human can do that better.
Different states do it differently. A permit is just a card that says "the government gives you permission". There is no requirement that every state must embody "permission" as a physical learner's permit card, or that a learner's permit is the only way you can get permission for an unlicensed driver to operate a vehicle on a public road.
Clearly they managed it here. They've documented the fact with a video, and acknowledged that they did it in cooperation with the local PD. It stands to reason that they had permission.
I believe Google presently relies on hyperaccurate maps (previously collected laser scans) of the route. It seems unlikely that they would go through the trouble of collecting this data if the route was inappropriate. In the future, it seems likely that they'll want the cars to adapt to roads that have never been traveled before, but how often is it that you happen upon a road that lacks Street View coverage (which seems like a great "vehicle" for collecting the laser scans)? Even if self-driving cars only work on (a) highways, (b) major arteries, and possibly (c) routes that you've manually driven before, that's still a huge net win, even if it means I have to take control whenever we leave the self-driving routes.
I would call that a true statement, providing that you include the earth itself in "we"*. We've found better ways to access and utilize the wealth we've got, but we haven't created anything new
While wealth is usually described in terms of material possessions, the sum of all material possessions on (in) the earth, while being essentially "fixed" due to the principle of conversation of mass, do not necessarily imply the derived wealth is fixed.
Let's say that you live in a cave, and have some trees nearby. The farmer across the street has food and you are hungry. You can point the farmer at your trees, but he has no need for trees, and so does not value the trees very highly and refuses to trade. But if you cut the trees down and fashion the wood into a tool for the farmer, he would value that more than the food, and would agree to give it to you.
In either case, it's the same raw materials, but by the application of work, you have increased the value of that wood. You have created wealth. Otherwise, where did the value come from? Did you deceive the farmer somehow? The material content of the earth is exactly the same as it was before, but a small part of it is reconfigured in a small way that makes it more valuable. That increase represents the creation of wealth.
Sure, if you reduce everything to thermodynamics, it's all "the same", but that's not what wealth is.
I think people are talking past each other here. "infinite wealth" does not imply anybody will ever become "infinitely wealthy". It just implies that the sum of wealth in human society is not fixed (finite). People are fixating on the wrong things in the arguments describing this. Here's my attempt:
1. A land owner has a bunch of dead trees that he values at $1. He sells them to a lumber mill for $10. Wealth is transfered here, but not created.
2. The lumber mill cuts the trees into lumber and sells it for $100 to a carpenter. The lumber mill has created wealth.
3. The carpenter takes his $100 worth of wood and builds a house with it, and sells that house for a profit of $1000. The carpenter has created wealth.
Wealth is created by doing work. It doesn't even require a transaction. The lumber mill is "wealthier" when it produces lumber from trees. The carpenter is "wealthier" when the house is built. (Indeed, some jurisdictions tax producers based on when the product was created, not when it was sold.)
Since there is no inherent bound to how many times the same physical resource can be transformed (think of precious metals) into something more valuable, the wealth that can be created using the same resources is essentially unbounded (therefore infinite), but each act of wealth creation requires work, and you are unlikely to generate fabulous wealth without a significant amount of it (much less "infinite" wealth).
I think the point is that content publishers would like to see a small set of standard/mandatory codecs, so that they don't have to keep a library of many different versions of their content, or go through the CPU expense of transcoding everything on demand. Think of YouTube's storage costs, for instance.
Why do all of this when you can just opt out of ad personalization or delete your search history?
Hemoglobin is paramagnetic (at best), not ferromagnetic. Paramagnetism doesn't work like that.
Yes, it's called a "photon".
Given that the vehicles need to process an insane amount of data to effectively operate autonomously, it seems useful to allow them to send a snapshot of some of that data to the police if you push a "some driver is driving criminally around me" button.
The doctor is almost certainly weighing the risks here. If you really believe that his motivation involves fear of lawsuits from someone that can't get vaccinated, getting sick from a patient that is "voluntarily" unvaccinated, I submit that the risk of this happening is quite low, which implies that the doctor believes the risk for your nephew is even lower. This could come from, I don't know, many years of practical experience dealing with vaccinations of thousands of kids, many of whom are allergic to many of the components in a vaccine. I'm just guessing, though. Instead of second-guessing the doctor and assuming that he'd rather roll the dice with the life of your family, maybe you could just try talking to him so that you understand why he isn't as concerned as you believe he should be? You might learn something.
Sorry, but I question the accuracy of any quote that involves a doctor requiring that they knowingly inject a vaccine into someone known to be allergic to that vaccine. No doctor would ever require that their patients submit to being killed. So I have no reason to believe the rest of the story.
It seems quite likely to me that many parents make claims of allergies when they really just fear vaccines but don't want to tell their doctor that. Or, in this situation, maybe the doctor's office wasn't actually aware of the allergy, and the parents are tacking on a bit of hyperbole to their story.
No.
Why do you want to transfer the domain when you can just give him/her control of the web site? You can continue to own the services on the domain that matter to you (mail) and they'd own the HTTP service on the IP address you point the domain to. This could even be an intermediate step to full ownership transfer once you've moved your identity someplace else and are comfortable with the new owner of the domain taking more ownership over it.
There are technical solutions to these problems, such as tracking language/BIDI overrides when embedding strings provided by users (and reversing the effect afterward). You could also do it the "easy" way and just filter out characters based on their Unicode property (e.g. disallow all 'other' characters, which would include these formatting characters).
You say you've done some "basic" testing, but one of the biggest challenges for me upon entering a "real" software development role was adapting to test-driven development. Even if you don't take this all the way and write up all of your unit tests before you start coding, you do have to completely re-think how you structure your software so that it can be testable at all. This means breaking up your functions not just into parts that make it more readable, but into parts that can be independently tested. Usually this means breaking out your dependencies into interfaces, so that they can be mocked out (oh, and learning how to mock things), avoiding side effects, that sort of thing.
Also focus on writing readable code. I usually make one or two passes after I think I've gotten everything written and refactor with an eye toward making everything readable and understandable.
So you're saying that it is cost-effective (and perhaps a revenue source?) to lay conduit and fiber alongside every rail track in the US? Does this include existing rail lines?
It was always my experience that remote rail equipment was connected to public networks (PSTN mainly, but cellular and radio also). Are you saying that this is not true? Could you elaborate on the reasons that the railway systems discussed in this article were connected to a public network, since you seem to be saying that your lines have access to a private network?
No dystopian remote control systems required.
...yet. You're assuming that autonomous vehicles will always resemble the vehicles Google is currently testing. I can easily imagine a future generation of autonomous vehicles where manual control is only used for emergencies, and it's expected that people might be sleeping during their trips and might not be able to respond in a sufficiently timely manner to requests for things like pulling over.
It probably makes sense to have something like "traffic ops" that works like air traffic control, and can direct autonomous vehicles around manually as needed, which might include "pull over at the designated spot" or "go directly to jail". Keep this role separate from the police (or anyone else on the ground) to curb abuse.
You are mixing up your protocol layers. Head-of-line blocking of TCP segments is a wholly different thing than head-of-line blocking of HTTP responses.
"Why not?" Cost, of course. It's far cheaper to connect remote nodes like this to public networks than it is to lay your own data connections down along every length of track. Just because other people lay down lines near some tracks does not mean it's cheap or free for the rail operators to lay down their own lines along all tracks.