You get your wish. It is a class action suit. Based on witness testimony and documents, undisputed in the suit against AT&T, a fiber splitter was put on AT&T's main network conduits, sending a copy of all traffic to a secret room under control of the NSA.
So indeed, we allege that it is quite likely that typical AT&T customers (and others) had their traffic intercepted, without a warrant, by the NSA.
In the civil case (still going on, though dealt a blow through the passage of an act of congress extending immunity to the phone companies) the law specified monetary damages for customers to whom this happened. In the case against the government officials and agencies, whom we allege also participated in this unlawful activity, other forms of relief, including getting it to stop, are sought.
The EFF also sometimes engages in cases where probability of victory is lower, but we judge that the case must be fought, and that public benefit will come just from the fighting, and the hearing of evidence in open court. Of course we hope to win, but we also know that even if we don't win, there are other upsides.
This case (and the case vs. AT&T) get much of their benefit simply by having a court examine this illegal wiretapping program. Part of our message is that this program has not been subject to review by the courts, and that in of itself is bad.
The ACLU won early victory but fell down due to standing. We have well established evidence of massive interception of traffic. While some might think there is only an illegal wiretap if the government listens to you, it is unlawful for them to even intercept your communications, even if they toss them away later. Warrants must name specific targets, and it is the job of phone companies to isolate the traffic of targets and hand it over under lawful warrants. The government does not get to just intercept all the traffic and pull out what it desires.
I also have much wanted a shrinkable filesystem that did not have the performance issues of ext2/3 and the issues that caused MythTV to officially declare that you should not use reiserfs with it.
I mostly use xfs these days, but am annoyed I can't shrink it.
However, MythTV now offers the option to designate additional spool directories so you can have more than one. This would allow you, when needing extra space (as I did during the Olympics when I was recording 5 to 10 hours of HDTV per day) to connect a temporary drive, and have MythTV use it, and then once you were done, delete shows on that and eliminate the drive. Not quite as nice but in theory it should do the job.
Perhaps not why you write it, but why do you give it away under a free software licence, if not so others can make use of it?
And anyway, while some simply code for their own purposes, I don't think that contradicts the statement that many free software owners want their code to be widely used.
I just wrote a detailed comment and previewed. I noted at the end that it was saying I was not logged in, so I could log in or post as anonymous coward. So I clicked the login link, logged in and boom -- the long comment was erased.
The pre-javascript interface probably would not have done that.
Short summary of longer post:
1) He dances around but misses one other scenario. The designer knows the right UI, but it's harder to code, and so chooses to do a lesser but workable UI to have more time to code other things. The problem is the coder is also the "funder" and makes decisions based on how hard things are to code, rather than what's best for the users.
2) It's a false economy sometimes. Why do we write free software? I would hope part of the goal is to make code that lots of people will use. Yet sometimes we choose to work on a feature that will please 10% of our 10,000 users rather than a UI that will make us accessible to 100,000 users.
Just go to eBay, and buy a much older generation ultralight laptop, the kind that used to cost $2,000. You will pretty readily find one with better specs than that for quite cheap, possibly under $100. Replace the hard drive with a flash card. Using a adapter you can get for just a few bucks, also on eBay, you can plug a compact flash card into a 2.5" IDE drive cable as found on the laptop.
Ok, you need a distro that will distribute writes on the flash card, but I bet you can work it out.
In fact, I have often wondered if we couldn't duplicate the cheap-laptops-for-kids efforts with free, donated laptops into which you slot a pre-prepared IDE interface compact flash card with linux on it.
This is described in the essay, in what I call the School of Fish test. Fish can handle a crazy human diving into their school, and you never touch 'em. They do it by trusting their brother fish, among other things, and always having a gap ready in case something happens.
I hope the views are not inconsistent. The problems are hard, but I'm assuming that while we don't yet have solutions in 2008, we can reach them in 2020 -- where we'll have more and cheaper sensors and 120 times as much computing power at our disposal, if not more.
That's why I propose the difficult, but doable "School of Fish" test. The principles of defensive driving need to guide the algorithms of the cars. I'm not pretending we know what algorithms will pass this test, but I am predicting that finding them is within our abilities.
The point about electric cars and zipcars is that these are not successful technologies in the market today. I believe that the barriers to their success can be solved by a robocar. For car share, it's obvious -- car share is vastly better if the car comes to you where you need it, and you can take it one-way.
For electrics, I outline that in great detail. Robocars don't actually do much green themselves, but they make other green technologies *marketable*. And that's really the key. How to make technology people will actually buy.
Note that the car share, and lightweight electrics are all enabled with what I call "whistlecar" technology, where the car comes to you, but you drive it. That doesn't prevent accidents (on its own) however, but the robocar tech in the whistlecar does make it harder to get into an accident.
Can all accidents be eliminated? Doubtful. There will be situations where physics offers no way out. But a defensive robocar, always leaving gaps in the right places so that physics will offer a way out if something strange happens, can eliminate most accidents, I would offer.
One of the big points is to not go down this route. The DARPA grand challenges realized we could not depend on special roads, special lanes, that it was necessary to drive on any road, with obstacles, cars and pedestrians. And the teams came through.
What the special-lanes view misses is that government transportation projects are planned in decades, cost billions and are full of politics.
Any solution which comes mostly from the ground up -- with individuals buying technology one person at a time, using existing infrastructure -- that's going to win. Because with computer technology, each year it's twice as good, and individuals keep upgrading because they don't *plan*, they jut do.
So forget PRT, special highways, special lanes. That's truly the thing that will never happen. While we wait for the politics of this, the car designers will have solved any problems that needed those lanes -- if we can get the public to accept it.
PRT was a cool idea in the 70s but its time is past. We know are within sight of replacing guideways and monorails with smart computers with lidar and 21st century machine vision systems. Not trivial, but within sight of it.
Yes, a great deal less, and almost all private money. That's because we already replace all the cars with amazing rapidity. The average car is owned 5 years I think.
I can't predict how much money it will take for the research (all earned back in sales though) but look at what's been done for paltry $1M and $2M prizes.
The effective cost of this is so close to zero you can't see it on the scale of national budgets. Negative really, considering the $230 billion dollar annual cost of accidents in the USA according to the NTSB.
It doesn't. Can't solve everything. For that, I have hopes on the various areas of energy research -- thermosolar, new generation PV, geothermal, wind, waves, you name it. We do have to get off coal. As I identify the two big things we have to fix are cars and electric generation. Right now everything else is in the noise compared to them. Later the rest comes to the top.
As the logistics of this are complex, they are not spelled out fully, but the point is that many options are open. Vehicles will of course recharge in the day, but they only need to do so if they will be needed later that day. Or they can swap battery packs for other batteries charged at night. I don't suggest we can do all charging at night, but we can do a lot more of it.
There will be an economic trade-off done on electrics. Does it make more sense to recharge during the day? To swap batteries? To go to a high-current fast-charge station? To leave the vehicle idle and use a different vehicle? All these choices might make sense based on circumstances. One thing is sure, there will be more charging done at night.
Swappable battery packs make a lot of sense for high-use vehicles like taxis. Ordinary charging makes more sense for private vehicles making a few trips a day.
When I say "just enough range" I should be clear I don't mean just enough range for a trip, but for all the travel it must do to be usable, which may include range for 2 trips if it is likely to be called upon for that, and range to get to charging stations efficiently etc.
"Charging stations" are nothing fancy for electric cars. Really just poles with plugs on them that cars can drive up to, plug into, transmit credit authorization to and get a charge. Perhaps not even that, perhaps they are any old plug if the robotics are good enough to have a robot arm plug into those, an the plug has a digital camera to photograph the licence plates of thieves.
It's really very cheap and simple compared to what we have today.
High current charging stations and battery swap depots are something larger, along the lines of a gas station today. Funny thing is, with those gas stations closing as people move to electric cars, we'll have a place to put the charging depots, won't we?
Yes, this is discussed. Do you want that car in the city?
I think that many people will still own fun-to-drive cars, and take them out into the country to have fun driving. Or they'll ride a robocar to the country and rent one there. I do think you won't see as much of this in the city. Fewer people think urban streets are a thrill to drive.
I would love to fix our cities. But this is an immense project, that will take vast resources and much time. We should get to work on it.
But at the same time, I've come to the conclusion that teams of skilled computer people with a fraction of a typical city transit budget could create robocars, and solve a great number of problems.
If they did, we would immediately abort the city-reinvention project we started because the rules will have changed. In fact, while it's far more speculative, I am interested in exploration of how cities will grow if offered cheap, quick, efficient urban transportation, so that within the several miles square area of the city, all places can be reached in 5 minutes and distance almost ceases to exist. I can see many changes, some good, some bad. No urban planners today are thinking about them, though.
So I will criticise our transportation systems, and our cities, and advocate fixing what we can fix.
As for sleeper cars, they are clearly not for everybody. Not even for me, I don't sleep too well on transportation. But lots of people do.
They won't be deployed until we are convinced they kill far fewer people than humans do at the wheel. In fact, I suspect in the USA a very low problem rate will be demanded. I think the engineers can deliver that rate.
I could be wrong on that. It's worth trying.
The number of people killed by human drivers in the USA is similar to that killed by Alzhiemer's or stomach cancer or several other major killers. Largest killer from 5 to 45 in fact.
If I told you, "We could probably cure Alzheimers with a relatively modest engineering effort" would you ever write a post wondering if it was worth it?
No, it's not speculation to say if the cost of accidents is seriously reduced, the cost of policies to cover them is also reduced. That's basic insurance math. If the vendor has to buy a very expensive insurance policy because they will be sued, the cost of that policy will be split up among buyers, but still cost each buyer less if the cost of accidents is, in the aggregate, less.
I have a section in TFA about the liability questions, and they are serious and may drive the tech overseas, but that doesn't seem to be what you're wriging about.
As I said there will be vandals and theives surely. But what is your point? I don't think anybody thinks there will not be such crime. There is now, lots of it.
The point is, you summon up a taxi by saying, "I need to get to location X." That's what you care about. Will it get you there, on time, and in comfort. The taxi company worries about getting you a vehicle that can do the job, you don't. If they don't deliver you use a different taxi company. (No taxi monopolies any more, thank god.)
I suspect that Hasbro is going to use trademark as a large part of their thrust against scrabulous. If that's wrong then I stand corrected. It is the strongest doctrine of law in their favour, because Scrabulous made the error of using a name that sounds like Scrabble.
Had they called their game "Crossword Tile Game" or some other completely different name, this avenue would not be open to Hasbro, which would have to rely on much less workable principles of game copyright, trade dress etc. Their lawyers will have tried all angles, I know that without even reading the complaint.
For full rush hour, shuttling back does cut efficiency, but not nearly in half. First of all, ultralight electric vehicles won't weigh as much as a person, so they are going to be much more efficient going back. Secondly, only some of them have to go back (depends how many people own them). The empty trains might be an excellent place for them to return on, actually -- even more efficient.
You have to move some vehicles outside Manhattan, but not too many. Because during the low traffic parts of the day, they can double park on the streets, filling driveways, sitting in front of fire hydrants, leaving just enough space for the non rush hour traffic.
You will find many of your issues addressed in the article. In fact, I have a large section on the question of how people like to store stuff in their cars, as I am one of those people. At the same time, in cities like NYC, where nobody owns cars, people seem to have managed to get past this "insurmountable" problem.
Suggest you read the article for more on your concerns. If you wish to shop personally, by the way, you would load the deliverbot, not the store. Deliverbots should cost around 5 cents/mile, I predict, for small one suitable for typical cargo.
People who want to own cars will still own cars, but they can own different cars, and hire specialized cars for specialized trips.
The sleeper car does not need to refuel, if it's going slow. My example is a trip to Lake Tahoe that's 4 hours at 75mph but 7 hours at 40mph. Cars actually get *better* MPG at slower speeds, so it would have to refuel *less* often.
As for renting durable goods. It costs more because there is a large overhead in renting today. Picture a world where delivery is quick and cheap, and thus the durable goods are also rented a far larger percentage of their time. This is a side-issue, but I think the potential here is very large for much cheaper rental, always beating the cost of owning something you use 2 hours/month.
I am adding a section to the deliverbot concept about a room for the deliverbot. That's where the bed arrives, and stays if you like. I'm also wondering if we don't see better in-house robotic tech for moving furniture but I don't want to depend on it. Guest beds are worth paying extra for (to cover disinfect, inspection and work of moving in a house) because the real cost of a permanent guest bed is not the cost of the bed -- it's the space in the house an infrequent guest room takes.
But I agree the deliverbot/renting speculation is a sideline to the real message of the article, so tell me what else you don't think is credible there.
AVGS is more generally taken to apply to factory floor mobile robots. It's not a very workable term for the public. I considered a lot of terms because there is no one universal term, and settled on robocars as simple, self-explanatory, and understandable to the general public.
You'll also see people call these self-driving cars, driverless cars, robotic cars, autonomous vehicles and a variety of other names. I stand by the name choice. And I do have a section on deliverbots, a name I made up for what comes after AVGS, when delivery and task robots roam the streets.
I don't remotely claim this is a solved problem. I think the path to solution is getting clearer. For the reasons you state, LIDAR is the most popular solution on today's prototypes, though I think later models will use not just LIDAR, but better (light source independent) machine vision, deep infrared temperature sensors and many other things.
Not much benefit? Saving a million lives a year, globally? Saving 50 billion hours of human time every year in the USA? Cutting U.S. transportation energy needs in half? Reducing dependence on foreign oil and halting middle east imports with the wars that causes?
Just what is your idea of a project with a lot of benefit?
Is diesel more fuel efficient? You get more miles per *gallon* of fuel but isn't that just because diesel is denser, and you have more pounds of fuel -- which is what really matters -- in each gallon. It's why the gallons cost more.
Reverse for ethanol, where a gallon has only 75% of the energy of a gallon of gasoline.
That's the point. When taking a short trip (which is the vast majority of all trips) you take an electric car. When taking a long trip, you use a liquid fueled car. You ask the robotaxi company to send you the car you need for the trip you are taking.
So how is this solving the wrong problem? Moving all the short trips to electric or alternative fuels and keeping the long trips in cars fueled by gasoline, biofuel or natural gas does wonders for the total energy usage of cars.
Slashdot Mirror
You get your wish. It is a class action suit. Based on witness testimony and documents, undisputed in the suit against AT&T, a fiber splitter was put on AT&T's main network conduits, sending a copy of all traffic to a secret room under control of the NSA.
So indeed, we allege that it is quite likely that typical AT&T customers (and others) had their traffic intercepted, without a warrant, by the NSA.
In the civil case (still going on, though dealt a blow through the passage of an act of congress extending immunity to the phone companies) the law specified monetary damages for customers to whom this happened. In the case against the government officials and agencies, whom we allege also participated in this unlawful activity, other forms of relief, including getting it to stop, are sought.
The EFF does not of course always win, but it does frequently and has effected quite a bit of change to bad law as a result.
http://www.eff.org/victories/
Outlines just some of the major victories.
The EFF also sometimes engages in cases where probability of victory is lower, but we judge that the case must be fought, and that public benefit will come just from the fighting, and the hearing of evidence in open court. Of course we hope to win, but we also know that even if we don't win, there are other upsides.
This case (and the case vs. AT&T) get much of their benefit simply by having a court examine this illegal wiretapping program. Part of our message is that this program has not been subject to review by the courts, and that in of itself is bad.
The ACLU won early victory but fell down due to standing. We have well established evidence of massive interception of traffic. While some might think there is only an illegal wiretap if the government listens to you, it is unlawful for them to even intercept your communications, even if they toss them away later. Warrants must name specific targets, and it is the job of phone companies to isolate the traffic of targets and hand it over under lawful warrants. The government does not get to just intercept all the traffic and pull out what it desires.
I also have much wanted a shrinkable filesystem that did not have the performance issues of ext2/3 and the issues that caused MythTV to officially declare that you should not use reiserfs with it.
I mostly use xfs these days, but am annoyed I can't shrink it.
However, MythTV now offers the option to designate additional spool directories so you can have more than one. This would allow you, when needing extra space (as I did during the Olympics when I was recording 5 to 10 hours of HDTV per day) to connect a temporary drive, and have MythTV use it, and then once you were done, delete shows on that and eliminate the drive. Not quite as nice but in theory it should do the job.
Perhaps not why you write it, but why do you give it away under a free software licence, if not so others can make use of it?
And anyway, while some simply code for their own purposes, I don't think that contradicts the statement that many free software owners want their code to be widely used.
I just wrote a detailed comment and previewed. I noted at the end that it was saying I was not logged in, so I could log in or post as anonymous coward. So I clicked the login link, logged in and boom -- the long comment was erased.
The pre-javascript interface probably would not have done that.
Short summary of longer post:
1) He dances around but misses one other scenario. The designer knows the right UI, but it's harder to code, and so chooses to do a lesser but workable UI to have more time to code other things. The problem is the coder is also the "funder" and makes decisions based on how hard things are to code, rather than what's best for the users.
2) It's a false economy sometimes. Why do we write free software? I would hope part of the goal is to make code that lots of people will use. Yet sometimes we choose to work on a feature that will please 10% of our 10,000 users rather than a UI that will make us accessible to 100,000 users.
Just go to eBay, and buy a much older generation ultralight laptop, the kind that used to cost $2,000. You will pretty readily find one with better specs than that for quite cheap, possibly under $100. Replace the hard drive with a flash card. Using a adapter you can get for just a few bucks, also on eBay, you can plug a compact flash card into a 2.5" IDE drive cable as found on the laptop.
Ok, you need a distro that will distribute writes on the flash card, but I bet you can work it out.
In fact, I have often wondered if we couldn't duplicate the cheap-laptops-for-kids efforts with free, donated laptops into which you slot a pre-prepared IDE interface compact flash card with linux on it.
This is described in the essay, in what I call the School of Fish test. Fish can handle a crazy human diving into their school, and you never touch 'em. They do it by trusting their brother fish, among other things, and always having a gap ready in case something happens.
I hope the views are not inconsistent. The problems are hard, but I'm assuming that while we don't yet have solutions in 2008, we can reach them in 2020 -- where we'll have more and cheaper sensors and 120 times as much computing power at our disposal, if not more.
That's why I propose the difficult, but doable "School of Fish" test. The principles of defensive driving need to guide the algorithms of the cars. I'm not pretending we know what algorithms will pass this test, but I am predicting that finding them is within our abilities.
The point about electric cars and zipcars is that these are not successful technologies in the market today. I believe that the barriers to their success can be solved by a robocar. For car share, it's obvious -- car share is vastly better if the car comes to you where you need it, and you can take it one-way.
For electrics, I outline that in great detail. Robocars don't actually do much green themselves, but they make other green technologies *marketable*. And that's really the key. How to make technology people will actually buy.
Note that the car share, and lightweight electrics are all enabled with what I call "whistlecar" technology, where the car comes to you, but you drive it. That doesn't prevent accidents (on its own) however, but the robocar tech in the whistlecar does make it harder to get into an accident.
Can all accidents be eliminated? Doubtful. There will be situations where physics offers no way out. But a defensive robocar, always leaving gaps in the right places so that physics will offer a way out if something strange happens, can eliminate most accidents, I would offer.
Submissions have been low, but not that low. We're switching moderators.
One of the big points is to not go down this route. The DARPA grand challenges realized we could not depend on special roads, special lanes, that it was necessary to drive on any road, with obstacles, cars and pedestrians. And the teams came through.
What the special-lanes view misses is that government transportation projects are planned in decades, cost billions and are full of politics.
Any solution which comes mostly from the ground up -- with individuals buying technology one person at a time, using existing infrastructure -- that's going to win. Because with computer technology, each year it's twice as good, and individuals keep upgrading because they don't *plan*, they jut do.
So forget PRT, special highways, special lanes. That's truly the thing that will never happen. While we wait for the politics of this, the car designers will have solved any problems that needed those lanes -- if we can get the public to accept it.
PRT was a cool idea in the 70s but its time is past. We know are within sight of replacing guideways and monorails with smart computers with lidar and 21st century machine vision systems. Not trivial, but within sight of it.
Yes, a great deal less, and almost all private money. That's because we already replace all the cars with amazing rapidity. The average car is owned 5 years I think.
I can't predict how much money it will take for the research (all earned back in sales though) but look at what's been done for paltry $1M and $2M prizes.
The effective cost of this is so close to zero you can't see it on the scale of national budgets. Negative really, considering the $230 billion dollar annual cost of accidents in the USA according to the NTSB.
It doesn't. Can't solve everything. For that, I have hopes on the various areas of energy research -- thermosolar, new generation PV, geothermal, wind, waves, you name it. We do have to get off coal. As I identify the two big things we have to fix are cars and electric generation. Right now everything else is in the noise compared to them. Later the rest comes to the top.
As the logistics of this are complex, they are not spelled out fully, but the point is that many options are open. Vehicles will of course recharge in the day, but they only need to do so if they will be needed later that day. Or they can swap battery packs for other batteries charged at night. I don't suggest we can do all charging at night, but we can do a lot more of it.
There will be an economic trade-off done on electrics. Does it make more sense to recharge during the day? To swap batteries? To go to a high-current fast-charge station? To leave the vehicle idle and use a different vehicle? All these choices might make sense based on circumstances. One thing is sure, there will be more charging done at night.
Swappable battery packs make a lot of sense for high-use vehicles like taxis. Ordinary charging makes more sense for private vehicles making a few trips a day.
When I say "just enough range" I should be clear I don't mean just enough range for a trip, but for all the travel it must do to be usable, which may include range for 2 trips if it is likely to be called upon for that, and range to get to charging stations efficiently etc.
"Charging stations" are nothing fancy for electric cars. Really just poles with plugs on them that cars can drive up to, plug into, transmit credit authorization to and get a charge. Perhaps not even that, perhaps they are any old plug if the robotics are good enough to have a robot arm plug into those, an the plug has a digital camera to photograph the licence plates of thieves.
It's really very cheap and simple compared to what we have today.
High current charging stations and battery swap depots are something larger, along the lines of a gas station today. Funny thing is, with those gas stations closing as people move to electric cars, we'll have a place to put the charging depots, won't we?
Yes, this is discussed. Do you want that car in the city?
I think that many people will still own fun-to-drive cars, and take them out into the country to have fun driving. Or they'll ride a robocar to the country and rent one there. I do think you won't see as much of this in the city. Fewer people think urban streets are a thrill to drive.
I would love to fix our cities. But this is an immense project, that will take vast resources and much time. We should get to work on it.
But at the same time, I've come to the conclusion that teams of skilled computer people with a fraction of a typical city transit budget could create robocars, and solve a great number of problems.
If they did, we would immediately abort the city-reinvention project we started because the rules will have changed. In fact, while it's far more speculative, I am interested in exploration of how cities will grow if offered cheap, quick, efficient urban transportation, so that within the several miles square area of the city, all places can be reached in 5 minutes and distance almost ceases to exist. I can see many changes, some good, some bad. No urban planners today are thinking about them, though.
So I will criticise our transportation systems, and our cities, and advocate fixing what we can fix.
As for sleeper cars, they are clearly not for everybody. Not even for me, I don't sleep too well on transportation. But lots of people do.
They won't be deployed until we are convinced they kill far fewer people than humans do at the wheel. In fact, I suspect in the USA a very low problem rate will be demanded. I think the engineers can deliver that rate.
I could be wrong on that. It's worth trying.
The number of people killed by human drivers in the USA is similar to that killed by Alzhiemer's or stomach cancer or several other major killers. Largest killer from 5 to 45 in fact.
If I told you, "We could probably cure Alzheimers with a relatively modest engineering effort" would you ever write a post wondering if it was worth it?
No, it's not speculation to say if the cost of accidents is seriously reduced, the cost of policies to cover them is also reduced. That's basic insurance math. If the vendor has to buy a very expensive insurance policy because they will be sued, the cost of that policy will be split up among buyers, but still cost each buyer less if the cost of accidents is, in the aggregate, less.
I have a section in TFA about the liability questions, and they are serious and may drive the tech overseas, but that doesn't seem to be what you're wriging about.
As I said there will be vandals and theives surely. But what is your point? I don't think anybody thinks there will not be such crime. There is now, lots of it.
The point is, you summon up a taxi by saying, "I need to get to location X." That's what you care about. Will it get you there, on time, and in comfort. The taxi company worries about getting you a vehicle that can do the job, you don't. If they don't deliver you use a different taxi company. (No taxi monopolies any more, thank god.)
I suspect that Hasbro is going to use trademark as a large part of their thrust against scrabulous. If that's wrong then I stand corrected. It is the strongest doctrine of law in their favour, because Scrabulous made the error of using a name that sounds like Scrabble.
Had they called their game "Crossword Tile Game" or some other completely different name, this avenue would not be open to Hasbro, which would have to rely on much less workable principles of game copyright, trade dress etc.
Their lawyers will have tried all angles, I know that without even reading the complaint.
For full rush hour, shuttling back does cut efficiency, but not nearly in half. First of all, ultralight electric vehicles won't weigh as much as a person, so they are going to be much more efficient going back. Secondly, only some of them have to go back (depends how many people own them). The empty trains might be an excellent place for them to return on, actually -- even more efficient.
You have to move some vehicles outside Manhattan, but not too many. Because during the low traffic parts of the day, they can double park on the streets, filling driveways, sitting in front of fire hydrants, leaving just enough space for the non rush hour traffic.
You will find many of your issues addressed in the article. In fact, I have a large section on the question of how people like to store stuff in their cars, as I am one of those people. At the same time, in cities like NYC, where nobody owns cars, people seem to have managed to get past this "insurmountable" problem.
Suggest you read the article for more on your concerns. If you wish to shop personally, by the way, you would load the deliverbot, not the store. Deliverbots should cost around 5 cents/mile, I predict, for small one suitable for typical cargo.
People who want to own cars will still own cars, but they can own different cars, and hire specialized cars for specialized trips.
The sleeper car does not need to refuel, if it's going slow. My example is a trip to Lake Tahoe that's 4 hours at 75mph but 7 hours at 40mph. Cars actually get *better* MPG at slower speeds, so it would have to refuel *less* often.
As for renting durable goods. It costs more because there is a large overhead in renting today. Picture a world where delivery is quick and cheap, and thus the durable goods are also rented a far larger percentage of their time. This is a side-issue, but I think the potential here is very large for much cheaper rental, always beating the cost of owning something you use 2 hours/month.
I am adding a section to the deliverbot concept about a room for the deliverbot. That's where the bed arrives, and stays if you like. I'm also wondering if we don't see better in-house robotic tech for moving furniture but I don't want to depend on it. Guest beds are worth paying extra for (to cover disinfect, inspection and work of moving in a house) because the real cost of a permanent guest bed is not the cost of the bed -- it's the space in the house an infrequent guest room takes.
But I agree the deliverbot/renting speculation is a sideline to the real message of the article, so tell me what else you don't think is credible there.
AVGS is more generally taken to apply to factory floor mobile robots. It's not a very workable term for the public. I considered a lot of terms because there is no one universal term, and settled on robocars as simple, self-explanatory, and understandable to the general public.
You'll also see people call these self-driving cars, driverless cars, robotic cars, autonomous vehicles and a variety of other names. I stand by the name choice. And I do have a section on deliverbots, a name I made up for what comes after AVGS, when delivery and task robots roam the streets.
Don't take it seriously if you like.
I don't remotely claim this is a solved problem. I think the path to solution is getting clearer. For the reasons you state, LIDAR is the most popular solution on today's prototypes, though I think later models will use not just LIDAR, but better (light source independent) machine vision, deep infrared temperature sensors and many other things.
Not much benefit? Saving a million lives a year, globally? Saving 50 billion hours of human time every year in the USA? Cutting U.S. transportation energy needs in half? Reducing dependence on foreign oil and halting middle east imports with the wars that causes?
Just what is your idea of a project with a lot of benefit?
Is diesel more fuel efficient? You get more miles per *gallon* of fuel but isn't that just because diesel is denser, and you have more pounds of fuel -- which is what really matters -- in each gallon. It's why the gallons cost more.
Reverse for ethanol, where a gallon has only 75% of the energy of a gallon of gasoline.
That's the point. When taking a short trip (which is the vast majority of all trips) you take an electric car. When taking a long trip, you use a liquid fueled car. You ask the robotaxi company to send you the car you need for the trip you are taking.
So how is this solving the wrong problem? Moving all the short trips to electric or alternative fuels and keeping the long trips in cars fueled by gasoline, biofuel or natural gas does wonders for the total energy usage of cars.