Go look up Shor's Algorithm. Nothing magical about it - large numbers are trivial to factor with a quantum computer, and many asymmetric crypto algorithms depend on large numbers being unfactorable. These algorithms are used for all kinds of things.
Sure, they aren't magical - they may not be able to break every encryption system. However, I'm not aware of any proofs that a quantum algorithm does not exist to simplify cryptanalysis on other systems. Sure, nobody has published an equivalent to Shor's for ECC, but that doesn't mean that such an algorithm doesn't exist, or that it isn't known to the NSA.
The NSA can crack 4096-bit PGP keys? I doubt it. Seems like FUD to dissuade people from even attempting to use encryption
There is no mathematical proof that 4096-bit PGP keys are secure. You can only say that known algorithms cannot find a key in a practical amount of time on known computational hardware.
You don't know if an algorithm exists that would allow the keys to be factored in a short period of time. You also don't know if somebody has developed a practical quantum computer - it is already known that one would allow certain encryption systems to be trivially broken.
For every mathematician publishing articles about cryptography in the public space, there are probably 100 much-better-paid ones publishing articles in internal NSA publications. The NSA is by far the largest employer of mathematicians on earth - and they hire the best and the brightest they can find.
Morons there is no such thing as an exclusive back door. Once you broken the security of other countries networks, you leave access for anyone waiting to exploit, bet anything you like those morons did not at all to monitor and ensure those back doors were not exploited by others.
I get what you're saying, but those back doors wouldn't be there if the OS weren't exploitable in the first place. If anything I suspect that things were left more secure following the intrusion than before. They're just vulnerable to a different form of attack now (one that doesn't really concern the US - these aren't their networks they're messing with).
Securing a network is always harder than attacking a network and you can never fully understand a person's intentions when you grant them access.
Indeed this is a principle true in any form of warfare. The attacker gets to choose where to attack. Inevitably the attackers greatest strength is brought to bear on the defender's greatest weakness. Victory usually goes to whatever side can maintain the initiative.
This isn't some sci-fi movie, the UN is just like a big meeting place to avoid WWIII. It never really was meant for anything else.
Indeed - this point is lost on those who complain about the 5 veto powers. The whole point of that arrangement was to avoid sanctioning action that might actually lead to WWIII - the 5 veto powers were the 5 nations that had nuclear weapons. This is just a diplomatic extension of the kind of general paralysis that MAD inevitably leads to.
Atrocity can seem to give the one who commits it a brief surge of power, partly because of the fear it inflicts. But in the long run, atrocity and the killing of civilians is always counter-productive to a war effort.
You also need to consider the political aims of the war. Wars aren't just fought to kill people - there has to be a political aim. Atrocities tend to work against almost any political aim - you're setting yourself up for centuries of heavy-handed occupation if you want to hold the territory.
Chemical weapons are a problem because they usually do not kill. It takes a LOT of chemicals and the right environment to kill.
There is a bigger problem with chemical weapons - they're highly biased towards killing non-combatants.
Modern armies are equipped for fighting in a completely toxic environment. They don't like to wear all that gear because it slows them down, but using chemical weapons doesn't really provide a military advantage because it slows your own troops down just as much. Sure, the first strike will probably hit harder since nobody is ready for it, but you're not going to achieve a decisive victory just from the first strike.
On the other hand, all that nerve gas floating around is going to kill LOTS of civilians, and generally poison the entire battlefield for quite a while after hostilities are over. Chemical weapons are like landmines on steroids - another weapon that everybody is trying to get rid of. Landmines also don't really stop modern armies - they're equipped to handle them (though unlike chemical weapons they do provide an asymmetric advantage to the retreating force). However, landmines also tend to kill lots of kids/civilians after the war is over.
Oh, and as far as I'm aware chemical weapons are quite deadly. I think the only reason that some may perceive otherwise is that they aren't used much in a serious capacity - most attacks involve less-effective chemicals like sarin, and they're usually deployed by terrorists and such in a crude manner. Even in Syria the sense is that Sarin was the weapon used and they probably didn't use all that much. A large strike using VX with well-designed shells and long-range artillery would probably wipe out a city.
All that said, I don't see international reaction to the Syria incident as being likely to be a deterrent.
If you want to deter an action, then you need to ensure that those contemplating the action have cause to think that really bad things will happen to them if they perform that action which won't happen to them if they don't. From current posturing it sounds like the US is going to fire off a few salvos of cruise missiles - that isn't going to have a strategic impact on the war. There is a good chance the US would have eventually done that anyway. The US also has to worry about the Russian reaction and the possibility of a proxy war. The Syrian regime is also in survival mode - they don't have much to lose.
I'd say the main thing keeping dictators from gassing their populations is that it is more profitable to exploit people than kill them. Most people don't handle dictators right because most people don't have the personality of a dictator.
Yup. This stuff has been understood for ages. I used to administer a VAX whose console output was directed to printer. That isn't ideal - if the printer runs out of paper it actually halts the system until replaced and the buffer clears (which I guess is a secure way to handle things, if not productive).
A logging system that is itself secured by a separate admin team with separate physical security would be the obvious solution. Subverting that would require collusion.
Agree 100% with a full-costs analysis. For Oil I'd also factor in the need to bomb a bunch of arabs into the stone age every few years as well, and to have all that extra airport security to prevent retaliation.
However, I think much of the nuclear waste problem is self-inflicted. Nuclear waste could be reprocessed to a large extent and that both reduces waste volume and pays for itself economically. The main reason this is not done is the fear of nuclear proliferation. However, compared to building a Yucca mountain and dealing with shipping dangerous waste across the country, it seems like just having a few regional breeder reactors guarded by the US Army would be fairly cheap. We need army barracks anyway - just build them around reactor facilities. The nuclear waste problem would still exist, but it would be far simpler if we didn't intentionally create so much of it. Most of the rest is stuff we have to generate anyway - like medical waste.
I'd suggest GNU to take this on, but I don't think they'd be pragmatic enough.
What do you think GNU already is? Or the SFC?
There are lots of such organizations.
Now, none of them are going to falsify invoices for donations, because they're mostly composed of lawyers and accountants who understand the legal implications of doing this. Perhaps you were thinking of an organization more like the Mafia?
You can give a non-profit a donation but I don't think you can pay them for services, because then they aren't a non-profit. If there is an umbrella org, ie Apache, become a corporate member instead.
Sure they can bill you for services (though they might have to pay taxes on any revenue derived from this).
However, in this case they wouldn't be billing you for services. They'd be falsifying a bill for services that were really a donation. I can only imagine what their legal counsel would have to say about this. Who was the donor, Enron?
You want the equivalent of Ctrl-Z for the internet?
Well, Ctrl-Z suspends the execution of a process, so probably the closest equivalent for something remote would be Ctrl-S. Works on any sane terminal since the 70s or so.
Oh, and I don't know what they mean about using the shift key. Last time I checked ASCII only contained 26 control codes...
I'm not enough of a programmer to tell if there's explicit support for the kind of thing AirCast does
There isn't - that's why everybody is upset. Google never really intended the device to do what the Cyanogenmod guys are doing with it, just like the company that made the computer you're using never intended you to run Linux on it. The API is basically artificially limited, perhaps because Google doesn't want you to play the copy of the movie that you already have, and instead they want you to buy yet another copy of it from them or one of their partners.
I haven't really seen any whining - just pointing out that the API was changed. It is useful to know, because if you were planning on buying one of these just so that you could use it to stream from Cyanogenmod you know not to waste your money until this is straightened out. This is not unlike all the random posts about UEFI firmwares that have trouble running Linux for whatever reason - the vendors could care less if you want to run Linux but if you care then you need to know, since almost nobody makes consumer hardware intended to run Linux.
One of the features of AWS was supposed to be the ability to reroute everything to a different datacenter if one goes down. I know I read that somewhere back when AWS was first starting up. You don't think they lied, do you?
That all works just fine - if you build your application to use it.
However, nobody does this, because when your coworker is working on a new feature he can show the boss when it comes time for bonuses, do you want to spend your time working on something that you can only show off when Netflix goes down? Oh, and the way that you know that your work did anything is because your coworker's new feature still works.
Reliability is a hard personal sell in IT, and that is why there is so little of it. Anybody who set up real AWS redundancy didn't bat an eye at this outage. Their load balancers were not exclusively in one data center, and when they spotted the outage they sent all the work to other data centers where they spun up a ton of capacity.
If you just deploy all of your stuff and point your DNS at one Amazon datacenter, and that datacenter goes down, well so does everything you could have used to fix the problem. Even so, if you had control over your DNS outside of Amazon you could spin up another instance elsewhere manually if your tools are designed to handle that. If you hard-coded us-east-1 or whatever into all your scripts or didn't even have scripts to completely rebuild your instance from nothing, not so much.
With all they had learned with Vista and 7, (the first being how not to do a release, the second how to do a successful release) why the hell would they pick the technique that did not work?
Executives are not happy with merely making boatloads of money. You need to have GROWTH. Desktop operating systems are a mature market and MS already has 90% market share. If you want to grow by 10% annually you need something new
So, the execs just said, "hey, those tablet things are doing well - maybe we should just make Windows work like that." If they did that for their tablet OS they'd be fine, but they wanted to try to leverage their desktop market share so they turned their desktop OS into a tablet OS because it served their growth needs.
In doing so they're going to end up in a bloodbath by sacrificing their stable revenue sources in what amounts to a gamble. There isn't much downside for the execs though. If the company booms they get lots of money, if the company crashes they get paid the same. So, why not do something exciting? Besides, most of the execs are only sort-of in it for the money - they all have enough to retire at anytime so they have lots of incentive to take risks and make things interesting.
Yup, the UI of Win7 is generally an improvement across the board (the dock-like task bar is perhaps debatable, but it is also configurable). It also has good support for 64-bit (something you could get with XP, but I'm not sure how well anything supports that). Many features are upgraded in modest ways, like the resource manager from the previous task manager.
Win8 basically is an entirely different UI with a compatibility layer of sorts, and almost none of the changes are an improvement if you're not using a tablet.
I think we're just differing on the definition of small car. I drive a mid-size sedan. I don't really need one for much of what I do - I like the room up-front, but 95% of the time I don't need a trunk or rear seat. However, I need one at least once a week, so there is no way that rental would make any sense. However, I'm not going to plop down an extra 10k plus a ton of gas to drive a pickup truck or SUV for the one time every 3 years I haul something large.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with your first sentence—I did some poking a few years ago, and if you need a minivan to carry your 2 kids and all the luggage on a 5-hour drive once a year, and the rest of the time you just need to carry the aforementioned kids, it would be more economical to own a small car and rent the minivan.
Sure, if it is just for one trip a year. What if it is for one trip a week? The problem with current car rental systems is that they don't really handle short-duration rental well (some services are starting to take off, but they usually don't involve minivans, and they're only in major cities). You can't rent a minvan for two separate 15-minute trips 90 minutes apart. Even just renting it for 2h isn't really practical in most cases. With automation you could basically do that (really just a fancy cab service).
Agreed on all you posted, and much of my point was directed at #1-2, and to a lesser extent #3 (the reason they can offer support is that they make sure stuff doesn't get broken all the time). Most distros do not do any of these to the same extent, but the value of any linux distro is still often in the way they add a consistent quality layer to upstream release practices.
You would still need intersections for pedestrians. That way they can signal they want to cross the street and the cars can appropriately stop for them.
Maybe, but that doesn't require traffic lights - just a stand with buttons on it (and only for areas such that pedestrians can't just cross when no cars are around). As with all other traffic flow it doesn't even necessarily require stopping traffic - all that matters is that no cars go where the pedestrian is.
As long as you don't have more than 16 of anything, and didn't set the wrong address.:)
Oh, and back in that day virtually everything used daisy-chaining which isn't really practical for removable devices. That really wasn't a limitation in the bus itself though. The size of the cables was though.
While I agree that most people have cars larger than they need, today short-term car rentals really aren't a practical option in the way that they would be in a day of autonomous vehicles. If you don't have a trunk today then you have to call a cab every time you go to a store, which might be 3-4x a week. Cab rides are expensive - owning a larger car is cheaper. If cabs were autonomous it might cost $3 to have your groceries driven home, which makes the cab a viable option.
Today people need to get a car that is big enough to do everything they do 99% of the time - anything else is just uneconomical. With autonomous rentable cars people it will make more sense to buy a car that will do 70% of what you do, with frequent rentals to cover the rest. You could just have a button on your phone that says "have a car meet me at the door to take me home" and hit it while at the checkout line and you'd find a rental car ready to take your stuff home as soon as you step out the door, and you'd get the $3 bill on your credit card. Obviously you'd also have such a button to summon your own car as well. Grocery stores would probably also have delivery services which might be even cheaper (it could make multiple stops in a single trip).
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Nonsense. Quantum computers aren't magic; they can't magically break powerful encryption schemes.
Go look up Shor's Algorithm. Nothing magical about it - large numbers are trivial to factor with a quantum computer, and many asymmetric crypto algorithms depend on large numbers being unfactorable. These algorithms are used for all kinds of things.
Sure, they aren't magical - they may not be able to break every encryption system. However, I'm not aware of any proofs that a quantum algorithm does not exist to simplify cryptanalysis on other systems. Sure, nobody has published an equivalent to Shor's for ECC, but that doesn't mean that such an algorithm doesn't exist, or that it isn't known to the NSA.
The NSA can crack 4096-bit PGP keys? I doubt it. Seems like FUD to dissuade people from even attempting to use encryption
There is no mathematical proof that 4096-bit PGP keys are secure. You can only say that known algorithms cannot find a key in a practical amount of time on known computational hardware.
You don't know if an algorithm exists that would allow the keys to be factored in a short period of time. You also don't know if somebody has developed a practical quantum computer - it is already known that one would allow certain encryption systems to be trivially broken.
For every mathematician publishing articles about cryptography in the public space, there are probably 100 much-better-paid ones publishing articles in internal NSA publications. The NSA is by far the largest employer of mathematicians on earth - and they hire the best and the brightest they can find.
Morons there is no such thing as an exclusive back door. Once you broken the security of other countries networks, you leave access for anyone waiting to exploit, bet anything you like those morons did not at all to monitor and ensure those back doors were not exploited by others.
I get what you're saying, but those back doors wouldn't be there if the OS weren't exploitable in the first place. If anything I suspect that things were left more secure following the intrusion than before. They're just vulnerable to a different form of attack now (one that doesn't really concern the US - these aren't their networks they're messing with).
Securing a network is always harder than attacking a network and you can never fully understand a person's intentions when you grant them access.
Indeed this is a principle true in any form of warfare. The attacker gets to choose where to attack. Inevitably the attackers greatest strength is brought to bear on the defender's greatest weakness. Victory usually goes to whatever side can maintain the initiative.
There is UN
This isn't some sci-fi movie, the UN is just like a big meeting place to avoid WWIII. It never really was meant for anything else.
Indeed - this point is lost on those who complain about the 5 veto powers. The whole point of that arrangement was to avoid sanctioning action that might actually lead to WWIII - the 5 veto powers were the 5 nations that had nuclear weapons. This is just a diplomatic extension of the kind of general paralysis that MAD inevitably leads to.
Atrocity can seem to give the one who commits it a brief surge of power, partly because of the fear it inflicts. But in the long run, atrocity and the killing of civilians is always counter-productive to a war effort.
You also need to consider the political aims of the war. Wars aren't just fought to kill people - there has to be a political aim. Atrocities tend to work against almost any political aim - you're setting yourself up for centuries of heavy-handed occupation if you want to hold the territory.
Chemical weapons are a problem because they usually do not kill. It takes a LOT of chemicals and the right environment to kill.
There is a bigger problem with chemical weapons - they're highly biased towards killing non-combatants.
Modern armies are equipped for fighting in a completely toxic environment. They don't like to wear all that gear because it slows them down, but using chemical weapons doesn't really provide a military advantage because it slows your own troops down just as much. Sure, the first strike will probably hit harder since nobody is ready for it, but you're not going to achieve a decisive victory just from the first strike.
On the other hand, all that nerve gas floating around is going to kill LOTS of civilians, and generally poison the entire battlefield for quite a while after hostilities are over. Chemical weapons are like landmines on steroids - another weapon that everybody is trying to get rid of. Landmines also don't really stop modern armies - they're equipped to handle them (though unlike chemical weapons they do provide an asymmetric advantage to the retreating force). However, landmines also tend to kill lots of kids/civilians after the war is over.
Oh, and as far as I'm aware chemical weapons are quite deadly. I think the only reason that some may perceive otherwise is that they aren't used much in a serious capacity - most attacks involve less-effective chemicals like sarin, and they're usually deployed by terrorists and such in a crude manner. Even in Syria the sense is that Sarin was the weapon used and they probably didn't use all that much. A large strike using VX with well-designed shells and long-range artillery would probably wipe out a city.
All that said, I don't see international reaction to the Syria incident as being likely to be a deterrent.
If you want to deter an action, then you need to ensure that those contemplating the action have cause to think that really bad things will happen to them if they perform that action which won't happen to them if they don't. From current posturing it sounds like the US is going to fire off a few salvos of cruise missiles - that isn't going to have a strategic impact on the war. There is a good chance the US would have eventually done that anyway. The US also has to worry about the Russian reaction and the possibility of a proxy war. The Syrian regime is also in survival mode - they don't have much to lose.
I'd say the main thing keeping dictators from gassing their populations is that it is more profitable to exploit people than kill them. Most people don't handle dictators right because most people don't have the personality of a dictator.
Yup. This stuff has been understood for ages. I used to administer a VAX whose console output was directed to printer. That isn't ideal - if the printer runs out of paper it actually halts the system until replaced and the buffer clears (which I guess is a secure way to handle things, if not productive).
A logging system that is itself secured by a separate admin team with separate physical security would be the obvious solution. Subverting that would require collusion.
Agree 100% with a full-costs analysis. For Oil I'd also factor in the need to bomb a bunch of arabs into the stone age every few years as well, and to have all that extra airport security to prevent retaliation.
However, I think much of the nuclear waste problem is self-inflicted. Nuclear waste could be reprocessed to a large extent and that both reduces waste volume and pays for itself economically. The main reason this is not done is the fear of nuclear proliferation. However, compared to building a Yucca mountain and dealing with shipping dangerous waste across the country, it seems like just having a few regional breeder reactors guarded by the US Army would be fairly cheap. We need army barracks anyway - just build them around reactor facilities. The nuclear waste problem would still exist, but it would be far simpler if we didn't intentionally create so much of it. Most of the rest is stuff we have to generate anyway - like medical waste.
I'd suggest GNU to take this on, but I don't think they'd be pragmatic enough.
What do you think GNU already is? Or the SFC?
There are lots of such organizations.
Now, none of them are going to falsify invoices for donations, because they're mostly composed of lawyers and accountants who understand the legal implications of doing this. Perhaps you were thinking of an organization more like the Mafia?
You can give a non-profit a donation but I don't think you can pay them for services, because then they aren't a non-profit. If there is an umbrella org, ie Apache, become a corporate member instead.
Sure they can bill you for services (though they might have to pay taxes on any revenue derived from this).
However, in this case they wouldn't be billing you for services. They'd be falsifying a bill for services that were really a donation. I can only imagine what their legal counsel would have to say about this. Who was the donor, Enron?
Man, if they can't get the log for exactly what transpired when they see a messed up entry, they are fucked already.
Maybe they can, but that doesn't mean that they have to pay him for it.
They're paying for useful bug reports, not giving rewards to people who hack their website.
You want the equivalent of Ctrl-Z for the internet?
Well, Ctrl-Z suspends the execution of a process, so probably the closest equivalent for something remote would be Ctrl-S. Works on any sane terminal since the 70s or so.
Oh, and I don't know what they mean about using the shift key. Last time I checked ASCII only contained 26 control codes...
I'm not enough of a programmer to tell if there's explicit support for the kind of thing AirCast does
There isn't - that's why everybody is upset. Google never really intended the device to do what the Cyanogenmod guys are doing with it, just like the company that made the computer you're using never intended you to run Linux on it. The API is basically artificially limited, perhaps because Google doesn't want you to play the copy of the movie that you already have, and instead they want you to buy yet another copy of it from them or one of their partners.
I haven't really seen any whining - just pointing out that the API was changed. It is useful to know, because if you were planning on buying one of these just so that you could use it to stream from Cyanogenmod you know not to waste your money until this is straightened out. This is not unlike all the random posts about UEFI firmwares that have trouble running Linux for whatever reason - the vendors could care less if you want to run Linux but if you care then you need to know, since almost nobody makes consumer hardware intended to run Linux.
One of the features of AWS was supposed to be the ability to reroute everything to a different datacenter if one goes down. I know I read that somewhere back when AWS was first starting up. You don't think they lied, do you?
That all works just fine - if you build your application to use it.
However, nobody does this, because when your coworker is working on a new feature he can show the boss when it comes time for bonuses, do you want to spend your time working on something that you can only show off when Netflix goes down? Oh, and the way that you know that your work did anything is because your coworker's new feature still works.
Reliability is a hard personal sell in IT, and that is why there is so little of it. Anybody who set up real AWS redundancy didn't bat an eye at this outage. Their load balancers were not exclusively in one data center, and when they spotted the outage they sent all the work to other data centers where they spun up a ton of capacity.
If you just deploy all of your stuff and point your DNS at one Amazon datacenter, and that datacenter goes down, well so does everything you could have used to fix the problem. Even so, if you had control over your DNS outside of Amazon you could spin up another instance elsewhere manually if your tools are designed to handle that. If you hard-coded us-east-1 or whatever into all your scripts or didn't even have scripts to completely rebuild your instance from nothing, not so much.
With all they had learned with Vista and 7, (the first being how not to do a release, the second how to do a successful release) why the hell would they pick the technique that did not work?
Executives are not happy with merely making boatloads of money. You need to have GROWTH. Desktop operating systems are a mature market and MS already has 90% market share. If you want to grow by 10% annually you need something new
So, the execs just said, "hey, those tablet things are doing well - maybe we should just make Windows work like that." If they did that for their tablet OS they'd be fine, but they wanted to try to leverage their desktop market share so they turned their desktop OS into a tablet OS because it served their growth needs.
In doing so they're going to end up in a bloodbath by sacrificing their stable revenue sources in what amounts to a gamble. There isn't much downside for the execs though. If the company booms they get lots of money, if the company crashes they get paid the same. So, why not do something exciting? Besides, most of the execs are only sort-of in it for the money - they all have enough to retire at anytime so they have lots of incentive to take risks and make things interesting.
Yup, the UI of Win7 is generally an improvement across the board (the dock-like task bar is perhaps debatable, but it is also configurable). It also has good support for 64-bit (something you could get with XP, but I'm not sure how well anything supports that). Many features are upgraded in modest ways, like the resource manager from the previous task manager.
Win8 basically is an entirely different UI with a compatibility layer of sorts, and almost none of the changes are an improvement if you're not using a tablet.
I think we're just differing on the definition of small car. I drive a mid-size sedan. I don't really need one for much of what I do - I like the room up-front, but 95% of the time I don't need a trunk or rear seat. However, I need one at least once a week, so there is no way that rental would make any sense. However, I'm not going to plop down an extra 10k plus a ton of gas to drive a pickup truck or SUV for the one time every 3 years I haul something large.
VMS brings back memories...
The point of a bug report is to provide information to allow a flaw to be fixed, not to simply brag about having found a problem.
This isn't a useful bug report "This page demonstrates that I was able to bypass your security and tamper with one of your pages."
This is a useful bug report "I was able to bypass your security by sending the following malformed request to your server..."
Bug bounties are generally only offered for the latter.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with your first sentence—I did some poking a few years ago, and if you need a minivan to carry your 2 kids and all the luggage on a 5-hour drive once a year, and the rest of the time you just need to carry the aforementioned kids, it would be more economical to own a small car and rent the minivan.
Sure, if it is just for one trip a year. What if it is for one trip a week? The problem with current car rental systems is that they don't really handle short-duration rental well (some services are starting to take off, but they usually don't involve minivans, and they're only in major cities). You can't rent a minvan for two separate 15-minute trips 90 minutes apart. Even just renting it for 2h isn't really practical in most cases. With automation you could basically do that (really just a fancy cab service).
Agreed on all you posted, and much of my point was directed at #1-2, and to a lesser extent #3 (the reason they can offer support is that they make sure stuff doesn't get broken all the time). Most distros do not do any of these to the same extent, but the value of any linux distro is still often in the way they add a consistent quality layer to upstream release practices.
You would still need intersections for pedestrians. That way they can signal they want to cross the street and the cars can appropriately stop for them.
Maybe, but that doesn't require traffic lights - just a stand with buttons on it (and only for areas such that pedestrians can't just cross when no cars are around). As with all other traffic flow it doesn't even necessarily require stopping traffic - all that matters is that no cars go where the pedestrian is.
As long as you don't have more than 16 of anything, and didn't set the wrong address. :)
Oh, and back in that day virtually everything used daisy-chaining which isn't really practical for removable devices. That really wasn't a limitation in the bus itself though. The size of the cables was though.
Most people do not need larger cars now.
While I agree that most people have cars larger than they need, today short-term car rentals really aren't a practical option in the way that they would be in a day of autonomous vehicles. If you don't have a trunk today then you have to call a cab every time you go to a store, which might be 3-4x a week. Cab rides are expensive - owning a larger car is cheaper. If cabs were autonomous it might cost $3 to have your groceries driven home, which makes the cab a viable option.
Today people need to get a car that is big enough to do everything they do 99% of the time - anything else is just uneconomical. With autonomous rentable cars people it will make more sense to buy a car that will do 70% of what you do, with frequent rentals to cover the rest. You could just have a button on your phone that says "have a car meet me at the door to take me home" and hit it while at the checkout line and you'd find a rental car ready to take your stuff home as soon as you step out the door, and you'd get the $3 bill on your credit card. Obviously you'd also have such a button to summon your own car as well. Grocery stores would probably also have delivery services which might be even cheaper (it could make multiple stops in a single trip).