It is not the responsibility of a researcher who has discovered a vulnerability in some commercially available system to delay disclosure of the vulnerability until the system's manufacturer has had sufficient time to remedy the situation. The nature of the vulnerability is irrelevant to the question of when, where, and how to disclose. If the details are withheld, there is no public influence on the manufacturer to repair the system. If the details are disclosed, the customers will exert pressure on the manufacturer to make repairs. In the unlikely scenario that someone should use the disclosed details to exploit the vulnerability, the banks' insurance policies will cover the loss, representing a zero loss result to the bank customers. In the less likely scenario that private insurance policies do not cover the loss, the FDIC will cover the loss, up to $100k for each account. No substantial harm will be done. Disclosure benefits the banks and their customers.
I would expect a non-lethal weapon would not violate the intent of "innocent passage." The trouble I find is that any allowance we afford the merchant ships we must also afford the pirate ships. This means the pirates would be able to use non-lethal weapons to commandeer a target vessel, just as the target vessel would be able to use them to defend against such an attack.
Still, I would expect something like this dazzling device would be highly effective, especially mounted on a tranquilizer gun.
as someone who was heavily involved in collegiate competition similar to this effort, i have to say that this achievement seems like something that could be done by any college team with suitable funding and motivation. the science for controlling a powered paraglider is decades old, so this doesn't strike me as a breakthrough. what would impress me is some sort of system for mechanically deploying the lifting surface, like the top of a convertible car. without such an innovation, this vehicle would never be able to go anywhere near an urban center, given the power lines and other obstacles it would certainly encounter. to me, this represents a small, but measurable step toward an affordable flight-capable commercial vehicle for the average consumer. still, there remain many unanswered questions.
I mostly play a mage. I often find myself in real-world scenarios wishing I could turn people into sheep or teleport myself somewhere. I don't generally find myself wishing I could cast harmful spells on folks in the real world, but I do wish I could cast beneficial spells (buffs) on people, especially intelligence buffs. One of my favorite things I wish I could do is create an aura of clarity that might help people around me avoid stupid mistakes.
My mother lives in Omaha. She is not the sort to endorse this sort of thing, and I offer it as a bit of light humor, not meant to offend or insult you. She has heard many times from the locals that Nebraskans refer to Iowas as:
Idiots Out Walking Around
Of course, I'm from Baltimore, where folks are routinely referred to as Baltimorons, so take that for what it's worth.
When I submit an estimate for a task given by my manager, I take a conservative estimate of how long I think it will actually take and triple it. Then, my manager inevitably doubles or triples that and submits the resulting estimate to the client. Many times, the client says "wow, that's so fast!"
In almost all cases, I would finish the job in the amount of time I estimated to my manager, but he says something like "the client expects it to happen slower than you can get it done, so take your time." I typically refer to this as institutionalized waste. If I get something done in the time I actually estimated, then I'm usually left waiting for another person from another team to finish their work, so we can integrate our components together. In the end, if the management isn't keenly aware of the differences between the teams' timelines, there's always someone sitting around getting paid to do nothing.
You're right that software isn't food or clothing. It isn't tangible. Thus, whoever created the software must have known that their efforts were going toward creation of a product that can not be bought or sold in the same manner that bread and milk are. With tangible goods, either one has or one does not have the item. With intangible products like software, music, or movies, the question of whether or not one has the item is ambiguous. I think the real problem here is that the global economy is based on the construct that all products bought and sold are tangible. The industrial revolution brought us the ability to make the same thing many times, with a lower unit cost due to volume discount. The concept of mass production is meaningless when the cost of replicating a product is zero. The internet eliminates the distribution cost and allows every consumer to become a reseller in a zero-cost market.
As a software engineer myself, I have come to realize one simple fact about the 21st century global market. I do not and can not sell the product of my efforts. I sell my effort itself. I provide a service for a fee. Eventually, most of the software people need will have already been created, and with any luck the software will be organized and self-governed by open source communities. The people in these communities will not be paid by the users of the software through some sort of licensing system. They will be paid by the companies who produce tangible goods that can be sold in the marketplace, companies who derive benefit from integrating the software into their business model. The software itself will be free. The value provided to these companies by the software engineers will be the integration and application of the software to improve revenue generation of some tangible product.
My point was that the company as a whole must have already worked out some system for managing tax details in the billing, so they could use that same system to give you a minimum monthly bill for the base services you are buying, simply adding a note stating this value is the minimum total cost of the plan and that it could increase depending on service usage. Such a system (if it's a software component) could be integrated into the sales application as easily as the billing application.
Ok, fair enough. The taxes differ from region to region. They even might differ from carrier to carrier, but we're talking about one carrier with an exclusive distribution deal for iPhone. One developer, given a month or so (conservative estimate) and an adequate set of documentation describing the taxing system, could easily produce a black box that takes a description of the plan and billing address as input and produces a tax detail as output. Don't they need to do this *before* releasing the product anyway, so *they* can calculate the tax details correctly when they start billing their customers??
No, the hemi is an old (and as far as I'm concerned, crappy) approach that the american manufacturers rejuvenated in a ridiculous attempt to compete with the japanese companies. What I was talking about was this:
the basic laws of thermodynamics suggest that internal combustion engines are about as efficient as they are going to get.
I couldn't disagree more. There have been consistent advances in fuel control techniques, from the introduction of throttle body fuel injection in the late 80s to direct injection and custom piston head shapes in the late 90s. As computing technology advances, we continue to see better control mechanisms for spark, fuel, and valves. As these control systems improve, we'll see fuel efficiency improve and pollution decrease.
When I was in college, I worked on a hybrid vehicle development team that won a national collegiate contest. The rule of thumb for energy distribution at the time was that of the heat energy released from the fuel, one third goes to mechanical power at the crankshaft, one third goes into the engine coolant, and one third goes into the exhaust system. That tells me there is a huge potential for improvement.
I am appalled that you drive a 1964 car that, when loaded with two or three people, "falls into the mid-20s" for MPG. Your 40yr old car has the same fuel economy as my co-worker's brand new Acura RSX with similar passenger capacity. As an engineer who worked hands-on with development of hybrid electric SUV conversions in college and a hybrid owner, I find it disgusting that the best and brightest engineers at GM, Ford, Honda, Nissan, and Toyota can't seem to make a car do any better than 75mpg in the extreme case (Honda Insight) and 30mpg in the average case, despite their ability to do essentially the same thing 40 years ago.
I am not so naive as to believe they've been sitting around with their collective thumbs up their collective asses all this time. I realize that they have been striving to make the engines cleaner and more powerful. My concern is that we as a global society are focussed more on petty, self-serving ambition than collective growth. Instead of demanding better safety ratings, zero emissions, and low fuel consumption, the consumers demand leather seats, sunroofs, air conditioning that could nearly refrigerate the occupants, stereo systems that rattle windows in adjacent buildings, and the ability to surpass the speed limit from a dead stop in under five seconds.
Who are we racing? What are we trying to prove, and for what? I am disappointed with myself when I take the easy route and drive my hybrid to work instead of cycling. Are we so by our culture of acquisition and domination that we have forgotten to consider the consequences, that we don't care what world we leave to our children? There is an old native American proverb (which I admittedly learned from playing Civilization 4) that seems appropriate here:
"We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children."
i can juggle three balls and read at the same time. in fact, i like doing that because i find it therapeutic. it forces me to take my conscious mind out of both activities. i've never tried to determine if i do either task better or worse when i combine them, so i can't say much about the positive or negative impact of multitasking. i just find it relaxing.
At least with Mac vs PC, there are comparable metrics. Of course, we could always take the creationist approach to that argument and say "God created Mac," but I suppose that might be padding Steve Jobs' ego a bit too much.
some of us have no problems in this area. the problem i find is figuring out how to get rid of the chick after i realize that she's just a lush and not worth my time.
this would increase the chances of successful penetration significantly so, am i the only one who laughed when i read this? i'm somewhat amazed no one else posted about it. come on, guys! this sort of comment, when taken out of context, could lead to dozens of posts containing off-topic and highly enjoyable witty banter and sexual innuendo.
yeah, and men can finally experience menstrual cramping and childbirth. great... i'm much more interested in the experience of a female orgasm, personally.
with a little wifi and brain-to-wired network, i'm sure we could work out some rudimentary telepathy. who knows, maybe we could even manage to get 1200baud thought-sharing, though i doubt samba supports that.
theoretically, gravitational waves are created when acceleration changes, something called jerk, which is the third time derivative of position of a massive object. using a terahertz control input to drive a bunch of MEMS superconducting magnets with MEMS permanent magnets suspended above them, it should be possible to generate a gravitational wave signature that can be detected by the gravitational wave observatories currently in operation (like LIGO) and being designed (like LISA). i unfortunately do not have references on this computer or i'd share them. while these waves are believed to travel at the speed of light, i have heard no specific reasoning for why this should be the case other than pure speculation.
The terahertz band is the holy grail of telecommunications because at such high frequencies, we can begin to test communications based on gravitational waves instead of electromagnetic waves. This represents significant progress toward that end. Gravitational waves potentially are not limited to the speed of light, which might pave the way to real-time satellite communications with no lag or communications with operations on other planets with significantly shorter wait times.
The concept described on that website is similar to that of a proposal submitted by students at University of Maryland in 1998 to modularize train systems to improve efficiency. Using maglev propulsion, a train would be split into sections, the trailing sections separating from the train and slowing to stop at the station, while the front part of the train continues on at full speed. The passengers enter and exit the stopped section, and then the section is accelerated back to full speed. Once the section reaches cruising speed, the continuous speed section of the train behind it catches up from behind and joins.
This idea is troublesome in that it requires people to get up and move forward to the next car every so often to minimize travel time. They can certainly stay in their seats and take longer as the section slows down and speeds up, but eventually they need to be at the back of the train to get off. Also, there are technical challenges involved, such as negotiating the connection at cruising speed and designing a coupling that can facilitate passengers' moving between cars at cruising speed.
Ultimately, I think this sort of thing is a waste of resources. A track with many small cars is not much different from a highway, except the cars are automated. Since we're not far from having automated self-contained vehicles that can autopilot themselves around the existing road system, I think we're better off putting the energy into making that possible, safe, and affordable (in that order).
That is a good idea as well. I'm sure some combination of these types of systems would be good to carry us over until the automation becomes a reality. One thing about this system that would be difficult to manage is the scenario where the driver is "off-duty." In order for the system to work, there would need to be a two-way communication between the driver and the managing system. That way, a bunch of drivers who are "in range" could be selected and a message sent to each with the details of the passenger request. The first driver who responds gets the fare, and a second message goes out to the rest notifying them that the request has been filled. Of course, there are other problems, such as multiple-stop trips and trips involving one or more legs with delays in between (such as might happen when running errands).
The unfortunate truth about automation is that it forces people to get an education, so they can compete in the job market, and in a "free" society, it should not be required to get an education unless you want one. While I do think everyone should get an education, it's not my place or the place of the government or society to override the individual's right to decide.
This is linear thinking. Granted, the current public transport system doesn't work well. That's in part due to the cost, but mostly due to the lack of flexibility. When you know the bus will arrive within a 5-10min window at a particular location and carry you to a particular destination, from which you will very likely need to walk or transfer to a different bus or train, it is easy to see why one might not want to sacrifice one's personal transportation. I believe the bus system will always be like this, with static routes and schedules. This is due to the size of the vehicle. It is inefficient to have a vehicle capable of carrying 50 people that drives around like a taxi, picking people up wherever they are instead of driving a set path.
I envision a system of smaller vehicles, possibly 6- or 8-passenger vans, where each vehicle is given dynamic tasking based on requests through an internet portal. When a passenger needs to get to work, they submit a travel request to this portal and the system determines which of the fleet vehicles can most closely accomodate the request. That vehicle's path is then altered to include the new request, and all the current passengers' times of arrival are adjusted to support the additional passenger. Ideally, this would be 100% automated, with a computer controlling the vehicle completely. However, that solution puts working-class people out of jobs, so maybe it's better to have a person driving the vehicle and a computer telling the person where to go. With the increasing inclusion of navigation systems and communications systems like OnStar in automotive product lines, it's not a big step to integrate a two-way communication link between the vehicle and a central computer.
By increasing the flexibility of the system, more travellers are attracted to using it. By increasing the number of vehicles, more jobs are created. By organizing the travel of large numbers of people into optimized paths, traffic congestion, fuel usage, and pollution are reduced. There will always be people who are unwilling to sacrifice their freedom for such benefits, but as the system becomes more optimized and more attractive, it becomes more efficient.
Slashdot Mirror
It is not the responsibility of a researcher who has discovered a vulnerability in some commercially available system to delay disclosure of the vulnerability until the system's manufacturer has had sufficient time to remedy the situation. The nature of the vulnerability is irrelevant to the question of when, where, and how to disclose. If the details are withheld, there is no public influence on the manufacturer to repair the system. If the details are disclosed, the customers will exert pressure on the manufacturer to make repairs. In the unlikely scenario that someone should use the disclosed details to exploit the vulnerability, the banks' insurance policies will cover the loss, representing a zero loss result to the bank customers. In the less likely scenario that private insurance policies do not cover the loss, the FDIC will cover the loss, up to $100k for each account. No substantial harm will be done. Disclosure benefits the banks and their customers.
I would expect a non-lethal weapon would not violate the intent of "innocent passage." The trouble I find is that any allowance we afford the merchant ships we must also afford the pirate ships. This means the pirates would be able to use non-lethal weapons to commandeer a target vessel, just as the target vessel would be able to use them to defend against such an attack.
Still, I would expect something like this dazzling device would be highly effective, especially mounted on a tranquilizer gun.
as someone who was heavily involved in collegiate competition similar to this effort, i have to say that this achievement seems like something that could be done by any college team with suitable funding and motivation. the science for controlling a powered paraglider is decades old, so this doesn't strike me as a breakthrough. what would impress me is some sort of system for mechanically deploying the lifting surface, like the top of a convertible car. without such an innovation, this vehicle would never be able to go anywhere near an urban center, given the power lines and other obstacles it would certainly encounter. to me, this represents a small, but measurable step toward an affordable flight-capable commercial vehicle for the average consumer. still, there remain many unanswered questions.
I play WoW (no surprise there).
I mostly play a mage. I often find myself in real-world scenarios wishing I could turn people into sheep or teleport myself somewhere. I don't generally find myself wishing I could cast harmful spells on folks in the real world, but I do wish I could cast beneficial spells (buffs) on people, especially intelligence buffs. One of my favorite things I wish I could do is create an aura of clarity that might help people around me avoid stupid mistakes.
My mother lives in Omaha. She is not the sort to endorse this sort of thing, and I offer it as a bit of light humor, not meant to offend or insult you. She has heard many times from the locals that Nebraskans refer to Iowas as:
Idiots Out Walking Around
Of course, I'm from Baltimore, where folks are routinely referred to as Baltimorons, so take that for what it's worth.
When I submit an estimate for a task given by my manager, I take a conservative estimate of how long I think it will actually take and triple it. Then, my manager inevitably doubles or triples that and submits the resulting estimate to the client. Many times, the client says "wow, that's so fast!"
In almost all cases, I would finish the job in the amount of time I estimated to my manager, but he says something like "the client expects it to happen slower than you can get it done, so take your time." I typically refer to this as institutionalized waste. If I get something done in the time I actually estimated, then I'm usually left waiting for another person from another team to finish their work, so we can integrate our components together. In the end, if the management isn't keenly aware of the differences between the teams' timelines, there's always someone sitting around getting paid to do nothing.
You're right that software isn't food or clothing. It isn't tangible. Thus, whoever created the software must have known that their efforts were going toward creation of a product that can not be bought or sold in the same manner that bread and milk are. With tangible goods, either one has or one does not have the item. With intangible products like software, music, or movies, the question of whether or not one has the item is ambiguous. I think the real problem here is that the global economy is based on the construct that all products bought and sold are tangible. The industrial revolution brought us the ability to make the same thing many times, with a lower unit cost due to volume discount. The concept of mass production is meaningless when the cost of replicating a product is zero. The internet eliminates the distribution cost and allows every consumer to become a reseller in a zero-cost market.
As a software engineer myself, I have come to realize one simple fact about the 21st century global market. I do not and can not sell the product of my efforts. I sell my effort itself. I provide a service for a fee. Eventually, most of the software people need will have already been created, and with any luck the software will be organized and self-governed by open source communities. The people in these communities will not be paid by the users of the software through some sort of licensing system. They will be paid by the companies who produce tangible goods that can be sold in the marketplace, companies who derive benefit from integrating the software into their business model. The software itself will be free. The value provided to these companies by the software engineers will be the integration and application of the software to improve revenue generation of some tangible product.
My point was that the company as a whole must have already worked out some system for managing tax details in the billing, so they could use that same system to give you a minimum monthly bill for the base services you are buying, simply adding a note stating this value is the minimum total cost of the plan and that it could increase depending on service usage. Such a system (if it's a software component) could be integrated into the sales application as easily as the billing application.
Ok, fair enough. The taxes differ from region to region. They even might differ from carrier to carrier, but we're talking about one carrier with an exclusive distribution deal for iPhone. One developer, given a month or so (conservative estimate) and an adequate set of documentation describing the taxing system, could easily produce a black box that takes a description of the plan and billing address as input and produces a tax detail as output. Don't they need to do this *before* releasing the product anyway, so *they* can calculate the tax details correctly when they start billing their customers??
No, the hemi is an old (and as far as I'm concerned, crappy) approach that the american manufacturers rejuvenated in a ridiculous attempt to compete with the japanese companies. What I was talking about was this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_direct_injection
Here's a decent writeup also:
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/03/29/215606.php
the basic laws of thermodynamics suggest that internal combustion engines are about as efficient as they are going to get.
I couldn't disagree more. There have been consistent advances in fuel control techniques, from the introduction of throttle body fuel injection in the late 80s to direct injection and custom piston head shapes in the late 90s. As computing technology advances, we continue to see better control mechanisms for spark, fuel, and valves. As these control systems improve, we'll see fuel efficiency improve and pollution decrease. When I was in college, I worked on a hybrid vehicle development team that won a national collegiate contest. The rule of thumb for energy distribution at the time was that of the heat energy released from the fuel, one third goes to mechanical power at the crankshaft, one third goes into the engine coolant, and one third goes into the exhaust system. That tells me there is a huge potential for improvement.
I am appalled that you drive a 1964 car that, when loaded with two or three people, "falls into the mid-20s" for MPG. Your 40yr old car has the same fuel economy as my co-worker's brand new Acura RSX with similar passenger capacity. As an engineer who worked hands-on with development of hybrid electric SUV conversions in college and a hybrid owner, I find it disgusting that the best and brightest engineers at GM, Ford, Honda, Nissan, and Toyota can't seem to make a car do any better than 75mpg in the extreme case (Honda Insight) and 30mpg in the average case, despite their ability to do essentially the same thing 40 years ago.
I am not so naive as to believe they've been sitting around with their collective thumbs up their collective asses all this time. I realize that they have been striving to make the engines cleaner and more powerful. My concern is that we as a global society are focussed more on petty, self-serving ambition than collective growth. Instead of demanding better safety ratings, zero emissions, and low fuel consumption, the consumers demand leather seats, sunroofs, air conditioning that could nearly refrigerate the occupants, stereo systems that rattle windows in adjacent buildings, and the ability to surpass the speed limit from a dead stop in under five seconds.
Who are we racing? What are we trying to prove, and for what? I am disappointed with myself when I take the easy route and drive my hybrid to work instead of cycling. Are we so by our culture of acquisition and domination that we have forgotten to consider the consequences, that we don't care what world we leave to our children? There is an old native American proverb (which I admittedly learned from playing Civilization 4) that seems appropriate here:
"We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children."
Sadly, I think I'm preaching to the choir...
i can juggle three balls and read at the same time. in fact, i like doing that because i find it therapeutic. it forces me to take my conscious mind out of both activities. i've never tried to determine if i do either task better or worse when i combine them, so i can't say much about the positive or negative impact of multitasking. i just find it relaxing.
At least with Mac vs PC, there are comparable metrics. Of course, we could always take the creationist approach to that argument and say "God created Mac," but I suppose that might be padding Steve Jobs' ego a bit too much.
Microsoft can have as much of my urine as they like. If they want to test it, they can just hold out a cup.
some of us have no problems in this area. the problem i find is figuring out how to get rid of the chick after i realize that she's just a lush and not worth my time.
I recommend that all slashdot comments must be written in pseudocode. We're all geeks anyway.
Or, along the lines I just described:
Rules.recommend( Rules.comments.forceFormat(Format.PSEUDOCODE) );
assert( PersonalityTypes.GEEK.contains( slashdot.getUsers() ) );
yeah, and men can finally experience menstrual cramping and childbirth. great... i'm much more interested in the experience of a female orgasm, personally.
with a little wifi and brain-to-wired network, i'm sure we could work out some rudimentary telepathy. who knows, maybe we could even manage to get 1200baud thought-sharing, though i doubt samba supports that.
theoretically, gravitational waves are created when acceleration changes, something called jerk, which is the third time derivative of position of a massive object. using a terahertz control input to drive a bunch of MEMS superconducting magnets with MEMS permanent magnets suspended above them, it should be possible to generate a gravitational wave signature that can be detected by the gravitational wave observatories currently in operation (like LIGO) and being designed (like LISA). i unfortunately do not have references on this computer or i'd share them. while these waves are believed to travel at the speed of light, i have heard no specific reasoning for why this should be the case other than pure speculation.
The terahertz band is the holy grail of telecommunications because at such high frequencies, we can begin to test communications based on gravitational waves instead of electromagnetic waves. This represents significant progress toward that end. Gravitational waves potentially are not limited to the speed of light, which might pave the way to real-time satellite communications with no lag or communications with operations on other planets with significantly shorter wait times.
The concept described on that website is similar to that of a proposal submitted by students at University of Maryland in 1998 to modularize train systems to improve efficiency. Using maglev propulsion, a train would be split into sections, the trailing sections separating from the train and slowing to stop at the station, while the front part of the train continues on at full speed. The passengers enter and exit the stopped section, and then the section is accelerated back to full speed. Once the section reaches cruising speed, the continuous speed section of the train behind it catches up from behind and joins.
This idea is troublesome in that it requires people to get up and move forward to the next car every so often to minimize travel time. They can certainly stay in their seats and take longer as the section slows down and speeds up, but eventually they need to be at the back of the train to get off. Also, there are technical challenges involved, such as negotiating the connection at cruising speed and designing a coupling that can facilitate passengers' moving between cars at cruising speed.
Ultimately, I think this sort of thing is a waste of resources. A track with many small cars is not much different from a highway, except the cars are automated. Since we're not far from having automated self-contained vehicles that can autopilot themselves around the existing road system, I think we're better off putting the energy into making that possible, safe, and affordable (in that order).
That is a good idea as well. I'm sure some combination of these types of systems would be good to carry us over until the automation becomes a reality. One thing about this system that would be difficult to manage is the scenario where the driver is "off-duty." In order for the system to work, there would need to be a two-way communication between the driver and the managing system. That way, a bunch of drivers who are "in range" could be selected and a message sent to each with the details of the passenger request. The first driver who responds gets the fare, and a second message goes out to the rest notifying them that the request has been filled. Of course, there are other problems, such as multiple-stop trips and trips involving one or more legs with delays in between (such as might happen when running errands).
The unfortunate truth about automation is that it forces people to get an education, so they can compete in the job market, and in a "free" society, it should not be required to get an education unless you want one. While I do think everyone should get an education, it's not my place or the place of the government or society to override the individual's right to decide.
This is linear thinking. Granted, the current public transport system doesn't work well. That's in part due to the cost, but mostly due to the lack of flexibility. When you know the bus will arrive within a 5-10min window at a particular location and carry you to a particular destination, from which you will very likely need to walk or transfer to a different bus or train, it is easy to see why one might not want to sacrifice one's personal transportation. I believe the bus system will always be like this, with static routes and schedules. This is due to the size of the vehicle. It is inefficient to have a vehicle capable of carrying 50 people that drives around like a taxi, picking people up wherever they are instead of driving a set path.
I envision a system of smaller vehicles, possibly 6- or 8-passenger vans, where each vehicle is given dynamic tasking based on requests through an internet portal. When a passenger needs to get to work, they submit a travel request to this portal and the system determines which of the fleet vehicles can most closely accomodate the request. That vehicle's path is then altered to include the new request, and all the current passengers' times of arrival are adjusted to support the additional passenger. Ideally, this would be 100% automated, with a computer controlling the vehicle completely. However, that solution puts working-class people out of jobs, so maybe it's better to have a person driving the vehicle and a computer telling the person where to go. With the increasing inclusion of navigation systems and communications systems like OnStar in automotive product lines, it's not a big step to integrate a two-way communication link between the vehicle and a central computer.
By increasing the flexibility of the system, more travellers are attracted to using it. By increasing the number of vehicles, more jobs are created. By organizing the travel of large numbers of people into optimized paths, traffic congestion, fuel usage, and pollution are reduced. There will always be people who are unwilling to sacrifice their freedom for such benefits, but as the system becomes more optimized and more attractive, it becomes more efficient.