The list of robocar teams grows again with a new project from Oxford university, led by Paul Newman. Nissan is also involved, though the base vehicle is a Bowler Wildcat off-road vehicle.

I'm actually not a fan of login and sessions on the web, and in fact prefer a more stateless concept I call authenticated actions to the more common systems of login and "identity."

But I'm not going to win the day soon on that, and I face many web sites that think I should have a login session, and that session should in fact terminate if I don't click on the browser often enough. This frequently has really annoying results -- you can be working on a complex form or other activity, then switch off briefly to other web sites or email to come back and find that "your session has expired" and you have to start from scratch.

There are times when there is an underlying reason for this. For example, when booking things like tickets, the site needs to "hold" your pending reservation until you complete it, but if you're not going to complete it, they need to return that ticket or seat to the pool for somebody else to buy. But many times sessions expire without that reason. Commonly the idea is that for security, they don't want to leave you logged on in a way that might allow somebody to come to your computer after you leave it and take over your session to do bad stuff. That is a worthwhile concept, particularly for people who will do sessions at public terminals, but it's frustrating when it happens on the computer in your house when you're alone.

Many sites also overdo it. While airlines need to cancel your pending seat requests after a while, there is no reason for them to forget everything and make you start from scratch. That's just bad web design. Other sites are happy to let you stay "logged on" for a year.

To help, it would be nice if the browser had a way of communicating things it knows about your session with the computer to trusted web sites. The browser knows if you have just switched to other windows, or even to other applications where you are using your mouse and keyboard. Fancier tools have even gone so far as to use your webcam and microphone to figure if you are still at your desk or have left the computer. And you know whether your computer is in a public space, semi-public space or entirely private space. If a browser, or browser plug-in, has a standardized way to let a site query session status, or be informed of session changes and per-machine policy, sites could be smarter about logging you out. That doesn't mean your bank still should not be paranoid if you are logged in to a session where you can spend your money, but they can be more informed about it.

Some Robocar updates, since with Burning Man and Singularity U my posting volume has been down:

Today an op-ed by John Sununu and Harold Ford Jr. of "Broadband For America" (a group of cable companies and other ISPs which says it is really a grass-roots organization) declared that the net needs a better pricing model for what Netflix is doing. For a group of ISPs, they really seem to not understand how the internet works and how pricing works, so I felt it was worthwhile to describe how things work with a remarkably close analogy. (I have no association with Netflix, I am not even a customer, but I do stream video on the net.)

You can liken the internet to a package delivery service that works somewhat differently from traditional ones like the postal service or FedEx. The internet's pricing model is "I pay for my line to the middle, and you pay for your line to the middle and we don't account for the costs of individual traffic."

In the package model, imagine a big shipping depot. Shippers send packages to this depot, and it's the recipient's job to get the package from the depot to their house. The shippers pay for their end, you pay for your end, and both share the cost of creating the depot.

Because most people don't want to go directly to the depot to get their packages, a few "last mile" delivery companies have sprung up. For a monthly fee, they will deliver anything that shows up at the depot addressed to you directly to your house. They advertise in fact, that for the flat fee, they will deliver as many packages as show up, subject to a fairly high maximum rate per unit of time (called bandwidth in the internet world.) They promote and compete on this unlimited service.

To be efficient, the delivery companies don't run a private truck from the depot to your house all the time. Instead, they load up a truck with all the packages for your neighbourhood, and it does one delivery run. Some days you have a lot of packages and your neighbours have few. Other days you have few and they have a lot. The truck is sized to handle the high end of the total load for all the neighbours. However, it can't handle it if a large number of the neighbours all want to use a large fraction of their total load on the same day, they just didn't buy enough trucks for that, even though they advertised they were selling that.

This is not unreasonable. A majority of the businesses in the world that sell flat rate service work this way, not just internet companies. Though there are a few extra twists in this case:

• The last mile companies have a government granted franchise. Only a couple can get permission to operate. (In reality -- only a few companies have got permission to have wires strung on poles or under the street.)
• Some of the last mile companies also used to be your exclusive source for some goods (in this case phone service and TV) and are concerned that now there are competitors delivering those things to the customers.

The problem arises because new services like Netflix suddenly have created a lot more demand to ship packages. More than the last mile companies counted on. They're seeing the truck fill up and need to run more trucks. But they proudly advertised unlimited deliveries from the depot to their customers. So now, in the op-ed, they're asking that companies like Netflix, in addition to paying the cost of shipping to the depot, pay some of the cost for delivery from the depot to the customer. If they did this, companies would pass this cost on to the customer, even though the customer already paid for that last mile delivery.