HOV lanes exist to encourage ride sharing and to reduce the traffic load during rush hour.
Ticketing cheaters serves that end and is not exclusively about monetary gain for the State

So yes, you are being cynical, though I wouldn't take off the tin foil hat.

Lithium batteries have much higher charge and discharge rates.

And while you *can* discharge lead acid batteries down to 10%, you *shouldn't*.
The best lifespan is with a cycle that only goes down to 50%.
A 10% discharge cycle leads to significantly shorter lifespans for lead acid batteries.
This is not the case for lithium technologies.

It's like how a real terrorist would not joke about a bomb at an airport. But someone who does is detained or arrested, and time is spent by TSA that could be better spent looking for real terrorists.

I studied and tutored experimental design and this use of inferential statistics. I even came up with a formula for 1/5 the calculator keystrokes when learning to calculate the p-value manually. Take the standard deviation and mean for each group, then calculate the standard deviation of these means (how different the groups are) divided by the mean of these standard deviations (how wide the groups of data are) and multiply by the square root of n (sample size for each group). But that's off the point. We had 5 papers in our class for psychology majors (I almost graduated in that instead of engineering) that discussed why controlled experiments (using the p-value) should not be published. In each case my knee-jerk reaction was that they didn't like math or didn't understand math and just wanted to 'suppose' answers. But each article attacked the math abuse, by proficient academics at universities who did this sort of research. I came around too. The math is established for random environments but the scientists control every bit of the environment, not to get better results but to detect thing so tiny that they really don't matter. The math lets them misuse the word 'significant' as though there is a strong connection between cause and effect. Yet every environmental restriction (same living arrangements, same diets, same genetic strain of rats, etc) invalidates the result. It's called intrinsic validity (finding it in the experiment) vs. extrinsic validity (applying in real life). You can also find things that are weaker (by the square root of n) by using larger groups. A study can be set up in a way so as to likely find 'something' tiny and get the research prestige, but another study can be set up with different controls that turn out an opposite result. And none apply to real life like reading the results of an entire population living normal lives. You have to study and think quite a while, as I did (even walking the streets around Berkeley to find books on the subject up to 40 years prior) to see that the words "99 percentage significance level" means not a strong effect but more likely one that is so tiny, maybe a part in a million, that you'd never see it in real life.

That was a philosophical choice made by NASA: pilots should have as much control as possible over the systems.
Sort of like the design choice made by Boeing to let the pilot override the automated systems and break the airplane if he wants to vs Airbus limiting the max g-forces a pilot can generate.

It didn't hurt that Eisenhower told NASA to only recruit military test pilots for the Mercury program.
While NASA no longer exclusively recruits test pilots, they still make up a large portion of recruits.

You should have prepended that sentence with the qualifier "American"
In Europe, anti-trust philosophy and regulation is most definitely focused around consumer welfare.

If you re-read the reporting a bit more carefully, the problem with Google's actions is not that it is bad for competition, but that it is bad for consumer welfare.

This is a major difference in thinking between Europe and the USA.
There are other large differences, particularly as a result of the EU's need to integrate markets across its member Countries.
That need to integrate was never a factor during the formation of the USA's anti-trust policies.

Google is a European company.
Actually, many European companies.
http://www.google.com/about/company/facts/locations/

Google's European headquarter is in Ireland... well, actually, it's an Irish company that is headquartered in Bermuda.
Google USA licenses its IP to Google Ireland Holdings (headquartered in Bermuda).
In turn, Google Ireland Holdings sub-licenses the IP to its wholly owned subsidiary in the Netherlands: Google Netherlands Holdings B.V.
Then Google Netherlands Holdings B.V. sub-sub-licenses the IP to another Google Ireland Holdings subsidiary: Google Ireland Ltd.

To coordinate all this, Google has a network of corporations in individual EU States, usually just "sales support" staff who run the ad-sales and ad-placements.

TLDR: The EU can't break up Google USA, but they can force Google Ireland Holdings to GTFO or change the way it offers services in the EU.

A quick search kicks back FTPs with robots.txt in the root directory.
allinurl:ftp:// XXXX robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

It doesn't really seem like Google is indexing the FTP.
Instead Google seems to be crawling through and only indexing txt, doc, pdf, html, xls, xml, aspx, rtf, etc.

If Google was indexing ftps, a search like intext:"Up to higher level directory" inurl:ftp:// XXXXXX.net should kick back folder directories, but it doesn't.

Fireproof safes (actually fire resistant) are not what you want to use for storing electronics or cd/dvd/bd media.

You specifically want a fire resistant "media" or "data" safe.

The difference is that "fireproof" safes are intended to prevent paper from charring/burning, so their design allows for internal temperatures that are high enough to cook your electronics. Media/data safes maintain a significantly lower interior temperature (and humidity), which safeguards your relatively fragile electronic hardware.

And it's not just enough to avoid high temperatures, your safe needs to be sealed against gasses.
In a home fire, you have all types of corrosive and unpleasant chemicals that are created from burning plastics, toilet cleaner, etc.
Those chemicals will generally attack any metal and plastic that they come into contact with (YMMV).

TLDR: You get what you pay for, so get the right thing.

If you RTFA, they mention that it puts out close to 2 volts.
While that's almost perfect as a replacement for lead-acid batteries, it's not enough to replace two AA batteries (2.4v/3v) or one lithium-ion (3.6~3.7v)

I'd love to see a fight between Big Oil and Big Insurance, because Big Insurance's profit margins are driven by data and not ideology.
No amount of Oil Industry pressure would let them accept a bad legal precedent which could screw with their long term 12%~15% profit margins.

Not to mention that the insurance industry is a very.... entangled business community.
Almost everyone who issues insurance policies is also hedging their risk by buying a reinsurance policy from one or more (re)insurance companies.
It's never just one insurance company that you're suing.

Isn't that the entire point of emergency powers? The order specifically says "national emergency."

Anyways, let's look at the laws that are cited:
Termination of existing declared emergencies: 50 U.S.C. 1601
Unusual and extraordinary threat; declaration of national emergency; exercise of Presidential authorities: 50 U.S.C. 1701
General authorization to delegate functions: Section 301 of Title 3
Inadmissible aliens: 8 U.S.C. 1182(f)

Presidential authorities: 50 U.S.C. 1702(b)(2)
Banning entry to aliens covered by the order: section 1 of Proclamation 8693 of July 24, 2011 [really long name] (PDF)
Critical infrastructure definitions: Presidential Policy Directive 21
Reporting requirements to Congress on spending for emergency orders: 50 U.S.C. 1641(c)
Reporting requirements to Congress in general for emergency orders: 50 U.S.C. 1703(c)

The only ones that I think worth quoting are:

If the war on terror never ends, neither will these emergency powers.

There's nothing secret about the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons list (actually lists).

There's also non-SDN lists, which are included in this consolidated list:
http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/SDN-List/Pages/default.aspx

Pork has nothing to do with it and the science isn't all that bad.
The problem is that SPOT is a diet-version of Israel's behavioral screening program, which is what makes it a waste of money.

SPOT leaves out the naked profiling that Israel uses and it also completely neglects the intrusive (and lengthy) questioning of travelers.
Basically, the two pieces that make it at all effective.

To summarize, the Israeli system could never be fully transplanted into the USA because
1. It profiles based on race, religion, and country of origin
2. It is manpower intensive
3. It puts security before anything, including your family of 5 missing their flight.