What is the purpose of signing the card when I already signed a paper saying that I agreed to the terms and conditions in order to get the card ?

They do not authenticate.
The point is that you usually know when your phone is compromised, because you do not have it anymore.
Meanwhile, you usually do not know when your password is compromised.

Using "literally" in that way is just a very common hyperbole. It is not a new usage, and I doubt advertising or marketing have anything to do with it...
It is just like people saying they have a ton of work to do.

I think the point of the poster was that the car could accelerate hard with near silence.

You just have to mandate a decreasing amount of noise over the years, so that you will eventually get silence, and so that people will have enough time to get used to silent cars. As you do for almost every transition.

Personally, I would rather rent a car than have the train haul the mass of the car around. For an energy saving point of view, this does not make a lot of sense. However, the convenience does attract people, as about half of the chunnel passengers are transported in a car shuttle.

I do not remember any local hero saving the day during the latest shootouts in the US.
Besides, you might want to gather more information on the police response before talking too much.

I would also like to know if there is really a "widespread use" of polygraphs. I understood they were almost exclusively used in the US, and that most other countries actually forbade its use as evidence in courts - which would make the use of polygraph a local idiosyncracy rather than a widespread practice.

You read technical articles and code listing at bedtime ?
In that case i'm not sure that this study really applies to you. The studied case is reading books within one hour to bedtime, for which refresh time or color do not matter at all.

The Uber paying service will be banned starting from January the 1st, according to the French governement.

In France, taxi drivers are taxi owners (more than 80% of them).

This is not really about Uber drivers "stealing" customers from taxi cabs. This is about regulation.
The taxi drivers we are talking about are independant workers who paid in the 100k€ - 300k€ range to get a state-regulated taxi licence plate. These plates are resellable, and their number increase very slowly: this means that their price is driven by supply and demand. If new players such as Uber can enter the market, operating under legal loopholes (considered as car sharing and not transportation), the price of the taxi plates will drop because of less demand. This may be good for the customers (increase of the number of cabs, increased competition...) However, you cannot say this is fair for the taxi drivers who took out a lengthly loan to pay for their licence plate - and will not be able to resell them to recover their investment.
So, the way forward for the governement should be pretty clear: either ban Uber, or go for a deregulation of the market. In the latter case, buy back at a fair price the taxi plates from their owners. However at that time, the government has not made a clear choice, which explains the unrest.

As we are talking about a strike in France, you may be interested to know that it really does not work like this in France. Actually, there are basically three different kinds of taxi drivers:
- Drivers on a payroll (3%) - working for a company who bought the taxi plates. They are paid at a percentage of income.
- Renters (11%) - they rent the car with a taxi plate. They keep all the income, but have to pay the rent of the car each month.
- Independant workers (86%) - who bought a taxi plate (from 100 000 to 200 000 €). They keep all the income.
So in France, most of the taxi drivers are independant workers who took out a loan to buy their plate - and intend to sell their plate at a high price when they retire.

Would you call keeping old hardware a "counterculture" then? Because I certainly see a lot of this behaviour around.

Yet, you have surely seen a lot of insects, leaves or rain drops splashing on the windshield. Now compare that to the fight against terrorism...