Though your point is valid, it is undermined by your misrepresenting the phone's price. The number of people who actually spent $850 on an iPhone (i.e. 64 GB *and* unlocked) is a small minority. Most who buy the latest generation, will be the $200 16 GB on contract ($650 contract-free).

If you insist that this is the "true cost" of the phone whether they bought it on contract or not, then I'd better see you using the same standard for the competition, e.g. the $610 Nokia Lumia 1020, the $640 Samsung's Galaxy S4, and the $725 Galaxy Note III.

Although that's what Enterprise ended up being, the original intention was to refit Enterprise to be fully spaceflight-capable, but changes to design specs during the late 70s meant a teardown and rebuild was too costly.

So we have the irony where Star Trek fans successfully campaigned to rename the first shuttle, which ended up never actually going into space.

It seems like a long time, but bureaucracy really gets in the way. A company I worked at was involved in many federal government (not USA though) projects, including one or two that came directly from signed legislation. It was not uncommon to see actual work starting a full year or more after the RFPs were put out (which themselves were a month or two after the funding was confirmed).

And this was for small projects with total funding of a few hundred thousand to a couple of million dollars, max.

You'd think the high-profile nature of ACA might make this go faster, but no: according to the contract for website development contract to CGI was awarded in late 2011... over 1.5 years after the ACA was signed.

So in fact they had less than 2 years between being awarded the contract, to getting the system up and running.

You can argue that CGI wasn't competent for the task, but you can't say they had 3.5 years to do it in.

And under the banner of a Conservative government.

Congrats! You managed to get stuck in an infinite loop in a self-contained system just two simple lines, instead of the dozens it took for Apple to do it in Mail against a remote server's junkmail system.

It's not just bicycles, the practice breaks down for anything smaller than a car, like mopeds and of course pedestrians.

I suspect it has to do with relative speeds, and available room to manoeuvre. A car and an 18 wheeler are wildly different masses but can move at the same speed on the roadway. A smaller plane might be slower than a bigger one, but can manoeuvre better and it isn't restricted to 2 dimensions for avoiding a collision.

For the slower, smaller things on the road: they may technically be more manoeuvrable but the speed differences make it harder to get out of the way in time. Bikes/mopeds are restricted to veering left and right, with curb or barrier limiting choices further. Pedestrians have more freedom of movement but even less speed.

As for the gentleman saying drivers have to adjust their behaviour to accommodate cyclists: as you noted cyclists aren't angels, but generally speaking, he's not wrong. Bikes legally belong on roads, so car drivers do in fact have to accommodate them, whether it's to pass them, turning at intersections... heck, even opening driver-side doors after parking on on a street can be deadly (New York City taxis have stickers asking clients to exit passenger-side for this very reason). In many places without dedicated bike lanes, bikes are even legally allowed (and sometimes encouraged) to take the entire lane, the same way a horse-drawn carriage or tractor does, so cars would have to move an entire lane to pass. Most cyclists are reluctant to take advantage of this last privilege because they do recognize the inconveniences they've already put on drivers and don't want to cause even more grief, but they reduce own their safety by not doing so.

Evidence against an accused, sure. The journalist was not charged with anything illegal, none of her notes would be used to prosecute her for anything.

This was an intel-gathering operation. Doesn't matter if the warrant doesn't cover it, the information is now exposed to whatever agencies wanted it in the first place, and they will take action against the [disloyal | patriotic] informants in ways the legal system can't handle. They've acted on intel obtained by far worse means, this won't even make them blink.

We're just lucky the journalist didn't get served with one of those can't-admit-you-got-one national security certificates, and is able to tell her story.

The impression I got is that it's a semi-permanent change, though, i.e. future OSX upgrades would also be free.

It's actually a rather staggering amount of potential sales they're passing up on for this OSX version alone: close to $1 billion at the previous price of $20 (assuming 40-50 million Mavericks-capable Macs sold since 2007, given that Macs now have an installed base of 72 million, 28 million copies of Mountain Lion sold as of June excluding pre-installs).

Not to mention the possibility that once self-driving cars become more widespread, they could be granted lanes and eventually entire roadways to drive at higher speeds than regular traffic, subject to road conditions of course.

The downside to that is that higher speed = more fuel, until they figure out a way to safely draft.

I was surprised as all heck when I flew domestic USA twice, and unlike international or domestic Canada, no one was asked for ID at the gate, they just scanned their boarding pass. Yes, you had to check in, and pass TSA screening with appropriate ID, but for some reason they decided not to bother with that final link in the chain of "trust but verify."

Hong Kong also has articulated subway cars, it's actually quite fascinating to watch the cars ahead or behind you twisting and turning at turns and inclines. Millions of people pack those subway trains, including standing in the articulated spaces (too short an area for any seats), without any problem.

Or Canadians party harder than Berliners :)

Vomit is a little more substantial than rainwater or spilled drinks, so it won't run off. Even for liquids that might, their smell remains until it's washed away.

Seriously, you had to go back over a decade to find an example of Apple cheating on benchmarks? How many generations ago is that in computer technology?

Try again by citing a source that shows them cheating on benchmarks now.

I see you ignored that I said "usually," but even in your examples it can easily be argued we are somewhere between the absolutes.

Slavery: property of another, subject to their demands and abuses. Liberty: you're your own person, free to do as you wish. In developed societies, as a worker you are *not* property, but are subject to an employer's demands (i.e. "wage slave"), up until you freely choose another job and maybe file grievances for actionable abuses. In less developed societies factory workers are far closer to the "slave" end of the spectrum: hard labour, poor conditions, low pay, few rights... but they're not property and are technically free to leave their job any time. People in developed countries give tacit approval of this by continuing to buy products from these factories and demand still-lower prices.

Virtue and corruption: Not that these are really opposite extremes by definition, but in the spirit you probably mean them to be: No one can be completely virtuous and still get ahead in life, so select ideals are inevitably compromised/corrupted. And yet you have to retain some virtues lest you go too far and end up in jail, or worse.