Most users don't want to go that far on a bike.

Really? Where I'm from, "range anxiety" is a thing -- people buying an electric vehicle don't want to run out of power off in the middle of nowhere.

I was an Optibike owner back in the day, and active on their mailing list -- one of the questions we got most often from folks deciding on whether or not to buy was how realistic the range numbers were (something like 47 miles in economy mode on the internal battery alone, and 105 with the external touring battery). It's a very real concern to folks who haven't yet bought in and realized how little of that range they'll habitually use. :)

Electric bikes tend to be lousy bikes.

The cheap ones, yes. If you're not going for cheap, then you get in-frame batteries and bottom-bracket motors -- and your stock components are made by named, high-end manufacturers.

Still a markup, sure, but that markup paid for Optibike to fly one of their engineers in to Austin to train a local bike shop on replacing their electrical components when mine broke, so I'm not much complaining. ;)

and sort of ignores the fact that there are you know derailleur gears to cope with hills

...which works, but can be incompatible with getting where you're going in a reasonable amount of time, if there's significant distance between points A and B.

Switching from a car to an electric bike did my health a huge amount of good commuting from Austin to Round Rock -- a 30-minute drive was a 50 minute assisted bike ride (acceptable), or a 90 minute unassisted bike ride each way (not always acceptable). Getting that 100 minutes of pedaling in each day (both directions) improved my health enough that in six months I was able to do the same commute on an unassisted bike on those days when I had three hours to spare. I don't see how that's anything but win.

As an aside -- my strongly preferred variety of e-bike is mid-drive, with the motor's power going through the chain, so you're still shifting. A really well-designed system such as that from Optibike is tuned such that the motor is only in its optimal efficiency band if you're pedalling alongside it -- one gets more assistance from an Opti if maintaining a constant 80-100rpm cadence, which is a good place to be in from a cardio perspective regardless.

The United States market doesn't fall into that "most places on Earth" -- laws are state-by-state, but most follow CSPC guidelines, which puts the limit at 1hp (750W), or 20mph, and has no pedal-assist requirement.

Because if you banned pre-existing condition exclusions without forcing folks to be insured, people wouldn't get insured until after they were sick.

Corn ethanol is ridiculously inefficient. Sugar-based biofuels, by contrast, can have a quite good return and are actively used by developing countries in South America that don't have money to waste on things that don't make economic sense (but aren't used in the US because we have relatively little land able to grow sugarcane).

In short, it's more complex than either "all bio-fuels are good" or "all bio-fuels are evil". This shouldn't be a surprise -- few things are so simple.

It's not the bloody that's allegedly the perpetrator's, but semen found on the shawl. I'm surprised nobody else replying to you seems to have done their homework either.

The USPTO isn't funded by campaign contributions, it's funded by patent application fees. Much easier to follow the money than assume ulterior motive being applied in a more roundabout way.

...and Texas also has silly blue laws, so liquor stores are all closed on Sunday, and armed TABC agents rough up customers at locations accused of violations.

I rather prefer the liquor laws in Chicago -- if ever there was a city that learned its lessons from Prohibition...

We've been paying for roads by the mile for decades, via gas taxes -- an effective way of making people who drive more, pay more.

That might be true if gas taxes were more than double what they are now.

Funds from gas taxes go to a fund accessible to the federal highway administration -- which is to say that they don't pay for city streets at all, which are covered purely by property taxes. Even then, the FHWA only covers about 49% of highway costs, meaning that the majority of the costs of highways remain borne by the states, and are paid out of different taxes.

(This is a sore point because so many folks wrongly consider cyclists freeloaders on account of not paying gas taxes -- when the amount of wear put on roads is proportional to cubed vehicle weight, making the road wear caused by cyclists negligible, whereas the property taxes and state sales taxes paid are not).

"Earned" offshore, when 99% of the work is not the sales but the engineering -- which is very much onshore effort.

This is a place where Europe's VAT approach has it right.

publishers pay the people who fronted money for the study

If only they did.

Funds paid to scientific publishers pay for editing, not for the original studies. Moreover, peer review -- the most important part of the process -- is almost universally done for free by other scientists in the field; the publishers are just mediators in that process, adding minimal value.

Someone's got to pay to fund the research.

...but that someone isn't generally the publishers running the paywalls, so how is that relevant?

I may be wrong on this, but in the US, HIPAA would rule the day on such a case, no? That would mean that 200k Pounds Sterling would be a wee drop in the bucket compared to the fine such an organization would face here should it face a data leak of that magnitude.

You're making substantial assumptions about what kind of teeth HIPAA has. When I worked at a medical software company -- wherein I was directly responsible for systems handling patient data, went through HIPAA training, and worked directly with our HIPAA compliance officer to determine technical measures -- it was damned near toothless; what we spent hiring said officer and taking said measures was much more than we would have been fined for a single breach. (We wouldn't have been able to sell the system or satisfy investors unless we could pass an audit, so it was the right business decision to make, but much of what our compliance officer told us was how much work we didn't have to do; the actual compliance requirements often fell far short of what I considered best practices).

which viewpoint prevailed (if any)?

Nobody won -- the developer is holding the property, which remains zoned industrial, until market conditions (financing availability) and political considerations give them more leeway in its use.