I think this is already getting close to optimized and isn't going to change much. I already get almost everything delivered to my door by a company that goes so far as to map its routes so there are fewer left turns to save fuel. Somebody still has to get out of the truck and deliver it to my porch. Some things are a lot less cost-effective to ship.

I can get fresh stuff delivered, too, but the limits on that aren't related to the vehicle so much as trusting who's picking them out or whether they'll have to sit out in the sun or where animals can get into them.

That works until you combine multiple trips where you're picking things up in different places. If you don't have a dedicated vehicle you have to haul all that stuff around. I routinely will take a bicycle or two somewhere, go for a long ride, then stop a few places on the way home for shopping (sometimes bulk). So either I leave the stuff (which can add up to quite a lot) in the car and wait for the car, or I haul it around with me (unworkable). Parking lots local to the shopping work much better for my use case.

I've completely uninstalled Flash from my personal computer and don't miss it at all. My work machine has it because we have internal apps that use it, but I have a little shell script that finds the flash process and kills it if it starts to act like a pig.

I've taken most of my mac laptops apart at least once, usually to replace something with a spindle: a hard drive, a superdrive (super fragile), or a fan. I've taken a few down pretty far to resolder things like a power connector on an iBook.

Some is, some isn't. Hydro-Quebec generates 99.8% of its energy from water.

I have neighbors in SoCal who have bills higher than that in the summer. They apparently run their air conditioners full blast. I pay about $60 in the summer because I don't have AC and my house (built in the 50s) is designed to stay cool even when it's over 100F out.

Or in an alternative version of the future, autonomous cars mean there are *more* cars on the road and it still takes about the same amount of time to get from point A to point B as it does now, it's just that the autonomy and networking enable the same roads to carry more traffic. The barrier to driving for many trips will be lower since the driver won't have to consider the stress of traffic as a reason not to go, and the cost of autonomous cars will be about the same relative to incomes as cars cost now.

Your vision is for very specific use cases and most likely is overlooking a lot of use cases that will push things in the opposite direction from what you imagine. Southern California is already a counterexample to your "only allow autonomous cars in the city". There is no central location that everyone commutes to from outlying burbs. It's a giant network of people with crisscrossing commutes and various bottlenecks, but DTLA isn't really that much of a central commute target, though it is a commute bottleneck.

All of the major ebookstores (including amazon, kobo, apple, google, and overdrive) let the publisher determine whether their titles will be sold with or without DRM. Amazon is the only one that won't let a publisher switch a title from DRM to DRM-free after release. I run a small publishing house and we bought the catalog of another publisher that wanted to retire. They were big on DRM, we're very much not-- the coffee you drink while reading the book will cost you more than most of our titles, so we trust people to go the easy way and just pay $3-5 at a store. All the bookstores except amazon let us just give them instructions to switch all the titles to DRM-free, so all our new titles are DRM-free everywhere, but the old ones from the imprint we bought are DRM-free everywhere except Amazon. We also sell via our own online store and offer three formats for most titles (epub, mobi, and pdf), let you download all three, and explicitly let you format shift if something new comes out (not like we could stop you).

If you have free will you don't need to worry about it, and if you don't there's nothing you can do about it.

Page charges predate open access publishing by at least decades, so in some cases the publishers are getting paid by both the authors and the readers.

All active duty military and civilian employees of DOD. I.e. Anybody who has a CAC. The equivalent PIV-II badges from other agencies don't get you precheck.

Precedent is set in the appellate courts. The one court order creates no precedent.

The real thing to evaluate is those costs against the costs of pavement to move the equivalent number of people at the same speed through the Bay Area, which in my experience has traffic at least as bad as LA, and often worse. If you supplied the transportation infrastructure via adding more roads and/or lanes, you'd be paying half the cost of it through non-gas taxes. Gas taxes only cover about half the cost of operating the road system, and the rest comes from general funds.

That would most likely be fought under as a violation of their 5th amendment rights " nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.". Given the value of the signing key (based on the corporate value of Apple the corporation that would be severely harmed as a result), the government probably doesn't have that kind of cash lying around.

Apple is very much a disinterested 3rd party in all this.

As an information services provider (iCloud) they promptly replied to all of DOJs requests for assistance and information, providing what was available in the iCloud account when it was requested.

As a device manufacturer, their obligation ended when the device left the store. The device and the information on it belong to SB County. SB County can (and has) turned it over to the FBI and said go ahead and get what you can off it. Apple has, in the past, provided services for law enforcement to do that when it was part of what they already did to repair and/or recover phones. They're being told to provide a service that's outside the scope of what they do as a company, even internally for diagnostics (why the pen register argument doesn't apply). Apple don't own the device, and while they license the software that's on it, that license amounts to "you can't copy this". The Federal Gov't is free to use their own vast resources to get information off the phone without interference or help from Apple.

For the government to demand the signing key, when Apple hasn't committed a crime and the signing key is itself not something that was used in the crime, amounts to an act of eminent domain. That's got a whole different set of standards, and the signing key could be determined to be extremely valuable to Apple (as in able to cause a substantial drop in the value of one of the highest valued companies in the world). They'd bring out a whole different set of really good lawyers for that one, and win easily.

That shows a profound misunderstanding of how the US legal system works. Once they've done it, then the probability of them being coerced again is identically 1. If the gov't is allowed to compel them to produce software, and especially produce particular features, then the government can:
a) repeatedly compel them to recreate the software to crack existing phones that can be cracked by that method. Then apple effectively has to either maintain a team to keep recreating and destroying the software (good luck hiring people who want that job. seriously tiresome) or keep the software intact and protect it. But they can't do that, because once it gets used in an actual criminal prosecution then the defendant will have the right to see the software. And every defendant it's used against will have that right. So then it's out.
b) compel them to create a permanent backdoor in all future versions (the precedent for government compulsion of particular features having been established, despite CALEA's wording to the contrary. And they can do it secretly through the FISA court, and it will be 5-10 years before we hear about it publicly. In the meantime, people will find the holes and exploit them (aside from NSA and FBI exploting them).

The technical possibility of that particular phone being hackable by sideloading a custom system is almost irrelevant to the case. It's the legal precedent that's important.