Micron felt tip. I'm also an engineer and it's what I use to scribble.

I wish I could fine the government for impeding and delaying all sorts of things that annoy me. DMV line moving too slowly? Bam! Fine those sloth-like paper pushers.

My friends who work at medical device companies feel no pressure to keep costs down. Why make a part out of plastic when things machined from billet aluminum are shiny? Oops, there was an error in that part. Maybe we should order twice as many more of the next revision, because surely we will have caught all the bugs. Later, when the R&D is done, they'll sell the machine for a boatload of money and only honor the warranty if the end-user (your doctor) buys all of their consumables from the OEM. Now they also sell bottles of buffered saline for $10k/liter. As far as I can tell, the rest of the medical industry works in much the same way. But it's all OK, because you want the very best possible care and you wouldn't want to kill Uncle Pete for want of a few hundred thousand dollars.

I'm a US citizen and I needed medical care in Coober Pedy, South Australia. The hospital was closed for the night so they called in a doctor for me. He looked me over, gave me some painkillers and anti-inflammatories, slapped on an ice-pack, billed me $46, and sent me on my way. No government or insurance was involved.

Had this been the United States, they would've billed me $400 for opening the door, $150 for the first drug, $220 for the second, $190 for the ice-pack, $30 in clerical fees, and made me sign a bunch of paperwork. I don't understand why medicine is so expensive in our country.

8% is a pretty good rate. If you find an investment that can pull that off without violating any laws, please let me know. Also, having cash on hand does not correlate to a credit score. As recently as last year I was unable to get a post-paid cell phone plan despite having enough cash on-hand to pay the monthly bill until the end of the millennium.

I wonder what happens if I glue a metal plate to the pavement above the sensor...

...now delivered with greater efficiency than ever before.

Given how things are going in America, the next time I leave I may just not bother with the return.

On the left of the results page hit search tools, then click "Verbatim". It does just what you think it does. It searches for exactly your terms with no modifications, substitutions, or customizations.

Words like "the", "and", & "a" are non-informational words and have effectively no search value. I propose we take the list of representatives and companies supporting SOPA and add them to the list of non-informational words. They'll instantly cease to exist online.

I said nothing that all six stalls were big, just that the bathroom was needlessly large. But we digress; size of the bathroom isn't the point. The point is that engineering everything to accommodate everyone is unrealistic. In a world of infinite variety, I can always come up with another edge case that will define another requirement. At some point it makes more sense to move the mobility solution closer to the person requiring the mobility, rather than bending infrastructure to fit around the edge case. If there's a worthwhile market, technology will grow to provide a solution.

You can use the same argument for parking spaces, and it seems we've decided as a society that it's important to penalize one behavior and not the other.

I propose cameras pointed in to toilet stalls with 24/7 monitoring to ensure that handicapped toilet stalls aren't abused by those able-bodied assholes. We'll also need to amend the building code to increase the total number of available stalls to ensure that the population is appropriately served.

I was on the building planning committee for a new building at Stanford. The bathrooms are comically large because of handicap access requirements. Despite consuming 800 square feet, there are only six total stalls. The same building also has two handicapped parking spots out front, out of four parking spots total.

Given that the population served is, on average, 22 years old and in excellent health, these measures seem inappropriate. Things would be completely different if this were a retirement home.

Precisely. Further, most LED shop lights have a narrow beam angle, about 20-30 degrees. That makes them dramatically less useful than the 180 degree ordinary shop light. I'm not claiming that every household should be illuminated with incandescent lights, but rather that it is the consumer and the market who should negotiate the choices in technology. There's no reason to force a technology choice when the same desired outcome (higher household electrical efficiency) can be had by simply making the resource (electricity) more expensive through simple means (taxes).

My goal is to show by counterexample why this type of legislation is not terribly bright. Trying to promote resource efficiency is most directly and efficiently accomplished by increasing the price of the resource. But our politicians are spineless and won't do anything so pragmatic, including work with one another.