Maybe the brakes were too good, resulting in all the rear-endings?

Or the positioning of the gas tank that made it vulnerable in rear-end collisions made it less vulnerable in other kinds of collisions. That's exactly the kind of tradeoff real safety engineers have to make.

Must live in NYC, the bay area or Seattle area.

Or Boston, Washington DC, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Tokyo, Beijing, Singapore, Cairo, Baghdad, Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, or most of the other major cities in the world. A very large fraction of the world lives either on or close to a coast, or on a low relief plain.

If the officer had started a 15 minute search after placing the defendant in his car to ensure he was safe would that have made this incident ok?

Probably not. The point is that officers aren't allowed to deliberately drag things out in order to give the dog time to arrive. The search of a vehicle without an arrest is supposed to be limited to protecting the officers' safety, i.e. looking for easily available weapons, so extending it to 15 minutes would still count as dragging it out to wait for the dog. If they actually take the driver to their car, that would count as detaining him, and they need some evidence beyond "swerved to avoid a pothole" to do that.

it's been the only way anti-death penalty folks could make even the slightest bit of progress in the States.

This is simply untrue. It's certainly true that there are large portions of the country where capital punishment remains popular, and judicial challenges have been the only effective way of challenging it there. But there have been several states that have recently abolished capital punishment through the normal legislative process, most recently Maryland in 2013. Notably, few states that have abolished the death penalty legislatively have any real prospect of bringing it back.

One thing that any language needs is a reason for people to want to learn and use it. Some people are willing to learn a new language for commercial or professional reasons, but having an actual culture built around the language is very important. People still learn dead languages like Latin, Classical Greek, and Biblical Hebrew because they want to read the important works of literature written in them. People learn Italian because they want to understand opera and Japanese so they can watch Anime. And they learn English at least in part so they can read Shakespeare and watch Hollywood movies in their original language. If your constructed language lacks that kind of culture, it's going to be at an inevitable disadvantage.

You can't hold someone responsible to show up for a court date for which you have not made sufficient effort to make sure that the person is aware.

The problem is that it sounds very much as if the husband is deliberately avoiding service. He is apparently still in contact with the wife by phone and Facebook, but claims to have no stable residence or workplace where he could be served with papers. The judge is allowing service on Facebook as a last resort because other ways of serving the papers are unavailable and his Facebook contact is known to be good. And, FWIW, if the wife is only able to contact her husband by phone and Facebook for years at a time, the divorce is a formality anyway; that marriage is long over.

This is important as a matter of principle. People shouldn't be allowed to duck out on the legal system by making themselves impossible to find. If you don't allow something like this, then the person who's trying to handle things responsibly through the legal system loses out because they don't get their day in court. One way or the other, somebody is not getting a chance to present their case. It makes sense for that somebody to be the one who's avoiding the process and who could present their side just by showing up rather than the one who is doing everything they can to handle things through the legal system.

Most people would be smarter to buy a car that's suitable for their most common driving and renting on the rare occasion when they need to do something their daily car can't do. They'll save more money on fuel by having a very fuel efficient daily driver- and by avoiding wear and tear on their car on longer drives- to more than make up the difference.

I must compare a well-run meeting with a well-worded email, not a well-worded email compared to a poorly-run meeting.

I think the most reasonable comparison is a typical meeting and a typical email exchange. Maybe a great meeting is better than great email, but we don't always have access to either, and the best judgment should be based on the quality we usually encounter in real life.

No. Refactoring is when you take the awful, unmaintainable spaghetti code you produced when you were in a deadline crunch and convert it into something maintainable. The goal is to restructure the source code without changing the functionality at all.

Calling it the most dangerous toy seems like a gross overstatement. Yeah, Uranium ore is scary, but it's a fairly low-level radiation source and as an alpha emitter it's only dangerous internally. Chemical and physical hazards are a lot more serious. Toys with lead paint that kids were likely to chew on were probably more dangerous, not to mention ones that could catch kids on fire (ordinary chemical sets) or get them run over in traffic (like bicycles).

How should I make sure that I retain access to today's data 20 years from now?

If you really want to be able to keep your data that long, you need a serious plan. You need to back up everything to at least two separate devices other than your main storage, and you need to keep at least one of those devices off-site so your data can't be destroyed in a local disaster. You need to test your backups regularly to know if/when your medium is failing.

When a medium fails- or if you think it might be about to fail- get a replacement that uses more modern technology, and make a fresh copy. If you are ever about to replace your computer with a new one that can't read your old backup medium, buy newer media that does work with the new computer and make copies while you can still read the old ones. If you keep doing that regularly, you can always have a good copy that will work with your computer. It's more effort than copying to the cloud and trusting, but it means you're in control of your own data.

The real key is to keep making regular backups and regular tests. If you expect to be able to put something into a box and still use it 20 years later, you're in for an unpleasant surprise. You have to keep copying, testing, and updating your technology in order to have a serious hope of keeping up. If you do that, though, you have a very good chance of keeping access to your data at least as long as you have software that will still read it. I have 20+ year old data at work that I can still access because we've been careful about moving it to new media, and because the company that wrote the software is good about backward compatibility.

Only if your claims are too vague to test. If you make a claim that's specific enough to be tested scientifically, you need to have an actual scientific study to back it up. For example, POM just lost on appeal because they made specific medical claims about pomegranate juice that they couldn't back up with results from randomized clinical trials. So if you want to sell expensive placebos, you need to limit your claims to something vague enough that it can't be tested definitively.

Even if the switch to Wayland happens, most people will still be stuck with using XWayland constantly for a decade.

They may be stuck with XWayland for a handful of apps that aren't being updated, but the work to let modern desktop environments run on Wayland instead of X11 is quite far along. Once the basic KDE and GNOME libraries are ported to Wayland, anything that uses those higher level libraries rather than talking directly to X will run under Wayland without needing any intermediary like XWayland. It's possible to log in and run under Wayland rather than X11 today; I have done it on my Fedora box.

But generally, my archive set is large (3+TB) and sensitive (taxes, bank statements, account numbers, passwords, etc) so this solution works best for me.

My guess is that most of that 3+TB is not at all sensitive. The vast bulk of most people's data is stuff like photos and videos that are primarily of interest to them. The amount of really sensitive information like taxes, account numbers, etc. is probably small enough to put on an encrypted thumb drive that you keep on your person. If you really trust encryption- including your ability to select a secure password- you could even encrypt it and store it on the cloud. It still makes sense to keep copies of your bulk data- also encrypted unless you're confident in your ability to keep the sensitive data off it- some place safe, but it would give you an extra level of protection against losing your really precious information.