When the bottoms fall out of the fiat currencies,

Most people will be dead as it will be the result of total war. Nothing else is going to rock the worldwide markets so thoroughly that all 6 major reserve currencies have their value evaporated.

That something should be relatively rare, easily verified, have low carrying costs (i.e. doesn't rust or rot), and be somewhat portable. Gold and silver fit the bill,

So does the greenback, and in the modern world it's used a hell of a lot more extensively than gold or silver. Unless the fed goes full retard and starts printing physical bills at a rate significantly greater than inflation (would be basically impossible to do with the current infrastructure) that's not going to change.

to shoot down hundreds of incoming warheads, plus ten thousand dummy balloons.

I don't think anyone is realistically planning to use an ABM system against China or Russia, it's much more likely to be used against the one or two missile boats that North Korea or Iran manage to outfit with a handful of missiles.

No, not all towers need to have an EA done, only those meeting the criteria in 47.1.1307 which is a fairly limited set of criteria where it makes sense to me to require a review. The rules basically come down to, are you in a sensitive wildlife habitat, are you in a designated historic place like Gettysburg or an Indian burial ground, or are you going to potentially fry people if you aim something wrong. That doesn't seem like an onerous list, and the percentage of towers that falls under it has to be at most, what 10-20% (and it's probably well under 5%).

That article was very much wrong, the engine in question was Amtrak locomotive 601, of the brand new Cities Sprinter class, the class entered service in February of 2014.

No, he's right, this is almost assuredly a strict liability scenario, unless it can be proven that something outside the engineers control was to blame then he is negligent and will go to jail. It's not just that he was exceeding the speed limit for the curve, he was significantly exceeding the speed limit for the straightaways so absent a system fault that caused uncontrolled acceleration combined with complete loss of brakes (almost impossible given the evidence of speed reduction at the curve) he's responsible. A medical condition which was missed at his last physical might be a mitigating circumstance, but that's really about it.

For a fraction of that effort (although a lot more pain an initial expense) we could lay down rails through every suburb and have automated travel cars.

You don't have a clue how capitalism works, do you? If the market says it's more expensive to put in rail everywhere then there's a good bet that it's more effort. Capitalism has its flaws, but relatively efficient allocation of resources is not one of them.

They're given out free to people in abuse shelters and the homeless which is probably the source of almost all of the legitimate traffic and the majority of the non-legitimate traffic as well (homeless folks tend to have mental problems as the root cause of their homelessness).

As to pranks, we've had E911 as a requirement for over a decade now, shouldn't be too hard to locate the perps if they keep doing it.

Non-competes are basically unenforceable in California unless you're a principal who is selling the business and nonsolicitation clauses even against poaching clients are void in California so going after former coworker is almost surely protected. The ONLY leg they might have to stand on is if they can prove that Apple was hiring these folks to misappropriate A123's trade secrets, not merely to hire them for their skills in the arts which is a very hard thing to prove so long as Apple was smart enough not to leave a smoking gun like an email stating clearly that they wanted A123's tech.

Uh, how is this any different than when Apple ties up all the Gorilla glass capacity, or 1.8" hard drives (original ipod), or Samsung fab capacity for X months, or any other scarce resource that doesn't allow competitors to compete directly with them through contracts and offering a higher price? Oh, it involves non-executives earning a higher wage so therefore it's somehow bad. Pure BS.

my prediction is that the LED status panel on a remote solar power installation somewhere will still be functioning hundreds of years

Only if someone makes one with non-RoS solder and uses solid electrolyte capacitors or only glass/mica dielectric capacitors since there's no way regular electrolytic capacitors will survive anywhere near that long.

Yup, though I was more partial to BladeMaster since it didn't have the three turn limit on most systems (if at all, hard to remember that far back). In fact I ran a BladeMaster IP-BBS for a while, was interesting getting a WorldGroup module working in modern Windows.

It's just within the realm of possibilities that the Ballmer days of "When I want your opinion, I'll tell you what it is," are over? In more than just name?

I'm not sure about that, they had a good start menu implementation early in the windows 10 tech preview and managed to mess it up and haven't listened to anyone who has told them that the new shrunken start screen alternative in the newer builds is crap so I don't think that part has changed that much. There are other positive changes happening at MS, but that particular cultural wart still seems to be in place.

Some powerful customer will demand some interface to be supported or else

No, they're shipping IE11 with enterprise compatibility mode to support back to IE8 quirks which will be fine for 99+% of their customers for legacy apps. Trust me, most of their customers are going to be happy to have a standards compliant browser as the default, the only trick will be in the mechanism to kick user over when they try to go to a corporate site that needs classic IE within Edge and keeping that mechanism from being abused by the bad guys.

They support WebGL which is going to be the next attack vector as well as continuing to support flash with sandboxing that the hackers will tear to shreds in short order.