That is exactly how markets work in cases where you don't want to end up with multiple competing systems. We've seen this with the Bluray/HD-DVD debacle, with VHS vs. Beta vs. V2000, and in the financial sector with credit cards.

The end goal of all participants is a monopoly, and the quickest way to get there is by forming alliances or buying out the competition. The largest alliance benefits from network effects and soon can offer lower prices than the competition. The majority of consumers vote based on price, not on technical merits, and we end up with the largest alliance/best-networked player as the monopolist.

All I'm saying is that this isn't the best way to decide which system should be used for important, big-impact items such as payment systems. There should be standardization, not a commercial free-for-all.

No, I'm saying there should be ONE contactless pay system, not several competing systems. Because if the market decides, you just get the biggest player, not the best system. This was worked out long ago for money, it's not called "legal tender" for nothing; companies aren't free to come up with their own coins and bills. Why should abstractions of coins and bills be any different?

I know why the market shouldn't decide this. Having multiple incompatible payment schemes would be bloody annoying. It's like the credit card market before all the players consolidated into Visa and MasterCard: tons of money will be invested in the losing solution, that's a lot of money down the drain that could have been put to better use.

Hm. Ignore parent, Cloudflare is used by the website I'm trying to connect to, not my ISP. Not properly awake yet.

My ISP apparently uses Cloudflare. The only information I have to this effect is the error page when I try to connect to a website that's down. So what can I do to avoid Cloudflare? Change ISPs and hope they don't use Cloudflare?

Well, he wasn't wrong. In a fighter jet, the task of driving/flying is vastly simpler than on land, so it's easier to combine driving and targeting. When you're flying, all you have to do is a. not hit the ground and b. point the aircraft in the general direction of the enemy. Weapons are mostly fire-and-forget to minimize pilot workload.
On the ground, there's lots of micromanagement in steering around obstacles, reading the soil to make sure you don't get stuck in a bog etc. In a tank, you have the added complication that the main gun points in a different direction than the vehicle which makes is hard to combine driving and targeting. And the main weapon is unguided, so targeting is manual.

"On this spot, Steve Jobs bought all his good ideas."

FTFY.

don't link to Discovery.com for TFA. The last time I tried to load a page there, the NoScript menu got half a mile long. Every domain I enabled trying to get the site to display correctly, added 5 more script domains to the list. You end up downloading half the Internet just to display one page.

I checked the MAN 'giant marine diesel' portfolio: they offer 4 different stroke lengths, with rpm ranges that top out at 72 rpm for the longest-stroke version.

Industry-specific units of measurement rarely serve any purpose other than to befuddle outsiders. We decided on an actual standard long ago, these nautical types need to get with the times.

For grocery stores (and other shops where you'd buy a large number of items in one go) the single line is less convenient for the customer.
I like being able to stack all of my groceries onto the conveyor before the cashier starts processing them. When the cashier gets to my groceries, I can immediately start packing them (in the right order, heavy items first).
In a single-line system, you're inevitably still unpacking while the cashier processes your item, so they all end up in a mangled heap at the end of the conveyor belt.

Large pods would just move the inefficiencies elsewhere. You'd have to load the ISO containers into these pods, then load the pods onto a ship.
You can't reliably transfer these pods at sea, so you'll have to do this in port anyway, so your system won't result in shorter routes.
Smaller ships are less efficient than large ships: the longer a ship gets, the more efficient its propulsion system gets. You also get other economies of scale (less crew, for instance).

They're using a different type of engines, optimized for running at lower speeds.

The CO2 emissions have little to do with impurities in the fuel. They emit so much CO2 because they require a lot of power for propulsion. The Triple-E is a lot more efficient than the previous generation of ships, so CO2 emissions are some 20% lower despite carrying more containers.