The problem is that the holy rollers won't lose money. Gays are a tiny minority. It is estimated that at most 5% of the population is gay, and only a fraction of them are "out", the rest miserably pretending to be heterosexual to fit in.

It is entirely possible that there will be *no* photographers in your small town who will photograph a gay wedding.

Should a shop be able to refuse to provide a cake with a mixed race couple on it? Or a black couple?

Speak for yourself - I got my FAA PPL in about 50 hours and adjusted to today's dollars it probably cost less than half of that.

Navigable airspace in the US starts at the surface, everywhere. Don't confuse class G airspace with the idea that it's unregulated.

When it comes to road safety, sentience is overrated.

If a non-sentient computer can drive a car safer and more efficiently than me and other people, we'll be better off for it.

You are somewhat the rarity with your vintage car. For most people, drive by wire is already a thing. The throttle has been drive by wire for years on most cars, and some of today's cars are steer by wire. (Yes, there is manual reversion if it fails, but in normal driving you have no mechanical connection between the steering wheel and the wheels of the car). Many cars can brake independently of the driver. Even my 2007 Civic has traction control and ABS fitted as standard.

Traffic would probably flow considerably better in a city full of self driving cars. A lot of the chaos of city driving is because of human error and human reaction delays.

You only have to fly over a traffic jam on a major highway to see problems that could be significantly alleviated by self driving cars that communicate with each other. Quite often you see traffic jams with no explanation - a mile of stationary traffic, but there's no obstacle in front and none behind. What happened is two hours earlier someone slammed on their brakes, someone following too close had to brake harder, and eventually the whole highway stops. As long as traffic is not leaving the stopped area faster than it is arriving, you get a self-sustaining traffic jam long after the original cause has gone away. The self driving car will reduce the instances in the first place of the cause, and if it does happen will be able to as a group moderate their speed in such a way that you don't end up with a mile of stopped cars. Instead of the next car only starting after it has seen the previous one begin to move + reaction delay, all cars will be able to start moving at once or nearly so.

Surely drive-by shootings will become easier, as now they have one more person who can do the shooting once you get rid of the need for a driver?

Don't feel too bad. I'm a native English speaker (with Spanish as a 2nd language) and I can't do crosswords (in English) either.

I have a Microsoft mouse on my main work workstation. The irony is that it has never been connected to a computer running Microsoft's software, and I've been using it now for years...

I have a Unicomp at home.

Our department is constantly criticised for "being lacksadasical", "not having enough urgency"... because our jobs involve sitting down and thinking a lot. (The finance director suggested we "walk quickly" to get rid of this perception).

My suggestion is we kit the entire department with Unicomp buckling spring keyboards. Not only will we enjoy typing more, but we will sound like an old fashioned typing pool, and we will sound hugely productive.

Peak oil is a mathematical certainty. One day we will be no longer using oil. This means it is mathematically certain at some point there will be a global maximum to the oil production function.

I have dozens of LEDs and had so far only one failure in 4 years (I thought I had a new failure the other day, but there's a bad connection in the lighting circuit - the lamp works fine when put in another fixture), so "rarely last more than 4 years" seems unlikely at this stage.

The colour rendering is good enough, I replaced my kitchen lights with LEDs about 4 years ago and have not noticed any issues with colour rendering. A turn-on delay of 100ms is functionally instant (I can't imagine any case in my home where 100ms for a light to turn on will be significant - and tungsten bulbs will require at least this long to warm up and glow at full brightness), and they are full brightness immediately (unlike GU10 CFLs that take 4-5 minutes to warm up). The EM emissions are utterly trivial. At the frequencies the current regulation electronics works at, there is nothing on the internal circuit board that is long enough to act as anything remotely close to an efficient antenna, and none of the lights I have bought are "dodgy" - they have all been tested for conformance to EM emission standards. They do not interfere with any radio equipment I have.

My bike light is a seriously bright LED headlight (and tail light). The headlight is as bright as a car's headlight, and I ride on quite a few unlit roads. Once I've been out of streetlights for a while in the very white pool of light the LED headlight gives me, whenever a car comes the other way, their lights look as orange as sodium lights. Normally I'd see the lights of oncoming cars as more or less white.

The system as a whole is far from 100% efficient. Once you add transmission losses and generation losses, electric resistive heating will be probably below 25% for the system as a whole, as most of the heat will be getting made outside of the building that's being heated.

Gas heating would be far more efficient as a system, since the losses in shipping the gas to your house to burn will be less than shipping the gas to the power station, burning it there to make heat, turning that into electricity, transmitting the electricity, then turning what's left back to heat in the building.