Shark was sold in Boston in the early 1980s, touted as a substitute for swordfish, which was more expensive and contained a lot of mercury. I don't know how well it did but I bought it occasionally. (In my opinion, it doesn't taste as good as swordfish, though there is a resemblance.)

But you can use it to store energy, and this has indeed been done and it is an important part of how the Grid works. Look up pumped storage hydroelectricity some time.

It's backed by the fact that the government can shoot people until everyone agrees that it is valid. We could beat around the bush a lot more, but the threat of force (together with the ability to pay taxes that follows from that) is a key thing in making a currency valid.

That would be a very large table indeed, as there are a lot of critical nuances and a lot of languages (even if we exclude the ones without the ability to do a useful subset of all system calls).

You must disclose any breach at least 90 days prior to discovery or 60 days prior to its occurrence, whichever comes first. Any breach occurring without advance notification will be dealt with severely.

You must disclose all breaches on Form 27B/6. The form is secret and you do not have access to it.

Access to your system by any person on the 'no access list' will be considered a breach. The identity of persons on the 'no access list' is secret, and the Government will not inform you of whether any given person is or is not on it.

Knowing of any breach makes a person a 'high risk' individual. 'High risk' individuals shall be added to the 'no access list.'

The Government reserves the right to access your system at any time without notification. Allowing anyone, including the Government, access without advance approval is a security breach.

These rules themselves are secret and you do not have access to them.

Thank you for your cooperation, Citizen.

If you're lucky, the scripts are in Lua (or possibly even one of the other embeddable scripting languages). If you're unlucky, they're in something custom...

Almost certainly Tcl; the right engineers knew it at the time, but JS managed to get to a shipping browser slightly sooner.

The English power consumption profile is winter-biased, and that's when loss of power can really cause trouble. Politicians think it is better (in electoral terms) to over-spend than to have the lights (and heating!) go out; they may be right on that.

What's more, the total amount of silver required by world industry has been dropping a lot recently due to the switch to digital photography. Silver availability really isn't a problem.

I travel a ton and stay in dozens of different hotels every year. Domestically, and in maybe 50% of the foreign cases, the high priced hotels had worse and slower internet up until a couple of years ago. For the last 2 years they have gotten better, on the average. Oh, I was in a 5-star Vegas resort last night that had horrible bandwidth. In the past, my joke was accurate that the difference between a Four Seasons (just an example) and a Super 8 is that at the Super 8 the internet worked and was free. The most important thing to me in a hotel is computer use. The fancy suites in major hotels are often set up for entertaining friends and DON'T even have a computer desk. I ask my wife to book me into Super 8's whenever possible.

Of course, the usual reason why the case got to the Supremes in the first place is because there were two cases by different Appeals Circuits which conflicted.

Mine did, but doesn't now: their lowest grade plan is now faster than that. The upper tiers might have throttling, but I don't thing the base grade tier can hit the level at which they care.

But then I'm not in the US. We have real competition between communications providers.

Are you sure about that? You seem to be assuming that everyone will be travelling from and to different places and that there will be no concentrations of people attending the same location at the same time. It's been my experience that people don't work like that. I also suspect that the price that these vehicles would charge would make them rather less economic than you think. Unless there's evidence that what you propose would be cheaper than public transport currently is, or that there will be no common locations and times for people to go somewhere, there will be an incentive to have public transport of some form.

I suspect that this difference may be in large part due to the more widespread use of water-based transport in the EU; it's a lot more efficient than even rail (provided you've got a suitable river going in the right direction or are close to the sea, which describes more of the EU than the US).

I've seen a few driverless trains around the world (e.g., in Paris, Copenhagen and at ORD in the US for transfer between terminals) and they usually operate with two sets of doors: one set on the train, and the other on the platform. This keeps people from accessing the track area except when the train is there to let them board. Combine this with obstruction detection when the doors are closing (without which millions of automatic doors wouldn't be safe) and I think we can say that this particular problem is solved.

Or was the GP foolishly assuming that they had to use the existing equipment? That no investment was possible?