I know it's enterprise software, but you're really not supposed to shove it up your ass each time you use it.

The way to deal with these people is to ignore whether they have the second hostage (assume he's already dead, even if that's technically premature) and to bomb the area, preferably with something like white phosphorous incendiaries. It also needs to be done soon, because people regard such actions less favourably when it is longer from the event which the punishment is being meted out for. Make it very clear that once someone starts killing hostages, reprisals will come. If you don't, the next damn terrorist group will think they can get away with this sort of thing too; you're not protecting those already captured, you're protecting everyone else.

It's a shame, but being this nasty is the only way of hammering home to idiots that fucking with is a seriously bad idea (unless you can act with more precision and kill just the terrorists). And it does work: it's been proved to work over and over throughout history. It probably needs to be accompanied with a full apology to any innocents caught up in the crossfire to mitigate incidental downstream trouble.

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).

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.

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?

Funnily enough, on Stack Overflow! Not all of the security-related questions are overflowing with shitty misinformation. (SO might not be great, but it's better than the squillion shitty places for question answering that preceded it.)