So, not just the price of the building permit, then?

The purpose of development charges is to defray (some of) the costs to local government that they would otherwise incur for doing things like connecting your new home to the water, sewer, electrical, and any other utilities; construction of roads and streetlights; construction and purchase of additional emergency services equipment (fire trucks and fire houses, etc.); construction or enlargement of water reservoirs, sewage treatment plants, and electrical substations....

In other words, there's a heck of a lot of new infrastructure capital costs associated with new expansion of a community--costs that wouldn't be incurred without the new construction. (The rest of your comment notes how precious a commodity water is, and how difficult it is to secure access to more of it.) Instead of loading those costs on to people already living in town, the municipalities put the costs on the developers, who in turn pass them on to the new home buyers.

If you were to instead demolish an existing home and replace it with a new one of similar size, the building permit costs would be far less than $30,000, since the home would already have water, sewer, roads, electrical service....

Yes. Also, yes.

With conventional, mechanically-linked, non-variable steering, if I twitch the wheel at 2 mph while creeping into a parking space, nothing happens. If I twitch the wheel the same amount on the highway at 60 mph, I lurch sickeningly across a couple of lanes of traffic.

A sensible system would allow me to make moderately-sized inputs at whatever speed I'm travelling, and convert those to appropriate adjustments of the wheels of the car: big deflections of my tires with lots of power assist when I'm parallel parking, tiny deflections when I'm changing lanes on the highway.

This is true. So...?

Absolutely correct.

I presume that you won't mind getting a copy of Meyer's Twilight instead of Stoker's Dracula. I mean, they're both vampire novels, so they're completely fungible, right?

(That's likely not true, but I'll roll with it for now.) The distinction is that emissions from ethanol burning are carbon neutral, whereas the emissions from fossil fuel burning are not. That is, each gram of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by burning ethanol came from a gram of carbon dioxide absorbed from the atmosphere by a growing plant. No matter how much ethanol you burn, you're only putting back the carbon dioxide that was pulled out of the air a few months earlier by a sugarcane or corn plant, rather than adding new carbon dioxide. In contrast, burning gasoline releases into the atmosphere carbon stores that had been sequestered for millions of years.

As an added bonus, ethanol is itself cleaner burning (and encourages cleaner burning of gasoline in blends), reducing emissions of sulfur and nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, and particulates (soot), especially in high-ethanol blends like E85.

That said, there is a caveat--there is an energy cost associated with the process of growing, harvesting, fermenting the crops used to produce ethanol. In many places, these processes still depend to some extent on fossil fuels--which can in turn offset some of the emissions benefits associated with producing carbon neutral ethanol fuels.

You snark, but yes. My computer's Disk has an Operating System, but I'm pretty sure I'm not actually using DOS.

Actually, that's not really the point of the article, either. Large numbers of charge-discharge cycles are a feature of pretty much any supercapacitor, not just these ones. They're arguing that these new supercapacitors have sufficient mechanical strength and robustness that that could be used as structural, load-bearing components in some applications. In other words, you don't have to put a box around them; they can be an integral part of the frame or case of your device. The battery (or capacitor) doesn't have to be a separate, discrete, armored lump inside the case.

In practice, as long as the energy storage density of these things is still just a tenth that of rechargeable lithium ion batteries, they're going to have problems in mobile applications. Near-indestructible material and near-instantaneous charging are both good things. But I'm not really "liberated from my power cord" if I have to top up the capacitor every couple of hours, or if my new battery-less iPhone weighs a couple of pounds with its giant supercapacitor frame.

Well no, it's not, actually. The active ingredient in Ritalin, methylphenidate is quite distinct, chemically, from amphetamine, methamphetamine, or any of the related close derivatives. While methylphenidate and methamphetamine both start with the same four letters, their biochemical effects are different. (For example, both compounds are dopamine reuptake inhibitors, but only methamphetamine is a dopamine releasing agent. The two compounds have opposite effects on neuronal firing rates. And so forth.)

Which would be a sound argument if (a) ballistic vests were actually able to safely absorb all shots that hit them without allowing the person wearing them to be seriously injured or even killed; and (b) police officers were only ever shot in the torso--and never below the waist, on the arms, or in the neck or head.

Ballistic vests aren't a magical wall, except in the movies.

That's a special brand of gullible you have, wherever it is you're from. The only place where police deliberately take non-lethal, specifically-incapacitating shots with a firearm is in the movies.

The only place where there is readily available, secure, bulletproof cover within a split-second's reach of every foot chase is, once again, in the movies. Seriously, dude. When someone fleeing an armed robbery points a gun at a cop, it's one of those occasions when use of deadly force by the police is actually justified, and not just "justified".

Okay, so my new device (a LeakyTech router, say) has a five-year expiry clock on it. A vulnerability is discovered a year after I buy it. It spends 80% of its lifetime completely exposed. I'm now out of pocket for the cost of a new device every five years, and I'm only protected for 20% of the time. Nice.

Or, my new device (from Securitron, this time) is actually quite secure. It takes ten years for the bad guys to find an unpatched or unpatchable hole. Five years of reliable, trustworthy use I could have had get thrown away. I've pointlessly reduced the safe, working lifetime of my electronic device by 50%, doubling my hardware cost and incurring extra downtime for no improvement in my security. Nice.

Better yet, I've gone through a couple of cycles of forced obsolescence. This time around, I've moved from the Securitron product to the LeakyTech one, and now introduced a hole in my security that wasn't there before. Either the LeakyTech device has another rapidly-discovered vulnerability - maybe it was introduced when they tried to patch their first one-year defect- or I didn't configure the new hardware properly when I was making my enforced switchover. Nice.

Similarly, we should cease enforcement of all traffic rules and regulations. We should only punish drivers whose actions actually injure or kill someone else. Anything else is government overreach.

Probably because pedophelia doesn't involve acts between consenting adults able to give appropriate, informed consent. Given that you couldn't resist that analogy, it gives a pretty good idea of where you're coming from on this issue--and it's not a good place.

Personally, I'm just going to stand up for "disappointment", rather than "outrage". (I would go with "outrage" when talking about how, for instance, it's still legal in most U.S. states to fire someone from their job for no reason other than their being gay--but that's just my opinion.) That said, I will firmly declare a "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on" for presuming that because you're not outraged, or you think it's a dumb thing to be upset about, that anyone else expressing serious anger has to be faking it.

Which is totally sound reasoning, if you would like to make the assertion that "LGBT people", "black people", and "animals" are all proper subsets of the group "people". Or, alternatively, that "LGBT people", "black people", and "animals" are all not subsets of the group "people". Which one of those arguments did you want to plant your flag on?

Welcome to America, where we have now passed through the stage where money is equivalent to speech and reached the point where money is the only socially-acceptable form of speech.

Don't like what other people are saying about the game, pla? Guess you should stop pissing and moaning about it, and just not give any money to the people whose behaviour you disagree with. You know--follow your own advice.

Well, of course the director was unamused. During flight testing you noted documentation errors and several out-and-out flaws in the code, and then you tried to pass that pile of dreck off to him as "promising". Be honest--your code only survived the landing because the pilot intervened and took control of the aircraft. In the future, maybe you shouldn't try to sugarcoat things.