That's what I am noticing. While the prices go up, the quality goes down. More and more "reality" junk. More and more insipid and inane programs. And what seems like hundreds of "crap" channels on the cable (shopping, infomercial) that serve no purpose other than to artificially inflate the channel count that the cable company provides.

My wife is a sports nut, and right now you can't get that online. That and a handful of news programs is about all we regularly watch, and you can't get that online either. I would dearly love to pull the plug on the whole business and go without and form of TV.

No, the problem is somewhere ahead of you, there are people waiting for a traffic signal (blocked from moving most likely because the block on the other side of the signal is completely full). And the same goes for the block ahead of it, and so on, and so on.

In some cases the cars are waiting to merge onto another road that is also at a standstill. Or sometimes merging from 3 lanes down to two.

There are a limited set of cases where human behavior causes problems, and you have enumerated some of them. But day-in, day-out long traffic jams in the same place every day are just caused by too many cars on the road.

There is a 2nd location on Tyco Road - it looks like they have a service department there, but from the outside it looks like just any other car showroom.

Where I am, the bad traffic is stuck at a standstill. No more room for any cars on the road. Whether you are driving the thing or the car is driving itself, it isn't going to move any faster.

The only case I can see the benefit you describe is in somewhat congested roads where the traffic is still moving.

I can just see a traffic jam of unoccupied cars all tooling around trying to find parking.

Oh, wait - the rules say that you need to have a driver in case of emergency. So you are sitting in your "driverless" car circling around to find parking, and you can't leave the car until it finds a spot.

Really??? You can't?? We have a Tesla dealer just down the street from us, and yes we live in Virginia.

I am in complete agreement. The first thought that came to my mind is that I would like a PassivHaus.

My wife and I have been going back and forth about where we want to retire to. I am horrified by the horrible construction quality that one gets from the normal builders. We are thinking of buying a lot somewhere and then hiring our own builder who would build the thing to our specs. But the next phase for us is to see if we can find a custom builder that can deliver on what we want with huge bonus points for anyone who has already built something along these lines. I don't want to pay so that someone else can learn on the job.

I don't have the time/energy to build the thing myself.

Popular doesn't mean economically viable, and it doesn't mean that Uber valuation isn't far in excess of what it is really worth. I think it is a huge bubble that is just waiting for a pinprick, and once that happens, there will be layoffs all over the place.

Personally I just don't get Uber, but I have never had any trouble with using a normal taxi either.

Try Google.

I have one on my keyring. I know exactly what it is, and what it is used for.

The communicators in the original Star Trek were sort of like this. The original Moto Razr copied some design elements from that - if you just take that phone and permanently flatten it, you have something roughly the same shape and size as an iPhone.

Plexico, is that you? Did that gunshot wound to your thigh heal properly?

And what do I use it for? Mainly to unlock PasswordSafe. I have the YubiKey NEO, so it has a USB connection so I can plug it into the PC. And it also has NFC, so I can use it to unlock the same password database on my Android phone.

I don't know why, but to me it brings to mind the Borg.

I would have thought that the original author must have had DRM on the original copy of the ebook, and yet these pirate copies also have DRM.

So what happened here? Did the original author not use DRM on the original book, or did the pirate break the DRM so that they could distribute?

Every year or two we undergo emissions inspections - they use a sensor to measure what is in the exhaust gas, and if things are outside of the required limits, you have to fix it. In addition, they use the OBDII port to see if there are any codes being thrown by the engine, and if there are you have to fix those as well.

Older cars were grandfathered in, and only need to pass whatever the standards were at the time they were manufactured.