I imagine for people already driving there won't be much change in cost. Once you've been on the road five years or so the insurance companies have a pretty good idea if you are a high risk driver or not from your records (both insurance records and traffic offense records).

Where things could get nasty is for people new to manual driving, I would think the combiantion of "inexperianced" and "wants to drive for fun rather than utility" is going to end up as a pretty high risk category. At least here in the UK it's already prohibitively expensive for a new young driver to insure a fast car and even with a basic econobox it's not unheard of for the insurance to cost more than the car (One teenager here even resorted to driving a tractor because car insurance was unaffordable,e).

Which means 50 years later there would be relatively few people on the road with sufficient manual driving experiance to get manual driving insurance at a reasonable price.

At least here in the UK it's still perfectly legal to ride on horseback or in a horse drawn vehicle on normal roads* at any time. It's reccomended to get training first but unlike with motor vehicles there is no legally mandated licensing requirement.

One big difference between horses and cars is that horses are high maintinance. They have to be fed, mucked out etc whether you are using them or not. Cars on the other hand can hapilly sit in a garage for months at a time. So owning a "play car" is much less of a commitment than owning a horse. I could see that changing how things play out.

*Motorways are as the name suggets for motor vehicles only.

Latex has it's good and bad points.

good points
maintains mental distinction between input and output
maintains a reasonable level of semantic information
reliable and reasonablly fast for large documents
produces really nice typeset output
handles equations well
handles captioning and cross-referencing well
makes a reasonable job at layout before tweaking

bad points
only a few image formats work, with traditional latex it's EPS or bust, pdflatex is a bit better but it still pretty limited with PDF being the only vector format supported (which is fun as most pdf creators don't want to create arbitary sized pdfs so you often have to print to pdf then use a seperate tool to remove the borders) and the only bitmap formats supported being png and huffman jpeg (at least in my experiance artimetic coded jpeg doesn't work and gives an unhelpful error message, that caused some head scratching)
the layout engine is reasonablly smart but not smart enough to get a layout i'm happy with without tweaking and the compile-build-view cycle gets annoying during layout tweaking.
the whole system feels like hacks built on top of hacks. The parameters to hyperef to avoid ugly boxes don't work in all versions (not sure if they work in the latest now, I certainly remember having to downgrade when working on my thesis because of this). Hyperref links go to the float caption rather than the float itself unless you add another hack package called hypcap but that in turn requires further hackery to work with custom figure types (such as figures placed by the side of the text rather than inline with it..
table handling leaves a lot to be desired requiring significant manual tweaking for any nontrivial table.
there are way too many markup sensitive characters, this means that significant editing is often required after pasting in plain text.
requires running a bunch of tools in the right order and sometimes multiple times to process a document

Thats my experiance from writing a phd thesis with the thing anyway.

I'd guess a combination of a small population and a large petrochemical industry pushes them up in the rankings (note that the rankings in question are per-capita).

Being a small island probablly doesn't help, in particular small islands are often short on fresh water which pushed them to energy intensive desalination. It can also make it difficult to achive economies of scale in power generation.

AIUI EE is currently owned by deutsche telekom and france telecom, so this is one former state monopoly telco buying a buisness off other fromer state monopoly telcos, not a takeover of an indpendent buisness.

Note that while " large ISP/Telco company." is not wrong it's something of an understatement. BT is the former state monopoly telco in the UK.

AIUI BT openreach (the part of BT that owns the physical lines) has an effective monopoly for about half of the UK households. For most of the rest they are competing against virgin media but virgin media don't sell wholesale. Theres a few small upstarts arround too but they tend to have negligable coverage areas.

Fortunately we have reasonablly effective regulation which allows competition at the service provider level despite the monoploy at the physical line level.

Mint and chocolate combinations seem pretty common in the UK too. Personally I like them...

So at times of high demand the price of using the freeway will rise to the point it's discouraging people from using the freeway.

and you think this will help with the problem of people chosing to use local streets instead of the freeway?!

AIUI suppliers in general don't formally accept orders until they ship them. .

AIUI in many muslim majority countries children of muslim parents are automatically deemed to be muslim and abandoning islam to take up another religion or just because you don't belive in religion at allis a serious crime (punishable by death in at least some cases).

While in christian majority countries you are generally free to chose whatever religion you like.

And then theres places like the ISIS territories where they go even further and force people of other faiths to convert to islam on penalty of death.

Yes we have some christian fundamentalist nutjobs but by and large they don't have much power.

Easier said than done.

Firstly it's difficult to prove who is intentionally disrupting traffic and who is just caught up in the disruption. Especially if the disruption strategy is to focus a large number of vehicles on a small area but otherwise drive normally. Secondly if the roads are gridlocked getting the cop cars and tow trucks in and out is going to be difficult.

I remember reading an EPE article that claimed tha tthe difference in sound between valve amps and most modern transistor amps was caused by driving the speaker differently with the valve amps being effectively controlled current sources while the modern transistor amps are effectively controlled voltage sources. Thus causing the speaker to respond differently.

Said article also gave a design for a FET based amp which used the topology of and supposedly sounded like a valve amp.

I suspect they do have a backup soloution (paper based or otherwise) but using it results in a much lower capacity than the main system. After all why would you build a new computer system if their wasn't a significant benefit to doing so?

If you have an incident that reduces capacity significantly in a system that is close to capacity then you have to prioritise. The priority for ATC is going to be to get planes already in the air safely onto the ground before they run out of fuel. Planes on the ground can wait.

I don't see anything in his post saying he was dumb enough to try and power the whole rack with such a power cord.

In my experiance (living in the UK) most IEC cords are 0.75mm. 0.75mm flex is supposed to be good for 6A (and is probablly in practice good for substantially more, the current ratings on the small flex sizes are very conservative). That should be sufficient for most servers.

I do find it very misleading that the moulded IEC connectors seem to always be stamped with 10A even when connected to 0.75mm flex but if his flex melted either it was a very big server or the 0.75mm printed on the flex was a lie.

The JPEG originals from the camera are generally far too large for reasonable web use anyway. Nearly all photos you see on the web will have been downscaled and recompressed since they left the camera.