Why would you think that LEDs are bad because you have a poor experience with CFLs?

You're right, many CFLs do have the issues you describe. That makes it a great argument FOR the LED bulbs, which don't have most of the issues you describe. One of the worst characteristics of CFLs is that their lifetime is hit hard by frequent on/off cycles. LED bulbs care about frequent on/off cycles even less than incandescent bulbs.

keyboard quality: full travel keys
endurance: 8 hours on 4 AA batteries. Replacement batteries are cheap and ubiqutous
discretion: no flip up screen
portability: 3 pounds
future ease-of-reference: plain text files are the easiest to search & archive

A lot of cities have an all-red time. And it does reduce the number of accidents for a few years, although the effect deteriorates over time as drivers acclimatise.

Most cities are installing magnetic sensors at intersections to reduce "stupid stoplights", as you put it. That's why those "push to walk" buttons are becoming ubiquitous. But it's expensive to tear up pavement, so it's only generally done when other road work is done.

Short term studies show that increasing the length of the yellow light decreases accidents, but longer term studies show that the effect disappears over time. As drivers acclimatise to long yellows, they run them more often, which is a dangerous practice.

Actually, Firefox has done a lot to improve addon compatibility. They now have a bot that checks the API calls of all addons in their repository and automatically marks those that don't use any changed API's.

I used to leave Firefox 2 open with hundreds of tabs on Linux for months at a time. Firefox 3 forced me to restart it every week or so. However, it has worked great for me since Firefox 7, and 8 appears to be even better.

Once Chrome gets the breadth of plugins that Firefox has, it'll be no better than Firefox.

Modern Firefox is virtually as fast as Chrome and actually uses less memory than Chrome. `The problem is that many Firefox extensions leak memory and really slow Firefox down. The reason that Chrome's plugins don't is that Chrome plugins simply aren't allowed to do a lot of the things that Firefox extensions do.

It's no surprise that those black people you've met in Silicon Valley are exceptional. Not only have they learned the skills necessary to break into the IT department, they've also overcome the cultural barriers put up by their own community, and any institutional racism that still exists. Pretty much anybody that makes it through all of those three filters is going to be exceptional.

Paradoxically, the answer is more industrialization, not less. History shows that pollution reaches a maximum for a country around when GDP per head reaches about $10,000. Below that number, citizens care more about the fundamental basic needs, and would rather have more money than a cleaner environment. As the citizenry gets richer, they start to care more about the environment they live in and demand that their government does something about it, and are willing to sacrifice some income to achieve it.

Luckily, China can take advantage of technological process, and will likely never be as bad as countries that industrialized earlier. No place ever has been or ever will be as polluted as London was in the late 1800s.