Stop making sense.

Ok, I'll bite. I'll start by saying that my premise here is to demonstrate that the year of manufacture really doesn't fucking matter.

I have a 2002 GMC Safari cargo van. I also have a 1979 Pontiac Firebird Esprit.

They're both rear-wheel drive. The suspensions are almost identical. As are the brakes -- I think the front rotors might even be the same part. Idealized engine output is about the same. Both have open differentials. And no rear sway bar. Both have 15" wheels of similar overall circumference and width. Neither vehicle's design pays much attention to weight distribution.

Chief differences: The Safari is a little top-heavy and has much more body roll, and it is fuel-injected and has ABS, so it tolerates cold weather a bit better.

Yes, I'm comparing a work truck to a 34-year-old "sports car". It is not an unfair comparison even though more than 20 years separate them: In fact, it disturbs me somewhat to think this through and realize how similar they really are.

They work about the same. Braking sucks, cornering sucks, and acceleration is OK. Handling, in raw terms, is ridiculously similar: They both understeer badly, and there is no easy fix for it in street driving (late braking works, but scares the straights and tosses tools all over the truck).

Meanwhile, I also have a 1995 BMW 325i. It itself is creeping up on being 20, although other identical cars were produced 20 years ago.

Braking? The seatbelts can leave a bruise across your chest. Handling? Tends to understeer, but that's easily fixed with throttle manipulation instead of late-brake techniques. Winter? You betcha: Feed it correct tires and it goes where you tell it...quite boringly and predictably, in fact. Acceleration? Meh, but it's got an engine that is old enough to vote with over 200k hard miles and zero internal work.

Comparison to a buddy's new F-150 King Ranch with a twin-turbo Ecoboost V6, or another friend's new Mazda 3 with a spunkier 2.3l 4? I'll keep the old BMW, thanks...and the 18-year-old sedan certainly works better than the 11-year-old work truck, or the 34-year-old "sports car" that is almost the same.

But more to the point: Blindly comparing a 20-year-old car to a modern car? Good luck with that: There are simply too many variables. Automotive things do not change as fast as you think that they do, and do not change in easily-generalized directions. Generalizations suck because they're usually wrong. Please stop doing that.

(I could write more about the 1995 Chevy Beretta that I drove to death, or 1996 Pontiac Firebird that a deer ate, but I have no purpose in beleaguering the point further.)

I see this mode of operation in many cities in Ohio.

The lights have been there for eons, though control of them has been continually improved over my lifetime (at least) in accordance with available technology.

Perhaps your usual stomping round just sucks.

But I only get traffic tickets once every several years on average. I think I have had two tickets in the past decade.

I live in and do almost all of my driving in semi-rural Ohio, and the courts are not quite so factory-like here as you describe. There is an excellent chance that the officer will actually show up, if I follow all of the steps you present and actually get a real trial.

Once there, I suppose I could pull out the usual bag of tricks (tuning fork, ad infinitum), but it is likely that I will be found guilty.

And having once spent a month in jail for pissing off a judge in a civil matter, I do not want to repeat that.

So why should I bother with the fight? Because I'm a patriot? An altruist?

Nay. I think I'll just pay for the citation and move on.

So trains can't stop for shit because...couplings.

Obviously you fail to understand that each car on a train has its own braking system.

But I think there's a few other things you don't understand, so I'll let it slide. This time.

The problem with broad generalizations is that they're usually wrong.

Downtown in my fair city, the traffic lights do all of the following, all of the time:

Timer-based operation
Pedestrian button-based operation
Inductive loop operation
Photosensitive activation by emergency strobes of a certain cadence

The walk signals also operate whenever the light turns green for that direction, no matter what activated the light, unless it was activated by an emergency vehicle.

Despite all of this, the countdown displays make excellent predictors of an upcoming yellow light in normal traffic: It counts to zero (or 1, I forget), starts flashing some manner of "Don't Walk" idiogram for several seconds. After that, the yellow and solid "Don't Walk" happen concurrently.

Every. Single. Time. It's consistent.

Meanwhile, car-specific indicators do exist: Examples of them are on US 23 north of Columbus with a speed limit of 55MPH. The sign simply says "Prepare to stop if flashing" a good distance ahead of the intersections. By golly: If it's flashing when you approach that sign, you may as well coast because you'll be stopping soon enough.

In terms of trying to drive safely and proactively, I don't need a timer to tell me that the light will change soon. I just need an indicator. For me in my area, a dedicated flashing light works fine on higher-speed roads, as does a countdown timer on lower-speed city streets: I can see it fine at 35MPH. *shrug*

Strawman.

There are many private businesses that are authorized to exist by Congress.

???

-adolf

You must be joking. Competing currencies would be a lot better than the current theft through inflation carried out by the US government.

You mean "theft through inflation carried out by the Federal Reserve Bank."

(Pro-Tip: The Federal Reserve, despite its name, is not a government entity.)

I figured that it must be that way, but with the power required by a CPU such a regulator must either very noisy and/or require substantial capacitance and/or use ridiculously high frequencies.

So. Filtering? These might be the most expensive mass-produced caps in the world if they're also on-die.

Your broad generalization is only if it is a linear regulator. Switch-mode regulators change the game. TFA doesn't seem to indicate which it is.

What does an encoder have to do with DRM?

This "right to profit" thing you allude to: I do not think this is the crowd for it.

Also: Because nobody has thought of this before.

Not quite. With an offline version, one can buy a "second hand" install CD. With an "only for rental" offer on the market, there's no chance to do it.

Think textbooks

The CD itself isn't the issue; Adobe has had their most prized offerings freely downloadable for a few major versions now, AFAICT. It's been all about licensing, and not physical possession, for a long time.

If I can't already re-sell my CS6 license key (and I don't think I can) to an unrelated party, then your analogy means....nothing.