Oh, they do something... just not at the time of day that you're driving. Try driving at three or four in the morning some time, and you'll see just how well those sensors work.

What this professor proposes is basically a massively scaled-down version of what I've been proposing for years. Unfortunately, that scaled-down nature of the proposal makes it a lot less useful in practice. To do traffic optimization well, you really need automated vehicles so that people register their destinations with a central system that can optimize which roads each vehicle takes, optimize which lanes go in which direction, and optimize when vehicles should pass through intersections to minimize stopping. The more information you have, the easier it is to make such decisions. More to the point, by knowing the entire route (rather than just one or two intersections ahead), you can do a much better job of optimization.

For example, if you know that a vehicle passes through three traffic lights in a short period of time, you may find that by making the vehicle stop at the first light rather than the second light (or vice-versa), you shift its arrival at the third light enough so that a vehicle does not have to stop that otherwise would have stopped, resulting in an overall efficiency gain.

Eventually, when nearly all cars have been converted to automatic drivers, you could leave the traffic lights in place, with all directions red by default, turning green only when a legacy manual vehicle approaches. Until then, however, having ten or twenty seconds of advance warning won't really help all that much. As others have said, we already have road sensors for this. If the lights are configured to not use the road loops, the operators are sure as heck not going to upgrade the lights to use a transponder-based system that gives them even more inputs to ignore.

The only situation I'm aware of where the subject is relevant is when the subject is a painting or other piece of art, and only then because the photograph is a derivative of a copyrighted work.

I've never heard of the subject of a photograph successfully making any copyright claim on a photo. Now commercial use of that photo might run into problems with the use of someone's likeness without their permission, but that's not a copyright issue. Further, the person who owns the background definitely has no copyright claim.

The courts say that co-ownership only occurs if "...the parties intended to be joint authors at the time the work was created" and if their "contributions to the works were independently copyrightable." (Natkin et al v. Winfrey et al). One might argue that in the case of a couple taking picture of their vacation that they intended to be joint authors, but it would be much harder to argue that their contributions to the works were independently copyrightable. A mere pose is not copyrightable, according to current copyright rules.

Never, ever use engine braking on ice. It does cause skidding. Obviously, the road doesn't care why your wheels are resisting turning. If you do it in a standard maybe you have the reflexes to hit the clutch again, maybe not. If you do it in an automatic, you're probably screwed, because almost nobody has automatic reflexes for up shifting.

I find the opposite is true, at least for moderately rain-slick roads. If your engine is doing the braking, it does so evenly over a long period of time, which means it is less likely to cause traction loss than periodically decelerating wheels that are spinning freely by applying the brakes.

Now I'll admit that if you have sufficient leg strength and dexterity to lightly touch the brake continuously, it is slightly safer than engine braking because it's easier to let the wheels become free-rolling again, but realistically speaking, this is not how most people drive....

And when driving on ice, I'm not likely to get past second gear anyway, making the question of engine braking mostly moot. I think the fastest I've ever run on mixed snow and ice was maybe thirty or thirty-five on an interstate-grade four-lane highway with essentially nobody else on the road. My experience was similar there—steer, do not touch the brakes under any circumstances, and let the engine slow you down over the course of hundreds of feet, and remember that you will not be able to steer quickly. Pretend you're steering a boat, or perhaps a ballistic missile....

HFT pulls the price more quickly towards the middle, but that does not mean everyone gets a better deal. Eventually, either the buyers, the sellers, or both would have been forced to move higher or lower in order for the transaction to occur. Therefore, the HFT just speeds up what would inherently have occurred eventually without their assistance.

As a result, the profits from doing so come by creating a profit spread where otherwise those parties would have met in the middle without that distance. Therefore, the sellers make less than they would have made if they had waited for a real buyer to meet them halfway, and the buyers pay more than they would have paid if they had waited for a real seller to meet them halfway.

HFT transactions are parasitic in nature, taking money from the system while contributing nothing other than increased market volatility. You should read up on unregulated free markets. They're anything but awesome. I don't think you understand how markets work....

If you buy stock in four companies, it costs you $40 at $10 per trade, not 80, which is 4% of your investment. Still not small change, but....

It probably means that the JavaScript/CSS trick for determining what sites you've visited no longer shows that the IP number of believed downloaders have visited those sites. Which probably just means the government authorities in question don't know what "dynamic IP" means, but I digress....

Unless you have a preexisting contract to the contrary, the legal rights to a work (copyright) are divided equally among all of the work's creators.

However, most of your data was not created mutually. Most photos, for example, were taken by one person or the other. In that case, they are actually mere contributions to a collection. Thus, ownership belongs to the person who shot the photo. This is straightforward most of the time, because the other person is usually in the picture. And arguably, if you are both in the picture, unless you used a tripod, someone else probably owns the copyright, though any claim is usually pretty unlikely.

That said, you can, as a condition of the divorce, contractually transfer all rights into a shared pool such that you both hold 50% rights in every photo. This is probably the easiest solution, assuming either of you cares enough to bother arguing about such a minor point.

What does book publishing require that LaTeX doesn't/can't do?

Other way around. It's what LaTeX requires that book publishers can't realistically do.... Highly skilled programmers.

To get a chapter head design that would have taken about ten minutes in a program like Indesign, it took me several days of serious macro programming in LaTeX, starting with building up basic primitives like the equivalent of CSS's min-width (25 lines of macro code by itself). This complexity is primarily caused by the fundamental design of TeX as A. a multipass engine that does not update its layouts on the fly, and B. a macro-based language that expands in strange and wonderful ways....

Basically, LaTeX is acceptable for use by non-programmers only if you are satisfied with the default output with only minor changes to things like page size. As soon as you need anything slightly complex—even something as simple as producing a physical page size that differs from the logical page size—you're in a world of hurt. God help you if you ever need to use if statements or perform any actual mathematics on lengths. This will invariably require a really good programmer to spend weeks debugging your document. Most people feel that docs should be written and designed, not debugged, and therein lies the fundamental disconnect.

To describe LaTeX as an unholy hell is something of an understatement. The only thing that even approached the pain of the LaTeX PDF generation for me was the pain of all the custom HTML hacks to make Kindle behave, and even that was an order of magnitude less effort, time-wise.

Besides, using LaTeX to write HTML (which is what nearly all eBook formats are based on) is like using two toggle switches to key in Java bytecode a bit at a time. Most sane people start with something else, e.g. DocBook XML, then write trivial scripts to convert to XHTML for ePUB or to LaTeX code for PDF output (assuming they bother with PDF output). Starting with a language that is as thoroughly write-only and paper-centric as LaTeX would be utter insanity.

Of course, the best solution by far would be C. deliver the antibiotics to the sinus cavity by dissolving them in the water that you spray them up your nose....

They've been removed from Heathrow now (at least T5, the BA one). I believe Manchester is the only ones left.

As I understand it, only the X-ray systems have been removed (except in Manchester). The L3 and Smiths detection (millimeter wave) scanners are still very much authorized for use at LHR. So if they aren't in place at the moment, I'd be very surprised if they aren't there by next fall. Given recent comments by the UK transportation minister, I have zero faith in the UK becoming a place I will willingly travel to or through again by air unless several conservative party members of the UK government are ejected en masse in a landslide election, are tried before the Hague, and are forced to finish out the remainder of their lives in a hard labor camp for their crimes against humanity to serve as an example for other political leaders that would act against the public interest for their own political (and usually economic) gains.

That's the level of political upheaval that would be required to convince the sorts of mental defectives who would mandate forcible on-camera strip-searches as a prerequisite for travel that such actions are uncivilized and unjustifiable, no matter the perceived risks or rewards.

In other words, I'm not holding my breath.