You're attributing far too much value and putting far too much importance on money.

Police offices can be hospitalized for even minor injuries, largely because of liability concerns. Just because they're in a hospital doesn't mean they had limbs amputated or third degree burns or severe trauma or some such. It could very well have been whiplash or cuts and bruises or smoke inhalation or even concussion-like symptoms.

Michael Bay will get the movie rights.

If those folks could just pick up a cheap Areo subscription

There won't be any such thing as a cheap Aereo subscription though.

Once Aereo starts paying broadcasters their requested fees their product will cost as much as any basic cable subscription, because the bulk of the cost of the service is the content, and Aereo needs to cover service costs and make a profit on top of that. Aereo's entire business plan (from a revenue standpoint) was based on using OTA provisions to cut out the content costs, making their only cost the service itself. The SCOTUS ruling has put an end to that.

Aereo can "win" in as much as they may be able to force the networks to negotiate with them, but that's it. And TFS got something very wrong here: the 1996 cable reforms mean that the rates are de facto set by the networks and not the government. The older statutory royalties provisions will not apply here; for various reasons this is not how business is done today, and every last cable company is now paying rates set by negotiations.

Consequently Aereo's backup plan of simply paying less than the cable companies for the same content will also fall flat on its face. They are going to pay full price, the same as anyone else, and they're going to need to find a way to structure their business around it to make it viable. Otherwise, to invoke XKCD, this is the copyright equivalent of thinking you can protect a laptop from the government with encryption. Aereo will simply get wrenched; this isn't a battle that can be won with legal tricks, as evidenced by the SCOTUS ruling.

But an assembly line manned by robots? Why should that be cheaper in China? Is capital that much cheaper?

Even if wages and other costs were equal, the location advantage is substantial. It's not that it's cheaper in China, but that it's cheaper in the huge manufacturing hubs. You have suppliers and manufacturers for just about every single component you need without long-distance shipping, and a deep pool of design and manufacturing expertise working in the area.

That's not to say you can't manufacture efficiently elsewhere (we have plenty of recent examples such as the Raspberry Pi), but that the advantages has as much to do with the concentration of resources as with the cost of labour and regulations. And of course, as this inudstry becomes ever more automated, it no longer matters much for jobs where it happens any longer.

You can use the exact same arguments against fly-by-wire technology. Yet, that is now the norm, with not a mechanical linkage in sight.

Wake me up when they make smart pocket watches.

The worse thing that could happen to a view screen is that it gets so smashed up you can't resolve fine details through all the cracks (actually, the absolutely worse thing that could happen is that it ceases to exist, but at that point you've got other problems). But the fine details are hardly necessary for flying and landing.

The worse thing that could happen to a video feed is that the feed goes completely dead, in which case you will be literally flying blind. In that case, your only chance of survival is to eject.

I can't speak for London, but you'd be surprised about how backwaters the U.S. can be, especially in government organizations. When contracts are dragged out far beyond the initial bid (or even estimate, in a no-bid situation), it's more cost effective to do nothing and stick with paper and pencil. Check out the CityTime project if you want to see what happens to government contracts. It's an extreme case, certainly, but similar things happen on all scales, from the union workers to the contractor all the way up to management.

I read somewhere that the heavens and the Earth came first.

I thought so as well, then I read the fine print on the Cox website. Your plan has probably changed and is at 250GB transfer limit. YMMV but it is here in Orange County, CA.

Scones. They get cooked at around 230C, as do a number of other baked goods.

We renovated last year, and as part of it, we replaced all the light fittings in the house and changed all the globes to LEDs.

The globes may have cost more, but they have a significantly lower energy consumption.

Nah, that's fairly normal for Japan. They were probably running Pachislo machines alongside some Pachinko machines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachislo

Does not seem legal.

It's legal if the law says it is. And when the lawmakers are in bed with Big Business, like they are in the US, anything goes.