That's a non-sequitur. The cost is born by society. Government is the name of the body that we elect to represent society. If taxing an activity reduces it, which, in turn, reduces a cost that is born by society, then the government has done its job. The point of such taxation is to reintroduce externalities into the costs, so that the market will correctly adjust.

The advantage of the cars in this model is that they speed up unloading. Go and watch a freight train being unloaded some time, it's a massive endeavour. Now imagine if each of the trucks could just drive off along the roads on its own as soon as the train arrived at its destination.

Because, in the USA especially, lots of Federal government money has been spent connecting the major population centres with roads. Very little has been spent on the rail infrastructure. If you can make it work on roads, then you can take advantage of all of the existing infrastructure cheaply.

Lidar is typically used in situations where you have this kind of interference, but the solution is conceptually pretty simple. You tune the detectors to a specific wavelength and you vary that wavelength between devices. You can typically vary the wavelength in software, so if you detect a lot of interference then you just hop to another frequency. If someone is intentionally blanketing your entire band, then it's not really any different from someone shining a floodlight in the eyes of human drivers - you just point them out to the police.

That's true on the desktop, but absolutely untrue on mobile devices. You typically have an OpenVG accelerator in the SoC that uses a lot less power than the GPU (or is part of the GPU, but uses a lot less power than the 3D mode).

If you are planning on taking Bitcoins in payment for some real product then you want some assurance that you can sell the Bitcoins for more than the cost of that product. You get this implicitly with established currencies, because they have reasonably stable inflation rates and, most importantly, those inflation rates are usually tied to your local economy and so the value of the currency doesn't alter in terms of what you can buy with it in the short term (if you're hoarding significant amounts of currency, rather than investing it in your business, for example using it to pay your employees or buy stock then you're a currency speculator and so have different requirements). With an immature and volatile currency like Bitcoin, you effectively need to buy Bitcoin futures or have some other entity underwrite your Bitcoins.

If you want to be in the business of offering payment services that accept Bitcoins, then you want to be able to do this underwriting. People will be a lot more willing to accept Bitcoins if you can say 'the value of BTC fluctuates relative to USD, but we guarantee that we will always buy them at this exchange rate. If you use this exchange rate for setting your prices then you will never suffer from these fluctuations'. To be able to do this (and not make huge losses), you need to be able to influence the market price by buying and selling in large quantities and by avoiding selling when the price is too low. Having a large initial stash of Bitcoin helps with this.

Paper doesn't scale very well. I have a repository for a project that's been going on for a few years and has a few hundred photos of whiteboards. Trying to find one is almost impossible because there's no full-text search for photos of whiteboards. If you don't need diagrams, then running OpenEtherPad with a machine connected to the projector as a client and just saving the output is much better, but I've not found a good equivalent that supports drawing (especially not free-form drawing on a tablet or whiteboard and then automatically recognising shapes and handwriting, as the Newton's drawing program did 20 years ago).

Enforcement of non-competes varies a lot between jurisdictions, but there is some precedent for requiring the company that demands the non-compete to pay the employee's salary for the duration. This also provides a good incentive for non-competes to scale with employment time.

A contract does not require a signature, it requires a meeting of minds. A signature is one way of demonstrating this. Accepting the pay cheque and showing up for work is another.

How on earth are you buying CFLs with only a 3-year warranty for $12 each? The only ones I've seen that are that expensive come with a 10-20 year warranty. 5 years is about the shortest I've seen and that's on ones that are under $1.

The youngest CFL I've replaced was, I think, 3 years old. I left most of them behind when I moved house after living in the same place for 7 years and most of the CFLs had never been replaced since I installed them shortly after moving in. I was a poor student back then, so all of them were the absolute cheapest that I could find.

If you're rewiring and going all-LED, you can apparently save quite a bit with a DC main for lighting. And this also makes it easy to have USB and similar outlets for device charging. I wish more new builds would install a DC main alongside the AC...

Maybe you're not looking very hard. Typical incandescents get 16 lumens per Watt, CFLs get 60 lm/W. That means that your 100W incandescent would generate around 1600lm, and you'd need a 26W CFL for equivalent. That's not a round figure, but 25W is and a 10 second search tells me I can pick up 25W spiral CFLs which are about the same size as an incandescent for around £5.

I was actually a bit surprised by those numbers (maybe Wikipedia is wrong?), because I found that the light level increased when I replaced a pair of 100W incandescents with 18W CFLs around 10 years ago. I mostly now buy 12W ones, because they're cheap and the fact that they're much brighter per Watt than incandescents means that I can put them in lights that are only rated for a 40W bulb and have more of them.

That said, I started using CFLs about 16 years ago (largely because I got tired of replacing bulbs). The first generation ones were noticeably dimmer after 2-3 years (but had already paid for themselves in energy savings, so were just demoted to lamps that didn't want to be as bright). The first ones died after 5-6 years. Since then, I've not bought a light fitting that doesn't comfortably fit a large CFL bulb. Most lampshades do, so it's only the smaller free-standing ones that are a problem. I like the Japanese-style ones that are a vertical cylinder of paper and these will happily take CFLs that are brighter than 60W incandescents, but won't take anything hotter than a 40W incandescent.

UNIT is not a British organisation, it's under UN control.

That's the same logic people used for choosing C, and just past the 25th anniversary of the first remote exploit of a buffer overflow vulnerability, it's still top of the list of causes of CVEs.