Isn't ending a relationship mutually still a divorce if it's a married relationship?
Honestly I've known of two marriages that ended even without claims of sexual infidelity and neither was terribly happy. In one case they were poor enough to where there wasn't much to fight about and in the other case both parties were smart enough to divide assets without a whole lot of fighting knowing that it would cost more in lawyer fees than the items being fought-over would cost. in the latter case it also helped that the party that decided to leave also decided to not claim too much, the house was paid-off, and there were no kids, so it was technically smooth even if there was still a lot of emotional animosity.
I just reflect on the vows I made to the woman that I married from time to time.
People are disgusting anyway. This is simply another in a long line of ways for people to hide communications that include alternate Internet e-mail addresses, alternate accounts through AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy, PO Boxes, and if one goes back REALLY far, private couriers.
Ironic thing is, unless one's spouse or significant-other has really, REALLY let themselves go, the grass really isn't greener on the other side. The other person might appeal because they're new, but it's usually because they're new and the shiny luster hasn't been worn off through familiarity, and once that familiarity is well and truly established the new person isn't any better than the previous one, and could actually be worse.
Last time I checked, the tax situation for being married without having any dependents weren't especially better than for being single. First couple tax seasons after getting married we calculated our taxes both ways, and there wasn't really much of a difference.
Unfortunately if a fifteen-ton dump truck gets into an accident on the freeway during heavy traffic, there will be many more people impacted both literally and due to the effects on traffic patterns than just the truck driver and the car that caused the wreck.
I spent about five years in the late Nineties and early Noughties without a TV tuner. On and off we had cable TV then back to over-the-air when we realized that we had a hundred channels and nothing was worth watching, and while we watch some TV now it's nothing like it was at the peak. We use adblock and flashblock and I use noscript, and I'm occasionally surprised when other people talk about TV shows and ads that I've never seen. I probably hear more ads on the radio when I'm driving around or are out working in the shop than I see ads in any visual medium.
For relatively inexpensive stuff where quality is mostly consistent across multiple sources I let price and the experience of getting the product dictate where I shop; Costco wins out a lot of the time with that, and for more expensive purchases I end up doing a lot of homework before spending my money. Sometimes ads might influence me in that I learn of the very existence of a product because of them, but having eliminated most unnecessary convenience purchases it's a lot easier to reduce the effects of advertising on myself.
It's not a prototype surface, it's a new technique that's being widely implemented. The I-10, the I-17, and most of the state routes through this urban area are paved in the stuff or will be shortly. If one wants to take a freeway to get across town there's no way to avoid it.
Or, we could make the road out of a material that is passively heated by the sun's rays during the day, with a slow release of that pent-up heat overnight, such that the road stays warmer than the surrounding earth...
Copyright and other intellectual-property laws have always been about protecting the income of the content owner. In the short-term I actually agree with them; I don't think that it's wrong for those who create content to make a living off of that content as they produce it. My biggest complaint is the trend of indefinite copyright where works that have influenced culture aren't eventually released into the public domain, as it gives too much a degree of control over our very culture to powerful entities that own the works that have helped define that culture, further empowering them. It'd be one thing is most copyright was held by the people that created content and if that copyright ended some set duration after their deaths, but when media companies can hold copyright for the better part of a hundred years that's just getting ridiculous.
The other side of it is the challenge in calculating how much financial damage is done to a copyright holder when unlicensed copies of their work are distributed and 'consumed'. Case in point, older movies that are available on the Internet that weren't popular releases when they initially debuted. If someone watches Spaced Invaders for free simply because they have access to it, who wouldn't have paid any amount of money to watch it however small, is Disney/Touchstone actually out anything? If the viewer would never have watched it to begin with then it's hard to say that Disney is financially hurt by someone watching it without paying for it.
That's a shame. Our roads here in the Phoenix-area seem to be serviced on a schedule. About once a decade on the major roads they grind the surface off and lay a new one down so that they never get horribly bad. Probably every 20-30 years or so on the neighborhood streets that see less traffic.
I live in the desert and we have potholes form here too, where it doesn't ever freeze enough for the mild overnight frost to do jack to the roads.
Our roads pothole because enough traffic over time stresses the material, and the expansive soil expands and contracts, causing the road to fracture. Since it doesn't rain much here either, the roads are not designed to drain as well as in other places (ie, no steeply banked crown) and the water finds its way down into the cracked road surface. As vehicles continue to drive on it they push down, and when they let up the pressure pent-up pushes road material up and out of the road surface.
Admittedly this happens more on the roads in less-populated areas at the outskirts of the city more than in the middle where the roads have been resurfaced off and on for 50+ years, but every time it rains I see chunks of asphalt on the roads that were pushed out by the pressure and moisture.
The whole point in just about all construction is to achieve an acceptable, durable result for the lowest possible price. Having to heat the road itself completely negates that, as there's a LOT of road out there.
Roadways start by digging a wide, shallow cut. That cut is lined with some form of crushed stony material or sand, and harder and larger layers are built-up until truly solid layers are applied. In some places they use concrete and coat it with a layer of asphalt, in other places it's just multiple layers of asphalt that are let to cool before the next is put down. Most of the materials used are themselves durable in the local environment so that they wear well. The tar and oil components of the top layer simply act to bind the durable sandy/stony mix together so it stays-put.
The idea of prefabbed sections worries me. If it's a top-layer I worry about water or other liquid getting between it and the substrate on which it sits. If it's anchored with tie-downs into the lower layers, I worry that they'll push up and puncture tires. Ever lost tire pressure at freeway speeds? I have three times. It's scary as hell.
The idea of taking our roadways' surface area and making it do something useful is appealing, but so far I don't see any ideas that make more sense than using the same old layered-material approach that we've used in some form or another since Roman times. There's simply not enough benefit to outweigh the detriments and costs.
They are also a little more dangerous for heavy trucks. A friend drives a 16-wheel dump truck with pushers and a strongarm, and apparently if he has to panic-stop the rubberized-asphalt roads are more prone to surface melting and turning to liquid under the tires, effectively making the truck hydroplane in otherwise dry conditions. Nothing like fifteen tons of uncontrollable truck sliding at freeway speeds toward a stupid motorist that cut-off the truck...
I've also noticed they're not nearly as durable as the hard concrete surfaces they replace. There are stretches on most of the oldest coated roads like the I-17 around the Durango Curve and on the US-60 where it diverges Eastbound from the I-10 where the coating has been scraped off in patches, and there are other sections where the coating has split above the control joints in the underlying concrete, making the road noisy again.
I won't deny they're beautifully quiet when new, but they just don't age very well.
That's what I was thinking. The problem of not being a handheld mechanical linkage from the operator's finger to the firing pin, and having some remote form, is that I don't see how it couldn't be instructed through programming to be an automatic weapon, so long as the act of firing the weapon cycles it to be ready to fire again. Obviously this wouldn't apply to a single-shot pistol or a single-action revolver if it lacks a means to cock the hammer after firing, or required triggering an entirely different, unrelated mechanism to cock the hammer.
I had meant to say cam, not crank in my previous reply.
It probably was a 400 in his car. Definitely the Bandit-era look to it.
Most of the seventies cars that I've played with (admittedly mostly Mopars) were much weaker than the cars from the sixties; power continued until about '71 or '72 and then dramatically fell-off with low compression. Chrysler discontinued the dual-quad and six-barrel carb options before '73 on both the small block and big block engines, and '78 was the last year of Chrysler's now-detuned big block in any passenger car, though it continued in light trucks for a couple more years. When my father bought his then-new '73 Charger SE the most powerful combination available was the 440 4bbl, presumably either a Thermoquad or an AVS.
I just wish that the emissions testing regimen would be revised for cars over a certain age. Everything '67+ that had to be emission-tested when it was built still has to be tested here, but engine tech and exhaust tech advances mean that most of the early emissions devices aren't needed but still have to be present to make the car pass an inspection.
I admit that I don't know the formal definition of what constitutes an automatic weapon, but if avoiding being called an automatic weapon requires that a human being manually pull a mechanical trigger on the firearm to be discharged, then having a remote control to fire the weapon would not be adequate to avoid it.
There is a difference. Before the advent of the modern quadcopter the barrier to entry was much higher (mainly due to cost) and the ability to control the RC device was much worse; simply losing control and crashing was a fact of life in the hobby of RC flying things.
If we want to make a firearms analogy for the RC flyers, the old-school RC planes and helicopters with no self-stabilization and short-life batteries were like muzzle-load pistols, or perhaps early cap-and-ball single-action revolvers. Modern quadcopters with electronic stabilization and other modes that are still mostly flown from handheld remote controls are your semi-automatic pistols. Completely computer-controllable quadcopters that can be programmed to autonomously navigate flightplans or can do object detection and avoidance are your small automatic weapons.
Human nature is how humans racked up their body counts. I expect that even when we were operating as very small tribes scattered over large areas and with leaders whose positions were tenuous at best we still made war.
You'll also generate logs through your network traffic. Even if you use a burner laptop at a coffee shop and a burner 3G or 4G device there's a chance that they'll get enough information to figure out where you were when you were controlling it to eventually figure out who you are. You're probably better off using actual radio as there won't be logs with mac addresses and fingerprints related to the network stacks on the devices and such.
You're going to need a lot more than a crank to get those kind of horses out of a smog-era Trans-am. My brother had a '77 with the 455 and the compression in that engine is so low that you're talking at least new pistons plus the associated bore/hone/bearing job, and if you want those 500 ponies to not grenade you'll need a forged crank and probably H-beam rods, plus if they cheapened the transmission as the HP dropped and didn't need to be so strong, you'll probably have to replace that. Then there's the differential, which probably is highway-geared somewhere around 2.7:1, and you'll need at least 3.2:1 to be fun, probably more like 3.5:1 or 4:1 depending on what you want it to do. Then there's the crappy open-chamber heads, the inefficient intake manifold the carburetor sized for the existing powerplant, the logs they used for exhaust manifolds, etc.
You undoubtedly can make that car go fast, but it's going to cost you a lot more than $300 for a cam and a set of lifters.
The only two cars that I am aware of that were sold in the US that even came close to what you're suggesting were the early CVCC-based Honda Accord and the Suzuki Swift, sold as the Geo Metro here. Fuel economy was the only thing going for these cars.
It's unfortunate, but size really is equated with comfort and luxury, and often for good reason as size gives room for features and room for the occupants find a comfortable seating position, and longer and wider wheelbases usually make for more comfortable rides so long as the suspension is calibrated for the weight of the vehicle and the passengers (as opposed to a cargo load that may or may not be present), as the longer wheelbases usually put the passengers further away from both suspended axles.
You know...I'd really pretty much like to go back to simpler cars, without all the computer bullshit, and make it mechanical again. Carburators, easy to use manual transmission, etc.
That way YOU could work on your own car again without an IT degree (not to mention breaking DMCA rules if you try to crack into your OWN car)...and you'd not be dependent on a software malfunction, nor have to worry about your car being 'hacked'...
Simple to use, simple to diagnose and repair.
Unfortunately older cars are gross polluters compared to newer cars. Older cars don't have any of the active passenger safety equipment that newer cars have and many of those systems don't work especially well without computers to operate them.
I work on cars for my entertainment, having ruined a good hobby in computers by making it my profession. There are advantages and disadvantages to all of the changes in the auto industry. I've found the sweet spot to be around 1995. I drive a '95 Impala SS because it has the best balance of the advantages of the newer technology (multiport fuel injection and plenty of power, overdrive transmission, four-wheel-disc antilock brakes, power-everything, decent fit-and-finish) and the advantages of older tech (easy to work on with plenty of room around the engine and transmission, true power steering gearbox with pitman arm, separate shocks and springs) so I can actually service the car at home without too many special tools. Before I knew how to work on cars I had an MN-12-based '93 Thunderbird that in hindsight was fairly easy to work on even if the 3.8L V6 had a significant design flaw, and I expect that the Panther-based Crown Victoria and Mercury Marauder are similar in construction given their design heritage.
We actually test-drove a couple of Chrysler 300s yesterday and I poked around under the hood a bit; they definitely are not as easy to service as the older stuff (especially the AWD version, which I would prefer) but are still easier to work on than just about all of the FWD stuff. The only FWD car that I've even come close to enjoying working on is my wife's Integra, the hood opens up very far and the cowl doesn't overhang the engine bay, so it's actually possible to reach stuff. Still harder than most RWD, but much less onerous than many others.
I do miss simple, but I don't miss 12 miles per gallon like I got in many older vehicles, nor do I miss having to make seasonal carburetor adjustments to keep it running decently.
Sadly this is not always the case. Toyota has been very haphazard as to what is and is not covered and when. It seems to predicate on who at the dealership acts as the customer's advocate and how the Toyota corporate rep they reach on a given day is feeling.
A friend of mine had a ridiculously expensive repair to his Prius that probably should have been covered but no one would hear him out. He's not planning on buying another Toyota product after that.
Yup. The FCC will confiscate equipment and will fine those that abuse, and will probably come down even harder on entities that intentionally do it for commercial purposes.
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Isn't ending a relationship mutually still a divorce if it's a married relationship?
Honestly I've known of two marriages that ended even without claims of sexual infidelity and neither was terribly happy. In one case they were poor enough to where there wasn't much to fight about and in the other case both parties were smart enough to divide assets without a whole lot of fighting knowing that it would cost more in lawyer fees than the items being fought-over would cost. in the latter case it also helped that the party that decided to leave also decided to not claim too much, the house was paid-off, and there were no kids, so it was technically smooth even if there was still a lot of emotional animosity.
I just reflect on the vows I made to the woman that I married from time to time.
I'm much more reasonable. I tell my wife that if she's going to have an affair ... so I have someone to play split-screen with.
Is that some kind of euphemism?
People are disgusting anyway. This is simply another in a long line of ways for people to hide communications that include alternate Internet e-mail addresses, alternate accounts through AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy, PO Boxes, and if one goes back REALLY far, private couriers.
Ironic thing is, unless one's spouse or significant-other has really, REALLY let themselves go, the grass really isn't greener on the other side. The other person might appeal because they're new, but it's usually because they're new and the shiny luster hasn't been worn off through familiarity, and once that familiarity is well and truly established the new person isn't any better than the previous one, and could actually be worse.
Last time I checked, the tax situation for being married without having any dependents weren't especially better than for being single. First couple tax seasons after getting married we calculated our taxes both ways, and there wasn't really much of a difference.
Unfortunately if a fifteen-ton dump truck gets into an accident on the freeway during heavy traffic, there will be many more people impacted both literally and due to the effects on traffic patterns than just the truck driver and the car that caused the wreck.
I spent about five years in the late Nineties and early Noughties without a TV tuner. On and off we had cable TV then back to over-the-air when we realized that we had a hundred channels and nothing was worth watching, and while we watch some TV now it's nothing like it was at the peak. We use adblock and flashblock and I use noscript, and I'm occasionally surprised when other people talk about TV shows and ads that I've never seen. I probably hear more ads on the radio when I'm driving around or are out working in the shop than I see ads in any visual medium.
For relatively inexpensive stuff where quality is mostly consistent across multiple sources I let price and the experience of getting the product dictate where I shop; Costco wins out a lot of the time with that, and for more expensive purchases I end up doing a lot of homework before spending my money. Sometimes ads might influence me in that I learn of the very existence of a product because of them, but having eliminated most unnecessary convenience purchases it's a lot easier to reduce the effects of advertising on myself.
It's not a prototype surface, it's a new technique that's being widely implemented. The I-10, the I-17, and most of the state routes through this urban area are paved in the stuff or will be shortly. If one wants to take a freeway to get across town there's no way to avoid it.
Or, we could make the road out of a material that is passively heated by the sun's rays during the day, with a slow release of that pent-up heat overnight, such that the road stays warmer than the surrounding earth...
Copyright and other intellectual-property laws have always been about protecting the income of the content owner. In the short-term I actually agree with them; I don't think that it's wrong for those who create content to make a living off of that content as they produce it. My biggest complaint is the trend of indefinite copyright where works that have influenced culture aren't eventually released into the public domain, as it gives too much a degree of control over our very culture to powerful entities that own the works that have helped define that culture, further empowering them. It'd be one thing is most copyright was held by the people that created content and if that copyright ended some set duration after their deaths, but when media companies can hold copyright for the better part of a hundred years that's just getting ridiculous.
The other side of it is the challenge in calculating how much financial damage is done to a copyright holder when unlicensed copies of their work are distributed and 'consumed'. Case in point, older movies that are available on the Internet that weren't popular releases when they initially debuted. If someone watches Spaced Invaders for free simply because they have access to it, who wouldn't have paid any amount of money to watch it however small, is Disney/Touchstone actually out anything? If the viewer would never have watched it to begin with then it's hard to say that Disney is financially hurt by someone watching it without paying for it.
That's a shame. Our roads here in the Phoenix-area seem to be serviced on a schedule. About once a decade on the major roads they grind the surface off and lay a new one down so that they never get horribly bad. Probably every 20-30 years or so on the neighborhood streets that see less traffic.
I live in the desert and we have potholes form here too, where it doesn't ever freeze enough for the mild overnight frost to do jack to the roads.
Our roads pothole because enough traffic over time stresses the material, and the expansive soil expands and contracts, causing the road to fracture. Since it doesn't rain much here either, the roads are not designed to drain as well as in other places (ie, no steeply banked crown) and the water finds its way down into the cracked road surface. As vehicles continue to drive on it they push down, and when they let up the pressure pent-up pushes road material up and out of the road surface.
Admittedly this happens more on the roads in less-populated areas at the outskirts of the city more than in the middle where the roads have been resurfaced off and on for 50+ years, but every time it rains I see chunks of asphalt on the roads that were pushed out by the pressure and moisture.
The whole point in just about all construction is to achieve an acceptable, durable result for the lowest possible price. Having to heat the road itself completely negates that, as there's a LOT of road out there.
Roadways start by digging a wide, shallow cut. That cut is lined with some form of crushed stony material or sand, and harder and larger layers are built-up until truly solid layers are applied. In some places they use concrete and coat it with a layer of asphalt, in other places it's just multiple layers of asphalt that are let to cool before the next is put down. Most of the materials used are themselves durable in the local environment so that they wear well. The tar and oil components of the top layer simply act to bind the durable sandy/stony mix together so it stays-put.
The idea of prefabbed sections worries me. If it's a top-layer I worry about water or other liquid getting between it and the substrate on which it sits. If it's anchored with tie-downs into the lower layers, I worry that they'll push up and puncture tires. Ever lost tire pressure at freeway speeds? I have three times. It's scary as hell.
The idea of taking our roadways' surface area and making it do something useful is appealing, but so far I don't see any ideas that make more sense than using the same old layered-material approach that we've used in some form or another since Roman times. There's simply not enough benefit to outweigh the detriments and costs.
They are also a little more dangerous for heavy trucks. A friend drives a 16-wheel dump truck with pushers and a strongarm, and apparently if he has to panic-stop the rubberized-asphalt roads are more prone to surface melting and turning to liquid under the tires, effectively making the truck hydroplane in otherwise dry conditions. Nothing like fifteen tons of uncontrollable truck sliding at freeway speeds toward a stupid motorist that cut-off the truck...
I've also noticed they're not nearly as durable as the hard concrete surfaces they replace. There are stretches on most of the oldest coated roads like the I-17 around the Durango Curve and on the US-60 where it diverges Eastbound from the I-10 where the coating has been scraped off in patches, and there are other sections where the coating has split above the control joints in the underlying concrete, making the road noisy again.
I won't deny they're beautifully quiet when new, but they just don't age very well.
That's what I was thinking. The problem of not being a handheld mechanical linkage from the operator's finger to the firing pin, and having some remote form, is that I don't see how it couldn't be instructed through programming to be an automatic weapon, so long as the act of firing the weapon cycles it to be ready to fire again. Obviously this wouldn't apply to a single-shot pistol or a single-action revolver if it lacks a means to cock the hammer after firing, or required triggering an entirely different, unrelated mechanism to cock the hammer.
I had meant to say cam, not crank in my previous reply.
It probably was a 400 in his car. Definitely the Bandit-era look to it.
Most of the seventies cars that I've played with (admittedly mostly Mopars) were much weaker than the cars from the sixties; power continued until about '71 or '72 and then dramatically fell-off with low compression. Chrysler discontinued the dual-quad and six-barrel carb options before '73 on both the small block and big block engines, and '78 was the last year of Chrysler's now-detuned big block in any passenger car, though it continued in light trucks for a couple more years. When my father bought his then-new '73 Charger SE the most powerful combination available was the 440 4bbl, presumably either a Thermoquad or an AVS.
I just wish that the emissions testing regimen would be revised for cars over a certain age. Everything '67+ that had to be emission-tested when it was built still has to be tested here, but engine tech and exhaust tech advances mean that most of the early emissions devices aren't needed but still have to be present to make the car pass an inspection.
I admit that I don't know the formal definition of what constitutes an automatic weapon, but if avoiding being called an automatic weapon requires that a human being manually pull a mechanical trigger on the firearm to be discharged, then having a remote control to fire the weapon would not be adequate to avoid it.
Sorry, I'm not a member of congress, not an option.
There is a difference. Before the advent of the modern quadcopter the barrier to entry was much higher (mainly due to cost) and the ability to control the RC device was much worse; simply losing control and crashing was a fact of life in the hobby of RC flying things.
If we want to make a firearms analogy for the RC flyers, the old-school RC planes and helicopters with no self-stabilization and short-life batteries were like muzzle-load pistols, or perhaps early cap-and-ball single-action revolvers. Modern quadcopters with electronic stabilization and other modes that are still mostly flown from handheld remote controls are your semi-automatic pistols. Completely computer-controllable quadcopters that can be programmed to autonomously navigate flightplans or can do object detection and avoidance are your small automatic weapons.
Human nature is how humans racked up their body counts. I expect that even when we were operating as very small tribes scattered over large areas and with leaders whose positions were tenuous at best we still made war.
...fly it via cell phone network...
What part is difficult?
Damn lag...
You'll also generate logs through your network traffic. Even if you use a burner laptop at a coffee shop and a burner 3G or 4G device there's a chance that they'll get enough information to figure out where you were when you were controlling it to eventually figure out who you are. You're probably better off using actual radio as there won't be logs with mac addresses and fingerprints related to the network stacks on the devices and such.
You're going to need a lot more than a crank to get those kind of horses out of a smog-era Trans-am. My brother had a '77 with the 455 and the compression in that engine is so low that you're talking at least new pistons plus the associated bore/hone/bearing job, and if you want those 500 ponies to not grenade you'll need a forged crank and probably H-beam rods, plus if they cheapened the transmission as the HP dropped and didn't need to be so strong, you'll probably have to replace that. Then there's the differential, which probably is highway-geared somewhere around 2.7:1, and you'll need at least 3.2:1 to be fun, probably more like 3.5:1 or 4:1 depending on what you want it to do. Then there's the crappy open-chamber heads, the inefficient intake manifold the carburetor sized for the existing powerplant, the logs they used for exhaust manifolds, etc.
You undoubtedly can make that car go fast, but it's going to cost you a lot more than $300 for a cam and a set of lifters.
The only two cars that I am aware of that were sold in the US that even came close to what you're suggesting were the early CVCC-based Honda Accord and the Suzuki Swift, sold as the Geo Metro here. Fuel economy was the only thing going for these cars.
It's unfortunate, but size really is equated with comfort and luxury, and often for good reason as size gives room for features and room for the occupants find a comfortable seating position, and longer and wider wheelbases usually make for more comfortable rides so long as the suspension is calibrated for the weight of the vehicle and the passengers (as opposed to a cargo load that may or may not be present), as the longer wheelbases usually put the passengers further away from both suspended axles.
You know...I'd really pretty much like to go back to simpler cars, without all the computer bullshit, and make it mechanical again. Carburators, easy to use manual transmission, etc.
That way YOU could work on your own car again without an IT degree (not to mention breaking DMCA rules if you try to crack into your OWN car)...and you'd not be dependent on a software malfunction, nor have to worry about your car being 'hacked'...
Simple to use, simple to diagnose and repair.
Unfortunately older cars are gross polluters compared to newer cars. Older cars don't have any of the active passenger safety equipment that newer cars have and many of those systems don't work especially well without computers to operate them.
I work on cars for my entertainment, having ruined a good hobby in computers by making it my profession. There are advantages and disadvantages to all of the changes in the auto industry. I've found the sweet spot to be around 1995. I drive a '95 Impala SS because it has the best balance of the advantages of the newer technology (multiport fuel injection and plenty of power, overdrive transmission, four-wheel-disc antilock brakes, power-everything, decent fit-and-finish) and the advantages of older tech (easy to work on with plenty of room around the engine and transmission, true power steering gearbox with pitman arm, separate shocks and springs) so I can actually service the car at home without too many special tools. Before I knew how to work on cars I had an MN-12-based '93 Thunderbird that in hindsight was fairly easy to work on even if the 3.8L V6 had a significant design flaw, and I expect that the Panther-based Crown Victoria and Mercury Marauder are similar in construction given their design heritage.
We actually test-drove a couple of Chrysler 300s yesterday and I poked around under the hood a bit; they definitely are not as easy to service as the older stuff (especially the AWD version, which I would prefer) but are still easier to work on than just about all of the FWD stuff. The only FWD car that I've even come close to enjoying working on is my wife's Integra, the hood opens up very far and the cowl doesn't overhang the engine bay, so it's actually possible to reach stuff. Still harder than most RWD, but much less onerous than many others.
I do miss simple, but I don't miss 12 miles per gallon like I got in many older vehicles, nor do I miss having to make seasonal carburetor adjustments to keep it running decently.
Sadly this is not always the case. Toyota has been very haphazard as to what is and is not covered and when. It seems to predicate on who at the dealership acts as the customer's advocate and how the Toyota corporate rep they reach on a given day is feeling.
A friend of mine had a ridiculously expensive repair to his Prius that probably should have been covered but no one would hear him out. He's not planning on buying another Toyota product after that.
Yup. The FCC will confiscate equipment and will fine those that abuse, and will probably come down even harder on entities that intentionally do it for commercial purposes.