The US already has laws against it, including state and federal "Do Not Call" registries. The robo-calls became epidemic after those laws were enacted, confounding identification of those making the calls, so that making complaints to law enforcement is ineffective. Before the callers were mostly legitimate businesses who would identify themselves; now they are from criminals pretending to be somebody whom they are not--or politicians (a particular example of the more general case).
I would favor that, with the majority of the fee being statutory damages paid to the both the receiver of the call and to the person whose number was spoofed.
Then we just need to bring the political polls and campaign calls under the robo-call prohibition, and perhaps it would be safe to to answer the phone again.
There is an important difference between any government agency and UL. UL's product safety standards are developed in partnership with those who produce the products and with other safety agencies, notably IEC and CSA. This brings credibility, skill, and independence into play.
For government officials the desire to be seen "doing something" favors haste and visibility rather than long term effectiveness. UL's primary focus is product safety, not favorable media coverage.
{ }
The null set: that set of empty braces is as close as it came. Little did I suspect this was an introduction to the concept of "stubs" for missing code that might be written at some leter data!
Taking off the tech hat...others have given good advice for triage on the equipment, etc.
Safety of you and your staff is the priority. Anybody who does not need to be there should get to safety now, before the evacuation order comes. The fewer people to be accounted for, the less chaos there will be if you need to leave on short notice. Make sure to exchange cell phone numbers (if you haven't already), so you can rendezvous with the others later on.
Assign a person to be the safety monitor--to stay at the phone and radio, and get the word out to all others if the evacuation order comes. Vigilance is their only assignment. The safety monitor should have a list of everybody still on site, to be sure nobody is left behind. If you get the call to evacuate, you'll have only minutes to get everybody out and down the road to safety.
Have N+1 vehicles ready to go, where N is the number you need to get everybody to safety. If one doesn't start, don't mess with it--leave it behind and call the insurance company later.
You should have two ways out. If one becomes impassible because of the fire, head down the other way immediately.
I hope you and your center escape the fire. But if it comes to a choice between you and the data center, let the servers melt!
If you have an open slot in the breaker panel for another two-pole unit, you may be able to get a surge protector that installs right in the breaker panel. This avoids having anything attached in the open, or having to "tear open the wall" to replace it. Look for a "Type 1" or "Type 2" surge protector, made for your make and model of breaker panel In most places, you have to hire a licensed electrician and get a permit to legally install it.
You will also need protection for TV/satellite cables, etc. These need to be physically close to the power line protector, and be connected to the same ground system, through a short fat wire. Using a separate ground stake and a long, skinny grounding wire (as too many inept installers do) can actually increase the risk of damage: surge currents flow from the AC line, through your flat screen TV, and out the coax cable to the cable's ground rod. Goodbye flat screen TV, hello fire department!
it would be more impressive if it used voice recognition to do the job. That's a product IBM could sell, starting with every insurance, cable and credit card company running one of those useless voice response systems. "I'm sorry, I didn't understand that. Did you want to take out a $10,000 cash advance at 28% interest or upgrade to the new super premium platinum preferred customer card? Press the pound key for 'Yes'."
88 km/hr is slower than the one-hour standing start record for human powered streamlined bikes (90.6 km/hr for a single rider). I suppose that's because the large surfaces needed for the solar cells add to the frontal area and drag for the electric vehicle.
Get rid of automatic transmissions and power steering so drivers actually have to use their hands to control the car. Give them something meaningful to do, then perhaps they will finally Hang Up and Drive!
On mountain peaks and ridges you do have a good chance of accessing a repeater. Check the Colorado Connection system of linked repeaters, it covers much of the state. But if you are down in a canyon or valley, repeater coverage is much less reliable in the back country.
If you are competent in Morse, there are several sub-pound transceiver options (this is a manufacturer's marketing page, read it as such). Morse gains about 7dB improvement over SSB radiotelephony from reduced noise bandwidth (typically 500Hz vs. 2500Hz) and about 6dB more because the peak-to-average power ratio is 1:1 instead of 4:1 or worse. Net improvement: 13dB, making 5W of Morse about equally effective as 100W of SSB (a result which my experience and that of other QRP fanatics confirm).
But no matter what radio you carry, including satellite phones, don't assume you'll be able to reach it and use it if you have a serious fall or accident. You may lose it down a slope, hit it on a rock and break it, or be incapacitated and unable to communicate with anything. The best advice is to not go it alone: hike with a companion. If you do go solo, stay on well-traveled main trails where help is likely find you. Technology does not ensure safety in the back country.
The devil is in the details: figuring which part is the 90% that you'll never need again, and which is the 10% that will be needed. Some of that "write-only" data is stuff that companies are legally obligated to retain, some is CYA records that you hope you'll never need again. In both cases when the court, IRS, etc. orders you to produce the documents, you'd better have them.
For IBM this isn't about winning a settlement. It's about making a public stand: you won't get Big Blue to back down by filing a flimsy lawsuit, and IBM will indemnify and defend their users against such claims even at great expense to themselves. Both IBM's customers and their would-be antagonists will remember this case for a long time to come.
* If you don't find any bugs, then your software doesn't have any.
* If you don't find any bugs, then there must be some left in your software.
It sounds to me as if Toyota is saying the former, while Cummings says the latter. Neither is a correct conclusion.
I agree with that, but it comes down to a principal of safety engineering (related to what goombah99 was saying). If the design has not, or cannot, be shown safe and reliable, you should assume that it is not safe. Such designs should have a truly independent back-up system that can be shown to be safe and reliable. While software that disables the electrical throttle control when the brake is pressed and shuts down the engine when the button is held for 3 seconds is helpful, it does not guard against single points of failures ( control computer, various sensor, wiring failures, as well as the software). With literally millions of affected vehicles on the road, each for hundreds of hours per year, even highly unlikely events cannot be ignored. Safety engineering is a rather paranoid profession, and for good reason!
Keith Armstrong [MS Word doc file] discusses many possible failure mechanisms that could cause the run-away Toyotas, in ways that would leave no clue as to the actual cause. His key point: It is impossible to prove, by testing alone, that electronics are reliable enough for safety-critical systems such as throttle control. That doesn't mean to not test, only that testing alone is never enough.
What I heard from a wind farm tech is the biggest problem is maintenance expense. The mechanical parts (step-up gearing) don't last as long as the utilities expect equipment to be used, and maintaining anything that large 200 feet up in air is a difficult and expensive operation. A "simple"oil change requires hauling dozens of gallons of oil to the top of the tower, and bringing that much waste oil back down to the ground. Just bringing a crane crew on-site to a rural wind farm can cost $20,000, before the first hour of actual work takes place. The maintenance tech describes wind as the financial opposite of solar: up front costs are attractive, while the ongoing maintenance is costly.
The article talked of the another problem area: sites with the most consistent wind power potential aren't near the major population centers, and generally aren't in existing HV power transmission corridors. Getting the necessary transmission lines installed is expensive and politically difficult. That is the major limitation for wind power: adding more turbines may increase the power generated by a wind farm, but if there isn't enough transmission capacity some of those units will be idled on good wind days, just to avoid overloading the lines.
The logic really is (or should be) a little more complicated than that, requiring the car to be moving or ignoring modest throttle applications. Otherwise, the usual way of starting up a steep hill has the unintended consequence of killing the motor. But the overall plan is a good one, when there are conflicting inputs go to a safe condition.
I don't buy the nonsense that the driver shouldn't switch off the ignition to control a run-away motor. Losing power-assisted brakes and steering is no excuse, the car should be perfectly controllable without them (what happens when you run out of gas?). The steering wheel doesn't lock on any car I've seen until you actually pull the key out of the ignition lock, and there is an interlock that prevents you from doing that without operating a separate safety latch (manual transmission) or shifting into park (automatic transmission). It's designed that way for this very reason. If the motor is running away, turn off the switch!
Intuit must really hate Colorado's Net File system. It's easy, relatively fast, and costs nothing. You still have to fill in the stupid forms, but it's 90% just copying the numbers from the equivalent lines of your federal tax forms. Paying Intuit extra to get the Colorado state version simply isn't worth the cost if your tax situation allows you to file online, and almost all individual returns can be filed online.
Does anyone have actual data or methods to predict this kind of effect on human bodies?
Yes [long pdf]. The FCC cites the specific IEEE and NCRP studies they used to set RF exposure limits. You are correct about the wavelength effect reducing human RF absorption at AM broadcast frequencies, an effect shown in the frequency-dependent FCC exposure limits (page 17 of the pdf file).
There are some famous examples of this working. But only because the parents had time, money, and high standards. Yes, not necessarily, and that's not all the story!
Proper home-schooling is a tremendous time commitment. It requires either a stay-at-home parent or dependably scheduled shift work. Even with lesson plans prepared by others, the home-school parents must spend time preparing and managing their child's education in addition to the face-to-face teaching time.
Money is rather irrelevant in many states. You can spend piles of your own money on a prepackaged curriculum if you wish. That is much less expensive than private school tuition, which is a big reason home schooling became popular (the benefits of a Catholic school education, without the tuition bills--or nuns). But you can also enroll in "virtual academies" that operate as charter schools in most states. They use the charter school funding to pay for the materials, certified teachers to assist you, and the required standardized tests. This comes at no additional charge, courtesy of your school taxes.
High standards will help you be successful. I think it's more accurate to say you should have motivation, meaning that you have standards consistent with your child's abilities, and consistently require those standards be met. Not all will be superstar students, but all can learn the discipline to do their best. That is the best predictor of success and happiness I know of, no matter what path your child follows.
You left out a key factor: patience. If you don't have the ability to stay with the program, to keep working with your child until he "gets it ", you will not be an effective home-school parent. The same is true for traditional teachers: the ones who don't care enough to persevere through the tough parts are poor teachers, the ones who treat the setbacks as opportunities are following the path of Jaime Escalante.
What I'm saying boils down to this: it's not whether home-schooling is right for your child, rather it's whether you are are the right teacher for her. If you're not willing to make the commitment to be that teacher, please don't home-school. You won't be doing your child a favor.
ABS: Drivers can do better than ABS but only if they're really experienced. Also only if they have brakes that are amenable to modulation. The power-assisted brakes on most modern cars are heavily damped, causing a noticeable lag (a tenth of a second or so) between pedal pressure changes and braking effect. The ABS actuator is in the hydraulic system, bypassing the power assist booster and thus allowing fast response when a wheel loses traction. ABS can release the locked wheel and reapply the brake almost instantly. It is not possible to do that with the brake pedal, no matter how skilled a driver you are. The brake booster doesn't respond fast enough, no matter how well trained your foot is.
ABS allows for "good enough" at the weakest link in the system: the human element! That is what makes it a good solution.
Another one comes up in embedded programming. Optimizing compilers assume that a variable that hasn't been written to inside a loop won't change inside that loop, so its evaluation is moved outside the loop to optimize for speed. But if that variable is changed by an external influence (an interrupt service routine, timer, input pin status, etc.) the optimized code will never see it. For example: while (DataNotReady) delay();/* yes, there are better ways but this saves code space in memory-limited microcontrollers */ can be optimized to evaluate DataNotReady only for the first pass of the while loop, so it never exits if data isn't ready. The ISR changes the flag, but the while loop doesn't see it. That's why embedded compilers include ways to disable specific optimizations that break this type of code.
The fuel tax has a useful advantage: drivers of heavier, less fuel-efficient vehicles pay more tax. Consider a 45 cent per gallon fuel tax and 2 cent per mile road-use tax. Drivers of a Suburban getting 15 miles per gallon pay 3 cents a mile for the fuel tax, so the road use fee saves them a penny per mile. If you have a Prius getting 45 miles per gallon, you pay only one cent per mile for fuel tax, so the road use fee costs you an extra penny per mile. If you have a Tesla, your tax went from nothing to 2 cents per mile: about the same as the cost of electricity to recharge the car in many states (200 mile range on a 40 kWhr recharge = 5 miles per kWhr and 10 cents per kWhr). It reverses the tax incentive to drive a more efficient car!
About the bottle and altitude effects. Use a plastic bottle and fill it not quite full. Squeeze the sides gently to displace about a third of the air, then cap it. Now you have expansion space, so your bottle won't be pressurized. You can open it safely in flight and take a drink. This also applies to toiletry items, especially if you're flying (or driving) from sea level to a high altitude city such as Denver. A tightly sealed bottle can pick up more than 2 PSI from the altitude change, helping the contents ooze out. That's why I was putting bottles into zip-lock baggies long before TSA made it mandatory.
An "open-source" car opens some interesting legal questions. Hot rodders and customizers can legally build cars that haven't been crash-tested, haven't undergone long-term emissions system durability testing, etc. and register these one-of-a-kind vehicles for highway use (in most US states). Open source designs mean that many people or small companies could be building the same car, no one maker in quantities that exceed the legal threshold for a volume-produced vehicle, but cumulatively in volumes that would require undergoing the rigorous test regimes.
How will the law deal with distributed authority and decision-making of open-source designs? Who would be responsible for performing the tests? Who would pay for it? Who will ensure that all the manufacturers using the design build it to the same specifications as the versions tested? Who will be held responsible in the inevitable product-liability suits?
...and that's the hardest part of upgrading rail service. The freight haulers own the rails, and Amtrak can run only when, where, and at speeds compatible with freight operations. Even if the trains are TGV class, that doesn't help when their schedule must fit around the freight traffic. To have an effective high-speed rail system, they'll need to get right-of-way, lay the rails, and maintain them to high-speed standards. Even if they could use Interstate Highway right-of-way, the cost of the system is huge. If they choose to skimp and stay on freight tracks (which seems likely), the trains between LA and Chicago will still be running slower than they did half a cantury ago (39:30 then for Santa Fe's Super Chief, compared to 43:00 now for Amtrak's Southwest Chief).
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The US already has laws against it, including state and federal "Do Not Call" registries. The robo-calls became epidemic after those laws were enacted, confounding identification of those making the calls, so that making complaints to law enforcement is ineffective. Before the callers were mostly legitimate businesses who would identify themselves; now they are from criminals pretending to be somebody whom they are not--or politicians (a particular example of the more general case).
I would favor that, with the majority of the fee being statutory damages paid to the both the receiver of the call and to the person whose number was spoofed. Then we just need to bring the political polls and campaign calls under the robo-call prohibition, and perhaps it would be safe to to answer the phone again.
There is an important difference between any government agency and UL. UL's product safety standards are developed in partnership with those who produce the products and with other safety agencies, notably IEC and CSA. This brings credibility, skill, and independence into play.
For government officials the desire to be seen "doing something" favors haste and visibility rather than long term effectiveness. UL's primary focus is product safety, not favorable media coverage.
{ } The null set: that set of empty braces is as close as it came. Little did I suspect this was an introduction to the concept of "stubs" for missing code that might be written at some leter data!
Taking off the tech hat...others have given good advice for triage on the equipment, etc.
Safety of you and your staff is the priority. Anybody who does not need to be there should get to safety now, before the evacuation order comes. The fewer people to be accounted for, the less chaos there will be if you need to leave on short notice. Make sure to exchange cell phone numbers (if you haven't already), so you can rendezvous with the others later on.
Assign a person to be the safety monitor--to stay at the phone and radio, and get the word out to all others if the evacuation order comes. Vigilance is their only assignment. The safety monitor should have a list of everybody still on site, to be sure nobody is left behind. If you get the call to evacuate, you'll have only minutes to get everybody out and down the road to safety.
Have N+1 vehicles ready to go, where N is the number you need to get everybody to safety. If one doesn't start, don't mess with it--leave it behind and call the insurance company later.
You should have two ways out. If one becomes impassible because of the fire, head down the other way immediately.
I hope you and your center escape the fire. But if it comes to a choice between you and the data center, let the servers melt!
If you have an open slot in the breaker panel for another two-pole unit, you may be able to get a surge protector that installs right in the breaker panel. This avoids having anything attached in the open, or having to "tear open the wall" to replace it. Look for a "Type 1" or "Type 2" surge protector, made for your make and model of breaker panel In most places, you have to hire a licensed electrician and get a permit to legally install it. You will also need protection for TV/satellite cables, etc. These need to be physically close to the power line protector, and be connected to the same ground system, through a short fat wire. Using a separate ground stake and a long, skinny grounding wire (as too many inept installers do) can actually increase the risk of damage: surge currents flow from the AC line, through your flat screen TV, and out the coax cable to the cable's ground rod. Goodbye flat screen TV, hello fire department!
it would be more impressive if it used voice recognition to do the job. That's a product IBM could sell, starting with every insurance, cable and credit card company running one of those useless voice response systems. "I'm sorry, I didn't understand that. Did you want to take out a $10,000 cash advance at 28% interest or upgrade to the new super premium platinum preferred customer card? Press the pound key for 'Yes'."
88 km/hr is slower than the one-hour standing start record for human powered streamlined bikes (90.6 km/hr for a single rider). I suppose that's because the large surfaces needed for the solar cells add to the frontal area and drag for the electric vehicle.
Get rid of automatic transmissions and power steering so drivers actually have to use their hands to control the car. Give them something meaningful to do, then perhaps they will finally Hang Up and Drive!
I know, it's just wishful thinking...
On mountain peaks and ridges you do have a good chance of accessing a repeater. Check the Colorado Connection system of linked repeaters, it covers much of the state. But if you are down in a canyon or valley, repeater coverage is much less reliable in the back country.
If you are competent in Morse, there are several sub-pound transceiver options (this is a manufacturer's marketing page, read it as such). Morse gains about 7dB improvement over SSB radiotelephony from reduced noise bandwidth (typically 500Hz vs. 2500Hz) and about 6dB more because the peak-to-average power ratio is 1:1 instead of 4:1 or worse. Net improvement: 13dB, making 5W of Morse about equally effective as 100W of SSB (a result which my experience and that of other QRP fanatics confirm).
But no matter what radio you carry, including satellite phones, don't assume you'll be able to reach it and use it if you have a serious fall or accident. You may lose it down a slope, hit it on a rock and break it, or be incapacitated and unable to communicate with anything. The best advice is to not go it alone: hike with a companion. If you do go solo, stay on well-traveled main trails where help is likely find you. Technology does not ensure safety in the back country.
The devil is in the details: figuring which part is the 90% that you'll never need again, and which is the 10% that will be needed. Some of that "write-only" data is stuff that companies are legally obligated to retain, some is CYA records that you hope you'll never need again. In both cases when the court, IRS, etc. orders you to produce the documents, you'd better have them.
For IBM this isn't about winning a settlement. It's about making a public stand: you won't get Big Blue to back down by filing a flimsy lawsuit, and IBM will indemnify and defend their users against such claims even at great expense to themselves. Both IBM's customers and their would-be antagonists will remember this case for a long time to come.
* If you don't find any bugs, then your software doesn't have any.
* If you don't find any bugs, then there must be some left in your software.
It sounds to me as if Toyota is saying the former, while Cummings says the latter. Neither is a correct conclusion.
I agree with that, but it comes down to a principal of safety engineering (related to what goombah99 was saying). If the design has not, or cannot, be shown safe and reliable, you should assume that it is not safe. Such designs should have a truly independent back-up system that can be shown to be safe and reliable. While software that disables the electrical throttle control when the brake is pressed and shuts down the engine when the button is held for 3 seconds is helpful, it does not guard against single points of failures ( control computer, various sensor, wiring failures, as well as the software). With literally millions of affected vehicles on the road, each for hundreds of hours per year, even highly unlikely events cannot be ignored. Safety engineering is a rather paranoid profession, and for good reason!
Keith Armstrong [MS Word doc file] discusses many possible failure mechanisms that could cause the run-away Toyotas, in ways that would leave no clue as to the actual cause. His key point: It is impossible to prove, by testing alone, that electronics are reliable enough for safety-critical systems such as throttle control. That doesn't mean to not test, only that testing alone is never enough.
The article talked of the another problem area: sites with the most consistent wind power potential aren't near the major population centers, and generally aren't in existing HV power transmission corridors. Getting the necessary transmission lines installed is expensive and politically difficult. That is the major limitation for wind power: adding more turbines may increase the power generated by a wind farm, but if there isn't enough transmission capacity some of those units will be idled on good wind days, just to avoid overloading the lines.
The logic really is (or should be) a little more complicated than that, requiring the car to be moving or ignoring modest throttle applications. Otherwise, the usual way of starting up a steep hill has the unintended consequence of killing the motor. But the overall plan is a good one, when there are conflicting inputs go to a safe condition. I don't buy the nonsense that the driver shouldn't switch off the ignition to control a run-away motor. Losing power-assisted brakes and steering is no excuse, the car should be perfectly controllable without them (what happens when you run out of gas?). The steering wheel doesn't lock on any car I've seen until you actually pull the key out of the ignition lock, and there is an interlock that prevents you from doing that without operating a separate safety latch (manual transmission) or shifting into park (automatic transmission). It's designed that way for this very reason. If the motor is running away, turn off the switch!
Intuit must really hate Colorado's Net File system. It's easy, relatively fast, and costs nothing. You still have to fill in the stupid forms, but it's 90% just copying the numbers from the equivalent lines of your federal tax forms. Paying Intuit extra to get the Colorado state version simply isn't worth the cost if your tax situation allows you to file online, and almost all individual returns can be filed online.
Does anyone have actual data or methods to predict this kind of effect on human bodies?
Yes [long pdf]. The FCC cites the specific IEEE and NCRP studies they used to set RF exposure limits. You are correct about the wavelength effect reducing human RF absorption at AM broadcast frequencies, an effect shown in the frequency-dependent FCC exposure limits (page 17 of the pdf file).
There are some famous examples of this working. But only because the parents had time, money, and high standards. Yes, not necessarily, and that's not all the story!
Proper home-schooling is a tremendous time commitment. It requires either a stay-at-home parent or dependably scheduled shift work. Even with lesson plans prepared by others, the home-school parents must spend time preparing and managing their child's education in addition to the face-to-face teaching time.
Money is rather irrelevant in many states. You can spend piles of your own money on a prepackaged curriculum if you wish. That is much less expensive than private school tuition, which is a big reason home schooling became popular (the benefits of a Catholic school education, without the tuition bills--or nuns). But you can also enroll in "virtual academies" that operate as charter schools in most states. They use the charter school funding to pay for the materials, certified teachers to assist you, and the required standardized tests. This comes at no additional charge, courtesy of your school taxes.
High standards will help you be successful. I think it's more accurate to say you should have motivation, meaning that you have standards consistent with your child's abilities, and consistently require those standards be met. Not all will be superstar students, but all can learn the discipline to do their best. That is the best predictor of success and happiness I know of, no matter what path your child follows.
You left out a key factor: patience. If you don't have the ability to stay with the program, to keep working with your child until he "gets it ", you will not be an effective home-school parent. The same is true for traditional teachers: the ones who don't care enough to persevere through the tough parts are poor teachers, the ones who treat the setbacks as opportunities are following the path of Jaime Escalante.
What I'm saying boils down to this: it's not whether home-schooling is right for your child, rather it's whether you are are the right teacher for her. If you're not willing to make the commitment to be that teacher, please don't home-school. You won't be doing your child a favor.
ABS: Drivers can do better than ABS but only if they're really experienced. Also only if they have brakes that are amenable to modulation. The power-assisted brakes on most modern cars are heavily damped, causing a noticeable lag (a tenth of a second or so) between pedal pressure changes and braking effect. The ABS actuator is in the hydraulic system, bypassing the power assist booster and thus allowing fast response when a wheel loses traction. ABS can release the locked wheel and reapply the brake almost instantly. It is not possible to do that with the brake pedal, no matter how skilled a driver you are. The brake booster doesn't respond fast enough, no matter how well trained your foot is.
ABS allows for "good enough" at the weakest link in the system: the human element! That is what makes it a good solution.
Another one comes up in embedded programming. Optimizing compilers assume that a variable that hasn't been written to inside a loop won't change inside that loop, so its evaluation is moved outside the loop to optimize for speed. But if that variable is changed by an external influence (an interrupt service routine, timer, input pin status, etc.) the optimized code will never see it. For example: while (DataNotReady) delay(); /* yes, there are better ways but this saves code space in memory-limited microcontrollers */ can be optimized to evaluate DataNotReady only for the first pass of the while loop, so it never exits if data isn't ready. The ISR changes the flag, but the while loop doesn't see it. That's why embedded compilers include ways to disable specific optimizations that break this type of code.
The fuel tax has a useful advantage: drivers of heavier, less fuel-efficient vehicles pay more tax. Consider a 45 cent per gallon fuel tax and 2 cent per mile road-use tax. Drivers of a Suburban getting 15 miles per gallon pay 3 cents a mile for the fuel tax, so the road use fee saves them a penny per mile. If you have a Prius getting 45 miles per gallon, you pay only one cent per mile for fuel tax, so the road use fee costs you an extra penny per mile. If you have a Tesla, your tax went from nothing to 2 cents per mile: about the same as the cost of electricity to recharge the car in many states (200 mile range on a 40 kWhr recharge = 5 miles per kWhr and 10 cents per kWhr). It reverses the tax incentive to drive a more efficient car!
About the bottle and altitude effects. Use a plastic bottle and fill it not quite full. Squeeze the sides gently to displace about a third of the air, then cap it. Now you have expansion space, so your bottle won't be pressurized. You can open it safely in flight and take a drink. This also applies to toiletry items, especially if you're flying (or driving) from sea level to a high altitude city such as Denver. A tightly sealed bottle can pick up more than 2 PSI from the altitude change, helping the contents ooze out. That's why I was putting bottles into zip-lock baggies long before TSA made it mandatory.
An "open-source" car opens some interesting legal questions. Hot rodders and customizers can legally build cars that haven't been crash-tested, haven't undergone long-term emissions system durability testing, etc. and register these one-of-a-kind vehicles for highway use (in most US states). Open source designs mean that many people or small companies could be building the same car, no one maker in quantities that exceed the legal threshold for a volume-produced vehicle, but cumulatively in volumes that would require undergoing the rigorous test regimes.
How will the law deal with distributed authority and decision-making of open-source designs? Who would be responsible for performing the tests? Who would pay for it? Who will ensure that all the manufacturers using the design build it to the same specifications as the versions tested? Who will be held responsible in the inevitable product-liability suits?
Both the Netwon's original and the 20th century work of the same name.
...and that's the hardest part of upgrading rail service. The freight haulers own the rails, and Amtrak can run only when, where, and at speeds compatible with freight operations. Even if the trains are TGV class, that doesn't help when their schedule must fit around the freight traffic. To have an effective high-speed rail system, they'll need to get right-of-way, lay the rails, and maintain them to high-speed standards. Even if they could use Interstate Highway right-of-way, the cost of the system is huge. If they choose to skimp and stay on freight tracks (which seems likely), the trains between LA and Chicago will still be running slower than they did half a cantury ago (39:30 then for Santa Fe's Super Chief, compared to 43:00 now for Amtrak's Southwest Chief).