The reason is, if you don't like what a private company is doing, you can decide not to do business with them. Hence, private companies evolve strategies to avoid annoying their customers. If you don't like what the government is doing, well, I suppose the right-wingers have the slogan "love it or leave it." But most of us aren't willing to go that far.
From the article: "The Mars Climate Orbiter, and the Mars Polar Lander it contained, would have advanced our knowledge of the Red Planet immensely...."
Ouch. Mars Climate Orbiter did not "contain" Mars Polar Lander. They were two separate missions.
Saying it was a "simple" mistake is a little simple. The mistake could also be stated as the error of using heritage software in an embedded system, without examining it and testing its validity.
Strider wrote:
When the mission was funded, some congressman saw that it was an opportunity to give some pork to his district and put in some language essentially requiring JPL to hire Rockwell (as I recall, though it might have been Boeing) as the prime contractor.
Neither one; MCO was Lockheed-Martin.
Furthermore, it wasn't "some congressman giving pork to his district." The mission was competed using the standard competition; it may b hard to believe this, but NASA uses competitive bidding, a lot. Unfortunately, the bidding was done under the mandate of "faster better cheaper", and the two elements of that which could be numerically quantified on the bid were "fast" and "cheap." Mars Climate Orbiter was required to be flown at half the price of the previous (Mars Pathfinder) mission-- which was already the cheapest Mars mission flown since the 1960s.
A much better idea is time-dependent pricing, so that consumers can make the trade-off themselves between using power at peak times, or at off-peak times, and revise their decisions on a day by day basis. This would mean consumers could save by moving to technologies like air conditioners with thermal storage, so they can run the AC at night, when power is very nearly too cheap to meter, instead of during the afternoon peak.
However, for some reason utility regulatory boards don't like time dependent pricing.
Unfortunately, although it's better than studies that try to quantify exposure by asking people to self-estimate their cell phone use (these studies are completely lacking in value, unfortunately), it's still a bad study protocol.
The kind of people who take steps to reduce their microwave radiation exposure from cell phones are, unfortunately, very likely to be the same kinds of people who take steps to reduce their exposure to other possible risks, some of which actually do cause cancer. Not all of these confounding factors can be adjusted out.
Keep in mind the placebo study which showed that not only does the use of a placebo benefit health, but the people who take the placebo regularly and according to instructions benefit more than people who take the placebo less meticulously.
I don't think you can call this a statistics problem if you aren't defining any of the constants. Why are you assuming a cracker has a 1% chance of guessing a password a month?
The numbers are just examples; pick any numbers you like.
Suppose you have a probability per unit time p' of cracking a password. If the password change time is C, then the probability of cracking the password in time C is p'C. Suppose the cracker is attacking N accounts. (For the moment, assume N>>1, although you can change that assumption later-- N>>1 allows the statistics to be well defined). The number of accounts compromised in time C is thus Np'C. Now, if the password change time is multiplied by k (where k>1 and kp'C is 1 (note that if kp'C is not 1, then your system is cracked in either case.)
First, if the time taken to crack a password is two months, and you change your passwords every two months, then there's a 50% chance of cracking the password in the first attempt, and a 100% chance of cracking the password the second attempt. So your example doesn't work.
How did you arrive at this "100% chance of cracking the password the second attempt"? Does that extend to 150% chance in the third attempt by that logic?
If you change your password every two months, and it takes two months to crack a password, then, starting at the moment you change the password, the cracker has two months to crack the passworld. Since the assumption was it takes twomonths to crack the password, in two months the password will be cracked.
Which part of this do would you like explained again?
Sorry, but you are wrong. Odds of cracking succeeding does change (decrease) by password changing for all but the most idiotic cracking mechanisms.
Nope, sorry. The probability of changing a password to one in the window about to be probed is equal to the probability of changing a password out of the window about to be probed. Work it out in the case that the chance of cracking a password is very low (but the cracker is working on a large number of accounts), and calculate the average number of accounts cracked per month. Then ask yourself the question, if the average number of passwords cracked per month is independent of the frequency of password change, can frequent password change help a specific account security?
No.
There is a small modification of these statistics for the case where the probability of cracking is not small-- but the modification is small, and in that case you're at risk anyway.
The world is divided into two groups, the Willow devotees and those who cannot admit to themselves that they are Willow devotees.
I suppose Willow was ok for a pre-LoTR fantasy movie, but I hardly imagine there are really a lot of devotees. Interesting for featuring Val Kilmer, I guess. Actually, I can barely remember it.
OOps, should have read the article, and not just posted before reading. This is Avengers, the Marvel Comic series, not The Avengers, the 1961-1969 British TV series.
Any well implemented password strength checking algorithm will reject a change of password which is based on the old one with a few characters appended
If the password strength-checking algorithm has access to the old password, it's not well-implemented. Now the hacker doesn't have to crack the password-- just crack the password strength-checking algorithm.
Pretend it would take about two months of processing time for a computer or cluster of computers to crack your 16 character length password with symbols, uppercase, lowercase and numbers. Now imagine that if your password were to be changed every month that the two month duration attempt to crack the password is useless since the password has changed and another two month attempt would have to be initiated.
That is an incorrect argument made by somebody who knows nothing about statistics.
First, if the time taken to crack a password is two months, and you change your passwords every two months, then there's a 50% chance of cracking the password in the first attempt, and a 100% chance of cracking the password the second attempt. So your example doesn't work.
Now, suppose a cracker has a, say 1% chance of guessing a password per month of attempts, and is attacking, say, 10,000 accounts. On the average, the cracker will have a ten hits every month, but he will only break your account, on the average, once every 8 years. Still, that's a 12 percent chance of you getting compromised in a year, and a 6 percent chance you'll get hit in six months. So, can you reduce that 6 percent chance by changing your password every 2 months? NO. The chance that your change password moves into the window of passwords that the cracker is going to try next month is exactly equal to the chance that the password change moves the password out of the window the cracker is trying. The odds of the cracking succeeding does not change at all by password changing.
The number of passwords that the cracker guesses per month does not change.
And even enjoyable in a somewhat psychedelic sort of way but Hollywood never quite seems to get it.
You might try the film version of "A Scanner Darkly." Unaccountably, they actually did try to hold to the Phil Dick original, rather than jettisoning the written work to write a different work "based on" the novel.
Hmmm-- it wouldn't be hard to get pairs of special "2-D" glasses that let you watch 3-D films in 2-D... just make glasses with the polarization on both eyes the same.
Then you could calmly watch your 2-D movie with your friends who watch the 3-D movie.
"a remake of Total Recall is being developed by the ironically named Original Films Studio."
Wow, mixed feelings at the totally missed opportunity there.
First, Philip K. Dick never wrote a piece called "Total Recall." A few of the major themes from his short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" were grabbed and incorporated into a completely different plot to make the movie "Total Recall," but for the most part, "Total Recall" isn't Phil Dick, and "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" was not made into a movie.
So it seems like there is an opportunity here, to make a movie from the story Dick actually wrote.
Instead, though, for no detectable reason they seen to want to remake "Total Recall." I can't see the slightest reason to do this. It was already a fine film-- for what it was, which is an action-effects extravaganza that incorporated some themes from Dick's work into a Hollywood-plotted film-- and I doubt that that film can be remade better.
Basically, the idea that adding a tax on gasoline will increase government spending doesn't seem to be based on any kind of actual data. The government is already spending.
That's not what I said. I was pointing out the inherent dichotomy in raising taxes with the expectation of both increasing revenue and decreasing consumption.
If that's your only point, my response would be, sure. So what.
What tends to happen when taxes are raised to increase revenue consumption does go down, and when it does politicians are baffled why revenue did not increase.
To the contrary. This kind of tax happens all the time-- my county, for example, put a tax on cigarettes, and on liquor-- and if consumption does go down, they aren't "baffled" at all, instead they put out press releases crowing about how they are improving the health of everybody, horray for us, vote for me.
If you think politicians would be "baffled" by the fact that a tax with the intent of reducing consumptions actually reduces consumption, well, your opinion of politicians is even lower than mine.
Instead of looking for new ways to tax people into poverty the government needs to find ways to reduce spending.
Ah, the true heart of the matter. No, actually, regardless of implementing or not implementing new taxes, the government needs to find ways to reduce taxes.
Actually, a substantial portion of government spending is the interest on the debt incurred by previous government spending, so, in fact, increasing government revenue to pay off debt would reduce government spending.
Getting rid of all those agencies created under the guise of the "commerce clause" would be a great place to start.
Sure. And if you have a million dollars of credit card debt, ceasing to buy a piece of bubble gum every week will lower your spending, too.
The huge, enormous, gigantic piece of discretionary spending of the US is the military budget. For some strange reason, the budget hawks don't notice that one.
The other huge piece of the budget is "entitlements". The word makes some commentators think that it can be easily removed. The largest of the "entitlements" is social security, in which the people are "entitled" to their money because they paid it to social security in the first place, and they're entitled to get it back. Likewise Medicare.
So, you want to cut government spending? Cut defense spending and Social Security.
Oh, and pay off debt.
Everything else is peanuts.
Long list of complaints about government agencies snipped
The problem with raising the taxes on gasoline is that the government becomes addicted to the income.
Yes, that's a real worry.
The problem, however, is that for some decades now (with the exception of the Clinton administration*), the government has been doing deficit spending-- basically, saying "we need to spend money now, and we'll pay for it in the future." So the government is already addicted to spending money. Deficit spending is, in its essence, a tax on the future. Well, guess what, it's the future. So, instead of a petroleum tax, what's your suggestion for how to pay that tax that previous politicians already passed? Increase the income tax? Do you propose a value-added tax, maybe? Inheritance tax?
Basically, the idea that adding a tax on gasoline will increase government spending doesn't seem to be based on any kind of actual data. The government is already spending.
---
*Oddly, budget hawks have been curiously unable to notice deficit reduction when it's done by the Clinton administration.
The problem is that vastly overweight cars are dangerous to other cars on the road. To the extent that fuel economy makes all the cars on the road lighter, it doesn't hurt safety, and likely improves it.
Let's test your theory and put a couple of Indy and F1 cars on a track with some from NASCAR. See how that works.
Do not forget the Law of Unintended Consequences. When you raise taxes on gasoline, you also raise prices on food and every other good that needs to be transported, which includes just about everything.
I deal with unintended consequences every day. You think that Corporate Average Fuel Economy rules have no unintended consequences?
Of course increasing fuel costs would also increase the cost of things that are transported by fuel. Not by a whole lot, actually, since fuel cost turns out not to be the main cost of most goods in the US, but some. It will, however, increase the fuel portion of the operating costs of transport companies, and hence give them a very strong economic incentive to reduce fuel use. This could be by any of many techniques-- more efficient trucks, more efficient planning of routes, changing to alternate transportation methods (*I go for cargo zeppelins!), or even--strange as this may seem in a nation where the strawberries on my morning cereal come from Guatemala-- using food sources closer to the customer.
The US is flat-out large and even though we try to do large-scale transportation for goods (such as trains and river shipping where applicable), everything comes down to trucks in the end.
Everything comes down to diesel because diesel fuel is damn cheap (and the trucking industry has heavy invisible subsidies by the government.)
Yes, they're diesel. You think that not taxing diesel would work when there's a heavy tax on gasoline?
Gasoline use may have some short-term imelasticity, but the data (from previous price jumps) show that in the medium and long term demand is elastic..
In the longer long term, elasticity comes from resource substitution-- as is true with almost everything. When the price of whale oil went up (because of whale depletion), whale oil use decreased. Not because people decided not to use lights at night, but because they switched to kerosene and gas lights.
Fuel economy standards are actually a stupid way to reduce petroleum usage. A far more effective way to do this would be to put a hefty tax on gasoline, and then the market can decide what the optimum trade is for fuel efficiency. Unfortunately, tax is such an incredibly dirty word in politics that this is just flat out impossible; anybody trying to do such a thing would not merely be voted out of office, they'd very likely be lynched.
Ultra-Lightweight cars were attempted before. You crash, you die.
No, not at all. Indy cars, for example, are vastly lighter than any standard American cars, and they crash at extremely high speeds with very few fatalities, and often without even injuries to the driver. Lightweight cars can be made quite safe. If I were designing cars from a safety point of view alone, I'd go with styrofoam as the main structural element. You crash it-- well, go and spend the ten bucks and buy a new shell to replace the one you broke.
The problem is that vastly overweight cars are dangerous to other cars on the road. To the extent that fuel economy makes all the cars on the road lighter, it doesn't hurt safety, and likely improves it.
I suppose that this is intended as an April fool's joke, but I can't figure out what part is supposed to be funny.
The only part that seems funny is that, in general, the thousands of garage start-ups that remain garage start-ups usually don't get any press coverage, so it's funny that this one does. Yeah, there are lots of them.
So the conclusion is this: People can be induced to reduce their driving speeds when cars are parked along the roadways, when buildings are close to the street, and when those buildings include commercial rather than residential activity.
Wow. These people are idiots. Their plan is to make the roads less safe, so that it forces to make people drive slower, because driving slower makes the roads safer???
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The reason is, if you don't like what a private company is doing, you can decide not to do business with them. Hence, private companies evolve strategies to avoid annoying their customers.
If you don't like what the government is doing, well, I suppose the right-wingers have the slogan "love it or leave it." But most of us aren't willing to go that far.
From the article: "The Mars Climate Orbiter, and the Mars Polar Lander it contained, would have advanced our knowledge of the Red Planet immensely...."
Ouch. Mars Climate Orbiter did not "contain" Mars Polar Lander. They were two separate missions.
Saying it was a "simple" mistake is a little simple. The mistake could also be stated as the error of using heritage software in an embedded system, without examining it and testing its validity.
Strider wrote:
When the mission was funded, some congressman saw that it was an opportunity to give some pork to his district and put in some language essentially requiring JPL to hire Rockwell (as I recall, though it might have been Boeing) as the prime contractor.
Neither one; MCO was Lockheed-Martin.
Furthermore, it wasn't "some congressman giving pork to his district." The mission was competed using the standard competition; it may b hard to believe this, but NASA uses competitive bidding, a lot. Unfortunately, the bidding was done under the mandate of "faster better cheaper", and the two elements of that which could be numerically quantified on the bid were "fast" and "cheap." Mars Climate Orbiter was required to be flown at half the price of the previous (Mars Pathfinder) mission-- which was already the cheapest Mars mission flown since the 1960s.
A much better idea is time-dependent pricing, so that consumers can make the trade-off themselves between using power at peak times, or at off-peak times, and revise their decisions on a day by day basis. This would mean consumers could save by moving to technologies like air conditioners with thermal storage, so they can run the AC at night, when power is very nearly too cheap to meter, instead of during the afternoon peak.
However, for some reason utility regulatory boards don't like time dependent pricing.
Unfortunately, although it's better than studies that try to quantify exposure by asking people to self-estimate their cell phone use (these studies are completely lacking in value, unfortunately), it's still a bad study protocol.
The kind of people who take steps to reduce their microwave radiation exposure from cell phones are, unfortunately, very likely to be the same kinds of people who take steps to reduce their exposure to other possible risks, some of which actually do cause cancer. Not all of these confounding factors can be adjusted out.
Keep in mind the placebo study which showed that not only does the use of a placebo benefit health, but the people who take the placebo regularly and according to instructions benefit more than people who take the placebo less meticulously.
I don't think you can call this a statistics problem if you aren't defining any of the constants. Why are you assuming a cracker has a 1% chance of guessing a password a month?
The numbers are just examples; pick any numbers you like.
Suppose you have a probability per unit time p' of cracking a password. If the password change time is C, then the probability of cracking the password in time C is p'C. Suppose the cracker is attacking N accounts. (For the moment, assume N>>1, although you can change that assumption later-- N>>1 allows the statistics to be well defined). The number of accounts compromised in time C is thus Np'C. Now, if the password change time is multiplied by k (where k>1 and kp'C is 1 (note that if kp'C is not 1, then your system is cracked in either case.)
First, if the time taken to crack a password is two months, and you change your passwords every two months, then there's a 50% chance of cracking the password in the first attempt, and a 100% chance of cracking the password the second attempt. So your example doesn't work.
How did you arrive at this "100% chance of cracking the password the second attempt"? Does that extend to 150% chance in the third attempt by that logic?
If you change your password every two months, and it takes two months to crack a password, then, starting at the moment you change the password, the cracker has two months to crack the passworld. Since the assumption was it takes twomonths to crack the password, in two months the password will be cracked.
Which part of this do would you like explained again?
Sorry, but you are wrong. Odds of cracking succeeding does change (decrease) by password changing for all but the most idiotic cracking mechanisms.
Nope, sorry. The probability of changing a password to one in the window about to be probed is equal to the probability of changing a password out of the window about to be probed. Work it out in the case that the chance of cracking a password is very low (but the cracker is working on a large number of accounts), and calculate the average number of accounts cracked per month. Then ask yourself the question, if the average number of passwords cracked per month is independent of the frequency of password change, can frequent password change help a specific account security?
No.
There is a small modification of these statistics for the case where the probability of cracking is not small-- but the modification is small, and in that case you're at risk anyway.
The world is divided into two groups, the Willow devotees and those who cannot admit to themselves that they are Willow devotees.
I suppose Willow was ok for a pre-LoTR fantasy movie, but I hardly imagine there are really a lot of devotees. Interesting for featuring Val Kilmer, I guess. Actually, I can barely remember it.
OOps, should have read the article, and not just posted before reading. This is Avengers, the Marvel Comic series, not The Avengers, the 1961-1969 British TV series.
Never mind. Joss, you're pardoned.
I've long been an advocate of the death penalty for Hollywood directors and producers who remake movies or television shows from the 1960s and '70s.
I know it's tough, and may seem a little unfair sometimes, but it's really all for the good.
Sorry, Joss, it's been nice to have you, but no exceptions. We'll remember you for the good stuff you did.
Any well implemented password strength checking algorithm will reject a change of password which is based on the old one with a few characters appended
If the password strength-checking algorithm has access to the old password, it's not well-implemented. Now the hacker doesn't have to crack the password-- just crack the password strength-checking algorithm.
Pretend it would take about two months of processing time for a computer or cluster of computers to crack your 16 character length password with symbols, uppercase, lowercase and numbers. Now imagine that if your password were to be changed every month that the two month duration attempt to crack the password is useless since the password has changed and another two month attempt would have to be initiated.
That is an incorrect argument made by somebody who knows nothing about statistics.
First, if the time taken to crack a password is two months, and you change your passwords every two months, then there's a 50% chance of cracking the password in the first attempt, and a 100% chance of cracking the password the second attempt. So your example doesn't work.
Now, suppose a cracker has a, say 1% chance of guessing a password per month of attempts, and is attacking, say, 10,000 accounts. On the average, the cracker will have a ten hits every month, but he will only break your account, on the average, once every 8 years. Still, that's a 12 percent chance of you getting compromised in a year, and a 6 percent chance you'll get hit in six months. So, can you reduce that 6 percent chance by changing your password every 2 months? NO. The chance that your change password moves into the window of passwords that the cracker is going to try next month is exactly equal to the chance that the password change moves the password out of the window the cracker is trying. The odds of the cracking succeeding does not change at all by password changing.
The number of passwords that the cracker guesses per month does not change.
And even enjoyable in a somewhat psychedelic sort of way but Hollywood never quite seems to get it.
You might try the film version of "A Scanner Darkly." Unaccountably, they actually did try to hold to the Phil Dick original, rather than jettisoning the written work to write a different work "based on" the novel.
Hmmm-- it wouldn't be hard to get pairs of special "2-D" glasses that let you watch 3-D films in 2-D... just make glasses with the polarization on both eyes the same.
Then you could calmly watch your 2-D movie with your friends who watch the 3-D movie.
"a remake of Total Recall is being developed by the ironically named Original Films Studio."
Wow, mixed feelings at the totally missed opportunity there.
First, Philip K. Dick never wrote a piece called "Total Recall." A few of the major themes from his short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" were grabbed and incorporated into a completely different plot to make the movie "Total Recall," but for the most part, "Total Recall" isn't Phil Dick, and "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" was not made into a movie.
So it seems like there is an opportunity here, to make a movie from the story Dick actually wrote.
Instead, though, for no detectable reason they seen to want to remake "Total Recall." I can't see the slightest reason to do this. It was already a fine film-- for what it was, which is an action-effects extravaganza that incorporated some themes from Dick's work into a Hollywood-plotted film-- and I doubt that that film can be remade better.
Basically, the idea that adding a tax on gasoline will increase government spending doesn't seem to be based on any kind of actual data. The government is already spending.
That's not what I said. I was pointing out the inherent dichotomy in raising taxes with the expectation of both increasing revenue and decreasing consumption.
If that's your only point, my response would be, sure. So what.
What tends to happen when taxes are raised to increase revenue consumption does go down, and when it does politicians are baffled why revenue did not increase.
To the contrary. This kind of tax happens all the time-- my county, for example, put a tax on cigarettes, and on liquor-- and if consumption does go down, they aren't "baffled" at all, instead they put out press releases crowing about how they are improving the health of everybody, horray for us, vote for me.
If you think politicians would be "baffled" by the fact that a tax with the intent of reducing consumptions actually reduces consumption, well, your opinion of politicians is even lower than mine.
Instead of looking for new ways to tax people into poverty the government needs to find ways to reduce spending.
Ah, the true heart of the matter. No, actually, regardless of implementing or not implementing new taxes, the government needs to find ways to reduce taxes.
Actually, a substantial portion of government spending is the interest on the debt incurred by previous government spending, so, in fact, increasing government revenue to pay off debt would reduce government spending.
Getting rid of all those agencies created under the guise of the "commerce clause" would be a great place to start.
Sure. And if you have a million dollars of credit card debt, ceasing to buy a piece of bubble gum every week will lower your spending, too.
The huge, enormous, gigantic piece of discretionary spending of the US is the military budget. For some strange reason, the budget hawks don't notice that one.
The other huge piece of the budget is "entitlements". The word makes some commentators think that it can be easily removed. The largest of the "entitlements" is social security, in which the people are "entitled" to their money because they paid it to social security in the first place, and they're entitled to get it back. Likewise Medicare.
So, you want to cut government spending? Cut defense spending and Social Security.
Oh, and pay off debt.
Everything else is peanuts.
Long list of complaints about government agencies snipped
Irrelevant.
The problem with raising the taxes on gasoline is that the government becomes addicted to the income.
Yes, that's a real worry.
The problem, however, is that for some decades now (with the exception of the Clinton administration*), the government has been doing deficit spending-- basically, saying "we need to spend money now, and we'll pay for it in the future." So the government is already addicted to spending money. Deficit spending is, in its essence, a tax on the future. Well, guess what, it's the future. So, instead of a petroleum tax, what's your suggestion for how to pay that tax that previous politicians already passed? Increase the income tax? Do you propose a value-added tax, maybe? Inheritance tax?
Basically, the idea that adding a tax on gasoline will increase government spending doesn't seem to be based on any kind of actual data. The government is already spending.
---
*Oddly, budget hawks have been curiously unable to notice deficit reduction when it's done by the Clinton administration.
The problem is that vastly overweight cars are dangerous to other cars on the road. To the extent that fuel economy makes all the cars on the road lighter, it doesn't hurt safety, and likely improves it.
Let's test your theory and put a couple of Indy and F1 cars on a track with some from NASCAR. See how that works.
I'd watch that!
Do not forget the Law of Unintended Consequences. When you raise taxes on gasoline, you also raise prices on food and every other good that needs to be transported, which includes just about everything.
I deal with unintended consequences every day. You think that Corporate Average Fuel Economy rules have no unintended consequences?
Of course increasing fuel costs would also increase the cost of things that are transported by fuel. Not by a whole lot, actually, since fuel cost turns out not to be the main cost of most goods in the US, but some. It will, however, increase the fuel portion of the operating costs of transport companies, and hence give them a very strong economic incentive to reduce fuel use. This could be by any of many techniques-- more efficient trucks, more efficient planning of routes, changing to alternate transportation methods (*I go for cargo zeppelins!), or even--strange as this may seem in a nation where the strawberries on my morning cereal come from Guatemala-- using food sources closer to the customer.
The US is flat-out large and even though we try to do large-scale transportation for goods (such as trains and river shipping where applicable), everything comes down to trucks in the end.
Everything comes down to diesel because diesel fuel is damn cheap (and the trucking industry has heavy invisible subsidies by the government.)
Yes, they're diesel. You think that not taxing diesel would work when there's a heavy tax on gasoline?
Of course not, that would be silly.
Gasoline use may have some short-term imelasticity, but the data (from previous price jumps) show that in the medium and long term demand is elastic..
In the longer long term, elasticity comes from resource substitution-- as is true with almost everything. When the price of whale oil went up (because of whale depletion), whale oil use decreased. Not because people decided not to use lights at night, but because they switched to kerosene and gas lights.
Fuel economy standards are actually a stupid way to reduce petroleum usage. A far more effective way to do this would be to put a hefty tax on gasoline, and then the market can decide what the optimum trade is for fuel efficiency. Unfortunately, tax is such an incredibly dirty word in politics that this is just flat out impossible; anybody trying to do such a thing would not merely be voted out of office, they'd very likely be lynched.
Ultra-Lightweight cars were attempted before.
You crash, you die.
No, not at all. Indy cars, for example, are vastly lighter than any standard American cars, and they crash at extremely high speeds with very few fatalities, and often without even injuries to the driver. Lightweight cars can be made quite safe. If I were designing cars from a safety point of view alone, I'd go with styrofoam as the main structural element. You crash it-- well, go and spend the ten bucks and buy a new shell to replace the one you broke.
The problem is that vastly overweight cars are dangerous to other cars on the road. To the extent that fuel economy makes all the cars on the road lighter, it doesn't hurt safety, and likely improves it.
I suppose that this is intended as an April fool's joke, but I can't figure out what part is supposed to be funny.
The only part that seems funny is that, in general, the thousands of garage start-ups that remain garage start-ups usually don't get any press coverage, so it's funny that this one does. Yeah, there are lots of them.
Wow. These people are idiots. Their plan is to make the roads less safe, so that it forces to make people drive slower, because driving slower makes the roads safer???
Give it a parachute and external airbags then just crash it into Mars and be done with it...
"Crashes" would be right. MSL is too heavy for airbag landing, I'm afraid.
We had real problems with the airbag system for even the MER, and MSL is twice as large in all dimensions.
It's that cube-square thing-- "a horse splashes". (--Haldane)
"How Do Yo Land a Nuke-Powered Mini-Cooper On Mars?"
Clearly, it's a pun on the word "Yo-yo".
Since the plan is that it does down, but not back up again, it's just a "yo".