Not only was the battery submerged, but also electronics and wiring in the enclosed, normally dry parts of the car. That makes comprehensive inspection and repair of all possibly affected parts so expensive that flood damaged cars are more often scrapped than repaired, whether it was under fresh water or sea water.

LED bulbs can't get the cookie dough up to temperature.

IMO, "Click to Cancel" is the wrong paradigm. It should be "double-opt-in to renew" at least annually, with automatic cancellation and automatic permanent erasure of all personal data within a year of account cancellation. No more ten pages of fine print saying "if you visit this domain (even accidentally) you hereby agree to all these vague requirements and weasel-worded exceptions." No more automatically billing your card because you did something too late, or did nothing. No more hiding the cancel option in a forest of .jsp spyware any sensible browser will automatically block.

new, super-thin models have speakers that are behind the screen or point downward, bouncing sound away from you.

Besides poor speaker placement (a consequence of the large screen dictating the dimensions), the audio amplifiers and speakers in many flat screen sets have poor frequency response and distort at high sound levels. The thin set profiles don't leave enough room for a good speaker, especially not when part cost is a big consideration. It's worse when they don't provide any audio output connections for a sound bar (not even old style dirt-cheap RCA jacks, in one set I own).

Our REA co-op adjusted the rate structure several years ago, so that the per-KWhr charge is lower (closer to the wholesale rate), while the monthly base charge for maintenance, administration, etc. increased to make up the difference. That does decrease the benefit of net metering, and comes closer to everybody paying for the actual costs the co-op incurs to provide power to their home or business.

This increases the total monthly bill for members with lower energy usage, while decreasing the bill for high usage members. Owners of summer cabins occupied only a fraction of the year had a significant percentage increase (albeit on quite small bills); some calling it an "EV Subsidy" for those who use an extra 300 KWhr per month to recharge their Teslas. On the other hand, large users see it as correcting the long-standing practice where they paid for most of the facilities and services shared by the all users.

I doubt that the California PUC would be politically able to make such a change, when their electricity bills are already among the highest in the country. It is easier for the REA co-op to do it, because most members recognize that a financially sound co-op is a better deal than the corporate alternative.

Per the Ars Technica article:

" If the cell was discharged over two hours and charged in just six minutes, it still had a charge capacity per weight that was 25 percent higher than lithium-ion batteries and retained roughly 80 percent of that capacity after 500 cycles—well beyond what you'd see with most lithium chemistries."

The follow-up question is how much the capacity loss accelerates past the 80% point (and whether the failure rate does the same). 500 cycles is only about five years of twice-weekly charge cycles; for an EV application this would be about the time you make the last payment of the purchase contract.

"AM signals travel further than FM broadcasts do"

AM also provides some coverage in mountainous terrain. FM broadcasts are VHF signals, usable to only slightly beyond the visual line of sight. The ionosphere bends longer wavelength AM signals back to Earth, allowing reception even when the transmitter is far beyond the horizon or behind a mountain ridge. When you're driving through the western states (especially at night), big AM stations like KFI, KOA, KGO, and KSL are available. The FM band is white noise unless you are near a transmitter.

Jim Hall used it in the Chaparral 2J Can-Am car eight years before that. The SCCA banned it after one season.

For a more recent example, consider the Pi 400.

The article says that older models (200 and 200C) are not affected. Is that because they used a different altimeter (or didn't have one), or simply because US carriers no longer fly that model?

Raised floor fire extinguishers of that era used Halon 1301 (bromotrifluoromethane), a halogenated hydrocarbon rather than argon, an inert noble gas. Halon is very effective because it disrupts chemical reactions spreading the fire, not merely displacing oxygen and cooling the material, so it works at relatively low (5% to 7%) concentrations. It also does minimal harm to other equipment (the parts that aren't on fire). It is no longer made, being restricted as an ozone-depleting substance.

They might owe http://calteches.library.calte...>Wally Rippel [links to pdf] royalties. I recall his microbus was called the "Voltswagen".

As of today (May 31), Zoom states:

"Beginning May 30, 2020, all Zoom clients must be on 5.0+ in order to join any meeting, as GCM Encryption will be fully enabled for all Zoom meetings. This also applies to Zoom Rooms."

"Do I need to be a paid user to have GCM encryption? No, all accounts will use GCM encryption once enabled on May 30."

"Can I opt out of GCM? No, this is a required change for all accounts on the Zoom backend."

So if these statements are accurate every account, paid or unpaid, will have GCM. No exceptions, no way to opt-out.

Map publishers often include non-existent streets to identify unauthorized copies. The famed Thomas Bros. maps of Los Angeles showed "Greenleaf Drive" looping through an elementary school and cutting across the golf course on the other side of the street. Google Maps identifies my neighbors' long private driveway as a public road, and uses it as a way point in their directions (good luck looking for that street sign!) I wonder how many of the "navigational errors" reported in this article were the result of such cartographic watermarks,

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).