dunmalg

>Gass also has a PhD in physics and was the person who designed and engineered the product.

So what? That doesn't make him NOT an attorney. There's nothing that says a PhD and product inventor can't ALSO be a engaged in a scheme to have their own patent encumbered invention mandated by law.

Airbus is a threat, but they have a huge obstacle Boeing doesn't: they don't build planes in the US except for the A319-320-321. Any defense contract won with an Airbus airframe as its basis (e.g. NG's KC-X submission based on the Airbus A330 MRTT) also includes the expense and possible difficulty building a factory in the US to manufacture them. Boeing may have a bad reputation for screwing up manufacturing, but that's a known quantity vs. the giant question mark that is the quality of a theoretical Airbus factory--- run by a US defense contractor rather than Airbus--- that hasn't been built.

That far north is definitely outside the central valley. Once you travel north out of Redding, you're climbing up into the mountains, and it's 60 miles of that before you get to Shasta. Lassen is better candidate, since it actually erupted recently (1921) and is only ~40 miles east of Redding... but it's also part of the Cascade range like Shasta, which sn't really IN the valley.

SpaceX will never have an IPO because being publicly traded means ceding a certain degree of control. The founders' goal is to make life multiplanetary, and the typical goal of rando shareholders is to pump up the stock price. They don't want to have to deal with the latter. They may at some point spin off Starlink and IPO that, but not until it's fully deployed and not heavily dependent on frequent, super cheap, low bureaucratic friction launch services from SpaceX.

Firearm and ammunition manufacturers are already not culpable for people getting shot. Your argument would be better made comparing Comma 3X hardware + OpenPilot software to something that unintentionally causes injury despite being used as intended.

Then again, if you used that line of reasoning you'd have to show a comparable example of OpenPilot unintentionally causing injury, rather than just waving your hands and saying "it COULD happen, because unregulated!"

Like any public utility, there's a huge cost to get the infrastructure in place because there is... well... a CITY in the way. The immense capital outlay is generally worth it for the first to enter the market in a given area, because they stand to collect 100% of the demand for the service they offer. In contrast, a second competing entity incurs the same capital outlay, but can only count on as much of it's competitors business as it can wrest away. Unless their offering is of substantially better value, the most they can realistically hope for is 50%. In cases like local rail service, the initial outlay is so immense that there's little chance that anyone could make a compelling business case for it.

Problem is, both sides of the ideological spectrum have spent 100+ years studiously ignoring the actual basis for rights in the US--- Natural Rights theory--- in favor of more "malleable" approaches that can be twisted to their desired ends. Both the crazy strict textualists, who think that the constitution as-written is the end-all be-all of human rights, and at the opposite end of the spectrum, the crazy extreme "living document" theorists with their "anything goes" approach; neither of them want to acknowledge that there's an underlying philosophical framework that potentially flips the table on their shenanigans.

$10/gal gasoline is not the answer, because it's a regressive tax that just prices the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder out of the transportation they need to get to work. It also adversely affects businesses that can't use public transit, like technical service people with tools and materials, and delivery drivers. The actual answer is to build a comprehensive mass transit system that makes driving unnecessary for most people. Trying to force people to use an inadequate public transit system by making the alternative unaffordable is just a shitty thing to do to people.

Comparatively cheap because you're just handing off magnet links, but when you're serving millions of unique visitors daily, it all adds up.

lol, step 1 destroys the entire stock market!

The other problem with increased complexity is that the more intricate your mechanism is, the more prone to failure due to wear or contamination it becomes. A security measure is only as good as it can remain usable. As a locksmith for working in the industry for 25 years, I've seen a lot of high security designs come and go, and the stuff that sticks is the stuff that's simple and reliable. The fundamental fact of locks and security is that people just don't pick locks much. The vast overwhelming majority of unauthorized accesses are via an acquired key or via bypass attacks on other aspects of the locking hardware than the keyed cylinder.

To put it bluntly, all these fancy pick-proof designs people are coming up with have zero real world utility and are just toys for locksport enthusiasts to play with.

EDIT: and really, I'd say all the patent discussion is moot. A patent is only useful if there's a market for your product. This product has design shortcomings that render it a non-starter for most applications, i.e. no master keying capacity, which makes it useless in any institutional setting, and a design necessity of using critical precision parts that won't handle outdoor exposure well, and a physical size that makes it incompatible with even the largest north american cylinder format. This is a product without a profitable customer base.

Yeah, it's a bit of a tautology. It amounts to "complex problem solving tools tend to converge with existing tools for addressing similar complex problems as their level of complexity approaches parity".