Lots of things can increase the tendency to knock.

Lean fuel-air mixture (which is common these days in efforts to improve emissions and mileage)
High load (due to towing, steep grade, heavy acceleration, high speed, etc)
High ambient air temperature
Too high heat range of spark plugs (which may happen when auto makers are trying to improve warm-up times for emissions purposes)
Too much boost in a forced induction system

I happen to live near a freeway (traffic commonly moving at 70+ MPH) that has a steep grade and summer temps over 100F (which means that air conditioning is adding to the engine load too). Knock can be a serious issue.

Not all newer vehicles benefit from higher octane gas, but it's more than the Car Talk guys would have you believe.

It's not like that? It's exactly like that. Your car has made you into an idiot.

High octane equals higher resistance to uncontrolled preignition (aka knock, or detonation). Higher resistance to preignition allows more advanced ignition timing. More advanced ignition equals higher cylinder pressures and longer burn duration. Higher cylinder pressure and longer burn duration allows more complete combustion and higher efficiency.

Modern vehicles with knock sensors can get greater efficiency from higher octane fuels due to their ability to keep ignition timing as advanced as possible without running into preignition.

Though it may not be obvious why to someone in a metropolitan area or Europe.

MPG is the more useful number when you need to figure out what the range of a vehicle is (and perhaps if you'll be able to reach the next station). In the western US it's not unheard of to find yourself 100 miles from any gas station.

This is about implementing the most technically elegant solution for printing from mobile devices, it's about keeping HP's printer business in the black.

Seeing as this is being pushed by the printer company who is worried over the fact that people are printing less, and not by the manufacturers of cell phones and web tablets that don't really have any reason to implement any kind of printing subsystem in their OS or applications; maybe that would explain the decision to use email?

Tell me these will use at least a whitelist to determine which emails get printed. I don't need a stack of full color Viagr@ spam in my printer tray.

The older I get, the more I realize that an efficient government is a nightmare. I'm not a fan of wastefulness, but impotence and gridlock is wonderful.

Obviously the Federal government still has a role to play; with things like national defense, diplomacy, regulating interstate commerce, and protecting the constitutional rights of citizens. That stuff is spelled out in the constitution.

The government of the United States was never supposed to be the top heavy behemoth it is today. At the time our nation was formed, the states of our federation were intended to be much more autonomous - for exactly the reasons outlined in the article.

Local issues and positions can't be handled fairly from a central authority. A country this big just can't be homogeneous enough for that to work.

Your comment seems to be based on a misunderstanding of what ideology means.

Ideology isn't fundamentally about what is, but what should be. That makes it a fundamentally subjective matter, and no living person can really refrain from having an ideology.

The problems you're pointing to are the result of dogmatic beliefs in how to make things be what a particular ideology says they should be.

The money collected from the meters may not amount to much, but the revenue from parking tickets for lapsed meters is spectacular.

That works great right up to the point where some girl with a thing for nerds decides to jump you.

Don't laugh, it could happen to you (it's not likely of course, but it is possible).

That sounds about right. I think I started in late '98.