So, leaving your porch lights on all night is where the "everon" in the title comes from?

The Prius blows away just about every other gasoline powered vehicle available today in the highest up-front cost performance factor in history: Emissions. Extremely low emissions is the best reason to get a Prius, especially if you live in an area with a high incidence of respiratory disease amongst children.

Toyota and others put electric motors in their SUV drivetrains for the acceleration performance enhancement (peak torque available at zero RPM) as much as the eco-branding. No, NASCAR is not going to be the primary race format to develop this technology, unless they start adding a lot more road courses that actually require the use of brakes.

USB was already becoming the de-facto power port for low power devices like mobile phones, especially in the form of AC adapters and battery packs with the ubiquitous USB Type A receptacle. The new EU standard enforces USB power negotiation (thus the "data phone" mandate), but I'd bet real money that Apple bundles a dock connector-to-microUSB adapter instead of polluting the iPhone enclosure with an extra port, and continues shipping a version of its Type A receptacle AC adapter updated to comply with the new EU mandate.

It's not just the width of the solid rocket boosters. A much more serious design trait of the SRBs driven by the low-bid contractor's dependency on railroad transportation is that they are segmented only in order to fit on railroad freight cars. If the job had gone to Thiokol's competitors, structurally simpler, stronger and lighter one-piece SRBs would have been built in Florida and the Challenger disaster would have been averted--no segmentation of SRBs, no o-rings, no leak, no exploding main fuel tank.

This has always tainted the Shuttle project in my eyes. The sooner we move away from that awful jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none design the better, and banning all future use of Imperial Units at NASA regardless of the $350M cost to the Constellation program would honor the sacrifice of those who died because of previous cheapskate decisions.