I am in the USA. Here the freight trains are Diesel-electric, and often over a mile (1.6KM) long.

I've read that railway transport is the cheapest and most efficient,
mostly due to low rolling resistance and aerodynamic drag (low frontal
area of first engine unit compared to the overall mass of the train).

It's worth taking the time to watch the video.
The individual cowering in the corner of the room
with fingers in ears gives you a good idea of how
loud it is.

I nicknamed my '70 Porsche 911S the blue flame,
since, if you revved it in neutral and stood outside
at night, you could see a blue flame coming out of
the (stock) exhaust pipe.

A chip like http://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/Devices.aspx?dDocName=en545659
this PIC32MX695F512L is $9.58 in single unit quantities and is orders of magnitude more versatile
than the 3 Atmel AVRs in the proposed device. It has a full 32-bit processor (MIPS),
512K of Flash, and 128K of RAM, plus ethernet, USB, serial I/O, etc. Couple it with
a small FPGA and you can build quite a system that sells for less than $50.00 and still
make a little profit.

If you or someone can get me the database files (from Kalmbach?) I am willing
to try to extract useful data from them, into simple ASCII text file(s), suitable
for loading into a relational database like Postgresql, for free.

Care to share your homebrew "ALFS" scripts, etc. ? I'd love to avoid
reinventing the wheel, especially if what you've done is fairly straightforward
and clean.

Nicotine is far from harmless. Best to keep people away from it if at all possible.
Not by force of law necessarily, but by education and social support.

I took a look at the aggregated US Government idea site, but didn't see the
USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office).

The USPTO needs a lot of help as far as I'm concerned; too bad they aren't
accepting ideas. They do have a "feedback channel" http://www.uspto.gov/blog/feedback
but it seems pretty limited.

As the years pass, one thing becomes more and more obvious:

It's all about the data, and keeping it intact.
For me (running Ubuntu/Debian on around 20 machines)
the most frustrating thing right now is the lack of Sun's
(now Oracle's) ZFS or equivalent filesystem. Do you have
plans to address this by obtaining the right to incorporate
ZFS into Ubuntu at the kernel level, or to fund the development
of an alternative like BTRFS?

If your computer is turned off, lightning isn't blowing through the ground line of your UPS like a knife through butter and turning your motherboard into a campfire.

No. The easy, safe, way to protect against lightning strikes is to turn off and unplug the computer so there is no conductive path into it.

And this was very interesting reading:
http://www.tvhistory.tv/1938-Scophony-UK.htm

Prove it.

Knowing what I know, and when I knowed it,
I'd say AMD has 4 cores on that die and one
just blowed it.

Most of the captions are chock full of
factual, grammatical, and spelling errors.
Sad, because this sort of codswallop is
propagated to the unknowing public and
difficult to correct once "out of the bag".