The FAA would have to get money to install new equipment. And getting businesses to pay for upgrades. Plus making changes to planes is kind of risky. How "transponders" work is by listening for the radar signal, and sending out a radio message right after you're hit with a radar ping, which gives you a user-entered ID, and likely you altitude. Most airline aircraft have 2 GPS's in them, and 2 computers that can read from either GPS, and 2 GPS systems that could do the navigation. They also have 2-3 IRU, which are fancy gyro-sensors that basically work like the motion detection in phone or a wii controller. They put together various bits of data, and basically keep a tally of where it thinks you are by keeping track of your exact acceleration and your exact heading. It probably only has one transponder on it, because it's not actually hugely critical. The plane knows where it is, just ATC doesn't know where the plane is. If a plane has a Transponder failure, and radar isn't available, ATC makes them fly a known route, and says "Tell me when you pass XXX", and it can use timing to track your estimate your location. And the reason it takes decades? Cost. No one wants to drop hundreds of thousands doing upgrades if they can avoid it.

It's a bit higher requirements that weren't included in the transponder requirements. The "new" part is anywhere below a class B or C. That's a pretty large area that wasn't in the list already. You didn't need a transponder if you were outside the mode C veil, but under a Bravo shelf. Now you do. Also now E below 10k feet MSL. But realistically, most aircraft that can fly over 10k MSL probably have a transponder already. Basically airports that are less then 5miles, but less then 10miles outside of a medium sized city, didn't used to require transponders, but now do. So there's a ring of people that are in a bit of trouble because of this.

You forgot the 2 or 3 levels above that problem. Why was the clock issue not detected? How did the pre-launch testing not simulate the "real thing". What tests need to be re-run to check for similar problems? Since this one was mission time vs actual time, a review of everything that checks the time should be done, what if this wasn't the only copy of this bug? Then, why wasn't the fact the test didn't simulate the "real thing" detected? What in their development process let them build a testing system that didn't simulate the "real thing" closely enough to detect this? What other tests might not be like the "real thing"? If what caused the above issue was some kind of management decision, what other decisions did they make that could be a problem. If it was a risk management odds failure, then you need to go through and recalculate the odds in that area...

Since the article said the odds of hitting the bug were roughly 1:256, my guess is a programmer casted the return value from memcmp to a char instead of an int.

But you can figure out form the GPS Cords where the person lives. I know my truck spends about 1/3 of it's time at my house, 1/4 of it's time right outside where I work. Google (or several other services) can do the coords to address lookup. I'd say that's pretty personally identifible.

I worked for a company that handled all this mess because they had a tax nexus in all states. There's companies that deal with this whole mess for you, and they keep all of their data up to date with the different tax laws. All you have to do is classify each product in one of about 100,000 categoires and you're set. It was easy for us because everything fell into like 3 categories, but I'd hate to be Amazon having to go through and classify their whole inventory. Tax law is horribly complex... in some states you pay the selling point's tax rate, some states you pay the recipient's tax rate. And then you fall into crazy tax holidays. In Texas we have a pre-school tax holiday. All school supplies are tax free, along with clothing, and sporting goods (in case your kids are taking baseball for example) except for luxury items like golf equipment. It starts getting crazy when you start asking "Do golf shoes count as clothing, sporting goods, or golf equipment?" The category system helped you get it all figured out. The last update I remember seeing had an categories for water heaters, based on their power effency and size. My guess is some state gives you a tax break on high efficency water heaters. Other then huge volume sellers like Amazon that sell a crazy amount of different items, I really don't see the burden of doing it as being very hard. All you have to do is during checkout, hit a database (provided by the tax company) for their correct city/state/zip/in-city info. Match it against quantity, orderitem amount, category, etc, and you're done. I didn't name any companies here because I'm not promoting any of them, I'm just saying the burden isn't really that high. You just pay the tax company to figure out the taxes for you, and for us it was a minimal cost, once a month we just updated our raw data and we're done.

200A services are actually common where there is electric central heat and electric water heating. It has nothing to do with "New big AC units" They are actually much more efficent then 20 year old ones. I replaced my Mid-80's Outdoor unit with a modern high-efficency unit, and the breaker went from a 50A to a 20A. That's a much lower expected power useage.

And a new service is more like $1500 to have one of the big-chain companies do it, last time I checked.

100A wire is smaller then my pinky, but it costs a few dollars per foot (and you want a 220 plug?, that means you need a black, red and white wire at that size, plus a smaller ground wire)

I googled for what the Chevy Volt takes for a recharger (It's just what jumped to mind, I've seen too many ads for it) A statement on in this page http://gm-volt.com/forum/showthread.php?6307-HOW-TO-ORDER-YOUR-HOME-CHARGING-STATION says it's a 16 Amp, 220V plug. A normal "dryer" plug is a 50Amp, 220v plug. So if you had the ablity to use something as large as a dryer plug, It'd let your car recharge about 3x as fast. But to do that, you also need a larger electrical service in some cases. Some older houses don't have a very large service, and so you'd end up causing problems (either your main breaker tripping, or worse a fire) if you tried running your dryer, your household heater (or A/C) and charging your car at the same time.

What I acutally ended up doing was borrowing a co-worker's cube and messing with a bunch. Once you solve it a few dozen times, the action gets a lot smoother and it's faster to handle. I know the solutions I was doing were a lot more then 30 moves, but they were very simple to memorize, so I was able to do them quickly. I think I memorized a total of about 8 patterns, this is the site I used. http://peter.stillhq.com/jasmine/rubikscubesolution.html There are a few cases where I have to do the same pattern multiple times, but they are simple, so I learned to do them quickly without much delay.

The best solution for a rubix cube is always less then 20 moves (see http://www.cube20.org/ ) It averages around 18 moves for the best solution. That's 27 seconds to solve on average. Where this 11 second youtube video shows a guy solving a cube.. in less then 11 seconds. I can do it in about 60 seconds and I'm not very good. Also, before using computerized solutions, you have to know your whole solution. The manual solutions you can figure out as you go along... you can figure out your next steps while you're manipulating your current step.