"10. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off."
"This actually is the case now..."

"6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation" warning light."

This is also the case now on some cars.

The Cold War was also enormously profitable for CA.
Steve Blank's "The Secret History of Silicon Valley" lecture is very informative and interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It also explains why some other efforts to replicate the Silicon Valley somewhere else have not succeeded on the same scale.

Many fiction books are as full of interesting ideas to explores. I enjoy a mix of both fiction and non-fiction.

By the time the get around to vaccinating you, they will have plenty of test data from the few million who chose to go first (and who met whatever the priority criteria is). Waiting for animal trials will cause more loss of life than proceeding quickly with the associated risks.

>"as if their citizens were part of a huge clinical trial?"

Yes, that is the idea. They will test on the first groups and expand the trial and the widespread vaccinations if the results are good.
The production and distribution issues will limit how fast it can be ramped up. There will be plenty of volunteers as well as those who prefer to wait first.

Who else are they going to try it on besides real people that are citizen's of some country?
Testing on monkeys doesn't prove much.

Not everything on the rocket needs to have a different connector. Reusing common and proven components is actually a good idea. However, when there are two identical actuators being plugged into with identical looking cables, probably coming out of a tightly anchored cable harness that can't be easily traced back, having some sort of keying to avoid a mix up is a good idea.

"This was clearly a production and quality issue, a series of human errors, and not a design one."

The actuator cables should have been fitted with slightly different connectors so they could not have been plugged into the wrong place. The designers could have anticipated this potential error. If the actuators are electrically the same, testing can't detect this assembly fault.

Google Contacts is pretty good, but it is brain dead when it comes to populating a new contact from an email.
I can see the person's name right in the email From: field, but contacts often omits bringing in anything but the actual email address. I still have to type in the name.
I usually just paste the person's contact info from the email signature footer into the notes section rather than fill in fields. They could have made it much easier to enter that info into all the address and company info fields. They don't even attempt to auto-populate anything.
Google: How about some drag and drop functionality?
It's like they don't even use their own product.

Tip: I put the person's company name in the name Suffix field in square brackets so it shows up in the displayed name. This helps a lot to find the right person when you have 20 John's in your contact list. (Click on Show More to see that field.)

Google Calendar is brain dead too. It doesn't even attempt to import a ICS event invite attachment received in an email.

And the entire super computer will stop working if any of the printer cartridges go empty (even just the color ones).

"I haven't tested it yet, but it should be perfectly safe.
Just a bit of harmless brain alteration, that's all."
                                            Wallace - The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

I wonder how much experimentation went into finding the right patterns.

Manufacturers did intentionally limit the life of light bulbs to drive sales. They design bulbs to fail after an agreed-upon 1,000 hours.
The Phoebus cartel existed to limit the useful life of bulbs and actually tested them to ensure they did not last too long. This was in the the early 20th century though (1925 onwards).

A good article is "The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy" in IEEE Spectrum.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech...

Great software. Good prices.

Affinity Photo (like Photoshop) - https://affinity.serif.com/en-...
Affinity Designer (like Illustrator) - https://affinity.serif.com/en-...
Affinity Publisher (like InDesign) - https://affinity.serif.com/en-...

Available for for Mac and Windows, and some for IPad. Free trials available.

There are also open-source alternatives (GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus).

And how did our banking system end up so loosey-goosey such that it's hard to trace & punish scammers and recover the money?

Google should also control Youtube ads to prevent scams and predatory medicinal "cure" snake oil ads. I've been surprise at the garbage ads they allow.

Many neighborhoods are power limited by the transformer capacities. Not every house can have an EV and charge at the same time. Power companies are installing or subsidizing smart chargers that prevent too many cars from charging at the same time and leveling the load throughout the night. Apartment dweller have same problem with an even higher possible car density.