I'm stuck with a cloth interior. I bring a beach towel to drape on the seat after my rides. Mud falls onto the towel which makes it easy to clean out of the vehicle.
It depends on the use case. If your server is able to handle 45k connections but 42k of them are stalled because of mobile users with too much packet loss, QUIC could look pretty attractive. QUIC is a solution to some of the problematic aspects of TCP that couldn't be fixed without breaking things.
The primary advantage of QUIC for things like congestion control is that companies like Google are free to innovate both sides of the protocol stack (server in prod, client in chrome) simultaneously. I believe that QUIC uses BBR for congestion control, and the major advantage that QUIC has is being able to get a bit more useful info from the client with respect to packet loss.
This could be achieved by encapsulating TCP in UDP and running a custom TCP stack in userspace on the client. That would allow protocol innovation without throwing away 3 decades of optimizations in TCP that make it 4x as efficient on the server side.
Is that true? Aren’t lots of the tcp optimisations about offloading work to the hardware, eg segmentation or tls offload? The hardware would need to know about your tcp-in-udp protocol to be able to handle that efficiently.
Most hardware is fairly generic for tunneled protocols, and tx descriptors can take things like "inner l4 header offset/len" and "outer l4 header offset/len"
Generic support for tunneled TCP is far more doable than support for a new and volatile protocol.
QUIC would work okay, but not really have many advantages for machine-to-machine traffic. Machine-to-machine you tend to have long-lived connections over a pretty good network. In this situation TCP already works well and is currently handled better in the kernel. Eventually QUIC will probably be just as good for TCP in this use case, but we're not there yet.
But that is the huge advantage of QUIC. It does NOT totally outcompete TCP traffic on links (we already have bittorrent over udp for that purpose). They redesigned the protocol 5 times or so to achieve that.
I've wanted a receipt printer for years just for giggles, after doing some custom integrations with them in medical labs. It turns out F**book marketplace in my area has some for movie night prices, just in case someone else is thinking along the same lines..
One other thing you can do - live in a newly developed area. Areas that had car traffic when lead was still used in fuel can have significant amounts of lead in the soil. If you live in an older area and suspect lead poisoning, test your garden soil and test the playground dust.
I had to look this up, and I found the answer interesting because I used to develop software to accurately report magnetic declination at any point in time, for directional drilling oil wells in Canada. https://www.geomag.nrcan.gc.ca/mag_fld/magdec-en.php has some great information on why. For example, Yellowknife can experience declination changes over one degree every three years.
I haven't used a compass since I was a kid and at that time declination where I live was 21 degrees. Now it's down to 13 degrees. I had no idea it changed that much.
I'm not a lawyer, but worked in the US for 6 years as a Canadian TN. The green card eligibility is the big differentiator between TN and H1B. Other than that, there isn't much difference that I could tell. One difference between Mexican and Canadian TNs is that Mexican TNs can switch employers without renewing TN, whereas with a Canadian TN you have to reenter the country when you switch employers.
When I was switching jobs I encountered a handful of companies that would consider H1B holders but would not consider TNs because they simply had no experience hiring TNs. I didn't fit their hiring pipeline.
I had some banks give me a rough time when seeking financing for buying a house, who were not familiar with TNs. Wells Fargo were willing to work with me.
Another issue I experienced (I think, my memory is fuzzy on this one) is because various members of my family had passports that expired on different dates (kids get a 3 year passport only), the TN and TD (dependent) were only granted up until the expiry of the passport, so less than 3 years that a TN could be granted for. To avoid costly plane flights I used to drive down to the Mexican border where the border folks were nice enough to renew my TN/TDs.
The US/Mexico border folks don't get many Canadians entering there so they aren't really set up for it. One time they erroneously gave me a Mexican TN authorization which I didn't learn about until I went back there to renew after switching jobs and the border person basically told me to get lost because I had a valid visa. I had to do some quick talking because even though I had a stamp, the visa was invalid because it is up to me to ensure I have valid work authorization.
The website for Canadians entering the US for TN purposes is clearly geared to Canadians entering from the Canadian side of the US, but doesn't explicitly say Canadians shouldn't enter from the Mexican side. It worked out in the end but no guarantees.
My advice: if the company is offering to switch you over to H1B, take them up on it. My employer originally said they would apply to switch me over to an H1B, but when it came time to actually do it, they no longer had budget to do it. This eventually became important because in Texas it affects the ability of your kids to apply for (state?) student loans (I'm fuzzy on this one). I ended up moving back to Canada to be with my kids while they go through university.
My guess is no, it won't. This is US taxpayer money being used to increase the manufacturing capacity available to the market so that the US has domestic manufacturing when stuff goes sideways. A similar thing regularly occurs with auto manufacturing and manufacturing in country A usually frees up capacity for other countries, resulting in slightly lower prices.
What could happen is that once the US has manufacturing capacity it decides to tariff imported chips, causing your country to retroactively do the same. This is decades away, and the US has a problem sourcing chips it can trust right now, so it's not currently on the radar. It's not something I'm going to worry about.
Viewed through a pessimistic eye, the US finally is realizing that its arms production critically relies on chip production and it can't says its chips are US made when selling arms on the market. A change in mindset like this typically takes a generation and so even though this change in weapons really happened around the turn of the century, the people in power have mostly retired and the new generation now understands this reality.
It is unlikely that a natural gas conversion could be done for this price. The tanks to hold natural gas are quite expensive and I doubt we will find a significantly better way to build a high pressure tank than we already know about.
Then you have the issue about a filling station.
Then considering taxes on fuel are nearing 50% of fuel cost, you're right around where this conversion gets you. (I don't know if NG at the pump would be taxed)
Electric solutions work around the issue of fuel cost and filling locations nicely. Electricity is cheap and basically available in every garage. If you have a garage. Having a hybrid electric works around the issues of limited range and cold weather.
I'm just thinking people would fill up at home. If nothing else use it for commuting. Most Americans already have a natural gas line coming into their house.
So charging stations wouldn't be necessary and taxes wouldn't be an issue either.
The design decreases the efficiency of the car in total, through increase in weight, increase in mass and probably a few other things we haven't thought of. It makes up for it by allowing you to replace gasoline with electricity, which is much cheaper.
Less efficient, much cheaper, and hopefully less environmentally harmful.
I like what this solution offers - a chance for someone like me who will probably never buy a new car to easily modify an older car to run at least partially off electricity.
