Indeed.

practice pushing the gas pedal just enough to hold the engine at 3000 RPM or so. Not making crazy racing noises, just a nice steady “the engine is running normal-fast-ish”

Depending on the type of car, this might usually be somewhere between 1500 and 2000 RPM (even lower for a diesel), 3000 RPM are more typical for a sports car.

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Let’s hope so, yet I don’t think this will happen.

The current oversight processes are absolutely useless against these billion-dollar companies. Even the fines against Meta and Apple under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in April 2025 were surprisingly low. Remember, fines can be up to 10% of the company’s total worldwide annual revenue. While fines of €200 million or €500 million, respectively, sound a lot, it could have been in the billions.

They already do, but it takes ages.

The issue is that small companies — like ours — have pretty much no recourse. Legal actions are too expensive, and a complaint to the EU takes too long. Together with about 40 other businesses and organizations, we filed a complaint about similar anti-competitive behavior in 2021. We are now four years in, and nothing has happened. What do you think happens to a company that releases no updates to its app in four years?

I think it’s treated a bit like WD40 with its “magical” properties, they are both water displacing compounds that help clean away dirt.

Yet, AfaIk, the generic WD40 is not a lubricant and should not be used for bike chains.

In my eyes it seems legit. As far as I understand, the quintessence is that you should not use degreaser when cleaning the drive train, as it removes fat from places where it should not be removed, e.g. in bearings and the joints of the chain, as it is impossible or hard to put new grease (not oil) back there.

In German they are named Uhu which is essentially the same.

They’re called eagle owls for reason.

Don’t forget the generator/engine.
I didn’t claim it was cost or ressource efficient in any way.

That was not my point.

Edit: EAR is preemptively put into the licences of companies doing business in the US, although unrestrictedly publicly available FOSS isn’t “published” in the legal sense and thus isn’t subjected to EAR.

According to Wikipedia, as of 2018/19, SUSE is owned by the Swedish inverstment company EQT AB and, as I understand, since 2010/11, when Novell was bought by Attachmate group, no longer part of Novell.

I also think their numbers are too optimistic. You probably could store about 2 GWh energy if you equip all of the supposedly 100,000 mine shafts in Australia with their storages. Yet, this would not only mean 100,000 facilities to be constructed, but also mean 100,000 facilities to be checked and maintained regularly.

If I understand them correctly, they intend to use heavy materials from scrap for the weights, e.g. some steel container filled with concrete rubble. Thus, the price of them will be relatively low.

I was talking about the length of the wire. You are talking about the length of the spring.

By reducing the free length the “dead coils” slightly increase stiffness. They have an impact on the total force at compression.

Yes, the part of the wire coiled up in the dead coils does not contribute to the stiffness of the spring. The stiffness if the spring is determined only by the two sections in between. This is the length L in your equation and not the total length of the spring.

I think in this image were looking at what, maybe 10% difference in any of those factors? For the life of me i can’t imagine this matters terribly much in a pen.

You’re probably right.

I am curious about the full impact of the dead coils (I like that term). I was treating then simply as a rigid connections, effectively splitting the spring into series, reducing the effective stiffness. Can you elaborate on how they would work to increase the stiffness?

Yes, if you think of the depicted spring with dead coils in the centre, as two springs of half length combined, they decrease the stiffness of the combined springs, as two springs in row have only half the stiffness.

My thought was starting from the opposite: A spring with the same number of coils, but equally spaced. At its ends, the axial force onto the spring is converted into internal torque. By Hooke’s law, torque and shear strain (here change of twist angle with the coordinate running along the wire) are linked. This twist causes the coiled spring to contract.
However, in the spring with the “dead” coils, this motion is limited to the free coils, as the twist of the “dead” coils is inhibited by their contact. They behave like they were rigid. Thus, there only the wire of the free coils contributes to the (compressive) stiffness of the spring, which is less than the total amount of wire, yielding into a stiffer spring.

The problem is that many of the Christians in the US aren’t Catholic. Thus, it probably won’t help if the pope excommunicated them.

Upon further reflection, spring stiffness does not care about length.

It does. If you have two springs with the same diameter made from the same wire, but one spring has the double amount of coils, i.e. the double length, the longer spring will have half the stiffness (or the double compliance) of the shorter spring.

This design would reduce the effective spring stiffness by half (and therefore the force)

In fact it’s the opposite. The “dead” coils at the end and in the centre increase the overall (compressive) striffness of the spring.

The most obvious other way to reduce stiffness would be reducing wire thickness, which could reduce reliability.

Slightly increasing (or decreasing) spring stiffness by changing the wire diameter is much harder to do, as the diameter of the wire enters the stiffness factor by the power of four orders of magnitude, i.e. increasing the diameter from 0.4 mm to 0.5 mm increases the stiffness by factor 2.44. Thus, it’s much simpler to introduce ‘dead’ or fewer coils in the spring to increase its stiffness when the outer geometric design properties (spring diameter and length) are given by the design of the pen.

Rome being built only on its seven hills is a common misconception. Moreover it has also always been in the space in between and towards the river Tiber.

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I think, a “biking prohibited” sign would have a wider black border. Yet, the border of the “bike lane” sign in the picture is a bit too wide, in my opinion, to avoid confusing it with a “biking prohibited” sign.