In this case, it is more of a question of whether the FBI considered it a criminal matter. The lessor was in possession of the car. The lessee filed a lawsuit against the lessor to get it back. It sounds more like a contract dispute: a civil matter.
Serious Q: What is the fundamental difference between a legal and illegal e-bike. This largely is differentiated by the location but I don't know what illegal e-bike means.
Maximum power output and maximum (assisted) speed are generally legislated. In the UK, an e-bike is up to 250 W and 25 kph. More than that, it would classify as a motorbike and you'd need a license (not particularly onerous). The bike itself is often built differently to accommodate the different power profile.
As a pedal cyclist, I feel that's a reasonably sensible limit as much faster than that you should be more experienced as a cyclist to control the bike and anticipate the conditions.
In addition to the other answer you got. E-bikes are pedal assist, so illegal ones usually have throttles in addition to more powerful motors. This depends on the region though.
In the United States, throttle-only ebikes that go up to 20 miles per hour (Class 2 ebikes) are legal pretty much everywhere. They're required to have functional pedals, but no pedal assist function is required.
Your class 3 definition is inaccurate. Class 3 is limited to 28mph and cannot have a throttle, only pedal assist.
Anything that doesn't fall in one of those classes is a motorcycle that is not street legal and can only be rudden of private property (unless you can convince your DMV to give you registration as a motor vehicle.)
This can vary somewhat from state to state, but most states have adopted or are moving to adopt these classes.
I and most people agree that's it's possibly too high, but it's ignorant to treat it like a scam.
The fact that it is so high is a scam.
It really depends on the grant. For the larger grants, it may work somewhat like you describe. For the smaller grants, they literally do just take 60% of the money (and complain that it is not enough to administer the grant while providing absolutely no support whatsoever). In theory, it's paying for salary and office space and whatnot, but those are already covered by other budgets.
Naively as an outsider, this situation seems like everything worked as intended?
I don't remember all of the rules off the top of my head, but if you are ever landing with less than 30 minutes of fuel, something has gone seriously wrong. You are required to take off with sufficient fuel to fly to your destination, hold for a period of time, attempt a landing, fly to your alternate, and land all with 30 minutes remaining. If you are ever in a situation where you may not meet these conditions, you are required to divert immediately. In choosing your alternate, you consider weather conditions along with many other factors. This was, without question, a serious emergency.
From the very brief description in the article, I would say they should have diverted to Manchester at least 25 minutes sooner than they did. I will include the GP's caution, however:
I'd be very wary to get ahead of the investigation and make speculative statements on how this could have happened, the one thing that I know for sure is that it shouldn't have happened, no matter what.
If you are ever in a situation where you estimate you will land with less than 30 minutes of fuel, you are legally obliged to declare a MAYDAY. One of the few situations where a mayday is legally required.
I don't think we know, yet. The system was only in place a day before the earthquake. The fact that it worked is a nice smoke test, but tells us nothing about false positives nor false negatives.
Computational simulations have been involved in aircraft design for decades. However, at some point you still have to verify the simulations with real world tests. I think (as a non-expert) the main reason no aerodynamically novel aircraft have been developed lately is because we have essentially optimised designs, already. To be clear, I am not saying that we can't do better. I am saying that the manufacturing (and other) cost of incremental improvements is large and the benefit is small. For commercial aircraft (as an example only), it is really hard to beat a tube with wings for the lowest cost of moving large numbers of people or volumes of cargo. Military aircraft with specialised roles are a bit more varied, and a lot more expensive to build and fly.
I think there's also a lot of "if we don't change too much, we have a pretty good chance to not face issues getting the aircraft certified", and "if we change the aircraft too much it'll cause issues where airports have to alter their infrastructure" (which is relevant for things like the blended wing research that's popped up recently).
There's a ton of legacy in overall airline/aircraft operations that discourages big changes.
It happens every now and again on here: someone comes up with like a 2% improvement in aerodynamics, and people are unimpressed. Meanwhile airlines are basically scrambling to get it rolled into their next-gen purchases because it's the biggest improvement in costs in a decade.
You cannot possibly know that without knowing the operational lifetime of a plane and it's expected return. An airline doesn't buy a plane planning to break even on the purchase cost, for example.
Setting aside that you pulled that number out of your ass to argue against it, if something produces 400X it's purchase cost over it's operational life time, a 2% improvement takes that to 408X it's purchase cost for only a 2X increase in initial outlay, meaning it pays for itself 4 fold.
But very few innovations have that sort of effect on manufacturing cost to start with.
The sibling comments are good answers. Another factor is the fact that written English goes back a long time. In some cases, pronunciation has drifted over time, but the spelling didn't change. The silent k's in words like knight and knife were not always silent, for example, but you have to go back to old English for them to be pronounced.
Of course, this is simply my speculation.