Well, the exhaust in reality is much more clean then presented in some media. It's not a perfect way of showing that, but I get their point. We need to keep our risk awareness calibarated to the issue at hand and with relation to other risks in our life.
You are applying "psychopath" label in a very liberal way. They cheated. They tried to hide it. It's a fact. It still doesn't make them psychopaths.
They missed a single emission standard, for a quite short time. It's a crime, but every punishment should be proportional to the negative result. In this case, fine seems sufficient, as money from it could be used to put more filters on e.g. coal plants.
I think we have much bigger issues with coal plants, iron extraction from the ore, making concrete, commercial trucks with worse emission equipment requirements, or even airplanes still using leaded gasoline, etc.
Made a fresh reinstall of Kubuntu 18.04 (previously I had Kubuntu 16.04 on my primary desktop).
Everyting works, drivers were detected (including nvidia). Multiscreen setup works, no DPI problems, fonts are clear, performance is better. Default plasma setting are way better than 16.04.
Experience is very smooth.
Disclaimer: I'm not using sleep/hibernate, so no comment there.
BTW: it seems that most of binaries are being build as PIE, which also becomes the default mode for gcc (-pie/-no-pie).
"Had a conventional gasoline car encountered the same object on the highway, the result could have been far worse."
Diesel-powered car would be much safer, since oil requires something like a wick in it to burn. It's hard to argue with Tesla's statement, since argument is true; but it doesn't include this issue in electric vs ICE vehicle competition.
dual mass flywheel: irrelevant for the US market (think older torque converter automatic; new ones have dual mass flywheel for gasoline engines too).
diesel injectors: direct gasoline injectors are very similar.
turbo: common in modern gasoline engines due to downsizing and direct injection.
particulate filter: while I respect the following statement: "The cheapest, fastest and most reliable components are those that aren’t there."
(Gordon Bell), thermal efficiency of a diesel cycle may make it worth.
ECU faults: those actually help with solving problems before they are serious. Please go to qualified workshops! Computers are no longer a dark magic.
I have a habit of listening to a single song over and over again. I am able to do so for about 3 hours. Using such randomizer technology, this time will be dramatically prolonged...