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I was saving for years to be able to buy an RX-9 if/when it hit the market

Last rumor I heard Mazda was going to call the RX-9 the RX-7. I guess someone in marketing decided that was a better name.

Sure, they're dropping the RX-8, but they've made promises that a rotary is in their future.
(ref 3rd gear)

I first read that as "Delivering Medicine By UAW"

I was afraid that my surgeon would arrive drunk and the nurses high.

I did some quick research.

According to California officials, there are no laws that would bar Google from testing such models, as long as there's a human behind the wheel who would be responsible should something go wrong.

Taken from here: http://jalopnik.com/5661240/are-googles-driverless-cars-legal which was linked in the article from the summary.

However i would say that there is a difference from operating the car and manually driving the car. The google spokesperson used the phrase, manually driving.

Here's a link: http://jalopnik.com/5549518/how-the-us-government-killed-the-safest-car-ever-built

Basically touted as one of the safest cars ever built and good MPG for its time to boot. Oh, and silently destroyed.

"This looks stupidly inefficient. Either the car takes too god damn much energy to run; it has too huge of a battery; or it can't power a whole house for long."

From the description:
" supply electricity to power a house during a power outage or shortage."

Wow you didn't even get past the first sentence! This isn't designed to power your house for life, it's for an blackout, when a summer storm just knocked out power and it's 100 degrees out and you don't have a $500+ 7000w gas generator laying around. Your car engine is far more powerful than any gas generator and it has gas tank much larger than generators, problem is you can't power your house with the engine on idle, it needs to be revved up a bit, and leaving your car outside revved up for hours risks it being stolen and is hard on the engine unless you know exactly how high the RPMs should be.

This is not a new idea, this guy did it with his Prius in 2009, but I'm glad a manufacture is finally designing a car that can function as a generator rather than the "backyard mechanics" method consumers had to use in the past.

Unfortunately they're designing this for the Nissan Leaf which is an electric vehicle with no gas engine so when the battery is dead on your Leaf from powering your house in a blackout you now have no power and no method of transportation. Not smart.

http://jalopnik.com/cars/ad-watch/super-bowl-ad-watch-gm-forces-robot-to-kill-self-233617.php

But wait: http://www.allcarselectric.com/news/1063329_aptera-answers-our-questions-shares-no-new-information At least Tesla is still making the roadster, but wait: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/06/tesla-stop-production-electric-roadster-focus-model-s-sedan.php At least there's the Corbin Sparrow or the Sinclair C5 or ??? http://jalopnik.com/5809904/whats-historys-most-awesome-failed-electric-car I'm an electrical engineer and this is depressing. Oh yeah, and there are still no batteries good enough!

But I'm still more impressed with the lego Porsche with functioning dual clutch transmission. http://jalopnik.com/5819500/this-porsche-may-be-the-most-detailed-lego-car-ever

Perhaps not the Goatse one that managed to slip through and get posted on the BBC's site.

You can forgive them that mistake when Audi did a whole UK-wide billboard and newspaper ad campaign that featured similar imagery. It wasn't like they even pulled it or anything AFAICT, the one near where I lived was up for quite a while before they replaced it with another one after roughly the usual length of time.

They already are.
http://jalopnik.com/?_escaped_fragment_=5371967/feds-seize-illegal-nissan-skyline-gt+rs-in-cali#!5371967/feds-seize-illegal-nissan-skyline-gt+rs-in-cali

The guys over at jalopnik aren't so sure, unless he's traded in his Mercedes SL55 AMG for a 10+ year old Honda Civic...

http://jalopnik.com/#!5763321/cmon-does-the-national-enquirer-really-think-steve-jobs-owns-a-honda

It's also not a study. Jalopnik has more. It's a survey of drivers in the age range 17 to 39, half of whom were gamers. Possible sources of error include the possibility that gamers are more likely to be young and male and that this is the actual cause of their recklessness. It's not apparent from the report whether or not they accounted for demographic factors but the way the figures are reported - x% of gamers vs. y% of non-gamers - suggests not. Also it's asking drivers to describe their own behaviour so it may just be that gamers are more self concious than other drivers, or just prouder of their bad behaviour. And the there's the causation issue - boy racers like racing games.

OTOH, the pro-gaming study didn't actually include any evidence that gamers' superior reaction times translated to safer driving. So neither study draws much conclusion either way.

Yours faithfully,

Buzz Killington

The only angle of validity I could believe that the Continental study may have is risk vs. reward behavior. Games tend to emphasize this, and the reward is commonly disproportionately greater than the risk involved. However, in reality, ordinary well-adjusted people recognize that there are consequences for driving irresponsibly. Personally I like to drive fast, and I've got two speeding tickets in my 13 years driving to show for that. On a day to day basis, though, I keep my speed within 10 mph (16.09 kph for the rest of the world) of the posted limit to mitigate the risk of being cited again.

I'm of the belief that games generally improve driving ability, due to common requirements of the two activities such as concentration, environmental awareness, reflexes, and rapid judgment. I know benefits to hand-eye coordination are well-documented in various studies, but I'd be interested to see more research in this area. As regards driving games specifically, I suppose that they would boost confidence behind the wheel. I felt like a driving god when I finally earned the S-class license in the original Gran Turismo. The game had some relevant advice for real-world driving in the license test briefings too.

Also, maybe gamers are simply more honest about their mistakes? This was a survey of 1000 gamers and 1000 non-gamers. Gamers do experience failure on a very regular basis, and discuss those failures pretty openly in my experience. Primarily to overcome them, and progress further in the game, but who knows? Maybe this is habit-forming.

Aaaaand... Fox News is on the case, naturally.
http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2011/01/31/study-says-video-gamers-make-dangerous-drivers
Here's Jalopnik's version. At least they provide some context. (Since the Metro version is nowhere to be found.)
http://jalopnik.com/5747792/video-gamers-more-dangerous-drivers-than-non+gamers

Already done by Porsche...

http://jalopnik.com/5728504/how-the-porsche-918-rsrs-amazing-hybrid-works/gallery/

They have a flywheel driven by a motor/generator powered by the motor/generator at the wheels when the car is breaking.. the flywheel can then dump power into the motor/generator for a power boost.

http://jalopnik.com/5726457/this-is-every-batmobile-ever

That said, it's not every batmobile. But the discussion has some interesting things!

Then, of course, are RVs. John Madden has a famous refusal to fly and relies on a custom RV instead.

So all we are talking about hear is moving around on rails instead of roads, since this particular town in Norway happens to have a lot of extra railways lying around.

No, they wouldn't. Look at it.

It looks like an old style land rover, though it would be more likely its one of those old style Toyota's. Either way, it'd be called a 4WD.

A ute is totally fucking different.

The helicopter crew is out of hospital. All four of them.

"Imagine if you were sold a factory automobile, perfectly capable of 100 mpg with no loss of performance, but which had to be "tuned" with special software to do so, at a cost of an extra $1000. It would piss a lot of people off!" No need to imagine... http://jalopnik.com/cars/news/so-long-guvnor-mercedes-will-unlock-top-speed-on-amg-models-in-the-us-for-a-price-154226.php

That's like saying a Ferrari is a poor performance car because it can't compete against a Ford Focus on cost-per-max-speed or miles-per-gallon.

I doubt that IBM mainframes suffer from the equivalent of engine fires.

Looks like the resale on my older model might improve!

First I read a few months ago that Australia impounds cars for speeding (even if it's someone else's car) and cars are impounded permanently and auctioned-off (proceeds going to govt of course) making lots of money:
"Car confiscation is big business in Australia. The state of Victoria seized 3437 cars generating $1 million in net revenue between July 2006 and December 2007."

And now they're going after iPhone apps?

What gives Australia? Why do you hate your citizens?

check it out on jalopnik

http://jalopnik.com/5602570/chinese-to-revolutionize-cities-with-traffic+straddling-bus

This isn't the kind of thing you expect from Slashdot, or Slashdot submitters/readers.

It's a PR stunt, but it's filed under 'science'.
It's also linking to a third party blog, 11 days after it was news.

Press release containing contact info: http://media.gm.com/content/media/gb/en/news/news_detail.brand_chevrolet.html/content/Pages/news/gb/en/2010/CHEVROLET/07_15_perfect_hand_shake

Original (as far as I know) blog entry mentioning it: http://jalopnik.com/5588201/this-is-the-formula-for-the-perfect-handshake

Contact email on the press release is chevrolet@mischiefpr.com.

If a Slashdot contributor gets taken for a line with that one, and editorial staff allows it through as a Science (not Idle) story, while nobody bothers to do even the slightest amount of digging, it might be high time to revise standards and practices, since Slashdot is starting to descend to a less-timely, less-informed, more gullible version of reddit.

I remember when Slashdot was THE place for techie/geeky news, and the comments were considerably more often than not insightful. Nowadays, people seem happier to quibble over minor semantics in an article while missing the big picture. I'm not trying to put Slashdot, one of my favorite sites, down but I'd rather it retain or improve level of quality, not slip toward the same plateau as Slashdot Parody Sites[tm].

If you're going to accept PR advertisements, at least put them in the ad box in the corner and accept payment, so people can opt out.

Eh? Boring? You're not supposed to watch the races, the exciting stuff in Formula 1 takes place off the track, involving the directors of the sport: http://jalopnik.com/373884/f1-boss-max-mosley-caught-with-five-hookers-in-nazi-orgy-video-scandal

Now that is a good, wholesome sport for the whole family to participate in!

Root for the hooker of your choice!

1950s - Drug and atomic experimentation on soldiers, Military Industrial Complex arises
1960s - Military Industrial Complex continues, War on Drugs declared, domestic spying
1970s - War on Drugs continues, No Knock, Military Industrial Complex continues, escalation of Viet Nam war, domestic spying continues
1980s - Reagan Era voodoo economics, seeding of Al Queda in Afghanistan, Feds cut programs that would have directly benefited the citizenry
1990s - Gridlock, gutting of regulatory agencies begins, DMCA
2000s - Katrina, "privatization" of government, domestic spying intensifies, PATRIOT Act, ACTA

I would say on balance that the Federal government has gotten damned little right vs. that which they gotten wrong.

Why not provide manual overrides for things like door locks and windows.

Jaguar has such an override for their electronic transmission.

Yes, F1 drivers are awesome. Yes, I couldn't hope to drive as good as they can. But what differentiates the winner comes largely down to the technology, and the workers in the pits - as opposed to differentiation in skill.

Sure you can argue other conventional sports rely largely on fancy sports medicine, or whatnot, but really, it's not to the same level as F1. Differentiation in other sports comes more down to the skill, morale and strategies employed by the team/individual who are *on the field*.

Rally driving on the other hand, certainly seems to have more emphasis on driving/navigation skill. I was just reading any article about how someone built up a cheap E30 318i which cost him $500 + money on cheap modifications. With no team, no fancy tools, he placed 3rd in a rally against $400k+ professional race cars with full teams. You'd never see that in F1.

I mean hey if Google loses source to their search engine no biggie right?

Perhaps, they do have many trade secrets, but they also have patents and are valuable because of their prominence.

Or Microsoft the source to Office?

What's the fear, a Chinese copy of Office? They already copy it for free in China - why add the effort?

Cisco the source to their IOS

They've licensed it before and I think it's been leaked at least once, and it doesn't seem to have hurt them. Cisco sells hardware.

It's all no big deal right and they should have been prepared somehow?

Either they're tremendously stupid or the money they're losing from being in China isn't as great as the money they're gaining from being in China.

Even if you have backups you've lost everything else.

Agreed, only knowledge can be so distributed, not assets.

How exactly do you verify backups to the nth degree for accuracy?

You have your workers work off of the central data every day. They'll notice if the data goes screwy. You back up deltas between current and last, keep a long history and do checksumming.

If you were Walmart could you do backups and verify them before the data was stale?

Sure, backup snapshots. But most R&D shops don't produce massive floods of transactional data.

As for cars... Mini Cooper\Lifan 320, Matiz\Cherry QQ - (body panels interchange!), Honda CRV\Laibo SR-V, Frontera\Landwing X6 (priced 50% less and a ZERO star crash rating), BMW 5 series\Brilliance M2, Yaris\Florid, MB CLK\BYD S8, Landcruiser\Dadi Shuttle, Fortwo\Houyun's electric car, RR Phantom\Geely GE. More info: http://www.theautoindustrieblog.com/2009/03/chinese-clone-cars.html Jalopnik covers this stuff often -> http://jalopnik.com/371517/take-a-look-inside-a-chinese-smart-fourtwo-cloning-factory

These look like knock-offs, not mechanical copies, right? The FourTwo 'clone' looks like a go-cart underneath. They're violating our concept of 'design patents', not 'utility patents', right? Not that their culture necessarily recognizes these concepts.

Hell they have cloned entire companies to produce counterfeits - to the point that when people tried to shut down the factories the companies thought they had a legit license to produce.

I recall Cisco being one of many companies which got some press when their factories kept producing after the quitting bell and so-called counterfeits eventually making it to the US. But Cisco hasn't left China or become unprofitable over it. Some say they're better off having Chinese sysadmins learn IOS on $200 routers rather than some other technology (e.g. bsd) because they'd never get the $7000 for them over there.

Odds seem low? Have you truly not been paying attention to that degree? Any company losing 100mill in research is going to be hurt and who says it will happen just once? I mean hey if Google loses source to their search engine no biggie right? Or Microsoft the source to Office? Cisco the source to their IOS. It's all no big deal right and they should have been prepared somehow?

Backups might be a long shot but it IS doable. Even if you have backups you've lost everything else. How exactly do you verify backups to the nth degree for accuracy? If you were Walmart could you do backups and verify them before the data was stale?

As for contingency you're thinking like someone who's watching out for a company and not their parachute. This is occurring far less than you think I'm sure and frankly a company shouldn't have to do this.

As for cars... Mini Cooper\Lifan 320, Matiz\Cherry QQ - (body panels interchange!), Honda CRV\Laibo SR-V, Frontera\Landwing X6 (priced 50% less and a ZERO star crash rating), BMW 5 series\Brilliance M2, Yaris\Florid, MB CLK\BYD S8, Landcruiser\Dadi Shuttle, Fortwo\Houyun's electric car, RR Phantom\Geely GE. More info: http://www.theautoindustrieblog.com/2009/03/chinese-clone-cars.html Jalopnik covers this stuff often -> http://jalopnik.com/371517/take-a-look-inside-a-chinese-smart-fourtwo-cloning-factory

So no, not just old cars. Current cars too and as recently as the last auto show. But hey, chances of them really doing this are low right? Hell they have cloned entire companies to produce counterfeits - to the point that when people tried to shut down the factories the companies thought they had a legit license to produce. Seriously, do some research and you'll see this isn't benign.... Sadly many companies don't come forward.

the 9-5 redesign has been waiting in the wings...it has been held up from production by SAAB's pending doom.

http://jalopnik.com/5320311/2010-saab-9+5-for-the-big-boys/gallery/

A ticket like that in CA would result in revocation of license, a criminal charge, mandatory jail time and fine many times that...and god help you if you so much as had a shot of NyQuil in you at the time.

http://jalopnik.com/5318413/top-gear-played-by-bogus-210%252B-mph-bugatti-veyron-ticket-too

The Swiss hate cars, even more than nanny-state California does. A 210+ mph ticket on a Veyron there had a max fine of $500.

You've obviously never actually spent any time in California or you'd know that, in fact, the car totally rules!

Try getting around most anywhere in this state other than San Francisco without one.

The Swiss hate cars, even more than nanny-state California does. A 210+ mph ticket on a Veyron there had a max fine of $500.

Produced from 1924 to 1954 in fairly large quantities. I had a friend with one of these. It was huge. Drove cross country in it one summer. Great road trip.

http://jalopnik.com/5411696/plug+in-hybrids-will-not-kill-the-power-grid-yet

Yeah, like Toyota *needs* more publicity, right? I mean, just look at the company...

• Over takes GM as the biggest car manufacturer.
• Became the "name brand" of eco-cars with the Prius. You can't say "hybrid" without thinking "Prius".
• The Corolla is like the best selling car in America.
• Toyota has been named one of the best car brands by folks like readers digest for some time now.

I mean, heck, Toyota needs all the help they can get, amiright?

Though, why the hell they want to do something edgy with the Matrix is beyond me. They should just do a customer loyalty and convenience thing. There's nothing bloody edgy about a sports-wagon.

* Disclaimer, I technically own 2 Toyota cars. A Corolla and a Pontiac Vibe(aka "Matrix"). Both have been great cars.

Yet, at the same time... this is typical American culture. Some woman thinks she deserves 10 million dollars because she got some email. I'd like to see examples of this email. All I can find so far is An ad asking people to sign up and some people who tried it.

It's odd. It appears that the campaign is that you sign yourself up for the website. Then you get phone calls, emails, and other communications from this odd personality (pre-defined and picked from the website). After 5 days of ads, you find out... "PUNK'D" that you did it to yourself by signing up for the website? *boggle*

Ok, dumb prank. I think it could cross the line, particularly with phone calls and what not. But $10 million? Yeah right. Maybe a public scorning, some rolled heads, and an apology. Whatever. "American Dream" of making it rich has been "sue sue sue" for some time now.

Obligatory reference: The Office.

He chose a bad study its distracted and or slow drivers not speeders that cause delays. http://jalopnik.com/5352906/helpful-holiday-traffic-graphic-why-highways-come-to-a-halt

Something Lockheed makes makes India's planes' maneuverability irrelevant? How so? We're going to be fighting each other or something? Is Lockheed going to be selling their stuff to Pakistan?

Most of the focus today is on BVR (Beyond Visual Range) warfare. Radars and missiles help so that planes can engage and never get to a "merge" or force within Visual range (WVR) engagement. Of course, these arguments are not new. The claim was made as long ago as the korean war and vietnam war. Range issues, limitations on number of missiles carriable to number of targets, on situational awareness, mission objectives (eg penetrate and strike at land target as opposed to intercept & keep away), and countermeasures including ecm and airborne maneouvres, mean that WVR still has a role, to the point that the Israelis still design guns on their aircraft. Maneouvrability is most important for WVR combat, but maneouvrability and energy (speed) has a role to play in BVR/surviving that BVR engagement also). Stealth also has a role allowing an attacker to reduce the range or a defender to keep just outside an opponents hit zone.

Northrop / Lockheed make the EO-DAS which is claimed to increase the range, situational awareness and augment the network centric warfare to focus on BVR engagements. http://jalopnik.com/5264575/f+35-joint-strike-fighter-electro+optical-distributed-aperture-system-explained Use your judgment on the amount of salt to be taken with. Thrust Vector Control (TVC) is present on both the Sukhoi Su30-MKI and on the later lockheed planes.

You beat me to it, but I've got one better:

1957 Chrysler New Yorker. These, my friend, are tailfins.

http://alamedarides.com/chrysler-newyorker1957/57Chrysler-NewYorkerB.jpg

http://jalopnik.com/assets/resources/2007/07/57_NY_Rear.jpg

http://telstarlogistics.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/01/28/newyorker017x.jpg

You can find an example of this material here

I'm glad they put Premium PC in quotes because that's exactly what it is.

This article only proves that Apple's are expensive. That's it.

I could have written a article stating "Lamborghini made up a whopping 91 percent of the $200,000-and-up automobile market in June". Duh, because how many cars are over $200,000? But who'd you rather be, Lamborghini or Toyota? In 2007 Lamborghini sold 2,406 cars and made a ~70 million dollar profit. Toyota sold 2.6 million vehicles and made 14.9 billion dollars in profit.

Thanks Apple but you can keep your Lamborghini, I'll stick with my PC and my Toyota.

A recent incident that comes to mind.

VW Bluesport Roadster Unimpressive as far as fuel economy goes.

Slashdot is the SLOWEST web site on the net.

You obviously haven't had to suffer through the bloated shit that Gawker Media forces upon its victims. Not only does their slower-than-Slashdot Javashit have to be enabled to view comments, and comments were just changed to be forcibly presented in reverse chronological order. Always. No user-configurable option to sort 'em chronologically. Image galleries are forcefed as slideshows; no click-to-open-in-tab ability.

I used to visit Jalopnik multiple times a day, and am now down to once or twice a week, and now actively avoid Gawker's other properties. The only other "design" that ever annoyed me enough that I pre-emptively avoid reading anything they do was the Forbes fetish for the Top 10 Slide Show, but the new Gawker is right up there. Compared to that, the pile of bloated Javashit that is Slashdot is tame by comparison -- because unlike the other sites, at least we can turn all the crap off (classic view) and still read the comments.

Or this for an alternative [Jalopnik]
0-210mph in 7 seconds. That works out to 0-60 in about 1 second. That being on a car that can (as claimed in the article) get 11 mpg and runs on normal 'pump' gasoline and utilizes DOT approved tires.

That Corvette is at least the _quickest_ street legal car. I wonder where the top speed would be. At some point the aerodynamics has to make it flat out dangerous to travel at that speed.

Since it is a '63 corvette. That predates many (all?) of the DOT safety requirements so he can, for example, legally replace his seat belts with a 5-point harness. (Yes removing or altering safety equipment is illegal - you need to keep those stock, DOT approved, seat belts). It also pre-dates any emission control regulations.

At one point Maryland (my home state) had a requirement for window defroster. I wonder if the vette needed/has that?

True... ish. 500M is not much compared to 6B.

Ford does have the distinction of the Detroit 3 of being the only one to not take bailout (ahem... loan) money for the core business. In fact, Ford's done a hell of a job getting their act together and they do have 3 of the top 10 spots in new car sales in the US (including the 1 overall). So... Not quite.

source: A little Google-ing - http://jalopnik.com/5277118/top-ten-best-selling-cars-may-2009

(First, I must acknowledge the authors of TFA started it off by saying it was "snarky and unscientific". Noting that...)

How could Boston make this list? It is a serious hotspot for technology. There are numerous smaller tech specific schools, as well as the MIT factor (assuming that four hundred yards across the Charles is still considered "Boston" from the article's point of view). There are numerous financial companies that are always hiring for IT, or at least hiring from other Boston based consulting firms. Then there's Big Pharma. If you consider Boston to be "within the 495 belt", you have a huge number of opportunities. If you consider Boston to JUST be Boston proper, then the traffic is a non-issue, as you should be taking public transport anyway.

The traffic...I'm not going to say it is great, but it doesn't make the Forbes 12 Worst. However, it does make number eight on Jalopnic's list in 2008. That being said, there are alternatives to driving your car to most city locations.

Regarding the sports championships that were brought up...that's just stupid. As somebody already said, they list SF because of the LACK of championships, but list Boston because there are too many. Silly. If you are into sports, you will find a very educated (although biased) fan base for every major sport (excluding NASCAR). I could go on regarding the sports situation, but I'm pretty sure anyone that cares about sports is already aware of the mark Boston has made on the sports world in the past decade.

History. Someone complained that the town felt "old". Really? The city with the first university on this continent, the first battles of the Revolutionary war, the longest continuously run restaurants in the country, the first public park in the country, some of the oldest churches in the country, the oldest surviving naval vessel in the country, the first post office, the oldest professional sports venue(Fenway) in the country, and the first underground rail system in the country? That city came across as old? We prefer to view it as historic.

Considering Boston is one of the cities in this country with the longest and most influencial histories and is also a long standing technology innovator, I would think there would be some understanding as to why there might be a level of pride.

To bring home the point, you will notice that the author of TFA gave the number of job postings available for every other city on the list, except Boston and SF. That is because Boston (I don't know about SF) is still a power house in the tech world. The author complained about traffic and his home town teams losing too many sporting events to Boston's teams. Which is about as snarky and unscientific as you can get...