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Oy! For starters number of cylinders has exactly nothing to do with power production or torque. I don't drive in the city, I drive in traffic. My 10mile commute takes me as much as 45minutes to make, I seldom break 30MPH for much of it. So no this isn't combined anything, it's sit in traffic hell and I get around 38MPG doing it.

Yes, I can justify spending more money for a car that gets less performance because this isn't a car I drive FOR performance and it performs well enough for the job at hand - it's a tool. This is a car I drive for MPG and for commuting, it is comfortable and I have to fuel it just once a month or so. The other cars I own most certainly DO require premium fuel and they make the 0-60 figures you quote for the gas VW laughable. Here's one of them from the past -> http://www.streetfire.net/video/blkmgks-t78-supra-6spd-before-being-trashed-by-a_84169.htm That's a 1/4 mile BTW, think of it as merging onto the highway for some frame of reference - note the speed at the end.

Please do not try to tell me anything about the octane of gas and what works best or I'll be forced to school you on cylinder pressures, knock, timing, air/fuel mixtures, and appropriate fuels for the job. If I'm buying something that's not for MPG it will be for performance, it will require premium - which is what the car in that video ran - pump premium and a little methanol on top :-) Certainly little cars that go A-B like your's do fine on regular, nothing I buy that runs on gasoline is likely to however which is why I mentioned performance and compression. Diesel works for my commute, a hybrid would work better, if i had more highway mileage my MPG would go up - WAY up. 600 miles on a tank would be easily achievable, I get about 525 now.

I wonder - what's the resale on that gasser VW compared to the TDI. I know when I bought mine I bought new because no one would sell their TDI for a price that was reasonable and buying new made sense. It was one of THE only cars I've ever bought new and it's maintenance has been pretty much zippo....

I wouldn't be so sure about it.

Also, Tesla Roadster:
http://www.streetfire.net/video/top-gear-reviews-tesla-roadster_206233.htm

No, they did not. It's blatantly obvious that they're staging a situation to make a point when the power sort-of goes out. Look. If you don't see it, then you're simply incapable of understanding media. Asperger?

Top Gear actually did drive a car over a non-frozen lake in Iceland. While racing against a snowmobile doing the same. The snowmobile won, but the car did make it across as well. Real driving, no floating.

This one is pretty good too:

http://www.streetfire.net/video/5th-gear-crash-test-between-a-old-car-and-a-new_134903.htm

Don't forget about the similarly powered vehicles. GM had the Camaro SS and Firebird TransAm WS/6, both similar in power, weight, and handling characteristics to the Corvette. The biggest difference (at least to me) was that the F-bodies have 4 seats, and cupholders. :)

    I think he was probably referring to the soccer moms in their F650, EM-50, or Knight XV.

    [/me goes looking for a place to test drive the Knight XV]

I thought it was no mystery anymore?
http://videos.streetfire.net/video/Family-Guy-The-Lindbergh_639275.htm

And since I also doubt that you possess such information your "my kids can't eat" statement comes across as either ignorant, manipulative or both.

It was manipulative in that I wanted to elicit a response, which I did.

Without financial incentive, there will be less innovation. Take all the major copyrighted works that you use/enjoy that were produced by big companies. Of those, ask yourself which ones would have really been produced if those companies didn't have financial incentive to do so. There are some things that got produced for free (Linux), but it's taken MUCH longer than it took to produce the commercial alternative. Also, in the case of Linux, it only really got good when big companies started getting behind it as a way to fight of Microsoft (maybe that's debatable, but it's my view).

Also ask yourself why communism never produced a decent car.

To be clear, copyright and patent laws definitely need to be reformed. They're stuck in the 20th century. No doubt about that, but we need them in some form in order to spur innovation.

I'm feeling snarky too. I'm thinking you're either sleep deprived and not thinking clearly, or maybe you haven't studied economics in college yet.

One thing that people consistently ignore is that without monetary rewards, people (and companies) will not invest in the research and development necessary to produce innovation. Are drug companies going to invest in the massive amounts of money necessary to produce new drugs without financial incentive to do so? Are companies going to invest enough to create the next World of Warcraft without financial incentive? Would Wolverine ever have been made without a financial incentive to do so? Like it or not, the quickest way for a government to ensure innovation is to create financial incentives for people to do it.

Copyrights are an incentive. So are patents. The laws surrounding both of them are screwed up in many, many ways. So let's reform them so they reflect modern realities. Maybe TPB are like the Black Panthers and are trying to create change in society. Or maybe they're just a bunch of yahoos trying to "stick it to the man." I don't really know. I can support the former. The latter, not so much.

A lot of the arguments I've seen about this posted here exhibit a form of cognitive dissonance. In essence, the argument factors down to this: I want free stuff, therefore I will reject any laws and arguments that prevent me from getting my free stuff. Yes, people and companies will get rich when they produce things that people want. And they'll twist the laws to prolong their revenue streams and make themselves richer. And they'll hide behind the laws to prevent business models from changing (even though you can't really do that over the long term). But to say that copyright laws are bad for society because people are getting rich is pretty silly. Ask yourself why communism never produced a good car.

They just call them "crossovers" now. Seriously, it's all marketing.

Proof

"* Reliable Tires (or that fail gradually) - Tires are still based on air-filled balloon technology, making them problematic." There appears to be a good solution for this one in the works: http://forums.streetfire.net/showthread.php?s=&t=251

If anyone comes up with the technology and the big energy companies catch wind of it first, it very well might be! http://forums.streetfire.net/showthread.php?t=7018

I launched my video hosting website http://videos.streetfire.net/ for hosting car videos and sister site http://video.freevideoblog.com/ for everything else, 4 months ago. In those 4 months we have swelled to 300K videos streamed a day proving one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt...... That American Infomerical-TV sucks and that kids with DV cameras can create more entertaining content than than TV production studios looking for the next ad sponsored show. (i.e. Pontiac Solstice "Aprentice" or "Batman Begins" NASCAR 400).....of course the bitter irony is that in order to support this service we use banner ads, so maybe we're no better afterall.....ahh sweet irony. making hypocrits of us all

In the next few years I think we're going to see some serious changes to the Television big-media business model. Much in the way Napster was distruptive to the music industry, Bit Torrent and the like will be disruptive to TV entertainment in how shows are piloted, selected and funded

Just my humble experience

-Adam

My company httpwww.vidiac.com creates ad-supported Video portals for website owners. For example http://videos.streetfire.net/ is one of our ~12 Video portals. We're streaming close to 300,000 videos a day to close to 100,000 people and have only been in operation for 4 months. The *only* way we have covered our cost is in advertising, and even then, just barely. None of the founders of the company has yet to take a nickle out of the company because we're allways scrounging to support our 1Gbps Internet feed that averages over 120Mbps. (FWIW Right now we're averaging more than $1,000/month a piece out of our own pockets to cover the success of the site)

I understand that nobody wants to see a Viagra banner ad, but I also understand we are growing by 30% per week as people watch free videos online. If our site was subscription supported, pay per view or otherwise, we would never have attained this level of popularity. Reading the responses here, I can see that a lot of people feel entitled to free content online. This content has to be subsidized in some way. If anyone has a suggestion on how we can continue to offer 300K videos a day to 100K users, while covering the 100+ hours a week the owners of the company are spending on this site I would love to hear it.

PS we have allready looked into pay-per-view, and it was categoricly rejected by users.

-Adam

Firstly once you've made a stylesheet it's done - you can use it for one page, one thousand pages or a million pages.

All my sites use styles. As a matter of fact http://videos.streetfire.net/ uses CSS, and that same code base is running (5) other sites with their own style sheet and skin. for example http://www.crossroadvideos.com/ is the same server same code, different ASCX "master tamplate", different CSS. Guess what though, CSS has been around since 1996, so that's not what we're talking about here, and as I said before, since CSS/DHTML came out there have been no improvements to the standard significant enough for me to EOL all my old site code.

Do you have any idea how tiny Mac/IE5's market share really is? That's like saying you don't use CSS at all because 0.01% of your users view it in NN4. And of course you're forgetting that the job of the web is to propegate and present information - our ability to make the information look nice is just a bonus.

*confused* so I have to use XHTML to cater to blind people, but making code that looks just as good on a MAC as a PC isn't a factor? Is Disabled > MAC users? *sigh*

Once again it's a matter of professionalism, it disgusts me just how unproffesional the majority of the 'website development' industry is

No offense but this just sounds elitist to me. `I use XHTML, and EOL HTML because I'ma "proffesional" all you writing HTML just simply aren't "proffesionals"'? Again my users never once judged the validity of my website based on what HTML standard I'm using or how "proffesional" they think my coding practices are.

The P tag sucks because it's redundant and the new P tag standard agrees with me. It makes more sense to say "New Line" instead of "Stop Paragraph""Start Paragraph". Obviously if you need a new Paragraph then the old one has ended.

Also if you need to scootch your text down just a smidge, it's easier to just drop in a BR than dig into the CSS.

As for my HTML skill level, it rises to the needs of the project and I have yet to see an end-user affecting need that requires a drive to newer standards. It makes more sense to write code in the most backward compatible spec that gets the job done.

As for how I handle Content Management, http://videos.streetfire.net/ is an HTML skin with .NET objects embeded as needed by the Nav state. The main page uses 13 nested objects to be built and at ~200 concurrent users we rarely see CPU utilization go above 4%. (and that's because we're running 5 domains being dynamicly skinned real time with App and DB servers running on the same pipe). We use HTML instead XHTML because Site Owners can upload an HTML template with a Tag that says "insert video player" and the server builds the page dynamicly from there.

http://video.freevideoblog.com/ is running the same objects and the same server with different content and a different skin. We scratch built the CMS/VMS (video Managment System?) to allow N number of skinned video portals. Go to http://www.vidiac.com/ if you want more overview.

Jakob Nielson and the gang have pushed us to really boring text based browsing that is a chore to read

Straw man. He actually advocates using images and good design, and keeping text short and snappy, emphasising the key points.

my website is a video hosting portal http://videos.streetfire.net/ [streetfire.net] so I doubt the 40,000 folks coming to my site every day care about text based browsing or low-bandwidth options, since the end media is video.

Most search engine spiders don't watch the videos.

FWIW though I chose 3.0 HTML

There's no such thing, 3.0 never made it out of draft status.

I admit there are a lot of neat things you can do with XHTML [link to CSS Zen Garden]

You are clueless. That has nothing to do with XHTML. You can do the exact same thing with HTML. You can even use stylesheets with HTML 2.0 documents.

Adam HTML guy since 1994.

You sure don't know a lot for somebody who claims to have been doing this for over a decade.

Macromedia, Adobe and gang have to push things forward to keep getting us to buy product right. Is HTML now "designed obsolescence"?

No

Jakob Nielson and the gang have pushed us to really boring text based browsing that is a chore to read, and not worth a casual flipping. Why should *I* care if my website is Modem/text based browsing compliant? Sure if I had a research website I can see the point, but my website is a video hosting portal http://videos.streetfire.net/ [streetfire.net] so I doubt the 40,000 folks coming to my site every day care about text based browsing or low-bandwidth options, since the end media is video.

FWIW though I chose 3.0 HTML because it's easier to integrate the 13 ASCX objects into my single ASPX page than if I kept styling separate with XHTML.

Now that if course is just me and maybe I'm bothered by people saying my site is obsolete. I admit there are a lot of neat things you can do with XHTML http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/152/152.css& page=1 [csszengarden.com] (Click "select a design to see the style changes). But again I see that as new candy that doesn't really solve problems that neither I nor my viewers are having. [/rant]

PS I used the BR tag too, because I still think the P tag is lame.

-Adam HTML guy since 1994.

My video site http://videos.streetfire.net/ is advertising supported and growing at 30% week to week averaging 40,000 unique visitors a day. 99% of our content is Junky DV stuff, and no one video dominates our 80,000 daily video views. Check this article out. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

Okay this pisses me off, the "Benign Giant" yet again kills another one of my fledgling companies.

Last year I started a company to offer people and business free 1GB email and 2GB File Sharing... within a month of use debuting, Google anounces GMAIL. The writing was on the wall they had buzz, and name, we had nothing. I would literally see people say "Anyone have a good webmail account?" I'd post "feel free to use mine 1GB mail and 2GB file/photo sharing" Next post down someone would say "I have 6 GMAIL invites" and my post would be ignored.

Okay so we canned that (software we had spent 4 years developing) went back tot he drawing board and made it into a video sharing service you can add to your website. (That is point CNAME.yourwebsite.com to our server and we skin your site with our video portal).

For Example:
http://videos.streetfire.net/
http://video.freevideoblog.com/

We debuted this in February and in 6 weeks we went from 500 visitors a day to 25,000 and 55,000 videos served a day. 30% week to week growth. Finally we had something that people wanted and was growing fast.

Now Google launches free video hosting and yet again I'm screwed. Do they have my phones tapped or something?

Next I'm going to launch a free Potatoe Gun building service just to see how Google destroys that business too.

GOOGLE I HATE YOU!!!!

-Adam, destitute programmer watching a big company destroy my livelyhood...again.

Mybe you're right. With the right indexing, TOC, menu, etc. video can be a resonable medium to publish in. Consider the difference between a well-organized DVD of content with a very granular menu vs. broadcast television. The stream-based nature of TV makes it difficult to access content because the viewer has to wait for their desired content to arrive... sitting through irrelevant content in the process. At best the viewer can choose a different stream (channel) and hope there is more relevant content coming soon.

Here's kind of an example of what you're talking about.

You know a year ago, on StreetFire.net we launched a "hard drive for life" with 1GB webmail, calendars, user groups, 2GB file storage, sharing (share with user, group, domain or web).

Guess what? We only had 100 people sign up and half of them didn't use the system.

• Disabled webmail
• Disabled contacts
• Disabled calendars
• Disabled All uploaded file types with the exception of video formats
• Disabled all share levels and made everything shared with Web.

Then we renamed the service http://videos.streetfire.net/

Guess what? now it's a run away success, with 50% traffic growth and we're up to 44,000 unique visitors in 3 weeks and will have half a million videos served in our first month.

So the moral of the story is, it isn't the service it's how it's marketed.

-Adam