1. Stop the engine at idle and use the large battery to drive accessories and air conditioning. Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive goes a step further and lets you stop the engine at almost any time (up to a certain vehicle speed).
This feature has no relevance to the driving pattern we are discussing.
2. Downsize the engine so it is more efficient at typical engine loads.
The minimum size of an engine you need is determined by the top speed you wish to be able to sustain. I have yet to see an engine with a high enough HP rating to sustain a vehicle, yet which does not deliver enough torque for good acceleration.
[[...] engine keeping it in more efficient operating ranges
That is precisely the job of a transmission.
And the car will still be slower and less efficient than the hybrid.
For freeway driving, it will be lighter than the hybrid, just as fast, and no less fuel efficient. The hybrid drive train can't provide any help, so the internal combustion engine in a hybrid must necessarily be large enough for on its own.
Since you want to talk in vague generalities and assert you are correct, rather than trying to actually prove anything, I will simply point you to the last time I discussed this instead, with someone a bit more informed:
If you keep a vehicle for the duration of the loan, you'll never have negative equity.
Now you're just playing a sill numbers games. No, it won't technically be 'negative equity' once you've paid off the loan... It will just be an out and out loss of many thousands of dollars. Continuing to fuel it up and drive it just puts you further in the hole.
Now is the absolute worst time to upgrade to a more fuel efficient vehicle...any gain in efficiency will be overwritten by market hysteria.
I specifically discussed that already. "Hysteria" or not, waiting to sell of your SUV means more time for it's value to depreciate. You are gambling that the "hysteria" will subside in a reasonably short period of time, and that gas prices won't continue to rise significantly.
The reason is that the serial hybrid is perfect for working as a generator. A construction worker can drive to the job site and then use their batteries/hybrid as power for the job sites.
Don't recall the name, but Ford was promising up and down they were going to produce just that, a very large truck with hybrid drive train and 4 120/240v outlets built-in to it. Never happened.
It's amazing how slow and reluctant car makers have been to produce what people actually want.
If you need large passenger seating, there are minivans. If you need to haul load, there are trucks. If your commuting, there are sedans and compacts.
Minivans aren't any more fuel efficient than SUVs.
Besides, your long list of what SUVs can do, yet would require 3 different vehicles, is a strong indicator of the versatility of SUVs. (Note: I have never owned an SUV)
Re:Toyota knew the high price of oil was coming...
on
The SUV Is Dethroned
·
· Score: 1
Toyota knew the high price of oil was coming......which is why they spent so much money in the 1990's developing the hybrid, when all the other car manufacturers thought they were nuts.
Completely untrue. Toyota and Honda's hybrids came out of the same regulation as the all-electric GM/Saturn EV1, Ford Th!nk, etc. It wasn't Toyota being "forward thinking", it was them responding to the California Air Resources Board (CARB) regulations that would REQUIRE manufacturers to sell such low-emissions vehicles.
US car manufacturers had much, much better technology in their all-electric vehicles they were leasing across the state than Toyota has in it's hybrids. The only difference is that, when the CARB backed down on it's regulations under pressure from industry, US car makers decided to cease production, and crush their test vehicles, while Toyota decide to market and sell their hybrid technology as a 'luxury' vehicle. This gave them the infrastructure to roll it out on a much larger scale as prices started going through the roof, and US car makers were caught napping.
Toyota didn't take a big risk that payed off. Just the opposite in fact... It's a real twist of fate that Toyota took the least expensive and least risky route with their low-emissions vehicle technology, and just happened to be in a good position when oil prices unexpectedly spiked.
Re:What if gas prices drop again?
on
The SUV Is Dethroned
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Believe me, prices won't drop and if they drop it will be just very temporary.
In fact, you're very, very, very wrong. Gas prices aren't being drive-up by demand at all.
Demand in the US has gone down significantly, and demand in Asia appears to be FAR lower than anyone expected. Meanwhile, as demand keeps falling, oil prices continue rising. There's no clearer sign of a bubble.
It's all (mostly) just a feed-back cycles of a bunch of insane speculators driving up the price to ridiculous levels. The only question is when it will burst and separate all those foolish speculators from their money, and drop prices back down to rational levels again.
Moral of the story: You were an idiot to buy the SUV, and now you're STUCK with the negative equity, no matter what you do. Throwing in the extra cost of gas and continuing to drive it will just put you deeper in a hole.
You can non-op it, drop the insurance on it, and HOPE the second-hand SUV market will improve, particularly as all evidence points to gas prices dropping sharply next year. But you're betting against a year of depreciation as well, so it might still be a loss to wait.
Even if you bought a Prius (46mpg, $1282/yr) it'd take 65k miles, or 5.5 years, to make up the difference.
Essentially Einstein never liked the idea that the universe was based on randomness, hence the famous "god does not throw dice with the universe" quote. As a consequence he repeatedly tried to disprove quantum mechanics by inventing scenarios in which the random nature of QM would conflict with GR. The surprising, and somewhat ironic, outcome of his attempts was however new insights into quantum mechanical interactions that just seem to confirm the random nature of QM.
This Disney-esque version of history is forced into an oversimplified mentality, to the point of being nonsense. It's not like Einstein was some old, irrational curmudgeon, where QM was concerned.
Einstein disagreed with QM early on, when it was still in it's infancy. He did not really try to disprove it, per se, so much as he just repeatedly extrapolated, based on the known data, different QM scenarios that seemed to apparently conflict with GR. This led to research and improvements to the theory of QM, to the point that Einstein was eventually satisfied. So much so that trying to unify GR and QM took up the last several years of his life.
No matter how like you make a conventional vehicle, you're still running it entirely on gasoline (or diesel).
If you have a hybrid, instead, it can easily be designed to allow plugging it in to charge the batteries, and then the first, say, 10 miles of every trip can be driven without using a drop of gasoline.
It wasn't long ago I would have agreed with Mr Murray, mainly because I do a lot of freeway driving, where hybrids are just dead weight. However, I've watched how most people drive, and I believe requiring ever manufacturer to sell plug-in hybrids would immediately cause a HUGE drop in demand for gasoline, as most people do most of their driving in short trips. What's more, the amount of fuel wasted in traffic, at long stop lights, idling in drive-thrus, etc. is quite substantial, and could be eliminated...
Of course, next, they need to make hybrids able to power the A/C without running the engine, rather than eliminating practically all the gains of a hybrid during the summer months.
Personally, I'm anxiously awaiting serial-hybrids... Electric vehicles, with perhaps a 20+ mile range, and a very small gasoline generator that runs to charge the batteries on longer trips. That larger all-electric range would eliminate an the majority of people's fuel consumption, and yet also allow for extremely small and efficient engines, and vehicles that are much lighter, and SIMPLER to build and maintain than either conventional or hybrid vehicles, and have far lower operating costs.
Changing the definition of SUV doesn't change the point.
Pickups and SUVs are an entirely separate class of vehicles for most purposes, and you can be damn sure "Landscapers" aren't putting their lawn mowers, covered in grass clippings, in the back of a nice, carpeted SUV, with folded-down seats taking up much of the space, and a roof, making it impossible to haul larger objects.
How do you drive customer upgrades to more bloaded OSes when customers are demanding devices with lower cpu/ram specs?
Microsoft figured that out 15 years ago... You sell OEMs and customers a nice lean mean OS, and then provide critical security updates which steadily increase the CPU and memory load. That way, your system is seriously dragging, and the next version of the OS, with no such updates, seems reasonably quick compared to your bogged-down old OS.
Don't be so cynical. It's that our government is so idiotic that they don't know terrorists and criminals can and will lie. It's that they're protecting us from a much more serious threat... Those damn smelly hippies that refuse to go along with the pack and surrender all of their rights when asked in a confident voice by an authority figure.
It's just a good thing terrorists don't know how to pretend to be authority figures...
More regulation to correct a problem created by regulation.
You're more than welcome to prove that "regulation" caused our current problems. All evidence points to the contrary.
why is that Houston,TX which lacks zoning laws restricting industrial, commercial and residential construction to specific neighborhoods, did not experience the boom/bust in real estate that other major cities did?
It was because of my "economy rock". I keep it in a post office box in Houston...
My baseless correlation is just as strong as yours...
When you count Britney Spears CDs, Windows, Bewitched and Gilligan's Island DVD box sets, etc. as "manufactured goods," yeah, we turn out a lotta shit.
The software and entertainment industries are VERY, VERY TINY relative to manufacturing... Sub-sub-sub sectors of manufacturing are many times bigger than software or entertainment. There's no way they could possibly have a noticeable effect on such huge (multi-trillion-dollar) figures.
The weak dollar is not the cause, but it is a symptom.
The weak dollar is much of the cause of our ridiculously high oil prices. The high oil prices are much of the cause of our slowing economy. The slowing economy is much of the cause of our weak dollar... Aren't feedback cycles fun?
The national debt doesn't help, two simultaneous and indefinite wars (one VERY unpopular with those guys that set the price of oil) doesn't help, and the "conservative approach" (no oversight) to banks selling mortgages hurt quite a bit as well, and was really what set off this recession.
And a recession is exactly what it is. The "decline of empire" nonsense is utterly baseless fear-mongering. Since the '40s, they've never lasted more than 2 year, and they're typically much shorter than that.
just socialize, just like britain.
Great (sarcastic) suggestion there. Clearly Britain is a model we want to avoid, what with the British pound being the strongest currency in the world, more than 2X the value of US Dollars, and about 50% more valuable than the Euro. It sure would be terrible if that happened to us...
We are not leaders in economic growth, and the middle class which used to defined growth is becoming non existent.
That has a whole lot to do with those "true conservative values" such as vastly cutting taxes for the wealthiest, with a small superficial overture for the poorest, leaving the middle class to hold the bag and pay for damn near everything.
The weak dollar is just making the middle class even smaller. Now, the government and the populous has to borrow,and who are we borrowing from, the chinese.
Actually, the weak dollar should be helpful to the middle class, as they, on average, have negative savings, and inflation shrinks their debts.
we are soon going to owe 40% of debt to foreign agents, who are now free to call us for favors, and we can no longer pressure. These facts put us back a pre-super power standing.
The US has only been free of debt ONCE in its entire history, and it was long before we were any kind of a world power. If national debt saps national power, we couldn't have ever been a superpower... Yet here we are.
The F-22 is our cool jet, but the f-35 is yet to be built, and everything seems to be ineffective against kitchen table IEDs.
You think the F-35 is vulnerable to IEDs?
There is PLENTY of US military tech that is effective against IEDs... Note Humvee heavy armor, Strykers, Tanks, and most importantly, improving technology which allows most personnel to stand well clear of danger, while killing the enemy, with minimal collateral damage. For all the talk about terrorism, the body count of US Soldiers is incredibly small, compared to any other war. 4,000? We had 10X that in the 3 years of the Korean war, which was a success. I don't like the Iraq war in the slightest, but your world view is bordering on paranoid delusions.
That being said, if you're going to build a maglev train, you might as well build it between two major cities, like New York to Washington.
Los Angeles and Las Vegas are pretty-damn-big cities. What's more, the traffic traveling between the two on a regular basis is enormous, and the length of the route in addition to the congestion means getting people out of their cars could be a HUGE win.
The French made their TGV go much faster than 300Mph
Yes, but that was just a gimmick... A "test" run in an attempt to set the record. It would be extremely impractical to try and move passengers on a regular basis at that speed... so they don't. A maglev, on the other hand, actually WILL run at 300MPH in day-to-day service.
Or we could just make the California Lottery terminals in every 7-11 and liquor store self service and eliminate the need to go to Vegas.
Gambling in Atlantic City didn't slow down Vegas. The expansion of tribal gambling didn't slow down Vegas. More gambling in CA won't do it either... It has become the high-class "adult" amusement-park to the world.
All the same, I think I'll take my chances on the highway. At least nobody is going to attempt coercing me into a full-body scan and cavity search just to get into my car.
Don't be so sure. Cops are very fond of stopping out-of-state drivers for even the most trivial of reasons.
After all, if you're driving and not flying cross-country, you MUST be a drug mule. And what are you going to do, drive several hundred miles out of your way to come back and challenge a ticket?
With the latest DNA retention laws, it won't be long before every speeding ticket gets you a cavity search, fingerprinted, and swabbed.
DVDs are encrypted (badly, but still) thus, when you copy them, you are circumventing copy protection, which is a patent violation of the DMCA.
The DMCA explicitly allows decryption technology for things like "interoperability"... Since you can't play DVDs on eg. Linux/BSD any other way, it should be okay. The legality of libdvdcss has never been challenged.
If you are going to pirate a movie, don't tip-toe around it. Just download the thing from the Internet.
Reasons NOT to download movies from the internet:
1) Release groups suck. I've never seen ONE decent rip of a DVD, EVER! Idiots that encode them use crappy apps that cause nasty ghosts. How that can happen when encoding from fully-progressive DVDs, I don't even know... They downscale the resolution dramatically to try and make up for their utter lack of video encoding knowledge... It's not uncommon for VCDs to look better than the hatchet job DVD-rips most people do.
2) I can do 2-pass encoding from the DVD in much less time than it takes to download the same film over my DSL connection... and mine will look infinitely better.
3) Upgrading to a higher-speed connection would cost more than my entire Netflix subscription, and still might not increase download speeds significantly.
4) It's easy to find new releases online, and not too difficult to find older blockbusters and award winners. It's quite a bit more difficult to find cult films, independent films, and older pretty-good but overlooked films. Netflix has almost ALL of them, any time you want them. Good luck getting eg. Hell Comes To Frogtown, Canadian Bacon, etc.
5) Downloading movies you don't own is letter-of-the-law illegal. Making a copy of a DVD you have rented is just a bit on the legal side of the grey area... You are allowed to indefinitely time-shift rented DVDs just as you are with TV programs. Nobody wants to talk about this terribly inconvenient fact, however.
Slashdot Mirror
This feature has no relevance to the driving pattern we are discussing.
The minimum size of an engine you need is determined by the top speed you wish to be able to sustain. I have yet to see an engine with a high enough HP rating to sustain a vehicle, yet which does not deliver enough torque for good acceleration.
That is precisely the job of a transmission.
For freeway driving, it will be lighter than the hybrid, just as fast, and no less fuel efficient. The hybrid drive train can't provide any help, so the internal combustion engine in a hybrid must necessarily be large enough for on its own.
Since you want to talk in vague generalities and assert you are correct, rather than trying to actually prove anything, I will simply point you to the last time I discussed this instead, with someone a bit more informed:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?threshold=-1&mode=nested&commentsort=1&op=Change&sid=234837&cid=19145087&pid=19145087
Now you're just playing a sill numbers games. No, it won't technically be 'negative equity' once you've paid off the loan... It will just be an out and out loss of many thousands of dollars. Continuing to fuel it up and drive it just puts you further in the hole.
I specifically discussed that already. "Hysteria" or not, waiting to sell of your SUV means more time for it's value to depreciate. You are gambling that the "hysteria" will subside in a reasonably short period of time, and that gas prices won't continue to rise significantly.
Of course it does. They've designed it to be as efficient of a car as they could. The hybrid power/drive train has NOTHING to do with that, however.
No, a properly designed transmission allows you to properly size an engine.
Indeed. Give me a car with an Atkinson cycle engine, that doesn't have the dead weight of a hybrid, and I'll be happy.
Don't recall the name, but Ford was promising up and down they were going to produce just that, a very large truck with hybrid drive train and 4 120/240v outlets built-in to it. Never happened.
It's amazing how slow and reluctant car makers have been to produce what people actually want.
Minivans aren't any more fuel efficient than SUVs.
Besides, your long list of what SUVs can do, yet would require 3 different vehicles, is a strong indicator of the versatility of SUVs. (Note: I have never owned an SUV)
Completely untrue. Toyota and Honda's hybrids came out of the same regulation as the all-electric GM/Saturn EV1, Ford Th!nk, etc. It wasn't Toyota being "forward thinking", it was them responding to the California Air Resources Board (CARB) regulations that would REQUIRE manufacturers to sell such low-emissions vehicles.
US car manufacturers had much, much better technology in their all-electric vehicles they were leasing across the state than Toyota has in it's hybrids. The only difference is that, when the CARB backed down on it's regulations under pressure from industry, US car makers decided to cease production, and crush their test vehicles, while Toyota decide to market and sell their hybrid technology as a 'luxury' vehicle. This gave them the infrastructure to roll it out on a much larger scale as prices started going through the roof, and US car makers were caught napping.
Toyota didn't take a big risk that payed off. Just the opposite in fact... It's a real twist of fate that Toyota took the least expensive and least risky route with their low-emissions vehicle technology, and just happened to be in a good position when oil prices unexpectedly spiked.
In fact, you're very, very, very wrong. Gas prices aren't being drive-up by demand at all.
Demand in the US has gone down significantly, and demand in Asia appears to be FAR lower than anyone expected. Meanwhile, as demand keeps falling, oil prices continue rising. There's no clearer sign of a bubble.
It's all (mostly) just a feed-back cycles of a bunch of insane speculators driving up the price to ridiculous levels. The only question is when it will burst and separate all those foolish speculators from their money, and drop prices back down to rational levels again.
No... no... no...!
Moral of the story: You were an idiot to buy the SUV, and now you're STUCK with the negative equity, no matter what you do. Throwing in the extra cost of gas and continuing to drive it will just put you deeper in a hole.
You can non-op it, drop the insurance on it, and HOPE the second-hand SUV market will improve, particularly as all evidence points to gas prices dropping sharply next year. But you're betting against a year of depreciation as well, so it might still be a loss to wait.
Moral of the story: Buy used.
Simple answer: The Second Law of Thermodynamics, entropy, and the eventual Heat Death of the Universe.
The Universe is not in a state of equilibrium. Its time is going to run out, according to pretty strong observational evidence.
This Disney-esque version of history is forced into an oversimplified mentality, to the point of being nonsense. It's not like Einstein was some old, irrational curmudgeon, where QM was concerned.
Einstein disagreed with QM early on, when it was still in it's infancy. He did not really try to disprove it, per se, so much as he just repeatedly extrapolated, based on the known data, different QM scenarios that seemed to apparently conflict with GR. This led to research and improvements to the theory of QM, to the point that Einstein was eventually satisfied. So much so that trying to unify GR and QM took up the last several years of his life.
No matter how like you make a conventional vehicle, you're still running it entirely on gasoline (or diesel).
If you have a hybrid, instead, it can easily be designed to allow plugging it in to charge the batteries, and then the first, say, 10 miles of every trip can be driven without using a drop of gasoline.
It wasn't long ago I would have agreed with Mr Murray, mainly because I do a lot of freeway driving, where hybrids are just dead weight. However, I've watched how most people drive, and I believe requiring ever manufacturer to sell plug-in hybrids would immediately cause a HUGE drop in demand for gasoline, as most people do most of their driving in short trips. What's more, the amount of fuel wasted in traffic, at long stop lights, idling in drive-thrus, etc. is quite substantial, and could be eliminated...
Of course, next, they need to make hybrids able to power the A/C without running the engine, rather than eliminating practically all the gains of a hybrid during the summer months.
Personally, I'm anxiously awaiting serial-hybrids... Electric vehicles, with perhaps a 20+ mile range, and a very small gasoline generator that runs to charge the batteries on longer trips. That larger all-electric range would eliminate an the majority of people's fuel consumption, and yet also allow for extremely small and efficient engines, and vehicles that are much lighter, and SIMPLER to build and maintain than either conventional or hybrid vehicles, and have far lower operating costs.
Changing the definition of SUV doesn't change the point.
Pickups and SUVs are an entirely separate class of vehicles for most purposes, and you can be damn sure "Landscapers" aren't putting their lawn mowers, covered in grass clippings, in the back of a nice, carpeted SUV, with folded-down seats taking up much of the space, and a roof, making it impossible to haul larger objects.
No, they don't. I rode on Amtrak just a few weeks ago. They never asked to see any form of ID.
Microsoft figured that out 15 years ago... You sell OEMs and customers a nice lean mean OS, and then provide critical security updates which steadily increase the CPU and memory load. That way, your system is seriously dragging, and the next version of the OS, with no such updates, seems reasonably quick compared to your bogged-down old OS.
Don't be so cynical. It's that our government is so idiotic that they don't know terrorists and criminals can and will lie. It's that they're protecting us from a much more serious threat... Those damn smelly hippies that refuse to go along with the pack and surrender all of their rights when asked in a confident voice by an authority figure.
It's just a good thing terrorists don't know how to pretend to be authority figures...
You're more than welcome to prove that "regulation" caused our current problems. All evidence points to the contrary.
It was because of my "economy rock". I keep it in a post office box in Houston...
My baseless correlation is just as strong as yours...
The software and entertainment industries are VERY, VERY TINY relative to manufacturing... Sub-sub-sub sectors of manufacturing are many times bigger than software or entertainment. There's no way they could possibly have a noticeable effect on such huge (multi-trillion-dollar) figures.
The weak dollar is much of the cause of our ridiculously high oil prices. The high oil prices are much of the cause of our slowing economy. The slowing economy is much of the cause of our weak dollar... Aren't feedback cycles fun?
The national debt doesn't help, two simultaneous and indefinite wars (one VERY unpopular with those guys that set the price of oil) doesn't help, and the "conservative approach" (no oversight) to banks selling mortgages hurt quite a bit as well, and was really what set off this recession.
And a recession is exactly what it is. The "decline of empire" nonsense is utterly baseless fear-mongering. Since the '40s, they've never lasted more than 2 year, and they're typically much shorter than that.
Great (sarcastic) suggestion there. Clearly Britain is a model we want to avoid, what with the British pound being the strongest currency in the world, more than 2X the value of US Dollars, and about 50% more valuable than the Euro. It sure would be terrible if that happened to us...
That has a whole lot to do with those "true conservative values" such as vastly cutting taxes for the wealthiest, with a small superficial overture for the poorest, leaving the middle class to hold the bag and pay for damn near everything.
Actually, the weak dollar should be helpful to the middle class, as they, on average, have negative savings, and inflation shrinks their debts.
The US has only been free of debt ONCE in its entire history, and it was long before we were any kind of a world power. If national debt saps national power, we couldn't have ever been a superpower... Yet here we are.
You think the F-35 is vulnerable to IEDs?
There is PLENTY of US military tech that is effective against IEDs... Note Humvee heavy armor, Strykers, Tanks, and most importantly, improving technology which allows most personnel to stand well clear of danger, while killing the enemy, with minimal collateral damage. For all the talk about terrorism, the body count of US Soldiers is incredibly small, compared to any other war. 4,000? We had 10X that in the 3 years of the Korean war, which was a success. I don't like the Iraq war in the slightest, but your world view is bordering on paranoid delusions.
That's what happens when you build your house inside a train station...
Los Angeles and Las Vegas are pretty-damn-big cities. What's more, the traffic traveling between the two on a regular basis is enormous, and the length of the route in addition to the congestion means getting people out of their cars could be a HUGE win.
Yes, but that was just a gimmick... A "test" run in an attempt to set the record. It would be extremely impractical to try and move passengers on a regular basis at that speed... so they don't. A maglev, on the other hand, actually WILL run at 300MPH in day-to-day service.
Gambling in Atlantic City didn't slow down Vegas. The expansion of tribal gambling didn't slow down Vegas. More gambling in CA won't do it either... It has become the high-class "adult" amusement-park to the world.
Don't be so sure. Cops are very fond of stopping out-of-state drivers for even the most trivial of reasons.
After all, if you're driving and not flying cross-country, you MUST be a drug mule. And what are you going to do, drive several hundred miles out of your way to come back and challenge a ticket?
With the latest DNA retention laws, it won't be long before every speeding ticket gets you a cavity search, fingerprinted, and swabbed.
The DMCA explicitly allows decryption technology for things like "interoperability"... Since you can't play DVDs on eg. Linux/BSD any other way, it should be okay. The legality of libdvdcss has never been challenged.
Reasons NOT to download movies from the internet:
1) Release groups suck. I've never seen ONE decent rip of a DVD, EVER! Idiots that encode them use crappy apps that cause nasty ghosts. How that can happen when encoding from fully-progressive DVDs, I don't even know... They downscale the resolution dramatically to try and make up for their utter lack of video encoding knowledge... It's not uncommon for VCDs to look better than the hatchet job DVD-rips most people do.
2) I can do 2-pass encoding from the DVD in much less time than it takes to download the same film over my DSL connection... and mine will look infinitely better.
3) Upgrading to a higher-speed connection would cost more than my entire Netflix subscription, and still might not increase download speeds significantly.
4) It's easy to find new releases online, and not too difficult to find older blockbusters and award winners. It's quite a bit more difficult to find cult films, independent films, and older pretty-good but overlooked films. Netflix has almost ALL of them, any time you want them. Good luck getting eg. Hell Comes To Frogtown, Canadian Bacon, etc.
5) Downloading movies you don't own is letter-of-the-law illegal. Making a copy of a DVD you have rented is just a bit on the legal side of the grey area... You are allowed to indefinitely time-shift rented DVDs just as you are with TV programs. Nobody wants to talk about this terribly inconvenient fact, however.