This is not true, and is something that the Prius specifically addresses, by having a bladder inside of the fuel tank.
What about this bladder is specific to hybrids?
In point of fact that bladder was invented for conventional gasoline cars and really, all gasoline cars should have them, as one of their primary functions is to reduce the risk of explosion. They are available off the self if you wish to retrofit.
If Pintos had had such bladders they would not have blown up even with the design flaw of the extruding bolt.
Perhaps you are not grasping the fact that I am arguing that a conventionally powered car could be made that is superior to the Prius, as well as that a hybrid could be made superior to the Prius.
I am not concerning myself with what is available right now on your dealer's lot. I'm am concerned with what I know could be on your dealer's lot, or what you could do to modify what is on your dealer's lot.
A Volvo executive is currently driving around in a conventional diesel car that gets 70 mpg on cooking oil purchased directly off the shelves of a supermarket. It represents no particular advance in technology. It's straight out of the book stuff.
But you cannot buy one, nor do they have any intention of making it available.
All three are exactly the same aerodynamically as the non-hybrid vehicle, all three weigh considerably more (I think it's around 300 lbs for the Escape) than the non-hybrids, yet all 3 get better fuel mileage
What are the comparative performance figures?
produce significantly less tailpipe emissions
As I have alluded to elsewhere I am not particularly interested in tailpipe emmissions. Those are smoke and mirrors when promoted as reduction of pollution.
As many folks have mentioned, hybrids get much of the economy gains by using engines tuned for fuel economy
Yes, I have mentioned that myself. That is one of the primary points of a hybrid. The other being to reduce the drivetrain to the absolute minimum.
Granted, you could make the engine and CVT changes to a non-hyrbid and probably get as good or possibly even better fuel economy. ..
Exactly!
. ..but your aggregate tail pipe emissions would likely be higher
I am not particularly interested in tailpipe emmissions. I am interested in reducing pollution.
. ..your driving experience would probably be worse.
Nonesense.
And please note that the post to which you are responding was only intended to address the issue of regenerative breaking. I have written about other issues elsewhere over the years, which I have done because I like hybrids.
No evaporative emissions means that they have fewer emissions while being driven than a typical gasoline car has while just sitting.
A gasoline car while just sitting emits nothing.
Maybe I chose a bad car to compare against
Yes, maybe you did.
You are comparing cars as a consumer. Looking at what you see. I am comparing cars as an engineer. Looking at what can be made and what affect that making has.
You are saying, "This is what I am offered."
I am saying, "This is what you could have been offered."
. ..aside from the creation/recycling. Is that so bad?
Rather. In fact, horrid.
What about hybrids is so bad, in your estimation?
You missunderstand me, as most people do when I question the validity of particular hybrids. I love hybrids, but if I want the kind of hybrid I love I have to make it, because I cannot buy it. This also makes me aware of the engineering tradeoffs involved and there are always engineering tradeoffs. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
We are of course, only after a cheaper lunch, but because the lunch is actually cheaper, not because someone else is paying a buck to reduce the cost of our own lunch two bits.
And I have ridden my bike to work quite a few times, thank you.
Good on ya, and you're welcome.
I haven't actually done any work on electric cars in about 5 years. I make bicycles now.
However my next design project is intended to be a hybrid.
The prius gains more from ENGINE BRAKING than physical regenerative brakes. When you are coasting, your turning the genny.
Oh, and this is regenerative braking It doesn't matter which particular system the braking comes from.
The best way to achieve regenerative braking in an electric is to use hub mounted motors and reverse their polarity when you wish to slow down, turning the driving motors into resistive generators.
All the marketing hype and perceived value to a Prius has always been centered on city traffic.
Where cars themselves are especially stupid, and if you look at the packaging of a Prius it is obviously not a city commuter model but is equiped as a long range family hauler, because that is what people expect and will put their money down for.
. ..my average 10 minute drive
You are efficiency and environmentally concious and you drive ten minutes to work, including two to three minutes stopped at lights and a train crossing?
I would be ashamed of such an admission and all of your Prius, used as such, represents nothing but fuel waste in the first place.
the Prius gasoline engine TURNS OFF. So typically, I spend 2 to 3 minutes of my average 10 minute drive not poluting at all.
Are you aware of the fuel and emmissions costs of simply turning on a gasoline engine? They can exceed those of an engine idling for a minute or two. You would gain more benefit from this is you commuted on the Long Island Expressway, not in your short commute.
Also, a very simple engineering fact is that the amount of polution released in the atmosphere is directly related to the amount of fuel that is combusted.
No, this is intuitively obvious, but it is a simple engineering fact, that is to say empirical, that it is not always true, because a gasoline burning engine does not operate with a flat burning efficiency curve.
. ..is combusing less fuel because some of the energy contributing to the work is coming from a battery.
Which energy was produced by the elves that live under my bed?
Thus the Prius will be expelling less waste (pollution) than the other vehicle.
From its tailpipe. This is not at all the same thing as saying that its use expells less pollution. You have fallen prey to the smoke and mirrors. You are expelling that added pollution into my backyard instead of yours. I don't necessarily appreciate your treating me in such a fashion.
Even if that difference is less than 1%, it's still better than nothing.
Have you ever driven a conventional gas engineed car designed and tuned to your particular commute and measured it's fuel efficiency and emmissions against the Prius?
You are, I'm afraid, one of these people who see certain gross functions of the vehicle and translate that into a feeling that you are coming out ahead, without actually knowing that you are.
Your use is faith based.
You can crunch all the numbers you want on emmisions and functioning of the Prius system. ..
The Prius does not reduce emmisions. It reduces emmisions at the tailpipe compared to a conventional system.
When you consider the emmisions cost of the entire system, production, energy production/transmission and disposal, the current commercially available hybrids are unmitigated environmental disasters hidden by ignorance, smoke and mirrors.
How to get 10 mpg better milage while reducing emmisions from a standard, gasoline burning Accord:
Regear and retune the engine to give maximum efficiency while producing the same level of performance as a Prius.
Notice in the above post that the driver achieved his milage in the Prius through modification of his driving technique.
As a demonstration I once achieved 40 mpg from an completely box stock, 1976 Ford Fiesta on the open road simply by driving with my mind on efficiency rather than performance. If I had modified the car to run in this manner innately it would have reduced its emmisions greatly as well.
The Prius owner quoted above is an efficiency minded fellow who drove his car with his mind on driving as efficiently as possible. It is a biased anecdote.
Gas powered CRX drivers reported getting 60 mpg with low overall emmisions. The cars were simply tuned for economy rather than performance as well as being smaller and lighter than a Prius. It did not sell well, because it lacked performance. Buyers of this car, and the buyers of the Prius, are innately people who are willing to sacrifice performance for efficiency and the purported benefits of the hybrid system come mostly from this sacrifice of performance, not from the hybrid system.
Give me a blank sheet of paper and I will design you a vehicle that can sustain 30 mph on only 60 watts of power, is fueled by pizza and exhausts relatively small amounts of CO2 balanced by the carbon cycle.
But you would not likely buy such a vehicle because it would not make you happy.
The current line of hybrids are designed to make people happy by giving them the impression that they are achieving reduced fuel use and emmissions over some other system.
As an engineer I love electrics and hybrids and have been involved with them since the mid 70s. They are elegant. I appreciate that elegance.
But the claims surrounding the current crop of hybrids are faith based, not engineering based.
Give me a Prius shell and I will build you a conventional diesel in it that gets 70 mpg with no loss of performance.
That is the point. Not whether the Prius gets good milage, but whether some other nonhybrid design could get equal or better milage.
The Prius gets better milage than an Accord because it is smaller, lighter and with less aerodynamic drag than the Accord, not because it is a hybrid with regenerative braking.
To compare the cost/benefit of the hybrid system in a Prius you do not compare it to an Accord. You compare it to another Prius using some other drive system.
If I may take the liberty of quoting from an electric car builder with 30 years of experience and founder of the Electric Car Club:
. .."while braking the car, you can slow it down by converting the forward motion of the car into electricity that can be redirected to the batteries. This is known as regenerative braking. From my perspective, the added weight and complexity of the regenerative braking system, plus the low absorption efficiency rate of conventional batteries, ultimately provides for little if any gain in range for the vehicle. In the case of long range driving, with little braking required, the added weight of the regenerative braking system, probably reduces range somewhat."
Yes, regenerative braking can add to the efficiency of hybrids under certain conditions they are not a primary reason for the efficiency of the system and may under other circumstances actually degrade it, even with the advances made since the above was written.
A properly designed hybrid gains its efficiency through reducing the weight and friction of the conventional drivetrain and by operating the fuel engine at a constant rate tuned for maximum efficiency.
The current line of commercially available hybrid cars are not properly designed, their designs being determined by various legal, political, social and marketing reasons, not engineering.
They actually gain what little added efficiency they possess through reducing weight and aerodynamic drag in ways that are perfectly applicable to a fuel powered vehicle. They are compelled to marketing these cars as gaining added efficiency through regenerative braking because that is the one feature they can point to that is unique to their vehicles, not because it actually works as well as it is promoted.
Give me a Prius shell and I can turn it into a conventional fuel powered car with equal or greater fuel economy without giving up, and perhaps gaining, performance.
If past experience in putting forth this inforamation is any guide, I am about to recieve any number of retorts telling me I have to be an idiot to believe that regenerative braking does not add to the efficiency of a vehicle, because the point seems obvious.
But the point is not obvious, which you would know if you had ever actually designed and built one of these things as I have.
Regenerative braking can add to the efficiency of a particular vehicle under certain circumstances, but says nothing about whether another vehicle can be designed and built with greater efficiency without using regenerative braking.
And I'm sorry, but cars like the Prius are relatively crude designs whose efficiency could be increased by converting them to conventional diesels (or even gas) without the benefit of regenerative braking, especially in highway cruising mode where hauling the system around is just a leech on the fuel economy.
And that's just the way it is.
A proper hybrid never runs on anything but electric power, using the fuel engine solely to turn a generator which drives the electric motors directly and the batteries function as a reserve energy sink, not the prime energy source.
And even in this kind of hybrid regenerative braking can result in a net loss of fuel economy if you are primarily driving it at constant speed on the highway, because you don't do much braking in the first place.
That's ok, so has the hybrid itself. Dr. Ferdinand Porsche's first design, circa 1900, was a hybrid that was even perspicacious enough to use hub mounted motors. With hub mounted motors you have to do little more than reverse the polarity when the brakes are applied to acheive regenerative braking.
The problem with American patriotism is not so much that it is false, the Russian plan of patriotism is false as well, but that it is hypocritical.
The Russian plan follows its own rules. Be a patriot as the current rulers define it, or we will shoot you. It's a simple plan. It is applied in a straightforward manner. It doesn't matter that the patriotism is false because truth or falsity have nothing to do with the plan. Many even choose to oppose the plan and get shot.
Whereas America holds forth certain ideals to oppose the Russian plan, but follows it anyway through the power exerted by a proxy. This is what makes it politically a joke.
Be a patriot as the current rulers define it, or the newspapers will shoot you.
Almost any man can steel himself to face a firing squad, death is the end of all woes after all, but it takes an extra ordinary man to stand before a newspaper without turning moral coward and hypocrite.
KFG
Re:Anecdotal evidence...
on
Spam is Dead
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Wtf is a "Penis Launcher" anyway?
Hold on to your pants, buddy, you're about to find out:
We teach them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter--exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place--the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan. - Mark Twain, a Biography
The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice--and always has been. - Mark Twain's Notebook
[Patriotism]...is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn't a foot of land in the world which doesn't represent the ousting and re-ousting of a longline of successive "owners" who each in turn, as "patriots" with proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of "robbers" who came to steal it and did--and became swelling-hearted patriots in their turn. - Mark Twain's Notebook
We have a bastard Patriotism, a sarcasm, a burlesque; but we have no such thing as a public conscience. Politically we are just a joke. - marginalia written in Clemens' copy of The Future in America; A Search After Realities by H. G. Wells
. ..there will still be another brick doing AC-DC conversion beneath your super tiny designer micro case or nanomac.
Yes. The brick goes by the technical name "battery."
You might have one of those bricks in the brick that goes by the technical name "UPS". . .
Or car, or boat, or airplane, or. . .
Lovely bit of kit. I'll be buying some of these.
And in a lot of ways if you already rely on a UPS it makes more sense to use one of these and run off the UPS as a battery supplied power source than it does to build an AC/DC power source into the computer case.
Slashdot Mirror
So the solution is to not get a license.
Or your nondriver ID.
You want ID? Ya gotta go to the DMV.
KFG
Your question is suspicious.
KFG
This is quite common, if not by law than by contract with the label.
Go independant.
KFG
. . .coming home they got a free ride down the hill...
:)
Well, ya got me there. I certainly couldn't do that in a conventional car, or on my long board.
http://www.gravityseries.com/
KFG
This is not true, and is something that the Prius specifically addresses, by having a bladder inside of the fuel tank.
What about this bladder is specific to hybrids?
In point of fact that bladder was invented for conventional gasoline cars and really, all gasoline cars should have them, as one of their primary functions is to reduce the risk of explosion. They are available off the self if you wish to retrofit.
If Pintos had had such bladders they would not have blown up even with the design flaw of the extruding bolt.
Perhaps you are not grasping the fact that I am arguing that a conventionally powered car could be made that is superior to the Prius, as well as that a hybrid could be made superior to the Prius.
I am not concerning myself with what is available right now on your dealer's lot. I'm am concerned with what I know could be on your dealer's lot, or what you could do to modify what is on your dealer's lot.
A Volvo executive is currently driving around in a conventional diesel car that gets 70 mpg on cooking oil purchased directly off the shelves of a supermarket. It represents no particular advance in technology. It's straight out of the book stuff.
But you cannot buy one, nor do they have any intention of making it available.
KFG
All three are exactly the same aerodynamically as the non-hybrid vehicle, all three weigh considerably more (I think it's around 300 lbs for the Escape) than the non-hybrids, yet all 3 get better fuel mileage
.
.but your aggregate tail pipe emissions would likely be higher
.your driving experience would probably be worse.
What are the comparative performance figures?
produce significantly less tailpipe emissions
As I have alluded to elsewhere I am not particularly interested in tailpipe emmissions. Those are smoke and mirrors when promoted as reduction of pollution.
As many folks have mentioned, hybrids get much of the economy gains by using engines tuned for fuel economy
Yes, I have mentioned that myself. That is one of the primary points of a hybrid. The other being to reduce the drivetrain to the absolute minimum.
Granted, you could make the engine and CVT changes to a non-hyrbid and probably get as good or possibly even better fuel economy. .
Exactly!
. .
I am not particularly interested in tailpipe emmissions. I am interested in reducing pollution.
. .
Nonesense.
And please note that the post to which you are responding was only intended to address the issue of regenerative breaking. I have written about other issues elsewhere over the years, which I have done because I like hybrids.
KFG
No evaporative emissions means that they have fewer emissions while being driven than a typical gasoline car has while just sitting.
.aside from the creation/recycling. Is that so bad?
A gasoline car while just sitting emits nothing.
Maybe I chose a bad car to compare against
Yes, maybe you did.
You are comparing cars as a consumer. Looking at what you see. I am comparing cars as an engineer. Looking at what can be made and what affect that making has.
You are saying, "This is what I am offered."
I am saying, "This is what you could have been offered."
. .
Rather. In fact, horrid.
What about hybrids is so bad, in your estimation?
You missunderstand me, as most people do when I question the validity of particular hybrids. I love hybrids, but if I want the kind of hybrid I love I have to make it, because I cannot buy it. This also makes me aware of the engineering tradeoffs involved and there are always engineering tradeoffs. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
We are of course, only after a cheaper lunch, but because the lunch is actually cheaper, not because someone else is paying a buck to reduce the cost of our own lunch two bits.
And I have ridden my bike to work quite a few times, thank you.
Good on ya, and you're welcome.
I haven't actually done any work on electric cars in about 5 years. I make bicycles now.
However my next design project is intended to be a hybrid.
An electric and human powered vehicle.
KFG
. . .it has NADA to do with copyright - you can copyright a song without registering it with a rights organization.
You can, but you have a right to, because you hold a copyright.
No copyright, no performance right, no performance right collection agencies.
You may, of course, choose not to enforce your rights, but your rights are certainly all about, well, your rights.
KFG
The prius gains more from ENGINE BRAKING than physical regenerative brakes. When you are coasting, your turning the genny.
Oh, and this is regenerative braking It doesn't matter which particular system the braking comes from.
The best way to achieve regenerative braking in an electric is to use hub mounted motors and reverse their polarity when you wish to slow down, turning the driving motors into resistive generators.
KFG
But I would love to have the "normal driving " fuel economy of my prius friend with the same performance as my car.
I canna change the laws of Physics, Cap'n.
Have a chat with Q.
KFG
Rickshaws are powered by rice noodles.
KFG
All the marketing hype and perceived value to a Prius has always been centered on city traffic.
.my average 10 minute drive
.is combusing less fuel because some of the energy contributing to the work is coming from a battery.
.
Where cars themselves are especially stupid, and if you look at the packaging of a Prius it is obviously not a city commuter model but is equiped as a long range family hauler, because that is what people expect and will put their money down for.
. .
You are efficiency and environmentally concious and you drive ten minutes to work, including two to three minutes stopped at lights and a train crossing?
I would be ashamed of such an admission and all of your Prius, used as such, represents nothing but fuel waste in the first place.
the Prius gasoline engine TURNS OFF. So typically, I spend 2 to 3 minutes of my average 10 minute drive not poluting at all.
Are you aware of the fuel and emmissions costs of simply turning on a gasoline engine? They can exceed those of an engine idling for a minute or two. You would gain more benefit from this is you commuted on the Long Island Expressway, not in your short commute.
Also, a very simple engineering fact is that the amount of polution released in the atmosphere is directly related to the amount of fuel that is combusted.
No, this is intuitively obvious, but it is a simple engineering fact, that is to say empirical, that it is not always true, because a gasoline burning engine does not operate with a flat burning efficiency curve.
. .
Which energy was produced by the elves that live under my bed?
Thus the Prius will be expelling less waste (pollution) than the other vehicle.
From its tailpipe. This is not at all the same thing as saying that its use expells less pollution. You have fallen prey to the smoke and mirrors. You are expelling that added pollution into my backyard instead of yours. I don't necessarily appreciate your treating me in such a fashion.
Even if that difference is less than 1%, it's still better than nothing.
Have you ever driven a conventional gas engineed car designed and tuned to your particular commute and measured it's fuel efficiency and emmissions against the Prius?
You are, I'm afraid, one of these people who see certain gross functions of the vehicle and translate that into a feeling that you are coming out ahead, without actually knowing that you are.
Your use is faith based.
You can crunch all the numbers you want on emmisions and functioning of the Prius system. .
Q.E.D.
KFG
The Prius does not reduce emmisions. It reduces emmisions at the tailpipe compared to a conventional system.
When you consider the emmisions cost of the entire system, production, energy production/transmission and disposal, the current commercially available hybrids are unmitigated environmental disasters hidden by ignorance, smoke and mirrors.
How to get 10 mpg better milage while reducing emmisions from a standard, gasoline burning Accord:
Regear and retune the engine to give maximum efficiency while producing the same level of performance as a Prius.
Notice in the above post that the driver achieved his milage in the Prius through modification of his driving technique.
As a demonstration I once achieved 40 mpg from an completely box stock, 1976 Ford Fiesta on the open road simply by driving with my mind on efficiency rather than performance. If I had modified the car to run in this manner innately it would have reduced its emmisions greatly as well.
The Prius owner quoted above is an efficiency minded fellow who drove his car with his mind on driving as efficiently as possible. It is a biased anecdote.
Gas powered CRX drivers reported getting 60 mpg with low overall emmisions. The cars were simply tuned for economy rather than performance as well as being smaller and lighter than a Prius. It did not sell well, because it lacked performance. Buyers of this car, and the buyers of the Prius, are innately people who are willing to sacrifice performance for efficiency and the purported benefits of the hybrid system come mostly from this sacrifice of performance, not from the hybrid system.
Give me a blank sheet of paper and I will design you a vehicle that can sustain 30 mph on only 60 watts of power, is fueled by pizza and exhausts relatively small amounts of CO2 balanced by the carbon cycle.
But you would not likely buy such a vehicle because it would not make you happy.
The current line of hybrids are designed to make people happy by giving them the impression that they are achieving reduced fuel use and emmissions over some other system.
As an engineer I love electrics and hybrids and have been involved with them since the mid 70s. They are elegant. I appreciate that elegance.
But the claims surrounding the current crop of hybrids are faith based, not engineering based.
And people will defend their faith no matter.
KFG
That has nothing to do with the point.
Give me a Prius shell and I will build you a conventional diesel in it that gets 70 mpg with no loss of performance.
That is the point. Not whether the Prius gets good milage, but whether some other nonhybrid design could get equal or better milage.
The Prius gets better milage than an Accord because it is smaller, lighter and with less aerodynamic drag than the Accord, not because it is a hybrid with regenerative braking.
To compare the cost/benefit of the hybrid system in a Prius you do not compare it to an Accord. You compare it to another Prius using some other drive system.
KFG
If I may take the liberty of quoting from an electric car builder with 30 years of experience and founder of the Electric Car Club:
."while braking the car, you can slow it down by converting the forward motion of the car into electricity that can be redirected to the batteries. This is known as regenerative braking. From my perspective, the added weight and complexity of the regenerative braking system, plus the low absorption efficiency rate of conventional batteries, ultimately provides for little if any gain in range for the vehicle. In the case of long range driving, with little braking required, the added weight of the regenerative braking system, probably reduces range somewhat."
. .
Yes, regenerative braking can add to the efficiency of hybrids under certain conditions they are not a primary reason for the efficiency of the system and may under other circumstances actually degrade it, even with the advances made since the above was written.
A properly designed hybrid gains its efficiency through reducing the weight and friction of the conventional drivetrain and by operating the fuel engine at a constant rate tuned for maximum efficiency.
The current line of commercially available hybrid cars are not properly designed, their designs being determined by various legal, political, social and marketing reasons, not engineering.
They actually gain what little added efficiency they possess through reducing weight and aerodynamic drag in ways that are perfectly applicable to a fuel powered vehicle. They are compelled to marketing these cars as gaining added efficiency through regenerative braking because that is the one feature they can point to that is unique to their vehicles, not because it actually works as well as it is promoted.
Give me a Prius shell and I can turn it into a conventional fuel powered car with equal or greater fuel economy without giving up, and perhaps gaining, performance.
If past experience in putting forth this inforamation is any guide, I am about to recieve any number of retorts telling me I have to be an idiot to believe that regenerative braking does not add to the efficiency of a vehicle, because the point seems obvious.
But the point is not obvious, which you would know if you had ever actually designed and built one of these things as I have.
Regenerative braking can add to the efficiency of a particular vehicle under certain circumstances, but says nothing about whether another vehicle can be designed and built with greater efficiency without using regenerative braking.
And I'm sorry, but cars like the Prius are relatively crude designs whose efficiency could be increased by converting them to conventional diesels (or even gas) without the benefit of regenerative braking, especially in highway cruising mode where hauling the system around is just a leech on the fuel economy.
And that's just the way it is.
A proper hybrid never runs on anything but electric power, using the fuel engine solely to turn a generator which drives the electric motors directly and the batteries function as a reserve energy sink, not the prime energy source.
And even in this kind of hybrid regenerative braking can result in a net loss of fuel economy if you are primarily driving it at constant speed on the highway, because you don't do much braking in the first place.
KFG
That's ok, so has the hybrid itself. Dr. Ferdinand Porsche's first design, circa 1900, was a hybrid that was even perspicacious enough to use hub mounted motors. With hub mounted motors you have to do little more than reverse the polarity when the brakes are applied to acheive regenerative braking.
KFG
The problem with American patriotism is not so much that it is false, the Russian plan of patriotism is false as well, but that it is hypocritical.
The Russian plan follows its own rules. Be a patriot as the current rulers define it, or we will shoot you. It's a simple plan. It is applied in a straightforward manner. It doesn't matter that the patriotism is false because truth or falsity have nothing to do with the plan. Many even choose to oppose the plan and get shot.
Whereas America holds forth certain ideals to oppose the Russian plan, but follows it anyway through the power exerted by a proxy. This is what makes it politically a joke.
Be a patriot as the current rulers define it, or the newspapers will shoot you.
Almost any man can steel himself to face a firing squad, death is the end of all woes after all, but it takes an extra ordinary man to stand before a newspaper without turning moral coward and hypocrite.
KFG
Wtf is a "Penis Launcher" anyway?
Hold on to your pants, buddy, you're about to find out:
10
9
8
7
.
.
.
.
KFG
The bigger problem is that I occasional miss e-mails that vanish in the ether.
Because you are not actually receiving less spam. You are seeing less spam because you are filtering it.
The net still sees the whole lot.
Throwing junk snailmail in the trash doesn't mean the carrier didn't have to haul all that shit around and put it in your box.
KFG
Gates and co. would have to have an effective monopoly on email traffic for that to work.
Boy, I bet they never thought of that.
KFG
You Brits are so polite. Around here that would have been dubbed "The Dildo" while it was still just in blueprint.
We already have "The Nipple."
http://www.union.edu/Nott/
KFG
We teach them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter--exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place--the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan.
...is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn't a foot of land in the world which doesn't represent the ousting and re-ousting of a longline of successive "owners" who each in turn, as "patriots" with proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of "robbers" who came to steal it and did--and became swelling-hearted patriots in their turn.
- Mark Twain, a Biography
The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice--and always has been.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
[Patriotism]
- Mark Twain's Notebook
We have a bastard Patriotism, a sarcasm, a burlesque; but we have no such thing as a public conscience. Politically we are just a joke.
- marginalia written in Clemens' copy of The Future in America; A Search After Realities by H. G. Wells
KFG
I could be wrong (it has been known ;-)
I have been wrong a lot of late. About simple things.
Being sick can be as bad as being drunk. I have been rather sick for rather too long.
KFG
. . .there will still be another brick doing AC-DC conversion beneath your super tiny designer micro case or nanomac.
Yes. The brick goes by the technical name "battery."
You might have one of those bricks in the brick that goes by the technical name "UPS". . .
Or car, or boat, or airplane, or. . .
Lovely bit of kit. I'll be buying some of these.
And in a lot of ways if you already rely on a UPS it makes more sense to use one of these and run off the UPS as a battery supplied power source than it does to build an AC/DC power source into the computer case.
KFG
How many trees will I have to tap to power my server?
All of them.
KFG