You need a special tool for a lot of cars to service or replace or upgrade the brakes. Or the springs and shocks. AutoZone lends 'em out for free, though.
Bah. Just find a local club. There's always a few wrenchers, and if you're a member clubs will often hold "install days" where you can get stuff installed for free or for the price of a few beers (or sodas, if you're like me and you don't drink). I have some minor additions to make to my 2000 Golf that I'm going to get done at that time, with some work done by me, some by others.
My club's next one is in about 2-3 weeks. And as long as the job's done right, your dealer can't yell at you. (Also by law the Magnuson-Moss Act blocks dealers from voiding your entire warranty, just for whatever part is out of spec and was not properly serviced. If I get someone to work on part A, and they do it right, the dealer can't complain, nor can they void any warranty on part B.)
Join a local club (find one through the regional forums on http://www.vwvortex.com) and make friends with the members. Someone will have this tool.
I've already saved the $100 "you had a momentary sensor blip" stealership idiot fee once! That alone was worth the $15 I've spent so far in membership fees as a founding member, plus I also saved a bundle on getting a suspension installed, plus I'll save a bundle more with future mods and some minor fix-it stuff on the next club "install day" coming up in two weeks.
I have a 2000 Golf. For other makes, I'm sure similar tools exist, so try looking for enthusiast websites for you car.
The battery box cover is designed to pop open so you can get at the battery terminals. (I drive a 2000 Golf, so I know.) It's right behind the car's left headlight. Lift up that cover and the battery, terminals, and power leads are nicely protected under it. It may be in a slightly different place on different models, but the Golf, Jetta, and New Beetle are all based on the same platform, so that's where to look for those, at least. In the Passat, it is probably in the same place, but I'm not sure.
The battery is in the same place in the original VW Beetle. They were prone to having the same thing happen -- and the rear seats of the time were filled with flammable material! (straw, or something like that, I think; been a long time since I looked up exactly what.)
Hondas are fantastic. I'm a VW owner myself (2000 Golf) and love it, but my parents drive nothing but Hondas and they are superb. Mom just got an '04 CR-V. We all love it. I'm confident those cars will last 15 years each, at least. (The other one is an '88 Accord LX-i, I drove it for a few years -- it's great; you do have to watch out for the headlight wiring eventually fraying due to the pop-up headlight eventually wearing it out. The dealer will fix it by rerouting the wiring, for a very reasonable price. Also be sure to get the moonroof drain channels de-clogged every so often by pouring a mix of bleach and water down them.)
We need a concept car for this? That's what seat covers are for.
Seats with covers changeable to match my outfit
I have black seats. If I didn't have black seats, I'd have grey seats. Black and grey go with anything. But IT'S A CAR, NOT A DRESS. I get in the car to go somewhere. If I wear something nice, it has nothing to do with what the car looks like.
Auto-adjusting seats and pedals
Fantastic. I want this. My seat goes up and down and back and forth and the back tilts up and down, and the steering column goes up and down and in and out, but why can't I move the pedals back and forth? It's been done, and I'm short and I could really, really use that feature. Where is it?! Oh, and why can't I adjust the seatbelt more? I have to use cheap plastic adjusters to keep it off my neck, since a seatbelt on the neck is unsafe and uncomfortable.
Back seats that fold down only when needed
Well, that can be interesting, but I can either leave my seats folded down for carrying large stuff or just put stuff on the seats. Does this give me any more room than just leaving the seats as they are?
Hidden umbrella
Now that I like. I'm not sure where mine is and it's raining like crazy outside. I need to get one of those ultra-small foldable ones and stow it in the CD changer cubbyhole.
Welded-shut hood
Now this is stupid. Their justification is that people don't want to open the hood except when they want to refill washer fluid or check the oil. So they just want to put in a smaller hatch for that. Um... okay. So what's wrong with having one single hood that allows access to the engine AND allows refilling of vital fluids? I like being able to check my engine's condition and refill things and do whatever I want to it, like reverse VW's stupid decontenting (the car didn't come with OEM fog lights but it has them anyway, screw you VW). You're stupid if you can't see the big blue-colored flap for the washer fluid tank that also has the standard 'washer fluid' symbol stamped into it. Same with the oil filler cap which has a large picture of an oil container on it. Make things easy for me to find, but DON'T mess with my ability to do whatever I want to the car I own.
Automatically notices if something's wrong and contacts garage
That's what the "check engine" light (also called MIL) is for. It lights up if something is wrong and I need to get it fixed. But I'll do it on my own good time (I'll have a a local VW club member bring their scanner tool to the next meeting, or just borrow it from them, find out what the car thinks is wrong, and call a shop of MY choosing if it's something serious requiring a mechanic to fix; last time the light came on it was a momentary sensor failure; a shop would have charged me $100 to tell me that and clear the code.)
Ponytail-proof headrest
Good idea in theory, for people who may need an extra bit of room for that or any other reason, but I bet it looks really stupid. I often wear my hair in a ponytail, and I didn't think it was bad enough to require this sort of thing...
Never to go into production
THANK GOODNESS.
Other interesting tidbits
But many of the ideas hatched by the female think-tank may still appear in more conventional Volvos, as well as in other cars within the group.
Volvo is a subsidiary of Ford, and the Swedish carmaker's idiosyncratic insistence on practicality and safety seems to be spreading within the group.
Take the new Mondeo which is to be built on the Volvo S60 platform.
The decision was apparently taken after Volvo refused to accept plans to use a Mazda platform across the group since it did not live up to its safety standards.
VW does. This is why many components in the engine bay are hard to get to (changing a headlight bulb i n the 4th-generation Golf/Jetta requires small, nimble hands if you don't take the entire headlight assembly off, which requires taking the front bumper and grille off.) Fortunately, I have small hands and know how to do all that. Even more fortunately, I've gotten good at replacing the bulbs without taking the lights out.
The problem is, by blocking Windows machines from installing updates, they're contributing to the virus/worm problem.
I don't think you can change the key for XP Corporate since it thinks it's already registered at install time and the form to change to a different reg key never appears in the 'out of box' app. Or di I miss something?
Actually, it's not the software that's the real problem. Anybody who knows orbital mechanics can figure it out. The 'problem' is certain types of data about whatever the shuttle is launching to intercept. I honestly don't know if the data's still available or not, but it's not the software itself that is worrisome.
And I bet you could find similar content elsewhere. When Spaceflightnow.com started talking about going reg (for pay, to view quicktimes), I emailed them and pointed out that the content was already paid for and generated by taxpayers (I'm a US citizen, and most of the stuff they cover in video reports is US government work) and they might not get a lot of people to pay (including me) and they did it anyway. Seems they don't pay much attention to the opinion of actual readers who care to take the time to write in.
So I get the same content from the NASA website, which I pay for as part of my yearly taxes.
Perceived value is thus partly affected by availability of the same content elsewhere and whether users feel they're being unfairly charged for something that really should be free (e.g. is a public resource of sorts.)
I seem to remember netscape once supposedly being not-free for non-educational/student use. I never paid, being an actual student at the time. Eventually it went free, but even then, people still gradually quit using it and its successors.
Or did I misread the licensing/info pages way back when?
I don't subscribe to a physical paper ("I don't want to waste paper and have a messy house, mom") yet my parents are always surprised when I say I've seen stuff in the local paper. Why? Because I read all the papers online. More up to date, no mess, I can e-mail articles to people, and I read more specialized sources for my interests (sci/tech/space) than available in the paper, etc.
But, to be honest, there are enough freely-available news sources right now that I don't know that I'd pay for a source unless it was absolutely unique and not duplicated anywhere else. And in fact a lot of news aggregator sites (fark.com comes to mind as I found their copy of this rule just this weekend) won't accept links to sites requiring registration because enough people just won't register if they don't have to as long as free sources are available.
So I have to wonder if eventually some sites won't start "going free" as an incentive to get readers, if too many start driving people away because they find the reg requirement too intrusive. I don't mind taking surveys for the kinds of things they ask (salary, occupuation, etc)... as long as it's voluntary. Maybe papers could randomly pop up such surveys in separate windows, occasionally, when someone tries to view a story - but not penalize them if they just close it. Voluntarily-filled-out surveys are also more likely, I think, to be filled out honestly.
This is not a flame -- it's a general query -- I signed up for a washingtonpost account today after not having gotten around to it for months. The registration didn't seem all that nosy -- the NYT's is worse (not that I put in any personal info they could trace, and they got the spambait yahoo address, not one I actually read). Why do people feel WP's reg is intrusive?
"Bad" is demanding all kinds of stuff like salary info, addresses, yadda yadda... while the WP asked about occupation (I chose "Other" for all of them) I don't think it asked about salaries. If it did, I've honestly forgotten - I don't pay too close attention to that kind of form other than making sure the marketing stuff is all turned off before submitting the form.
The BBC is fantastic. It has a much more broad range of stories and there seems (to me at least) to be a lot less bias in their stories. And there are NO ADS! (I am guessing that the cost of running the site is covered by TV licenses, though since I'm in the US, I'm not sure on this.) I can't see why having a resource like that is a bad thing...... though when they write "Nasa" and not "NASA" it gets me wanting to poke them a bit.:)
Looks like yet another crappy search engine for me. I think the URL is wrong...?
Anyone know where I can get Elton John concerts? I've been looking without any luck. MP3, ogg, whatever-that-lossless-format-is-called, etc., I don't mind what format they are in as long as it's not WMA or RealAudio.
The post wasn't meant to make that kind of judgment (i.e. I did not intend to state a specific view on the laws being discussed in those debates.) It was, instead, meant to say that I can understand why people might make that comparison, if they believe that the laws in question are unjust.
But I will say that there's no yes or no answer here, and different people will answer differently. Copyright itself is important (I don't think it should be abolished), but the extremely long term of modern copyright rules doesn't seem quite 'right'. There is going to be debate over that issue for a long time to come.
The civil rights movement was about protest, peaceably, against laws that were widely seen as unjust. So is this. If you feel a law is wrong, disobey it -- as long as no one else actually gets harmed -- and be prepared to suffer the consequences, but make sure that your experiences get widely publicized as examples of how laws are used to justify things that morally seem wrong.
Change takes time (a lot happened during the civil rights movement) and a lot of people went to jail for what they did, but in the end, the protests worked. Just because the issues aren't as, er, black and white (pun semi-intended!) doesn't mean some level of comparison isn't valid.
If no one protests when bad laws are passed, then not only will those bad laws stay on the books but even more bad laws will be passed in the future since it can be 'gotten away with' by those who want to push said laws through.
They don't, as far as I know, but I'm a lefty who uses the mouse with the right hand and always has, so it's not a problem for me. In fact, I like it that way -- I can write with one hand and use the mouse (and thus my UI) with the other.
I have the Cordless MouseMan Optical at home, and the (now no longer made) MouseMan Dual Optical at work, which has the same case that the cordless mouse does (it just has a cord instead of a battery compartment.) It's just about perfect, and all the buttons are recognized by OS X without installing additional drivers.
I don't really care for their new designs -- I tried one for a few minutes, courtesy of a friend who bought the Bluetooth model for his new Aluminum Powerbook -- and am perfectly happy to use the mice I already have.
Slashdot Mirror
You need a special tool for a lot of cars to service or replace or upgrade the brakes. Or the springs and shocks. AutoZone lends 'em out for free, though.
Bah. Just find a local club. There's always a few wrenchers, and if you're a member clubs will often hold "install days" where you can get stuff installed for free or for the price of a few beers (or sodas, if you're like me and you don't drink). I have some minor additions to make to my 2000 Golf that I'm going to get done at that time, with some work done by me, some by others.
My club's next one is in about 2-3 weeks. And as long as the job's done right, your dealer can't yell at you. (Also by law the Magnuson-Moss Act blocks dealers from voiding your entire warranty, just for whatever part is out of spec and was not properly serviced. If I get someone to work on part A, and they do it right, the dealer can't complain, nor can they void any warranty on part B.)
For VW/Audi owners:
http://www.ross-tech.com
Join a local club (find one through the regional forums on http://www.vwvortex.com) and make friends with the members. Someone will have this tool.
I've already saved the $100 "you had a momentary sensor blip" stealership idiot fee once! That alone was worth the $15 I've spent so far in membership fees as a founding member, plus I also saved a bundle on getting a suspension installed, plus I'll save a bundle more with future mods and some minor fix-it stuff on the next club "install day" coming up in two weeks.
I have a 2000 Golf. For other makes, I'm sure similar tools exist, so try looking for enthusiast websites for you car.
The battery box cover is designed to pop open so you can get at the battery terminals. (I drive a 2000 Golf, so I know.) It's right behind the car's left headlight. Lift up that cover and the battery, terminals, and power leads are nicely protected under it. It may be in a slightly different place on different models, but the Golf, Jetta, and New Beetle are all based on the same platform, so that's where to look for those, at least. In the Passat, it is probably in the same place, but I'm not sure.
The battery is in the same place in the original VW Beetle. They were prone to having the same thing happen -- and the rear seats of the time were filled with flammable material! (straw, or something like that, I think; been a long time since I looked up exactly what.)
Hondas are fantastic. I'm a VW owner myself (2000 Golf) and love it, but my parents drive nothing but Hondas and they are superb. Mom just got an '04 CR-V. We all love it. I'm confident those cars will last 15 years each, at least. (The other one is an '88 Accord LX-i, I drove it for a few years -- it's great; you do have to watch out for the headlight wiring eventually fraying due to the pop-up headlight eventually wearing it out. The dealer will fix it by rerouting the wiring, for a very reasonable price. Also be sure to get the moonroof drain channels de-clogged every so often by pouring a mix of bleach and water down them.)
Seat covers removable for cleaning
We need a concept car for this? That's what seat covers are for.
Seats with covers changeable to match my outfit
I have black seats. If I didn't have black seats, I'd have grey seats. Black and grey go with anything. But IT'S A CAR, NOT A DRESS. I get in the car to go somewhere. If I wear something nice, it has nothing to do with what the car looks like.
Auto-adjusting seats and pedals
Fantastic. I want this. My seat goes up and down and back and forth and the back tilts up and down, and the steering column goes up and down and in and out, but why can't I move the pedals back and forth? It's been done, and I'm short and I could really, really use that feature. Where is it?! Oh, and why can't I adjust the seatbelt more? I have to use cheap plastic adjusters to keep it off my neck, since a seatbelt on the neck is unsafe and uncomfortable.
Back seats that fold down only when needed
Well, that can be interesting, but I can either leave my seats folded down for carrying large stuff or just put stuff on the seats. Does this give me any more room than just leaving the seats as they are?
Hidden umbrella
Now that I like. I'm not sure where mine is and it's raining like crazy outside. I need to get one of those ultra-small foldable ones and stow it in the CD changer cubbyhole.
Welded-shut hood
Now this is stupid. Their justification is that people don't want to open the hood except when they want to refill washer fluid or check the oil. So they just want to put in a smaller hatch for that. Um... okay. So what's wrong with having one single hood that allows access to the engine AND allows refilling of vital fluids? I like being able to check my engine's condition and refill things and do whatever I want to it, like reverse VW's stupid decontenting (the car didn't come with OEM fog lights but it has them anyway, screw you VW). You're stupid if you can't see the big blue-colored flap for the washer fluid tank that also has the standard 'washer fluid' symbol stamped into it. Same with the oil filler cap which has a large picture of an oil container on it. Make things easy for me to find, but DON'T mess with my ability to do whatever I want to the car I own.
Automatically notices if something's wrong and contacts garage
That's what the "check engine" light (also called MIL) is for. It lights up if something is wrong and I need to get it fixed. But I'll do it on my own good time (I'll have a a local VW club member bring their scanner tool to the next meeting, or just borrow it from them, find out what the car thinks is wrong, and call a shop of MY choosing if it's something serious requiring a mechanic to fix; last time the light came on it was a momentary sensor failure; a shop would have charged me $100 to tell me that and clear the code.)
Ponytail-proof headrest
Good idea in theory, for people who may need an extra bit of room for that or any other reason, but I bet it looks really stupid. I often wear my hair in a ponytail, and I didn't think it was bad enough to require this sort of thing...
Never to go into production
THANK GOODNESS.
Other interesting tidbits
But many of the ideas hatched by the female think-tank may still appear in more conventional Volvos, as well as in other cars within the group.
Volvo is a subsidiary of Ford, and the Swedish carmaker's idiosyncratic insistence on practicality and safety seems to be spreading within the group.
Take the new Mondeo which is to be built on the Volvo S60 platform.
The decision was apparently taken after Volvo refused to accept plans to use a Mazda platform across the group since it did not live up to its safety standards.
Yay!
VW does. This is why many components in the engine bay are hard to get to (changing a headlight bulb i n the 4th-generation Golf/Jetta requires small, nimble hands if you don't take the entire headlight assembly off, which requires taking the front bumper and grille off.) Fortunately, I have small hands and know how to do all that. Even more fortunately, I've gotten good at replacing the bulbs without taking the lights out.
Where are the flying cars!? I was promised flying cars!!
Hell, I'd spend $40K to get my 2000 VW Golf to start flying! Even though the car itself is sold new these days for less than half that much.
Why don't I see amy flying cars!? Why, why, why??
Ah. (I'm actually a Mac user, but that does put some curiosity to rest.) Thanks!
The problem is, by blocking Windows machines from installing updates, they're contributing to the virus/worm problem.
I don't think you can change the key for XP Corporate since it thinks it's already registered at install time and the form to change to a different reg key never appears in the 'out of box' app. Or di I miss something?
They already have blocked updates.
Don't get me started on the crappy cold patch they are using on the 40-to-Kingshighway-North exit ramp!!
Actually, it's not the software that's the real problem. Anybody who knows orbital mechanics can figure it out. The 'problem' is certain types of data about whatever the shuttle is launching to intercept. I honestly don't know if the data's still available or not, but it's not the software itself that is worrisome.
If you find any, please contact me? I work in an EM lab too (I'm not kidding) and this could be very, very useful.
And I bet you could find similar content elsewhere. When Spaceflightnow.com started talking about going reg (for pay, to view quicktimes), I emailed them and pointed out that the content was already paid for and generated by taxpayers (I'm a US citizen, and most of the stuff they cover in video reports is US government work) and they might not get a lot of people to pay (including me) and they did it anyway. Seems they don't pay much attention to the opinion of actual readers who care to take the time to write in.
So I get the same content from the NASA website, which I pay for as part of my yearly taxes.
Perceived value is thus partly affected by availability of the same content elsewhere and whether users feel they're being unfairly charged for something that really should be free (e.g. is a public resource of sorts.)
I seem to remember netscape once supposedly being not-free for non-educational/student use. I never paid, being an actual student at the time. Eventually it went free, but even then, people still gradually quit using it and its successors.
Or did I misread the licensing/info pages way back when?
I don't subscribe to a physical paper ("I don't want to waste paper and have a messy house, mom") yet my parents are always surprised when I say I've seen stuff in the local paper. Why? Because I read all the papers online. More up to date, no mess, I can e-mail articles to people, and I read more specialized sources for my interests (sci/tech/space) than available in the paper, etc.
... as long as it's voluntary. Maybe papers could randomly pop up such surveys in separate windows, occasionally, when someone tries to view a story - but not penalize them if they just close it. Voluntarily-filled-out surveys are also more likely, I think, to be filled out honestly.
But, to be honest, there are enough freely-available news sources right now that I don't know that I'd pay for a source unless it was absolutely unique and not duplicated anywhere else. And in fact a lot of news aggregator sites (fark.com comes to mind as I found their copy of this rule just this weekend) won't accept links to sites requiring registration because enough people just won't register if they don't have to as long as free sources are available.
So I have to wonder if eventually some sites won't start "going free" as an incentive to get readers, if too many start driving people away because they find the reg requirement too intrusive. I don't mind taking surveys for the kinds of things they ask (salary, occupuation, etc)
This is not a flame -- it's a general query -- I signed up for a washingtonpost account today after not having gotten around to it for months. The registration didn't seem all that nosy -- the NYT's is worse (not that I put in any personal info they could trace, and they got the spambait yahoo address, not one I actually read). Why do people feel WP's reg is intrusive?
... while the WP asked about occupation (I chose "Other" for all of them) I don't think it asked about salaries. If it did, I've honestly forgotten - I don't pay too close attention to that kind of form other than making sure the marketing stuff is all turned off before submitting the form.
"Bad" is demanding all kinds of stuff like salary info, addresses, yadda yadda
The BBC is fantastic. It has a much more broad range of stories and there seems (to me at least) to be a lot less bias in their stories. And there are NO ADS! (I am guessing that the cost of running the site is covered by TV licenses, though since I'm in the US, I'm not sure on this.) I can't see why having a resource like that is a bad thing ... ... though when they write "Nasa" and not "NASA" it gets me wanting to poke them a bit. :)
Rosetta hasn't launched yet. It's just been put aboard its booster, that's all. :p Not even close enough for government work.
Looks like yet another crappy search engine for me. I think the URL is wrong...?
Anyone know where I can get Elton John concerts? I've been looking without any luck. MP3, ogg, whatever-that-lossless-format-is-called, etc., I don't mind what format they are in as long as it's not WMA or RealAudio.
The post wasn't meant to make that kind of judgment (i.e. I did not intend to state a specific view on the laws being discussed in those debates.) It was, instead, meant to say that I can understand why people might make that comparison, if they believe that the laws in question are unjust.
But I will say that there's no yes or no answer here, and different people will answer differently. Copyright itself is important (I don't think it should be abolished), but the extremely long term of modern copyright rules doesn't seem quite 'right'. There is going to be debate over that issue for a long time to come.
And why shouldn't the comparison be made?
The civil rights movement was about protest, peaceably, against laws that were widely seen as unjust. So is this. If you feel a law is wrong, disobey it -- as long as no one else actually gets harmed -- and be prepared to suffer the consequences, but make sure that your experiences get widely publicized as examples of how laws are used to justify things that morally seem wrong.
Change takes time (a lot happened during the civil rights movement) and a lot of people went to jail for what they did, but in the end, the protests worked. Just because the issues aren't as, er, black and white (pun semi-intended!) doesn't mean some level of comparison isn't valid.
If no one protests when bad laws are passed, then not only will those bad laws stay on the books but even more bad laws will be passed in the future since it can be 'gotten away with' by those who want to push said laws through.
They don't, as far as I know, but I'm a lefty who uses the mouse with the right hand and always has, so it's not a problem for me. In fact, I like it that way -- I can write with one hand and use the mouse (and thus my UI) with the other.
I have the Cordless MouseMan Optical at home, and the (now no longer made) MouseMan Dual Optical at work, which has the same case that the cordless mouse does (it just has a cord instead of a battery compartment.) It's just about perfect, and all the buttons are recognized by OS X without installing additional drivers.
I don't really care for their new designs -- I tried one for a few minutes, courtesy of a friend who bought the Bluetooth model for his new Aluminum Powerbook -- and am perfectly happy to use the mice I already have.