No kidding. In 1994, the 'web didn't exist and I was doing most of my computing on a REALLY expensive 486SX 25MHz machine. I have a calculator faster than that now.
I bought the HX CVT because my old station wagon broke down beyond cost-effective repair in 2001 and the original Prius had an 8-month waiting list. The hybrid civic didn't exist yet. The HX uses a similar low-emissions high-economy VTEC-e 4-cylinder and has the same mileage-improving emissions-reducing CVT transmission as the hybrid.
I'm the type who would have one if I could have. But what I have is ULEV and rated at 40mpg, and I see a sigificant percentage of that at 35-37.
I probably shouldn't have said "the only ones paying attention" but the general point still stands-- people who buy hybrids are buying to get high gas mileage. They will, of course be watching this feature of their cars closely, and discovering just how unbelieveably stupid the EPA mileage rating system is. (and then incorrectly blaming it on their car's manufacturer) You can't blame Honda or Toyota for their ads with these numbers-- federal law prevents them from using any others. At the absolute worst, the manufacturers are guilty of building really clean cars to get a good fuel economy rating. Kinda like comitting one good deed to get credit for a different one, or something...
To quote the article poster, "It looks like these cars are more hype than help in the battle against pollution and foreign fuel reliance."
This is two separate issues. The first is reducing fuel use, and the second is reducing pollution.
The fuel-use reduction is very real with hybrid cars, but the unfortunate side-effect of EPA mileage ratings is that this seems to be the first time people are realizing just how inaccurate they are. Cars get (on a good day) 75% of their EPA rating, and this includes conventional automobiles. People who by hybrids are, of course, concerned about their mileage, and are the only ones paying this kind of attention to it. So for every 60mpg prius averaging 40mpg, there are hundreds of 24mpg cars averaging 18mpg.
The second issue is pollution. This is harder to check on your own, but if the numbers are to be believed, SULEV/PZEV rating the Prius has is as high as you can get.
The worst part of all of this is that the EPA seems to be using emissions to rate fuel economy, which is going to result in cleaner cars appearing more efficient. From the article, "The 19-year-old EPA tests for city and highway mileage actually gauge vehicle emissions and use that data to derive an estimated fuel-efficiency rating." Call me crazy, but this seems like just about the most retarded way to measure fuel economy I've ever heard. Did it never occur to them to measure the distance driven, and then measure the fuel used?
And just to add my anecdote to everybody else's-- my non-hybrid 2001 civic HX CVT gets 35-37mpg, depending on what I was doing on that particular tank of gas.
Unfortunately, it's been long enough that Duke Nukem Forever jokes are retro. Sure, they were out of style for a while, but now *all* the kids are into it, along with puffy-front mesh trucker hats.
That's about as likely as me sprouting wings and flying off to the moon for a nice afternoon of cheese-tasting.
Of course, Lord of the Rings turned out okay, and boy did I enjoy the moon-cheese that day. So it has now been conclusively proven that movies based on books don't *have* to ruin the story, just that it's overwhelmingly likely.
Unless you're at the back of the plane, and they run out of everything except the basket o' candy, as has happened to me on the last two flights I took. I *would* have paid, but all i could get was a basket of potato chips and candy bars. Not sure how to fix that-- it's an inventory issue that can't be solved unless they carry enough of every choice for everybody, which probably isn't feasible.
I'll take the old method any day, where the food sucked unless you were smart enough to call ahead and ask for the vegetarian meal.
Funny coincidence with your.sig-- I read the book I mentioned as part of a science fiction literature class at Purdue years ago, as preparation for discussion of Phillip K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly."
I am mixing up a couple of different conditions in my previous post. (It has been eight years since I read that book last)
I believe what the article was referring to was prosopagnosia. This condition has people able to tell a face from a vase, but unable to tell one face from another. The condition I was referring to I can't find the proper name for, but is more severe still, and may have been limited to the few cases for which the book I mentioned was named.
While I agree with you about the general "culture of euphemism," as you put it-- I don't think this is one of those times. Face Blindness is not referring to people like you and me who are just lousy at remembering who we met, but rather people with profound neurological disorders who *literally* cannot tell a face from something vaguely facelike, like a vase or a particular arrangement of shadows. This goes far beyond not remembering the guy you met at a convention a year ago-- but rather not even being able to tell the difference between his face and the PDA he was holding.
For a quick read on it, check out The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The things that happen to the poor people in this book as a result of disease, physical damage to the brain, or conditions they were born with are bizarre but definitely interesting.
Good call. I think I have two licenses for the original UT, as well. I'm not sure why that didn't occur to me-- for some reason all that was leaping to mind as an "older FPS" was counterstrike, a game whose complexity is offputting to even serious gamers. Not that that stops us from figuring it out eventually, but still-- not a good starting point.
Doom or Wolf3D are probably even better, as they eliminate some of the complexity of movement and aiming. If you think back to how many games we went through before we were playing things like CS, it's pretty staggering-- but for most of us the approach was gradual. We just don't notice anymore-- each new game adds just one thing. Doom added additional floors to wolf3D. Quake added mouselook and 3D aiming, and standardized our expectations for control and powerups, as well as the various styles of weapon (spread, accurate, arc, instantaneous). UT taught me dual-use weapons. Team Fortress and Tribes tossed us character classes and vehicles, which helped prepare me for Battlefield. Modern games with unusual features (saber fights in JKII) are just "one little thing added to a standard FPS" for us, but when you lack the standard FPS background, you're missing a lot more than you think.
I've seen this as well. My girlfriend has always been a gamer, back well into the days of 8-bit consoles and sierra adventure games. She did, however, have quite a bit of time off from gaming during college and medical school-- which coincided nicely with the advent of the 3D gaming era.
I was amazed by how much we just take for granted-- and the painstaking detail required to "bring somebody up to speed." (you have to manage the camera? is moving body-relative or screen-relative? how can i tell where i'll land from a jump without depth perception?) It turned out that the easiest way was to drag out the old N64 and let her start 3D gaming from where 3D gaming started. The games were simpler, and the rules upon rules hadn't been built yet.
There are other things, as well-- things we just don't realize. Consider all of the graphical conventions. The average slashdotter probably recognizes three or four different ways to indicate a "status ailment" in an RPG, for example. But to somebody new, in the middle of a fast fight, how can you explain the difference for the status ailment indication, and the powerup indication? It can be done, but it's tricky, and it's a huge barrier to entry. She expressed an interest in Battlefield 1942 a while back, and I'm not sure *how* I'm going to get her up and running with the PC FPS genre without teaching a class.
I see it, at our office, pretty regularly. On business trips, it's not difficult to find another professional to hook up a link game with at the airport. It's more common among adults than you'd think, because they're cheap, simple, and fun.
Of course, just because I see it frequently doesn't make it universally true. Just adding my anecdote to yours.
Get on an elevator in NJ and fart. Repeat until you can get someone else on the elevator to say something with the word "damn" in it.
In this case, you will have definitely "pumped your own damn gas." The gas will be damned, the gas will be your own, and you will have pumped it. In New Jersey.
Or you could just get a motorcycle, or possibly a small can of gasoline and a small handheld pump. But where's the spirit in that?
Dirty underwear and burnt insulator plastic are two distinct smells. Perhaps you are confusing this incident with one where one of our other erstwhile roommates tried to smoke something in a homemade plastic pipe?
Or maybe there really was burnt plastic in my underwear, and I've just forgotten. I was probably too busy trying to beat Zelda 64 between engineering exams to notice.
Find an AT machine. (ATX PSUs probably won't do this). Connect any one of the case LED jumpers to the power switch connector with the polarity right.
Plug in machine. What you have done, essentially, is used the LED as a dead short across the power switch. The tiny wire on that connector will not handle the high current, and the insulation will be on fire before you can say "hey, I made it through POST!"
I can confirm it works, having done it on accident once. Computer was fine, but it stunk in my room for days. The PSU fan moves that nasty plastic smoke into your room very effectively.
Note that the item doesn't say "gasoline" specifically, either. It says "pump your own damn gas in new jersey."
The solution is as simple as:
1. Go to new jersey 2. Acquire pump 3. Use it to pump a damn gas of your choice. (Air is handy)
Hell, just breathing there probably counts as "pumping a gas."
I'd be more worried about fulfilling the "damn" part of the requirement-- you may have to curse the gas, or coerce the gas into comitting a sin before pumping it.
The "Giant Battery" in the original Prius was pretty small, not much bigger than two or three standard car batteries (depends on what you drive). I believe the battery in the new Prius is even smaller. And it's not a micro-car-- it's roughly the same size as the new honda accords. Small battery, average-sized sedan.
It wouldn't be a big deal for a rescue crew to just pull it out before they cut anywhere else, making sure the power is cut. Probably a good idea with a normal battery in a wreck that bad, on the off chance that a spark would ignite any gas vapour.
I would suggest that the government standardize a location for a cutoff switch, though, making this sort of thing easy and painless for rescue crews. No such thing exists for fuel lines (except in race cars) but that hasn't stopped us from driving.
By the same token, high-pressure hydrogen is not as big of a deal as most people are assuming, either. Crack the tank, and where does the hydrogen go? Up, quickly. It doesn't linger around at ground level, or pool under or inside the car like gasoline.
In general, cars are large, dangerous machines. They involve hundreds of thousands of watts of power, and nothing you can ever do will make handling that sort of power perfectly safe, whether the power is sitting still in a gasoline tank, a large battery, or a hydrogen cannister; or converted to kinetic and thermal energy in the form of a two-ton metal box moving at high velocity and a large steel engine block filled with blistering-hot oil and coolant. Better driver training standards and enforcement (why so many speeding tickets, but so few tickets for unsignalled lane changes?) in America would go farther than anything else.
Perhaps he has one of those newfangled portable cellular phones in his automobile. I have heard that they can be as small as a briefcase.
Re:Can I smell something ?
on
Directed Sound
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yeah, this particular little invention is what really drove the concept of "vapourware" home for me. I read about it first while I was in college, back in *1998*. I followed it excitedly, because at the time it was touted as a lightweight, low-power, flat-frequency-response speaker system. The directionality was just a side effect. Turns out it's not all it's cracked up to be in the audio quality department, but hey... that side effect is still there six years later, so let's capitalize on that instead!
As I tried to keep up with who was developing what with the tech (it's been licensed over and over, but nobody's ever built anything commercially available) I got more and more depressed with the whole thing. And I learned an important life lesson... until you can click "Buy Now," (and sometimes not even then) it may as well not exist unless you intend to build your own from a copy of the patent. I try to just ignore announcements like "Hypersonic Sound" now.
As another poster pointed out, this isn't much of a risk, unless you have a BB gun that can shoot 13 miles straight up. I don't think the ones we had at cub scout camp in the '80s were quite that good.
Besides, we used *canvas* to stop the BBs past the targets. I think the blimp will be okay.
I was just pointing out what I thought was a gross overreaction, and a comical one at that. I mean, seriously-- getting "really pissed off" about someone having a stereotype of you as "having a temper" is pretty silly in a circular sort of way.
If it will make you feel better, go ahead and mock my racial heritage. Do it all you want! Don't feel bad about it, either, because IT DOESN'T MATTER. What matters is that we recognize the qualities in individuals, and don't get so worked up about it that we end up removing things like "master/slave" and "red-headed stepchild" and "white men can't jump" from our historical and linguistic record. No amount of wishing these things had never been said will make it so-- but you can remove any hurt such a remark may have by simply not giving it that power.
If someone doesn't attack you personally, then don't take it personally.
If you want an "obvious injustice," you might want to look a little farther than your own horizon. If you think the red-headed stepchild remark is an obvious injstice, you might want to look to the Rwandan genocide, or the massive disparity in Redhead-American vs. African-American salary, Apartheid, or the Holocaust. *those* are obvious injustices. Being the butt of jokes is true for everybody, whether your a stiff, awkward, greedy white guy, a "fiery" redhead, an overweight american, a messy bachelor, a gay guy who knows how to decorate, or an old woman who drives too slow, etc... I think it gets spread pretty evenly. If we can't poke fun at eachother without it erupting into this sort of hatred, what does THAT say?
And as to the beer thing, that was unintentional. I really meant that having a couple of beers might be a good way to relax and get over it. See what jumping to racist conclusions gets us? You take an innocent remark like that, and we're so touchy THAT gets labelled racism.
"I can't speak for other redheads, but this kind of comment really pisses me off."
and...
"It really doesn't surprise me that redheads have a stereotype of having fiery tempers"...and there you have the reason for why people think you have a temper. You do. But just for you, we'll make it "stepchild with a different hair color than either the mother or father leading one to wonder whether or not a third party was involved in the conception of said child, and whom is treated poorly by the other members of the family because of his differing hair color and questionable parentage."
Feel better? If not, you have issues that may require a beer or two to fix.
You make a good point, but I don't think you go far enough. Bikes waste valuable metals and other materials, and require petroleum-based lubricants. I suspect he would just walk barefoot, or if nobody was looking, levitate around with his superpowers.
Walking, however, requires the expenditure of energy and thus the consumption of food to provide it-- so he'd probably just stay put. Come to think of it, maybe that explains why nobody ever sees God or his Kid and Ghost around anymore-- they're all holding very, very still and being very, very quiet to conserve energy.
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No kidding. In 1994, the 'web didn't exist and I was doing most of my computing on a REALLY expensive 486SX 25MHz machine. I have a calculator faster than that now.
I bought the HX CVT because my old station wagon broke down beyond cost-effective repair in 2001 and the original Prius had an 8-month waiting list. The hybrid civic didn't exist yet. The HX uses a similar low-emissions high-economy VTEC-e 4-cylinder and has the same mileage-improving emissions-reducing CVT transmission as the hybrid.
I'm the type who would have one if I could have. But what I have is ULEV and rated at 40mpg, and I see a sigificant percentage of that at 35-37.
I probably shouldn't have said "the only ones paying attention" but the general point still stands-- people who buy hybrids are buying to get high gas mileage. They will, of course be watching this feature of their cars closely, and discovering just how unbelieveably stupid the EPA mileage rating system is. (and then incorrectly blaming it on their car's manufacturer) You can't blame Honda or Toyota for their ads with these numbers-- federal law prevents them from using any others. At the absolute worst, the manufacturers are guilty of building really clean cars to get a good fuel economy rating. Kinda like comitting one good deed to get credit for a different one, or something...
To quote the article poster, "It looks like these cars are more hype than help in the battle against pollution and foreign fuel reliance."
This is two separate issues. The first is reducing fuel use, and the second is reducing pollution.
The fuel-use reduction is very real with hybrid cars, but the unfortunate side-effect of EPA mileage ratings is that this seems to be the first time people are realizing just how inaccurate they are. Cars get (on a good day) 75% of their EPA rating, and this includes conventional automobiles. People who by hybrids are, of course, concerned about their mileage, and are the only ones paying this kind of attention to it. So for every 60mpg prius averaging 40mpg, there are hundreds of 24mpg cars averaging 18mpg.
The second issue is pollution. This is harder to check on your own, but if the numbers are to be believed, SULEV/PZEV rating the Prius has is as high as you can get.
The worst part of all of this is that the EPA seems to be using emissions to rate fuel economy, which is going to result in cleaner cars appearing more efficient. From the article, "The 19-year-old EPA tests for city and highway mileage actually gauge vehicle emissions and use that data to derive an estimated fuel-efficiency rating." Call me crazy, but this seems like just about the most retarded way to measure fuel economy I've ever heard. Did it never occur to them to measure the distance driven, and then measure the fuel used?
And just to add my anecdote to everybody else's-- my non-hybrid 2001 civic HX CVT gets 35-37mpg, depending on what I was doing on that particular tank of gas.
Unfortunately, it's been long enough that Duke Nukem Forever jokes are retro. Sure, they were out of style for a while, but now *all* the kids are into it, along with puffy-front mesh trucker hats.
That's about as likely as me sprouting wings and flying off to the moon for a nice afternoon of cheese-tasting.
Of course, Lord of the Rings turned out okay, and boy did I enjoy the moon-cheese that day. So it has now been conclusively proven that movies based on books don't *have* to ruin the story, just that it's overwhelmingly likely.
Unless you're at the back of the plane, and they run out of everything except the basket o' candy, as has happened to me on the last two flights I took. I *would* have paid, but all i could get was a basket of potato chips and candy bars. Not sure how to fix that-- it's an inventory issue that can't be solved unless they carry enough of every choice for everybody, which probably isn't feasible.
I'll take the old method any day, where the food sucked unless you were smart enough to call ahead and ask for the vegetarian meal.
Funny coincidence with your .sig-- I read the book I mentioned as part of a science fiction literature class at Purdue years ago, as preparation for discussion of Phillip K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly."
I am mixing up a couple of different conditions in my previous post. (It has been eight years since I read that book last)
I believe what the article was referring to was prosopagnosia. This condition has people able to tell a face from a vase, but unable to tell one face from another. The condition I was referring to I can't find the proper name for, but is more severe still, and may have been limited to the few cases for which the book I mentioned was named.
While I agree with you about the general "culture of euphemism," as you put it-- I don't think this is one of those times. Face Blindness is not referring to people like you and me who are just lousy at remembering who we met, but rather people with profound neurological disorders who *literally* cannot tell a face from something vaguely facelike, like a vase or a particular arrangement of shadows. This goes far beyond not remembering the guy you met at a convention a year ago-- but rather not even being able to tell the difference between his face and the PDA he was holding.
For a quick read on it, check out The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The things that happen to the poor people in this book as a result of disease, physical damage to the brain, or conditions they were born with are bizarre but definitely interesting.
Wattage and voltage are both perfectly cromulent words.
Good call. I think I have two licenses for the original UT, as well. I'm not sure why that didn't occur to me-- for some reason all that was leaping to mind as an "older FPS" was counterstrike, a game whose complexity is offputting to even serious gamers. Not that that stops us from figuring it out eventually, but still-- not a good starting point.
Doom or Wolf3D are probably even better, as they eliminate some of the complexity of movement and aiming. If you think back to how many games we went through before we were playing things like CS, it's pretty staggering-- but for most of us the approach was gradual. We just don't notice anymore-- each new game adds just one thing. Doom added additional floors to wolf3D. Quake added mouselook and 3D aiming, and standardized our expectations for control and powerups, as well as the various styles of weapon (spread, accurate, arc, instantaneous). UT taught me dual-use weapons. Team Fortress and Tribes tossed us character classes and vehicles, which helped prepare me for Battlefield. Modern games with unusual features (saber fights in JKII) are just "one little thing added to a standard FPS" for us, but when you lack the standard FPS background, you're missing a lot more than you think.
I've seen this as well. My girlfriend has always been a gamer, back well into the days of 8-bit consoles and sierra adventure games. She did, however, have quite a bit of time off from gaming during college and medical school-- which coincided nicely with the advent of the 3D gaming era.
I was amazed by how much we just take for granted-- and the painstaking detail required to "bring somebody up to speed." (you have to manage the camera? is moving body-relative or screen-relative? how can i tell where i'll land from a jump without depth perception?) It turned out that the easiest way was to drag out the old N64 and let her start 3D gaming from where 3D gaming started. The games were simpler, and the rules upon rules hadn't been built yet.
There are other things, as well-- things we just don't realize. Consider all of the graphical conventions. The average slashdotter probably recognizes three or four different ways to indicate a "status ailment" in an RPG, for example. But to somebody new, in the middle of a fast fight, how can you explain the difference for the status ailment indication, and the powerup indication? It can be done, but it's tricky, and it's a huge barrier to entry. She expressed an interest in Battlefield 1942 a while back, and I'm not sure *how* I'm going to get her up and running with the PC FPS genre without teaching a class.
I see it, at our office, pretty regularly. On business trips, it's not difficult to find another professional to hook up a link game with at the airport. It's more common among adults than you'd think, because they're cheap, simple, and fun.
Of course, just because I see it frequently doesn't make it universally true. Just adding my anecdote to yours.
Get on an elevator in NJ and fart. Repeat until you can get someone else on the elevator to say something with the word "damn" in it.
In this case, you will have definitely "pumped your own damn gas." The gas will be damned, the gas will be your own, and you will have pumped it. In New Jersey.
Or you could just get a motorcycle, or possibly a small can of gasoline and a small handheld pump. But where's the spirit in that?
Dirty underwear and burnt insulator plastic are two distinct smells. Perhaps you are confusing this incident with one where one of our other erstwhile roommates tried to smoke something in a homemade plastic pipe?
Or maybe there really was burnt plastic in my underwear, and I've just forgotten. I was probably too busy trying to beat Zelda 64 between engineering exams to notice.
Find an AT machine. (ATX PSUs probably won't do this). Connect any one of the case LED jumpers to the power switch connector with the polarity right.
Plug in machine. What you have done, essentially, is used the LED as a dead short across the power switch. The tiny wire on that connector will not handle the high current, and the insulation will be on fire before you can say "hey, I made it through POST!"
I can confirm it works, having done it on accident once. Computer was fine, but it stunk in my room for days. The PSU fan moves that nasty plastic smoke into your room very effectively.
Note that the item doesn't say "gasoline" specifically, either. It says "pump your own damn gas in new jersey."
The solution is as simple as:
1. Go to new jersey
2. Acquire pump
3. Use it to pump a damn gas of your choice. (Air is handy)
Hell, just breathing there probably counts as "pumping a gas."
I'd be more worried about fulfilling the "damn" part of the requirement-- you may have to curse the gas, or coerce the gas into comitting a sin before pumping it.
The "Giant Battery" in the original Prius was pretty small, not much bigger than two or three standard car batteries (depends on what you drive). I believe the battery in the new Prius is even smaller. And it's not a micro-car-- it's roughly the same size as the new honda accords. Small battery, average-sized sedan.
It wouldn't be a big deal for a rescue crew to just pull it out before they cut anywhere else, making sure the power is cut. Probably a good idea with a normal battery in a wreck that bad, on the off chance that a spark would ignite any gas vapour.
I would suggest that the government standardize a location for a cutoff switch, though, making this sort of thing easy and painless for rescue crews. No such thing exists for fuel lines (except in race cars) but that hasn't stopped us from driving.
By the same token, high-pressure hydrogen is not as big of a deal as most people are assuming, either. Crack the tank, and where does the hydrogen go? Up, quickly. It doesn't linger around at ground level, or pool under or inside the car like gasoline.
In general, cars are large, dangerous machines. They involve hundreds of thousands of watts of power, and nothing you can ever do will make handling that sort of power perfectly safe, whether the power is sitting still in a gasoline tank, a large battery, or a hydrogen cannister; or converted to kinetic and thermal energy in the form of a two-ton metal box moving at high velocity and a large steel engine block filled with blistering-hot oil and coolant. Better driver training standards and enforcement (why so many speeding tickets, but so few tickets for unsignalled lane changes?) in America would go farther than anything else.
Maybe they'll introduce a nice budget Radeon X86.
Perhaps he has one of those newfangled portable cellular phones in his automobile. I have heard that they can be as small as a briefcase.
Yeah, this particular little invention is what really drove the concept of "vapourware" home for me. I read about it first while I was in college, back in *1998*. I followed it excitedly, because at the time it was touted as a lightweight, low-power, flat-frequency-response speaker system. The directionality was just a side effect. Turns out it's not all it's cracked up to be in the audio quality department, but hey... that side effect is still there six years later, so let's capitalize on that instead!
As I tried to keep up with who was developing what with the tech (it's been licensed over and over, but nobody's ever built anything commercially available) I got more and more depressed with the whole thing. And I learned an important life lesson... until you can click "Buy Now," (and sometimes not even then) it may as well not exist unless you intend to build your own from a copy of the patent. I try to just ignore announcements like "Hypersonic Sound" now.
As another poster pointed out, this isn't much of a risk, unless you have a BB gun that can shoot 13 miles straight up. I don't think the ones we had at cub scout camp in the '80s were quite that good.
Besides, we used *canvas* to stop the BBs past the targets. I think the blimp will be okay.
I was just pointing out what I thought was a gross overreaction, and a comical one at that. I mean, seriously-- getting "really pissed off" about someone having a stereotype of you as "having a temper" is pretty silly in a circular sort of way.
If it will make you feel better, go ahead and mock my racial heritage. Do it all you want! Don't feel bad about it, either, because IT DOESN'T MATTER. What matters is that we recognize the qualities in individuals, and don't get so worked up about it that we end up removing things like "master/slave" and "red-headed stepchild" and "white men can't jump" from our historical and linguistic record. No amount of wishing these things had never been said will make it so-- but you can remove any hurt such a remark may have by simply not giving it that power.
If someone doesn't attack you personally, then don't take it personally.
If you want an "obvious injustice," you might want to look a little farther than your own horizon. If you think the red-headed stepchild remark is an obvious injstice, you might want to look to the Rwandan genocide, or the massive disparity in Redhead-American vs. African-American salary, Apartheid, or the Holocaust. *those* are obvious injustices. Being the butt of jokes is true for everybody, whether your a stiff, awkward, greedy white guy, a "fiery" redhead, an overweight american, a messy bachelor, a gay guy who knows how to decorate, or an old woman who drives too slow, etc... I think it gets spread pretty evenly. If we can't poke fun at eachother without it erupting into this sort of hatred, what does THAT say?
And as to the beer thing, that was unintentional. I really meant that having a couple of beers might be a good way to relax and get over it. See what jumping to racist conclusions gets us? You take an innocent remark like that, and we're so touchy THAT gets labelled racism.
"I can't speak for other redheads, but this kind of comment really pisses me off."
...and there you have the reason for why people think you have a temper. You do. But just for you, we'll make it "stepchild with a different hair color than either the mother or father leading one to wonder whether or not a third party was involved in the conception of said child, and whom is treated poorly by the other members of the family because of his differing hair color and questionable parentage."
and...
"It really doesn't surprise me that redheads have a stereotype of having fiery tempers"
Feel better? If not, you have issues that may require a beer or two to fix.
You make a good point, but I don't think you go far enough. Bikes waste valuable metals and other materials, and require petroleum-based lubricants. I suspect he would just walk barefoot, or if nobody was looking, levitate around with his superpowers.
Walking, however, requires the expenditure of energy and thus the consumption of food to provide it-- so he'd probably just stay put. Come to think of it, maybe that explains why nobody ever sees God or his Kid and Ghost around anymore-- they're all holding very, very still and being very, very quiet to conserve energy.