Your car has a velocity, but the speedometer only tells you the magnitude, which is speed (hence the name). If they built in an arrow on your dashboard that always pointed forwards when in drive and backwards when in reverse, then you could say it told you the velocity.
Yup! I avoided getting into that quite deliberately; most mathematically ill-equipped don't know there's a difference between speed and velocity.
'Course, I had a winter beater once (1989 Dodge Colt, bought it for $200 and drove it three winters) which had forward and reverse arrows on the dashboard's transmission display. There was also a cheap spherical compass glued to the dashboard when I got it. I guess, with the direction arrows providing the +/-1 factor, speedometer providing scalar s, and the compass providing a unit direction vector u, a mathematically correct velocity could be described as 1s*u = s*u in forward and -1s*u = -s*u in reverse.
There! That qualifies as a full velocity vector, entirely derived from displays which were in the car when I got it!
Just to nitpick, but velocity is the result of the integral of position with respect to time, not the derivitive. Here's the basic physics terms:
* Acceleration : m/s^2
* Velocity: Derivative of acceleration, m/s
* Position/Displacement: Derivative of velocity, m
You seem to be knowledgable, but don't ever forget the basics.;-)
Best to refute this with an example. You've got it backwards, I don't. [grin]
Position, s(t) = 3(x^2)+2x+1
Velocity, v(t) = 3(2x)+2 = 6x+2
Acceleration, a(t) = 6
Jerk, j(t) = 0
Jerk is the derivative (the rate of change) of acceleration. Acceleration is the derivative (rate of change) of velocity. Velocity is the derivative (rate of change) of position.
Think about Newton's Quotient (First Principles) for a second.
And as was said before, if you don't know math, good luck writing video games. Games like Quake perform tons of mathematical operations every second.
For sure! I don't know Quake personally (I'm not into video games at all), but I assume that it's another one of the 3D videogames where your surroundings change with your perspective.
That requires loads of matrix transformations directly out of linear algebra. It sounds terrifying, but it's just about having a group of numbers called a matrix. By multiplying them with a bunch of (x,y) coordinate in a certain order, you can do all sorts of warps and shrinks and stuff. If those (x,y) coordinates correspond to a bitmap of an object, you've just warped or shrunk the object, exactly as you'd have to do in a 3D maze or similar.
Then, there's calculus. There are two courses *everyone* should have to take in high school - auto mechanics (so you know how to change a tire, among other things) and calculus. Calculus means "small stones", as for counting. It's all about rates of change. You could tell the speed of your car by looking at your odometer and your watch, but that will give you only the average speed over a given time or distance. The speedometer, on the other hand, gives you your instantaneous speed - which is the derivative (calculus term) of your position (odometer) with respect to time. This makes sense when you think about it: speed is the rate of change of position.
(Actually, it's velocity, but that's a whole other kettle of fish if you don't know about vectors from Linear Algebra yet.)
Don't worry about the math. It's usually the easiest course in your university schedule - and I tell you that as someone who failed high school math classes constantly and who dropped out of high school because of math (that's a long story, though). Math *is* your friend. How's that? You can be guaranteed that if you do all your homework, you will get an A+ in the course. That's it. No reading, no stupid assignments which get marked by TAs who know less than you, nothing. It doesn't even matter how good or bad your teacher is. Just do all your homework and you'll get an A+. It's a non-linear relationship, do 50% of your homework (every second assigned problem) and you'll get a B+. Do 25% of your homework and you'll get a C+.
As an EE, I had to take 7 university level math classes.
Calculus I: Basic calculus, a re-hash of high school which introduced Integration by Parts (table method!)
Linear Algebra: Matrices, parametric equations, Gaussian elimination, eigenvalues and eigenvectors. Don't let the names scare you, it's all very easy.
Calculus II: Differential equations and infinite series. Always had a hard time with infinite series... but I passed it.
Numerical Methods: A whole course on how to make numerical approximations when you come across something that is impossible to integrate. Mostly programming in MATLAB. Open book exam, I used LyME (MATLAB clone) on my Palm.
Calculus IV: Mathematical Methods. All about how to solve partial differential equations like the heat equation and wave equation, also Laplace and Fourier transforms, Sturm-Liouville differential equations, etc. Scary sounding, but actually rather easy once you get your head around it. Doing homework on the blackboard with your friends in an empty classroom is recommended - the arts class which came into the room after our homework sessions always looked at us like we were geniuses. We're not.
Statisitics: Ugh. Mostly just plug numbers into equ
Wake up and smell the damn coffee, it's not a problem exclusive to Microsoft, as much as some of the Linux rah-rah club would like to think.
Why is it OK for Linux to patch the hell outta itself but a damn near capital crime if Microsoft has to?
No, that's right. Linux and *BSD have had root exploits before. But the problem is that Microsoft insists on shipping Windows with all sorts of daemons (ahem... services) running. Each one is a potential exploit; the Microsoft philosophy of run-everything-for-convenience is a lot more dangerous than the Unix philosophy of run-only-what's-necessary. Bugs in code don't get exploited in services which aren't running.
Microsoft released a patch, people did not install the patch. Who's fault is that? None of the 1000+ systems in my office were infected because I'm intelligent enough to have policies in place to prevent stuff like this from happening.
You rolled out a patch in 1000+ systems without testing it extensively? Sooner or later, one of those patches will break your 1000+ systems.
Behind a firewall, thinking you're safe without patching? Sooner or later, someone is going to release a worm which also propagates by e-mail or web browsing (IIRC, Nimda did it) and infects a machine behind your firewall. In a matter of minutes, your entire network will be compromised.
Either way - when a patch fails and takes out the machines, or when a worm gets into your LAN and takes out the machines - I'd love to be the fly on the wall while you explain to your boss why 1000+ users are out of work for a day or two.
Your ass would be fired faster than you can say Control-Alt-Delete.
Let your employees run autoupdates and if one of them does break your machines, roll it back. Servers are a special case, because if you lose the TCP stack on your mail server it's much worse than if Ted from Marketing loses his.
Most corporate desktops are imaged from a standard install. They're clones of each other.
Therefore, if a patch breaks one of the desktops, it breaks them all. And pretty soon, I have 600 employees who can't work because all their computers are down.
All of which will remain down until either we massively roll-back the update (probably requires re-imaging each and every machine) or figure out a way to remotely deploy a fix for whatever the patch broke. Either way, 600 users are down for at least a day. Average salary in my organzation is $75,000 a year which translates to a daily loss of $180,000 - just in salaries.
That's the sort of scenario which results in getting fired.
If you don't believe me, Google around for articles about patches breaking machines versus articles about viruses breaking machines. I think you'll see that some of the latest viruses and worms hit in the many millions, whereas the problems experienced from patches hit in the many thousands or are not completely debilitating.
Great! You can explain that to my boss when 500 out of the 600 users in my organization are unable to work because a Microsoft patch broke one of our servers and everything has to be reinstalled from scratch and incrememental backups, only to be hit 5 minutes later by the very worm we'd applied the patch against!
Recovery from that - conservatively, a day. Conservatively. Now, these 500 people are out of work for a day, but they're salaried... lawyers, Judges, court reporters, clerks. The average salary is probably $75,000 in this organization. That's about $300 per day per employee, or $150,000 in damages. Never mind the fact that we have to run on set schedules or else other bad things happen. I can't take that risk, even if it's 1 in 100, before I click on that little Windows Update icon.
Theoretically, of course, the patch shouldn't do anything but fix the poor bounds checking in some DLL or something - just replace the DLL with a corrected binary. But if you've ever applied a patch, you *know* they play with all sorts of other things. We run Novell, and I've used Snapshot on PCs before and after applying what should be very simple patches, only to find dozens of files and unrelated registry keys have been changed. Microsoft clearly does other stuff in patches - quiet fixes of other problems which haven't been publicized, adding DRM software, I don't know but you can only guess at their motives - and how long until one of those breaks one of my production server?
No, man. I need to be able to look at a patch and know exactly what it does, so that I can tell in advance if it's going to break something. I need the diffs between the patch and the original source so that if it does break something, my developers can immediately know what changed and how to work around it. I need to be able to apply them individually without requiring a reboot of the server, just a restart of the daemon (ahem... service) in question.
And I ain't gonna get any of that from Microsoft. But, unfortunately - and it wasn't my decision - this server is running Windows 2000 Server, and the best thing I can do is hope that there's no e-mail borne version of the worm to get it into my LAN.
Of course I think Microsoft should be sued for some of the problems we have. I don't think everything in the EULA will hold up in court in every state. But it's not my decision.
Okay. How about those people who don't even run Windows and therefore have no part in the EULA? Their networks are being ground to a halt because of flaws in Microsoft software and their patching process, as infected machines attack them.
Analogy: car company X builds cars with defective brakes. You didn't buy that car. Your wife and children are driving home from shopping and someone driving X's car runs through a red light because he can't stop, and plows into the side of your wife and kids. Now, not that I'm overly litigious, but there's a time and place for companies to be held responsible for the damage caused by their poor products and designs.
Who do you sue? The guy driving the car with defective brakes, or the company that has a pattern of time and time again making defective products?
In an unrelated question, has anyone tried the spray on products for defeating "speed cameras"? Found one listed at Phantom Plate but don't know if the stuff really works. Probably should drive the speed limit more closely, but those darn cameras are going up everywhere in Maryland.
I wouldn't bother. For one thing, a spray-on product is likely to be rather ineffective - sure, it could be a textured clearcoat, but the texture is only going to trap road dirt and make your license plate filthy all the time.
The other thing is that around here (Ontario, Canada), it's illegal to have anything on your license plate. Cops ignore dealer frames and clear plastic license plate covers, but if you go with anything else, they're likely to nail you.
Another thing is that photo radar units (in Ontario experience) tended to be installed in high-traffic areas because that's where they'd catch the most violators. Because they're high-traffic areas, they're also precisely the places where you shouldn't be driving like an idiot. I like to stretch those throttle return springs, too - but the time and place to do it is in an *empty* piece of freeway where there's no traffic. No traffic generally means a quiet enough area that a photo radar unit wouldn't be financially viable or would be subject to vandalism. My personal record is getting my 1976 big-block Dodge Ram up to 120 MPH - it got a little scary so I didn't push it further, the aerodynamics of the vehicle are such that the back end was getting light. And the only person I was risking was myself.
The other thing I'd remind you is that the speedometer in your car is really not a very accurate gauge - generally +/- 10% anyway. Then, you get the optional wheel package on your new car, and you'll have bigger wheels with the same speedometer - probably no difference in the speedometer pickup gear (VSS) or software in the ECM, and you'd be going ($whatever_percent_the_circumference_of_your_tires _are_bigger_than_speedometer_design)*($speedometer _reading).
A friend of mine is a cop, and he told me the rules: they don't pull you over if you're within 20% of the speed limit. 120km/h in a 100km/h zone will be ignored, unless you're driving like an asshole (changing lanes constantly, tailgating, staying in the passing lane when not passing, etc.).
I have never in my life been nailed for speeding or any other moving violation. Cops are reasonable, and if you're playing safe, they don't care.
Vehicles I've had (as a testament to how quickly I've travelled):
1973 Plymouth Duster 340-4bbl, ex drag race car which I returned to the street (had to reinstall taillights, wipers, exhaust system, etc.), 12.5 seconds on the quarter mile on street tires, did wheelies on slicks.
1968 Plymouth Valiant Signet 2-door sedan, 440CID (7.2L) big-block V8 - not as quick as the Duster only because it wasn't as wildly built
1976 Dodge Ram Heavy-Half with towing package (3.93 gears in rear) and 400CID (6.6L) big-block V8 - stomping on the gas causes the glove box door to pop open, smokes the tires on the 1-2 and 2-3 shifts.
Fast cars I've driven extensively (in order of potential for speeding tickets):
1967 Plymouth GTX, 426 Hemi, 4-speed
1987 Buick Grand National
1975 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme with built Olds Rocket 350
1995 Chevrolet Impala SS
Like I say, don't worry about the photo radar. You'll only find it installed in places where you shouldn't be driving like an asshole.
WTF are you talking about? I guess I haven't seen any hand-cranked CD players but that hardly seems relevant as I haven't seen any LP walkmen either.
Actually, Sony did make an LP Walkman. It was the original Discman, released in about 1983. I've never seen one in person; they didn't catch on for obvious reasons of practicality. Nor could I find any references to it anywhere online, but it was featured in the Gadget section of Hands-On Electronics magazine at the time - I think I'll have to scan the article and put it online. The Sony model looked like a large 80's-styled plastic C-clamp. It came with a belt clip (presumably only for carrying it to your listening spot, since having a whirring record on your hip would be...problematic), and it took a 33RPM LP. I don't know what you'd use it for - back when I was a kid, libraries would lend LPs, maybe for listening in the library?
You can get rid of the clickety click by adjusting the valve lash to within specs. According to my Chiltons, it's.010" Intake,.020" Exhaust. My old Volare was as quiet as a hydraulic lifter car until the body rusted out and I had to junk it.
Yup. But remember you have to set the valve lash when the engine is hot! I do it just before an oil change (that way, any dust which gets in is removed). Take off the valve cover, then put it back on held loosely by two bolts. Start the engine, let it idle until the upper rad hose gets hot. Then shut it off, unplug the ignition coil (so it can't somehow start when you're cranking it over by hand to set the lash on the open valves) and get busy with the feeler gauge.
When it's properly set, the Slant-6 will make a distinct valve lash noise when it's cold, but once it's warm, it'll be nearly silent.
Water is a remarkable battery if we could manufacture a fuel cell affordably (i.e. - out of non-noble metals like platinum). Just add electricity and you've got H2 and O. Lovely.
Yeah, that's essentially a battery all right. You're investing energy to dissociate the hydrogen and oxygen. You then have to compress the hydrogen and fill automotive fuel tanks with it.
There are two big problems. Big problem number one is that a tank of hydrogen is several orders of magnitude more frightening than a tank of gasoline. Hydrogen seeps through cast iron, exactly like acetylene but faster. And it burns with a hell-fire, requiring far less ignition energy and over a wider air/fuel mixture than gasoline. I don't want to share the road with cars fuelled up with that.
Big problem number two is where are you going to get the energy to do this electrolysis? Nuclear plants? Coal plants?
Solar and wind have poor practicality to being put onto the grid - solar cells output DC, wind turbines could output AC but the frequency won't be stable. Either one must be provided to the grid in lock-step with the 60Hz sinewave coming out of the wall socket, and that will require inverters producing perfect sinewaves in phase with the grid. Inverters can be, at thereoretical best, 70.7% efficient - practical inverters are less. But at least electrolysis could harness DC power from them directly, providing a more useful application for this energy.
However, solar cells are inefficient (both in terms of real estate and energy capture) and have a finite lifespan (heating/cooling cycles primarily). Wind turbines will cause public protest ("You're not building that in my backyard! You'll spoil my view!") and will affect the local climate - take enough energy from the wind and you'll slow it down, causing weird things like new orographic precipitation, etc.
Seriously, these are the kind of stories which make the populace at large think that the solutions to the world's energy problems is just around the corner, so in the mean time lets squander our remaining oil reserves and pollute the atmosphere.
Yeah, generally I view this sort of thing with skepticism. But if you take a look at Iogen's website, you'll see that they can take 1 ton of cellulose-rich farm waste and turn it into about 300L of ethanol.
Not only could you have a hell of a party with that, but there are other possibilities.
They can use wood chips. So, probably paper too. I'm sure there's a fairly large waste stream from paper recycling, of paper and pulp which can't be used to make new paper. How about tree bark? How about compostable waste from the garbage? Maybe even cotton fibers?
This is a *massive* quantity of raw material which is all waste anyway. And all of it is plant-derived, so consuming it as fuel causes no net increase in CO2.
All they need to do is not tax the fuel, and you've instantly provided cost competitiveness and a powerful incentive to convert your vehicle (if it isn't already ready for it).
I read that there's an ethanol/methanol gas station here in Ottawa, but they're for the federal government vehicles. It's just down the street from me, in fact. I'm a federal government employee, I wonder if I can fill up my personal vehicles there?
My 1976 Dodge Ram has an aftermarket fuel pump on it. The fuel pump is a high-volume unit, designed for drag racing, and I put it on because it was cheaper than an original replacement part (more competition in the aftermarket). But it's rated for 100% methanol. The carburetor, which I rebuilt soon after I bought the truck in 1999, has a brass float - also safe for methanol. I replaced the rubber body-to-engine fuel line at the same time as the fuel pump; it's also safe for methanol.
In short, I can fill up my Ram with ethanol or methanol. If the cost is competitive, I'll happily throw a vacuum gauge on it and adjust the timing and mixture for the new fuel.
The old big-block, with bores the size of paint cans, really won't care what the fuel is as long as it pushes the pistons back down at the right times.
Yeah, it's really smart to replace petrol with ethanol; a fuel that takes more energy to produce it than it yields...
Isn't that the same as solar cells, given that they require massive amounts of energy to make, output feeble amounts of energy on a per-cell basis (and at most 0.707 of that is harnessable as alternating current), and have a finite lifespan (primarily to cracking caused by heating/cooling cycles)?
Actually, ethanol/methanol is a great step toward solar-powered cars; capture the solar energy with plants, store it as chemical energy, release it as heat energy within an internal combustion engine. Of course, one could argue that this is already what happens when you start up your Hummer.
Enthanol/methanol are a far better automotive fuel than electricity, so if this replaces the (misguided) efforts to produce electric cars, that would be excellent. It's still effectively zero emissions, since every CO2 molecule which comes out of the car's tailpipe was already scrubbed from the atmosphere when the plant was growing. There will still be NOx and unburnt HC, as there are with conventional cars, but neither one of those species is chemically stable in our atmosphere and both are rendered back to N2, CO2 and H2O very quickly.
I have two big worries with electric cars. The biggest being the batteries - by necessity, the greater the energy density of the battery, the nastier the chemicals inside it have to be. Weird things happen to cars - accidents, ditched in lakes, etc. - so it doesn't seem like a good idea to be carrying around hazmats which make gasoline look benign. The other great worry is that electric cars all must be recharged somewhere - how many new nuclear and coal power plants will have to be built to keep all these electric cars recharged?
Transition would be easy, too - as soon as the fuel is economically feasible, gas stations can start dedicating a pump or two to it. Many modern vehicles are already built to run on methanol - Chrysler experimenting with "Flexifuel" Plymouth Acclaims and Dodge Spirits as far back as 1992. And with a little bit of work - swapping old rubber-diaphragm fuel pumps then doing standard tune-up stuff like adjusting the mixture and the timing - just about any antique vehicle will run happily on the stuff. The hardest converts will probably be 1980s EFI cars.... and diesels.
Well, okay, diesels will already run happily on vegetable oil.
Early 81's had the gooved hood and fuel flap. Some 81's have a grooved hood and no flap. All 83's had no flap and no grooves. If you did in fact have an 83, the hood was from an 81.
That's news to me; but I did have the grooved hood which I'd always associated with the earlier cars - I thought they'd gone back to an older styling idea (probably because the grooves would have added strength to the hood).
The VIN number was an '83, and the date code on various parts (including the engine block casting) was all late 1982-early 1983. There were no signs of a collision, but the car was missing the grille and a few other front-end parts when I got it (as you can see in the pic).
Paid $1800; put $2000 of parts and labor into it, sold it for $14,000 a little over 6 months after buying it. Still see it driving around every now and then, though I've lost touch with the owner. Wish I'd held onto it, even though it was purely a show car - parts expensive and hard to get, not especially quick, doesn't handle very well, feels like a kit car. But still beautiful.
I should clarify that the Irish designer of the delorian was a junkie not the man that stuck the flux capacitor in.
There was no "Irish designer of the DeLorean".
John DeLorean is American.
John DeLorean founded the company. The exterior design (and what you would probably associate with DeLorean styling) was done by the very famous Giugiaro in about 1975 - pictures on their website here along with someothercarsthey'vedone; by the time it actually hit production in 1981, it was already looking a little old. The car was built in Ireland (North or South, I can't remember which) only because the government there was willing to invest massively in the DeLorean Motor Company (BTW, that's where the DMC on the grille and dashboard comes from).
He was neither Irish, nor a junkie. He was an American of French decent, and was charged with conspiracy to traffic cocaine, and aquitted due to the cop's obvious attempt to entrap him.
That's right. I used to have a DeLorean (rare, 1983 model, note the fuel fill door on the hood) and still have a driver's side gull wing door kicking around my garage. Lemme tell you, they're already a pain in the ass to work on - the engine is in the back and there are the little "sail windows" which give it the rough profile of a hatchback when it isn't. I can't imagine how it is to try to get at the motor with all the BTTF props on it!
Anyway, I read a lot about DeLorean. Here's the problem. DeLorean was a former Pontiac executive, and one of the creators of the Pontiac GTO.
(The Vega and its twin the Pontiac (dis)Astre, was the predecessor to the Chevette, produced from 1971-1977, and is probably the single worst car ever made by Detroit - still not so bad compared to lots of early Japanese and Eastern European cars, though... Renault Beep-Beep Dauphine!)
DeLorean decided to make his own personal luxury car, the ethical luxury car. Stainless steel body that would never rust, best of the best materials (yeah, as a former DeLorean owner, tell me how to fix dents in the stainless steel!). By the time he'd arranged for the production (factory in Ireland for the tax breaks), it was 1981.
When the Guigaro (same styling house that did most VW, Hyundai, Audi) styled the DeLorean, it was the mid-1970s. Such a simple rectangular, clean car was unheard of.
In 1978 Ford introduced the Ford Fairmont and Mercury Zephyr, also the restyled "Fox-body" Mustang. GM introduced the super-square Impala about this time - all of these are things that we associate with 1980s cars, versus the rounded and skirted shapes of 1970s cars. All of a sudden, the DeLorean's simple clean angular body wasn't so cutting-edge.
In 1981, inflation was rampant, and the economy was doing poorly. Chrysler was on the verge of bankruptcy. When you factor in inflation, gasoline was more expensive then than it is now. People were not in the mood to buy luxury cars; people were buying Chevettes and Ford Escorts and Plymouth Reliants. DeLorean's nascent car company launched at the wrong time.
By 1983, he was running out of money. The cars were already looking dated as the simple early 1980s angular shape was giving way to the "Aerobird" shapes of the new 1984 Thunderbird, Cougar and Tempo, all premiering in the 1983 car show circuit. There was no money to restyle and retool, and DeLorean started to look for other ways of keeping the company afloat, at least for a little while.
The car had been produced with massive subsidies from the (North/South - can't remember which) Irish government. When the company finally folded (with a little over 2,000 DeLorean DMC-12 sports cars produced), the government destroyed all the stamping dies and tooling to ensure that no more DeLoreans would ever be made.
To summarize. Car use accounts for approx. 84% of the energy expended in the life cycle of a car. Recycling itself (crushing) is insignificant. Material production and manufacturing is about 14%.
Do you have references? Because I think they've got it reversed.
Let's start with the assumption that the average car lasts 200,000 miles. That's generous, I think you'll agree if you've ever wandered around a junkyard and looked at odometers.
Now, calculate back, projecting the car's fuel economy, to figure out how many gallons of gasoline it went through. Now figure out how many joules, BTUs, calories, whatever, of energy that was.
Now, estimate the mass of the car. Consider that it will probably be melted twice during each production cycle, whether it's as ingots, sheets, or castings. Estimate 50% efficiency in the die-stamping of body panels - think of using a cookie-cutter on cookie dough, what percentage do you have to roll up into a ball (remelt) and try again to make your cookies?
And then tell me how much coal it takes to do that.
Oh, and btw, 1990-spec emissions are now 14 years out of date. So meeting them isn't too impressive.
You clearly know nothing about cars.
This is a 34 year old car without EFI, a catalytic converter or EGR system.
The carburetor is a Carter BBD mounted on a Feather Duster aluminum intake manifold. Air cleaner is factory from a 1975 model, with heat stove system (keeps intake air temperature constant) connected and working. Exhaust is a Hedman 6:1 header with a 3" exhaust into a suitable glasspack muffler, 2" from the muffler back. Ignition is 1974-1975 Chrysler Electronic with a Mopar Performance aftermarket spark control computer. Engine and head are original cast iron, bored 0.030" over and polished ports, respectively. Crank is dead-stock forged iron. Transmission is a TorqueFlite A-518 with same underdrive ratios as original 904, but an overdrive gear added (didn't matter on the dyno, only tested at idle and 40km/h, and even then, my car was exempt from emissions testing; I did it for fun). Diff is original open-ended with 2.94 gears. Everything in the car has CARB EO numbers, so the car is 50-state legal (the engine would officially be classed as a 1974/1975 aftermarket, even though it's still the original 1970 block and heads).
That *is* impressive; most impressively, it demonstrates how well the car is maintained. (Most well-maintained old cars will blow nearly as clean as modern cars.)
Noting, of course, that there was only one emissions system requirement (PCV valve) at the time that car was built, and yet it blows away 1972 requirements, 1974 requirements, 1976 requirements, 1980 requirements, 1985 requirements, and falls somewhere into 1988-1990 requirements. Of course, 1988 was when the most arduous new requirements were added...
A poser SUV? What the fuck do you call a Cadillac SUV then, or 99% of the other SUVs on the market?
Silly SUVs. But at least they tend to be real solid-axle 4x4 vehicles, built on pickup truck frames, with that stupid plush station wagon body dropped on top.
Don't even try to compare a CR-V or a Toyota Rectal Assault Vehicle with a real 4x4, even if it does have silly leather seats and carpets. A Lincoln Navigator could easily back over you in a parking lot, if his transfer case was set to 4WL.
At least if I took my CR-V offroad and broke it I could replace it without breaking the bank!
Yup... But you'd be a lot less likely to break the Cadillac Escalade, Lincoln Navigaton, Cherokee, Grand Cherokee, Durango, Suburban, whatever.
Stand behind your CR-V and look at the rear axle sometime. Tell me, based on the width of the differential in there, exactly how much steel you think is in those gears? Oh, what's that, there aren't even gears in there? Well, I rest my case, then. And I'm quite secure in the knowledge that I could point my two wheel drive 1970 Dodge Dart down that little logging path, following the SUVs, and make it a hell of a lot further than your cute little 4WD or AWD setup.
(Please don't try to teach me about off-road driving. It really won't work. For one thing, I live in Ottawa, Canada - we get *lots* of snow. For another thing, I'm frequently in the bush, scavening automotive parts at ancient wrecking yards or going camping 25 miles down a dirt road from the next nearest human being.)
And WTF is "artificially high resale value"? Is that what someone with a car with crappy resale value says to refute the fact that their car ages like crap?
No. That's what's used to describe the resale value of just about all trucks (real and poseurs like yours) at this current time. I just sold a 1993 Dodge Ram 4x4 with a 318 for $10,000. The thing is a former plow truck with 300,000km on it. That's artificially high resale value.
Anyways, IMHO in general an SUV is not an offroad vehicle. It's a yuppie-mobile.
A real one is.
SUVs became popular only as the manufacturers were being forced to discontinue the full-size RWD station wagons like the Caprice Classic Wagon and LTD Estate.
But people still wanted them. So, noting that the CAFE rules didn't apply to pickup trucks, Detroit started dropping station wagon bodies onto pickup truck frames.
Need more evidence of this? Look up the sales numbers for the original SUVs - Jeep Wagoneer, Chevy Suburban, Dodge Ramcharger, Ford Bronco - before 1987-1988. They'd been around forever (Wagoneer and Suburban since the 1950s!), in fairly small quantities, sold mostly in rural areas. Urban yuppies had no interest in them until they couldn't get the car they really wanted!
The CR-V is an economical family car.
You said it.
For us it's a solid, comfortable grocery getter with more cargo space than our 2 seater for long trips. That's it. All we want is something that drives, holds value well (relatively), is comfortable, reliable, and gets the job done.
Wouldn't you have been better off with a lighter weight, lower aerodynamic profile station wagon? Oh, wait. Can't really make those anymore - thank your government and your environmentalists influencing technology from the depths of their arts degrees!
The Wrangler solves a different problem. I'm sure it's a way better off-road vehicle. But who cares? Look around, you idiot. 99.99% of the people who are buying SUVs today will NEVER take them offroad, unless you count that big gravel patch in the Safeway parking lot offroad.
The Wrangler is a special case, appealing mostly to people looking for a particular image - and it's always been that way, since back when the first 1944-1946 Jeep M-38s (CJ = civilian version of M-38, YJ and TJ are descendents, all the CJ/YJ/TJ models have been called Wranglers at some point) were being surplused after World War II.
But I agree; most of these people would have been better off with station wagons or convertibles.
You need to check your facts or at least give us hints as to which car manufacturers don't produce " tinfoil crap."
Unfortunately, due to market pressures (fuel efficiency requirements, cost reductions by using thinner gauges of steel and other material reduction, performance increases due to lighter curb weight), I can't think of too many.
I'd consider anything full-frame, RWD, American made: Caprice Classic, Crown Victoria, pickup trucks without silly crap like power windows and carpets.
Also, consider a V6 Mustang. They're designed for the output of the V8, with some room to spare for performance mods, and I would suspect that the torsional loads on the body (which contribute massively to paint cracking and metal fatigue) would be substantially minimalized with the V6. As for the V6 drivetrain itself, I dunno.... if they're still offering the 3.8L V6 with the AOD automatic (or a good manual), I'd take that, coupled to the Ford 8.8" rear axle. Though, if you get the V8, treat it well and hang onto it for a long time, you might even find that it appreciates in value (20 years +).
I mean, I had an 85 Civic that ran 250,000 no problem, why shouldn't a new one, better engineered, run longer?
Better engineered to last a specific amount of time. Better engineered to be reliable and consistent.
Typically, when the CV joints start to rattle, scrap the car and buy a new one - the Japanese are great at making the car work consistently and flawlessly until they get to that mileage. Once they're there, CV joints wear, alternator dies, valve stems are loose, balljoints aren't going to pass a safety inspection, etc.
Old cars aren't necessarily better, and are often worse.
That's BS. The manufacturing of older cars is frequently worse - manufacturing tolerances and stuff were greater.
But the design, while simpler, is usually leaps and bounds better with inherent tolerance for, well, tolerances!
CAD, finite element analysis and scientific calculators which hold ten decimal places are responsible for this. In the old days, with a sliderule handling 2 or 3 significant figures, you'd round up forces and round down material strengths. The net result was that it was a lot stronger than it needed to be! Also, with design allowances for wider production line tolerances, the finished product continued to perform well despite normal wear.
On top of that, engine bay space wasn't at the premium it is now. Everything is easy to get at, to check it or to fix it, using common hand tools. This brings down maintenance and repair costs and serves to lengthen the vehicle's lifespan. Compare that to the alternator that I just replaced on a friend's 1993 Civic.... (never done an alternator in a Civic? Try it sometime.)
Aside from the power used, it's a cyclic process with minimal wastage. The rubber, plastic, metal can be reused for whatever purpose necessary. It has to be economically viable if these companies are willing to lay out so much green for these 'car eaters'.
Wow.... Uhhh, yeah. So you've got a Honda Civic or some other piece of junk which only lasts 7 years. You crush it, transport it, shred it, smelt it, transport the ingot, re-melt for cold rolling, roll it, stamp it, weld the stampings back together, paint it, and sell it as a new car.
Okay... Why don't you try looking up the specific heat of iron and the energy content of coal. Sit back and tell me how many tons of coal you have to burn each time you melt an equivalent quantity of iron and steel to a car.
It's horrifically wasteful and terrible for the environment. In fact, you'd have to drive a poorly-tuned old gas guzzler for 22 years (on top of its regular lifespan) to make up the environmental damage caused by recycling it.
Buy a good and *durable* car that is easy to work on - not some Japanese tinfoil crap. Wash it and wax it every week. Change the oil every 4,000km or three months. Keep the engine tuned up, and when it needs rings and bearings, do it. And drive the thing for as long as you can - I'm thinking 40+ years. The newer more environmentally-"friendly" cars aren't.
My automotive stable includes a 1970 Dodge Dart with a Slant-6. Fits my 6'4" tall body comfortably, starts every morning with the legendary Chrysler gear-reduction "dive bomber" starter motor and a satisfying click-click-click of the solid lifters, gets 28MPG and blows as clean on the emissions test as a 1990-spec. And forget the $3000 HID headlights; mine are $4.99 each at Wal*Mart.
Instead, appeal to a more urgent need. "Doh, I can't read this.DOC file. Can you resend it as.RTF?" Easy. Believable. And it won't make you look like you're making a mountain of a mole-hill.
I agree completely with everything that you've said... except the mountain out of a molehill part. It's already a mountain; it's not an exaggeration of the problem.
"Saving in external formats may have caused information loss." Boy, that message frustrates me, because I know how most people read it (I remember switching my wife over to OO - she panicked at that dialog). They imagine whole paragraphs excised, pages gone poof. And worse -- why should they know how programs handle "files"? As far as they know, the original document (before the Save As) is also trashed now. "Information loss" is why they aren't supposed to open attachments anymore at work. Of course that looks bad.
What OO needs to have is, in the drop down file menu, "Save as Word file", and then pop up a box asking for selection of the filename and five buttons: "Recipient is using Word 95", "Recipient is using Word 97", "Recipient is using Word 2000", "Recipient is using Word XP", "Don't know what version of Word the Recipient is using". At the bottom of the box, another button, smaller: "If the document won't be edited by the recipient, please consider clicking here to send as Adobe Acrobat PDF."
The loss of information warning should include, at the very least, the word "formatting" - as in, "Warning: saving in this file type will result in some loss of formatting information." Better still, though, would be "You've asked OO to save the document in a file type which might not support all the features of this document. Your text and graphics will all be saved, but it might not be laid out quite as you intended. Are you sure you wish to continue?"
Developers need to remember to think in terms of the lowest common denominator.
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Your car has a velocity, but the speedometer only tells you the magnitude, which is speed (hence the name). If they built in an arrow on your dashboard that always pointed forwards when in drive and backwards when in reverse, then you could say it told you the velocity.
Yup! I avoided getting into that quite deliberately; most mathematically ill-equipped don't know there's a difference between speed and velocity.
'Course, I had a winter beater once (1989 Dodge Colt, bought it for $200 and drove it three winters) which had forward and reverse arrows on the dashboard's transmission display. There was also a cheap spherical compass glued to the dashboard when I got it. I guess, with the direction arrows providing the +/-1 factor, speedometer providing scalar s, and the compass providing a unit direction vector u, a mathematically correct velocity could be described as 1s*u = s*u in forward and -1s*u = -s*u in reverse.
There! That qualifies as a full velocity vector, entirely derived from displays which were in the car when I got it!
Just to nitpick, but velocity is the result of the integral of position with respect to time, not the derivitive. Here's the basic physics terms:
* Acceleration : m/s^2
* Velocity: Derivative of acceleration, m/s
* Position/Displacement: Derivative of velocity, m
You seem to be knowledgable, but don't ever forget the basics.
Best to refute this with an example. You've got it backwards, I don't. [grin]
Position, s(t) = 3(x^2)+2x+1
Velocity, v(t) = 3(2x)+2 = 6x+2
Acceleration, a(t) = 6
Jerk, j(t) = 0
Jerk is the derivative (the rate of change) of acceleration. Acceleration is the derivative (rate of change) of velocity. Velocity is the derivative (rate of change) of position.
Think about Newton's Quotient (First Principles) for a second.
Still don't believe me? Check this out.
So
Nope, Google! Sorry.
And as was said before, if you don't know math, good luck writing video games. Games like Quake perform tons of mathematical operations every second.
For sure! I don't know Quake personally (I'm not into video games at all), but I assume that it's another one of the 3D videogames where your surroundings change with your perspective.
That requires loads of matrix transformations directly out of linear algebra. It sounds terrifying, but it's just about having a group of numbers called a matrix. By multiplying them with a bunch of (x,y) coordinate in a certain order, you can do all sorts of warps and shrinks and stuff. If those (x,y) coordinates correspond to a bitmap of an object, you've just warped or shrunk the object, exactly as you'd have to do in a 3D maze or similar.
Then, there's calculus. There are two courses *everyone* should have to take in high school - auto mechanics (so you know how to change a tire, among other things) and calculus. Calculus means "small stones", as for counting. It's all about rates of change. You could tell the speed of your car by looking at your odometer and your watch, but that will give you only the average speed over a given time or distance. The speedometer, on the other hand, gives you your instantaneous speed - which is the derivative (calculus term) of your position (odometer) with respect to time. This makes sense when you think about it: speed is the rate of change of position.
(Actually, it's velocity, but that's a whole other kettle of fish if you don't know about vectors from Linear Algebra yet.)
Don't worry about the math. It's usually the easiest course in your university schedule - and I tell you that as someone who failed high school math classes constantly and who dropped out of high school because of math (that's a long story, though). Math *is* your friend. How's that? You can be guaranteed that if you do all your homework, you will get an A+ in the course. That's it. No reading, no stupid assignments which get marked by TAs who know less than you, nothing. It doesn't even matter how good or bad your teacher is. Just do all your homework and you'll get an A+. It's a non-linear relationship, do 50% of your homework (every second assigned problem) and you'll get a B+. Do 25% of your homework and you'll get a C+.
As an EE, I had to take 7 university level math classes.
Wake up and smell the damn coffee, it's not a problem exclusive to Microsoft, as much as some of the Linux rah-rah club would like to think. Why is it OK for Linux to patch the hell outta itself but a damn near capital crime if Microsoft has to?
No, that's right. Linux and *BSD have had root exploits before. But the problem is that Microsoft insists on shipping Windows with all sorts of daemons (ahem... services) running. Each one is a potential exploit; the Microsoft philosophy of run-everything-for-convenience is a lot more dangerous than the Unix philosophy of run-only-what's-necessary. Bugs in code don't get exploited in services which aren't running.
Microsoft released a patch, people did not install the patch. Who's fault is that? None of the 1000+ systems in my office were infected because I'm intelligent enough to have policies in place to prevent stuff like this from happening.You rolled out a patch in 1000+ systems without testing it extensively? Sooner or later, one of those patches will break your 1000+ systems.
Behind a firewall, thinking you're safe without patching? Sooner or later, someone is going to release a worm which also propagates by e-mail or web browsing (IIRC, Nimda did it) and infects a machine behind your firewall. In a matter of minutes, your entire network will be compromised.
Either way - when a patch fails and takes out the machines, or when a worm gets into your LAN and takes out the machines - I'd love to be the fly on the wall while you explain to your boss why 1000+ users are out of work for a day or two.
Your ass would be fired faster than you can say Control-Alt-Delete.
Let your employees run autoupdates and if one of them does break your machines, roll it back. Servers are a special case, because if you lose the TCP stack on your mail server it's much worse than if Ted from Marketing loses his.
Most corporate desktops are imaged from a standard install. They're clones of each other.
Therefore, if a patch breaks one of the desktops, it breaks them all. And pretty soon, I have 600 employees who can't work because all their computers are down.
All of which will remain down until either we massively roll-back the update (probably requires re-imaging each and every machine) or figure out a way to remotely deploy a fix for whatever the patch broke. Either way, 600 users are down for at least a day. Average salary in my organzation is $75,000 a year which translates to a daily loss of $180,000 - just in salaries.
That's the sort of scenario which results in getting fired.
If you don't believe me, Google around for articles about patches breaking machines versus articles about viruses breaking machines. I think you'll see that some of the latest viruses and worms hit in the many millions, whereas the problems experienced from patches hit in the many thousands or are not completely debilitating.
Great! You can explain that to my boss when 500 out of the 600 users in my organization are unable to work because a Microsoft patch broke one of our servers and everything has to be reinstalled from scratch and incrememental backups, only to be hit 5 minutes later by the very worm we'd applied the patch against!
Recovery from that - conservatively, a day. Conservatively. Now, these 500 people are out of work for a day, but they're salaried... lawyers, Judges, court reporters, clerks. The average salary is probably $75,000 in this organization. That's about $300 per day per employee, or $150,000 in damages. Never mind the fact that we have to run on set schedules or else other bad things happen. I can't take that risk, even if it's 1 in 100, before I click on that little Windows Update icon.
Theoretically, of course, the patch shouldn't do anything but fix the poor bounds checking in some DLL or something - just replace the DLL with a corrected binary. But if you've ever applied a patch, you *know* they play with all sorts of other things. We run Novell, and I've used Snapshot on PCs before and after applying what should be very simple patches, only to find dozens of files and unrelated registry keys have been changed. Microsoft clearly does other stuff in patches - quiet fixes of other problems which haven't been publicized, adding DRM software, I don't know but you can only guess at their motives - and how long until one of those breaks one of my production server?
No, man. I need to be able to look at a patch and know exactly what it does, so that I can tell in advance if it's going to break something. I need the diffs between the patch and the original source so that if it does break something, my developers can immediately know what changed and how to work around it. I need to be able to apply them individually without requiring a reboot of the server, just a restart of the daemon (ahem... service) in question.
And I ain't gonna get any of that from Microsoft. But, unfortunately - and it wasn't my decision - this server is running Windows 2000 Server, and the best thing I can do is hope that there's no e-mail borne version of the worm to get it into my LAN.
Of course I think Microsoft should be sued for some of the problems we have. I don't think everything in the EULA will hold up in court in every state. But it's not my decision.
Okay. How about those people who don't even run Windows and therefore have no part in the EULA? Their networks are being ground to a halt because of flaws in Microsoft software and their patching process, as infected machines attack them.
Analogy: car company X builds cars with defective brakes. You didn't buy that car. Your wife and children are driving home from shopping and someone driving X's car runs through a red light because he can't stop, and plows into the side of your wife and kids. Now, not that I'm overly litigious, but there's a time and place for companies to be held responsible for the damage caused by their poor products and designs.
Who do you sue? The guy driving the car with defective brakes, or the company that has a pattern of time and time again making defective products?
In an unrelated question, has anyone tried the spray on products for defeating "speed cameras"? Found one listed at Phantom Plate but don't know if the stuff really works. Probably should drive the speed limit more closely, but those darn cameras are going up everywhere in Maryland.
I wouldn't bother. For one thing, a spray-on product is likely to be rather ineffective - sure, it could be a textured clearcoat, but the texture is only going to trap road dirt and make your license plate filthy all the time.
The other thing is that around here (Ontario, Canada), it's illegal to have anything on your license plate. Cops ignore dealer frames and clear plastic license plate covers, but if you go with anything else, they're likely to nail you.
Another thing is that photo radar units (in Ontario experience) tended to be installed in high-traffic areas because that's where they'd catch the most violators. Because they're high-traffic areas, they're also precisely the places where you shouldn't be driving like an idiot. I like to stretch those throttle return springs, too - but the time and place to do it is in an *empty* piece of freeway where there's no traffic. No traffic generally means a quiet enough area that a photo radar unit wouldn't be financially viable or would be subject to vandalism. My personal record is getting my 1976 big-block Dodge Ram up to 120 MPH - it got a little scary so I didn't push it further, the aerodynamics of the vehicle are such that the back end was getting light. And the only person I was risking was myself.
The other thing I'd remind you is that the speedometer in your car is really not a very accurate gauge - generally +/- 10% anyway. Then, you get the optional wheel package on your new car, and you'll have bigger wheels with the same speedometer - probably no difference in the speedometer pickup gear (VSS) or software in the ECM, and you'd be going ($whatever_percent_the_circumference_of_your_tires _are_bigger_than_speedometer_design)*($speedometer _reading).
A friend of mine is a cop, and he told me the rules: they don't pull you over if you're within 20% of the speed limit. 120km/h in a 100km/h zone will be ignored, unless you're driving like an asshole (changing lanes constantly, tailgating, staying in the passing lane when not passing, etc.).
I have never in my life been nailed for speeding or any other moving violation. Cops are reasonable, and if you're playing safe, they don't care.
Vehicles I've had (as a testament to how quickly I've travelled):
Fast cars I've driven extensively (in order of potential for speeding tickets):
Like I say, don't worry about the photo radar. You'll only find it installed in places where you shouldn't be driving like an asshole.
WTF are you talking about? I guess I haven't seen any hand-cranked CD players but that hardly seems relevant as I haven't seen any LP walkmen either.
Actually, Sony did make an LP Walkman. It was the original Discman, released in about 1983. I've never seen one in person; they didn't catch on for obvious reasons of practicality. Nor could I find any references to it anywhere online, but it was featured in the Gadget section of Hands-On Electronics magazine at the time - I think I'll have to scan the article and put it online. The Sony model looked like a large 80's-styled plastic C-clamp. It came with a belt clip (presumably only for carrying it to your listening spot, since having a whirring record on your hip would be ...problematic), and it took a 33RPM LP. I don't know what you'd use it for - back when I was a kid, libraries would lend LPs, maybe for listening in the library?
Others did make similar things but mostly in slot-load format - check out these pictures of one which was only capable of 45RPM singles.
Yes, I know. It's asinine. But they did make 'em.
You can get rid of the clickety click by adjusting the valve lash to within specs. According to my Chiltons, it's
Yup. But remember you have to set the valve lash when the engine is hot! I do it just before an oil change (that way, any dust which gets in is removed). Take off the valve cover, then put it back on held loosely by two bolts. Start the engine, let it idle until the upper rad hose gets hot. Then shut it off, unplug the ignition coil (so it can't somehow start when you're cranking it over by hand to set the lash on the open valves) and get busy with the feeler gauge.
When it's properly set, the Slant-6 will make a distinct valve lash noise when it's cold, but once it's warm, it'll be nearly silent.
Water is a remarkable battery if we could manufacture a fuel cell affordably (i.e. - out of non-noble metals like platinum). Just add electricity and you've got H2 and O. Lovely.
Yeah, that's essentially a battery all right. You're investing energy to dissociate the hydrogen and oxygen. You then have to compress the hydrogen and fill automotive fuel tanks with it.
There are two big problems. Big problem number one is that a tank of hydrogen is several orders of magnitude more frightening than a tank of gasoline. Hydrogen seeps through cast iron, exactly like acetylene but faster. And it burns with a hell-fire, requiring far less ignition energy and over a wider air/fuel mixture than gasoline. I don't want to share the road with cars fuelled up with that.
Big problem number two is where are you going to get the energy to do this electrolysis? Nuclear plants? Coal plants?
Solar and wind have poor practicality to being put onto the grid - solar cells output DC, wind turbines could output AC but the frequency won't be stable. Either one must be provided to the grid in lock-step with the 60Hz sinewave coming out of the wall socket, and that will require inverters producing perfect sinewaves in phase with the grid. Inverters can be, at thereoretical best, 70.7% efficient - practical inverters are less. But at least electrolysis could harness DC power from them directly, providing a more useful application for this energy.
However, solar cells are inefficient (both in terms of real estate and energy capture) and have a finite lifespan (heating/cooling cycles primarily). Wind turbines will cause public protest ("You're not building that in my backyard! You'll spoil my view!") and will affect the local climate - take enough energy from the wind and you'll slow it down, causing weird things like new orographic precipitation, etc.
Seriously, these are the kind of stories which make the populace at large think that the solutions to the world's energy problems is just around the corner, so in the mean time lets squander our remaining oil reserves and pollute the atmosphere.
Yeah, generally I view this sort of thing with skepticism. But if you take a look at Iogen's website, you'll see that they can take 1 ton of cellulose-rich farm waste and turn it into about 300L of ethanol.
Not only could you have a hell of a party with that, but there are other possibilities.
They can use wood chips. So, probably paper too. I'm sure there's a fairly large waste stream from paper recycling, of paper and pulp which can't be used to make new paper. How about tree bark? How about compostable waste from the garbage? Maybe even cotton fibers?
This is a *massive* quantity of raw material which is all waste anyway. And all of it is plant-derived, so consuming it as fuel causes no net increase in CO2.
All they need to do is not tax the fuel, and you've instantly provided cost competitiveness and a powerful incentive to convert your vehicle (if it isn't already ready for it).
I read that there's an ethanol/methanol gas station here in Ottawa, but they're for the federal government vehicles. It's just down the street from me, in fact. I'm a federal government employee, I wonder if I can fill up my personal vehicles there?
My 1976 Dodge Ram has an aftermarket fuel pump on it. The fuel pump is a high-volume unit, designed for drag racing, and I put it on because it was cheaper than an original replacement part (more competition in the aftermarket). But it's rated for 100% methanol. The carburetor, which I rebuilt soon after I bought the truck in 1999, has a brass float - also safe for methanol. I replaced the rubber body-to-engine fuel line at the same time as the fuel pump; it's also safe for methanol.
In short, I can fill up my Ram with ethanol or methanol. If the cost is competitive, I'll happily throw a vacuum gauge on it and adjust the timing and mixture for the new fuel.
The old big-block, with bores the size of paint cans, really won't care what the fuel is as long as it pushes the pistons back down at the right times.
Yeah, it's really smart to replace petrol with ethanol; a fuel that takes more energy to produce it than it yields...
Isn't that the same as solar cells, given that they require massive amounts of energy to make, output feeble amounts of energy on a per-cell basis (and at most 0.707 of that is harnessable as alternating current), and have a finite lifespan (primarily to cracking caused by heating/cooling cycles)?
Actually, ethanol/methanol is a great step toward solar-powered cars; capture the solar energy with plants, store it as chemical energy, release it as heat energy within an internal combustion engine. Of course, one could argue that this is already what happens when you start up your Hummer.
Enthanol/methanol are a far better automotive fuel than electricity, so if this replaces the (misguided) efforts to produce electric cars, that would be excellent. It's still effectively zero emissions, since every CO2 molecule which comes out of the car's tailpipe was already scrubbed from the atmosphere when the plant was growing. There will still be NOx and unburnt HC, as there are with conventional cars, but neither one of those species is chemically stable in our atmosphere and both are rendered back to N2, CO2 and H2O very quickly.
I have two big worries with electric cars. The biggest being the batteries - by necessity, the greater the energy density of the battery, the nastier the chemicals inside it have to be. Weird things happen to cars - accidents, ditched in lakes, etc. - so it doesn't seem like a good idea to be carrying around hazmats which make gasoline look benign. The other great worry is that electric cars all must be recharged somewhere - how many new nuclear and coal power plants will have to be built to keep all these electric cars recharged?
Transition would be easy, too - as soon as the fuel is economically feasible, gas stations can start dedicating a pump or two to it. Many modern vehicles are already built to run on methanol - Chrysler experimenting with "Flexifuel" Plymouth Acclaims and Dodge Spirits as far back as 1992. And with a little bit of work - swapping old rubber-diaphragm fuel pumps then doing standard tune-up stuff like adjusting the mixture and the timing - just about any antique vehicle will run happily on the stuff. The hardest converts will probably be 1980s EFI cars.... and diesels.
Well, okay, diesels will already run happily on vegetable oil.
Early 81's had the gooved hood and fuel flap. Some 81's have a grooved hood and no flap. All 83's had no flap and no grooves. If you did in fact have an 83, the hood was from an 81.
That's news to me; but I did have the grooved hood which I'd always associated with the earlier cars - I thought they'd gone back to an older styling idea (probably because the grooves would have added strength to the hood).
The VIN number was an '83, and the date code on various parts (including the engine block casting) was all late 1982-early 1983. There were no signs of a collision, but the car was missing the grille and a few other front-end parts when I got it (as you can see in the pic).
Paid $1800; put $2000 of parts and labor into it, sold it for $14,000 a little over 6 months after buying it. Still see it driving around every now and then, though I've lost touch with the owner. Wish I'd held onto it, even though it was purely a show car - parts expensive and hard to get, not especially quick, doesn't handle very well, feels like a kit car. But still beautiful.
I should clarify that the Irish designer of the delorian was a junkie not the man that stuck the flux capacitor in.
There was no "Irish designer of the DeLorean".
John DeLorean is American.
John DeLorean founded the company. The exterior design (and what you would probably associate with DeLorean styling) was done by the very famous Giugiaro in about 1975 - pictures on their website here along with some other cars they've done; by the time it actually hit production in 1981, it was already looking a little old. The car was built in Ireland (North or South, I can't remember which) only because the government there was willing to invest massively in the DeLorean Motor Company (BTW, that's where the DMC on the grille and dashboard comes from).
He was neither Irish, nor a junkie. He was an American of French decent, and was charged with conspiracy to traffic cocaine, and aquitted due to the cop's obvious attempt to entrap him.
That's right. I used to have a DeLorean (rare, 1983 model, note the fuel fill door on the hood) and still have a driver's side gull wing door kicking around my garage. Lemme tell you, they're already a pain in the ass to work on - the engine is in the back and there are the little "sail windows" which give it the rough profile of a hatchback when it isn't. I can't imagine how it is to try to get at the motor with all the BTTF props on it!
Anyway, I read a lot about DeLorean. Here's the problem. DeLorean was a former Pontiac executive, and one of the creators of the Pontiac GTO.
Angered with GM, he wrote a scathing book, "On A Clear Day You Can See General Motors" in which he detailed how the first Chevy Vega tore itself in half after only 8 miles on the test track.
(The Vega and its twin the Pontiac (dis)Astre, was the predecessor to the Chevette, produced from 1971-1977, and is probably the single worst car ever made by Detroit - still not so bad compared to lots of early Japanese and Eastern European cars, though... Renault Beep-Beep Dauphine!)
DeLorean decided to make his own personal luxury car, the ethical luxury car. Stainless steel body that would never rust, best of the best materials (yeah, as a former DeLorean owner, tell me how to fix dents in the stainless steel!). By the time he'd arranged for the production (factory in Ireland for the tax breaks), it was 1981.
When the Guigaro (same styling house that did most VW, Hyundai, Audi) styled the DeLorean, it was the mid-1970s. Such a simple rectangular, clean car was unheard of.
In 1978 Ford introduced the Ford Fairmont and Mercury Zephyr, also the restyled "Fox-body" Mustang. GM introduced the super-square Impala about this time - all of these are things that we associate with 1980s cars, versus the rounded and skirted shapes of 1970s cars. All of a sudden, the DeLorean's simple clean angular body wasn't so cutting-edge.
In 1981, inflation was rampant, and the economy was doing poorly. Chrysler was on the verge of bankruptcy. When you factor in inflation, gasoline was more expensive then than it is now. People were not in the mood to buy luxury cars; people were buying Chevettes and Ford Escorts and Plymouth Reliants. DeLorean's nascent car company launched at the wrong time.
By 1983, he was running out of money. The cars were already looking dated as the simple early 1980s angular shape was giving way to the "Aerobird" shapes of the new 1984 Thunderbird, Cougar and Tempo, all premiering in the 1983 car show circuit. There was no money to restyle and retool, and DeLorean started to look for other ways of keeping the company afloat, at least for a little while.
The car had been produced with massive subsidies from the (North/South - can't remember which) Irish government. When the company finally folded (with a little over 2,000 DeLorean DMC-12 sports cars produced), the government destroyed all the stamping dies and tooling to ensure that no more DeLoreans would ever be made.
To summarize. Car use accounts for approx. 84% of the energy expended in the life cycle of a car. Recycling itself (crushing) is insignificant. Material production and manufacturing is about 14%.
Do you have references? Because I think they've got it reversed.
Let's start with the assumption that the average car lasts 200,000 miles. That's generous, I think you'll agree if you've ever wandered around a junkyard and looked at odometers.
Now, calculate back, projecting the car's fuel economy, to figure out how many gallons of gasoline it went through. Now figure out how many joules, BTUs, calories, whatever, of energy that was.
Now, estimate the mass of the car. Consider that it will probably be melted twice during each production cycle, whether it's as ingots, sheets, or castings. Estimate 50% efficiency in the die-stamping of body panels - think of using a cookie-cutter on cookie dough, what percentage do you have to roll up into a ball (remelt) and try again to make your cookies?
And then tell me how much coal it takes to do that.
Oh, and btw, 1990-spec emissions are now 14 years out of date. So meeting them isn't too impressive.You clearly know nothing about cars.
This is a 34 year old car without EFI, a catalytic converter or EGR system.
The carburetor is a Carter BBD mounted on a Feather Duster aluminum intake manifold. Air cleaner is factory from a 1975 model, with heat stove system (keeps intake air temperature constant) connected and working. Exhaust is a Hedman 6:1 header with a 3" exhaust into a suitable glasspack muffler, 2" from the muffler back. Ignition is 1974-1975 Chrysler Electronic with a Mopar Performance aftermarket spark control computer. Engine and head are original cast iron, bored 0.030" over and polished ports, respectively. Crank is dead-stock forged iron. Transmission is a TorqueFlite A-518 with same underdrive ratios as original 904, but an overdrive gear added (didn't matter on the dyno, only tested at idle and 40km/h, and even then, my car was exempt from emissions testing; I did it for fun). Diff is original open-ended with 2.94 gears. Everything in the car has CARB EO numbers, so the car is 50-state legal (the engine would officially be classed as a 1974/1975 aftermarket, even though it's still the original 1970 block and heads).
That *is* impressive; most impressively, it demonstrates how well the car is maintained. (Most well-maintained old cars will blow nearly as clean as modern cars.)
Noting, of course, that there was only one emissions system requirement (PCV valve) at the time that car was built, and yet it blows away 1972 requirements, 1974 requirements, 1976 requirements, 1980 requirements, 1985 requirements, and falls somewhere into 1988-1990 requirements. Of course, 1988 was when the most arduous new requirements were added...
A poser SUV? What the fuck do you call a Cadillac SUV then, or 99% of the other SUVs on the market?
Silly SUVs. But at least they tend to be real solid-axle 4x4 vehicles, built on pickup truck frames, with that stupid plush station wagon body dropped on top.
Don't even try to compare a CR-V or a Toyota Rectal Assault Vehicle with a real 4x4, even if it does have silly leather seats and carpets. A Lincoln Navigator could easily back over you in a parking lot, if his transfer case was set to 4WL.
At least if I took my CR-V offroad and broke it I could replace it without breaking the bank!Yup... But you'd be a lot less likely to break the Cadillac Escalade, Lincoln Navigaton, Cherokee, Grand Cherokee, Durango, Suburban, whatever.
Stand behind your CR-V and look at the rear axle sometime. Tell me, based on the width of the differential in there, exactly how much steel you think is in those gears? Oh, what's that, there aren't even gears in there? Well, I rest my case, then. And I'm quite secure in the knowledge that I could point my two wheel drive 1970 Dodge Dart down that little logging path, following the SUVs, and make it a hell of a lot further than your cute little 4WD or AWD setup.
(Please don't try to teach me about off-road driving. It really won't work. For one thing, I live in Ottawa, Canada - we get *lots* of snow. For another thing, I'm frequently in the bush, scavening automotive parts at ancient wrecking yards or going camping 25 miles down a dirt road from the next nearest human being.)
And WTF is "artificially high resale value"? Is that what someone with a car with crappy resale value says to refute the fact that their car ages like crap?No. That's what's used to describe the resale value of just about all trucks (real and poseurs like yours) at this current time. I just sold a 1993 Dodge Ram 4x4 with a 318 for $10,000. The thing is a former plow truck with 300,000km on it. That's artificially high resale value.
Anyways, IMHO in general an SUV is not an offroad vehicle. It's a yuppie-mobile.A real one is.
SUVs became popular only as the manufacturers were being forced to discontinue the full-size RWD station wagons like the Caprice Classic Wagon and LTD Estate.
But people still wanted them. So, noting that the CAFE rules didn't apply to pickup trucks, Detroit started dropping station wagon bodies onto pickup truck frames.
Need more evidence of this? Look up the sales numbers for the original SUVs - Jeep Wagoneer, Chevy Suburban, Dodge Ramcharger, Ford Bronco - before 1987-1988. They'd been around forever (Wagoneer and Suburban since the 1950s!), in fairly small quantities, sold mostly in rural areas. Urban yuppies had no interest in them until they couldn't get the car they really wanted!
The CR-V is an economical family car.You said it.
For us it's a solid, comfortable grocery getter with more cargo space than our 2 seater for long trips. That's it. All we want is something that drives, holds value well (relatively), is comfortable, reliable, and gets the job done.Wouldn't you have been better off with a lighter weight, lower aerodynamic profile station wagon? Oh, wait. Can't really make those anymore - thank your government and your environmentalists influencing technology from the depths of their arts degrees!
The Wrangler solves a different problem. I'm sure it's a way better off-road vehicle. But who cares? Look around, you idiot. 99.99% of the people who are buying SUVs today will NEVER take them offroad, unless you count that big gravel patch in the Safeway parking lot offroad.The Wrangler is a special case, appealing mostly to people looking for a particular image - and it's always been that way, since back when the first 1944-1946 Jeep M-38s (CJ = civilian version of M-38, YJ and TJ are descendents, all the CJ/YJ/TJ models have been called Wranglers at some point) were being surplused after World War II.
But I agree; most of these people would have been better off with station wagons or convertibles.
You need to check your facts or at least give us hints as to which car manufacturers don't produce " tinfoil crap."
Unfortunately, due to market pressures (fuel efficiency requirements, cost reductions by using thinner gauges of steel and other material reduction, performance increases due to lighter curb weight), I can't think of too many.
I'd consider anything full-frame, RWD, American made: Caprice Classic, Crown Victoria, pickup trucks without silly crap like power windows and carpets.
Also, consider a V6 Mustang. They're designed for the output of the V8, with some room to spare for performance mods, and I would suspect that the torsional loads on the body (which contribute massively to paint cracking and metal fatigue) would be substantially minimalized with the V6. As for the V6 drivetrain itself, I dunno.... if they're still offering the 3.8L V6 with the AOD automatic (or a good manual), I'd take that, coupled to the Ford 8.8" rear axle. Though, if you get the V8, treat it well and hang onto it for a long time, you might even find that it appreciates in value (20 years +).
I mean, I had an 85 Civic that ran 250,000 no problem, why shouldn't a new one, better engineered, run longer?
Better engineered to last a specific amount of time. Better engineered to be reliable and consistent.
Typically, when the CV joints start to rattle, scrap the car and buy a new one - the Japanese are great at making the car work consistently and flawlessly until they get to that mileage. Once they're there, CV joints wear, alternator dies, valve stems are loose, balljoints aren't going to pass a safety inspection, etc.
Old cars aren't necessarily better, and are often worse.That's BS. The manufacturing of older cars is frequently worse - manufacturing tolerances and stuff were greater.
But the design, while simpler, is usually leaps and bounds better with inherent tolerance for, well, tolerances!
CAD, finite element analysis and scientific calculators which hold ten decimal places are responsible for this. In the old days, with a sliderule handling 2 or 3 significant figures, you'd round up forces and round down material strengths. The net result was that it was a lot stronger than it needed to be! Also, with design allowances for wider production line tolerances, the finished product continued to perform well despite normal wear.
On top of that, engine bay space wasn't at the premium it is now. Everything is easy to get at, to check it or to fix it, using common hand tools. This brings down maintenance and repair costs and serves to lengthen the vehicle's lifespan. Compare that to the alternator that I just replaced on a friend's 1993 Civic.... (never done an alternator in a Civic? Try it sometime.)
When the world ends, the only things left afterwards will be cockaroaches and the Mopar Slant-6.
Well, ya gotta also remember McDonalds uniforms.
Aside from the power used, it's a cyclic process with minimal wastage. The rubber, plastic, metal can be reused for whatever purpose necessary. It has to be economically viable if these companies are willing to lay out so much green for these 'car eaters'.
Wow.... Uhhh, yeah. So you've got a Honda Civic or some other piece of junk which only lasts 7 years. You crush it, transport it, shred it, smelt it, transport the ingot, re-melt for cold rolling, roll it, stamp it, weld the stampings back together, paint it, and sell it as a new car.
Okay... Why don't you try looking up the specific heat of iron and the energy content of coal. Sit back and tell me how many tons of coal you have to burn each time you melt an equivalent quantity of iron and steel to a car.
It's horrifically wasteful and terrible for the environment. In fact, you'd have to drive a poorly-tuned old gas guzzler for 22 years (on top of its regular lifespan) to make up the environmental damage caused by recycling it.
Buy a good and *durable* car that is easy to work on - not some Japanese tinfoil crap. Wash it and wax it every week. Change the oil every 4,000km or three months. Keep the engine tuned up, and when it needs rings and bearings, do it. And drive the thing for as long as you can - I'm thinking 40+ years. The newer more environmentally-"friendly" cars aren't.
My automotive stable includes a 1970 Dodge Dart with a Slant-6. Fits my 6'4" tall body comfortably, starts every morning with the legendary Chrysler gear-reduction "dive bomber" starter motor and a satisfying click-click-click of the solid lifters, gets 28MPG and blows as clean on the emissions test as a 1990-spec. And forget the $3000 HID headlights; mine are $4.99 each at Wal*Mart.
Can't buy a new car like that these days.
Instead, appeal to a more urgent need. "Doh, I can't read this
I agree completely with everything that you've said... except the mountain out of a molehill part. It's already a mountain; it's not an exaggeration of the problem.
"Saving in external formats may have caused information loss." Boy, that message frustrates me, because I know how most people read it (I remember switching my wife over to OO - she panicked at that dialog). They imagine whole paragraphs excised, pages gone poof. And worse -- why should they know how programs handle "files"? As far as they know, the original document (before the Save As) is also trashed now. "Information loss" is why they aren't supposed to open attachments anymore at work. Of course that looks bad.
This is typical of the sorts of problems I rant about in my page dedicated to the reasons why Linux isn't ready for the desktop yet.
What OO needs to have is, in the drop down file menu, "Save as Word file", and then pop up a box asking for selection of the filename and five buttons: "Recipient is using Word 95", "Recipient is using Word 97", "Recipient is using Word 2000", "Recipient is using Word XP", "Don't know what version of Word the Recipient is using". At the bottom of the box, another button, smaller: "If the document won't be edited by the recipient, please consider clicking here to send as Adobe Acrobat PDF."
The loss of information warning should include, at the very least, the word "formatting" - as in, "Warning: saving in this file type will result in some loss of formatting information." Better still, though, would be "You've asked OO to save the document in a file type which might not support all the features of this document. Your text and graphics will all be saved, but it might not be laid out quite as you intended. Are you sure you wish to continue?"
Developers need to remember to think in terms of the lowest common denominator.