Spam legislation won't stop the problem
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MAPS vs. ORBS
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· Score: 4
Anybody else take a look at the text of yesterday's anti-spam legislation?
A couple of things come to mind.
Point 1: The spam must clearly identify a reply-to address so that you can get off the list. Spammers have pretended to do this for years. Usually, the reply-to just means that your e-mail address is valid, and gets you more spam.
Point 2: Headers must not be masked. I think this is a great first step, but won't it be hard to enforce?
Point 3: Won't all this simply move the problem offshore?
I think the Internet Community has to provide the solution for this. While government legislation is a great symbolic step, I'm not sure how much it will actually do to alleviate the 200-300 messages a day that I sometimes get in my mailbox.
There's no doubt that domestic pushrod engines can survive more abuse... a friend had a '79 Nova with the straight-6, it ran dry of oil at least twice and still ran reasonably well the last time I saw it at about 120000 miles.
Yup. Domestic engines, especially older ones, were overbuilt, and depended less on precise mechanical tolerances to run well.
All these are anecdotal, but I'll tell you the story of a friend of mine. We were in high school then, the long-haired guys with the Motley Crue t-shirts that all the guys from the computer lab avoided (until they discovered that I was, at the time, an avid and good assembly language programmer).
Jay picked up a 1977 Dodge Aspen. It was rotted right out, having been driven in the winter by an uncaring owner. The car cost him $30 and still ran very well. He got it safetied by a garage that didn't really look at it, and put it on the road.
He drove that car for two years, never once changing the oil in the Slant-6. Since it had some oil leaks, it needed topping up occasionally, which he did...
You know how old oil, coolant, transmission fluids and stuff are collected in the high school auto shops? Generally, a bucket under the car. And that bucket gets filled with everything, including cigarette butts and the sawdust that's used to mop up spills.
Jay, wanting to spend money only for gas, used to top up the oil with that. He still managed to put over 50,000 miles on that car in two years, the Slant-6 still coughing to life at the touch of the key. He finally scrapped the car when he got T-boned by a Cavalier on a winter evening.
Again, it's entirely anecdotal; most cars never suffer that kind of abuse, and fewer still would survive it. But now, having rebuilt several Chrysler Slant-6s, I know how Jay's Aspen didn't die. I know why it kept going.
It was built to last.
The Slant-6 is by far my favorite engine, for this exact reason.
As far as the mitsubishi 3.0 V6 goes, I have another friend with a plymouth acclaim that has one of these; yes, it leaks oil from every available orifice.
More so isn't the external leaks. The oil control rings coke up if the oil isn't changed frequently, and the engine starts blowing blue clouds when you hit the gas. Either rebuild the motor, or better still, yank it out and replace it with a good 2.2L or 2.5L non-turbo engine. It'll last longer.
Good thing it's a non-intereference engine because he's got over 160000 miles on it and hasn't changed the timing belt.
Hmmm... Are you sure it's a non-interference motor? I know for sure that the Mitsu 2.6L engine, optional in K-cars and stuff before the 3.0L V6, is an interference motor. But that was an engine that seldom made it to the 80,000 mile timing belt change - usually, they cracked their heads long before then. There are, last time I looked, four companies that sell mounting kits that let you put a 2.2L or 2.5L Chrysler engine into your car in place of that 2.6L Bitsumishi.
My personal preference (maybe it's an acquired taste) is to drive something smaller and lighter with an engine that likes to rev. I've had fun driving, maintaining (I do all my own work), and tuning my CRX for 12 years.
Okay. Tuning, or building?
Power is generally achieved through pulling off the head, porting and polishing it, increasing valve sizes, shaving the deck for increased compression ratio, port matching the intake and header to the head, etc.
Tuning is basic maintenance, not a performance upgrade, which is something that tends to confuse many rice rocket enthusiasts. Changing spark plugs, adjusting timing, adjusting fuel/air ratios, etc. is tuning, not building the engine up for better performance. Generally, building an engine takes the car off the road for a few weeks; most of these little kids who have the "Tuned by" stickers on their cars can't afford a second (or third) car, and therefore don't get any real performance work done.
The other thing is that once you've built the car for performance, real world street driveability is compromised. The manufacturers are interested in building cars for regular use, not drag or oval track racing, after all.
I'm guessing from your email address that your preferences lie elsewhere....
Absolutely, and I suspect that you're somewhat more astute and informed than most of the Japanese car enthusiasts that I come across, based solely on the fact that you either know what "BigBlock" is, or that you know what "Mopar" is. Though I will confess that I have seen one Honda products that really did impress me. The thing was a perfectly stock looking 1993 Civic hatchback. The guy had hacked on a huge Garrett turbo that looked like it was off a Buick Grand National. This Civic ran 11.9 on the 1/4 mile, despite the fact that front wheel drive doesn't lend itself to drag racing. That was impressive.
I gotta meet you dude... you got the best ideas I have ever heard!!:)
Thanks, but I can't really claim all the credit for this one... The Sex Pistols were a helpful inspiration.
I was sitting at the corner of Bay and King Streets in the heart of downtown Toronto's financial district. I was wearing a shirt and tie and driving my lovely old 1983 Dodge Ram, which my friends called either "Patches" (for the rough, unground weld marks from rust repairs) or "The Brick" (for its rectangular shape, almost free of curves, and its red primer paintjob). It was truly the ultimate urban warrior: someone hits you, and you just laugh at the poor fool.
Driving that truck was really neat: people would assume that you were a roofer or something, until they looked in and saw a young guy with a white shirt and silk tie. And then they'd stare at me, looking really confused. Anyway, I liked the truck, it suited me, and it was really practical.
So, I reached over to the Alpine CD player I'd put in there a couple of months before, and flipped in a Sex Pistols CD. I skipped up to "Anarchy in the UK", and turned up the volume until the 6x9s in the doors didn't sound like they'd take it anymore.
The Swift, who didn't appear to have AC since his windows were down, didn't fare very well as the big old truck beside him lowered its windows. And, as the lines "I am an anarchist / I am the anti-Christ" played to his shocked ears and drowned out some Eminem crap, I came up with the idea for the Sibilance Projectors. (With apologies to Traynor, who made a tweeter bin with the same name back in the 1970s.)
Radio Shack stores in Canada used to sell these piezo tweeters under their name. In MCM Electronics' catalog 42, they're on page 663. I used several of the Motorola KSN1177A dual horn tweeters on each side of the truck. $14.95 each. I threw together some brackets with a little bit of sheet steel and bolted them to the underside of the truck, just sticking out below the rocker panels.
High frequency sound is very directional, so you'll want to have a friend pull his car alongside yours at the same distance you'd be from an offensive Honda product, turn on the sound (quietly), and aim the tweeters until your friend reports that the sound is at its loudest. Do this for both sides, and adjust your brackets accordingly.
Now, these things are officially rated at about 100W RMS each. That's a lie. After playing with their smaller siblings a couple of times, I got the feeling that they were really tough. My record is hooking a piezo tweeter up to a bridged Crown MT2400 amplifier, and then pegging it. The MT2400, bridged, will drive over 2kW into 4 ohms, and a piezoelectric tweeter's impedance drops as the frequency increases... I think it's safe to say that the tweeter survived at least 1500W. Not for long, mind you, but it was very impressive.
I have run biamplified stacks in concerts using nothing but Motorola piezos for my high end, driving each tweeter with 500W RMS without any issues. Filling a 50,000 seat stadium like Toronto's SkyDome with these has always been painfully easy.
A couple of things. First off, piezo tweeters don't need crossovers. Their impedance is very high below their operating frequencies. If you're retrofitting an existing cabinet, make sure that you hook them up before the inductor that filters the high end from your bass driver. And secondly, they're really loud and they're really tough, but they're not really high fidelity. Don't expect cymbals and stuff to sound as clean as they do with a good dome or cone tweeter (my faves for fidelity being Celestion or older Acoustic Research stuff). But the piezos are every bit as good as a cast aluminum horn with a dynamic driver behind it.
In short, they're dirt cheap, readily available, tough as nails, loud as hell and sound reasonably good. And they carry the Motorola name. They're amazing.
Yes, they've produced some of the most fuel-inefficient vehicles on the market today. The Dodge Durango is the 2nd worst gas guzzler that's legal to own in Canada.
That's not a function of the fact that the engine is a long-stroke low-revving motor (which the 3.9L V6 and its optional cousins, the 5.2L and 5.7L V8s both are). The reason a Durango is a gas guzzler is because it's heavy, has fairly soft and wide tires and has a fairly large frontal area for the wind.
At the same time, I'd question your sources, for you appear to me to be rather ignorant. Both the Lincoln Navigator and the GMC Yukon are far bigger and heavier vehicles and have far worse gas mileage ratings, therefore usurping the Durango's place as the "second worst". And, since I see them frequently at GM and Ford dealerships here in Toronto, I know that they're available in Canada.
And that's only counting SUVs. Dodge still makes the V10-powered Ram, available with a 4x4 drivetrain and a one-ton suspension. I'm sure if you drive that with the hammer down, you'll go through twice as much fuel as the Durango.
Further, it's not illegal to build, sell or buy a vehicle that gets 2 miles per gallon, let alone what these vehicles get. You'll be taxed to hell on the purchase of it, but it's not illegal to sell a car or truck no matter how much fuel it uses. Amazingly enough, despite the fact the federal government screws with every aspect of Canadian society, they haven't yet done that.
So, you're so full of feces that your eyes are brown. You clearly don't know as much about automobiles, engines, or mechanical engineering as you believe you do.
Well, simply because if you're going to build an engine that runs at 9000 RPM without shaking itself to pieces, you have to build it with tolerances tighter than a twelve year old back injury. Which is something that Ford and GMC haven't done. Which was the criticism that the original poster brought up about 70's Hondas.
I'll readily agree. The Japanese have been building cars with absolutely amazing assembly quality over the past few years. I just don't like their designs.
Nor will I ever forgive Honda for the absolutely incredibly poor assembly quality of some of their older models. They make Detroit's worst quality control failures (ie. the Chevy Vega/Pontiac Astre) look like a Mercedes in comparison.
The biggest issues with low redlines isn't caused by the fact that Detroit's assembly quality isn't as good as the Japanese. It's that Detroit's engines have traditionally had fairly long strokes. The longer the stroke, the higher the piston speed at a given RPM, and therefore the higher the reciprocating forces are. But it has the benefit of not having to reciprocate the engine as frequently to produce a given power.
Unquestionably, I'd love to see the automakers unions get busted. When you've got some half-wit with a ninth-grade education and a lottery ticket addiction machining connecting rods for $21/hr, you can't afford to throw away the marginal ones. This is where the failures in Detroit's quality control lie. It appears suicidal that Detroit hasn't been able to address this issue, but the unions are very strong. Most Japanese and European automakers don't have the problem to anywhere near this extent, even if they're unionized at all.
Well, when an american carmaker can build a car for general use that redlines at 9,000 RPM without rattling itself to pieces (The S2000), come back and yak. If you're comparing cars from 1973, I'll volunteer the Ford Pinto to champion the USAmerican side.
The nicest thing about the American school of engine design is that you don't have to revv the engine up to 9,000RPM to make power.
Less RPMs = less energy wasted to make the pistons stop, change direction and start moving again. Unless you drastically cut the weight of your pistons (making them more fragile to detonation and engine load), you're going to exponentially reduce your efficiency.
Further, the more times your pistons go up and down for a given mile of road travelled, the more wear that your rings, bore and bottom end will experience, and therefore the less lifespan your engine will see.
Sure, the Japanese have manufacturing quality now to the point of an art that has yet to be duplicated anywhere else in the world. But I still don't like any engine where the manufacturing tolerance is the only factor towards longevity.
Give me an old Chrysler Slant-6 any day. They redline at 4,500 RPM, and with a 4.125" stroke and a 3.40" bore, they're massively oversquare. In low gears, they can pull stumps. In a higher gear, they can pin you back in your seat when you hit the gas on the highway. All without pushing the tach past more than about 3,500 RPM.
Not coincidentally, they're world-renowned for lasting nearly forever.
I had the best luck with 70's luxury cars (Buick LeSabre, Chevy Caprice Classic). I currently drive a 1985 Chevy 3/4 Ton Suburban with the V8-454. It is quick as shit and the milage is about 18MPG (If I don't hot-rod it too much). Despite being 6'8" I was able to drive a 1989 Buick Regal; it was a nice little ride and got pretty good milage.
I'm starting to wonder if there's some sort of correlation between one's height and the displacement of one's car engine.
With my 400 V8, I can drive down the road and say to myself, "my engine is bigger than his, and his, and hers, and his, and his, and hers, and...". It's an amusing way of passing time in a traffic jam. At the same time, I'm also 6'4", almost dwarfed by you, but all the same, I'm still frequently the tallest person in any given public place.
Interesting. Is the big engine borne of the practical need for a larger vehicle, or is it because we just like big things? I know both factors are at play with myself.
The biggest engine I've ever worked on was quite impressive, and a hell of a lot of fun. It was a MAN B&W diesel on a Great Lakes bulker ship. It was 4 stories tall, with a redline of about 75 RPM (but the Chief Engineer told me he'd never had the guts to rev it above 70 RPM). The valve springs were bigger than I am. And there I was, hanging off a catwalk on the side of a running engine, changing the oil pressure sensor for the front main bearing.:)
nobody likes me. you don't even notice i?m here. i?m a failure with the first post, and i?m a failure with evertyhing else.
maybe i should kill myself... but not until i?ve taken a few classmates with me. don?t bother trying to catch me, jonkatz -- you?ll never find me, fucker.
Hey dude, I'd be more worried about one of your classmates reporting you to Pinkerton's Thought Police.
Listen, life sucks. It's tough, it's frustrating, it's annoying. But no one ever said that life would be easy.
Go talk to your guidance counsellor at school or whatever. If you play your cards right, you'll get some nice and legal happy pills, paid for by your HMO. Then things start to look better.
It's just one more way that Microsoft insults the intelligence of their customers. I don't need an idiot paperclip popping up to tell me that it "looks like" I'm writing a letter. I know whether I'm writing a letter, thanks... But Microsoft makes the blanket assumption that ALL its customers are functionally illiterate.
A lot of my time at work is actually spent supporting new to intermediate Windows users, and, believe it or not, the paperclip and all the stuff that you and I, as more advanced users, consider to be the bane of our existances, is actually useful to a lot of them.
I just wish, in the control panel, there was a little setting called "User Skill". Drag the little control halfway for an intermediate user, all the way to 0 if you know that the user is a complete Windows newbie. If all the applications followed this lead, it would be the best of both worlds.
I use Internet Exploiter as my browser. Yes, it's evil, but since it's already there on my hard disk, like it or not, it saves me time and resources. And it seems to crash less often than any version of Netscape I've ever installed in Windows. And it didn't add that stupid AOL Instant Messenger the way Netscape did.
I just wish that, when an URL fails because the server is busy, Internet Exploiter didn't open up that stupid "Navigation Cancelled" screen. It wouldn't be so bad if the long URL I'd just (mis)typed into the address bar didn't get replaced with "About: Navigation Cancelled".
One would hope a User Skill control would, when cranked to the max, let me see the 404 error from the server.
ADD is a bit of a misnomer. It's not really an attention deficit disorder, but wild oscillations between the ability to hyperfocus for a long time and distractibility. Yes I know, this happens to everyone, but it moreso in people with ADD -- in fact, based on the symptoms, I think you almost have to have ADD to be a geek. (It's not a bad thing; the symptoms of ADD are closely related to the symptoms of genius and the symptoms of creativity -- they think Einstein, Edison and Mozart had it.)
You know, I had always thought that ADD was one of these conditions created by schoolteachers and stuff as an excuse for not being very good at classroom control.
Then, my best friend of 11 years was diagnosed with it, and lives on prescription dexamphetamines. He's got a brilliant mind, but all the way through high school, and, in fact, until the diagnosis, he couldn't stick with anything.
The change in his personality occurred within a few days of starting his prescriptions. He's a mechanic, and on a professional front, he moved from changing oil and mufflers at a Toyota dealership to working at the best automotive restoration shop east of California. Now, he repairs and restores big-buck collectible cars like 1930s Rolls Royces, Bugattis, and 1960s-1970s musclecars.
One of his lastest projects has been working on a 1950 Ford sedan that has been converted into a $500,000+ show car. He's at the top of his profession.
He's come a long way from hammering rusted exhaust systems off ten-year-old Tercels.
More power to you if you can beat this thing. It's truly the plague of genius. I don't know how I dodged that bullet. <grin>
Aside from the frequent crashes and the inefficiency, my other great frustration with Windows 9x/NT is that when I'm banging away at Eudora and waiting for Internet Exploiter to load a busy webpage, Internet Exploiter will steal the focus away from Eudora while I'm typing. With no time for me to respond, it just goes and takes the next character I was typing to Eudora as being my response to its question.
Of course, these aren't the only programs affected by this design shortcoming; when you have ten applications running at once, the frustration can be immense.
Now, has anyone figured out a way to make Windows behave differently when an app wants focus? How about flashing the window's taskbar presence and beeping a couple of times?
Is this a problem that I'll see when I'm running X on my Linux box? (I'm still very new to Linux, and I'm not yet at the point where I've ever had more than about three X applications open at once.)
my heart leaps with the knowledge that one day you will leave canada. i'm already counting the seconds... remind me to key every '76 dodge ram i come across...;) buh-bye.
See, the beauty of this is that if you key my Dodge Ram, it'll probably do more damage to your key than it will to my truck.
Further, you're well ahead to be warned that the sorts of people who generally drive 24-year-old pickup trucks aren't the sorts of people you'd want to have angry with you, lest you actually do try this.
Most of us have guns. Some of us are members of the Hells Angels. And I'm a rare exception: I keep an old camshaft in my truck, in case anyone needs to have an attitude adjustment.
Ummm well people who drive sporty little cars are always wizzing by me on the highway... going 100 in a stupid ass sports car is not safe... They are dangerous in the snow and they look like "big rig" food...
Right!
If you want a high performance car, you drive a Viper, a Falcon or a Barracuda.
You don't drive something that you could feed to a Viper, Falcon or Barracuda.
How are those "stupid little sports cars" (as opposed to stupid big sports cars, like the corvette) as "bad" as SUVs?
Speaking as one who feels comfortable with the statement that I probably know more about cars than 98.9% of my fellow Slashdotters, I'm unclear as to how you can justify calling a car with half its cylinders missing and the engine pointing a funny way in the engine bay a "high performance car".
Last time I checked, four cylinders were suitable for getting the kids to the dentist, not for getting to the traps at the end of the strip first.
Stupid little sports cars are at least as "bad" as SUV's. It's too bad the hitch didnt go right through his empty skull... at least then you woulda had a picture to sell to the penis bird guy.
That's precisely right. As long as I have to share the roads with idiots in Integras that are coated with silly stickers, the driver on the cellphone while his stereo pumps bass so loudly that the coins on my truck's dashboard are bouncing to his beat, you better bet your ass that I'll be driving the biggest and heaviest brick I can possibly get my hands on.
Just one question: How can you talk on the cellphone with the stereo so loud that quarters are getting air in adjacent vehicles? I suspect they're just poseurs, they can't actually afford the cellular service, but think that it's an important status symbol.
I've actually put a rather nice stereo into my truck. In a former career, I was a professional audio and video technician. I've done sound for Metallica, Garth Brooks and the Three Tenors. I hit the drawing board and crunched some numbers. Then, I stuck a couple of professional EV 10" bass drivers into the space between my seat and the back of my cab. With a small amplifier I designed and threw together, they can easily kill my battery...:)
I've also put a whole shitload of Motorola piezoelectric tweeters ($7 each, tough as nails) on the underside of the truck, with a switch to turn them on and off. The switch, appropriately enough, is labelled "Sibiliance Projector" and has a setting for left and right.
When I pull up beside one of these idiots who has the stereo pumped with the latest (c)rap or dance tune, I stick in my Ozzy Osbourne CD, flip the sibilance projector to his side of my truck, and pump it. I get 122dB @ 8kHz at 1 meter from the truck. 200 watts, real watts, not car stereo watts, RMS. Earbleed territory. That'll fix 'em.
Either way, it's comforting to be able to back over them if I need to.
Before anyone attempts to argue with this guy, know this-this species will never willingly acknowledge any kind of design/research/manufacturing innovation to any country (or automaker) but his chosen favorite.
That's not even remotely true.
I'll fully admit that lots of foreign manufacturers have come up with great ideas and innovations. Mazda, for bravely soldiering on with the rotary, a disaster in the 1970s, but excellent by the time the RX-7 was discontinued. Honda for bringing variable valve timing to the masses. The Germans for working hard to make cars more modular and more easy to recycle.
In fact, I'll go so far as to say that the Japanese, in the 1960s, pioneered vacuum-molding of aluminum. They made it work. And without them, the complex cylinder head castings of today's cars wouldn't be possible.
My beef is about the plethora of idiots who seem to think that an automatic-transmission, 4-cylinder Honda Civic loaded down with hundreds of pounds of stereo equipment and cheesy stickers is a high performance car capable of taking on anything with a V8 in a stoplight confrontation. It's so much fun to see one of these pulling up alongside a dead-stock and poorly maintained Mustang 5.0, for the look of shock on the Honda driver's face as the Mustang easily pulls past him is just classical.
Be reminded that a stoplight confrontation is essentially drag racing. And for drag racing, rear wheel drive, light vehicle weight and gobs of displacement will always win.
Sad to see that someone who infers some level of education and even a basic automotive knowledge wouldn't understand this.
I've rebuilt dozens of car engines, both for daily drivers and for performance vehicles. I've driven CASCAR street stock. And I cut a consistant 0.554 reaction time at time trials at the local drag strip.
I feel fully qualified to dismiss Honda and other Japanese cars as the overdone four-wheeled mopeds that they are.
And finally, when I was towing my old Fiero up to a friend's place, as I was driving down the freeway with the Fiero attached to my truck with a tow-bar, I had no less than 4 different "rice rockets" pull alongside the Fiero and attempt to race it.
Even towing a 2,800lb Pontiac Fiero, my 1976 Dodge Ram with a 400CID (6.6L) V8 was more than happy to play with them.
Judging from your e-mail address, it looks like you must be feeling a little bit of jealousy. I mean, what's a stoplight confrontation in the former Soviet Union like? A Trabant versus a Lada? Geez, I could walk faster.
Or a "Powered By Honda" sticker across the winshield.
Gimme a break. The only way a "Powered By Honda" sticker would impress me is if the guy had earned the right to put it onto a Toyota. But even then, there are far more interesting engine swaps to waste your time with.
And you think there is some sort of justice in two people dying in a tragic accident instead of one? You disgust me.
Yup. But my insurance company will also tell you that I'm quite a good driver. My license covers me to drive vehicles up to 5 tons, including an air brake endorsement. I used to work on the road as a professional broadcast technician, and I had to have a good driving record and be able to get an air brake endorsement, to be allowed to drive around a truck with many millions of dollars worth of equipment inside.
So, chances are, I'm not going to be the one who causes an accident. It's possible, of course; no driver is immune to error. But I'm far more likely to be hit by someone else.
Finally, I'm more intelligent, better looking and more useful to society than most people, let alone those idiots who drive while talking on a cellphone. In an interesting demonstration of my Vulcan logic, therefore, if society is deprived of the gift of my awesome intellectual prowess and stunningly attractive visage, I should at least be able to provide society with one final gift, accomplished by removing one of the more careless and probably less intelligent individuals from the genepool.
I'm sure Darwin would agree with me. In absentia, I shall decree that he would.
And ya know what, regardless of whether I'm kidding or not - which you will never know - you'll probably double-check your blind spots before changing lanes on your drive home tonight.
You should thank me in advance. I may have saved your life.
I aim for the little cheap ass shit cars like you're driving...
Woo-hoo! I do that, too!
I don't drive drunk, but it's really funny to see one of those silly little Acuras swerve wildly to get out of the way as my 1976 Dodge Ram comes at it.
One of them rear-ended me not too long ago. The idiot thought he was my trailer, the way he was tailgating me. Ya know, it's one of those Hondas with a big "Powered By Honda" sign across the windshield, and dude thinks he's driving a race car.
I stopped for the red light ahead. He didn't stop.
And I was very grateful, not only for the fact that I drive 4,500lbs of Michigan's finest steel, but also because of the Class 3 trailer hitch below my back bumper.
He mashed my bumper, which was resting against his engine block, trashed grille and radiator somewhere between. My bumper cost him $219 to replace.
On the other hand, my trailer hitch, protruding from the engine and welded to the 3/16" thick plate steel frame of my truck, went right though his engine block and into his engine's water jacket.
His car was a write-off. And, when I unbolted the old bumper and bolted on the new one that his insurance provided, my truck's paint hadn't even been scratched.
As long as people still drive like idiots, I'll still drive big and heavy trucks. And when most of the vehicles on the road are as big and heavy as mine, I'll just dust off my air brake license and get myself a good 5-ton cube van for my drive to work.
Up here in Canada we're paying close to $3/gallon ($0.80cdn/L) for gas. I'd like to see that double or triple, which it will eventually. Then maybe we can restore sanity to urban transit.
Good. Public transit. So I can sit in a subway train full of unwashed derelicts and third-world refugees.
Ya know, the ideas that tree-huggers have are very short sighted. I'm all for saving the planet, sure. But I'm also for enjoying my life.
I work hard so that I can drive. And I don't expect to be rewarded for my efforts by having to interface with the masses on a daily basis. I pay 72.5 cents per liter to drive my gas-guzzling 1976 Dodge Ram so that I don't have to share my life with people I don't want to meet.
So that I won't again get lice from the person sitting next to me on the subway.
And I drive my truck in particular because I like it. Period. And guess what? It gets 7 miles per gallon.
The shortsightedness comes from the fact that when I no longer make enough money to be able to drive to work every day, I will move. Period. I'll take my many skills and my good work ethic, and I will pick up and move to the United States, where I shall pursue citizenship and sever all my ties with Canada. And I'll leave Canada with its burgeoning population of highly trained and highly literate convenience store clerks.
The brain drain will continue and Canada's standard of living will drop until all the tree-hugging idiots who can't understand the basic laws of supply and demand back off and let commerce take its place.
If OPEC keeps fuel prices high, there will be no place that I can move to escape being raped at the pumps. But so long as fuel prices remain artifically high in Canada, I'll continue to have an alternative which I can exercise at any time.
So... are you an American employer seeking a reliable, loyal and hard working computer geek with experience in other fields including broadcasting, professional audio and video, marine radar and engine management systems and analog circuit design? E-mail me for a resume.
I hope your offspring get killed in a collision with a transfer truck, you ignorant son-of-a-bitch. Maybe you should go buy one of those. And think about the people who YOU might kill in your need for bigger and heavier SUV's
In celebration of gas guzzlers and noxious pollutants, on my way to the office in the morning, I'll disconnect a couple of the spark plug leads on my 6.6L V8 engine. I'll toast you, xtal, with my coffee cup as I drive across Toronto on the 401, listening to the Howard Stern Radio Show, and filling the air with unburnt hydrocarbons as my massive and temporarily detuned engine chugs me to work.
*Obviously* you're paying attention to the automaker's marketing blathering and not to the actual safety numbers - SUV's have a tendency to roll over (saw two SUV rollover's the other day) and to burst into flames. SUV's are by far not the safest vehicles you can own. It's not worth it, esp. when for the money you can buy a Volvo with side-impact air bags.
Okay, well, you're both right, and you're not right. Some SUVs have a high center of gravity that does make them more prone to rollover. The old Jeep CJ-7 was probably the worst ever for this, but the YJ and TJ are quite safe. The Suzuki Samurai was an incredible deathtrap, too.
Today's real SUVs, like the (Grand) Cherokee, Durango, Explorer, Expedition, Yukon, etc. are all fairly good, with a low center of gravity and enough width that, while you could topple them over (as you could with any car), you'd have to work for them. In fact, with the exception of the Cherokee (but not the Grand Cherokee), these are full-frame vehicles, most of them with perimeter frames that concentrate the weight down and away from the center. (On most of them, the frame runs under the rocker panels.)
Now, a full-frame vehicle is actually more dangerous than a good unibody in a serious accident: the frame is basically steel C-channel or box section. If you hit something, the frame isn't going to give all that much. The damage to the vehicle will be minimal compared to the damage on a comparable unibody designed to crumple. So, the truck may survive, but they'll have to hose your brains off the dashboard before they can sell it to the next guy.
Most accidents are minor urban fender-benders. This is why I like my truck. (Note that it's a pickup truck, not an SUV; with the exception of the carpets and leather seats, it's basically the same thing.)
If some guy in a Honda Civic cuts me off and there's 20MPH of speed difference between us when we hit, my front bumper will push his taillights into the back seat. My bumper will be bent, I'll have to replace my grille and maybe my radiator, but my truck won't be seriously damaged.
On the other hand, his Honda will we well on its way to being reincarnated into table legs and manhole covers.
Mass and steel will always win over flimsy Japanese tinfoil and plastic.
My major complaint with these efficient cars is that vertically enhanced folk can't get in them. The reviews always seem to be by short people. I'm 6'5" and would love a fuel effieicnt car.
Probably not.
I'm 6'4", and I've only ever found two vehicles that fit me really well, both in terms of personal taste and my stature.
One of them is the Dodge fullsize pickup truck, from 1974 to 1993. These things are great, and with a Slant-6 engine and a four speed manual transmission, my old 1983 Ram used to regularily get 22-25MPG on the highway. Not bad for a 4,500 lb steel brick cutting through the air. I currently have a '76 Ram with a 400CID (6.6L) V8. It's a barrel of monkeys and happily out-accelerates Mustang 5.0s, let alone all the silly Acuras and stuff, at stoplights. But it comes with a penalty: 7 MPG. And since the compression ratio is in the 9.2:1 range, I really should run it on premium gas, but that ain't gonna happen...
The other car that fit me really well, paradoxically, was my 1985 Pontiac Fiero. I bought it because I've always liked the styling, and the fact that they're American made. And it was cheap - $350 - because it had a bad clutch. I changed the clutch and drove it for two years before giving it to a friend of mine.
It got great gas mileage, and despite the tiny size of the thing, I had gobs of headroom and legroom. While it wasn't terrifically reliable, it was a really nice little car and I miss it.
.. I'd wage that %95 of SUV's on the road today havn't even driven on a dirt road let alone on a trail or something like that.
Hell, yeah! I'd be surprised if even the 5% of SUVs that you exclude see off-road use.
Ya know, the big problem is all the yentas who get behind the wheel of these things, and either leave them in 4-wheel-drive mode all the time, or turn it on when it's raining.
Or, better still, those who drive stupidly in snow because they think the 4x4 drivetrain will somehow allow them to handle and stop better than everyone else.
Gimme a break.
I drive pickup trucks, not because I need the size or the cargo space most of the time, but because I like them - which is what disposeable income and free will is all about. And because they offer a form of insurance that State Farm doesn't offer: If I'm going to die in a car accident with a Honda Civic, I'll be damned well assured that that I'm gonna take the other guy with me.
My trucks are all 2WD, because I don't need 4x4. I've currently got a 1976 Ram, and I love the thing, even though it only gets 7MPG. I love older pickup trucks, because I like the styling, I don't want leather seats or carpeting, and I'm not interested in driving around in something worth $20k +.
My previous truck was, paradoxically, newer: a 1983 Dodge Ram with a Slant-6 and a 4-speed manual transmission. Phenominal gas mileage; if I drove it gently, I could get 450 miles out of a 25 gallon tank of gas. Not bad for an old half-ton.
And it went everywhere, even though it was 2WD. I especially fondly remember watching a woman in a fur coat trying to get an Isuzu Trooper over a snowbank during a big snowstorm in Toronto two winters ago. She was spinning all four tires, just hitting the gas, the friction of her tires turning the snow under her into ice.
I pulled out of the gas station, having filled up, and gently goosed the gas pedal, having shifted early into third gear to give myself some traction. My old Ram hit the snowbank, doing about 30 miles an hour and just plowed through the 3 feet of slush, ice and snow. Then I downshifted quickly and hit the gas hard to fishtail myself into a sharp turn and into the road. I then pulled to the side, got out, and helped the lady get her Isuzu unstuck.
She was freaked out by my little display of winter driving, and commented that "weren't 4 wheel drive vehicles great?".
When I turned around and told her that my trusty old Ram didn't have four wheel drive, let alone a positraction differential, she was stunned, but that didn't stop her from driving her now-freed Trooper through the opening in the snowbank that I had made.
It's all in the driving skill. SUVs have their places, but it's not in the hands of accountants, housewives or soccer moms.
'Course, I grew up in Ottawa and Montreal, two cities known for being blanketed in snow for 5 months of the year. I've had opportunity for practice.
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody else take a look at the text of yesterday's anti-spam legislation?
A couple of things come to mind.
Point 1: The spam must clearly identify a reply-to address so that you can get off the list. Spammers have pretended to do this for years. Usually, the reply-to just means that your e-mail address is valid, and gets you more spam.
Point 2: Headers must not be masked. I think this is a great first step, but won't it be hard to enforce?
Point 3: Won't all this simply move the problem offshore?
I think the Internet Community has to provide the solution for this. While government legislation is a great symbolic step, I'm not sure how much it will actually do to alleviate the 200-300 messages a day that I sometimes get in my mailbox.
Yup. Domestic engines, especially older ones, were overbuilt, and depended less on precise mechanical tolerances to run well.
All these are anecdotal, but I'll tell you the story of a friend of mine. We were in high school then, the long-haired guys with the Motley Crue t-shirts that all the guys from the computer lab avoided (until they discovered that I was, at the time, an avid and good assembly language programmer).
Jay picked up a 1977 Dodge Aspen. It was rotted right out, having been driven in the winter by an uncaring owner. The car cost him $30 and still ran very well. He got it safetied by a garage that didn't really look at it, and put it on the road.
He drove that car for two years, never once changing the oil in the Slant-6. Since it had some oil leaks, it needed topping up occasionally, which he did...
You know how old oil, coolant, transmission fluids and stuff are collected in the high school auto shops? Generally, a bucket under the car. And that bucket gets filled with everything, including cigarette butts and the sawdust that's used to mop up spills.
Jay, wanting to spend money only for gas, used to top up the oil with that. He still managed to put over 50,000 miles on that car in two years, the Slant-6 still coughing to life at the touch of the key. He finally scrapped the car when he got T-boned by a Cavalier on a winter evening.
Again, it's entirely anecdotal; most cars never suffer that kind of abuse, and fewer still would survive it. But now, having rebuilt several Chrysler Slant-6s, I know how Jay's Aspen didn't die. I know why it kept going.
It was built to last.
The Slant-6 is by far my favorite engine, for this exact reason.
As far as the mitsubishi 3.0 V6 goes, I have another friend with a plymouth acclaim that has one of these; yes, it leaks oil from every available orifice.More so isn't the external leaks. The oil control rings coke up if the oil isn't changed frequently, and the engine starts blowing blue clouds when you hit the gas. Either rebuild the motor, or better still, yank it out and replace it with a good 2.2L or 2.5L non-turbo engine. It'll last longer.
Good thing it's a non-intereference engine because he's got over 160000 miles on it and hasn't changed the timing belt.Hmmm... Are you sure it's a non-interference motor? I know for sure that the Mitsu 2.6L engine, optional in K-cars and stuff before the 3.0L V6, is an interference motor. But that was an engine that seldom made it to the 80,000 mile timing belt change - usually, they cracked their heads long before then. There are, last time I looked, four companies that sell mounting kits that let you put a 2.2L or 2.5L Chrysler engine into your car in place of that 2.6L Bitsumishi.
My personal preference (maybe it's an acquired taste) is to drive something smaller and lighter with an engine that likes to rev. I've had fun driving, maintaining (I do all my own work), and tuning my CRX for 12 years.Okay. Tuning, or building?
Power is generally achieved through pulling off the head, porting and polishing it, increasing valve sizes, shaving the deck for increased compression ratio, port matching the intake and header to the head, etc.
Tuning is basic maintenance, not a performance upgrade, which is something that tends to confuse many rice rocket enthusiasts. Changing spark plugs, adjusting timing, adjusting fuel/air ratios, etc. is tuning, not building the engine up for better performance. Generally, building an engine takes the car off the road for a few weeks; most of these little kids who have the "Tuned by" stickers on their cars can't afford a second (or third) car, and therefore don't get any real performance work done.
The other thing is that once you've built the car for performance, real world street driveability is compromised. The manufacturers are interested in building cars for regular use, not drag or oval track racing, after all.
I'm guessing from your email address that your preferences lie elsewhere....Absolutely, and I suspect that you're somewhat more astute and informed than most of the Japanese car enthusiasts that I come across, based solely on the fact that you either know what "BigBlock" is, or that you know what "Mopar" is. Though I will confess that I have seen one Honda products that really did impress me. The thing was a perfectly stock looking 1993 Civic hatchback. The guy had hacked on a huge Garrett turbo that looked like it was off a Buick Grand National. This Civic ran 11.9 on the 1/4 mile, despite the fact that front wheel drive doesn't lend itself to drag racing. That was impressive.
Thanks, but I can't really claim all the credit for this one... The Sex Pistols were a helpful inspiration.
I was sitting at the corner of Bay and King Streets in the heart of downtown Toronto's financial district. I was wearing a shirt and tie and driving my lovely old 1983 Dodge Ram, which my friends called either "Patches" (for the rough, unground weld marks from rust repairs) or "The Brick" (for its rectangular shape, almost free of curves, and its red primer paintjob). It was truly the ultimate urban warrior: someone hits you, and you just laugh at the poor fool.
Driving that truck was really neat: people would assume that you were a roofer or something, until they looked in and saw a young guy with a white shirt and silk tie. And then they'd stare at me, looking really confused. Anyway, I liked the truck, it suited me, and it was really practical.
So, what should pull up beside me but a Suzuki Swift with tinted windows, one windshield wiper in the center and the little fake rubber ducky antenna on the back. I had my windows up (it was a hot summer day, and my '83 Ram's air conditioning worked like a million bucks), and I could still hear this guy's stereo just cranked.
So, I reached over to the Alpine CD player I'd put in there a couple of months before, and flipped in a Sex Pistols CD. I skipped up to "Anarchy in the UK", and turned up the volume until the 6x9s in the doors didn't sound like they'd take it anymore.
The Swift, who didn't appear to have AC since his windows were down, didn't fare very well as the big old truck beside him lowered its windows. And, as the lines "I am an anarchist / I am the anti-Christ" played to his shocked ears and drowned out some Eminem crap, I came up with the idea for the Sibilance Projectors. (With apologies to Traynor, who made a tweeter bin with the same name back in the 1970s.)
Well, you can take a look at what came up on Yahoo's Google search.
Radio Shack stores in Canada used to sell these piezo tweeters under their name. In MCM Electronics' catalog 42, they're on page 663. I used several of the Motorola KSN1177A dual horn tweeters on each side of the truck. $14.95 each. I threw together some brackets with a little bit of sheet steel and bolted them to the underside of the truck, just sticking out below the rocker panels.
High frequency sound is very directional, so you'll want to have a friend pull his car alongside yours at the same distance you'd be from an offensive Honda product, turn on the sound (quietly), and aim the tweeters until your friend reports that the sound is at its loudest. Do this for both sides, and adjust your brackets accordingly.
Now, these things are officially rated at about 100W RMS each. That's a lie. After playing with their smaller siblings a couple of times, I got the feeling that they were really tough. My record is hooking a piezo tweeter up to a bridged Crown MT2400 amplifier, and then pegging it. The MT2400, bridged, will drive over 2kW into 4 ohms, and a piezoelectric tweeter's impedance drops as the frequency increases... I think it's safe to say that the tweeter survived at least 1500W. Not for long, mind you, but it was very impressive.
I have run biamplified stacks in concerts using nothing but Motorola piezos for my high end, driving each tweeter with 500W RMS without any issues. Filling a 50,000 seat stadium like Toronto's SkyDome with these has always been painfully easy.
A couple of things. First off, piezo tweeters don't need crossovers. Their impedance is very high below their operating frequencies. If you're retrofitting an existing cabinet, make sure that you hook them up before the inductor that filters the high end from your bass driver. And secondly, they're really loud and they're really tough, but they're not really high fidelity. Don't expect cymbals and stuff to sound as clean as they do with a good dome or cone tweeter (my faves for fidelity being Celestion or older Acoustic Research stuff). But the piezos are every bit as good as a cast aluminum horn with a dynamic driver behind it.
In short, they're dirt cheap, readily available, tough as nails, loud as hell and sound reasonably good. And they carry the Motorola name. They're amazing.
That's not a function of the fact that the engine is a long-stroke low-revving motor (which the 3.9L V6 and its optional cousins, the 5.2L and 5.7L V8s both are). The reason a Durango is a gas guzzler is because it's heavy, has fairly soft and wide tires and has a fairly large frontal area for the wind.
At the same time, I'd question your sources, for you appear to me to be rather ignorant. Both the Lincoln Navigator and the GMC Yukon are far bigger and heavier vehicles and have far worse gas mileage ratings, therefore usurping the Durango's place as the "second worst". And, since I see them frequently at GM and Ford dealerships here in Toronto, I know that they're available in Canada.
And that's only counting SUVs. Dodge still makes the V10-powered Ram, available with a 4x4 drivetrain and a one-ton suspension. I'm sure if you drive that with the hammer down, you'll go through twice as much fuel as the Durango.
Further, it's not illegal to build, sell or buy a vehicle that gets 2 miles per gallon, let alone what these vehicles get. You'll be taxed to hell on the purchase of it, but it's not illegal to sell a car or truck no matter how much fuel it uses. Amazingly enough, despite the fact the federal government screws with every aspect of Canadian society, they haven't yet done that.
So, you're so full of feces that your eyes are brown. You clearly don't know as much about automobiles, engines, or mechanical engineering as you believe you do.
I'll readily agree. The Japanese have been building cars with absolutely amazing assembly quality over the past few years. I just don't like their designs.
Nor will I ever forgive Honda for the absolutely incredibly poor assembly quality of some of their older models. They make Detroit's worst quality control failures (ie. the Chevy Vega/Pontiac Astre) look like a Mercedes in comparison.
The biggest issues with low redlines isn't caused by the fact that Detroit's assembly quality isn't as good as the Japanese. It's that Detroit's engines have traditionally had fairly long strokes. The longer the stroke, the higher the piston speed at a given RPM, and therefore the higher the reciprocating forces are. But it has the benefit of not having to reciprocate the engine as frequently to produce a given power.
Unquestionably, I'd love to see the automakers unions get busted. When you've got some half-wit with a ninth-grade education and a lottery ticket addiction machining connecting rods for $21/hr, you can't afford to throw away the marginal ones. This is where the failures in Detroit's quality control lie. It appears suicidal that Detroit hasn't been able to address this issue, but the unions are very strong. Most Japanese and European automakers don't have the problem to anywhere near this extent, even if they're unionized at all.
You say that like it's a bad thing. I'd pay extra to have that. On other people's cars, anyway.
<grin> You have a point...
The nicest thing about the American school of engine design is that you don't have to revv the engine up to 9,000RPM to make power.
Less RPMs = less energy wasted to make the pistons stop, change direction and start moving again. Unless you drastically cut the weight of your pistons (making them more fragile to detonation and engine load), you're going to exponentially reduce your efficiency.
Further, the more times your pistons go up and down for a given mile of road travelled, the more wear that your rings, bore and bottom end will experience, and therefore the less lifespan your engine will see.
Sure, the Japanese have manufacturing quality now to the point of an art that has yet to be duplicated anywhere else in the world. But I still don't like any engine where the manufacturing tolerance is the only factor towards longevity.
Give me an old Chrysler Slant-6 any day. They redline at 4,500 RPM, and with a 4.125" stroke and a 3.40" bore, they're massively oversquare. In low gears, they can pull stumps. In a higher gear, they can pin you back in your seat when you hit the gas on the highway. All without pushing the tach past more than about 3,500 RPM.
Not coincidentally, they're world-renowned for lasting nearly forever.
I'm starting to wonder if there's some sort of correlation between one's height and the displacement of one's car engine.
With my 400 V8, I can drive down the road and say to myself, "my engine is bigger than his, and his, and hers, and his, and his, and hers, and...". It's an amusing way of passing time in a traffic jam. At the same time, I'm also 6'4", almost dwarfed by you, but all the same, I'm still frequently the tallest person in any given public place.
Interesting. Is the big engine borne of the practical need for a larger vehicle, or is it because we just like big things? I know both factors are at play with myself.
The biggest engine I've ever worked on was quite impressive, and a hell of a lot of fun. It was a MAN B&W diesel on a Great Lakes bulker ship. It was 4 stories tall, with a redline of about 75 RPM (but the Chief Engineer told me he'd never had the guts to rev it above 70 RPM). The valve springs were bigger than I am. And there I was, hanging off a catwalk on the side of a running engine, changing the oil pressure sensor for the front main bearing. :)
maybe i should kill myself... but not until i?ve taken a few classmates with me. don?t bother trying to catch me, jonkatz -- you?ll never find me, fucker.
Hey dude, I'd be more worried about one of your classmates reporting you to Pinkerton's Thought Police.
Listen, life sucks. It's tough, it's frustrating, it's annoying. But no one ever said that life would be easy.
Go talk to your guidance counsellor at school or whatever. If you play your cards right, you'll get some nice and legal happy pills, paid for by your HMO. Then things start to look better.
Best of luck.
A lot of my time at work is actually spent supporting new to intermediate Windows users, and, believe it or not, the paperclip and all the stuff that you and I, as more advanced users, consider to be the bane of our existances, is actually useful to a lot of them.
I just wish, in the control panel, there was a little setting called "User Skill". Drag the little control halfway for an intermediate user, all the way to 0 if you know that the user is a complete Windows newbie. If all the applications followed this lead, it would be the best of both worlds.
I use Internet Exploiter as my browser. Yes, it's evil, but since it's already there on my hard disk, like it or not, it saves me time and resources. And it seems to crash less often than any version of Netscape I've ever installed in Windows. And it didn't add that stupid AOL Instant Messenger the way Netscape did.
I just wish that, when an URL fails because the server is busy, Internet Exploiter didn't open up that stupid "Navigation Cancelled" screen. It wouldn't be so bad if the long URL I'd just (mis)typed into the address bar didn't get replaced with "About: Navigation Cancelled".
One would hope a User Skill control would, when cranked to the max, let me see the 404 error from the server.
Grrrrr...
You know, I had always thought that ADD was one of these conditions created by schoolteachers and stuff as an excuse for not being very good at classroom control.
Then, my best friend of 11 years was diagnosed with it, and lives on prescription dexamphetamines. He's got a brilliant mind, but all the way through high school, and, in fact, until the diagnosis, he couldn't stick with anything.
The change in his personality occurred within a few days of starting his prescriptions. He's a mechanic, and on a professional front, he moved from changing oil and mufflers at a Toyota dealership to working at the best automotive restoration shop east of California. Now, he repairs and restores big-buck collectible cars like 1930s Rolls Royces, Bugattis, and 1960s-1970s musclecars.
One of his lastest projects has been working on a 1950 Ford sedan that has been converted into a $500,000+ show car. He's at the top of his profession.
He's come a long way from hammering rusted exhaust systems off ten-year-old Tercels.
More power to you if you can beat this thing. It's truly the plague of genius. I don't know how I dodged that bullet. <grin>
Now, here's the question:
Aside from the frequent crashes and the inefficiency, my other great frustration with Windows 9x/NT is that when I'm banging away at Eudora and waiting for Internet Exploiter to load a busy webpage, Internet Exploiter will steal the focus away from Eudora while I'm typing. With no time for me to respond, it just goes and takes the next character I was typing to Eudora as being my response to its question.
Of course, these aren't the only programs affected by this design shortcoming; when you have ten applications running at once, the frustration can be immense.
Now, has anyone figured out a way to make Windows behave differently when an app wants focus? How about flashing the window's taskbar presence and beeping a couple of times?
Is this a problem that I'll see when I'm running X on my Linux box? (I'm still very new to Linux, and I'm not yet at the point where I've ever had more than about three X applications open at once.)
Thanks.
See, the beauty of this is that if you key my Dodge Ram, it'll probably do more damage to your key than it will to my truck.
Further, you're well ahead to be warned that the sorts of people who generally drive 24-year-old pickup trucks aren't the sorts of people you'd want to have angry with you, lest you actually do try this.
Most of us have guns. Some of us are members of the Hells Angels. And I'm a rare exception: I keep an old camshaft in my truck, in case anyone needs to have an attitude adjustment.
Only the strong survive.
Right!
If you want a high performance car, you drive a Viper, a Falcon or a Barracuda.
You don't drive something that you could feed to a Viper, Falcon or Barracuda.
Speaking as one who feels comfortable with the statement that I probably know more about cars than 98.9% of my fellow Slashdotters, I'm unclear as to how you can justify calling a car with half its cylinders missing and the engine pointing a funny way in the engine bay a "high performance car".
Last time I checked, four cylinders were suitable for getting the kids to the dentist, not for getting to the traps at the end of the strip first.
That's precisely right. As long as I have to share the roads with idiots in Integras that are coated with silly stickers, the driver on the cellphone while his stereo pumps bass so loudly that the coins on my truck's dashboard are bouncing to his beat, you better bet your ass that I'll be driving the biggest and heaviest brick I can possibly get my hands on.
Just one question: How can you talk on the cellphone with the stereo so loud that quarters are getting air in adjacent vehicles? I suspect they're just poseurs, they can't actually afford the cellular service, but think that it's an important status symbol.
I've actually put a rather nice stereo into my truck. In a former career, I was a professional audio and video technician. I've done sound for Metallica, Garth Brooks and the Three Tenors. I hit the drawing board and crunched some numbers. Then, I stuck a couple of professional EV 10" bass drivers into the space between my seat and the back of my cab. With a small amplifier I designed and threw together, they can easily kill my battery... :)
I've also put a whole shitload of Motorola piezoelectric tweeters ($7 each, tough as nails) on the underside of the truck, with a switch to turn them on and off. The switch, appropriately enough, is labelled "Sibiliance Projector" and has a setting for left and right.
When I pull up beside one of these idiots who has the stereo pumped with the latest (c)rap or dance tune, I stick in my Ozzy Osbourne CD, flip the sibilance projector to his side of my truck, and pump it. I get 122dB @ 8kHz at 1 meter from the truck. 200 watts, real watts, not car stereo watts, RMS. Earbleed territory. That'll fix 'em.
Either way, it's comforting to be able to back over them if I need to.
That's not even remotely true.
I'll fully admit that lots of foreign manufacturers have come up with great ideas and innovations. Mazda, for bravely soldiering on with the rotary, a disaster in the 1970s, but excellent by the time the RX-7 was discontinued. Honda for bringing variable valve timing to the masses. The Germans for working hard to make cars more modular and more easy to recycle.
In fact, I'll go so far as to say that the Japanese, in the 1960s, pioneered vacuum-molding of aluminum. They made it work. And without them, the complex cylinder head castings of today's cars wouldn't be possible.
My beef is about the plethora of idiots who seem to think that an automatic-transmission, 4-cylinder Honda Civic loaded down with hundreds of pounds of stereo equipment and cheesy stickers is a high performance car capable of taking on anything with a V8 in a stoplight confrontation. It's so much fun to see one of these pulling up alongside a dead-stock and poorly maintained Mustang 5.0, for the look of shock on the Honda driver's face as the Mustang easily pulls past him is just classical.
Be reminded that a stoplight confrontation is essentially drag racing. And for drag racing, rear wheel drive, light vehicle weight and gobs of displacement will always win.
Sad to see that someone who infers some level of education and even a basic automotive knowledge wouldn't understand this.
I've rebuilt dozens of car engines, both for daily drivers and for performance vehicles. I've driven CASCAR street stock. And I cut a consistant 0.554 reaction time at time trials at the local drag strip.
I feel fully qualified to dismiss Honda and other Japanese cars as the overdone four-wheeled mopeds that they are.
And finally, when I was towing my old Fiero up to a friend's place, as I was driving down the freeway with the Fiero attached to my truck with a tow-bar, I had no less than 4 different "rice rockets" pull alongside the Fiero and attempt to race it.
Even towing a 2,800lb Pontiac Fiero, my 1976 Dodge Ram with a 400CID (6.6L) V8 was more than happy to play with them.
Judging from your e-mail address, it looks like you must be feeling a little bit of jealousy. I mean, what's a stoplight confrontation in the former Soviet Union like? A Trabant versus a Lada? Geez, I could walk faster.
How long before we see a 6" tailpipe tip?
Or a "Powered By Honda" sticker across the winshield.
Gimme a break. The only way a "Powered By Honda" sticker would impress me is if the guy had earned the right to put it onto a Toyota. But even then, there are far more interesting engine swaps to waste your time with.
Powered by Honda? Yeah. So's my lawnmower.
You disgust me.
Yup. But my insurance company will also tell you that I'm quite a good driver. My license covers me to drive vehicles up to 5 tons, including an air brake endorsement. I used to work on the road as a professional broadcast technician, and I had to have a good driving record and be able to get an air brake endorsement, to be allowed to drive around a truck with many millions of dollars worth of equipment inside.
So, chances are, I'm not going to be the one who causes an accident. It's possible, of course; no driver is immune to error. But I'm far more likely to be hit by someone else.
Finally, I'm more intelligent, better looking and more useful to society than most people, let alone those idiots who drive while talking on a cellphone. In an interesting demonstration of my Vulcan logic, therefore, if society is deprived of the gift of my awesome intellectual prowess and stunningly attractive visage, I should at least be able to provide society with one final gift, accomplished by removing one of the more careless and probably less intelligent individuals from the genepool.
I'm sure Darwin would agree with me. In absentia, I shall decree that he would.
And ya know what, regardless of whether I'm kidding or not - which you will never know - you'll probably double-check your blind spots before changing lanes on your drive home tonight.
You should thank me in advance. I may have saved your life.
Woo-hoo! I do that, too!
I don't drive drunk, but it's really funny to see one of those silly little Acuras swerve wildly to get out of the way as my 1976 Dodge Ram comes at it.
One of them rear-ended me not too long ago. The idiot thought he was my trailer, the way he was tailgating me. Ya know, it's one of those Hondas with a big "Powered By Honda" sign across the windshield, and dude thinks he's driving a race car.
I stopped for the red light ahead. He didn't stop.
And I was very grateful, not only for the fact that I drive 4,500lbs of Michigan's finest steel, but also because of the Class 3 trailer hitch below my back bumper.
He mashed my bumper, which was resting against his engine block, trashed grille and radiator somewhere between. My bumper cost him $219 to replace.
On the other hand, my trailer hitch, protruding from the engine and welded to the 3/16" thick plate steel frame of my truck, went right though his engine block and into his engine's water jacket.
His car was a write-off. And, when I unbolted the old bumper and bolted on the new one that his insurance provided, my truck's paint hadn't even been scratched.
As long as people still drive like idiots, I'll still drive big and heavy trucks. And when most of the vehicles on the road are as big and heavy as mine, I'll just dust off my air brake license and get myself a good 5-ton cube van for my drive to work.
Good. Public transit. So I can sit in a subway train full of unwashed derelicts and third-world refugees.
Ya know, the ideas that tree-huggers have are very short sighted. I'm all for saving the planet, sure. But I'm also for enjoying my life.
I work hard so that I can drive. And I don't expect to be rewarded for my efforts by having to interface with the masses on a daily basis. I pay 72.5 cents per liter to drive my gas-guzzling 1976 Dodge Ram so that I don't have to share my life with people I don't want to meet.
So that I won't again get lice from the person sitting next to me on the subway.
And I drive my truck in particular because I like it. Period. And guess what? It gets 7 miles per gallon.
The shortsightedness comes from the fact that when I no longer make enough money to be able to drive to work every day, I will move. Period. I'll take my many skills and my good work ethic, and I will pick up and move to the United States, where I shall pursue citizenship and sever all my ties with Canada. And I'll leave Canada with its burgeoning population of highly trained and highly literate convenience store clerks.
The brain drain will continue and Canada's standard of living will drop until all the tree-hugging idiots who can't understand the basic laws of supply and demand back off and let commerce take its place.
If OPEC keeps fuel prices high, there will be no place that I can move to escape being raped at the pumps. But so long as fuel prices remain artifically high in Canada, I'll continue to have an alternative which I can exercise at any time.
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I hope your offspring get killed in a collision with a transfer truck, you ignorant son-of-a-bitch. Maybe you should go buy one of those. And think about the people who YOU might kill in your need for bigger and heavier SUV'sIn celebration of gas guzzlers and noxious pollutants, on my way to the office in the morning, I'll disconnect a couple of the spark plug leads on my 6.6L V8 engine. I'll toast you, xtal, with my coffee cup as I drive across Toronto on the 401, listening to the Howard Stern Radio Show, and filling the air with unburnt hydrocarbons as my massive and temporarily detuned engine chugs me to work.
Okay, well, you're both right, and you're not right. Some SUVs have a high center of gravity that does make them more prone to rollover. The old Jeep CJ-7 was probably the worst ever for this, but the YJ and TJ are quite safe. The Suzuki Samurai was an incredible deathtrap, too.
Today's real SUVs, like the (Grand) Cherokee, Durango, Explorer, Expedition, Yukon, etc. are all fairly good, with a low center of gravity and enough width that, while you could topple them over (as you could with any car), you'd have to work for them. In fact, with the exception of the Cherokee (but not the Grand Cherokee), these are full-frame vehicles, most of them with perimeter frames that concentrate the weight down and away from the center. (On most of them, the frame runs under the rocker panels.)
Now, a full-frame vehicle is actually more dangerous than a good unibody in a serious accident: the frame is basically steel C-channel or box section. If you hit something, the frame isn't going to give all that much. The damage to the vehicle will be minimal compared to the damage on a comparable unibody designed to crumple. So, the truck may survive, but they'll have to hose your brains off the dashboard before they can sell it to the next guy.
Most accidents are minor urban fender-benders. This is why I like my truck. (Note that it's a pickup truck, not an SUV; with the exception of the carpets and leather seats, it's basically the same thing.)
If some guy in a Honda Civic cuts me off and there's 20MPH of speed difference between us when we hit, my front bumper will push his taillights into the back seat. My bumper will be bent, I'll have to replace my grille and maybe my radiator, but my truck won't be seriously damaged.
On the other hand, his Honda will we well on its way to being reincarnated into table legs and manhole covers.
Mass and steel will always win over flimsy Japanese tinfoil and plastic.
Probably not.
I'm 6'4", and I've only ever found two vehicles that fit me really well, both in terms of personal taste and my stature.
One of them is the Dodge fullsize pickup truck, from 1974 to 1993. These things are great, and with a Slant-6 engine and a four speed manual transmission, my old 1983 Ram used to regularily get 22-25MPG on the highway. Not bad for a 4,500 lb steel brick cutting through the air. I currently have a '76 Ram with a 400CID (6.6L) V8. It's a barrel of monkeys and happily out-accelerates Mustang 5.0s, let alone all the silly Acuras and stuff, at stoplights. But it comes with a penalty: 7 MPG. And since the compression ratio is in the 9.2:1 range, I really should run it on premium gas, but that ain't gonna happen...
The other car that fit me really well, paradoxically, was my 1985 Pontiac Fiero. I bought it because I've always liked the styling, and the fact that they're American made. And it was cheap - $350 - because it had a bad clutch. I changed the clutch and drove it for two years before giving it to a friend of mine.
It got great gas mileage, and despite the tiny size of the thing, I had gobs of headroom and legroom. While it wasn't terrifically reliable, it was a really nice little car and I miss it.
Hell, yeah! I'd be surprised if even the 5% of SUVs that you exclude see off-road use.
Ya know, the big problem is all the yentas who get behind the wheel of these things, and either leave them in 4-wheel-drive mode all the time, or turn it on when it's raining.
Or, better still, those who drive stupidly in snow because they think the 4x4 drivetrain will somehow allow them to handle and stop better than everyone else.
Gimme a break.
I drive pickup trucks, not because I need the size or the cargo space most of the time, but because I like them - which is what disposeable income and free will is all about. And because they offer a form of insurance that State Farm doesn't offer: If I'm going to die in a car accident with a Honda Civic, I'll be damned well assured that that I'm gonna take the other guy with me.
My trucks are all 2WD, because I don't need 4x4. I've currently got a 1976 Ram, and I love the thing, even though it only gets 7MPG. I love older pickup trucks, because I like the styling, I don't want leather seats or carpeting, and I'm not interested in driving around in something worth $20k + .
My previous truck was, paradoxically, newer: a 1983 Dodge Ram with a Slant-6 and a 4-speed manual transmission. Phenominal gas mileage; if I drove it gently, I could get 450 miles out of a 25 gallon tank of gas. Not bad for an old half-ton.
And it went everywhere, even though it was 2WD. I especially fondly remember watching a woman in a fur coat trying to get an Isuzu Trooper over a snowbank during a big snowstorm in Toronto two winters ago. She was spinning all four tires, just hitting the gas, the friction of her tires turning the snow under her into ice.
I pulled out of the gas station, having filled up, and gently goosed the gas pedal, having shifted early into third gear to give myself some traction. My old Ram hit the snowbank, doing about 30 miles an hour and just plowed through the 3 feet of slush, ice and snow. Then I downshifted quickly and hit the gas hard to fishtail myself into a sharp turn and into the road. I then pulled to the side, got out, and helped the lady get her Isuzu unstuck.
She was freaked out by my little display of winter driving, and commented that "weren't 4 wheel drive vehicles great?".
When I turned around and told her that my trusty old Ram didn't have four wheel drive, let alone a positraction differential, she was stunned, but that didn't stop her from driving her now-freed Trooper through the opening in the snowbank that I had made.
It's all in the driving skill. SUVs have their places, but it's not in the hands of accountants, housewives or soccer moms.
'Course, I grew up in Ottawa and Montreal, two cities known for being blanketed in snow for 5 months of the year. I've had opportunity for practice.