"Each model contains hundreds of codes," he said. "It's a huge undertaking to take every vehicle and to put every single code on the Internet. As we find gaps, we are filling them in."
Yeah, how would the car manufacturer's representatives ever get lists of codes for their cars. It's freaking impossible.
Given the shop manuals on CD for every new car, and anyone competent could probably have 100 models complete lists done in a week.
You're acting as if all unverified information is useless. Name, address, SSN etc. is easily verifiable. If the information says you took an AIDS test on March 3rd that came back positive and had a few follow up visits, it's not directly verifiable, but your employer could call HR and see that you took March 3rd off to go to the doctor and match the other dates. Try explaining that away with "but it's not credible info!"
Everything sold as retail software now comes with at least a CD key
How does a CD key prevent copying anyway? I mean, pirates can copy a CD, but aren't smart enough to copy a 16 character key? Does it do anything other than piss off the consumer.
Someone help me, but this is a concept I've never understood.
I think a lot of people have missed the point, including (unfortunately) those who see this as a Byrne vs. Tufte or whoever conflict.
David Byrne did not say that PowerPoint is good as a business tool. He said it was useful as an artistic medium. A guitar isn't useful as a business tool, either, but is tremendously useful as an artistic medium.
The Ferrari has met US crash requirements. The T-Zero has not, and would weigh a lot more than it's sub-2000 pound weight if it had the required door intrusion bars, crush areas, etc. By the time it gets certified, it'll be a lot heavier and slower than the demo version being touted in the article. I predict it will end up slower than the Ferrari.
Ferrari, Porsche, etc. could easily build a car that outperfomed the TZero, if they weren't required to follow any guidelines about occupant safety. Porsche had a race car whose frame, suspension, driver's compartment and body weighed less than 100 lbs (the 904? I think). Of course it was the late 60's-early when race sanctioning bodies weren't too concerned about safety. Add the drivetrain of a 2003 GT3, and you'd have a 450+ HP, sub 1000 pound car. Of course, you'd also have major damage and possibly injury in the event of even a small fender bender, but it'd be as street legal as the T-Zero, and out-perform it in nearly every category. It's just a show car, the production version is a long way away.
In a race from say LA to New York (3200ish miles): Ferrari - 53ish hours at 60MPH (well under legal limit), plus over 6 hours to fill up 12 times, 60 hours total worst case. T-Zero - 32 hours at 100 MPH (top speed), plus 42 hours of charging (at 4 hours/charge), 74 total hours best case.
The T-Zero loses every race over 300 miles over about any car.
A one hour course in setting up firewalls and downloading patches will obviously prevent virus writers and hacking from obtaining licenses. The effectiveness would rival the tough questions that prevent passengers from bringing bombs aboard an airplane! College degrees would be an even better idea, after all, no progress was ever made in computers by anyone without a college degree.
I say it's a great idea not taken far enough.
We should require people to have a license before going out into public. The damage caused by computer viruses spread by unlicensed internet users is nothing compared to the damage from biological viruses spread by the unlicensed public. The rudeness of the average uncultered swine needs to be stifled. A one hour course should cover ettiquette and the use of surgical masks. There are almost no people left who can perform surgery on themselves when injured. To hell with a one hour course or 4-year degree, you'll need to be a licensed physician with incredible flexibility to interact with others.
It'll be a better world when me and all my Yogi-ER-physician-with-an-incredible-threshold-of- pain buddies are the only ones allowed outside.
Is there any way to get USB devices to run well under 95? I haven't found many USB devices that work on Win95, as the USB support sucks. I know, I should use Win98, and I used it in the past, but there are a few reasons I reverted to 95: 1. No IE 2. Faster at file deletes, copies, moves, etc. by a factor of 20, on my machine at least. 3. It's been 5 years since I've had a virus, worm, or any kind of security problem on it, not even a found or blocked virus by my scan software.
I can't justify upgrading when faced with #3. Every Win98/NT 4.0/2000 box I've had at work in that time has been hit by something in that time period, most recently the 2K box by the SQL worm. None of them were because of any action on my part. I know 95 has it's problems, but IE is a security nightmare. Why break into a house with an open 3rd story window when every other house in the neighborhood has their back door wide open?
OK, I've just about had it with all the audio snobs who are spouting that the current crop of inexpensive PC audio interfaces result in shitty recordings. 99.9% of people would not be able to tell the difference between a recording on $500K worth of studio equipment and one done well on a $500 6 channel sound card. I would guess that at least half the audio-snobs who have said so couldn't either. Just because the expensive equipment has.5% less THD doesn't mean the other equipment is shitty. The cheap equipment sounds great. The pro equipment sounds better. The one person out of 1,000 that can tell the difference isn't worth the extra $499,500 expenditure to most people/bands. Especially since, most of the time, that 1/1000 wouldn't care or isn't in a room quiet enough to notice.
If you're playing CD's at a party and put a tape in, no one notices any difference in sound quality. Ditto if you put on a early 90's CD vs. a 2002 CD recorded with the latest gear. A $50K monitor system would sound great, and mixing on that will solve many problems that only people with $50K stereos would notice. But the vast, vast, vast majority of the time music is played on $500 home stereos, $100 boom boxes, or the stock stereo system in a car. Or as an MP3 through a set of $5 computer speakers.
Pro gear is great, good studios will produce the best recordings, but inexpensive home recordings can be very, very good, provided you know what you are doing. They can also be horrible, because there is no guarantee that the equipment will be used correctly, but I've heard horrible recordings from cheaper studios due to the same problem.
Does this really suprise anyone? Think of the last 10 strangers you met or interacted with. At least 5 of them were morons. I don't think the guy working the drive through window or the lady manning the register at the gas station would understand 10 second synopsis of quantum mechanics, let alone any extensive study of it. They're still stuck on the word "synopsis." Hell, most of them can't figure out how much change to give you from a $20 if the register doesn't do the math for them. Throw in the people who haven't figured out that, despite the fact that many handheld mobile devices are available, you still need at least one free hand and at least a smidgen of attention to drive a car. Add at least half, if not all, of your company's marketing department. Even if you live in a rich neighborhood, a couple of your neighbors are morons. Look at Home Shopping Network, WB or the E! channel. Who do you think their audience is? I actually saw a few minutes of a game show who's actual name I didn't catch, but for all intents and purposes was "Who's the biggest dumbass?" And people volunteered to be on it.
They probably don't even know what atoms are, and explaining that what happens to little invisible things that make up everything they see is governed by probability would get you a nice, glazed look and a big fat "So what?" Magic powers of mind reading is far more tangible to them than the "magic" world of quantum mechanics.
(To the anal: yes, I've oversimplified QM, so shut up.)
"The tiny discs will be able to store up to five hours of CD-quality music, one hour of video, 1,000 digital photos, one video game or 100 e-books -- or any combination, up to 500 megabytes of storage."
Let's see 80 minutes of CD-quality music now uses 700 MB of space. How exactly does 300 minutes of CD-quality music fit on 500 MB?
Blank discs, which can store up to 500 megabytes of data, will retail for between $10 and $12
Wow, much better than the $15 I'm paying for 50 700 MB CD's. A single 500 MB disk for the price of over 20 GB of blank CD's. Where do I get in line?
"I just know by being in the business, there's definitely a need for a portable format," Bob Higgins said. "Portable CD players are too big and too bulky."
Gee, if there were only widely available, simple to use, portable digital music storage and listening devices on the market right now.
"I'd be astonished if the open-source community has in total done as many man-years of computer security code reviews as we have done in the last two months."
Giggle. Snort. Tee-hee. ha. Ha. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA^999
Sorry about that. They actually think they've made up for years of ignorance in two months? They must have had at least 500,000 programmers doing security code reviews.
[b]In the same fashion, you could take your '71 Nova SS 350 and blow away a stock 1995 civic. But you could also take the civic, add Nitrous, replace the hood with a fiberglass one, change the gears on the transmission, get a forced air kit, some traction bars, and a new set of cams, and run 11's. [/b]
As you (and most "ricer's") seem to conveniently forget, you could also add Nitrous (and all those other mods) to the Nova, and run 9's. The correct comparison is not a heavily modified Civic vs. a stock V8, but a heavily modified V8 vs. said Civic. And the large displacement V8 still wins. An engine with nearly 3x the displacement at the same level of modification will make more power. It's physics. Slap a turbo on a stock-motored Civic, tune it correctly, and you can run maybe a mid 12. A stock motored Camaro/Firebird can run high 12's, slap a turbo on one, and you will be in the mid-low 10's.
I'm really worried about the 20 percent that think they've mastered all the complexities of the computer, yet can't master a 5-control TV.
This must be the same group at BMW that thought that making turning up the radio a 5 step process using a joystick and video screen is an improvement over the quick and intuitive don't-need-to-look-at-it volume knob (new 7-series).
...can the companies sue each other over the decyrption?
Under the DMCA, what would happen if I create software, say a "secure" graphics program, that uses the same encryption technique as an E-book? Could I then be sued by Adobe since my software contains decrypting code that also "circumvents" their e-book software?
Am I missing something?
If it were dots per square inch, yes. But it is dots per inch, a 1-D measurement. Unfortunately, going from 300 dpi to 80 dpi is about 1/14th the resolution on a 2-D screen (90K dots vs 6.4K). About the same difference as would be seen when going from a 1600x1200 display to a 425x320. Not good.
The 300 million Hindi speakers is actually only 30% of the 1 billion people in India. Forget about the internet, this language can't even dominate one country, or even knock English out of their own government.
From the CIA World Factbook
"INDIA:
Languages: English enjoys associate status but is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication, Hindi the national language and primary tongue of 30% of the people, Bengali (official), Telugu (official), Marathi (official), Tamil (official), Urdu (official), Gujarati (official), Malayalam (official), Kannada (official), Oriya (official), Punjabi (official), Assamese (official), Kashmiri
(official), Sindhi (official), Sanskrit (official), Hindustani (a popular variant of Hindi/Urdu spoken widely throughout northern India)
note: 24 languages each spoken by a million or more persons; numerous other languages and dialects, for the most part mutually unintelligible"
Paperclip: "You have read nothing. No software will be installed until you've read everything, including the procedures for sacrificing the chicken. Since you lied to me you must also read all the marketing brochures for Win 2K."
Me: "Hey is that an error message?"
Paperclip: "Here, read your e-mail. No wait here's some spreadsheets. Urgent database coming up!"
The BSOD will be replaced by an urgent e-mail from your boss "get in here or you're fired" Once you left it would reboot. Paperclip: "You did not write 1200 lines of code this morning. Really, this is where you were when you left to see your boss."
I didn't doubt your top speed claims, just the 133MPH ones.
If you're comparing it to the mid 1970's just-strangled-by-emmissions cars, then a box turtle with flames painted on it would have great pick up.
I'm sorry but "great pick-up" and 0-60 in 10.6 seconds are contradictions for any car built in the last decade or so. (Car&Driver) It can keep up with traffic, it has adequate power to pass, but NOT great pick-up.
It's near the bottom of the econo-box category in acceleration (at least here in the States.) You don't need to compare it to sports cars.
Exactly how big is a 2500 HP electric motor, and how large are the batteries? In theory, you can get more power out of an electric & batteries, but the batteries would probably weigh 5,000 lbs themselves and the motors would be 12 foot in diameter. (WAG, no facts were used in the creation of those numbers) Gasoline engines are producing over 1200 HP without superchargers in the Pro-Stock class, supercharged cars can produce much, much more (I don't have an exact number). I have yet to see or hear of a fast (sub 8-sec 1/4mile) electric drag car. Best I've heard is 11.xx@115MPH for an electric. For $30K, you can buy a new street legal car and make it faster. If your include all internal combustion engines, the 6000-7000HP Nitromethane dragsters are untouchable by electrics. (Dynanometers don't exist that can handle that much power in that short a time period, so no one knows the exact power figure.)
Your points are valid, with one exception. The "great pickup". The car has many good points, but this isn't one of them. You can peel out in an Insight. I can peel out on a kid's bike, too, but the acceleration still sucks. The ability to peel out just means your engine (or bad footwork with the clutch & gas) overpowers your tires. 73HP isn't enough to overpower anything but the super thin traction-less "low rolling resistance" tires. 0-60 in 11 seconds is slower than ~99% of the cars out there. I've heard plenty of inflated performance claims, but this one takes the cake. Car & Driver measured 107MPH on a full charge, 94 with the batteries empty. A top speed 26MPH higher would require 54% more power. (Top speed varies with power squared, ie it takes 4 times as much power to make a car twice as fast) The people who said they achieved 133MPH are either a. Lying or b. Were going down a 18% grade or c. Had a 26MPH tailwind
Slashdot Mirror
The man has crash landed at least 10 times in the past 5 years due to engine failures and other problems witha plane that is undermaintained.
failures = death, and if you are over populated areas it means innocent deaths and damage on the ground.
So this guy died 10 times already? That's better than a cat!
"Each model contains hundreds of codes," he said. "It's a huge undertaking to take every vehicle and to put every single code on the Internet. As we find gaps, we are filling them in."
Yeah, how would the car manufacturer's representatives ever get lists of codes for their cars. It's freaking impossible.
Given the shop manuals on CD for every new car, and anyone competent could probably have 100 models complete lists done in a week.
You're acting as if all unverified information is useless. Name, address, SSN etc. is easily verifiable. If the information says you took an AIDS test on March 3rd that came back positive and had a few follow up visits, it's not directly verifiable, but your employer could call HR and see that you took March 3rd off to go to the doctor and match the other dates. Try explaining that away with "but it's not credible info!"
Well, at the very least least IBM is working on it.
t at ion/
http://www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/telepor
Everything sold as retail software now comes with at least a CD key
How does a CD key prevent copying anyway? I mean, pirates can copy a CD, but aren't smart enough to copy a 16 character key? Does it do anything other than piss off the consumer.
Someone help me, but this is a concept I've never understood.
I think a lot of people have missed the point, including (unfortunately) those who see this as a Byrne vs. Tufte or whoever conflict.
David Byrne did not say that PowerPoint is good as a business tool. He said it was useful as an artistic medium. A guitar isn't useful as a business tool, either, but is tremendously useful as an artistic medium.
The Ferrari has met US crash requirements. The T-Zero has not, and would weigh a lot more than it's sub-2000 pound weight if it had the required door intrusion bars, crush areas, etc. By the time it gets certified, it'll be a lot heavier and slower than the demo version being touted in the article. I predict it will end up slower than the Ferrari.
Ferrari, Porsche, etc. could easily build a car that outperfomed the TZero, if they weren't required to follow any guidelines about occupant safety. Porsche had a race car whose frame, suspension, driver's compartment and body weighed less than 100 lbs (the 904? I think). Of course it was the late 60's-early when race sanctioning bodies weren't too concerned about safety. Add the drivetrain of a 2003 GT3, and you'd have a 450+ HP, sub 1000 pound car. Of course, you'd also have major damage and possibly injury in the event of even a small fender bender, but it'd be as street legal as the T-Zero, and out-perform it in nearly every category. It's just a show car, the production version is a long way away.
In a race from say LA to New York (3200ish miles): Ferrari - 53ish hours at 60MPH (well under legal limit), plus over 6 hours to fill up 12 times, 60 hours total worst case.
T-Zero - 32 hours at 100 MPH (top speed), plus 42 hours of charging (at 4 hours/charge), 74 total hours best case.
The T-Zero loses every race over 300 miles over about any car.
A one hour course in setting up firewalls and downloading patches will obviously prevent virus writers and hacking from obtaining licenses. The effectiveness would rival the tough questions that prevent passengers from bringing bombs aboard an airplane! College degrees would be an even better idea, after all, no progress was ever made in computers by anyone without a college degree.
- pain buddies are the only ones allowed outside.
I say it's a great idea not taken far enough.
We should require people to have a license before going out into public. The damage caused by computer viruses spread by unlicensed internet users is nothing compared to the damage from biological viruses spread by the unlicensed public. The rudeness of the average uncultered swine needs to be stifled. A one hour course should cover ettiquette and the use of surgical masks. There are almost no people left who can perform surgery on themselves when injured. To hell with a one hour course or 4-year degree, you'll need to be a licensed physician with incredible flexibility to interact with others.
It'll be a better world when me and all my Yogi-ER-physician-with-an-incredible-threshold-of
Is there any way to get USB devices to run well under 95? I haven't found many USB devices that work on Win95, as the USB support sucks. I know, I should use Win98, and I used it in the past, but there are a few reasons I reverted to 95:
1. No IE
2. Faster at file deletes, copies, moves, etc. by a factor of 20, on my machine at least.
3. It's been 5 years since I've had a virus, worm, or any kind of security problem on it, not even a found or blocked virus by my scan software.
I can't justify upgrading when faced with #3. Every Win98/NT 4.0/2000 box I've had at work in that time has been hit by something in that time period, most recently the 2K box by the SQL worm. None of them were because of any action on my part. I know 95 has it's problems, but IE is a security nightmare. Why break into a house with an open 3rd story window when every other house in the neighborhood has their back door wide open?
OK, I've just about had it with all the audio snobs who are spouting that the current crop of inexpensive PC audio interfaces result in shitty recordings. 99.9% of people would not be able to tell the difference between a recording on $500K worth of studio equipment and one done well on a $500 6 channel sound card. I would guess that at least half the audio-snobs who have said so couldn't either. Just because the expensive equipment has .5% less THD doesn't mean the other equipment is shitty. The cheap equipment sounds great. The pro equipment sounds better. The one person out of 1,000 that can tell the difference isn't worth the extra $499,500 expenditure to most people/bands. Especially since, most of the time, that 1/1000 wouldn't care or isn't in a room quiet enough to notice.
If you're playing CD's at a party and put a tape in, no one notices any difference in sound quality. Ditto if you put on a early 90's CD vs. a 2002 CD recorded with the latest gear. A $50K monitor system would sound great, and mixing on that will solve many problems that only people with $50K stereos would notice. But the vast, vast, vast majority of the time music is played on $500 home stereos, $100 boom boxes, or the stock stereo system in a car. Or as an MP3 through a set of $5 computer speakers.
Pro gear is great, good studios will produce the best recordings, but inexpensive home recordings can be very, very good, provided you know what you are doing. They can also be horrible, because there is no guarantee that the equipment will be used correctly, but I've heard horrible recordings from cheaper studios due to the same problem.
"We need to get back to the Holy Grail," he tells the programmers. "And here's the Moses of programming."
What, the guy that predates it by thousands of years? I'm selling my stock. Moses didn't build an ark either.
Nature theme haikus
don't fit the discussion here
so cut us some slack.
Haiku history,
left out important info,
what to call this crap.
If it's not satire
but fits the five seven five
what do we call it?
CNN reports people are stupid. Film at 11.
Does this really suprise anyone? Think of the last 10 strangers you met or interacted with. At least 5 of them were morons. I don't think the guy working the drive through window or the lady manning the register at the gas station would understand 10 second synopsis of quantum mechanics, let alone any extensive study of it. They're still stuck on the word "synopsis." Hell, most of them can't figure out how much change to give you from a $20 if the register doesn't do the math for them. Throw in the people who haven't figured out that, despite the fact that many handheld mobile devices are available, you still need at least one free hand and at least a smidgen of attention to drive a car. Add at least half, if not all, of your company's marketing department. Even if you live in a rich neighborhood, a couple of your neighbors are morons. Look at Home Shopping Network, WB or the E! channel. Who do you think their audience is? I actually saw a few minutes of a game show who's actual name I didn't catch, but for all intents and purposes was "Who's the biggest dumbass?" And people volunteered to be on it.
They probably don't even know what atoms are, and explaining that what happens to little invisible things that make up everything they see is governed by probability would get you a nice, glazed look and a big fat "So what?" Magic powers of mind reading is far more tangible to them than the "magic" world of quantum mechanics.
(To the anal: yes, I've oversimplified QM, so shut up.)
"The tiny discs will be able to store up to five hours of CD-quality music, one hour of video, 1,000 digital photos, one video game or 100 e-books -- or any combination, up to 500 megabytes of storage."
Let's see 80 minutes of CD-quality music now uses 700 MB of space. How exactly does 300 minutes of CD-quality music fit on 500 MB?
Blank discs, which can store up to 500 megabytes of data, will retail for between $10 and $12
Wow, much better than the $15 I'm paying for 50 700 MB CD's. A single 500 MB disk for the price of over 20 GB of blank CD's. Where do I get in line?
"I just know by being in the business, there's definitely a need for a portable format," Bob Higgins said. "Portable CD players are too big and too bulky."
Gee, if there were only widely available, simple to use, portable digital music storage and listening devices on the market right now.
"I'd be astonished if the open-source community has in total done as many man-years of computer security code reviews as we have done in the last two months."
Giggle. Snort. Tee-hee. ha. Ha. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA^999
Sorry about that. They actually think they've made up for years of ignorance in two months? They must have had at least 500,000 programmers doing security code reviews.
[b]In the same fashion, you could take your '71 Nova SS 350 and blow away a stock 1995 civic. But you could also take the civic, add Nitrous, replace the hood with a fiberglass one, change the gears on the transmission, get a forced air kit, some traction bars, and a new set of cams, and run 11's. [/b]
As you (and most "ricer's") seem to conveniently forget, you could also add Nitrous (and all those other mods) to the Nova, and run 9's. The correct comparison is not a heavily modified Civic vs. a stock V8, but a heavily modified V8 vs. said Civic. And the large displacement V8 still wins. An engine with nearly 3x the displacement at the same level of modification will make more power. It's physics. Slap a turbo on a stock-motored Civic, tune it correctly, and you can run maybe a mid 12. A stock motored Camaro/Firebird can run high 12's, slap a turbo on one, and you will be in the mid-low 10's.
Guns don't kill people. Bullets do.
Oh, sure you can beat someone to death with one, but it so rarely happens.
I'm really worried about the 20 percent that think they've mastered all the complexities of the computer, yet can't master a 5-control TV.
This must be the same group at BMW that thought that making turning up the radio a 5 step process using a joystick and video screen is an improvement over the quick and intuitive don't-need-to-look-at-it volume knob (new 7-series).
...can the companies sue each other over the decyrption? Under the DMCA, what would happen if I create software, say a "secure" graphics program, that uses the same encryption technique as an E-book? Could I then be sued by Adobe since my software contains decrypting code that also "circumvents" their e-book software? Am I missing something?
If it were dots per square inch, yes. But it is dots per inch, a 1-D measurement. Unfortunately, going from 300 dpi to 80 dpi is about 1/14th the resolution on a 2-D screen (90K dots vs 6.4K). About the same difference as would be seen when going from a 1600x1200 display to a 425x320. Not good.
The 300 million Hindi speakers is actually only 30% of the 1 billion people in India. Forget about the internet, this language can't even dominate one country, or even knock English out of their own government.
From the CIA World Factbook
"INDIA:
Languages: English enjoys associate status but is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication, Hindi the national language and primary tongue of 30% of the people, Bengali (official), Telugu (official), Marathi (official), Tamil (official), Urdu (official), Gujarati (official), Malayalam (official), Kannada (official), Oriya (official), Punjabi (official), Assamese (official), Kashmiri
(official), Sindhi (official), Sanskrit (official), Hindustani (a popular variant of Hindi/Urdu spoken widely throughout northern India)
note: 24 languages each spoken by a million or more persons; numerous other languages and dialects, for the most part mutually unintelligible"
I have read and agree to the EULA...>Click
Paperclip: "You have read nothing. No software will be installed until you've read everything, including the procedures for sacrificing the chicken. Since you lied to me you must also read all the marketing brochures for Win 2K."
Me: "Hey is that an error message?"
Paperclip: "Here, read your e-mail. No wait here's some spreadsheets. Urgent database coming up!"
The BSOD will be replaced by an urgent e-mail from your boss "get in here or you're fired" Once you left it would reboot. Paperclip: "You did not write 1200 lines of code this morning. Really, this is where you were when you left to see your boss."
I didn't doubt your top speed claims, just the 133MPH ones.
If you're comparing it to the mid 1970's just-strangled-by-emmissions cars, then a box turtle with flames painted on it would have great pick up.
I'm sorry but "great pick-up" and 0-60 in 10.6 seconds are contradictions for any car built in the last decade or so. (Car&Driver) It can keep up with traffic, it has adequate power to pass, but NOT great pick-up.
It's near the bottom of the econo-box category in acceleration (at least here in the States.) You don't need to compare it to sports cars.
Exactly how big is a 2500 HP electric motor, and how large are the batteries? In theory, you can get more power out of an electric & batteries, but the batteries would probably weigh 5,000 lbs themselves and the motors would be 12 foot in diameter. (WAG, no facts were used in the creation of those numbers) Gasoline engines are producing over 1200 HP without superchargers in the Pro-Stock class, supercharged cars can produce much, much more (I don't have an exact number). I have yet to see or hear of a fast (sub 8-sec 1/4mile) electric drag car. Best I've heard is 11.xx@115MPH for an electric. For $30K, you can buy a new street legal car and make it faster.
If your include all internal combustion engines, the 6000-7000HP Nitromethane dragsters are untouchable by electrics. (Dynanometers don't exist that can handle that much power in that short a time period, so no one knows the exact power figure.)
Your points are valid, with one exception. The "great pickup". The car has many good points, but this isn't one of them. You can peel out in an Insight. I can peel out on a kid's bike, too, but the acceleration still sucks. The ability to peel out just means your engine (or bad footwork with the clutch & gas) overpowers your tires. 73HP isn't enough to overpower anything but the super thin traction-less "low rolling resistance" tires. 0-60 in 11 seconds is slower than ~99% of the cars out there. I've heard plenty of inflated performance claims, but this one takes the cake. Car & Driver measured 107MPH on a full charge, 94 with the batteries empty. A top speed 26MPH higher would require 54% more power. (Top speed varies with power squared, ie it takes 4 times as much power to make a car twice as fast) The people who said they achieved 133MPH are either a. Lying or b. Were going down a 18% grade or c. Had a 26MPH tailwind