The 'dangers' of fat are vastly overrated, the body needs fats to function properly.
The body needs, IIRC, 3 grams of linoleic acid a day, plus some trace amounts from other sources. Most people get MUCH more than that.
You'll find that excessive carbohydrates will do you more harm than anything.
It's important, and you allude to it later, that the quality of carbohydrate is critical. Most Americans eat lots of WHITE processed flour and sugar. It's stuff that INSTANTLY triggers an insulin reaction, and after a couple of decades of it the body just gets resistant to the insulin. Sadly, they've stopped calling it "Adult-onset diabetes" in the US because it's becoming more prevalent in teens and even younger.
And a lack of protein is more dangerous than too much. You can eat 200g of protein a day without ill effect, but eat less and you end up losing significant strength.
I would counter that a lack of protein is almost unheard of in the developed world. There's a published figure of 56g per day for a 75kg man, but actual studies indicate that it can be even lower, and that rat studies are NOT indicative of human studies. See the results of some studies here. The results of a diet too high in protein, esp. animal protein, usually are an increased load on the kidneys and bone calcium loss, primarily through extra acidtiy in the body. This is part of the reason the USRDA for calcium (1000mg) is almost double that recommended by most other governments (I belive the UK has an RNI number of 700mg for adult men.)
It's probably notable that human breast milk - the food that makes a baby double its weight in one year, is only about 10% protein by calories. If 10% is good enough for a newborn baby, it should be good enough for anyone.
Having taken Amtrak cross-country before, there are some problems with it that are mostly political in nature.
1) The original stopping points weren't established with economy in mind, but sheer pork-barrel politics. Many of the stops along Amtrak routes are TINY towns, and have always been such. In order to get the whole system approved, many of our congress-critters had to be appeased and stops in each district were established. Since each stop costs the same amount, this puts rail at a disadvantage to air-travel since all stops are served equally, regardless of base.
2) The original routes weren't established with people-transit in mind, but mostly freight. Often this corresponds nicely, but not always.
3) On many tracks, Amtrak is the guest, and freight owns the track. This means there are plenty of stops in the middle of nowhere for "no good reason" as the freight train has seniority, so to speak.
4) Sheer ticket cost. A single trip can cost several hundred dollars. Add in a couple of nights in a tiny sleeper car, and it's in the thousands.
Every couple of years, there's a bit of whining in Congress to make Amtrak self-sufficient, but it's notable that many of these elected officials doing the whining are the ones responsible for the inefficiencies in the first place.
Also: mass-transit is rarely self-sufficient; it is frequently, heavily, and often indirectly subsidized by government incentives, on the rationale that a mobile population is a working one. In the US, even personal transport via auto is the beneficiary of the Eisenhower plan to let the MILITARY move around quickly. http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/programadmin/interstate.ht ml
As it stands, the current target audience for the longer hauls (more than 200 miles) seems to be the wealthy elderly who are afraid of flying, and the poor who have no other means. On the shorter runs, it's stellar for a more general audience; the Chicago/Milwaukee route is fast, inexpensive, and pretty nice!
Well, you say that but the evidence says otherwise. Soldiers are already in active service in situations where they are fully aware that they don't have the best equipment (be it body armour, heavily armoured vehicles, etc) or sufficient manpower. They accept cost issues as a factor of life in the army (while no doubt praying that it's not them that takes the next round in a jacket designed by the cheapest contractor). It's not nice, but it's a fact of life.
Actually, many of the cuts at the VA indicate that you may be right. Soldiers who need the help aren't getting it, even YEARS after service. The administration actually expected this to be quite a short war, so VA funding wasn't increased to account for it. Counting long-term care of injured veterans, the actual cost of the war is calculated in the trillions. and climbing.
I really don't get it either, but nimbys have succeeded in closing down things that annoy them, even if they were built long before the nimby moved into the neighborhood.
It's pretty common for people to build/buy houses out by hog farms and complain about the smell. The local farmer has to mitigate the smell, then eventually gives up and leaves. On the up-side, the property values have usually climbed enough that the farmer can sell to a developer for a tidy profit.
So rent or borrow. I'm continually amazed at people who say they buy and drive Ford F-150's year round because they need them twice a year.
Darn if my mod points didn't all expire yesterday - I'd give them all to you.
When I went shopping for a commuter car five years ago, I had one infant and our family already had a VM wagon. I needed something that would get to work. I was concerned about the two-seatedness of the 2001 Honda Insight until I read a review that said "makes a great second car," and realized that's what I need.
There are plenty of families with multiple cars. Plenty of those families have two-seaters, or small four-seaters. Nobody ever bought a Corvette or a Porsche thinking "but where am I going to put my three kids?" They already had another car for that. There's no reason for EVERY car in a family to have seating for six and towing ability, too. It's simply a matter of "right tool for the job."
In the past four years we added another kid and we've still never found this arrangement restricting in any way.
Adobe has a nifty online converter here. I've been trying to wrap a piece of Javascript around it or something, but there's a bit of job-specific stuff that gets submitted with the URL.
Still, might be useful if your PDF file is on the internet, but not in Google.
Most people drive less than 100 miles a day commuting and have all night to recharge. This car meets these specs just fine.
Your point is a good one. Many multi-car families could get by quite well with one of these; Dad drives to work fifteen miles a day in the two seater electric, while mom uses the Ford Compensation to drive around town and get the kids.
Owners of two-seater sport cars and motorcycles understand this kind of compromise quite well - you don't have just one car. You take the right car for the job. Hauling 4x8 pieces of drywall or bags of mulch from the store? Get the pickup out of the garage. Driving to work ten miles away? Take the electric.
Of course, this prototype is still too expensive to be the second car for anyone who doesn't already have four or five expensive cars already. Still, the point of a prototype or first generation technology is to work out the bugs and build economy of scale with the early adopters first, then pass on the improvements to the masses later. Those of us who buy computers know this pattern well.
BTW: I bought a two-seater Honda Insight five years ago with the same idea in mind. With a wife, one child and one more on-the-way, I was concerned about the lack of a back seat, until I read a review that said "makes a great second car". I realized that was exactly what I was shopping for: not the only car in a four person family, but an extra car for a family that already had a station wagon.
We were webvan regulars and really liked them for a long time. They delivery guy would even put on little paper booties before going into our house to put the groceries on the table.
An early sign that they were going away was the day the guy stopped putting on the booties. Little things...
Yes, it's hard to dig anything up on them anymore. Their product was only compatible to Windows 95, and never got rolling on the NT kernel. I bought a couple of copies surplus hoping to run them on something, but never got around to it. Neat in concept.
(Funny, just noticed in passing that IE development somewhat parallels that of MS-DOS - 1&2 were barely useable, 3 was the first fully-working one, 4 was a dog full of fluff and bugs, 5 was better, and 6 the best. Maybe there's a lesson there...)
Something similar can be said of Windows versions. Actually, 1 and 2 were UNusuable, 3 (in 3.1) was the first fully-working one. Windows 4 (aka 95) was a dog, Windows 5 (aka 2000) and Windows XP seems to have gotten it together. Actually, there's some blurriness in versioning in there, were 2000 and XP could be considered the same product, but then you could leap to Windows 2003 Server as "6", which is really pretty well put-together.
Ok, first off, I reduced my individual emissions. I did this by buying a more efficient air conditioner and improving the insulating quality of my house. In addition, I replaced all of my light bulbs with low wattage, long life bulbs. Why? To save money. I reduced my electrical and natural gas costs by 30% per year. That is the financial incentive Americans need.
Same here. I've already had a hybrid car for four and a half years, but that's just a "geek toy" thing, and probably not all that much of a money saver (payback period, etc.) But, many lights (where practical) are CF, those that aren't are dimmable or appropriate wattage. We've got a front-load washer, we put in a ton of attic insulation this past fall, and adjusted the thermostat at night via timer. Our gas bill actually dropped this winter compared to last.
One reason that people don't make these moves is that of initial cost. When faced with the prospect of a five dollar light bulb that takes several years to pay back, or several hundred dollars of insulation that only takes a couple of years for payback, people will often go with the option that costs the least AT THAT MOMENT. Anything that complicates the picture at all discourages people from making that choice. For example: CF bulbs are offered with a rebate form to make them cheaper, earlier. Unless the cost is less than that of a conventional incandescent, the CF bulb will still often lose the sale.
In order for "consumers" rather than business or institutions to take these steps, the payback has to be faster, or transparent. CF bulbs need to be free from the electric company or just plain cheaper at the register (they're getting there). An interesting twist is marketing: people will buy anything if the marketing is smarter. Phillips, for example, found several years ago that people wouldn't buy its CF bulbs if they were promoted as "greener" or "cheaper in the long run", but would buy them if they were promoted as long-lasting. One Phillips commercial showed someone changing a bulb in a hard-to-reach area. In fact, this long-life is one of the big reasons that institutions like them; if you've got 500 light bulbs in a building, regular bulbs burn out on an almost rolling basis.
BTW: this argument doesn't limit itself to CF bulbs, but they're just more evident. Front-load washers, motion detector lights, and many other things all are expensive up-front, cheaper in the long-run, and have alternate features that can be promoted above the energy advantages. For example: our front-load washer holds more clothes than a top-load and gets them cleaner, too, using less detergent.
Well...the problem is that even if Tivo patented "digitizing television recordings"...they wouldnt be able to fight Dish Network.
Some of the patent issues in the case were actually that of interface, as well. It wasn't that TiVo was just doing something, but how they were communicating that back to the user. Much more the clincher in this case is that many of the things that TiVo claimed infringement on were things that they had exposed Dish to in licensing meetings that eventually failed.
Thank you for catching this one - not enough people seem to know about the Hawthorne Effect by name, but it comes up more often in "life" (non-quantum) than the Heisenberg Effect.
People are starving because of corrupt governments, broken supply chains, and poverty, not because the world can't produce enough food to feed everyone.
Agreed. Recent figures state that in the US, approx. 1/3 of all food product is disposed of - thrown in the garbage at some point in the chain. In the 80's, the world joined together hosting rock concerts to get food to Africa, where much of it rotted on the docks or was handed out to party faithfuls.
An additional wrinkle is that the main consumers of soybean products in the US are feed animals - cows, pigs, etc. Traditional rule-of-thumb has been that it takes 10 pounds of vegetation to grow one pound of animal. That one pound of animal product can then only maintain 1/10th of a pound of human. Far more efficent to eat the vegetation, yes?
How about the navigation software telling them to turn into a one-way street, driving the wrong way? I have an acquaintance who drives like this, blindly following the software without actually reading the road. It scares the hell out of me.
Wasn't there a good story about two years ago about a German driver who blindly followed his GPS suggestion to follow a road that wasn't there? Turned out that the mapping software forgot to mention the FERRY that he should have boarded, and he drove straight into the river.
Obtaining alcohol from corn/cane sugar (never understood why Americans love getting their sugar from corn, blech!)...
More of an artificial constraint by a few well-connected groups. In particular, the US grows much more corn than sugar cane, so it's locally easier to get. Additionally, imported sugar has an artificially high tariff to protect local growers. So we end up in a position where corn production is partially subsidized and sugar production is pretty thoroughly protected from international competition.
It's so bad that in the past companies have resorted to unusual tricks, such as converting international sugar to molasses, shipping it to the US, then converting it back to sugar again; that was eventually stopped. The "LifeSavers" candy had a manufacturing plant in the US as recently as a few years ago, but had to close it due to the cost of sugar. It's far cheaper to make the candy in Canada and send it south.
Interesting twist: the "high fructose corn syrup" product has recently been linked to excess weight gain in rodent studies. Even when the mice consumed the same number of calories in sugar compared to HFCS, they still gained more weight.
Huh? I've seen many, many stories over the years on how Americans watch too much TV. In fact, those stories far outnumber the stories I've seen on how Americans spend too much time online.
True, but the difference here is the word choice. Very few people are willing to use the word "Addiction" seriously when discussing television viewing. But, when it's the Internet, they'll use the loaded word "addiction" to change the discussion.
Sigh - maybe it's plain old rationalization and an unwillingness to offend your core audience. If ABC can tell its viewers that they're OK, but there are "bad people" out there who spend 20-40 hours a week staring at a DIFFERENT type of screen, those viewers can feel OK about themselves.
It's like that scene in "Airplane" where the old lady is offered a swig from a flask by a fellow passenger. She turns up her nose at him in disdain, but then turns away and snorts some cocaine instead.
My personal (perhaps rationalized) feeling is that we have here a device that is a telephone, a mailbox, a newspaper, a television, and a video game, as well as a tool to get some work done.
In the late 1980s I saw the same thing happen with a Hyundai. Motoring magazines reported on a really nice sporty little car they'd prototyped.
I think the car was the "HCD-3". It blew me away, as well as a few of my friends. The proposed hp/weight ratio was pretty good, and the styling was pretty neat.
Then, it got run by several departments that tried to fit it into existing molds, using existing Hynudai platforms (Accent was used, I think) and other concerns.
I believe the final product that was based on it that sold in the US was the "Hyundai Tiburon". The first revision of the Tiburon was pretty disappointing for what it "could have been", but recent revisions have included better styling and a bigger engine. Not shabby on its own, but still a disappointment compared to the prototype.
Check out this link for a little history and the current car review.
Interesting - I poked around the iRate site for about fifteen minutes unable to figure out how to download it until I noticed that the guide to installing it mentioned the home page (broken link on that page to the home page, but I could figure THAT out.) The home page had a suspiciously large blank area in the middle, but a mouse-over told me that there was something there.
Turns out that the installation image doesn't show under Opera (even if I identify as "IE", but does under IE. Anyone else notice?
Not all kidnappings can be prevented by the parents.
Actually, it's a matter of statistics that most kidnappings are BY one of the parents. Kidnapping by stranger is so rare as to be the exception that makes the news (extra points for young, white, girl).
Slashdot Mirror
The body needs, IIRC, 3 grams of linoleic acid a day, plus some trace amounts from other sources. Most people get MUCH more than that.
You'll find that excessive carbohydrates will do you more harm than anything.
It's important, and you allude to it later, that the quality of carbohydrate is critical. Most Americans eat lots of WHITE processed flour and sugar. It's stuff that INSTANTLY triggers an insulin reaction, and after a couple of decades of it the body just gets resistant to the insulin. Sadly, they've stopped calling it "Adult-onset diabetes" in the US because it's becoming more prevalent in teens and even younger.
And a lack of protein is more dangerous than too much. You can eat 200g of protein a day without ill effect, but eat less and you end up losing significant strength.
I would counter that a lack of protein is almost unheard of in the developed world. There's a published figure of 56g per day for a 75kg man, but actual studies indicate that it can be even lower, and that rat studies are NOT indicative of human studies. See the results of some studies here. The results of a diet too high in protein, esp. animal protein, usually are an increased load on the kidneys and bone calcium loss, primarily through extra acidtiy in the body. This is part of the reason the USRDA for calcium (1000mg) is almost double that recommended by most other governments (I belive the UK has an RNI number of 700mg for adult men.)
It's probably notable that human breast milk - the food that makes a baby double its weight in one year, is only about 10% protein by calories. If 10% is good enough for a newborn baby, it should be good enough for anyone.
PITA vs. PETA?
No, I like your acronym better. We nicknamed our cat PITA: Pain In The Ass.
1) The original stopping points weren't established with economy in mind, but sheer pork-barrel politics. Many of the stops along Amtrak routes are TINY towns, and have always been such. In order to get the whole system approved, many of our congress-critters had to be appeased and stops in each district were established. Since each stop costs the same amount, this puts rail at a disadvantage to air-travel since all stops are served equally, regardless of base.
2) The original routes weren't established with people-transit in mind, but mostly freight. Often this corresponds nicely, but not always.
3) On many tracks, Amtrak is the guest, and freight owns the track. This means there are plenty of stops in the middle of nowhere for "no good reason" as the freight train has seniority, so to speak.
4) Sheer ticket cost. A single trip can cost several hundred dollars. Add in a couple of nights in a tiny sleeper car, and it's in the thousands.
Every couple of years, there's a bit of whining in Congress to make Amtrak self-sufficient, but it's notable that many of these elected officials doing the whining are the ones responsible for the inefficiencies in the first place.
Also: mass-transit is rarely self-sufficient; it is frequently, heavily, and often indirectly subsidized by government incentives, on the rationale that a mobile population is a working one. In the US, even personal transport via auto is the beneficiary of the Eisenhower plan to let the MILITARY move around quickly. http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/programadmin/interstate.ht ml
As it stands, the current target audience for the longer hauls (more than 200 miles) seems to be the wealthy elderly who are afraid of flying, and the poor who have no other means. On the shorter runs, it's stellar for a more general audience; the Chicago/Milwaukee route is fast, inexpensive, and pretty nice!
Let me get this straight; you've adopted yourself to avoid amiguity?
Sorry - couldn't pass it up.
Actually, many of the cuts at the VA indicate that you may be right. Soldiers who need the help aren't getting it, even YEARS after service. The administration actually expected this to be quite a short war, so VA funding wasn't increased to account for it. Counting long-term care of injured veterans, the actual cost of the war is calculated in the trillions. and climbing.
Also out there for AIM - "AIM Express"
It's pretty common for people to build/buy houses out by hog farms and complain about the smell. The local farmer has to mitigate the smell, then eventually gives up and leaves. On the up-side, the property values have usually climbed enough that the farmer can sell to a developer for a tidy profit.
Make that a V W wagon. Spent too much of my youth in mainframe operations, and too much of the past few years in QA using VMWare. :)
Darn if my mod points didn't all expire yesterday - I'd give them all to you.
When I went shopping for a commuter car five years ago, I had one infant and our family already had a VM wagon. I needed something that would get to work. I was concerned about the two-seatedness of the 2001 Honda Insight until I read a review that said "makes a great second car," and realized that's what I need.
There are plenty of families with multiple cars. Plenty of those families have two-seaters, or small four-seaters. Nobody ever bought a Corvette or a Porsche thinking "but where am I going to put my three kids?" They already had another car for that. There's no reason for EVERY car in a family to have seating for six and towing ability, too. It's simply a matter of "right tool for the job."
In the past four years we added another kid and we've still never found this arrangement restricting in any way.
Still, might be useful if your PDF file is on the internet, but not in Google.
Your point is a good one. Many multi-car families could get by quite well with one of these; Dad drives to work fifteen miles a day in the two seater electric, while mom uses the Ford Compensation to drive around town and get the kids.
Owners of two-seater sport cars and motorcycles understand this kind of compromise quite well - you don't have just one car. You take the right car for the job. Hauling 4x8 pieces of drywall or bags of mulch from the store? Get the pickup out of the garage. Driving to work ten miles away? Take the electric.
Of course, this prototype is still too expensive to be the second car for anyone who doesn't already have four or five expensive cars already. Still, the point of a prototype or first generation technology is to work out the bugs and build economy of scale with the early adopters first, then pass on the improvements to the masses later. Those of us who buy computers know this pattern well.
BTW: I bought a two-seater Honda Insight five years ago with the same idea in mind. With a wife, one child and one more on-the-way, I was concerned about the lack of a back seat, until I read a review that said "makes a great second car". I realized that was exactly what I was shopping for: not the only car in a four person family, but an extra car for a family that already had a station wagon.
An early sign that they were going away was the day the guy stopped putting on the booties. Little things...
Found an old slashdot post by a couple of former Mango engineers: link
Yes, it's hard to dig anything up on them anymore. Their product was only compatible to Windows 95, and never got rolling on the NT kernel. I bought a couple of copies surplus hoping to run them on something, but never got around to it. Neat in concept.
Something similar can be said of Windows versions. Actually, 1 and 2 were UNusuable, 3 (in 3.1) was the first fully-working one. Windows 4 (aka 95) was a dog, Windows 5 (aka 2000) and Windows XP seems to have gotten it together. Actually, there's some blurriness in versioning in there, were 2000 and XP could be considered the same product, but then you could leap to Windows 2003 Server as "6", which is really pretty well put-together.
Same here. I've already had a hybrid car for four and a half years, but that's just a "geek toy" thing, and probably not all that much of a money saver (payback period, etc.) But, many lights (where practical) are CF, those that aren't are dimmable or appropriate wattage. We've got a front-load washer, we put in a ton of attic insulation this past fall, and adjusted the thermostat at night via timer. Our gas bill actually dropped this winter compared to last.
One reason that people don't make these moves is that of initial cost. When faced with the prospect of a five dollar light bulb that takes several years to pay back, or several hundred dollars of insulation that only takes a couple of years for payback, people will often go with the option that costs the least AT THAT MOMENT. Anything that complicates the picture at all discourages people from making that choice. For example: CF bulbs are offered with a rebate form to make them cheaper, earlier. Unless the cost is less than that of a conventional incandescent, the CF bulb will still often lose the sale.
In order for "consumers" rather than business or institutions to take these steps, the payback has to be faster, or transparent. CF bulbs need to be free from the electric company or just plain cheaper at the register (they're getting there). An interesting twist is marketing: people will buy anything if the marketing is smarter. Phillips, for example, found several years ago that people wouldn't buy its CF bulbs if they were promoted as "greener" or "cheaper in the long run", but would buy them if they were promoted as long-lasting. One Phillips commercial showed someone changing a bulb in a hard-to-reach area. In fact, this long-life is one of the big reasons that institutions like them; if you've got 500 light bulbs in a building, regular bulbs burn out on an almost rolling basis.
BTW: this argument doesn't limit itself to CF bulbs, but they're just more evident. Front-load washers, motion detector lights, and many other things all are expensive up-front, cheaper in the long-run, and have alternate features that can be promoted above the energy advantages. For example: our front-load washer holds more clothes than a top-load and gets them cleaner, too, using less detergent.
Some of the patent issues in the case were actually that of interface, as well. It wasn't that TiVo was just doing something, but how they were communicating that back to the user. Much more the clincher in this case is that many of the things that TiVo claimed infringement on were things that they had exposed Dish to in licensing meetings that eventually failed.
Earlier post detailing each patent.
Earlier post detailing a particular item and how it was presumed "stolen."
Thank you for catching this one - not enough people seem to know about the Hawthorne Effect by name, but it comes up more often in "life" (non-quantum) than the Heisenberg Effect.
Agreed. Recent figures state that in the US, approx. 1/3 of all food product is disposed of - thrown in the garbage at some point in the chain. In the 80's, the world joined together hosting rock concerts to get food to Africa, where much of it rotted on the docks or was handed out to party faithfuls.
An additional wrinkle is that the main consumers of soybean products in the US are feed animals - cows, pigs, etc. Traditional rule-of-thumb has been that it takes 10 pounds of vegetation to grow one pound of animal. That one pound of animal product can then only maintain 1/10th of a pound of human. Far more efficent to eat the vegetation, yes?
Wasn't there a good story about two years ago about a German driver who blindly followed his GPS suggestion to follow a road that wasn't there? Turned out that the mapping software forgot to mention the FERRY that he should have boarded, and he drove straight into the river.
More of an artificial constraint by a few well-connected groups. In particular, the US grows much more corn than sugar cane, so it's locally easier to get. Additionally, imported sugar has an artificially high tariff to protect local growers. So we end up in a position where corn production is partially subsidized and sugar production is pretty thoroughly protected from international competition.
It's so bad that in the past companies have resorted to unusual tricks, such as converting international sugar to molasses, shipping it to the US, then converting it back to sugar again; that was eventually stopped. The "LifeSavers" candy had a manufacturing plant in the US as recently as a few years ago, but had to close it due to the cost of sugar. It's far cheaper to make the candy in Canada and send it south.
Interesting twist: the "high fructose corn syrup" product has recently been linked to excess weight gain in rodent studies. Even when the mice consumed the same number of calories in sugar compared to HFCS, they still gained more weight.
Link: Sugar Prices
True, but the difference here is the word choice. Very few people are willing to use the word "Addiction" seriously when discussing television viewing. But, when it's the Internet, they'll use the loaded word "addiction" to change the discussion.
Sigh - maybe it's plain old rationalization and an unwillingness to offend your core audience. If ABC can tell its viewers that they're OK, but there are "bad people" out there who spend 20-40 hours a week staring at a DIFFERENT type of screen, those viewers can feel OK about themselves.
It's like that scene in "Airplane" where the old lady is offered a swig from a flask by a fellow passenger. She turns up her nose at him in disdain, but then turns away and snorts some cocaine instead.
My personal (perhaps rationalized) feeling is that we have here a device that is a telephone, a mailbox, a newspaper, a television, and a video game, as well as a tool to get some work done.
I think the car was the "HCD-3". It blew me away, as well as a few of my friends. The proposed hp/weight ratio was pretty good, and the styling was pretty neat.
Then, it got run by several departments that tried to fit it into existing molds, using existing Hynudai platforms (Accent was used, I think) and other concerns.
I believe the final product that was based on it that sold in the US was the "Hyundai Tiburon". The first revision of the Tiburon was pretty disappointing for what it "could have been", but recent revisions have included better styling and a bigger engine. Not shabby on its own, but still a disappointment compared to the prototype.
Check out this link for a little history and the current car review.
Interesting - I poked around the iRate site for about fifteen minutes unable to figure out how to download it until I noticed that the guide to installing it mentioned the home page (broken link on that page to the home page, but I could figure THAT out.) The home page had a suspiciously large blank area in the middle, but a mouse-over told me that there was something there.
Turns out that the installation image doesn't show under Opera (even if I identify as "IE", but does under IE. Anyone else notice?
I'm still going to give it a whirl.
Actually, it's a matter of statistics that most kidnappings are BY one of the parents. Kidnapping by stranger is so rare as to be the exception that makes the news (extra points for young, white, girl).