One thing that is definitely a welcome addition
on
Apple Unveils New Macbook
·
· Score: 5, Informative
is the addition of screen spanning, mirroring, and lid closed operation with a external monitor. Integrated graphics are a bummer, but are expected given their appearence in the mac mini. The new screen is long overdue (a 1024x768 screen doesn't cut it in 2006). Now the only thing we still are waiting on is a replacement for the powermac, but seeing as how few of the major pro apps are universal binaries, that release may be a ways down the road.
The article is in a newer rolling stone magazine and can be found here. The author is Sean Wilentz, a Princeton professor of American studies, and his bio (and list of writings) is found here.
George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.
From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty -- and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.
Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton -- a category in which Bush is the only contestant.
The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary to popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch. We assess the past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate surveys, conducted by those perceived as conservatives as well as liberals, show remarkable unanimity about who the best and worst presidents have been.
Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole -- a fact the president's admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about "the current crop of history professors" than about Bush or about Bush's eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more than half of those polled -- and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative rating -- reached back before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as Bush. The presidents most commonly linked with Bush included Hoover, Andrew Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the historians polled -- nearly as many as those who rated Bush a success -- flatly called Bush the worst president in American history. And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, B
Windows XP Pro - $299 Windows XP Pro SP1 - Free upgrade WIndows XP Pro SP2 - Added firewall, popup blocking, security center, free upgrade
OSX 10.0 - $129, beta quality release OSX 10.1 - OSX that is actually usable, free upgrade. OSX 10.2 - $129 added ichat, address book, spam filtering in mail, etc. OSX 10.3 - $129 added fast user switching (that XP had since the start), window tiling, home dir encryption, and a web browser OSX 10.4 - $129 added find-as-you-type search, widgets, RSS support, Automator, and some other tweaks
The total for OSX is $516 and that doesn't include $30 everytime apple decides to update Quicktime (there have been 3 new versions since OS X came out). At least with windows, you get free updates to media player and an un-crippled player out of the box. No doubt apple has done a lot of work on OSX since release, but you only get security updates unless you pay for the newest version.
The PSP has done well because of its overwhelming advantage in the war of shelf-space. At the local Circuit City, the DS shares a shelf with the GBA, while the PSP has its own special stand devoted to it and accessories. The demo DSs always are heavily scratched and look like shit, next to the PSPs superior (and unscratched) screen. Adding insult to injury is the terrible selection of DS games that most retailers (wal-mart, target, etc.) stock. The games that really utilize the system and show off what it can do aren't even on the shelf, instead you get the EA shit, Disney shit, and crappy ports from other consoles (King Kong). If Nintendo America was really aggressive in marketing the DS over here, I think they'd have a lot more success. DS has been out a year or so and the only ad I've ever seen on TV is the new one for Tetris; the PSP ads (its portable cheese? a nut you can play with outside? wtf?) are on all the time.
The volume buttons on dell keyboard work with no problems on my mac, as well as all 5 buttons on my mouse, and my monitor is correctly identified (and sets up the resolutions and refresh rates) on both windows and mac with no user intervention. Only on linux do I have to run a console based program to tell my monitor what resolutions and refresh-rates it can use (and that often doens't work). Despite following the Ubuntu wiki exactly, I never did get it to display anything above an eye-hurting 60hz, even though it recognized my monitor model.
As far as must have OSX software, I would recommend: Adium, Comic Life, Flip4Mac, Inquisitor (awesome extension of safaris search box), RockNES, SNES9x, and SCUMMVM.
Its a real shame Apple had to shackle its Pro notebook and consumer desktop with the uninspiring x1600. OS X relies on the graphics card for so much and they give it so little attention. I hope they follow the lead of other OEMs and make upgrades to their products as new stuff becomes available and not delay faster stuff so that Steve Jobs has something to talk about at Macworld or WWDC.
I agree that a turbo wouldn't make a lot of sense on a hybrid, but it is a very good tool for extracting more horsepower from small engines. A really good example of this would be to compare the Subaru Legacy Sedan and the Subaru Impreza STi. Both use the same 2.5L 4-cylinder, but the turbocharged STi gets 135 more horsepower (300 vs. 165) than the naturally aspirated Legacy. Both vehicles have similar gas mileage (18/24 for the STi and 21/28 for the Legacy).
Of course, this implies that for a given horsepower, you can use a smaller displacement engine that is turbocharged, and enjoy an increase in fuel economy over a larger, naturally aspirated motor.
Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot translator-o-matic NetBSD rules! Anyway, Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really means...
"Gentoo makes me so much more productive." "Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."
"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!" "Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."
"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs." "Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."
"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo." "I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and.debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), my box MUST be faster. It's nothing to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."
"...my Gentoo Linux workstation..." "...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."
"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..." "I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH.rpms together on the command line, and that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't designed for)."
"All the other distros are soooo out of date." "Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -09 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."
"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future." "OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"
It'd also be really nice if they could make the birdseye view seamless, and more consistent. You don't get the same available scrolling area each time you view a certain spot.
But I find http://local.live.com/ to be a little nicer for checking out what a huge place America really is. You can mark points of interest, zoom with the mousewheel, and get a nifty birds-eye view of a lot of places. Its in beta (and it shows), but has a lot of promise. The only thing wrong with it is its failure to work in safari (but it does fine in firefox and exploder) and some minor bugs (mousewheeling will sometimes zoom and other times pan).
And its no surprise since they have exclusive broadcast rights in the US. Rather than show most of the events, they hand pick a small few where the US is supposed to win and then cover them. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I'd much rather watch the biathlon or curling or x-country skiing than sit through another "spirit of the games" hype session (this olympian has battled through cancer, loss of family, broken leg, blah blah blah). Every olympian works hard and overcomes personal obstacles on their way to the games, its nothing special.
Snowboarding and freestyle skiing shouldn't be olympic sports; save that shit for the x-games. When I'm watching the Olympic games, I should never hear a commentator say "he got sick air on that phat run".
The only thing that has made these games less than absolute shit is the fact that I get CBC (hoser tv), and they actually cover the games, not the hype (Bode Miller needs to change his name to Sir Chokesalot)
But there are many areas where some minor federal intervention would be very useful.
The first thing the govt. should do is reevaluate the way it calculates fuel economy. The current system is grossly innaccurate, and doesn't give consumers a true picture of the gas mileage they can expect. Consumer Reports had an article about this and the auto industry rep. basically said that the auto companies know how the govt. tests, and optomizes their vehicles for the test (gear ratio tweaking, using prototype vehicles, etc.). Changing the test methods would give consumers more accurate information so they can make a more informed decision.
The second thing the govt. could do is raise the minimum required fuel economy and make light trucks subject to the gas guzzler tax. I work at a Dodge dealership and the fuel economy of new vehicles is attrocious. A new durango gets 14-18 mpg and pays no gas guzzler tax. A station wagon that got similar mileage would have a several thousand dollar tax associated with it. Treat SUVs like the cars that they are replacing and you will find that fewer people will buy one.
The third thing that the govt. and EPA could do to help is to standardize fuel grades. Under the current system, refiners have to produce something like 60-70 different blends to comply with various state enviromental regs. The govt. could reduce this clusterfuck by having perhaps 2 or 3 different blends; one blend for urban/enviromentally sensitive (pacific northwest, etc.) areas, and one blend for areas where pollution isn't as big of a problem. Current refineries in the US are running at or above full capacity, and this would help ease that situation, and allow oil companies to put current resources to better use.
In addition to the step above, I firmly believe that the govt. should raise minimum octane ratings for gasoline. If the US had higher octane ratings, we could use higher compression ratings, and turbochargers would be a lot more effective, allowing smaller displacement engines (like most japanese cars have) to produce the same horsepower as a larger naturally aspirated engine but with increased fuel economy.
Obviously, these aren't complete solutions to Americas oil addiction, but they are things that would help.
P.S. while writing this post, I came across an interesting ad that the sierra club ran in the new york times on Ford's 100th birthday. 100 years of "progress" indeed.
Of course oil production is in decline and we are all fucked. We can blame all of this on the greedy Americans (because noone else uses oil), Chimpy McBushitler, Christians, and Micro$oft.
Thats not quite true. Most "A" list DS games sell for $30-35 with most other console games games going for $50-60. 30-50% cheaper is not what I call "close to full price".
Slashdot Mirror
here
is the addition of screen spanning, mirroring, and lid closed operation with a external monitor. Integrated graphics are a bummer, but are expected given their appearence in the mac mini. The new screen is long overdue (a 1024x768 screen doesn't cut it in 2006). Now the only thing we still are waiting on is a replacement for the powermac, but seeing as how few of the major pro apps are universal binaries, that release may be a ways down the road.
Haha, I always felt soo bad for Troopers because they had to hold their contras up the whole time during retreats.
How many of the peripherals shown at E3 (remote/nunchuck, classic, lightgun, etc.) will be in the box when Wii ships???
maybe they should just leave the tough stuff to the smarter people at NASA.
I think the pressures they are referring to would be experienced during launch, not during spaceflight.
The article is in a newer rolling stone magazine and can be found here. The author is Sean Wilentz, a Princeton professor of American studies, and his bio (and list of writings) is found here.
George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.
From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty -- and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.
Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton -- a category in which Bush is the only contestant.
The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary to popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch. We assess the past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate surveys, conducted by those perceived as conservatives as well as liberals, show remarkable unanimity about who the best and worst presidents have been.
Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole -- a fact the president's admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about "the current crop of history professors" than about Bush or about Bush's eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more than half of those polled -- and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative rating -- reached back before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as Bush. The presidents most commonly linked with Bush included Hoover, Andrew Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the historians polled -- nearly as many as those who rated Bush a success -- flatly called Bush the worst president in American history. And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, B
Windows XP Pro - $299
Windows XP Pro SP1 - Free upgrade
WIndows XP Pro SP2 - Added firewall, popup blocking, security center, free upgrade
OSX 10.0 - $129, beta quality release
OSX 10.1 - OSX that is actually usable, free upgrade.
OSX 10.2 - $129 added ichat, address book, spam filtering in mail, etc.
OSX 10.3 - $129 added fast user switching (that XP had since the start), window tiling, home dir encryption, and a web browser
OSX 10.4 - $129 added find-as-you-type search, widgets, RSS support, Automator, and some other tweaks
The total for OSX is $516 and that doesn't include $30 everytime apple decides to update Quicktime (there have been 3 new versions since OS X came out). At least with windows, you get free updates to media player and an un-crippled player out of the box. No doubt apple has done a lot of work on OSX since release, but you only get security updates unless you pay for the newest version.
The PSP has done well because of its overwhelming advantage in the war of shelf-space. At the local Circuit City, the DS shares a shelf with the GBA, while the PSP has its own special stand devoted to it and accessories. The demo DSs always are heavily scratched and look like shit, next to the PSPs superior (and unscratched) screen. Adding insult to injury is the terrible selection of DS games that most retailers (wal-mart, target, etc.) stock. The games that really utilize the system and show off what it can do aren't even on the shelf, instead you get the EA shit, Disney shit, and crappy ports from other consoles (King Kong). If Nintendo America was really aggressive in marketing the DS over here, I think they'd have a lot more success. DS has been out a year or so and the only ad I've ever seen on TV is the new one for Tetris; the PSP ads (its portable cheese? a nut you can play with outside? wtf?) are on all the time.
The volume buttons on dell keyboard work with no problems on my mac, as well as all 5 buttons on my mouse, and my monitor is correctly identified (and sets up the resolutions and refresh rates) on both windows and mac with no user intervention. Only on linux do I have to run a console based program to tell my monitor what resolutions and refresh-rates it can use (and that often doens't work). Despite following the Ubuntu wiki exactly, I never did get it to display anything above an eye-hurting 60hz, even though it recognized my monitor model.
It's 2006, shit like this needs to be automatic.
http://www.softpedia.com/
http://www.macosxhints.com/ and
http://insidemacgames.com/
are all sites I've found to be helpful...
As far as must have OSX software, I would recommend:
Adium, Comic Life, Flip4Mac, Inquisitor (awesome extension of safaris search box), RockNES, SNES9x, and SCUMMVM.
Its a real shame Apple had to shackle its Pro notebook and consumer desktop with the uninspiring x1600. OS X relies on the graphics card for so much and they give it so little attention. I hope they follow the lead of other OEMs and make upgrades to their products as new stuff becomes available and not delay faster stuff so that Steve Jobs has something to talk about at Macworld or WWDC.
Nice post, but it can be summarized like this:
"Let me run emulators on my PSP so I can play SNES ROMS (that I downloaded from the internet for free) instead of your new $50 titles."
Sony realizes this and has no intention of supporting unofficial apps. Ever.
"Grammar is the obsession of the simple minded" - Mark Twain
I agree that a turbo wouldn't make a lot of sense on a hybrid, but it is a very good tool for extracting more horsepower from small engines. A really good example of this would be to compare the Subaru Legacy Sedan and the Subaru Impreza STi. Both use the same 2.5L 4-cylinder, but the turbocharged STi gets 135 more horsepower (300 vs. 165) than the naturally aspirated Legacy. Both vehicles have similar gas mileage (18/24 for the STi and 21/28 for the Legacy).
Of course, this implies that for a given horsepower, you can use a smaller displacement engine that is turbocharged, and enjoy an increase in fuel economy over a larger, naturally aspirated motor.
Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot translator-o-matic
.debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), my box MUST be faster. It's nothing to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."
.rpms together on the command line, and that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't designed for)."
NetBSD rules! Anyway, Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really means...
"Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."
"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."
"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."
"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."
"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo."
"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and
"...my Gentoo Linux workstation..."
"...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."
"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH
"All the other distros are soooo out of date."
"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -09 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."
"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"
It'd also be really nice if they could make the birdseye view seamless, and more consistent. You don't get the same available scrolling area each time you view a certain spot.
But I find http://local.live.com/ to be a little nicer for checking out what a huge place America really is. You can mark points of interest, zoom with the mousewheel, and get a nifty birds-eye view of a lot of places. Its in beta (and it shows), but has a lot of promise. The only thing wrong with it is its failure to work in safari (but it does fine in firefox and exploder) and some minor bugs (mousewheeling will sometimes zoom and other times pan).
And its no surprise since they have exclusive broadcast rights in the US. Rather than show most of the events, they hand pick a small few where the US is supposed to win and then cover them. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I'd much rather watch the biathlon or curling or x-country skiing than sit through another "spirit of the games" hype session (this olympian has battled through cancer, loss of family, broken leg, blah blah blah). Every olympian works hard and overcomes personal obstacles on their way to the games, its nothing special.
Snowboarding and freestyle skiing shouldn't be olympic sports; save that shit for the x-games. When I'm watching the Olympic games, I should never hear a commentator say "he got sick air on that phat run".
The only thing that has made these games less than absolute shit is the fact that I get CBC (hoser tv), and they actually cover the games, not the hype (Bode Miller needs to change his name to Sir Chokesalot)
Nothing for you to see here, move along.
But there are many areas where some minor federal intervention would be very useful.
The first thing the govt. should do is reevaluate the way it calculates fuel economy. The current system is grossly innaccurate, and doesn't give consumers a true picture of the gas mileage they can expect. Consumer Reports had an article about this and the auto industry rep. basically said that the auto companies know how the govt. tests, and optomizes their vehicles for the test (gear ratio tweaking, using prototype vehicles, etc.). Changing the test methods would give consumers more accurate information so they can make a more informed decision.
The second thing the govt. could do is raise the minimum required fuel economy and make light trucks subject to the gas guzzler tax. I work at a Dodge dealership and the fuel economy of new vehicles is attrocious. A new durango gets 14-18 mpg and pays no gas guzzler tax. A station wagon that got similar mileage would have a several thousand dollar tax associated with it. Treat SUVs like the cars that they are replacing and you will find that fewer people will buy one.
The third thing that the govt. and EPA could do to help is to standardize fuel grades. Under the current system, refiners have to produce something like 60-70 different blends to comply with various state enviromental regs. The govt. could reduce this clusterfuck by having perhaps 2 or 3 different blends; one blend for urban/enviromentally sensitive (pacific northwest, etc.) areas, and one blend for areas where pollution isn't as big of a problem. Current refineries in the US are running at or above full capacity, and this would help ease that situation, and allow oil companies to put current resources to better use.
In addition to the step above, I firmly believe that the govt. should raise minimum octane ratings for gasoline. If the US had higher octane ratings, we could use higher compression ratings, and turbochargers would be a lot more effective, allowing smaller displacement engines (like most japanese cars have) to produce the same horsepower as a larger naturally aspirated engine but with increased fuel economy.
Obviously, these aren't complete solutions to Americas oil addiction, but they are things that would help.
P.S. while writing this post, I came across an interesting ad that the sierra club ran in the new york times on Ford's 100th birthday. 100 years of "progress" indeed.
Of course oil production is in decline and we are all fucked. We can blame all of this on the greedy Americans (because noone else uses oil), Chimpy McBushitler, Christians, and Micro$oft.
This sounds like a setup to a Bush joke.
Yet they sell close to full price.
Thats not quite true. Most "A" list DS games sell for $30-35 with most other console games games going for $50-60. 30-50% cheaper is not what I call "close to full price".