I the consumer am no longer interested in channels, the packages they come in, nor the scheduling that you inflict on me. Give me a searchable catalog of every TV show and Movie from everywhere in the world in fairly high quality that I can watch buffered rather than compressed all to hell and streamed. Did I mention I want it on demand, and without the pay per view fees if I pay a monthly fee. I want the new movies the day they release in theaters, not six months later. (I don't give a good God damn about the theaters, why should you?) If I have to pay per view for the shows, then I want NO ADVERTISEMENTS, no more double dipping.
I am the consumer give me what I want and I'll give you what you want. If not then you get nothing, but I'll continue to obtain my media through other means.
Another step in the direction Lucas really want which is to get rid of all the actors. It would be pretty cool in the not so far future that a director could make a movie and then release a developer pack of all the CG objects, scenes, textures, and sound files to the fans and let them make their own movies with them. I think Unreal or Valve is going to beat him to the punch on that though.
Of course if Lucus did this the first 500 or so that would show up on youTube would be "Die Jar Jar Die" or "How Lucas stole my childhood dreams".
I can only hope that someone with talent and a good story will go through and gut episodes I-III of the whole "Saturday Crap Adverture Serials that I remember as a kid mentality that are completely different from the first three I made so I can cash in even more on the merchandise" Lucas had in mind when he did the Prequels.
Re:Cue the "hydrogen is not a power source" chorus
on
Driving on Starch
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· Score: 1
potatoes = starch + enzymes + still = vodka & the daily commute
I think I would love to run my car on starch and hydrogen.
Hehe, I just thought of something else. Depending on the enzyemes you could potentionally end up with a tank full of hooch. Talk about drinking and driving! The farther you drive the more you have to drink.
The end of a hard week, you drain your tank into still and make some vodka out of your weekly commute. I'm starting to think this idea could fly.
Well let's see potatoes are practically 100% starch, so how hard is it to grow potatoes? Of all the new ideas this the only one I can see where the average person could make some of their own fuel without any real impact on the environment. (We already have these big useless lawns that are devoted to growing grass.) Now as far as enzymes, goto the grocery store and look in the baking section for yeast. You'd probably want more than those little packets, but it's not much harder to handle than that.
Want to fill up your tank send the kids in the back yard to dig up taters, peel them, and then chop them up. Pour in a cup of enzemes, add the potatoes, and the water. Wait for twenty minutes for the stew to get up to temperature. Now go for a drive.
It still all amounts to solar power (growing the potatoes), I think I'd rather have an array of solar cells on the roof of my house and use the juice coming off of it to split the water into hydrogen, but this method would work 24/7 as long as the mix didn't get too hot or cold and as I said before, the "fuel" could be grown just about by anyone anywhere.
Paranoid yes, but that doesn't mean "they" are not out to get us.
It's hard not to be, you work your guts out and can barely keep a corporation with 20 members moving in the same direction, while there are corps that have thousands of memebers and seem to be able to print money and ships and can gather fleets big enough to lag out your connection when they move through your system.
Of course that's the whole point of the game, it's not supposed to be fair. Eve is pure and simply a no holds bared economic simulator. The rules are few, and the strongest eat the weakest. People come in from other MMO's to play Eve with the expection that it is WOW in space. After a month or three they come to the realization that there are portions of the game they will never have access to, no matter how long they play and how much they grind, and that death can come for them at any time reguardless of how high they climb and how big of a ship they can field. Many never come to grips with it, so they start crying foul over just about everything.
A player steals your ore or rips you off in a comercial transaction, it's griefing. A big ship has enough fire power to wipe out a little ship, they scream nerf. The little ship can out manuever the guns of the big ship, too much nerfing. A corportion that number in the thousands systematically wipes out corps with members numbering in the hundreds...
You knew everyone in your graduating class, all 150 people, you must have been pretty popular. I didn't realize we had such royalty here on/.
As far as piss-holes, East Anglia is a pretty nice piss-hole, it reminds me alot of the areas around where I grew up in the Midwest in the US. Lot's of farms, friendly people and not too many gits like yourself, but just like the Midwest outside the major cities what it lacked was full-time well paying jobs. A bull-shit part time job is not employment, which is why so many around here do in fact work several jobs to make the ends meet. You walk into a resturant or chain store in the US and it's a rare thing to see anyone over the age of 20 at the register. I've noticed it is quite the opposite here.
You know I could see getting upset over someone posting from the US that has never been here about "how it is in the UK", but the fact that you get bent about someone actually living in your fucking country for more than a year who calls it as he sees it, well you my friend are a fuck-tard. Trying prying your ass out of your, graduating class of 150, small butt-crack corner of the UK and getting out and seeing your own country. Of coure the thought of driving the daunting 4 hours it takes to get across it might be too intimidating for you.
You are confused we shoot at road signs, as we drive down the road of course, not CCTV cameras in the US. Most CCTV cameras are private companies, such as stores and banks, not the police.
I would expect Brits to shoot at them, but pointing your finger at a camera and yelling "Bang" doesn't seem to work too well.
That's from last year there smart guy and that's the average for the whole country. The current average is 5.5%, which is irrelavent. Some places the local rates are as high as 16%. Also a part time job, is not employement it's a hobbie. If you can't afford to rent a small apartment, buy a car, and do something other than eat, then you are not my friend, employed.
I was moved to the UK for work. Aim high Air Force!
I'd be silly to pass up an assignment overseas. Most people pay to visit UK/EU.
Quality of life is very subjective. I like it, it reminds me of what most cities where like in the States 20-30 years ago (with 5x times the population), before all the mega-stores and chains blighted the landscape. Most shops and resturants are of the local variety. Wages for middle income and lower income are pretty bad and the unemployment rate is well into the double digits. Quite a few Brits I've met seem to work 2-3 jobs. If you are a teenager good luck finding a job, even the local pizza delivery boy is in his early fifties. If you are at the top end of the pay scale, high-tech, global corp, multi-lingual type jobs then the pay is wonderful, but those are usually US companies paying those wages. The Brits making the big $$'s are usually overseas themselves. Exchange rate makes things very weird so to say pay has caught up is not accurate, it all depends on your situation.
Everything is badly overpriced and the VAT makes it even worse. I just try no to think about how many dollars I'm spending when I drop 100 quid on something (~$200) I've noticed that most things are price the same as the states they just swap the pound for the $, so you end up paying twice as much. Food and beer are the only things cheaper, but then again I'm right in the middle of the UK farmland. The beer isn't actually cheaper, but it's sold by the pint and has quit a bit more alcohol in it, so it ends up being cheaper per unit. Housing is like being in the popular places in California. The prices are start around $150,000 for a one bedroom apt and work their way up.
It's not all bad there are some things about living over here I like, and some that just makes me shake my head and wonder what the hell the locals are thinking. The roads and parking situation is pretty bad practially where every you go. I will say this it is 10 times better than most of the areas I've lived or visited in California, except maybe Monterey, and the odds of bumping into someone who speaks some form of English alot better. You may not understand their English, but it is English. I crack myself up when a linguistic difficulty arrises. I just apologize and say that I'm an American and that I don't understand English. It usually gets a laugh. The people are very friendly here.
Using an arial drone to look down by the police, what a novel concept. Oh wait we've been using helicopters to do the same for the past thirty years in most major cities in the US. A drone is cheaper to fly and can stay on station for the better part of half of a day at a time, and the pilot doesn't have to land to grab a donut and hit the bathroom, he just high-5's the back-up pilot and walks out of the room.
When I was a kid I always thought it was the coolest thing when ever the St Louis police helicopter (aka the Brown Hornet, it was brown, duh) landed in the parking lot of the Wendy's down the street. They'd kick the observer out to grab a bag of burgers.
I moved to the UK last year for work, and the only difference between the US and the UK is the fact the CCTV camera are labeled in the UK and typically not so in the US. Other than that there don't seem to be any more or less of them. What you don't see much of is the police. They don't "Fly the flag" near as much as they do in the US.
The only other thing that cracks me up is the radar cameras, most of which seem to have had every possible form of vandalism done to them. From being painted over to being blown up. I even saw one funny picture of a guy with a porky pig mask on with an fireman's emergency gas powered saw making short work of the post one was mounted on.
The only reason it costs more than $5 dollars a gallon in other parts of the world is because of the $5 in tax they charge. In the states the tax is typically used for road construction, over here in the UK they certainly aren't spending the money on roads.
Making toilet paper is horrible toxic too, from beginning to end, but I don't hear you bitching about that. Paper products are some of the worse culprits in mercury pollution of water and CO2 releases.
The only way a NiMH battery can hurt you is if a pallet of them fell over on you and crushed you. Compared to lead acid, alkaline, and Lion they are practically made out of baby smiles and happy thoughts. Think about that next time you are listening to your hippy hug the bunny song on your iPod.
I'm curious, unless you are bringing along a personal smoke alarm, what do you need a 9v battery for? I haven't found a use for them in years. As far as the AA, AAA that's a no brainer. I have one small charger that can quick charge 1-4 AA or AAA mixed together. If you look around you can find very small units that can plug into both 12vDC as well as AC, there is that as well as small chargers and even the batteries themselves that can plug into USB ports to recharge. Also some of the newer AA batteries are pushing 3000mili-amp/hour ratings now. More than 3x what they used to be when I first made the switch.
Other than maybe my handheld gps, I rarely carry more than one extra set of AA and AAA. For each device I usually can get 2-7 days worth of use out of them before they die on me. I just plug in one set each night when I'm getting ready for bed, and they are usually charged up before I hit the sack, that way I rarely have to dig into the spares.
I'm always on the lookout for more power efficient gadgets. The latest was a very bright 3 LED mini-mag sized light that only uses one AA battery. It's brighter than the 3 D-cell mag-light in my truck.
TSA are easy going people. Electronics, batteries, and hand-guns are practically hassel free items to check in your luggage, but you better be ready for a cavity search if you bring more than a small bottle of any kind of liquid with you. My latest trip out of LAX, I had to walk the check in person through the hand-gun check paperwork (she had no clue) and the TSA guy didn't even blink when he saw the handgun in the luggage, but he was VERY interested in my shampoo and conditioner.
You can pick up a DVI to HDMI cable just about anywhere for under $30. I'm running a PC on a 40inch Samsung 720p LCD tv. It is high enough resolution to surf the web on. Looks pretty decent, but unlike computer monitors the TV still play the ol CRT game of where the tube is partially covered up by the case, so you might have to run it one resolution lower so that everything ends up visible. Don't buy into 1080i being better than 720p. It may be technically a higher resolution, but computer displays look like crap on it. Too much flicker. Stick with either 720p or 1080p. Also don't be fooled that TV's have completely caught up with monitors. All things being equal computer monitors have better response times and better picture quality. If I could have done it over again, I would have just bought a 30" computer monitor instead of the 40" TV. Don't get me wrong, I like my TV alot, but a computer monitor it is not, so using it as such is somewhat of a compromise in quality.
Other than things where the batteries might get lost or destroyed or in things that I rarely use, such as in the many dive lights I've had flood then go boom, or that 3 cell mag light behind the seat of my truck, I stopped using Alkalines ten years ago. You are silly if you aren't using NiMH's in everything. Sure they last half as long and cost three times as much, but considering you can recharge them 100+ times they pay for themselves pretty quickly.
I would love to bike again to work, but unfortunately I live in the UK now, which has roads that are as unfriendly as it gets to bikes. Unless you live in the middle of town, and even then sometimes that is no help, you are rolling the dice. It's not that Brits are bad drivers, quite the opposite, it's just that the roads are worse than bad here. There's barely wide enough to drive on, much less bike, and they have a thing for walls and hedges so turning blind from side streets is practically the norm. It can be quite the adventure commuting at times. They do cater pretty well to pedestrians, but like most places in the US there are practically no bike paths.
The best town I ever lived in for bicycling to just about anywhere in town was Rapid City in South Dakota. A very large stream/very small river ran through the middle of town, to protect from flooding they made it a green space a block on each side of it with a bike path. In most cases, except in the dead of winter it was just as convient to bike to where ever you wanted to go. A lawyer that I knew sold one of his cars after buying a bike, he was thinking about selling the second till he got married. Then the only time either he or his wife ever used it was to go on trips or go to the store.
Yeah that is a daily thing that bugs me. I work on aircraft for the Air Force and due to aviation reg and mil spec requirements the newest stuff we have is nearly 20 years old because of all the hoops they have to jump through to bring it to market.
There is hope, the laws they enacted these past few years have made it alot harder for the lawyers to make headway against the aviation companies. I've been reading about modern engines with all the trimmings as well even those that run on auto diesel or Jet-A. Man that would be great that instead of having a 100 hour engine inspections they could bump them out to 1000 or even more.
Of course I forgot something. Hybrids such as the Prius actually have 2 batteries, the big pack for driving the wheels, and a small standard 12v battery for the gasoline motor and the accessories. So even if you run your big bank down to zero, you'll still be able to start your generator and charge it back up.
Never claimed to be an English major. I suspect that if they ever tried to put a spell checker on slashdot the server would go immediately into a catatonic state. I guess I could type everything out and then copy and paste, but then all the spell Nazi's would be bored.
Anyway a motor is a generator is a motor. It's exactly like an alternator charging the batteries which drives the motors, well sort of. Think of it this way you put electricity into an electric motor you get kinetic energy (it's a motor and it spins), but if you put kinetic energy into the same motor (spin it) it ouputs electricity and viola presto chango your motor is now a generator. Now if they could just figure out how to spin a gasoline engine and have it make gasoline!
Now getting back to what is driving what. If the electrical output of the generator (the one attached to the gasoline engine) is greater than the requirements of the motors attached to the wheels then the extra electricity flows into the battery pack. When you let off the gas and coast to slow down the motors attached to the wheels instantly turn into generators and convert back some of your forward motion and put that power into the battery as well. So now you push on the pedal and you start to role, all the juice is coming straight out of the battery. As the battery starts to deplete, then the motor/generator kicks back on and the main portion goes to the wheel motors and the extra goes to the battery, but leaves the battery depleted enough so there will be room for the electricity you'll generate at the wheels the next time you stop.
Now comes along our gear head/hardware hacker that thinks 50-60mpg is fine and dandy, but what he realy wants is to go faster, so he changes the software controlling when the motor kicks on and puts in a bigger electric motor on the wheels. Now instead of waiting for the battery pack to deplete the gasoline motor kicks on immediately, but it doesn't have enough power to supply 100% of the juice the newer bigger electric motor can handle, so the extra juice gets pulled from the battery pack and instead of just acting like a battery pack to store your energy from braking, it now acts like a turbo, and suddenly people realize hybrids are actually quite fast. Cool huh?
This is exactly like the battery/alternator set-up in your car, but instead of driving the wheels you power your lights, the radio, and the engine (ignition). When your alternator is working correctly it powers everything in the car, with the extra going to the battery. Of course if they are using an alternator as a generator in the hybrid then our little gear head is going to have to be vigilant or he'll drain his battery dry which will cause the gasoline engine to stall and he'll be walking home.
Alternators are interesting in that they require electricity to work, they don't have magnets in them, only coils. You can spin an alternator all day long and it won't do a thing, but as soon as you hook it up to a battery you can use it to generate electricity. This is why most modern cars can't be pop-started on a completely dead battery or continue to run if you disconnect the battery, for that you need a car with a generator (aka dynamo) which is another story for another time.
Here is a good discription on how an alternator works
Well that's my take on it. In addition to not being an English major, nor am I an Electrical Engineer. I'm a pilot/mechanic/avionics tech. I know a little about alot. In other words just dangerous enough to get things working again and not end up killing myself or others.
Poor placement does make things a pain. I've noticed this has more to do with front wheel drive cars than the electronics they've added in. Those things are absolutely shoe-horned in. There is hope for the diagnostics thought. The computer controls are much more standardized than in the past and I've been noticing more and more cheap diagnostic tools being available.
As far as things being mechanically controlled verses electronically, I'll take electronically any day of the week. I've had my Toyota Tacoma for now 9 years and have had to have it "tuned up" all of zero times. Yeah it may take a little more effort to deal with when it breaks (Of course it never has), and some extra tools, but I'll trade that any day of the week over the anual ritual of tuning the engine.
I'm not a total hater of all things mechanical. I do thoroughly enjoy having constantly deal with the mixture on the engine of the Cesna 172 that I fly.
Most of the truck or SUV hybrids I've seen use a two motor configuration. One bolted to the side of the both the front and rear differentials. They only part of the drive train that was eliminated was the trasfer case and the drive shafts.
I had forgotten about unsprung weight. The only vehicles that I've seen in public use so far was the giant earth mover trucks and some buses, niether of which get up above 20-30mph and the shear weight of the load they are carrying make it a non-issue. There is an article floating around about a four motored MINI with them in the hubs, but again it's probably nothing more than a developement vehicle used for publicity and wouldn't be capable of being used outside of a nice snooth track.
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Dear Phone/Cable Companies:
I the consumer am no longer interested in channels, the packages they come in, nor the scheduling that you inflict on me. Give me a searchable catalog of every TV show and Movie from everywhere in the world in fairly high quality that I can watch buffered rather than compressed all to hell and streamed. Did I mention I want it on demand, and without the pay per view fees if I pay a monthly fee. I want the new movies the day they release in theaters, not six months later. (I don't give a good God damn about the theaters, why should you?) If I have to pay per view for the shows, then I want NO ADVERTISEMENTS, no more double dipping.
I am the consumer give me what I want and I'll give you what you want. If not then you get nothing, but I'll continue to obtain my media through other means.
Of course if Lucus did this the first 500 or so that would show up on youTube would be "Die Jar Jar Die" or "How Lucas stole my childhood dreams".
I can only hope that someone with talent and a good story will go through and gut episodes I-III of the whole "Saturday Crap Adverture Serials that I remember as a kid mentality that are completely different from the first three I made so I can cash in even more on the merchandise" Lucas had in mind when he did the Prequels.
I think I would love to run my car on starch and hydrogen.
The end of a hard week, you drain your tank into still and make some vodka out of your weekly commute. I'm starting to think this idea could fly.
Want to fill up your tank send the kids in the back yard to dig up taters, peel them, and then chop them up. Pour in a cup of enzemes, add the potatoes, and the water. Wait for twenty minutes for the stew to get up to temperature. Now go for a drive.
It still all amounts to solar power (growing the potatoes), I think I'd rather have an array of solar cells on the roof of my house and use the juice coming off of it to split the water into hydrogen, but this method would work 24/7 as long as the mix didn't get too hot or cold and as I said before, the "fuel" could be grown just about by anyone anywhere.
Yes my sun I am. May piece bee with yuo.
It's hard not to be, you work your guts out and can barely keep a corporation with 20 members moving in the same direction, while there are corps that have thousands of memebers and seem to be able to print money and ships and can gather fleets big enough to lag out your connection when they move through your system.
Of course that's the whole point of the game, it's not supposed to be fair. Eve is pure and simply a no holds bared economic simulator. The rules are few, and the strongest eat the weakest. People come in from other MMO's to play Eve with the expection that it is WOW in space. After a month or three they come to the realization that there are portions of the game they will never have access to, no matter how long they play and how much they grind, and that death can come for them at any time reguardless of how high they climb and how big of a ship they can field. Many never come to grips with it, so they start crying foul over just about everything.
A player steals your ore or rips you off in a comercial transaction, it's griefing. A big ship has enough fire power to wipe out a little ship, they scream nerf. The little ship can out manuever the guns of the big ship, too much nerfing. A corportion that number in the thousands systematically wipes out corps with members numbering in the hundreds...
...it's CCP favoratism.
As far as piss-holes, East Anglia is a pretty nice piss-hole, it reminds me alot of the areas around where I grew up in the Midwest in the US. Lot's of farms, friendly people and not too many gits like yourself, but just like the Midwest outside the major cities what it lacked was full-time well paying jobs. A bull-shit part time job is not employment, which is why so many around here do in fact work several jobs to make the ends meet. You walk into a resturant or chain store in the US and it's a rare thing to see anyone over the age of 20 at the register. I've noticed it is quite the opposite here.
You know I could see getting upset over someone posting from the US that has never been here about "how it is in the UK", but the fact that you get bent about someone actually living in your fucking country for more than a year who calls it as he sees it, well you my friend are a fuck-tard. Trying prying your ass out of your, graduating class of 150, small butt-crack corner of the UK and getting out and seeing your own country. Of coure the thought of driving the daunting 4 hours it takes to get across it might be too intimidating for you.
I would expect Brits to shoot at them, but pointing your finger at a camera and yelling "Bang" doesn't seem to work too well.
That's from last year there smart guy and that's the average for the whole country. The current average is 5.5%, which is irrelavent. Some places the local rates are as high as 16%. Also a part time job, is not employement it's a hobbie. If you can't afford to rent a small apartment, buy a car, and do something other than eat, then you are not my friend, employed.
I'd be silly to pass up an assignment overseas. Most people pay to visit UK/EU.
Quality of life is very subjective. I like it, it reminds me of what most cities where like in the States 20-30 years ago (with 5x times the population), before all the mega-stores and chains blighted the landscape. Most shops and resturants are of the local variety. Wages for middle income and lower income are pretty bad and the unemployment rate is well into the double digits. Quite a few Brits I've met seem to work 2-3 jobs. If you are a teenager good luck finding a job, even the local pizza delivery boy is in his early fifties. If you are at the top end of the pay scale, high-tech, global corp, multi-lingual type jobs then the pay is wonderful, but those are usually US companies paying those wages. The Brits making the big $$'s are usually overseas themselves. Exchange rate makes things very weird so to say pay has caught up is not accurate, it all depends on your situation.
Everything is badly overpriced and the VAT makes it even worse. I just try no to think about how many dollars I'm spending when I drop 100 quid on something (~$200) I've noticed that most things are price the same as the states they just swap the pound for the $, so you end up paying twice as much. Food and beer are the only things cheaper, but then again I'm right in the middle of the UK farmland. The beer isn't actually cheaper, but it's sold by the pint and has quit a bit more alcohol in it, so it ends up being cheaper per unit. Housing is like being in the popular places in California. The prices are start around $150,000 for a one bedroom apt and work their way up.
It's not all bad there are some things about living over here I like, and some that just makes me shake my head and wonder what the hell the locals are thinking. The roads and parking situation is pretty bad practially where every you go. I will say this it is 10 times better than most of the areas I've lived or visited in California, except maybe Monterey, and the odds of bumping into someone who speaks some form of English alot better. You may not understand their English, but it is English. I crack myself up when a linguistic difficulty arrises. I just apologize and say that I'm an American and that I don't understand English. It usually gets a laugh. The people are very friendly here.
When I was a kid I always thought it was the coolest thing when ever the St Louis police helicopter (aka the Brown Hornet, it was brown, duh) landed in the parking lot of the Wendy's down the street. They'd kick the observer out to grab a bag of burgers.
I moved to the UK last year for work, and the only difference between the US and the UK is the fact the CCTV camera are labeled in the UK and typically not so in the US. Other than that there don't seem to be any more or less of them. What you don't see much of is the police. They don't "Fly the flag" near as much as they do in the US.
The only other thing that cracks me up is the radar cameras, most of which seem to have had every possible form of vandalism done to them. From being painted over to being blown up. I even saw one funny picture of a guy with a porky pig mask on with an fireman's emergency gas powered saw making short work of the post one was mounted on.
Thanks for the tip, I'll have to break down and actually read the manual and see if I can find it.
The only reason it costs more than $5 dollars a gallon in other parts of the world is because of the $5 in tax they charge. In the states the tax is typically used for road construction, over here in the UK they certainly aren't spending the money on roads.
Well I guess all the hybrids out there must be retarded then, because practically all of them have an all electric drive train now.
The only way a NiMH battery can hurt you is if a pallet of them fell over on you and crushed you. Compared to lead acid, alkaline, and Lion they are practically made out of baby smiles and happy thoughts. Think about that next time you are listening to your hippy hug the bunny song on your iPod.
Other than maybe my handheld gps, I rarely carry more than one extra set of AA and AAA. For each device I usually can get 2-7 days worth of use out of them before they die on me. I just plug in one set each night when I'm getting ready for bed, and they are usually charged up before I hit the sack, that way I rarely have to dig into the spares.
I'm always on the lookout for more power efficient gadgets. The latest was a very bright 3 LED mini-mag sized light that only uses one AA battery. It's brighter than the 3 D-cell mag-light in my truck.
TSA are easy going people. Electronics, batteries, and hand-guns are practically hassel free items to check in your luggage, but you better be ready for a cavity search if you bring more than a small bottle of any kind of liquid with you. My latest trip out of LAX, I had to walk the check in person through the hand-gun check paperwork (she had no clue) and the TSA guy didn't even blink when he saw the handgun in the luggage, but he was VERY interested in my shampoo and conditioner.
You can pick up a DVI to HDMI cable just about anywhere for under $30. I'm running a PC on a 40inch Samsung 720p LCD tv. It is high enough resolution to surf the web on. Looks pretty decent, but unlike computer monitors the TV still play the ol CRT game of where the tube is partially covered up by the case, so you might have to run it one resolution lower so that everything ends up visible. Don't buy into 1080i being better than 720p. It may be technically a higher resolution, but computer displays look like crap on it. Too much flicker. Stick with either 720p or 1080p. Also don't be fooled that TV's have completely caught up with monitors. All things being equal computer monitors have better response times and better picture quality. If I could have done it over again, I would have just bought a 30" computer monitor instead of the 40" TV. Don't get me wrong, I like my TV alot, but a computer monitor it is not, so using it as such is somewhat of a compromise in quality.
Other than things where the batteries might get lost or destroyed or in things that I rarely use, such as in the many dive lights I've had flood then go boom, or that 3 cell mag light behind the seat of my truck, I stopped using Alkalines ten years ago. You are silly if you aren't using NiMH's in everything. Sure they last half as long and cost three times as much, but considering you can recharge them 100+ times they pay for themselves pretty quickly.
The best town I ever lived in for bicycling to just about anywhere in town was Rapid City in South Dakota. A very large stream/very small river ran through the middle of town, to protect from flooding they made it a green space a block on each side of it with a bike path. In most cases, except in the dead of winter it was just as convient to bike to where ever you wanted to go. A lawyer that I knew sold one of his cars after buying a bike, he was thinking about selling the second till he got married. Then the only time either he or his wife ever used it was to go on trips or go to the store.
There is hope, the laws they enacted these past few years have made it alot harder for the lawyers to make headway against the aviation companies. I've been reading about modern engines with all the trimmings as well even those that run on auto diesel or Jet-A. Man that would be great that instead of having a 100 hour engine inspections they could bump them out to 1000 or even more.
Of course I forgot something. Hybrids such as the Prius actually have 2 batteries, the big pack for driving the wheels, and a small standard 12v battery for the gasoline motor and the accessories. So even if you run your big bank down to zero, you'll still be able to start your generator and charge it back up.
Anyway a motor is a generator is a motor. It's exactly like an alternator charging the batteries which drives the motors, well sort of. Think of it this way you put electricity into an electric motor you get kinetic energy (it's a motor and it spins), but if you put kinetic energy into the same motor (spin it) it ouputs electricity and viola presto chango your motor is now a generator. Now if they could just figure out how to spin a gasoline engine and have it make gasoline!
Now getting back to what is driving what. If the electrical output of the generator (the one attached to the gasoline engine) is greater than the requirements of the motors attached to the wheels then the extra electricity flows into the battery pack. When you let off the gas and coast to slow down the motors attached to the wheels instantly turn into generators and convert back some of your forward motion and put that power into the battery as well. So now you push on the pedal and you start to role, all the juice is coming straight out of the battery. As the battery starts to deplete, then the motor/generator kicks back on and the main portion goes to the wheel motors and the extra goes to the battery, but leaves the battery depleted enough so there will be room for the electricity you'll generate at the wheels the next time you stop.
Now comes along our gear head/hardware hacker that thinks 50-60mpg is fine and dandy, but what he realy wants is to go faster, so he changes the software controlling when the motor kicks on and puts in a bigger electric motor on the wheels. Now instead of waiting for the battery pack to deplete the gasoline motor kicks on immediately, but it doesn't have enough power to supply 100% of the juice the newer bigger electric motor can handle, so the extra juice gets pulled from the battery pack and instead of just acting like a battery pack to store your energy from braking, it now acts like a turbo, and suddenly people realize hybrids are actually quite fast. Cool huh?
This is exactly like the battery/alternator set-up in your car, but instead of driving the wheels you power your lights, the radio, and the engine (ignition). When your alternator is working correctly it powers everything in the car, with the extra going to the battery. Of course if they are using an alternator as a generator in the hybrid then our little gear head is going to have to be vigilant or he'll drain his battery dry which will cause the gasoline engine to stall and he'll be walking home.
Alternators are interesting in that they require electricity to work, they don't have magnets in them, only coils. You can spin an alternator all day long and it won't do a thing, but as soon as you hook it up to a battery you can use it to generate electricity. This is why most modern cars can't be pop-started on a completely dead battery or continue to run if you disconnect the battery, for that you need a car with a generator (aka dynamo) which is another story for another time.
Here is a good discription on how an alternator works
http://www.misterfixit.com/alterntr.htm
Well that's my take on it. In addition to not being an English major, nor am I an Electrical Engineer. I'm a pilot/mechanic/avionics tech. I know a little about alot. In other words just dangerous enough to get things working again and not end up killing myself or others.
As far as things being mechanically controlled verses electronically, I'll take electronically any day of the week. I've had my Toyota Tacoma for now 9 years and have had to have it "tuned up" all of zero times. Yeah it may take a little more effort to deal with when it breaks (Of course it never has), and some extra tools, but I'll trade that any day of the week over the anual ritual of tuning the engine.
I'm not a total hater of all things mechanical. I do thoroughly enjoy having constantly deal with the mixture on the engine of the Cesna 172 that I fly.
I had forgotten about unsprung weight. The only vehicles that I've seen in public use so far was the giant earth mover trucks and some buses, niether of which get up above 20-30mph and the shear weight of the load they are carrying make it a non-issue. There is an article floating around about a four motored MINI with them in the hubs, but again it's probably nothing more than a developement vehicle used for publicity and wouldn't be capable of being used outside of a nice snooth track.