It was a brand new first-year model, and I generally don't buy first-years, especially on drastic technology changes. When the '04s come out very soon (if not already) then this one is solved.
As of 2003, the Civic Hybrids have been popular in Japan for about 5 years (according to the salesperson who sold my girlfriend her car). They aren't really cutting edge. Incidentally, this is why you have to pay ~500$ freight for the vehicle: they are only made in Japan.
That said, there were some benefits:
In Virginia, and maybe in Maryland, you are allowed to drive the the HOV lanes by yourself if you have a hybrid.:-)
It's a shame you didn't get one. Honda does offer pretty good warantees on the battery, but I digress. Civics are still excellent vehicles, regardless of the presence of an electric motor.
Yes, Civic Hybrids are fairly expensive vehicles for what you get. It's a matter of weighing the appropriate price-performance ratio.
It should be interesting to note that while Honda sells these for about 20,000$, Honda manufactures them at 30,000$ (according to a salesperson at Herson's Honda in Rockville, MD).
So while it's good that we're supporting hybrid technology and trying to encourage auto manufacturers, they may not move forward as quickly as we'd like. Perhaps with increased popularity, they'll produce a higher volume and refine the manufacturing process? Who knows.
Unfortunately, according to the same salesperson, Honda is interested in selling these vehicles so they can reduce the average vehicle emmissions of all cars they sell. This allows them to legally sell more SUVs and other gas guzzlers (hence they are willing to make a 10,000$ write-off on every Civic Hybrid). Nothing for free it seems. What a lousy trade-off.
Maryland, 30 minutes north of Washington, DC. Drivers around here had better not go that fast--they simply lack the skill, the attention span, and the courtesy to go that fast without damaging or destroying large quantities of human life and property.
All modern Honda Accords and Civics use the same frame and base. The only difference is the shell and the luxuries. Also, try getting into one. They're quite large.
But you didn't look at the new Prius. When it comes out, it will raise the bar when it comes to hybrids. It's much bigger (it is a true mid-size car) and has more horsepower, yet still gets 50 mpg.
It looks cool. It's hard to get much information from that Flash crap though. Is there anywhere I can go to just get information, not a marketer's wet-dream manifested by a cheasy Flash animation?
However, it seems my primary complaint with the Prius remains in effect: the car tries too damn hard to be futuristic.
Joe Consumer doesn't want a car that looks and feels like it's from 50 years in the future. Joe Consumer doesn't want an Enterprise shuttle craft. That is not going to turn on most people except for geeks and early adopters.
I see hybrids as a direction with a specific purpose: reduce gasoline consumption as much as possible. This has many benefits which I will not elaborate on besides saving money and the environment. The Prius does not work to encourage the masses to accept electric cars. The masses don't want to know it's an electric car. They really don't care. Basically, Toyota is pushing TECHNOLOGY TECHNOLOGY TECHNOLOGY. Honda is pushing a practical, attractive car (oh, and by the way, it's electric and gets good gas milage). The Prius is loud and obnoxious. The Civic Hybrid is subtle and calm. See my point?
Toyota needs to offer a car that's offering these features and doesn't appear to be from the sapce age. That will attract many more people to the offerings. Right now, the perpetuate the stereotype (myth) that all electric cars must have this insane tear-drop shape and other crap. Sure, it may be better for aerodynamics, but people don't want that.
Are they a good alternative to conventional vehicles, or just a geek toy?
They are a great value. Your mom would be proud of you.
Do they perform well in the city?
If driven properly, you should see as high as 46-48mpg in city driving. If you drive with little concern for economy, you usually get around 43-45mpg.
How about on long road trips?
Again, driven carefully, I've gotten as high as 52.6mpg on my girl's Honda Civic Hybrid. That is accomplished by driving around ~55mph and slowing a bit when climbing hills. If you drive aggressively (say, 65-70mpg constant), you get around 47-48mpg. They can certainly keep up with traffic, mind you.
Remember, this experience is with a Honda Civic Hybrid, not a Prius. Your milage (arf) will vary.
My girlfriend got a 2003 Civic Hybrid with a CVT (Continuously Variable Transmission) last April. This vehcile is phenominal. As soon as I have the money, I will be getting one myself.
With proper driving technique, I've gotten it as high as 52.6mpg (average). (There is an instantaneous mpg meter beneath the average gauge that shows you what you're getting as you go over hills and so forth--it really helps you adjust your driving for maximum efficiency.) Without much thought, it usually averages between 43-46mpg. With a 12.7 gallon (it might be 13) tank, I've gone as far as 620 miles.
The engineering is quite nice, the car has been very reliable. The ride is remarkably smooth and the acceleration is silky. Handling is amazing. One nasty downside is the car is very light, so it hydroplanes easier than most vehicles. I would highly recommend getting AA-AAA rated tires (like Falkens) if you drive in wet areas a lot. They will help reduce this.
The interior is great too. If you didn't know it was a hybrid, you would think you were driving a regular car (albeit the console is very slick, kind of a retro look). It's a very spatious, full-sized sedan. The backseat floor does not have a hump in the middle and is also quite generous space-wise. I cannot say enough about the interior: it's a very decent size.
A quick summary of how it works: you have a small, 1.3L gasoline engine (I think 52hp). Right on the drive train, just before the transmission is the electric motor (that contribute an aditional 41hp for a total of 93). When electricity is "pumped" into the motor, it obviously reduces the load on the engine. This is used for acceleration and hill climbing. When idle, the electric motor does what all motors do when pushed externally: it generates power to charge the battery. The brakes are regenerative. When you stop at traffic lights or stop-signs, the engine stops to save gasoline. Since it has solid state ignition, it has zero turn-over, so it starts instantly (as soon as you let off the brake).
Apparantly, there are also a variety of hacks that can be done to cause it to favor the electric motor more for those of us who are really light on the gas pedal. I haven't really investigated this, so consider them rumors.
My recommendation: get one ASAP. You will not be disappointed with this car. It could use a few extra trimmings, but even in its simplicity feature-wise, it's a very enjoyable car. My girlfriend calculates it will pay for itself in a matter of 5 years. Nothing much more to say. At least go test drive one.
Oh, and we also looked at the Toyota Prius. Those things suck ass. They are very rough to drive. The computer screen is always full of motion and it's very distracting without lending much usefulness. Furthermore, it's cramped inside and the vehcile controls are just... bizarre. The engine compartment is also very cramped. Doing work on that vehicle would require taking a lot of shit apart, ergo it may be very expensive to service. Handling sucked. Overall, the Toyota Prius is just as shitty as its Echo counterpart.
One last note: you may want to hold off on a hybrid from anyone though. Honda has plans to market a fuel-cell powered electric car in the US within the next couple of years. Those will be far more interesting I think, if they ever actually reach dealerships.
Disclaimer: I do not work for Honda in any way. They just happen to make a spectacular hybrid vehcile.
Seems that http://www.microsoft-antitrust.gov/ is running Windows
The server fingerprints as Windows 2000/Microsoft-IIS/5.0. Is it just me, or is there something wrong with this picture?
"We're a site dedicated to enumerating all the bad, evil things that Microsoft does! We're here to show that Microsoft has an unfair monopoly on operating systems and other software. They need to be punished! *cough*Oh, by the way, we run IIS on Windows...*cough*"
Also the use of classes should be more semantic P0 and P1 are meaningless. How about changing P0 into an h2 and eliminating P1 (since it doesn't do much otherwise).
But what if the text contained in that paragraph tag wasn't a header. You've just violated one of the central principles: you're using markup to define appearance rather than define what the text is. You cannot just say you don't like having a paragraph tag and a class to make the font bigger, so you replace it with <h2>. It's not a second-level header, it's a paragraph. Just the same as you wouldn't take a paragraph tag and replace it with blockquote because you want the text to be indented.
Classes should be used to describe structural parts of your document whenever possible.
That is true. But sometimes you need classes simply to distinguish. For whatever design reason, you may want alternating paragraphs or rows on a table or whatever to not look the same. You can safely use CSS classes to do this. Software or devices that use the markup as metadata to describe the content specifically really do not care much about what CSS classes are being used. (Of course, not all attributes are ignored. One example: if you have an acronym tag, the title attribute is (should be) recognized as the acronym's expanded form.)
I humbly note that your "good" HTML example is 50% larger than your "bad" example:)
You have shattered my reality! No seriously, the examples are too small, or rather, they are not specialized to demonstrate the point of reduced bandwidth usage. To do that I would really have to come up with a block of markup that uses tables for layout and lots of other nasty stuff.
This is a very contrived example, but remember that the stylesheet should be in a separate file, therefore, it gets downloaded and cached once. Then imagine you had a lot of content spread over hundreds of pages. Consider how much space is saved by defining the visual appearance once rather than N times. Isn't that the very nature of compression?
Don't forget the second example is far easier to maintain and will work better in future browsers (it does not have built-in obsolescence).
You could certainly *write* your website in the "good" form, then process it into the "bad" (but more compact) form with an automated filter. Then you get the best of both worlds - a highly-structured authoring environment, and a compact on-the-wire representation.
But then you've defeated yourself. The following is valid XML:
<tag attribute="value">cdata</tag>
The following is not:
<tag attribute=value>cdata
XHTML is XML. XML is very strict in how its written to preserve integrit
In my experience, standards-compliant HTML is *less* space-efficient than ad-hoc HTML. Compare
font size="+1"
vs.
font size=+1
or the extra trailing slash on atomic tags, or/p tags (which you can pretty much omit entirely without confusing any browsers).
Wow. I've never encountered anyone who has spoken so confidently on a topic without knowing a damn thing about it it. You are so absolutely wrong that the example you gave is the exact oposite of what you think it is. You've demonstrated precisely what not to do when writing good markup.
I don't even know where to begin to correct your cluelessness. Here it goes...
When I talk about writing good markup, I'm speaking a purely structural sense.
In otherwords, markup text based on what it is, not what it looks like.
Separation of content from presentation is the principle to follow.
For example, this is bad HTML:
... <p><font size="12pt">Header</font> <p><font color="navy">We're going to list some <i>items</i>.</font> <p>Here 's a list:<br>- Item 0<br>- Item 1<br> ...
That's bad for many reasons.
The font tag eliminates the user's ability to define their own visual style
for the page. One of the central reasons for writing structural markup as
opposed to presentational markup is so that the user, not the author, has
final say on what the page will look like. From time to time, users will
supply their own stylesheet to help with readability. If there is no
structural nature to the markup, or it defines appearance, the user is
defeated. A web developer also has to keep in mind that the browser makes NO
guarantees about how something will be rendered.
No computer system could interpret that markup and understand *what* it
was. What's paragraph text? What's a list? What's a header? What text has
emphasis on it? There would be no prioritizing of the text. This defeats
search engines and screenreaders (for the blind). Basically, there is
nothing about that markup which is machine readable.
Changing the visual style of this context requires someone to go and edit
the markup. Now what if the visual style was defined in the markup across
1000 pages. That's 1000 complex changes that must be made.
Now, here's good HTML:
... <h1>Header</h1>
<p class="P0">We're going to list some <em>items</em>.</p>
<p class="P1">Here's a list.</p>
<ul> <li>Item 0</li> <li>Item 1</li> </ul> ...
And then a stylesheet:
h1 { font-size: 12pt; }
p.P0 { color: navy; }
p.P1 { color: black; }
Now, the user can easily define what stuff should look like based on what it
is. A user could supply a stylesheet that increases the size of paragraph
text by a percentage. A user could specify their own margins for list items.
A user could eliminate colors or adjust contrast to their liking.
On top of that, a machine can read that markup and know precisely what it is.
This is a header, that's a paragraph, this is a list, etc. A search engines
and screenreaders would know precisely what to do with the text.
Furthermore, the styling data is in one location, so if you have 1 or a 1000
pages, the work is the same to make them look different.
Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg. If you use XHTML and CSS
properly, you get more visual flexibility than otherwise. (This also implies
discarding tables for use in layout in favor of layers. Tables are for
organizing tabular data, not positioning things visually.) XHTML also gives
you forwards c
I assume by most browsers, you mean IE. Because that's true. IE has some issues with caching.
Mozilla used to have some issues with caching, especially when reading files off the local disk. (Ever write a page, read it locally with Mozilla, alter it, and find your changes not taking effect?) AFAIK, this has been fixed.
I've seen some caching weirdness (at least minor) on most browsers, but nevertheless, you are correct: Internet Explorer is the most frequent and long-standing culprit.
My former company was checking out NetAccelerator recently to resell to our clients.
These things are a joke. The primary performance increase comes from recompressing images into really nasty JPEGs. AOL was doing this years ago (and getting blasted for it). If you turn that off, the performance improvement is not even measurable.
Furthermore, you tend to get a lot of stale caches on your machine. Most browsers don't even get this right, so they add yet another layer of potentially buggy cache abstraction.
No, these things are junk. They act as proxy servers and their source is closed. How can you trust them to handle your data? Even with all their compression features turned on, the performance improvement is seriously overrated. Don't bother. You simply cannot get something for nothing in cases like these.
Now, what would improve the download speed of the web is if web designers would start building standards compliant markup. Many web sites have as much as 700kb overhead in markup from tools that create loads of font tags and their ilk. Pure XHTML + CSS layout would do a hell of a lot more to speed up the web than these scams. Of course, don't take my word for it--read Zeldman.
I'm sorry, but 58,000 emails is not worth 250,000$.
We bitch and we moan about how the RIAA wants to sue people who share music hundreds of thousands of dollars despite how trivial the issue really is.
Receiving a spam is annoying but I don't think a single spam email is worth ~4.31$. When you think about the bandwidth, storage, and time to delete, I think it is nowhere near that much. I think you could argue on the order of 0.50$ or so for each email. Cleaning them up should be relatively easy because if they came from the same source, they should have very similar characteristics.
I hate spammers, and I think what they do sucks. Nevertheless, this response is overkill. It's like putting someone in jail for 20 years because they were growing cannabis.
It's the reason Macs have a single menu bar, at the top of the screen. It seems to me to also be a key thought behind the dock.
Actually the reason for that is due to Fitt's Law. The menu bar (and the Dock) are at the very edges of the screen so that the user has to do less work pin-pointing the cursor on a target.
Granted the Apple menu is always in the same place, then the menu item following which represents the application's name menu is too. After that however, different menus may be in different location from app to app.
Your point does play a role, but the menu's at the top mostly to reduce time to target.
How was she, or anyone else who downloads music, not hurting artists in some way?
You're being overly critical!
It stands to reason if you grab an artist's music without paying for it
It isn't the artist's music, once they sign their rights away to a record label. They don't own it, the RIAA does. Often times, the RIAA never compensates the artists for sales. Artists making money from music sales is rare. Furthermore, the labels often require the artists to compensate them when the artist performs music publically, like in a concert. This is called selling out.
regardless of how much you hate the RIAA or disagree with how much percentage they get of sales--you still didn't pay for that artist's album.
Now, I disagree with the war in Iraq, but I will use a common argument. Under Saddam Hussain, the Iraqi people had food, water, electricity, and so forth. Nevertheless, Saddam was still a ruthless dictator who order the tortures, rapes, and murders of Iraqis. Now, under the RIAA, the artists get an initial compensation for their music, but they are abused and screwed by the RIAA continuously.
The goal here is to destroy the RIAA. When the RIAA no longer exists (what a dream), the artists will be forced to sell their music directly to music listeners and receive 100% of the revenue rather than 1% of 1%. How horrible!
And it will show up when the label looks at record sales and eventually drops that band for lack of it.
And then the band realizes they must choose dirt-cheap Internet based music distribution and reap the rewards. One can only hope this is how it will work.
This is fundamentally flawed. How can I be disgusted with reality if I am ignorant to it? If I was ignorant to it, why would I want it changed?
or to propose ways of changing an unpleasant state of affairs that are completely at odds with reality, is the province of childhood.
Returning to the original issue, how is not supporting something you disagree with "completely at odds with reality" and entering into the provice of childhood?
If I dislike X, I am certainly not going to support X. I practice vegetarianism. One of my reasons for pracitcing vegetarianism is because I believe it is unethical to raise animals in inhumane conditions and then slaughter them. If I believe that killing is wrong, I am certainly not going to support an institution whose primary function is to kill people.
What I would like to see happen is a sweeping global change where everyone understands that killing is wrong and no longer supports institutions that kill people.
Unlikely? Yes. Impossible? Yes. Likely over time in a gradual sense? Yes.
When someone comes forward and offers radical ideas as you are speaking out against (not supporting DoD or DARPA, etc.) they do not expect to get everything. They hope to get a small fraction of what they're actually shooting for. Just like how laws are created with the knowledge law enforcement will always over step them. Just like how people sue for x only hoping to get x/2. It's simple. You push for major change to get minor results.
In the long run, hopefully this idea will take root with more and more people. It will spread. Perhaps in centuries, these ideals will become reality.
I am not against idealism per se, but an idealism that is ineffective in the world is useless, or even worse than useless, as it can seduce people into unwise behavior.
Small acts can result in big change. No idealism is ineffective so long as it is communicated to other people. As an ideal is passed from person to person, it is refined and likely brought closer to reality (or reality closer to the ideal). If what you say is true, progress is impossible.
Clearly, it's not.
Well, that's exactly what we are, including you. That humans are equally as capable of, and prone to, evil as good is a well documented fact
What causes humans to choose one or another I wonder. Isn't the very cocept of good an unrealistic ideal? Good for goodness sake in a world full of evil? Perhaps I'm getting off topic. I am a little tired so bare with me if I stray all over the place.
I argue the current institutions have strong influence on which way a human being my sway. Do you understand that you can kill other people until the idea is introduced to you? What if you were taught that killing was always wrong. What if an institution existed that violated that rule? (The idea of a military says that it's OKay to kill people in certain cases.) Granted, everyone has to make up their own mind, but while humans are prone to good and evil, something nudges them one way or another.
and thumbing your nose at the military will not make that go away.
But if everyone did, every military would disappear over night. That's the point.
That you can hold these beliefs and publically proclaim them without fear of being imprisoned or murdered you owe, ironically, to the very military you despise.
Wrong. The fact that I can proclaim my ideas in public forum is a direct result of amendments to a legal document written approximately 200 years ago by civilized, idealistic people. These people, the Framers, depended on a great deal of intellectual dishonesty to convince themselves to forget about reality, where people try t
I don't know why I would bother replying to a post like this, but...
Man you are so fucking stupid it is scary.
This is usually the knee-jerk reaction made by many who simply can't handle the idea of a world where the more difficult path to peace is chosen in favor of violence.
To defend that, let's say you're a politician and you're confronted with a situation where you can either: A) invoke infinite patience and do the hard, long, tiring work of resolving differences and finding the root cause of problems, or: B) blow them up.
I assure you, option B is chosen most frequently and usually by the weak minded, for those whom it hurts to think. Without a doubt, it is the easier path. Nevertheless, there's a tradeoff with everything, thus the costs in the long run are much more severe in terms of life and property.
It is people like you that regard purveyors of option A as "fucking stupid" because you don't understand how that would work. You don't understand regression. You don't understand that every problem has a root (and that root may be a problem to resolve in itself). Find the cause of an effect. It's not easy and it's abstract and requires a lot of time and concentration. To you, that's "fucking stupid".
To people who wish for something better, it's worth the effort.
There will always be people who won't give a damn about anything and anyone
Are these people the cause or the product of the conditions we presently live in?
and who would love to be able to deal with such naive fools like you.
If they don't "give a damn" about anything or anyone, why would they "love" to deal?
Man some people just can't separate reality from nonsense even if their lives depended on it.
I never said these ideals were reality. That is your mistake. However, they are most certainly not nonsense.
Rest assured, you weren't hurting artists. You were hurting some rich RIAA execuative who likely has billions of dollars to his or her name.
Imagine if the richest man in the world ordered a poor man to pay him a month's salary because the rich man felt his wealth was in jeopardy. Now, imagine this rich man had an army of slaves doing his bidding, who all work to make him money. Doesn't that sound silly? Well, that's what the RIAA.
The RIAA effectively takes music from artists and gives them slave wages for their music. When the RIAA takes music from artists, the artists no longer own it.
Since the RIAA owns the music, there's no way you can hurt the artist by downloading music. Only the RIAA hurts artists. Hopefully, people will keep downloading songs so the RIAA will go away!
It's amazing how people so clever in one field can exhibit appalingly naive and childish thought in other areas. I would rather scientists like Potter grow up and face the realities of the world outside their labs than have their silly views pandered to by an indulgent press.
There are some of us who hope and strive for a better future. Then there are those who don't care and are willing to accept the pitiful condition the world is presently in.
Sorry, I agree with him. The future should be a place where there are no militaries. The future should be a place where human beings are civilized enough to not brandish weapons at one another. Until then, we are not much better than animals.
Surprise, surprise, we do spend loads of money on countries that need schools and agricultural help and so on
I don't think our government concentrates well over 400$ billion/year to these causes. Also remember our government regularly detracts money from education and funnels into the military. This is not progress.
but as anyone who has looked at the sad history of development aid in, say, Africa, knows, it is no use to build schools and whatnot if endemic violence destroys those schools and kills the people who would attend them. But like so many naive bien pensants, it's all 6 degrees of Dubya to him, and every evil that is is traceable back to the Pentagon.
Well, you do have a point there. Evil abroad perpetuates evil at home it seems. Good to know that the low-lifes of the world have such a good handle over us.
No doubt the human race is stuck in a neverending cycle. So long as it persists, progress will be minimal.
The first development followed another series of Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on SCO, which took place two weeks ago. These were the second and third such attacks in four months and have prevented Web users from accessing our web site and doing business with SCO. There is no question about the affiliation of the attacker - Open Source leader Eric Raymond was quoted as saying that he was contacted by the perpetrator and that "he's one of us." To Mr Raymond's partial credit, he asked the attacker to stop. However, he has yet to disclose the identity of the perpetrator so that justice can be done.
No one can tolerate DDoS attacks and other kinds of attacks in this Information Age economy that relies so heavily on the Internet. Mr Raymond and the entire Open Source community need to aggressively help the industry police these types of crimes.
Miss O'Gara, could you do us the courtesy and explain who is going to police your DDoS attack? The shitstorm that is the FUD you have created surrounding Linux is denying many existing and potential adopters of the benefits open source has to offer.
In addition, what your company is doing (stock manipulation, defamatory statements that inhibit Linux solutions, and so on) is just as illegal.
How on earth can you cry for justice when you are engaging in injust acts yourself? Pot, meet kettle. Kettle, pot.
This nonsense with SCO gets more ridiculous every day. I cannot stand how amazingly childish this has become. The DDoS attacks on SCO are counter-productive insofar as they reinforce the idea SCO is proposing that open source consists of criminals. But of course, everything SCO has done from the get-go is childish and stupid.
Unfortunately, open source is the only lose in the long run.
Whoever is pulling SCO's strings (Microsoft I'd guess) wins. SCO goes out of business; you can't hurt the dead and they were terminally ill anyway. SCO execuatives walk away with bags of money. Lastly, the reputation of the open source ends up severely damaged in the minds of everyone who may have considered OSS solutions.
In short: fuck you SCO. Quite honestly, nobody should give a damn what happens to you or your intellectual property. Had you handled this rationally, bringing claims against IBM or SGI if in fact they violated your property, without the maelstrom of FUD, things would be different. Instead, you've waged a mudslinging campaign that hurts lots of people and makes you look like assholes.
No good can come of this except for a few already wealthy execs.
Slashdot Mirror
As of 2003, the Civic Hybrids have been popular in Japan for about 5 years (according to the salesperson who sold my girlfriend her car). They aren't really cutting edge. Incidentally, this is why you have to pay ~500$ freight for the vehicle: they are only made in Japan.
In Virginia, and maybe in Maryland, you are allowed to drive the the HOV lanes by yourself if you have a hybrid. :-)
It's a shame you didn't get one. Honda does offer pretty good warantees on the battery, but I digress. Civics are still excellent vehicles, regardless of the presence of an electric motor.
This is an excellent comparison. More people should read this!
Yes, Civic Hybrids are fairly expensive vehicles for what you get. It's a matter of weighing the appropriate price-performance ratio.
It should be interesting to note that while Honda sells these for about 20,000$, Honda manufactures them at 30,000$ (according to a salesperson at Herson's Honda in Rockville, MD).
So while it's good that we're supporting hybrid technology and trying to encourage auto manufacturers, they may not move forward as quickly as we'd like. Perhaps with increased popularity, they'll produce a higher volume and refine the manufacturing process? Who knows.
Unfortunately, according to the same salesperson, Honda is interested in selling these vehicles so they can reduce the average vehicle emmissions of all cars they sell. This allows them to legally sell more SUVs and other gas guzzlers (hence they are willing to make a 10,000$ write-off on every Civic Hybrid). Nothing for free it seems. What a lousy trade-off.
Maryland, 30 minutes north of Washington, DC. Drivers around here had better not go that fast--they simply lack the skill, the attention span, and the courtesy to go that fast without damaging or destroying large quantities of human life and property.
All modern Honda Accords and Civics use the same frame and base. The only difference is the shell and the luxuries. Also, try getting into one. They're quite large.
It looks cool. It's hard to get much information from that Flash crap though. Is there anywhere I can go to just get information, not a marketer's wet-dream manifested by a cheasy Flash animation?
However, it seems my primary complaint with the Prius remains in effect: the car tries too damn hard to be futuristic.
Joe Consumer doesn't want a car that looks and feels like it's from 50 years in the future. Joe Consumer doesn't want an Enterprise shuttle craft. That is not going to turn on most people except for geeks and early adopters.
I see hybrids as a direction with a specific purpose: reduce gasoline consumption as much as possible. This has many benefits which I will not elaborate on besides saving money and the environment. The Prius does not work to encourage the masses to accept electric cars. The masses don't want to know it's an electric car. They really don't care. Basically, Toyota is pushing TECHNOLOGY TECHNOLOGY TECHNOLOGY. Honda is pushing a practical, attractive car (oh, and by the way, it's electric and gets good gas milage). The Prius is loud and obnoxious. The Civic Hybrid is subtle and calm. See my point?
Toyota needs to offer a car that's offering these features and doesn't appear to be from the sapce age. That will attract many more people to the offerings. Right now, the perpetuate the stereotype (myth) that all electric cars must have this insane tear-drop shape and other crap. Sure, it may be better for aerodynamics, but people don't want that.
Resolving confusion: I meant to make this post a response to this one. Read it if you want specific answers to the question in the story.
Oops, this was meant to be a reply to another post I made earlier.
Please read it for a good summary of the Honda Civic Hybrid.
Yikes, so much confusion!
They are a great value. Your mom would be proud of you.
If driven properly, you should see as high as 46-48mpg in city driving. If you drive with little concern for economy, you usually get around 43-45mpg.
How about on long road trips?Again, driven carefully, I've gotten as high as 52.6mpg on my girl's Honda Civic Hybrid. That is accomplished by driving around ~55mph and slowing a bit when climbing hills. If you drive aggressively (say, 65-70mpg constant), you get around 47-48mpg. They can certainly keep up with traffic, mind you.
Remember, this experience is with a Honda Civic Hybrid, not a Prius. Your milage (arf) will vary.
My girlfriend got a 2003 Civic Hybrid with a CVT (Continuously Variable Transmission) last April. This vehcile is phenominal. As soon as I have the money, I will be getting one myself.
With proper driving technique, I've gotten it as high as 52.6mpg (average). (There is an instantaneous mpg meter beneath the average gauge that shows you what you're getting as you go over hills and so forth--it really helps you adjust your driving for maximum efficiency.) Without much thought, it usually averages between 43-46mpg. With a 12.7 gallon (it might be 13) tank, I've gone as far as 620 miles.
The engineering is quite nice, the car has been very reliable. The ride is remarkably smooth and the acceleration is silky. Handling is amazing. One nasty downside is the car is very light, so it hydroplanes easier than most vehicles. I would highly recommend getting AA-AAA rated tires (like Falkens) if you drive in wet areas a lot. They will help reduce this.
The interior is great too. If you didn't know it was a hybrid, you would think you were driving a regular car (albeit the console is very slick, kind of a retro look). It's a very spatious, full-sized sedan. The backseat floor does not have a hump in the middle and is also quite generous space-wise. I cannot say enough about the interior: it's a very decent size.
A quick summary of how it works: you have a small, 1.3L gasoline engine (I think 52hp). Right on the drive train, just before the transmission is the electric motor (that contribute an aditional 41hp for a total of 93). When electricity is "pumped" into the motor, it obviously reduces the load on the engine. This is used for acceleration and hill climbing. When idle, the electric motor does what all motors do when pushed externally: it generates power to charge the battery. The brakes are regenerative. When you stop at traffic lights or stop-signs, the engine stops to save gasoline. Since it has solid state ignition, it has zero turn-over, so it starts instantly (as soon as you let off the brake).
Apparantly, there are also a variety of hacks that can be done to cause it to favor the electric motor more for those of us who are really light on the gas pedal. I haven't really investigated this, so consider them rumors.
My recommendation: get one ASAP. You will not be disappointed with this car. It could use a few extra trimmings, but even in its simplicity feature-wise, it's a very enjoyable car. My girlfriend calculates it will pay for itself in a matter of 5 years. Nothing much more to say. At least go test drive one.
Oh, and we also looked at the Toyota Prius. Those things suck ass. They are very rough to drive. The computer screen is always full of motion and it's very distracting without lending much usefulness. Furthermore, it's cramped inside and the vehcile controls are just... bizarre. The engine compartment is also very cramped. Doing work on that vehicle would require taking a lot of shit apart, ergo it may be very expensive to service. Handling sucked. Overall, the Toyota Prius is just as shitty as its Echo counterpart.
One last note: you may want to hold off on a hybrid from anyone though. Honda has plans to market a fuel-cell powered electric car in the US within the next couple of years. Those will be far more interesting I think, if they ever actually reach dealerships.
Disclaimer: I do not work for Honda in any way. They just happen to make a spectacular hybrid vehcile.
I didn't realize how redundant this had become. *cringe* Please don't moderate too hard.
Seems that http://www.microsoft-antitrust.gov/ is running Windows
The server fingerprints as Windows 2000/Microsoft-IIS/5.0. Is it just me, or is there something wrong with this picture?
"We're a site dedicated to enumerating all the bad, evil things that Microsoft does! We're here to show that Microsoft has an unfair monopoly on operating systems and other software. They need to be punished! *cough*Oh, by the way, we run IIS on Windows...*cough*"
But what if the text contained in that paragraph tag wasn't a header. You've just violated one of the central principles: you're using markup to define appearance rather than define what the text is. You cannot just say you don't like having a paragraph tag and a class to make the font bigger, so you replace it with <h2>. It's not a second-level header, it's a paragraph. Just the same as you wouldn't take a paragraph tag and replace it with blockquote because you want the text to be indented.
That is true. But sometimes you need classes simply to distinguish. For whatever design reason, you may want alternating paragraphs or rows on a table or whatever to not look the same. You can safely use CSS classes to do this. Software or devices that use the markup as metadata to describe the content specifically really do not care much about what CSS classes are being used. (Of course, not all attributes are ignored. One example: if you have an acronym tag, the title attribute is (should be) recognized as the acronym's expanded form.)
You have shattered my reality! No seriously, the examples are too small, or rather, they are not specialized to demonstrate the point of reduced bandwidth usage. To do that I would really have to come up with a block of markup that uses tables for layout and lots of other nasty stuff.
First, let's show a bad example:
Now, with standards compliant markup and CSS:
This is a very contrived example, but remember that the stylesheet should be in a separate file, therefore, it gets downloaded and cached once. Then imagine you had a lot of content spread over hundreds of pages. Consider how much space is saved by defining the visual appearance once rather than N times. Isn't that the very nature of compression?
Don't forget the second example is far easier to maintain and will work better in future browsers (it does not have built-in obsolescence).
But then you've defeated yourself. The following is valid XML:
The following is not:
XHTML is XML. XML is very strict in how its written to preserve integrit
Wow. I've never encountered anyone who has spoken so confidently on a topic without knowing a damn thing about it it. You are so absolutely wrong that the example you gave is the exact oposite of what you think it is. You've demonstrated precisely what not to do when writing good markup.
I don't even know where to begin to correct your cluelessness. Here it goes...
When I talk about writing good markup, I'm speaking a purely structural sense. In otherwords, markup text based on what it is, not what it looks like. Separation of content from presentation is the principle to follow.
For example, this is bad HTML:
That's bad for many reasons.
Now, here's good HTML:
And then a stylesheet:
Now, the user can easily define what stuff should look like based on what it is. A user could supply a stylesheet that increases the size of paragraph text by a percentage. A user could specify their own margins for list items. A user could eliminate colors or adjust contrast to their liking.
On top of that, a machine can read that markup and know precisely what it is. This is a header, that's a paragraph, this is a list, etc. A search engines and screenreaders would know precisely what to do with the text.
Furthermore, the styling data is in one location, so if you have 1 or a 1000 pages, the work is the same to make them look different.
Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg. If you use XHTML and CSS properly, you get more visual flexibility than otherwise. (This also implies discarding tables for use in layout in favor of layers. Tables are for organizing tabular data, not positioning things visually.) XHTML also gives you forwards c
Take a picture. Using your favorite image editing software, save it as a JPEG. Load the JPEG and save it as a JPEG again. Lather, rince, repeat.
Doesn't take too long to look like shit, right? Welcome to NetAccelerator.
Mozilla used to have some issues with caching, especially when reading files off the local disk. (Ever write a page, read it locally with Mozilla, alter it, and find your changes not taking effect?) AFAIK, this has been fixed.
I've seen some caching weirdness (at least minor) on most browsers, but nevertheless, you are correct: Internet Explorer is the most frequent and long-standing culprit.
My former company was checking out NetAccelerator recently to resell to our clients.
These things are a joke. The primary performance increase comes from recompressing images into really nasty JPEGs. AOL was doing this years ago (and getting blasted for it). If you turn that off, the performance improvement is not even measurable.
Furthermore, you tend to get a lot of stale caches on your machine. Most browsers don't even get this right, so they add yet another layer of potentially buggy cache abstraction.
No, these things are junk. They act as proxy servers and their source is closed. How can you trust them to handle your data? Even with all their compression features turned on, the performance improvement is seriously overrated. Don't bother. You simply cannot get something for nothing in cases like these.
Now, what would improve the download speed of the web is if web designers would start building standards compliant markup. Many web sites have as much as 700kb overhead in markup from tools that create loads of font tags and their ilk. Pure XHTML + CSS layout would do a hell of a lot more to speed up the web than these scams. Of course, don't take my word for it--read Zeldman.
I'm sorry, but 58,000 emails is not worth 250,000$.
We bitch and we moan about how the RIAA wants to sue people who share music hundreds of thousands of dollars despite how trivial the issue really is.
Receiving a spam is annoying but I don't think a single spam email is worth ~4.31$. When you think about the bandwidth, storage, and time to delete, I think it is nowhere near that much. I think you could argue on the order of 0.50$ or so for each email. Cleaning them up should be relatively easy because if they came from the same source, they should have very similar characteristics.
I hate spammers, and I think what they do sucks. Nevertheless, this response is overkill. It's like putting someone in jail for 20 years because they were growing cannabis.
Actually the reason for that is due to Fitt's Law. The menu bar (and the Dock) are at the very edges of the screen so that the user has to do less work pin-pointing the cursor on a target.
Granted the Apple menu is always in the same place, then the menu item following which represents the application's name menu is too. After that however, different menus may be in different location from app to app.
Your point does play a role, but the menu's at the top mostly to reduce time to target.
You're being overly critical!
It isn't the artist's music, once they sign their rights away to a record label. They don't own it, the RIAA does. Often times, the RIAA never compensates the artists for sales. Artists making money from music sales is rare. Furthermore, the labels often require the artists to compensate them when the artist performs music publically, like in a concert. This is called selling out.
Now, I disagree with the war in Iraq, but I will use a common argument. Under Saddam Hussain, the Iraqi people had food, water, electricity, and so forth. Nevertheless, Saddam was still a ruthless dictator who order the tortures, rapes, and murders of Iraqis. Now, under the RIAA, the artists get an initial compensation for their music, but they are abused and screwed by the RIAA continuously.
The goal here is to destroy the RIAA. When the RIAA no longer exists (what a dream), the artists will be forced to sell their music directly to music listeners and receive 100% of the revenue rather than 1% of 1%. How horrible!
And then the band realizes they must choose dirt-cheap Internet based music distribution and reap the rewards. One can only hope this is how it will work.
This is fundamentally flawed. How can I be disgusted with reality if I am ignorant to it? If I was ignorant to it, why would I want it changed?
Returning to the original issue, how is not supporting something you disagree with "completely at odds with reality" and entering into the provice of childhood?
If I dislike X, I am certainly not going to support X. I practice vegetarianism. One of my reasons for pracitcing vegetarianism is because I believe it is unethical to raise animals in inhumane conditions and then slaughter them. If I believe that killing is wrong, I am certainly not going to support an institution whose primary function is to kill people.
What I would like to see happen is a sweeping global change where everyone understands that killing is wrong and no longer supports institutions that kill people.
Unlikely? Yes. Impossible? Yes. Likely over time in a gradual sense? Yes.
When someone comes forward and offers radical ideas as you are speaking out against (not supporting DoD or DARPA, etc.) they do not expect to get everything. They hope to get a small fraction of what they're actually shooting for. Just like how laws are created with the knowledge law enforcement will always over step them. Just like how people sue for x only hoping to get x/2. It's simple. You push for major change to get minor results.
In the long run, hopefully this idea will take root with more and more people. It will spread. Perhaps in centuries, these ideals will become reality.
Small acts can result in big change. No idealism is ineffective so long as it is communicated to other people. As an ideal is passed from person to person, it is refined and likely brought closer to reality (or reality closer to the ideal). If what you say is true, progress is impossible.
Clearly, it's not.
What causes humans to choose one or another I wonder. Isn't the very cocept of good an unrealistic ideal? Good for goodness sake in a world full of evil? Perhaps I'm getting off topic. I am a little tired so bare with me if I stray all over the place.
I argue the current institutions have strong influence on which way a human being my sway. Do you understand that you can kill other people until the idea is introduced to you? What if you were taught that killing was always wrong. What if an institution existed that violated that rule? (The idea of a military says that it's OKay to kill people in certain cases.) Granted, everyone has to make up their own mind, but while humans are prone to good and evil, something nudges them one way or another.
But if everyone did, every military would disappear over night. That's the point.
Wrong. The fact that I can proclaim my ideas in public forum is a direct result of amendments to a legal document written approximately 200 years ago by civilized, idealistic people. These people, the Framers, depended on a great deal of intellectual dishonesty to convince themselves to forget about reality, where people try t
I don't know why I would bother replying to a post like this, but...
This is usually the knee-jerk reaction made by many who simply can't handle the idea of a world where the more difficult path to peace is chosen in favor of violence.
To defend that, let's say you're a politician and you're confronted with a situation where you can either: A) invoke infinite patience and do the hard, long, tiring work of resolving differences and finding the root cause of problems, or: B) blow them up.
I assure you, option B is chosen most frequently and usually by the weak minded, for those whom it hurts to think. Without a doubt, it is the easier path. Nevertheless, there's a tradeoff with everything, thus the costs in the long run are much more severe in terms of life and property.
It is people like you that regard purveyors of option A as "fucking stupid" because you don't understand how that would work. You don't understand regression. You don't understand that every problem has a root (and that root may be a problem to resolve in itself). Find the cause of an effect. It's not easy and it's abstract and requires a lot of time and concentration. To you, that's "fucking stupid".
To people who wish for something better, it's worth the effort.
Are these people the cause or the product of the conditions we presently live in?
If they don't "give a damn" about anything or anyone, why would they "love" to deal?
I never said these ideals were reality. That is your mistake. However, they are most certainly not nonsense.
Rest assured, you weren't hurting artists. You were hurting some rich RIAA execuative who likely has billions of dollars to his or her name.
Imagine if the richest man in the world ordered a poor man to pay him a month's salary because the rich man felt his wealth was in jeopardy. Now, imagine this rich man had an army of slaves doing his bidding, who all work to make him money. Doesn't that sound silly? Well, that's what the RIAA.
The RIAA effectively takes music from artists and gives them slave wages for their music. When the RIAA takes music from artists, the artists no longer own it.
Since the RIAA owns the music, there's no way you can hurt the artist by downloading music. Only the RIAA hurts artists. Hopefully, people will keep downloading songs so the RIAA will go away!
There are some of us who hope and strive for a better future. Then there are those who don't care and are willing to accept the pitiful condition the world is presently in.
Sorry, I agree with him. The future should be a place where there are no militaries. The future should be a place where human beings are civilized enough to not brandish weapons at one another. Until then, we are not much better than animals.
I don't think our government concentrates well over 400$ billion/year to these causes. Also remember our government regularly detracts money from education and funnels into the military. This is not progress.
Well, you do have a point there. Evil abroad perpetuates evil at home it seems. Good to know that the low-lifes of the world have such a good handle over us.
No doubt the human race is stuck in a neverending cycle. So long as it persists, progress will be minimal.
Miss O'Gara, could you do us the courtesy and explain who is going to police your DDoS attack? The shitstorm that is the FUD you have created surrounding Linux is denying many existing and potential adopters of the benefits open source has to offer.
In addition, what your company is doing (stock manipulation, defamatory statements that inhibit Linux solutions, and so on) is just as illegal.
How on earth can you cry for justice when you are engaging in injust acts yourself? Pot, meet kettle. Kettle, pot.
This nonsense with SCO gets more ridiculous every day. I cannot stand how amazingly childish this has become. The DDoS attacks on SCO are counter-productive insofar as they reinforce the idea SCO is proposing that open source consists of criminals. But of course, everything SCO has done from the get-go is childish and stupid.
Unfortunately, open source is the only lose in the long run.
Whoever is pulling SCO's strings (Microsoft I'd guess) wins. SCO goes out of business; you can't hurt the dead and they were terminally ill anyway. SCO execuatives walk away with bags of money. Lastly, the reputation of the open source ends up severely damaged in the minds of everyone who may have considered OSS solutions.
In short: fuck you SCO. Quite honestly, nobody should give a damn what happens to you or your intellectual property. Had you handled this rationally, bringing claims against IBM or SGI if in fact they violated your property, without the maelstrom of FUD, things would be different. Instead, you've waged a mudslinging campaign that hurts lots of people and makes you look like assholes.
No good can come of this except for a few already wealthy execs.