Too late, it's already happened. The FBI has already used OnStar equipment to monitor what was going on inside a car.
A judge slapped them down for doing it, not for constitutional reasons, but for 'contractual interference'. Apparently when they do this, your little buttons don't work anymore, and a judge didn't think that the FBI could come and change your tire or unlock your doors for you.
Just one more reason not to buy a GM car. Between their quality and this, no wonder their sales are slipping.
I have owned a hybrid car (Honda Insight) for almost 3 years now. While it is a completely different hybrid system than a Prius, they are still kind of the same animal.
For instance, my Insight, if I drive somewhere where it is flat, little/no wind, and drive very gingerly about 45 mph, it can get above 100 mpg. With some trips (say 20 miles), I have managed to keep the trip mileage over 100 mpg.
However, my lifetime mpg is about 56 mpg, because I don't drive the car gingerly, and instead move with traffic to keep my fellow commuters happy.
Here's where the problem with this is: If you drive gingerly and get 100 mpg, you aren't using the electrical power, and therefore it doesn't NEED to be charged. And with a 'stock' Insight, if you were to somehow charge the batteries without the car knowing it, the car will basically drain the batteries and allow the to recharge (called recalibration).
Obviously, some of these behaviors can be changed, but that requires reprogramming the computers (about 8 of them IIRC), without any assistance from Honda/Toyota.
I could see new PBX systems being made out of this, where a fiber optic line could come into a company (or maybe 2 for redundancy), then running a fiber line to each floor of a building, where it would convert it to digital lines for traditional office phones. I don't know how many channels fiber can carry, but in a 10 Ghz signal, there's room for 100,000? 100 Khz signals.
Combine this in a lot of buildings and all of the 'dark fiber' out there, and this could give VOIP a true run for it's money. Plus it keeps all the VOIP traffic off the internet.
Sounds like the next evolution past T1/E1....
Then again, with that kind of speed it could still be voip, but at CD quality sound. Though there are still potential legal differences between VOIP and telephony.
Innovations like this keep the future interesting.
Being the owner of a hybrid car (Honda Insight), IIRC correctly the electric motor can pull something like 60 or 70 amps when giving full assist. This is done with D cell sized NiMH batteries, 120 of the them screwed to each other to give 144 nominal volts.
The recharge on them is not as fast as the discharge of them. Unfortunately, the discharge and recharge of them is all computer controlled so as to be 'nice' to the batteries, and without hacking into the computer it wouldn't matter what type of batteries were in the car.
And besides, hybrid car models (at least the current models) aren't plugged in. They mostly do brake regeneration of the battery (though they can do some leeching of power from the gas motor).
My Insight can go 115 mph. And this is stock without being stripped, having a roll cage, or any other modifications.
It has a 995 cc 3 cylinder gas engine putting out about 63 hp. In series it has a 13 hp electric engine. Because the 2 engines have different hp/rpm curves, it puts out 68 hp. But it only weighs 1850 pounds.
The car goes 0-60 in 10.5 seconds, has really good handling, and drives kind of like a go kart. The only real bad thing is there isn't much sound insulation, so there is a fair amount of road noise.
But even going 90 mph, it can still click off about 50 mpg. At 45 mph, you can get it into 'lean burn' mode and get a bit over 100 mpg.
It's a really good commuter car, has a lifetime mileage of 56 mpg (would be a lot higher if I drove a bit more conservatively and didn't live in a hilly area).
Also, there are some electric cars that go 0-60 in 3.6 seconds IIRC.
I remember a friend bought MS Flight Simulator years ago (The Apple 2e version, probably about 1985?). On the outside of the box it talked about all of the nifty new features they had in that version, and pictures that very much 'enhanced' the graphics they had at the time.
Inside the box (and the shrinkwrap), they had a little slip of paper that listed all of the features that really weren't included in that version. Useful things, like a sound happening when the plane landed. Apparently the marketing people didn't talk with develpment even back then.
But back to the present: Lets say that you buy a new computer (and are a new computer user), and it gives you a URL to go read the EULA. How are you supposed to read it? Go to the library?
Not that I'm a die hard Microsoftie, but do you think it's really possible to have an operating system that:
1) Does as much as Windows 2) Has 90% of the OS market 3) Is written by a company that a lot of people don't care for. 4) Is used by a large number of users that aren't computer savvy. 5) Can easily install AOL.
That wouldn't have security issues? Do you really think that Linux, OS X, any flavor of Unix, or any OS that you could think of that is hacker proof?
Consider some of the non OS things that are easy hacked: 1) WIFI with people leaving their networks open 2) Alarm systems on houses that can be defeated by cutting a phone line 3) Front doors on houses that have windows right next to the lock.
To be a relatively safe computer user you have to almost be paranoid. Most users aren't. I have a neighbor that voluntarily runs Comet Cursor even though I've told him that it is spyware. I have other friends that don't care about spyware because 'they don't do anything bad on their computers'. With attitudes like that I could convince a lot of people (or enough of people) to install a program that would reformat their harddrive on Valentine's Day, and they'd type 'Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious' 5 times due to them misspelling it 4 times to install if if I put a nifty front end on it.
Microsoft has done some really stupid things with Windows and IE, no doubt. But if people are so gullible that they give their credit card numbers and SSNs to fake bank websites (probably on banks they don't do business with), how do you prevent this?
The alternative is to not allow anything to download and be installed. That would make rough for Adobe, Flash, the Bugmenot extension to Firefox, you get the picture. You can require them to be signed, but what's to stop Comet Cursor from being signed?
What's the answer? I dunno, but it obviously isn't straightforward if thousands of people in Redmond can't think of one.
Energy efficiency is key with our without alternative energy. I have been working on this for the last few years including things like: Insulating my house Installing a programmable thermostat Using compact florescents Installing a high efficiency AC when my old one died Ditto with my furnace buying a used hybrid car
Mind you, I'm not a tree hugging ultra liberal, I'm fairly libertarian in my philosophy. However, it just makes economic sense to do these things.
I live in a 3 bedroom house in the Atlanta area, and my highest electric bill this year was $103. My winter electric bill is usually about $27. This is for a 1970 house with single pane windows. It is also nice getting 450 miles on $15 worth of gas.
Efficiency is important, because if you can reduce energy consumption by 25-50%, you can reduce the number of solar panels, windmills, whatever, by 25-50%.
I don't want him coming down here with his Acme brand disintegrator gun (or even worse, the Uranium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator) because we won't let him use part of his home planet. It's kinda rude since he got there first. His abominable snowman needs lots of room to frolic and I don't want him naming me George.
Seriously though, might be be useful to find out what's really there/unique/useful on the surface before declaring them off limits? At the rate we are going, there's a good chance that any body that would make such a designation wouldn't be around anymore by the time we get there. For instance, if Ceasar had designated a national park in Egypt, I don't think the Egyptians would go out of their way to care in 2004.
They have an XP based one on their web site for about $270. It's a Celeron 2.4 Ghz with 128 megs of ram and a 40 gig hard drive, but no monitor.
The $200 one they used to have ran Lindows (whatever they are calling now).
If you take $270, subtract $60 for XP Home OEM, subtract $20 for a 20 gig drive, and $40 for a power supply, that gets the price down to $150. I'm not sure how much Lindows costs, but if it was $20, then the price is $130 and starting to get really close to the $100 cost of this one, and you can just buy 1.
To me, a $100 computer sounds like a perfect Citrix or Web client.
Why would a company spend $5k, get no hits, and spend a second $5k? They would be truly clueless and out of business pretty soon. Plus, are many legitimate businesses that into spam? Most of what I get are from rather shady companies (ie fake pharmacies and loan stores).
This approach might work against people that aren't scum. But these people aren't the type to lay down and go away. These are people that have done DDOS on Spamhaus and other anti spam websites. What happens when they do this to an average AOL user? Or some unsuspecting person with DSL that gets one for Christmas that thinks it's a good idea?
What does M$ have to do with Spam? I'm not a M$ supporter, but I'm missing the connection. Email has been insecure since long before M$ existed. I could likely come up with a Linux server and a perl script to launch spam if I wanted to.
I understand that spam has about a 0.0003% response rate. But I am suspecting that the response rate is getting less and less. Anybody have any hard numbers on this?
With some luck eventually the spam will peak and dramatically taper off at some point. The sooner the better.
In he mean time I'm not putting a big shiny target on my IP address. I have DSL and a firewall router plus I'm running zonealarm. But why risk it against those people? They aren't exactly white hats. It's one thing to do from systems that are locked down/secure/geek in control. It's another thing for the 'average' internet user to be taunting spammers. I know enough not to screw with them. Probably 0.01% of users are sosphisticated enough to be able to taunt them and get away with it. I'm concerned that people will do this that have ABSOLUTELY no business doing it. ie they have no firewall, missing security patches, running Windows 98...
I just remember the 'good old days' when if you got spam you could reverse DNS them and get an actual apology from their ISP. But then back then (early 90s) I'd get about one spam every 2 weeks.
Bottom line -- If you are reading this and aren't a firewall expert (at a bare minimum), don't do it.
What is to stop the spammers from doing a reverse DDOS on you? They would have your IP address, and would enjoy wasting your bandwidth too. My guess is they have a lot more bandwidth than most of us do.
They aren't exactly people I want to mess with.
If nobody buys their stuff, they would go away. Unfortunately that's the only solution I see to 'fix' the problem.
I have one in the garage. It's a Honda Insight. It has mileage that varies between about 40 and 120 mpg depending on how aggressively you drive in it and what terrain you drive it over. However, when I was cruising (cough) at 90 mph, it was still getting about 50 mpg.
The problem -- they really aren't selling very well even though they (for the most part) are pretty nice cars.
There is also the Toyota Prius that gets 50+ mpg, which I would take a long time before the Smart Car.
Americans are comfort creatures with relatively cheap gas. California is even talking about doing away with the gas tax and replacing it with a miles driven tax, so that will take another incentive to get cars with reasonable gas mileage.
We are also lead foots. Chrysler offers V8 HEMI engines on many of its models and it appears to be a popular option. Why people would want 300 HP in a station wagon I'm not sure. But it's their money (for the larger engine and extra gas).
We have also been subjected to some of the crummiest small cars out there. There never has been a small car (other than say the new Minis) in full production that are something other than rattletraps. There was the Yugo, the Geo Metro 1L hatchback, The Ford Aspire, and numerous others. All of them were awful cars coming off the showroom floor. The reason we don't have any diesels here is because of the early 80s diesels that Detroit offered that broke down at 30-50,000 miles. They used converted gas engines which couldn't stand up to the stresses.
The Honda Accord used to be a small car, now it's almost a full sized sedan. The Civic used to be a small car, now it's getting bigger every year.
If the smart car is going to succeed in the US marketplace, it needs to be a nice rock solid car that runs well and doesn't have many problems. Otherwise it will be the latest version of the Daewoo and Kia. It will also need to be cheap, which is hard to do and keep quality up. I suspect that a small car costs about the same as a large car to make given the same quality standards. The only difference I see is the amount of bulk metal and other materials (ie paint), which MIGHT be $1000. The actual part counts are probably pretty close to each other.
I agree it is a good idea to bring them in. I just hope they do it right because Americans are getting more and more suspicious about different car ideas.
I remember in 1998 and 1999 when programmers (and not necessarily even good ones), were being paid $100+/hr to do Y2k work, and then $100+/hr in 2000 to fix the stuff they broke in 1998 and 1999.
Obviously, prices like that are not sustainable in the free market It helps (programmers) that in the US that many kids think studying math and science is lame. But there are many other countries where this isn't the case.
I have had some very well paying software jobs. However, instead of buying a bigger house, getting Saab payments, and living the high life, I bought cars with cash, kept the small house, got out of debt (except a small mortgage), and built up some cash reserves.
In July I was laid off. In September I took a part time programming position with a 40% pay cut (same rate, but working 3 days/week). I'm still cash positive, and with the relatively low expenses I have, it is a nice life. I even came out ahead in my cash reserves with the severance they gave me.
I'm just glad I don't own a $700,000 house in silicon valley, the ones that are 1000 square feet on 1/10th acre. Guess that's always fixed with bankruptcy.
I thought one of the side notes about Sen. Mark Dayton closing his office because of 'threats' was considered no big deal because all of the senators were out campaigning? If they aren't in town, they can't vote.
It's not just El Paso. In Atlanta they had some school classrooms with enough networking equipment to run a small company, and it was just sitting in closets because nobody had a clue how to install it.
I don't think these funds pay for network administrators. And even if they did, how much connectivity does a grade school or middle school need?
If they wanted to do it cheaply, they could just set up WIFI stations for every couple of classrooms, and have those wired through the ceiling to a decent switch, uplinked through a filtering router (for spam and inappropriate materials), and connected to a T1 (depending on the size of the school, maybe something a bit more).
The problem at this point becomes maintenance. The user base is a combination of kids that don't have a clue, those that do have a clue, and teachers watching them that in a lot of cases don't WANT to have a clue. The teachers are interested in teaching sentence diagramming, not tweaking IP settings.
I have a 2001 5 speed with air conditioning.
I live in the Atlanta area, which is a part of the country with a lot of rolling hills and lots of stop and go driving.
The mileage I get is typically 48-55 mpg with the air conditioner on, and 55-65 mpg with it off. I have had stretches on roads where it is flat and have gotten over 80 mpg with it.
Power wise it is a tad underpowered, though if you need to accellerate you can downshift and get plenty of power (though that hurts mpg). The handling gets kind of sketchy above 80 mph. I've drive from Atlanta to Asheville, NC, and when the battery ran out going up the big hills, I put it in 3rd gear and it was fine. Even at 90 mph, if it is flat it still gets about 50 mpg.
It does NOT have cruise control, though there are people that have put 3rd party cruise control on it.
If you are interested in high mileage, you want to get the 5 speed, as it has 'lean burn mode' which allows it to cruise at 100 mpg+. The Civic hybrid is too heavy for the Honda IMA system IMHO.
If you want a lot more information, take a look at www.insightcentral.net, and check out the forums.
Or, if you want to email me, my gmail account name is sdhall.
As the owner of a hybrid (Honda Insight), this looks a bit suspicious
1) I would think you would need a motor/generator bigger than an alternator to generate a reasonable amount of power.
2) If they are talking 35 HP, that's a LOT of power. That's the equivilent of 26 kW, At 200 volts, that is 130 amps of current needed. Not cheap to do or maintain.
3) How do they implement regenerative breaking with this? On the Insight, it actually cuts the fuel off to the engine during full brake regen. Plus it doesn't initially apply the brakes, just regen.
4) That seems like a lot of stress on the belt. Are they using something like a timing belt to drive it? It would have to have teeth or it would just slip like crazy.
If you want more power off the line, get a supercharger. If you want better gas mileage, get a smaller engine.
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Too late, it's already happened. The FBI has already used OnStar equipment to monitor what was going on inside a car. A judge slapped them down for doing it, not for constitutional reasons, but for 'contractual interference'. Apparently when they do this, your little buttons don't work anymore, and a judge didn't think that the FBI could come and change your tire or unlock your doors for you. Just one more reason not to buy a GM car. Between their quality and this, no wonder their sales are slipping.
I have owned a hybrid car (Honda Insight) for almost 3 years now. While it is a completely different hybrid system than a Prius, they are still kind of the same animal.
For instance, my Insight, if I drive somewhere where it is flat, little/no wind, and drive very gingerly about 45 mph, it can get above 100 mpg. With some trips (say 20 miles), I have managed to keep the trip mileage over 100 mpg.
However, my lifetime mpg is about 56 mpg, because I don't drive the car gingerly, and instead move with traffic to keep my fellow commuters happy.
Here's where the problem with this is: If you drive gingerly and get 100 mpg, you aren't using the electrical power, and therefore it doesn't NEED to be charged. And with a 'stock' Insight, if you were to somehow charge the batteries without the car knowing it, the car will basically drain the batteries and allow the to recharge (called recalibration).
Obviously, some of these behaviors can be changed, but that requires reprogramming the computers (about 8 of them IIRC), without any assistance from Honda/Toyota.
I could see new PBX systems being made out of this, where a fiber optic line could come into a company (or maybe 2 for redundancy), then running a fiber line to each floor of a building, where it would convert it to digital lines for traditional office phones. I don't know how many channels fiber can carry, but in a 10 Ghz signal, there's room for 100,000? 100 Khz signals.
Combine this in a lot of buildings and all of the 'dark fiber' out there, and this could give VOIP a true run for it's money. Plus it keeps all the VOIP traffic off the internet.
Sounds like the next evolution past T1/E1....
Then again, with that kind of speed it could still be voip, but at CD quality sound. Though there are still potential legal differences between VOIP and telephony.
Innovations like this keep the future interesting.
Being the owner of a hybrid car (Honda Insight), IIRC correctly the electric motor can pull something like 60 or 70 amps when giving full assist. This is done with D cell sized NiMH batteries, 120 of the them screwed to each other to give 144 nominal volts.
The recharge on them is not as fast as the discharge of them. Unfortunately, the discharge and recharge of them is all computer controlled so as to be 'nice' to the batteries, and without hacking into the computer it wouldn't matter what type of batteries were in the car.
And besides, hybrid car models (at least the current models) aren't plugged in. They mostly do brake regeneration of the battery (though they can do some leeching of power from the gas motor).
I work in a 4 person department in a 20 person company.
I ran rattle them all off. Now where's my prize?
Though sometimes I have to think about what my own phone number is.....
Count me out for being a guinea pig and upgrading...
Why not just move it to Boston? Bostonians wouldn't allow ANY bean to be copyrighted....
At least it's not a Serra sculpture...
My Insight can go 115 mph. And this is stock without being stripped, having a roll cage, or any other modifications.
It has a 995 cc 3 cylinder gas engine putting out about 63 hp. In series it has a 13 hp electric engine. Because the 2 engines have different hp/rpm curves, it puts out 68 hp. But it only weighs 1850 pounds.
The car goes 0-60 in 10.5 seconds, has really good handling, and drives kind of like a go kart. The only real bad thing is there isn't much sound insulation, so there is a fair amount of road noise.
But even going 90 mph, it can still click off about 50 mpg. At 45 mph, you can get it into 'lean burn' mode and get a bit over 100 mpg.
It's a really good commuter car, has a lifetime mileage of 56 mpg (would be a lot higher if I drove a bit more conservatively and didn't live in a hilly area).
Also, there are some electric cars that go 0-60 in 3.6 seconds IIRC.
I remember a friend bought MS Flight Simulator years ago (The Apple 2e version, probably about 1985?). On the outside of the box it talked about all of the nifty new features they had in that version, and pictures that very much 'enhanced' the graphics they had at the time.
Inside the box (and the shrinkwrap), they had a little slip of paper that listed all of the features that really weren't included in that version. Useful things, like a sound happening when the plane landed. Apparently the marketing people didn't talk with develpment even back then.
But back to the present: Lets say that you buy a new computer (and are a new computer user), and it gives you a URL to go read the EULA. How are you supposed to read it? Go to the library?
Not that I'm a die hard Microsoftie, but do you think it's really possible to have an operating system that:
1) Does as much as Windows
2) Has 90% of the OS market
3) Is written by a company that a lot of people don't care for.
4) Is used by a large number of users that aren't computer savvy.
5) Can easily install AOL.
That wouldn't have security issues? Do you really think that Linux, OS X, any flavor of Unix, or any OS that you could think of that is hacker proof?
Consider some of the non OS things that are easy hacked:
1) WIFI with people leaving their networks open
2) Alarm systems on houses that can be defeated by cutting a phone line
3) Front doors on houses that have windows right next to the lock.
To be a relatively safe computer user you have to almost be paranoid. Most users aren't. I have a neighbor that voluntarily runs Comet Cursor even though I've told him that it is spyware. I have other friends that don't care about spyware because 'they don't do anything bad on their computers'. With attitudes like that I could convince a lot of people (or enough of people) to install a program that would reformat their harddrive on Valentine's Day, and they'd type 'Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious' 5 times due to them misspelling it 4 times to install if if I put a nifty front end on it.
Microsoft has done some really stupid things with Windows and IE, no doubt. But if people are so gullible that they give their credit card numbers and SSNs to fake bank websites (probably on banks they don't do business with), how do you prevent this?
The alternative is to not allow anything to download and be installed. That would make rough for Adobe, Flash, the Bugmenot extension to Firefox, you get the picture. You can require them to be signed, but what's to stop Comet Cursor from being signed?
What's the answer? I dunno, but it obviously isn't straightforward if thousands of people in Redmond can't think of one.
Energy efficiency is key with our without alternative energy. I have been working on this for the last few years including things like:
Insulating my house
Installing a programmable thermostat
Using compact florescents
Installing a high efficiency AC when my old one died
Ditto with my furnace
buying a used hybrid car
Mind you, I'm not a tree hugging ultra liberal, I'm fairly libertarian in my philosophy. However, it just makes economic sense to do these things.
I live in a 3 bedroom house in the Atlanta area, and my highest electric bill this year was $103. My winter electric bill is usually about $27. This is for a 1970 house with single pane windows. It is also nice getting 450 miles on $15 worth of gas.
Efficiency is important, because if you can reduce energy consumption by 25-50%, you can reduce the number of solar panels, windmills, whatever, by 25-50%.
Seriously though, might be be useful to find out what's really there/unique/useful on the surface before declaring them off limits? At the rate we are going, there's a good chance that any body that would make such a designation wouldn't be around anymore by the time we get there. For instance, if Ceasar had designated a national park in Egypt, I don't think the Egyptians would go out of their way to care in 2004.
They have an XP based one on their web site for about $270. It's a Celeron 2.4 Ghz with 128 megs of ram and a 40 gig hard drive, but no monitor. The $200 one they used to have ran Lindows (whatever they are calling now). If you take $270, subtract $60 for XP Home OEM, subtract $20 for a 20 gig drive, and $40 for a power supply, that gets the price down to $150. I'm not sure how much Lindows costs, but if it was $20, then the price is $130 and starting to get really close to the $100 cost of this one, and you can just buy 1. To me, a $100 computer sounds like a perfect Citrix or Web client.
This approach might work against people that aren't scum. But these people aren't the type to lay down and go away. These are people that have done DDOS on Spamhaus and other anti spam websites. What happens when they do this to an average AOL user? Or some unsuspecting person with DSL that gets one for Christmas that thinks it's a good idea?
What does M$ have to do with Spam? I'm not a M$ supporter, but I'm missing the connection. Email has been insecure since long before M$ existed. I could likely come up with a Linux server and a perl script to launch spam if I wanted to.
With some luck eventually the spam will peak and dramatically taper off at some point. The sooner the better.
In he mean time I'm not putting a big shiny target on my IP address. I have DSL and a firewall router plus I'm running zonealarm. But why risk it against those people? They aren't exactly white hats. It's one thing to do from systems that are locked down/secure/geek in control. It's another thing for the 'average' internet user to be taunting spammers. I know enough not to screw with them. Probably 0.01% of users are sosphisticated enough to be able to taunt them and get away with it. I'm concerned that people will do this that have ABSOLUTELY no business doing it. ie they have no firewall, missing security patches, running Windows 98...
I just remember the 'good old days' when if you got spam you could reverse DNS them and get an actual apology from their ISP. But then back then (early 90s) I'd get about one spam every 2 weeks.
Bottom line -- If you are reading this and aren't a firewall expert (at a bare minimum), don't do it.
What is to stop the spammers from doing a reverse DDOS on you? They would have your IP address, and would enjoy wasting your bandwidth too. My guess is they have a lot more bandwidth than most of us do. They aren't exactly people I want to mess with. If nobody buys their stuff, they would go away. Unfortunately that's the only solution I see to 'fix' the problem.
I have one in the garage. It's a Honda Insight. It has mileage that varies between about 40 and 120 mpg depending on how aggressively you drive in it and what terrain you drive it over. However, when I was cruising (cough) at 90 mph, it was still getting about 50 mpg. The problem -- they really aren't selling very well even though they (for the most part) are pretty nice cars. There is also the Toyota Prius that gets 50+ mpg, which I would take a long time before the Smart Car. Americans are comfort creatures with relatively cheap gas. California is even talking about doing away with the gas tax and replacing it with a miles driven tax, so that will take another incentive to get cars with reasonable gas mileage. We are also lead foots. Chrysler offers V8 HEMI engines on many of its models and it appears to be a popular option. Why people would want 300 HP in a station wagon I'm not sure. But it's their money (for the larger engine and extra gas). We have also been subjected to some of the crummiest small cars out there. There never has been a small car (other than say the new Minis) in full production that are something other than rattletraps. There was the Yugo, the Geo Metro 1L hatchback, The Ford Aspire, and numerous others. All of them were awful cars coming off the showroom floor. The reason we don't have any diesels here is because of the early 80s diesels that Detroit offered that broke down at 30-50,000 miles. They used converted gas engines which couldn't stand up to the stresses. The Honda Accord used to be a small car, now it's almost a full sized sedan. The Civic used to be a small car, now it's getting bigger every year. If the smart car is going to succeed in the US marketplace, it needs to be a nice rock solid car that runs well and doesn't have many problems. Otherwise it will be the latest version of the Daewoo and Kia. It will also need to be cheap, which is hard to do and keep quality up. I suspect that a small car costs about the same as a large car to make given the same quality standards. The only difference I see is the amount of bulk metal and other materials (ie paint), which MIGHT be $1000. The actual part counts are probably pretty close to each other. I agree it is a good idea to bring them in. I just hope they do it right because Americans are getting more and more suspicious about different car ideas.
I remember in 1998 and 1999 when programmers (and not necessarily even good ones), were being paid $100+/hr to do Y2k work, and then $100+/hr in 2000 to fix the stuff they broke in 1998 and 1999. Obviously, prices like that are not sustainable in the free market It helps (programmers) that in the US that many kids think studying math and science is lame. But there are many other countries where this isn't the case. I have had some very well paying software jobs. However, instead of buying a bigger house, getting Saab payments, and living the high life, I bought cars with cash, kept the small house, got out of debt (except a small mortgage), and built up some cash reserves. In July I was laid off. In September I took a part time programming position with a 40% pay cut (same rate, but working 3 days/week). I'm still cash positive, and with the relatively low expenses I have, it is a nice life. I even came out ahead in my cash reserves with the severance they gave me. I'm just glad I don't own a $700,000 house in silicon valley, the ones that are 1000 square feet on 1/10th acre. Guess that's always fixed with bankruptcy.
I thought one of the side notes about Sen. Mark Dayton closing his office because of 'threats' was considered no big deal because all of the senators were out campaigning? If they aren't in town, they can't vote.
It's not just El Paso. In Atlanta they had some school classrooms with enough networking equipment to run a small company, and it was just sitting in closets because nobody had a clue how to install it. I don't think these funds pay for network administrators. And even if they did, how much connectivity does a grade school or middle school need? If they wanted to do it cheaply, they could just set up WIFI stations for every couple of classrooms, and have those wired through the ceiling to a decent switch, uplinked through a filtering router (for spam and inappropriate materials), and connected to a T1 (depending on the size of the school, maybe something a bit more). The problem at this point becomes maintenance. The user base is a combination of kids that don't have a clue, those that do have a clue, and teachers watching them that in a lot of cases don't WANT to have a clue. The teachers are interested in teaching sentence diagramming, not tweaking IP settings.
I have a 2001 5 speed with air conditioning. I live in the Atlanta area, which is a part of the country with a lot of rolling hills and lots of stop and go driving. The mileage I get is typically 48-55 mpg with the air conditioner on, and 55-65 mpg with it off. I have had stretches on roads where it is flat and have gotten over 80 mpg with it. Power wise it is a tad underpowered, though if you need to accellerate you can downshift and get plenty of power (though that hurts mpg). The handling gets kind of sketchy above 80 mph. I've drive from Atlanta to Asheville, NC, and when the battery ran out going up the big hills, I put it in 3rd gear and it was fine. Even at 90 mph, if it is flat it still gets about 50 mpg. It does NOT have cruise control, though there are people that have put 3rd party cruise control on it. If you are interested in high mileage, you want to get the 5 speed, as it has 'lean burn mode' which allows it to cruise at 100 mpg+. The Civic hybrid is too heavy for the Honda IMA system IMHO. If you want a lot more information, take a look at www.insightcentral.net, and check out the forums. Or, if you want to email me, my gmail account name is sdhall.
As the owner of a hybrid (Honda Insight), this looks a bit suspicious 1) I would think you would need a motor/generator bigger than an alternator to generate a reasonable amount of power. 2) If they are talking 35 HP, that's a LOT of power. That's the equivilent of 26 kW, At 200 volts, that is 130 amps of current needed. Not cheap to do or maintain. 3) How do they implement regenerative breaking with this? On the Insight, it actually cuts the fuel off to the engine during full brake regen. Plus it doesn't initially apply the brakes, just regen. 4) That seems like a lot of stress on the belt. Are they using something like a timing belt to drive it? It would have to have teeth or it would just slip like crazy. If you want more power off the line, get a supercharger. If you want better gas mileage, get a smaller engine.