Yes, the Civic hybrid has been out for a while, but it's basically a first-generation hybrid (it followed the Insight, but didn't really introduce any improvements over the Insight's technology). We might as well drag the old version of the Prius in if that's what you want to talk about.
I did see your qualification about "performance hybrids" but I don't see that as applying to the Honda Accord, because the standard Accord is not considered a performance car. Yes, the hybrid version can accelerate like a performance car, but it gets that performance from the addition of a hybrid drive train, not from a performance-class ICE.
As for the Camry hybrid's comparison to its brethren, remember that the hybrid has an EPA rating of 40/38. I don't know where you got your numbers. For the other Camrys, you are using numbers that are higher than the EPA estimates. I found only one website supporting the 9+ second number for acceleration; most of the sites I looked at quoted 7.7 seconds. Possibly the 9 s is with the battery depleted. And don't compare it to the V6; my point was that you should compare apples to apples instead of to oranges.
Funny how a site with Toyota advertisments would have a bias (by comparing the Hybrid's performance with the cheapest and slowest Camry version).
It's a car magazine's website, for god's sake! They carry advertisements for all kinds of cars!
Well, I've also seen BMWs, Mercedeses, Volkswagens, Lexi, and so on driving slowly with trains of angry cars behind them. But maybe you took particular note of it when the culprit happened to be in a Prius.
lots of streets where I can go 40-50 MPH...reasonably timed traffic lights
In fact, the reason few people get the EPA estimate (for any car) is that few people drive like this. I compared the top graph on that page to my own commute (which covers a longer distance and has close to the same number of stops). But the EPA test covers about 30 minutes; I can make my trip in 20 to 25 minutes, but given the longer distance, if I drove a similar pattern to the test, it would take me about 40 minutes. Most likely, driving like the test would get me 55 to 60 MPG, but I don't have the time to waste and I would irritate a lot of other drivers (as it is, I get about 40 MPG). Timing traffic lights so that people could drive a constant 45 MPH would have four effects:
1. Less gasoline usage by the entire population of a city.
2. Less pollution.
3. People would get where they are going faster.
4. People would be a lot less irritated.
You truly are lucky to have those factors on your side.
I think that, in one respect, hybrids are more efficient at highway speeds. Most non-hybrid cars have engines that are sized to give them acceptable acceleration. That might mean putting in, say, a 135 HP engine. To get comparable acceleration, a hybrid might have a 90-HP engine and a 30-HP electric motor (total horsepower is less because the electric motor is better at delivering torque at lower speed, which is what count when accelerating). At 70 MPH, the 135-HP engine will be running less efficiently than the hybrid's 90-HP engine.
Uh, have you ever driven a Hybrid? Other than some of the new performance hybrids like the Lexus, they are pretty damn slow. I am generally afraid to pass in a Prius. They lose most of their acceleration at around 40 mph, and after that its pretty slow going.
Until recently it would have been hard to find a comparison between a hybrid and non-hybrid that are sufficiently similar in other respects (similar size, same body style, and similar equpment from the same manufacturer). Now we can compare the standard Honda Accord with its hybrid version. Oops, that doesn't support your statement. Maybe the hybrid Camry, whose designers put more emphasis on fuel economy than the Accord's, will. Nope.
I don't know where you live, but in Orange County, California, Priuses are very common these days. I rarely see one driving slower than the surrounding traffic.
That said, your point about the real-time MPG displays is valid, though I wouldn't go so far as to ban them. The real problem is that they are pretty much useless because some drivers will notice, as they accelerate hard, they only get around 10 MPG, whereas if they accelerate slowly, they get 25 MPG. But with the slower accleration, it takes longer to get up to speed where you can let up on the acceleration and 50+ MPG numbers appear, so these drivers are not conserving energy. I've never seen any evidence that a Prius (with its high torque that enables efficient acceleration from a stop) benefits from slower acceleration, and many Prius drivers believe the opposite is true. In fact, the speed at which you level off is a much greater determinant of MPG than acceleration; doubling one's top speed requires four times the investment in kinetic energy. But that is true of any car.
Actually I think we need three figures rather than two.
One figure would be the standard highway figure, only it would be based on a top speed of around 70 or 75 MPH instead of the current top speed used in the tests (which I think is somewhere around 55 or 60 MPH).
The second figure would be like the standard city driving test used today, probably without much modification. That test probably simulates driving in a small town rather than driving in a major city or in a Southern California suburb.
The third figure would reflect what I call California driving, which is where we have traffic lights every quarter to half mile on roads that have 50 or 55 MPH speed limits. In this test, instead of accelerating to 30 or 40 MPH and stopping roughly every half mile (the present city test), the car would accelerate to around 50 MPH between stops and stop about 3 times per mile.
The 3 stops per mile instead of 2 would increase the kinetic energy component (the largest component at below highway speeds) of fuel consumption by close to 50% over the current city test, and the higher speeds would account for about another 50%.
Sadly, the EPA is sticking with two figures.
Regenerative braking, though not a big source of energy, is an energy source.
Umm, don't you know what an energy source is? By your logic, we could look at a bullet hole and conclude that the bullet itself (projectile) is an energy source. But we all know that the energy came from the gunpowder in the shell.
Whenever I have to ride in a friend's Prius, I thank my lucky stars I'm not claustrophobic: they're tiny inside, and huge outside.
Not true, unless you're talking about a pre-2004 model, and those aren't huge on the outside so still not true. Interior space in the 2004 and later is comparable to the Camry (more headroom and legroom than the Camry, and slightly less room width-wise but that's only a problem if three people are sitting in the back seat). Most people who ride in my Prius are impressed with the amount of interior space.
And the windows are so small/awkward he needs the built-in video camera system to back up.
Never seen such a camera in a Prius, and I know for a fact that they weren't available options in the 2004 model year. If they are putting them in the newer models or your friend had one added after-market, then it isn't from necessity; backing up isn't any more difficult than in many other cars. Your friend is probably just enjoying the novelty of this item.
It's also more expensive (to buy, and also to operate) than my diesel.
I'll give you the first part. But we need to look at long-term maintenance costs to judge the second. Periodic maintenance for a Prius is the same for a hybrid as a similar class non-hybrid gasoline vehicle. Some costs should be less (brakes wear much slower due to regenerative braking, engine should experience less wear and tear, and planetary gear system should rarely have any trouble if at all). The only question is whether these factors will outweigh the cost of battery replacement after 10 years or so. Until we have 10 years or more of data on hybrid repair costs I don't think we can arrive at the conclusion you jumped to.
My opinion is that Bush wouldn't have made the order, if he and his legal counsel thought it were illegal.
More likely, they thought it was legally defensible, which is different from "not illegal". But the standard for impeachment is different from the standard for conviction in a court of law, so "legally defensible" wouldn't cut it in an impeachment proceeding.
Many legal experts think the belief that Clinton committed perjury is a questionable one; it would be difficult to prove in a court of law that any of his statements met the legal definition of perjury. Just google for "clinton perjury" and find a range of opinions on this.
As for Bush, what do you say to John Dean's statement that Bush is "the first President to admit to an impeachable offense"? IANAL but Dean is.
I suspect he is referring to the Altair. We had one in our engineering lab and I did some rudimentary coding on it, circa 1979. We also had a number of KIM-1s which made the big advance from binary input to hexadecimal.
If you had FPGAs when you studied engineering then these were probably before your time.
Since the standard model for global warming experts is that global warming means stronger hurricanes, like, oh, Katrina, what should we make of the complete failure of this year's hurricane season?
It's well-known that El Nino disrupts Atlantic hurricane formation, and El Nino is active this year (last year it was La Nina, the opposite phase of the cycle). Nobody is claiming that global warming will put an end to El Nino cycles, so it is clear that hurricane frequency will continue to rise and fall with those cycles (along with other factors).
Doesn't the failure of the model imply a problem with the theory?
Ironically, the CSU team that predicted higher than normal hurricane activity for this year maintains that thermohaline circulation, not global warming, is responsible for the increase. So you ask a pretty fair question.
Perhaps I used the wrong term, but I don't think what you describe really meets the legal definition of "extortion", either. IANAL, however.
I do have a concern that, if GLPed software is ever found to be infringing a patent, then that software's license is not valid (according to my understanding of the GPL). So even if Microsoft exempts Novell's customers in a patent lawsuit, and Microsoft prevails, Novell would have to halt their distribution of Linux. So Novell hasn't exempted itself from any legal quandary with this deal, after all.
You say "AFAIK..." I'm not aware that either climate scientists or Al Gore made as specific a prediction as you suggest, and attributed it to global warming. Can you cite such a statement? You linked to a report that predicts higher than average hurricane landfalls in 2006, but specifically not due to global warming. So the prediction that denied global warming's influence actually got it wrong. Gore has suggested an increase in hurricane strength (rather than frequency) due to global warming but I could not find any quote by him specific to the 2006 season. For a more accurate portrayal of his views on the matter, see his own words.
The current El Nino cycle has inhibited hurricane production in the Atlantic, a well-known effect. So far, nobody is saying global warming will put an end to El Nino (to the contrary, some say it might make El Nino stronger), and El Nino/La Nina is a cycle after all, so we will have ups and downs in hurricane frequency for a long time to come.
I understand the GPL requires that the licensor can't assert patent infringement claims against users of the licensed software. What I don't find is any wording that would prevent a third party from providing indemnity to those users, which is what Microsoft is doing. Maybe there's something else in the MS/Novell agreement that I'm not aware of. If so, someone please point that out.
I'm not saying there's nothing to worry about, but I think the indemnity is an issue that is orthogonal to the GPL, and perhaps Perens has raised a red herring here. And I'm one who agrees with Perens far more often than not.
You can give up rights, but never transfer them. That's one of the qualities of rights.
This half of your premise is correct: Rights aren't transferable. But, although you can waive the exercise of a right in a given instance ("I'll waive my 5th amendment rights in this case in exchange for immunity"), you can never "give up rights" (as in, "From this day forward, I declare that I no longer shall have the right to freedom of speech" -- regardless of your declaration, you will always have that right).
I can give up my right to bear arms by choosing to not bear arms.
You can waive your right to bear arms for a time by not exercising it, but that doesn't keep you from changing your mind later.
But I can't take away someone else's right to bear arms, nor can I elect to give my right to bear arms to some convicted murderer who is barred from ownership. Someone who chooses to not participate in a process when the participation is trivially easy loses their right to complain when the results are not what they wanted. They voluntarily and knowingly gave it up. That doesn't contradict the 1st Amendment.
"Transfer of rights" isn't even part of the argument here, it's a red herring. Your conclusion simply doesn't follow from any of the arguments you've put forward.
The point is, exercising a right (at some later time) can never be contingent on your casting a ballot, whether it's for a declared candidate or some futile write-in candidate. If there's a contingency, then it isn't a right at all. We have another word for things you are allowed to do under contingency. That word is privilege. There are no privileges defined in the Bill of Rights.
if you do not vote, you forfeit all right to complain about anything your government does until november 2008 (by which time, you will have learned your lesson and will vote, right?)
Not true; see Amendment #1, Constitution, United States of America.
It's the best solution. Oregon has had this for a while. It's an option in California (you can get permanent absentee voter status and have a ballot mailed to you automatically for every election).
My understanding is that Oregon has seen an increase in voter participation since adopting the vote-by-mail system.
Well, what the ACLU actually advocates is liberty, or more specifically, civil liberties. It's even in their name. Since personal responsibility goes hand in hand with responsible exercise of liberty (as this case makes obvious), it follows naturally, doesn't it?
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I did see your qualification about "performance hybrids" but I don't see that as applying to the Honda Accord, because the standard Accord is not considered a performance car. Yes, the hybrid version can accelerate like a performance car, but it gets that performance from the addition of a hybrid drive train, not from a performance-class ICE.
As for the Camry hybrid's comparison to its brethren, remember that the hybrid has an EPA rating of 40/38. I don't know where you got your numbers. For the other Camrys, you are using numbers that are higher than the EPA estimates. I found only one website supporting the 9+ second number for acceleration; most of the sites I looked at quoted 7.7 seconds. Possibly the 9 s is with the battery depleted. And don't compare it to the V6; my point was that you should compare apples to apples instead of to oranges.
Funny how a site with Toyota advertisments would have a bias (by comparing the Hybrid's performance with the cheapest and slowest Camry version).
It's a car magazine's website, for god's sake! They carry advertisements for all kinds of cars!
Well, I've also seen BMWs, Mercedeses, Volkswagens, Lexi, and so on driving slowly with trains of angry cars behind them. But maybe you took particular note of it when the culprit happened to be in a Prius.
In fact, the reason few people get the EPA estimate (for any car) is that few people drive like this. I compared the top graph on that page to my own commute (which covers a longer distance and has close to the same number of stops). But the EPA test covers about 30 minutes; I can make my trip in 20 to 25 minutes, but given the longer distance, if I drove a similar pattern to the test, it would take me about 40 minutes. Most likely, driving like the test would get me 55 to 60 MPG, but I don't have the time to waste and I would irritate a lot of other drivers (as it is, I get about 40 MPG). Timing traffic lights so that people could drive a constant 45 MPH would have four effects:
1. Less gasoline usage by the entire population of a city.
2. Less pollution.
3. People would get where they are going faster.
4. People would be a lot less irritated.
You truly are lucky to have those factors on your side.
I think that, in one respect, hybrids are more efficient at highway speeds. Most non-hybrid cars have engines that are sized to give them acceptable acceleration. That might mean putting in, say, a 135 HP engine. To get comparable acceleration, a hybrid might have a 90-HP engine and a 30-HP electric motor (total horsepower is less because the electric motor is better at delivering torque at lower speed, which is what count when accelerating). At 70 MPH, the 135-HP engine will be running less efficiently than the hybrid's 90-HP engine.
Until recently it would have been hard to find a comparison between a hybrid and non-hybrid that are sufficiently similar in other respects (similar size, same body style, and similar equpment from the same manufacturer). Now we can compare the standard Honda Accord with its hybrid version. Oops, that doesn't support your statement. Maybe the hybrid Camry, whose designers put more emphasis on fuel economy than the Accord's, will. Nope.
I don't know where you live, but in Orange County, California, Priuses are very common these days. I rarely see one driving slower than the surrounding traffic.
That said, your point about the real-time MPG displays is valid, though I wouldn't go so far as to ban them. The real problem is that they are pretty much useless because some drivers will notice, as they accelerate hard, they only get around 10 MPG, whereas if they accelerate slowly, they get 25 MPG. But with the slower accleration, it takes longer to get up to speed where you can let up on the acceleration and 50+ MPG numbers appear, so these drivers are not conserving energy. I've never seen any evidence that a Prius (with its high torque that enables efficient acceleration from a stop) benefits from slower acceleration, and many Prius drivers believe the opposite is true. In fact, the speed at which you level off is a much greater determinant of MPG than acceleration; doubling one's top speed requires four times the investment in kinetic energy. But that is true of any car.
Actually I think we need three figures rather than two. One figure would be the standard highway figure, only it would be based on a top speed of around 70 or 75 MPH instead of the current top speed used in the tests (which I think is somewhere around 55 or 60 MPH). The second figure would be like the standard city driving test used today, probably without much modification. That test probably simulates driving in a small town rather than driving in a major city or in a Southern California suburb. The third figure would reflect what I call California driving, which is where we have traffic lights every quarter to half mile on roads that have 50 or 55 MPH speed limits. In this test, instead of accelerating to 30 or 40 MPH and stopping roughly every half mile (the present city test), the car would accelerate to around 50 MPH between stops and stop about 3 times per mile. The 3 stops per mile instead of 2 would increase the kinetic energy component (the largest component at below highway speeds) of fuel consumption by close to 50% over the current city test, and the higher speeds would account for about another 50%. Sadly, the EPA is sticking with two figures.
Umm, don't you know what an energy source is? By your logic, we could look at a bullet hole and conclude that the bullet itself (projectile) is an energy source. But we all know that the energy came from the gunpowder in the shell.
Not true, unless you're talking about a pre-2004 model, and those aren't huge on the outside so still not true. Interior space in the 2004 and later is comparable to the Camry (more headroom and legroom than the Camry, and slightly less room width-wise but that's only a problem if three people are sitting in the back seat). Most people who ride in my Prius are impressed with the amount of interior space.
And the windows are so small/awkward he needs the built-in video camera system to back up.
Never seen such a camera in a Prius, and I know for a fact that they weren't available options in the 2004 model year. If they are putting them in the newer models or your friend had one added after-market, then it isn't from necessity; backing up isn't any more difficult than in many other cars. Your friend is probably just enjoying the novelty of this item.
It's also more expensive (to buy, and also to operate) than my diesel.
I'll give you the first part. But we need to look at long-term maintenance costs to judge the second. Periodic maintenance for a Prius is the same for a hybrid as a similar class non-hybrid gasoline vehicle. Some costs should be less (brakes wear much slower due to regenerative braking, engine should experience less wear and tear, and planetary gear system should rarely have any trouble if at all). The only question is whether these factors will outweigh the cost of battery replacement after 10 years or so. Until we have 10 years or more of data on hybrid repair costs I don't think we can arrive at the conclusion you jumped to.
So much for this ad.
More likely, they thought it was legally defensible, which is different from "not illegal". But the standard for impeachment is different from the standard for conviction in a court of law, so "legally defensible" wouldn't cut it in an impeachment proceeding.
As for Bush, what do you say to John Dean's statement that Bush is "the first President to admit to an impeachable offense"? IANAL but Dean is.
I suspect he is referring to the Altair. We had one in our engineering lab and I did some rudimentary coding on it, circa 1979. We also had a number of KIM-1s which made the big advance from binary input to hexadecimal.
If you had FPGAs when you studied engineering then these were probably before your time.
It's well-known that El Nino disrupts Atlantic hurricane formation, and El Nino is active this year (last year it was La Nina, the opposite phase of the cycle). Nobody is claiming that global warming will put an end to El Nino cycles, so it is clear that hurricane frequency will continue to rise and fall with those cycles (along with other factors).
Doesn't the failure of the model imply a problem with the theory?
Ironically, the CSU team that predicted higher than normal hurricane activity for this year maintains that thermohaline circulation, not global warming, is responsible for the increase. So you ask a pretty fair question.
Perhaps I used the wrong term, but I don't think what you describe really meets the legal definition of "extortion", either. IANAL, however. I do have a concern that, if GLPed software is ever found to be infringing a patent, then that software's license is not valid (according to my understanding of the GPL). So even if Microsoft exempts Novell's customers in a patent lawsuit, and Microsoft prevails, Novell would have to halt their distribution of Linux. So Novell hasn't exempted itself from any legal quandary with this deal, after all.
So now we are rating pop culture references relating to the thread in which they appear "off-topic"? Oh, ye humorless moderators...
The current El Nino cycle has inhibited hurricane production in the Atlantic, a well-known effect. So far, nobody is saying global warming will put an end to El Nino (to the contrary, some say it might make El Nino stronger), and El Nino/La Nina is a cycle after all, so we will have ups and downs in hurricane frequency for a long time to come.
And all this time I thought they were waiting for Lisa Kudrow.
I'm not saying there's nothing to worry about, but I think the indemnity is an issue that is orthogonal to the GPL, and perhaps Perens has raised a red herring here. And I'm one who agrees with Perens far more often than not.
Is that for real?
Where can I find this "covenant of the GPL"?
This half of your premise is correct: Rights aren't transferable. But, although you can waive the exercise of a right in a given instance ("I'll waive my 5th amendment rights in this case in exchange for immunity"), you can never "give up rights" (as in, "From this day forward, I declare that I no longer shall have the right to freedom of speech" -- regardless of your declaration, you will always have that right).
I can give up my right to bear arms by choosing to not bear arms.
You can waive your right to bear arms for a time by not exercising it, but that doesn't keep you from changing your mind later.
But I can't take away someone else's right to bear arms, nor can I elect to give my right to bear arms to some convicted murderer who is barred from ownership. Someone who chooses to not participate in a process when the participation is trivially easy loses their right to complain when the results are not what they wanted. They voluntarily and knowingly gave it up. That doesn't contradict the 1st Amendment.
"Transfer of rights" isn't even part of the argument here, it's a red herring. Your conclusion simply doesn't follow from any of the arguments you've put forward.
The point is, exercising a right (at some later time) can never be contingent on your casting a ballot, whether it's for a declared candidate or some futile write-in candidate. If there's a contingency, then it isn't a right at all. We have another word for things you are allowed to do under contingency. That word is privilege. There are no privileges defined in the Bill of Rights.
if you do not vote, you forfeit all right to complain about anything your government does until november 2008 (by which time, you will have learned your lesson and will vote, right?) Not true; see Amendment #1, Constitution, United States of America.
It's the best solution. Oregon has had this for a while. It's an option in California (you can get permanent absentee voter status and have a ballot mailed to you automatically for every election).
My understanding is that Oregon has seen an increase in voter participation since adopting the vote-by-mail system.
Well, what the ACLU actually advocates is liberty, or more specifically, civil liberties. It's even in their name. Since personal responsibility goes hand in hand with responsible exercise of liberty (as this case makes obvious), it follows naturally, doesn't it?