Unions DO increase the cost of cars substantially, not just the employment of surly overpaid union workers, but also with massive reductions in warranty cost, production costs, etc.
This is one of those things that I would believe given appropriate metrics, but most metrics that I've seen indicate the opposite. For example the JD Power quality award for North America I have never, ever seen go to a Mexican plant, however it's gone to plants in Ontario, Georgia, etc.
I think a lot of it is the image that the anti-union crowd has been so successful at selling of a bunch of surly gangsta's that comprise unions, rather than say lots of fathers and mothers who just want to have a somewhat secure and reasonable lifestyle. Again with production costs and warranty costs: Show me a single car made in Mexico, for instance, that represents a great value and/or great quality versus the US/Canadian counterpart. The Dodge Neon was made in Mexico and Illinois, and it was a well known fact that the one you had to watch out for (in a negative way) was the Mexican one.
I think the proof is the simple fact that cars made in places such as Mexico, where the labour force is paid an iota of the price of the United States/Canadian auto labour force, cost just as much. VW, Chrysler, Ford : They've all opened plants there (many companies have opened plants based upon "low wages" and quickly pulled out after discovering that wages are only one small part of running a factory) and strangely I still see the price of cars rising and rising, yet at the same time the natural unemployment rate increases as an entire sector of workers is displaced. The idea that unions increase the cost of cars substantially is not based in any reality whatsoever.
Most cable modems right now ARE receiving at 10Mbps, however they are artificially capped at 1.5Mbps, or whatever the cable company in question set it at. Indeed this is detrimental because it seems like the cap is per quarter of a second or the like so it's burst/stop, burst/stop. Doesn't help latency.
Do you become emotionally attached to the airbag system in your car because it's programmed to go off in your car exceeds a certain decceleration? What about your seat-belt that has a little pendulum that locks it if you're slowing down? Do you hug it when you get out of your car every day?
They're just machines and I'm not being a "cold person" for not getting attached. BTW: There is no such this as "free-will" in an artifical intelligence system, and every attempt to portray a system like that is a lot of fluff but if you look below the covers you see the wizard pulling the levers. If a car has "emotions" in that it can be "happy" or "sad", it isn't quite dramatic when you see iEmotion = (((fOilFactor / 33.6) * fEngineTemp)/ServiceRate);
You know the most astounding thing about that movie was that it was made in 1968. That absolutely blows me away. It really took on context when watching Apollo 13 and they referenced the theme to 2001, and of course Apollo 13 was in 1970. Bleeple.
You know when robots/artificial intelligence is given human attributes that really is just sad, and it implies a gross misunderstanding by the one perceiving the attributes. For instance I happened to see the movie Aliens the other night and gagged at the scene where "Bishop" is ripped in half by the alien and it's a big emotional scene. You see in my world Ripley would boot him out with the trash down the airlock. Bah.
I know what a disconnected tone sounds like, and if this isn't the same duration as a legit disconnected tone then you can absolutely be guaranteed that the telemarketers will reprogram their machine overnight, rendering anything with incorrectly timed tone patterns completely obsolete.
The commercial is hilarious because it shows a rather wealthy individual who's home is invaded by a telemarketer, and then it proposes the "Telezapper". The reality is that there isn't probably a "upper-crust" person on this planet who would expect their callers to listen through the 3-tone disconnected tone so that they can avoid telemarketers. Personally I'd be very irritated if everytime I called a friend I had to listen to that.
Having said that I get very few telemarketer calls and I presume it's because I'm hostile: For instance if I get a call with the "Please wait for an important call" I've usually hung up by "Pl...". If I get a call and there is a delay I hang up immediately. Quickly I seem to get removed from the sucker lists.
The implications of what your are saying, if there are any implications, is that people shouldn't worry about anthrax until more than 41,611 people are infected per year. Reasonable people do not look at risk this way.
No, but panic over one person dying (while incredibly tragic) is just absurd, especially when for all we know some psycho could have been mailing powderized anthrax for years and no one noticed, but now that every doctor is on the lookout for signs of biological weapons, so they are accurately diagnosing it, whereas previously it could have just been diagnosed as something else. We know that the pesticides that we're putting on our lawns is likely killing people through cancer, polluting our groundwater, reducing fertility rates, possibly leading to Parkinson's disease, likely giving kids nasty childhood diseases, etc. On an individual level the risk is low, but across the whole country it does account for many many magnitudes more than the victims of the anthrax attacks, yet it takes an incredible amount of push to get people to stop using them (I guess the "reward" is a golf green lawn), and you're saying that it's credible to stop using mail because one person died?
In addition, the perceived risks of driving and terrorism are not comparable. Drivers can take reasonable precautions to reduce their risk such as obeying traffic laws, not drinking, keeping their car in repair, etc. There are no similar ways for prudent individuals to reduce the risk from hijacking and bioterrorism except not flying and not using mail.
The only way to significantly reduce the risk is to not drive. The reality is that more deaths in vehicular accidents are victims of the actions of another moreso than themselves. Drive the speed limit and keep checking those mirrors with your hands at 10 and 2, but it doesn't mean much when Bob slams into your car.
The point of my whole message was not so much that deaths are acceptable, but rather that you go for the low hanging fruit first normally, rather than a countrywide state of panic because one person died from anthrax. People are dying every day because of multi-ton SUVs colliding with small vehicles, but to get changes would take years and incredible lobbying, yet even then it's unlikely to happen. i.e. You don't see "HOLY SHIT! SOMEONE DIED IN A CAR ACCIDENT! SHUT DOWN THE HIGHWAYS!".
I just told a good friend who told me she had flu symptoms to phone the ER and see if she should go in, so I apologize if a dip in snail mail seems a bit on the trivial side at this moment.
Phone the ER because of flu symptoms? Sorry, but here in Ontario people going into their local ER because they had trivial things like a common cold or a regular flue is directly responsible for thousands or tens of thousands of deaths per year (because the guy who actually does have a problem gets deferred while the person with the headache gets treated). If you are saying "Stop the mail! Someone might die!" then that is absolutely, positively, grossly ridiculous and knee-jerkish: Did you know that every consumer good you buy has a "human cost" to it? Why not ban car travel, air travel, hell human interactions in general because people might die undertaking any of those? 96 people died building the Hoover dam? Do you think about that when you turn on your computer? The Empire State Building took 5 lives directly in its construction, and countless more in the mining, smelting and rolling of the metal to build it, in the transport to get items to and from the construction site, etc.
"On a long enough timeline the survival rate for all of us is 0." Fight Club - Narrator (Jack) The human condition is one where death is part and parcel with the terroritory.
Someone targets airplanes, and people stop flying. Someone targets mail, and people stop using mail. Is this kind of a response reasonable? There's a lot of knee-jerk reactions which are not necessarily effective, and the economic effects of wholesale eschewment of mail and air travel are pretty widespread.
Yet in other areas people are so incredibly complacent. People will put off travel despite an impossibly remote possibility of being a victim of travel, but they'll happily hop on the local highway without regard for hundreds of 20,000lb transports hurtling down the road at 75mph all around them, any of which could crush them to death in the slightest instant if the driver just flicked the steering wheel the tiniest bit. 41,611 people were killed in automobile accidents alone in 1999 on US roads. 430,700 people died per year between 1990 and 1994 from cigarette smoking alone. It's quite stunning really the fear that the media can drum up when we come to live with enormously costly things like the millions that die every year because of voluntarily choosing to eat Big Macs and other high saturated fat foods.
I'm not saying that dying at the hand to terrorists is comparable to voluntarily undertaken risks, but it does seem that some things are being grossly overstated, such as the risks of anthrax.
As a sidenote to this: MapPoint 2002 absolutely rocks. I love that product. Couple the mini-MapPoint in a PocketPC with a GPS and you have a dream combination: Ever have a paper map show you the nearest bank machine or chinese restaurant?
Last night I noticed that in the one where Flanders goes crazy (when the Hurricane blows down their house) the doctor says that he dealt with Ned "30 years ago" and then it shows Ned as a small child having a tantrum, but of course Ned is supposedly a senior citizen.
6) Only titanic idiots ever get themselves truly lost anyway. Trust me, I live near a forest preserve. Morons go in there all the time, totally unprepared, no maps, no money, no clue. If you suddenly find yourself so far away from civilization that you need to use a GPS to locate your position (nice fantasy world there, by the way) , you sure as hell aren't going to be able to place a cellphone call. There wont be any nearby towers to handle the call. Gee, didn't think about THAT one, didja?:)
Actually they're primarily useful in the "urban jungle". As an example recently I had to drive into downtown Toronto in an area I don't know very well, and no maps show all of the quirks of an urban area (i.e. they don't show closed roads, congested roads, sometimes not even one way streets. It's quite the difference driving in a heavily urbanized area than the fantasy land a map presents). As such I grabbed the coordinates in MapPoint and programmed it as a waypoint in my GPS (a little Garmin) and did a GOTO. I went on the journey in the general vincinity of where it was, but because of extremely congestion I decided to take alternate routes: It meant nothing to me that I was on streets that I'd never been on before because my little GPS was pointing the direction and telling me exactly how far the destination was. In the end I parked on a little sidestreet within 50m of the destination. Worked like a dream.
The accuracy of GPS is significantly (by many, many magnitudes) better than the general tracking that cell companies do. Note that in the WTC disaster they couldn't call the cell phone company and ask where the phones were buried in the rubble: They had to bring in specialized equipment that zeroed in on one single signal (the point being that general radio triangulation is nowhere near as precise as you imply). In other words having your phone relaying where you are all the times to a great degree of precision (are they archiving this? Later can someone say "Show me the route 555-5555 did on Tuesday....oh look he stopped at 555-5729's house and then they met up and walked over to 555-5511's place where they stayed for 7 minutes"? That's an awful lot foreboding than "555-5555 was somehwere in the vincinity of the WTC, +/- several hundred meters.".
Notice that the story says America's first GPS cellphone. Having said that I'll bet that >80% of Slashdot readers are from the US, 10% are Canadian, and then 10% "Miscellaneous", so get use to a fair number of US-oriented posts.
What really sucks is that those 230HP cars come with automatic transmissions that keep the engine below 2500RPM nearly all the time (and the 230HP lies untapped at 5000+RPM). I drove a nice sporty rental car recently (with an auto. trans.), and I was constantly disappointed by it performing like a dying horse. The auto makers tout these high numbers and then detune the tranny into fuel-economy-above-all-else slush.
Isn't HP basically the torque at 1800RPM? Anyways the push for powerful engines, as long as it's coupled with reasonable fuel economy in normal driving, is superb. I recently rented a minivan for a couple of days and the 230HP made for very surprising get-up-and-go in what I would have thought would have been a sluggish beast.
The real revolution in cars is continuously variable transmissions (is it the Audi A6 that has that option on the 2-door model? Apparently it is absolutely stunning and neither automatic nor manuals can touch it for efficiency, hence both performance and fuel economy).
Hrmmm...dunno if I agree with that. I fully agree that as a system it is the whole package that matters, but if you're talking about engines then a 225HP engine is a 225HP engine, and a 100HP engine is a 100HP engine: They are directly comparable as a function of the output of power. Displacement on the other hand is often directly compared when it means extremely little (i.e. as you mentioned bikes are rated by displacement, yet that 0.6L may be 30HP or it may be 80HP. A 5L Mustang was all the rage because it was "5L", yet there are are cars with engines 1/2 the displacement that are far more powerful).
Unfortunately, it's about the same as horsepower in cars.
I would say that a better simile (or is it an analogy? Can't remember that anymore) would be not to horsepower, which is a quantifiable metric of power from the engine, but rather to displacement which truly is a generally, though not completely, meaningless unit of measure.
Ex. A 5.0L Mustang was all the rage and few cared that it had 225HP, which is comparable to the output of some 2.5L engines.
While I realize that it was a show of patriotism or something of that sort (at least I HOPE there's a reason like that behind it), what is with the colours on that site? Jesus my eyes are bugging out in pain.
We often look towards simple answers for complex questions. The simple answer tendered here is to blame the Jews for September 11. I sincerely hope that the majority of readers take the time to learn historical facts and understand the absurdity of such a conclusion.
I am not agreeing whatsoever to the message that you are replying to, however I do find it interesting that you follow up a critique of the cynicism on Slashdot with the words "we often look towards simple answers for complex questions". Indeed. The simple answer is "Bin Laden is the head vampire and if you kill him the vampire hoardes will be vanquished."
For sure the majority of spoilers on consumer cars are absurdly useless. Indeed I remember in the mid/late 80s when you could get the Mustang 5L (did Americans call this the Mustang 1.32G?:-}) in two variants: The plain jane version, and the "GT" version chocked full of ground effects and spoilers. In actual tests the GT version was somewhat slower than the plain version because of the added 40lbs+ of ground effects, plus the fact that they were aerodynamically horrendous and thwarted rather than helped the car.
The coolest thing about F1 cars is that most of the ground force is caused by air going under the car and sucking the car into the ground. Indeed they banned things like Venturi tunnels under there because the ground force was getting too extreme.
NO NO NO NO NO! You see terrorists use login nicks like "IMA_TERRORIST" and they like to have English conversations saying terms like "blow-up" and "assassinate", and they're just looking forward to the day that the US releases backdoored encryption protocols so they can dump all those stupid ultra-secure foreign ones like Rijendael to install the return-of-clipper.
Slashdot Mirror
Unions DO increase the cost of cars substantially, not just the employment of surly overpaid union workers, but also with massive reductions in warranty cost, production costs, etc.
This is one of those things that I would believe given appropriate metrics, but most metrics that I've seen indicate the opposite. For example the JD Power quality award for North America I have never, ever seen go to a Mexican plant, however it's gone to plants in Ontario, Georgia, etc.
I think a lot of it is the image that the anti-union crowd has been so successful at selling of a bunch of surly gangsta's that comprise unions, rather than say lots of fathers and mothers who just want to have a somewhat secure and reasonable lifestyle. Again with production costs and warranty costs: Show me a single car made in Mexico, for instance, that represents a great value and/or great quality versus the US/Canadian counterpart. The Dodge Neon was made in Mexico and Illinois, and it was a well known fact that the one you had to watch out for (in a negative way) was the Mexican one.
I think the proof is the simple fact that cars made in places such as Mexico, where the labour force is paid an iota of the price of the United States/Canadian auto labour force, cost just as much. VW, Chrysler, Ford : They've all opened plants there (many companies have opened plants based upon "low wages" and quickly pulled out after discovering that wages are only one small part of running a factory) and strangely I still see the price of cars rising and rising, yet at the same time the natural unemployment rate increases as an entire sector of workers is displaced. The idea that unions increase the cost of cars substantially is not based in any reality whatsoever.
Most cable modems right now ARE receiving at 10Mbps, however they are artificially capped at 1.5Mbps, or whatever the cable company in question set it at. Indeed this is detrimental because it seems like the cap is per quarter of a second or the like so it's burst/stop, burst/stop. Doesn't help latency.
Do you become emotionally attached to the airbag system in your car because it's programmed to go off in your car exceeds a certain decceleration? What about your seat-belt that has a little pendulum that locks it if you're slowing down? Do you hug it when you get out of your car every day?
They're just machines and I'm not being a "cold person" for not getting attached. BTW: There is no such this as "free-will" in an artifical intelligence system, and every attempt to portray a system like that is a lot of fluff but if you look below the covers you see the wizard pulling the levers. If a car has "emotions" in that it can be "happy" or "sad", it isn't quite dramatic when you see iEmotion = (((fOilFactor / 33.6) * fEngineTemp)/ServiceRate);
You know the most astounding thing about that movie was that it was made in 1968. That absolutely blows me away. It really took on context when watching Apollo 13 and they referenced the theme to 2001, and of course Apollo 13 was in 1970. Bleeple.
You know when robots/artificial intelligence is given human attributes that really is just sad, and it implies a gross misunderstanding by the one perceiving the attributes. For instance I happened to see the movie Aliens the other night and gagged at the scene where "Bishop" is ripped in half by the alien and it's a big emotional scene. You see in my world Ripley would boot him out with the trash down the airlock. Bah.
I know what a disconnected tone sounds like, and if this isn't the same duration as a legit disconnected tone then you can absolutely be guaranteed that the telemarketers will reprogram their machine overnight, rendering anything with incorrectly timed tone patterns completely obsolete.
The commercial is hilarious because it shows a rather wealthy individual who's home is invaded by a telemarketer, and then it proposes the "Telezapper". The reality is that there isn't probably a "upper-crust" person on this planet who would expect their callers to listen through the 3-tone disconnected tone so that they can avoid telemarketers. Personally I'd be very irritated if everytime I called a friend I had to listen to that.
Having said that I get very few telemarketer calls and I presume it's because I'm hostile: For instance if I get a call with the "Please wait for an important call" I've usually hung up by "Pl...". If I get a call and there is a delay I hang up immediately. Quickly I seem to get removed from the sucker lists.
The implications of what your are saying, if there are any implications, is that people shouldn't worry about anthrax until more than 41,611 people are infected per year. Reasonable people do not look at risk this way.
No, but panic over one person dying (while incredibly tragic) is just absurd, especially when for all we know some psycho could have been mailing powderized anthrax for years and no one noticed, but now that every doctor is on the lookout for signs of biological weapons, so they are accurately diagnosing it, whereas previously it could have just been diagnosed as something else. We know that the pesticides that we're putting on our lawns is likely killing people through cancer, polluting our groundwater, reducing fertility rates, possibly leading to Parkinson's disease, likely giving kids nasty childhood diseases, etc. On an individual level the risk is low, but across the whole country it does account for many many magnitudes more than the victims of the anthrax attacks, yet it takes an incredible amount of push to get people to stop using them (I guess the "reward" is a golf green lawn), and you're saying that it's credible to stop using mail because one person died?
In addition, the perceived risks of driving and terrorism are not comparable. Drivers can take reasonable precautions to reduce their risk such as obeying traffic laws, not drinking, keeping their car in repair, etc. There are no similar ways for prudent individuals to reduce the risk from hijacking and bioterrorism except not flying and not using mail.
The only way to significantly reduce the risk is to not drive. The reality is that more deaths in vehicular accidents are victims of the actions of another moreso than themselves. Drive the speed limit and keep checking those mirrors with your hands at 10 and 2, but it doesn't mean much when Bob slams into your car.
The point of my whole message was not so much that deaths are acceptable, but rather that you go for the low hanging fruit first normally, rather than a countrywide state of panic because one person died from anthrax. People are dying every day because of multi-ton SUVs colliding with small vehicles, but to get changes would take years and incredible lobbying, yet even then it's unlikely to happen. i.e. You don't see "HOLY SHIT! SOMEONE DIED IN A CAR ACCIDENT! SHUT DOWN THE HIGHWAYS!".
I just told a good friend who told me she had flu symptoms to phone the ER and see if she should go in, so I apologize if a dip in snail mail seems a bit on the trivial side at this moment.
Phone the ER because of flu symptoms? Sorry, but here in Ontario people going into their local ER because they had trivial things like a common cold or a regular flue is directly responsible for thousands or tens of thousands of deaths per year (because the guy who actually does have a problem gets deferred while the person with the headache gets treated). If you are saying "Stop the mail! Someone might die!" then that is absolutely, positively, grossly ridiculous and knee-jerkish: Did you know that every consumer good you buy has a "human cost" to it? Why not ban car travel, air travel, hell human interactions in general because people might die undertaking any of those? 96 people died building the Hoover dam? Do you think about that when you turn on your computer? The Empire State Building took 5 lives directly in its construction, and countless more in the mining, smelting and rolling of the metal to build it, in the transport to get items to and from the construction site, etc.
"On a long enough timeline the survival rate for all of us is 0." Fight Club - Narrator (Jack) The human condition is one where death is part and parcel with the terroritory.
Someone targets airplanes, and people stop flying. Someone targets mail, and people stop using mail. Is this kind of a response reasonable? There's a lot of knee-jerk reactions which are not necessarily effective, and the economic effects of wholesale eschewment of mail and air travel are pretty widespread.
Yet in other areas people are so incredibly complacent. People will put off travel despite an impossibly remote possibility of being a victim of travel, but they'll happily hop on the local highway without regard for hundreds of 20,000lb transports hurtling down the road at 75mph all around them, any of which could crush them to death in the slightest instant if the driver just flicked the steering wheel the tiniest bit. 41,611 people were killed in automobile accidents alone in 1999 on US roads. 430,700 people died per year between 1990 and 1994 from cigarette smoking alone. It's quite stunning really the fear that the media can drum up when we come to live with enormously costly things like the millions that die every year because of voluntarily choosing to eat Big Macs and other high saturated fat foods.
I'm not saying that dying at the hand to terrorists is comparable to voluntarily undertaken risks, but it does seem that some things are being grossly overstated, such as the risks of anthrax.
As a sidenote to this: MapPoint 2002 absolutely rocks. I love that product. Couple the mini-MapPoint in a PocketPC with a GPS and you have a dream combination: Ever have a paper map show you the nearest bank machine or chinese restaurant?
Last night I noticed that in the one where Flanders goes crazy (when the Hurricane blows down their house) the doctor says that he dealt with Ned "30 years ago" and then it shows Ned as a small child having a tantrum, but of course Ned is supposedly a senior citizen.
NED'S A FRAUD!
6) Only titanic idiots ever get themselves truly lost anyway. Trust me, I live near a forest preserve. Morons go in there all the time, totally unprepared, no maps, no money, no clue. If you suddenly find yourself so far away from civilization that you need to use a GPS to locate your position (nice fantasy world there, by the way) , you sure as hell aren't going to be able to place a cellphone call. There wont be any nearby towers to handle the call. Gee, didn't think about THAT one, didja? :)
Actually they're primarily useful in the "urban jungle". As an example recently I had to drive into downtown Toronto in an area I don't know very well, and no maps show all of the quirks of an urban area (i.e. they don't show closed roads, congested roads, sometimes not even one way streets. It's quite the difference driving in a heavily urbanized area than the fantasy land a map presents). As such I grabbed the coordinates in MapPoint and programmed it as a waypoint in my GPS (a little Garmin) and did a GOTO. I went on the journey in the general vincinity of where it was, but because of extremely congestion I decided to take alternate routes: It meant nothing to me that I was on streets that I'd never been on before because my little GPS was pointing the direction and telling me exactly how far the destination was. In the end I parked on a little sidestreet within 50m of the destination. Worked like a dream.
The accuracy of GPS is significantly (by many, many magnitudes) better than the general tracking that cell companies do. Note that in the WTC disaster they couldn't call the cell phone company and ask where the phones were buried in the rubble: They had to bring in specialized equipment that zeroed in on one single signal (the point being that general radio triangulation is nowhere near as precise as you imply). In other words having your phone relaying where you are all the times to a great degree of precision (are they archiving this? Later can someone say "Show me the route 555-5555 did on Tuesday....oh look he stopped at 555-5729's house and then they met up and walked over to 555-5511's place where they stayed for 7 minutes"? That's an awful lot foreboding than "555-5555 was somehwere in the vincinity of the WTC, +/- several hundred meters.".
Notice that the story says America's first GPS cellphone. Having said that I'll bet that >80% of Slashdot readers are from the US, 10% are Canadian, and then 10% "Miscellaneous", so get use to a fair number of US-oriented posts.
BTW: I meant 2WD model when referring to the CV transmission. I believe to get the AWD version you have to go with a normal transmission.
What really sucks is that those 230HP cars come with automatic transmissions that keep the engine below 2500RPM nearly all the time (and the 230HP lies untapped at 5000+RPM). I drove a nice sporty rental car recently (with an auto. trans.), and I was constantly disappointed by it performing like a dying horse. The auto makers tout these high numbers and then detune the tranny into fuel-economy-above-all-else slush.
Isn't HP basically the torque at 1800RPM? Anyways the push for powerful engines, as long as it's coupled with reasonable fuel economy in normal driving, is superb. I recently rented a minivan for a couple of days and the 230HP made for very surprising get-up-and-go in what I would have thought would have been a sluggish beast.
The real revolution in cars is continuously variable transmissions (is it the Audi A6 that has that option on the 2-door model? Apparently it is absolutely stunning and neither automatic nor manuals can touch it for efficiency, hence both performance and fuel economy).
Hrmmm...dunno if I agree with that. I fully agree that as a system it is the whole package that matters, but if you're talking about engines then a 225HP engine is a 225HP engine, and a 100HP engine is a 100HP engine: They are directly comparable as a function of the output of power. Displacement on the other hand is often directly compared when it means extremely little (i.e. as you mentioned bikes are rated by displacement, yet that 0.6L may be 30HP or it may be 80HP. A 5L Mustang was all the rage because it was "5L", yet there are are cars with engines 1/2 the displacement that are far more powerful).
Unfortunately, it's about the same as horsepower in cars.
I would say that a better simile (or is it an analogy? Can't remember that anymore) would be not to horsepower, which is a quantifiable metric of power from the engine, but rather to displacement which truly is a generally, though not completely, meaningless unit of measure.
Ex. A 5.0L Mustang was all the rage and few cared that it had 225HP, which is comparable to the output of some 2.5L engines.
While I realize that it was a show of patriotism or something of that sort (at least I HOPE there's a reason like that behind it), what is with the colours on that site? Jesus my eyes are bugging out in pain.
We often look towards simple answers for complex questions. The simple answer tendered here is to blame the Jews for September 11. I sincerely hope that the majority of readers take the time to learn historical facts and understand the absurdity of such a conclusion.
I am not agreeing whatsoever to the message that you are replying to, however I do find it interesting that you follow up a critique of the cynicism on Slashdot with the words "we often look towards simple answers for complex questions". Indeed. The simple answer is "Bin Laden is the head vampire and if you kill him the vampire hoardes will be vanquished."
For sure the majority of spoilers on consumer cars are absurdly useless. Indeed I remember in the mid/late 80s when you could get the Mustang 5L (did Americans call this the Mustang 1.32G? :-}) in two variants: The plain jane version, and the "GT" version chocked full of ground effects and spoilers. In actual tests the GT version was somewhat slower than the plain version because of the added 40lbs+ of ground effects, plus the fact that they were aerodynamically horrendous and thwarted rather than helped the car.
The coolest thing about F1 cars is that most of the ground force is caused by air going under the car and sucking the car into the ground. Indeed they banned things like Venturi tunnels under there because the ground force was getting too extreme.
Pipes are old school. Apps that are really cross-platform use sockets over TCP or UDP.
NO NO NO NO NO! You see terrorists use login nicks like "IMA_TERRORIST" and they like to have English conversations saying terms like "blow-up" and "assassinate", and they're just looking forward to the day that the US releases backdoored encryption protocols so they can dump all those stupid ultra-secure foreign ones like Rijendael to install the return-of-clipper.