Not without heavy-duty rollover/crush protection. A regular seatbelt allows the occupant's torso to pivot to the side if the roof begins to crush down on him, while a 4-point harness holds him rigidly upright.

Nope, you've got the gist of it. What you've really got to run these tools continuously over a period of time, so you can get a sense of where the problem link actually is. I had a similar issue with a college ISP many years ago, and didn't have any luck getting it resolved until I set up a script to run regular traceroutes and dump the output to a logfile, so I could go to the administration and say, "This is the IP of the thing that's broken. Fix it." I also had to include the above-linked graph to prove my point; apparently having an entire network segment go dark for hours at a time every day didn't raise any alarms over there.

Just like GP says: on most cars, with the mirrors properly adjusted, a vehicle exiting the field of view of the rear-view mirror will simultaneously cross into the side mirrors, and exit the side mirrors as it enters your peripheral vision. A quick sideways glance may be required to pick it back up at this point, but in most cases it should be nearly alongside you once it's out of the mirrors (this is not strictly true in, say, a convertible with the top up, but it still holds in most cases). This isn't to discount the importance of a good long look before changing lanes, but generally, you should be able to have constant 360-degree situational awareness without craning your neck around the B-pillars.

As previously mentioned, most drivers set their mirrors such that the wing mirrors are completely redundant with the center mirror, and don't cover any of the bind spots that they should be. Here's a great how-to on properly adjusting your mirrors from Car and Driver.

Philatelists Push Petition Pfhor Pluto Probe Postage

(I'm guessing that reference will fly right over the heads of quite a few...)

"Proposing" would be a better choice, since it avoids adding "to."

I'm leaning towards Abh, myself.

Nobody's ever been able to make a rotary or turbine engine that can match a reciprocating-piston engine for efficiency and reliability in a real world scenario. And it's not for lack of trying, either -- aerospace companies would kill to eke that kind of fuel efficiency out of their turbines, and Mazda worked for decades to make a rotary that doesn't burn fuel like a carb'ed big block and that doesn't require a complete teardown and rebuild every 100k miles or so. Yes, there are disadvantages to the piston design, but so far nothing else has managed to overcome the inherent advantages it has in efficiency of combustion. It may happen someday, but it hasn't happened yet.

Anyone who's been paying attention should know by now that the vast majority of hybrids on the market are pure marketing/greenwashing hype. They got a big early boost from the first hybrids to market, the original Prius and Insight, but very little since has lived up to the promise of those first two. If you look closely at those two cars, you'll quickly realize why -- they were designed from the ground up for fuel efficiency, and their hybrid motors were only a part of that strategy. The original Insight, for example, has a body made entirely from aluminum, with a minimized frontal area and vanishingly low coefficient of drag. In spite of its heavy battery pack, the Insight managed to be lighter than any other US-market car at the time. Its engine was a purpose-built, low-displacement 3-cylinder engine made with as much aluminum, magnesium and plastic as the designers could get away with. The electric motor was integrated into the flywheel, minimizing the extra weight of the hybrid system by allowing it to perform two functions simultaneously. The hybrid system helps, but the vast majority of the first-gen Insight's fuel efficiency comes from these things. Tuners have pulled the whole drivetrain out and replaced it with a 200-horsepower Civic Si engine, and still managed almost 50 miles per gallon out of the chassis!

From the above, it's pretty clear that hybrid drivetrains are just a piece of the fuel-efficiency puzzle -- yet ever since those first two cars hit the market, manufacturers have been tacking electric motors to otherwise ordinary cars and selling them to gullible consumers as the saviors of Earth. The electric motors are a little more efficient at low speeds, but everywhere else they're just additional dead weight that the gas engine has to drag around. Is it any surprise that these half-baked hybrids don't perform as advertised?

An architecture firm I contract for was trying to submit a handful of their projects for energy efficiency tax credits. This involved assembling a set of drawings and CAD files for a outside consultant to create energy models of the buildings in question. Architects are required to retain these drawings for about ten years for liability reasons, so this should be easy right...?

Haha, wrong! Sure, they retained the drawings... digitally. But nobody bothered to check that all of the cross-referenced CAD files got saved, or that the links inside of them them weren't broken when they got moved to near-line storage, or that consultant drawings were saved, or that Jimmy The Intern hadn't linked in a dozen files from his desktop for the sake of expediency and never got around to moving them to central storage before he went back to college, and then IS wiped his account. What should have been a quick dive into the archives turned into a three-month-long wild goose chase. Let's just say that I got really familiar with the large-format scanner and the AutoCAD Reference Manager tool.

I am ashamed of how quickly I read that.

That doesn't thin out the field much.

Geez, and I thought all the antifreeze on the ground at the typical U-Pull-It was hazardous. I can't wait until the self-service spaceship salvage yards give you hydrazine poisoning!

I mean, GM's ad department's already done the heavy lifting...

Her solution is distasteful, but her statement of the problem is accurate: Europe has a tremendous problem with xenophobia, one that's only become worse in recent years with increasing immigration from former colonies (many of which happen to be primarily Muslim). Because Europeans are generally used to thinking of their nations as being united by a common culture and (to a somewhat lesser degree) ethnicity, they tend to see those immigrants as outsiders and a social, economic, and religious threat. The 9/11 terror attacks, and the train bombings in London and Madrid, helped to justify that viewpoint to its adherents. If anything positive is to come of this, perhaps it will be to again remind Europe that homegrown radicals are every bit as capable of unspeakable atrocities as foreign radicals are.

I get migraines, but I'm lucky in that they're very occasional and very mild. I would have a hard time telling them from a regular bad headache but for the fact that I get textbook visual auras about an hour before they hit. So, when crazy glowing stairsteps start oozing across my field of vision, I just take a few Advil with a 20oz Coke chaser and lie down with the blinds closed for a few hours.