3 of the 4 mentioned will give anything a good review if you pay them and if you ever looked at the history of "TRUSTe", you're realise that _anything_ they endorse is best avoided.

"In the short-term, it may be cheaper just to keep the drivers on for the entire trip"

Indeed, but they may not be actually driving until they're in areas where it's _needed_

This is going to make a big difference to uptime hours and I can see "drivers" being abused by unscrupulous employers.

"Trucks are pulled over all the time for violations in properly securing their loads, and that's despite the fact that the driver is currently held legally responsible for it. Heaven help us if it's a corporate drone three states removed who may or may not be traceable."

There are ways of writing laws to hold corporations and their officers legally responsible for such things.

In one company I worked for (not in the USA), the CEO sent out a letter stating at the top: "I have no wish to go to jail for activities performed by my staff. Therefore any illegal activity will be dealt with swiftly and severely." it went on to say that culprits would be terminated on the spot and appropriate regulators notified., etc etc.

Firstly: Try catching a concorde flight today.

Secondly: All new-design contemporary turbofan jet aircraft travel slightly SLOWER than their turbojet predecessors (0.85–0.855 for a 747-400 instead of 0.89-0.91 for turbojet designs such as the Convair 900 and Boeing 707 - the 747 has always been a turbofan engine aircraft). Going faster than this has severe fuel penalties as it causes major issue with the fixed-pitch fans (and the larger the fan the lower the top speed).

There's a push to make civil transports slightly slower still for fuel economy purposes (bigger fans == greater efficiency/thrust but lower optimal speed as noted above). Having said that, the journey times are slightly faster because higher thrust levels mean that newer aircraft (or re-engined versions of old designs such as the 747) spend less time accelerating to cruise speed and altitude. In addition the higher thrust levels mean that the aircraft can carry far more passengers than original designs at the same or lower overall fuel consumption (same latency, bigger pipes)

Believe it or not, the big thing currently keeping speeds high is wing sweep. The "traditional" sweep on a jet transport was "set in stone" in 707-727 days and is optimised for near-transonic speeds. It's inefficient at the actual high-subsonic 0.8-0.85 speeds travelled at today - with inefficiency increasing as speed goes down (and of course, swept wings have nasty low speed stall characteristics plus they're a major contributor to the height limitations of current transport aircraft for the same reason - stall characteristics in thin air/high speed - aka "coffin corner", exacerbated by speed limits imposed by the use of fans for thrust instead of pure turbojet)

Reegnineering the 747 or other classic designs for a lesser sweep is a no-go area. There's been a lot of resistance within the industry to "de-sweep" wings as it's felt that passengers will associate this with turboprops, but this is a concept which _will_ happen with increasing emphasis on fuel consumption.

Several industry magazines have postulated that the ideal cruisng speed for future civil transports is likely to be in the 0.78-0.80 range, although there's a possibility that higher altitudes will be involved too (going above ~45,000 feet brings ozone into the cabin. This needs mitigation) To get there _will_ require much straighter wings than we currently see. Whether passengers like it will probably not matter in the end.

"you get your connectivity from Pedro, and something goes wrong."

That's between you and Pedro, not you and AT&T. Let Pedro duke it out with them. He's not going to let them screw him over or you'll take your business down the road to Shnycorp.

The reality is that Pedro provides substantially better service for a couple of bucks more than Shinycorp

Shinycorp do big nationwide advertising and low prices, by cutting deals with AT&T for lower quality of service and longer times to get onsite than AT&T sells as standard.

The result is that when your line goes down with Shinycorp, you argue for hours with their phone droids and go through the entire modem waggling routine before they admit there might be a problem and someone will be out next week to fix it.

When you ring Pedro, you speak to Pedro's tech, who looks at your circuit and goes "I'm on it. There'll be someone onsite by the end of the day"

Shinycorp competes with Bastardcorp, Screwupcorp and Cheatemcorp. They all have low prices with various gotchas and they all offer the same poor level of service. They have the highest rate of customer complaints in the industry but everyone goes with them because they all put saturation advertising in the media, so joe average has never heard of the others. They make millions each day and everyone hates them but doesn't look elsewhere.

Pedro makes a comfortable income. You're happy with your level of service. He lives or dies on this, so it's in his interest to keep his customers happy.

Fantasy? No, that's what happens in places with LLU and fairly closely describes the way I buy my connection

"As an aside, why the fuck are there drum brakes any more?"

For some applications, they work better. (and they're cheaper)

Why do you need to borrow a scantool when you can buy a bluetooth ODB one for $20-$60 (or $5 for the fake ELMs, which still work fine) ?

"My point was that points needed to be constantly adjusted."

Yup. I put a homemadeTAI system in my mother's car (A 1974 Datsun B210) back in the 80s and it went from needing point adjustments every 5000 miles to almost never (about 20k miles due to the rubbing block wearing out)

When I changed the points over to an optocoupler assembly the mechanic was horrified, but having eliminated the rubbing block the timing stayed solid for 60,000 miles.

As a nice side effect the engine could whiz through to 9000rpm if you weren't careful (6000rpm redline) but as we'd balanced everything this wasn't too much of an issue

" Just degree the pickup."

Uh yeah right.

The pickup runs off a notched tooth ring on the flywheel plus another on the camshaft if you're lucky.
each plug has its own coil pack. Wasted spark is common (partly because it ensures unburned hydrocarbons don't go down the exhaust)

It's been a long time since cars had distributors.

"Sadly, even most shops now are useless as they just plug the computer in and do what it tells them"

Yup. A GF spent about $3000 getting her mercedes C220 fixed because of this - and it made no difference whatsoever.

The actual fault was a jammed open thermostat. Replacing that ( $50 because it comes in a special housing) solved every other problem.

Because the engine remained stone cold when it should have warmed up the computers got confused and reported alarm codes out the wazoo. A competent mechanic would have looked for a common cause. Competent mechanics at dealerships are a rarity.

"The problem is that people like you who want to work on their car are becoming more and more rare"

I'll phrase it slightly differently: I want _my_ choice of mechanic to be able/allowed to work on it, not the stealership.

"But yeah, you can use a paper clip."

You can use a paper clip on (E)ODB cars too, or with some there's a "secret" mode for getting the readout (My nissan has something like keyoff/keyon/keyoff/keyon/ 5 *fullthrottle/off then hold the pedal down for 10 seconds)

It's generally easier to just use an ODB dongle though.

"I prefer to buy an import from a country where the engineers can count and know what metric is, like Germany or Japan. Every fastener will be metric, except spark plugs of course."

And the bolts holding the seatbelt anchors. For some reason even in europe and japan these are SAE

Presumably this is to prevent someone kludging something unsuitable in.

"Thus it must be branded as a waste product, and disposing of a radioactive waste product is insanely expensive if it is possible at all."

Which is silly, because thorium isn't particularly radioactive, even when turned into ingots.

Seriously. The stuff in the tailing ponds has a 14 billion year halflife - all the other isotopes are long-gone.

The main problem (as with many of the transuranics) is heavy metal poisoning if it gets into the biosphere.

"However, I've never seen a single reference to a study of the effects of windmills on regional wind patterns, massive areas of solar panels on regional temperature/wind/etc., let alone manufacturing of these things. Are they issues?"

In a nutshell: not really. The effects on wind pattern and temperature is negligable, even when compared to the downwind effects we already generate from cities.

In a larger nutshell: With appropriate nuclear technology, these things become totally superfluous. Solar and wind sources are notoriously "unreliable" which means you need backing plant to deal with extended downtimes or lose ~35% to storage systems (batteries).

If you can run the backing (aka peaking) plant from a nuclear source then you no longer need the Windmills / solar PV / tidal installations to keep your carbon emissions down and they revert to simply being a pain in the ass as far as power grid distribution designs go.

Even now, the economics of the things is shonky as all hell (if they were a viable source, power companies would be installing them all over and not sucking on subsidies to do so) and a good chunk of the seriously nasty pollution in china is a result of making solar PV systems.

I know I'm a LFTR cheerleader, but they have lots of upsides and few downs.

One of the major upsides over conventional nukes is that their power output can be changed rapidly and repeatedly without being crippled by the xenon poisoning that hits light water plants when you turn the output power down and results in an inability to turn LWRs back up for several hours. This is the critical factor which means that conventional "peaking plant" can be dispensed with.

LFTRs _will_ happen as large civil power plants within 20 years. Test ones will happen before the end of this decade (I'm expecting to see small testbeds the size of the USA's 1960s ones before the end of 2016)

They'll undoubtedly be chinese technology and that's a direct result of the USA cancelling all research 40 years ago because the test reactors were too good at making heat for driving turbines and effectively useless at producing weaponisable materials.

The chinese are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into LFTR research, whilst USA and EU groups are left begging for enough money (a few hundred thousand dollars) to run a few computer simulations to validate their models. It would make more sense for the western researchers to go and contract for China.

Why is this happening? Because china's leadership are mostly drawn from engineering backgrounds and when they see a need for something, they make sure it happens. The pollution crisis has underscored that need, but China announced it was planning to eliminate coal plants back in 2010 so this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

"Atoms for Peace" - from china. Yes really.