*All* telecom companies are evil.

But T-Mobile is the least evil available in the US.

AT&T, on the other hand, *define* evil.

Thanks. Are we sure that the truecryptcheck site has clean checksums?

But it does appear to be unavailable if you don't already have a copy. Source is gone as well.

I'm not sure if everyone else in this thread watched the same hearing I did.

I don't know what any of the voted for, since I haven't seen the details of the proposals.

But I know what they said. The Democrats argued in favor of Net Neutrality. Not the label of Net Neutrality, but the substance. The Republicans argued against the substance of Net Neutrality.

So if you try to convince me that the Democrats might actually vote for something contrary to what they said, I'll concede the point. Same with the Republicans.

But I'm a bit skeptical of the notion that both voted for the opposite of what they said, in effect each voting for their opponents' stated position.

Actually, it is. But even inside the center console, I feel safer with the low profile flash drive. The slot is on a ledge about halfway up the front of the compartment, so it's reasonably well protected, but I could still imagine dropping something on it or catching it as I put something in there.

Are there still cars with built in storage?

Ford included a whopping 10GB hard disk in their fanciest tech package 5 years ago. You can't get that now. Instead you get a USB port in the center console.

I've got a 64G low profile thumb drive plugged in with most of my music collection. Standard MP3s, no DRM issues. There are *other* issues -- the system has only so many slots to hold metadata, so if I add too many songs it will freak out and re-index the USB each time I start the car. But as long as I don't exceed some limit it behaves just fine.

For my purposes anyway, no storage and USB is far superior to built-in storage.

You might be underestimating the cost of a PC. I bought my first PC in 1982 and it came out to almost exactly $3000. That *was* upgraded a bit -- it had *two* floppy drives and they were double sided. *And* I upgraded the memory to 256K, and got a CGA card and an amber monitor.

I was still using punch cards in school (FORTRAN and PASCAL) as of 1978, but turnaround was much faster than overnight. It seldom took more than two or three hours to run my several hundred millisecond program.

My bad. Flashblock doesn't help. No luck blocking it with the ad blocker either....

It's both. Copyright is for authors. Patents are for inventors.

Congress later (1909) broadened the meaning of what an author is, so now copyright covers more than just text. Patents are still for inventors.

Whether either actually works to promote progress is another discussion, but it was clearly the intent of the framers.

Flashblock.

You still get the flash icon on the page, but you have to click on it before it will actually execute. It does this on all web pages, not just Slashdot.

Second best (after Adblock Plus) of all the Firefox extensions I install.

I've only seen the engine brake effect engage when I'm in hill mode, so I'm sure the C-Max and the Fusion are the same there. I also only saw that after they modified the firmware last August to allow EV mode up to 85mph, although you really only see that if you *are* heading downhill.

Good point, although this effect *is* significant for aircraft (called "P"-factor.) Most of that effect is aerodynamic rather than gyroscopic, but not all of it.

The complication of coupling two flywheels to the drivetrain are minimized if you do it electrically. Flywheels can act as high power-rate batteries, and you would then treat the drivetrain as a "conventional" hybrid. The big difference is that you're not limited by the rate at which you can feed electricity to a battery from the brakes or draw from it while you accelerate, since flywheels are much more flexible in that regard.

When I was in school (mid 70s) there was work being done on "super-flywheels," both for automotive use and for fixed energy storage. Flywheels can deliver (or accept) virtually unlimited power -- not unlimited energy, but if you need a burst of power in a very short time, your limitation is not going to be the flywheel.

One of the applications I read about then was for a university particle accelerator. The local city got upset at having the lights dim all over the city when they fired it up, so they spent hours spinning up a flywheel to release it in milliseconds.

This is handy for vehicles, since batteries can't accept or deliver power as rapidly as flywheels can and that limits both braking and acceleration. On the other hand, in an accident, being able to release power rapidly is more dangerous.

Super-flywheels, incidentally, were made of fiber based materials spinning at very high speeds, just like described here. They had the same or higher energy density as metal flywheels but failed less catastrophically. Metal flywheels tend to chunk when they fail, the fiber materials to shred.

Um.

You're going to get this effect (under braking or acceleration) no matter what orientation the flywheel is using. In one case it will be precession, in the other it will be a straightforward angular acceleration. The vertical axis might work better when your speed is constant.

When you apply the brakes with a vertical axis flywheel, you are accelerating that flywheel which means an application of torque. The frame of the car will experience the opposing torque, providing a twisting force in one direction or the other, depending on which direction the flywheel spins. Drawing energy off the flywheel to accelerate the car will twist you in the opposite direction.

Counter rotating flywheels would probably solve the problem.

I haven't seen this. My hybrid (Ford Fusion) bleeds a little off the speed when I lift the throttle, but somewhat less than a regular ICE drivetrain would. The brakes, on the other hand, extract speed energy into the battery as fast as the battery can take it -- if I'm braking harder than that, it simultaneously applies the friction brakes. From a "user interface" perspective, I can't tell which part of the brake system is being used until I've come to a stop, when it gives me a "braking score" that shows how much of my braking energy was recovered. After a while you get a feel for how hard to brake to get the most back from braking. As a bonus, brake pads might last you 60 or 70 thousand miles.

I'm pretty sure the reason the car doesn't freewheel completely on throttle lift is so that the car will behave more or less like 40 years of driving an ICE car has taught me to expect. That's a lot safer -- principle of least surprise, y'know.

There's a downhill mode that makes the car recover energy more aggressively, intended for when you're coming down a mountain. If the battery fills up before you get to the bottom, it will fire up the engine as a brake. I don't know how much (if any) fuel it uses for this -- the mpg meter stays pegged at "60+", which is its highest value.