That's true. I've also checked the odometer and speedometer against the the highway mileposts and at low speeds against the automatic radar stations that say "Your speed is: X". For the mileposts, I time how long it takes me to drive ten miles according the milepost signs on a flat stretch of road in very light traffic so I don't have to change lanes. On the Honda Civic Hybrid, the speedometer is accurate to within a mile per hour at 70 mph as well as 25 mph. Pretty good. As far as I can tell, the odometer is accurate to within a tenth of a mile or so as well, but I haven't checked with the new set of tires I got, which might have changed things.

From all of this, it seems like Honda is doing a better job of accuracy than some of the other car makers. Perhaps that suit against Hyundai about falsely reporting the fuel economy was warranted. I felt the one against Honda probably wasn't, i.e., Honda was sued because many people didn't get the advertised fuel economy, but I've not had a problem. I have heard rumors that BMW sets their speedometers about 5 mph faster than the real world as a marketing thing to fool their drivers into thinking the cars are faster than they are, but never saw any proof. Apparently this kind of thing really does happen.

When I am going faster than the car in front of me, I turn on my turn signal and when it's clear, I get in the left lane, pass the car and then get back into the right lane. It's not my fault that others choose to disregard the speed limit and then attempt to intimidate other drivers on the road by driving aggressively. I admit that my actions might exacerbate the issue, but frankly, I'm sick and tired of Americans not actually giving a shit about the rest of society and see no reason why I should accommodate people who disregard the rules and display unsafe and aggressive behavior. If someone runs up behind me suddenly, I can see that they are in a hurry and will get out of the way as soon as I can, until then they need to BACK OFF!

I have made that calculation, and many others besides. My trip MPG is consistently ~1 mpg off the one I calculate from the gas pumps at fill-up and from the odometer. While not perfect, you couldn't realistically ask for a better estimate than that.

In fact, the web-site fueleconomy.gov allows people to put in real world estimates of their fuel economy and show that data side-by-side the EPA estimates. Here's the one for my car, a 2010 Honda Civic Hybrid. The real world estimates (based on 11 data points) are about 1 mpg off from the EPA estimates. That's pretty darn good. While I will admit that there might be some companies who are gaming the system, it's not EPA's fault that they are doing that. By posting the real world fuel economy estimates, EPA is actually trying to combat that behavior. What I see here going on in this thread (and all too commonly on /. and American society in general) is a bunch of people demonizing the government for no good reason when they should be blaming the companies/individuals who are actually conducting the bad behavior.

Yeah, well, here's back at ya: aggressive drivers like yourself make me want to drive as slowly as possible (which is also the safe thing to do with an aggressive driver, gradually decelerate until the speed is appropriate for the space the driver behind you is maintaining). I try to get out of the left lane as soon as I can, but hey man, my tax payer dollars helped pay for that road and I've got a right to drive the speed limit in whatever lane I want. I don't care what you think about it, why should you have the right to whatever speed you wish but I don't?

When I had an alarm system connected in my previous residence, the saleswoman from the alarm company told me that the number one black market item in a home for a burglar to obtain is a gun. Highest street value. Making guns rarer means fewer gun deaths, period, there's no uncertainty there or bullshit answers about how criminals will always have guns. That includes accidental shootings and thefts and subsequent use of the stolen guns to kill people. To use the analogy from further up the thread, if every home had heroine there would be more heroine addicts, guaranteed.

But conservatives/libertarians/etc. are not motivated by rationality nearly as well as fear (evidence here for evidence), so unfortunately they will not accept any rational arguments the way liberals expect them to.

This is important. The slashdot crowd can talk about how you can't run most apps on a tablet, but a lot of these apps you just mentioned are made for tablets. No one doubts that MS will maintain a strong presence in the corporate world for a long time, but increasingly people aren't computing with PCs any more, they're using mobile devices. In any case, even in the corporate world, people are losing interest in MS. I do get e-mails about training for ipad users, I have yet to get one for Win8. In fact, IT has banned win8 from its computers thus far.

If you head over to statcounter and add up the iOS plus OS X versus all the windows flavors, you find that the peak in MS dominance of usage share occurred in May, 2009 at 94.33%. The minimum? February, 2013 at 86.04%. Apple is inversely correlated: max at Feb., 2013, minimum at Dec., 2008. This is not a coincidence. Similarly, if you look at Win8 adoption rates, you find that win8 is being adopted at 0.3% of usage share per month. Win7 was adopted at 1.1% per month. Even Vista was adopted at 0.5% per month, a greater adoption rate than Win8!! Microsoft has failed with its newest OS, and moreover the crest of each new OS they've released has been lower and lower. I'll admit that right now that non-MS stuff is a lot like people without a TV, growing, but still insignificant, but just wait until somebody like Valve releases a gaming OS or console based on linux, you could see the usage share of MS start to drop more rapidly.

How about climate change? The Virginia Attorney General scored points with his Tea Party supporters by claiming that Michael Mann (of the hockey stick and climate-gate fame) had misapprioriated VA funds by conducting fraud. I'm no fan of the behavior of some tenured professors, but on the other hand without tenure, jack-asses like Cuccinelli would get to dictate who researches what. The result would be what communism looked like in the cold war: if you research a politically unpalatable topic, or a topic that later becomes politically unpalatable, you get "disappeared". This is not a better alternative.

That's a good point. I looked and looked but can't find evidence that Gartner considered an xbox as something running "Windows". I did find this article that says that Apple TV was outselling the Xbox on a per quarter basis as late as last year. Lifetime sales of Xbox are still higher, but Xbox has been around a long while. While I don't doubt that a new Xbox release would reverse this, what I don't get is what Microsoft would possibly do with a new console that would make it worth buying. A little hardware refresh won't make any magic happen. On the other hand, there is this funny quote from the founder of Valve saying that an Apple iTunes-style walled garden gaming platform would eat Sony's, Nintendo's and Microsoft's lunch, so go figure. I can't imagine that Apple looks at the gaming space and thinks there's an opening there though, it's pretty saturated. On the other hand, there's a lot of clever little games out there for the iTunes store made by indie developers, maybe they really could create an opening for themselves.

You've obviously never lived in a major city in the U.S. The highway noise is 24/7 and constant, no intermittent about it. No amount of berms and sound fences will stop it, in part because of the Acoustic Shadow effect. Sure a highway doesn't throb, but that's not much of an issue with the newer wind turbines. The older wind turbines (70s era vintage, from the last energy crisis) had prop. speeds that were fast enough to throb, but people realized that having the props spin so fast was inefficient and was reducing the lifetime of the props due to fracturing, so the newer turbines all have automatic transmissions and gear boxes in them to keep the prop rotating at the same speed regardless of wind strength. As far as I know the props spin nice and slow now. Kills less birds, no throbbing.

As the owner of a Honda Civic Hybrid, I can attest that my battery suffers this too. When I first bought my car, I realized that the fuel economy was much worse in cold weather than in mild temperatures. In hot weather the battery just needs ~10-15 mins. to cool off after you start the car, but in cold weather I get worse fuel economy persistently. At first I thought it was something like the air pressure in the tires, but man... even after getting religious about keeping my tire pressure up I still get worse fuel economy.

Another thing that I've thought might cause it is that the air density at 32 F is only about 93% of air at 70 F (~20 C). This may become significant at high speeds because IIRC air resistance doubles every 10 mph or so so colder air may mean significantly more resistance at high speeds.

Regardless of other factors, the battery definitely holds less charge in cold weather.

And what, god was supposed to have directed that company to mimic his beetle? You know, I don't usually respond to ACs but given Marco Rubio's recent comments I figured I would. Here's what he said:

Him, you and all the people like you couldn't be more wrong. Science and mathematics has everything to do with the economic growth of the United States. How can the U.S. compete in biotechnology if what we learn in biology courses is that god created the beetle? How can we compete in oil production if all we learn is that fossils are there to fool the unbelievers and the earth is 6000 years old? Time and evolution created both: 4.54 billion years is a LONG time, animal species can change a lot over that amount of time.

Frankly, I think you people are all nuts, and I'd happily let you live in your bubble if not for the fact that you all are ruining my country. I think it's a real shame that our education system has failed so miserably to produce roughly 48% of the voting population who can't even do basic arithmetic (i.e., go read Ryan's or Romney's economic plans: they either don't add up or impossibly vague). This has nothing to with Democrat or Republican, you could have figure out who was the right person to vote for just by looking at which one could do basic arithmetic. This election, my vote went for logic and reason, and that fortunately prevailed, but only by 3.3% or so.

Actually, EPA and DOE jointly sponsor a web-site that gives you not just EPA ratings, but allows users to enter in their own ratings. Here is the link to my car:

http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=29712

You can see the EPA rating and the average user's rating are similar, but not exact. The more popular a car is, the more estimates there are. If you click on view individual estimates, it'll show you the locale, driving conditions, and the last time the estimate was updated. I found this site to be invaluable when trying to calculate how long it will take my hybrid to pay itself off in reduced gasoline costs. The answer, BTW, is 90-99k miles, or 5-6 years. Since the hybrid battery is warrantied for 100k miles or 8 years, it'll be fine.

On a different note, I can't help but wonder if Lucas is in poor health

He's pissed off because everyone keeps bitching at him. Nobody liked the Star Wars prequels, nobody liked Indiana Jones 4 (a.k.a. Indiana Jones and the kingdom of just how stupid do they think we are?), and Red Tails. He's declared he's going back to directing art films.

My opinion is that the Star Wars prequels not only showed that Lucas was making it up as he went along for the prequels, but in episodes 4-6 too. All that wondering about why Obi Wan would lie to Luke about Darth Vader killing his father? It's because Lucas pulled it out of his ass because he needed to make another movie after Star Wars was a hit and wanted some sort of continuity and dramatic tension to bring the characters together. Meh, he's still brilliant in terms of special effects, etc., it's just a pity he could never recognize that he should work with someone to get less silly storylines.

Did he now? I really appreciate your comment, it gives me hope! Shit, I wish I still had one of those candy colored imacs. I can still remember replacing OS 9 with os X 10.0 beta on the graphite colored imac. I remember booting X11 up in rootless mode and remarking, "this is going to put SGI out of business." Good times man, good times. Nothing like that sort of innovation going on today in the desktop-space (i.e., yeah yeah, unix had X11 for years, but what I liked about it was that I had all the power and functionality of that SGI 4 processor RISC workstation in my desktop -- just awesome).

So if you head over to macrumors.com, the posters are gleefully proclaiming the death of skeuomorphic design in iOS and OS X. This is a good thing. The leather stitching, the ridiculous animations in ical, the stupid contacts list, the game center that made me feel like I trapped in some creepy casino with chain smokers and octagenarian gambling addicts: this is all gone, and good riddance to bad rubbish. However, on the other hand, if you read this article with the following very interesting passage:

Inside Apple, tension has brewed for years over the issue. Apple iOS SVP Scott Forstall is said to push for skeuomorphic design, while industrial designer Jony Ive and other Apple higher-ups are said to oppose the direction. "You could tell who did the product based on how much glitz was in the UI," says one source intimately familiar with Apple’s design process.

After reading that, I realized that this was indeed true and in fact there has been an alternate philosphy besides the skeuomorphic design which is the "war on color" in some aspects of OS X (e.g., the flat gray scroll bars, the gray linen background for the virtual desktop manager, even the world map for changing the time zone). So, now I'm wondering if the skeuomorphic faction led by Forstall has lost the debate, was Ive and the other minimalist design people behind the "war on color" and if that's true, is that what we'll see in future versions of the OS with Ive leading the interface design? I'm not sure how I feel about that, I really don't like using an OS that is drab and boring, it's depressing (I actually liked Aqua for the most part, which was also Forstall's invention I guess). Either way, it's good to know that Apple isn't afraid of rocking the boat still. That skeuomorphic crap might have been good for increasing everyone's vocabulary with regards to interface design, but it was annoying as hell to use.

Now, if only Apple would admit they screwed up the document versioning system beyond repair and give us a proper "Save As..." since the dawn of the computer (or thereabouts) I would consider Apple as having fully realized the error of their ways and moving decidedly in a less terrible direction. But alas, Federhigi is still in charge and they haven't brought Serlet back from retirement unfortunately.