If you want quality and repairability too, those prices will be going up by another order of magnitude or so. Enjoy your $8,000 microwave, three for $250 lightbulbs, and 150-year iPhone contract. We live in a disposable society based around the creation of the maximum possible waste, we are at its epicenter, and we spend all of our free time pointing our fingers at others in blame.

"Set the level so that it does not effect [sic] the U.S.A." -- you do realize that China's pollution is, in large part, there because US companies moved or contracted most of their manufacturing there, right? This is a nice example of reaping what you sow -- America avoids pollution itself by offshoring, but the process of offshoring trades the pollution for severe weather instead.

Speak for yourself. I run both Windows 8 and Windows 7 machines, and my Windows 7 machines are demonstrably more stable and less buggy than my Windows 8 one. (Note: I say one because I've had such a piss-poor experience with Windows 8, which rapidly degrades in performance to the point of near-unusability. And even straight out of the box with a fresh install, it likes to do things such as take multiple *minutes* before task manager appears on a core i5 machine with 8GB of RAM and 50% CPU utilization or less. There's no way I'm buying another machine with Windows 8, let alone installing it on one. If I could downgrade to Win7 without needing to pay for an OS when I already paid for Win8, I'd do it in a heartbeat. And no, Linux is not an option for people who need to use real software.)

Windows 8 is a total dog, and has been from the day it shipped, even before one takes into account the absolutely godawful UI.

Suuuure you do. And there are plenty of owners around here, but I've not seen any of them do *any* of the things you claim are common, so I'm going to say they're figments of your imagination.

If there's one thing a 2CV does not provide, it is comfort.

36mpg is also not what you get in a Smart car, driven properly. Last time I measured mileage and fuel consumption over 5 or 6 tanks of gas, I averaged more like 45-47mpg in mine, and I don't even try that hard.

Way to generalize. As it happens, I own a Smart (as well as another, larger vehicle). I own it in recognition of the fact that most of the time, my wife or I drive somewhere alone, and dragging along five seats and sheet metal weighing extra three quarters of a ton (yes, that's the difference between the curb weight of my Mazda6 wagon and my Smart convertible) simply doesn't make sense.

However, it is only *ever* parked in an actual parking space or on my own driveway, it has never been on a sidewalk, I never block crosswalks or even pull into them if there's somebody legitimately allowed to cross by the signal, I never ignore lights, and I have never driven the wrong way down a one-way street. In fact, I would be willing to place a bet that I am a more careful and law-abiding driver than you ever will be. And my wife doesn't do any of these things, either.

But in your world, because you've got a big, fat, imaginary bee in your bonnet, damaging random, innocent people's expensive vehicles is just fine? Well hopefully somebody keys your Hummer and pisses in the gas tank. You probably did something to deserve it, after all.

Once you check in, you're in the airline's system.

That's not how it works, or even remotely so.

Not to mention that digital camera sensors -- especially the cheap ones that would almost certainly be used -- have limited dynamic range, limited low-light sensitivity, noticeable display lag, and issues with blooming when dealing with bright sources such as sunlight, and most LCD / OLED screens suffer from visibility issues (glare, too-weak backlighting, etc.) that simply don't exist for a mirror. Like much of Tesla's form-before-function design, this is a solution in search of a problem that simply doesn't exist.

[citationneeded.jpg]

I don't believe for one second they got even remotely near 3-4mpg difference from side mirrors, even if they were spectacularly badly-designed. The frontal area of the mirrors is microscropic compared to the frontal area of the car.

Using the same here, but sadly they've recently blocked tethering -- even if you're just tethering an Android tablet to your Android phone. (So effectively, simply increasing your screen size.) That rather kills the deal, for me -- unlimited data is pointless when you can only use that data on the phone itself.

That assumes it's even results of an actual survey, which is pretty debatable. What evidence do we have that they didn't simply make the whole thing up and publish a press release?

Just another sign of the demise of Slashdot. A clearly fake survey viral created solely to publicize a coupon website makes it to the front page of a site supposedly for people smart enough to know better than to fall for rubbish like this.

Could this any more obviously be a viral scam? No.

And nor could Slashdot any more obviously be a shadow of its former self.

The other innovation is flight simulation - many schools are getting new Redbird full motion simulators (cheap - something like $30K fully equipped).

I don't know where you got that figure from, but it's nonsense. A static, non-enclosed Redbird sim will set you back $29,800 - $37,295 depending on spec. For a static, enclosed sim you're talking $39,800 - $47,295.

You're not picking up a full-motion sim for less than $59,800, twice what you figure -- and it could run you up to $199,000 depending on the model.

Perhaps you're confusing the Redbird XWIND with a full-motion sim? That, you could pick up for $27,900 -- but at that price you're not getting full motion, just roll, yaw, and drift. You're also only getting a crosswind sim with no visuals, and almost no controls. And all of this is base pricing, before options.

That makes two of us. Guess the "7-digit newcomers" comment was way off base, eh MachineShedFred?