Are you purposely being obtuse? The Ford Focus and/or Fiesta have been outselling any compact car sold in the US market by any company for over ten years now. The majority of humans worldwide like Ford compacts more than any others. But your one person's supposed firsthand experience means that all Fords forever will be unquestionably bad. Guess I'm lucky you wrote on here otherwise I totally would've been fooled about the truth about a Ford car that you know is bad even though it isn't even for sale in your country yet.

In the time you just spent on Slashdot bloviating on all your prejudices regarding apparently all small cars from every manufacturer in a country, you could have glanced at any review of the Fiesta and picked up on such facts as that (a) the Fiesta is considered by much of the automotive media to be the benchmark of its class and (b) buyers seem to agree with the automotive media (#1 selling vehicle in Europe where it has been available for 2 years).

This is admittedly a bit OT, but I was just curious: Why do people refer to Android as if it was a distinct OS from Linux? To me that's like saying "I use SUSE OS" or something. Just a pet peave of mine. It's not as if it's a new OS. It's a variant of Linux just like countless other variants of Linux that we call Linux.

You've got the volumetric efficiency relative to rpm part backwards. Volumetric efficiency goes down with rpm. Thermal losses go up as surface area of cylinder goes up. However, pumping losses etc go up with rpm. So, the most efficient engine is one that is able to produce the most torque out of the smallest displacement. Or in other words, run at the lowest rpm to meet application's power needs. This is what lies at the heart of why you see in countries where fuel is more expensive than in the US the majority of cars sold are turbocharged diesel engines even though these engines are much more expensive to make than gasoline engines -- they get high power at low rpm the way large engines do but have lower surface area in cylinders). In other words, they are large engines stuffed into small displacement using positive pressure induction and high compression ratio. Another example would be how, if you have a manual transmission car, you'll notice that operating at higher rpms exponentially decreases mpg. A corvette with almost twice the power of a car like a Honda S2000 will actually get better gas mileage in any conditions where the drivers are using the full power of the vehicles (eg racing of course but even just driving them like sports cars are designed to be driven on mountain roads or whatever).

Why did this get modded up as informative? It's almost like people completely didn't get my post.

I have a very distinctive foreign name. The point is that whenever someone searches [i]my name[/i], these posts with my email address come up because my email address has my name in it. And it's obvious that the email address belongs to me.

So using a different account wouldn't change anything at all.

In fact, it bugs me nearly every day:

A few years ago I was living in a place for just a few weeks and using the computer that came with the room there. Unfortunately, I apparently left my browser with the cookie or whatever that automatically logged me into gmail account. So, some asshole came along after I left and used the opportunity to use my email account to register for some forum that discusses getting Viagra in all kinds of illegal ways. My gmail address is basically exactly my name.

So every time I apply for a job, every time I apply for an apartment or whatever, when I meet a girl etc, I feel like someone's going to Google me and nearly the first result that pops up is all this crap about all kinds of illegal ways of getting Viagra for recreation use etc. It's a nightmare. I've done everything I can to email administrators of the forum (which has now seemed to be swallowed up into other forums so the same posts appear on several different sites) but no one ever returns my emails no matter how much I explain the situation. Due to the nature of my work, I'm very confident this has in fact impacted my career. I don't want to think about things like potential girlfriends, housemates, people generally interested in what I've done in the (scientific) community I work in, etc.

If anyone has any ideas for me on what I could do it would be IMMENSELY valuable to me. I'm very glad this has come up on Slashdot.

It takes over 5 years to develop a standard model of car that represents an incremental improvement over the previous generation model. The Volt is both a new car model and also incorporates more first-time technology and/or systems applications than probably any other car in history. So what's with the negativity? I'm amazed how quickly they've developed it (opposite of Duke Nukem Forever).

They're excited to bring the most fuel efficient car yet out. I for one commend them for it and hope their marketing is absolutely as successful as possible. If the VOlt is a success then perhaps we might see other car manufacturers start making much more fuel efficient cars too. The last thing we need is big gambles in investment of money and technology toward more efficient vehicles failing to sell as well as they could due to inadequate marketing.

So does this mean that it's hereby not only politically correct to say that females have better verbal abilities than males, but now also higher overall aptitude too?

This is an amazingly common misconception. Degradations in sound quality add up. If you take a lossy mp3, play it with a noisy mp3 player with uneven frequency response, use crappy headphones with it, and then listen to it on the train, the sound is still worse than it would have been had started with a better sound file.

It's not as if only the worst single degrader of sound determines what the sound quality will be. Rather, the sound quality is determined by the total degradation.

The way I see it is that the least we can do is at least start with a file that represents the music the artist intended.

It's about 15-20 years away from real-world use and will require brain implants (of sensor + hole through your skull for wires etc to come out) which would most likely have to be removed and reimplanted into different area of brain every couple years (since signals at implant sites degrade over time and it's not looking like there's going to be any way stopping the degradation).

So, do you consider a neck brace a bionic neck? Do you consider a pair of crutches a bionic leg?

The guy still has his hand! This thing is essentially a glove that has springs to support the fingers so they don't hang limp. Kind of like a neck brace or knee brace etc has stiffness to it to support one's neck etc so it won't go limp without use of muscles or ligaments etc that are injured.

This thing is a brace for a hand that is limp.

It is not a functional replacement for a hand. That's what a "bionic hand would be". In fact, a "bionic" hand, as opposed to an artificial hand prosthetis, has some form of intelligence and interface with the nervous system.

I design them. I know what I'm talking about

This is in no way whatsoever a bionic hand. A bionic hand is a powered orthosis that has both intelligence in the form of things like feedback contol and intent recognition + integration with the nervous system in some way. This thing here is a fancy brace, basically. Nothing at all like a "bionic hand"! This is probably the worst misuse of the word "bionic" that I've ever seen.

Hah what a joke. You're an idiot, stick to your little conspiracy theory blogs or whatever over there in SF and I'll stick to doing what I do -- developing technology to save energy.