No need; I'll just park out in this handy Montana hailstorm. Free dimples!

Actually, that happened to my old truck -- got hailed on pretty good and had small dimples pretty uniformly over its entire upper surface. Didn't do shit for its MPG. And after a few years the dimples went away (let's hear it for Ford steel!) and you couldn't tell it had ever happened.

It helps considerably when that state legislature is a part-time avocation, not a full-time career. Frex, here in Montana it's 90 days every other year -- not enough time to pass bullshit and certainly not enough income to make a living. So the nimrods who are unhireable except as politicians don't thrive here; you can't live off being a politician in MT. (And a lot of local positions, like some county commissioners, are volunteer.)

Conversely, look at California where the legislature is a fulltime job, and observe what a crowd of Peter Principles it's attracted...

And yes, I have considered it, because common sense has to start somewhere. Hell, there's a opening on the local mosquito abatement board... not every job has to be ruling the world. Fixing your little corner is most of it.

I don't know about other stuff or what's current, but back in the 1980s Southern California had basically two telcos: Pacific Bell (good service and reasonable rates), and GTE (horrible service and much higher rates). GTE, being the poor little put-upon underdog company, was given protected monopoly areas where PacBell was not *allowed* to offer telco service.

Fast-forward to the massive restructuring that eventually turned GTE into Verizon, and now Verizon enjoys the legacy of GTE's protected monopoly areas.... which they remained even tho Verizon was now the 800 pound gorilla.

Okay, since the effect is apparently speed-related -- your thought about channels underneath made me wonder if an air intake feeding a channel system could be designed to regulate that airflow according to forward speed, and therefore regulate dimpling, without the tedium and moving parts of yet another pump.

So you do it on the sides (which naturally drain), but not on the roof (which doesn't), and possibly on the undersurface (if practical). The sides are about 2/3rds of the surface area of a big truck box anyway. But per this interesting comment from an AC:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
the benefit is speed-related, and "always drives at the same speed" is an absurd assumption for a car, let alone for a big truck.

Occurs to me to wonder, tho, what happens with drag if you reverse the dimples (as one would to prevent water accumulating). Someone who actually knows, pipe up!

Greenpeace is to the ecology roughly what Autism Speaks is to the autistic community, or what Bennett Haselton is to articles that aren't painfully stupid.

This is not news, and it does not deserve attention or reporting.

I'm wondering if it's more efficient only in limited speed ranges, and at other ranges actually increases drag.

But nominally-identical vehicles often get different MPG (my truck gets almost double what other supposedly identical trucks get!), and that MPG can change over time as well, so given how small the differences reported are, in this case it may be individual vehicle variance.

It should also be noted that this same military, which integrated early, is also one of the most conservative elements of society. Which should inform some folks, but probably won't.

This is what happens when no one reads the bills, let alone proofreads 'em.

Examine the pool of Slashdot users, then assume the opposite.

What's incorrect about the term "piracy"? Its been used to refer to copyright infringement for hundreds of years.

And I have to wonder how that's being figured... consider the Owens Valley to see how Los Angeles' water use far exceeds what was formerly extensive ag use with plenty to spare.

That's a good point -- stored water might as well go into the ground (and be used) as into the air (which one might argue becomes rain somewhere to the east, but that does Utah no good, and Utah needs it a lot more).

In the process of moving back to Montana from SoCal, I made numerous trips along both I-15 and routes further west, and I was quite struck by how the states that scream the loudest about conservation and that do the most enforcing against common use of resources... are also in the worst shape. Utah looks the best both agriculturally and industrially -- it seems to have a great deal more local industry than any other western state, yet it looks the most pristine and green, and sports a healthy ag sector. Montana and the agricultural parts of Nevada are also in good shape, as is much of Idaho. But you can just about draw a line around CA and OR solely by the poor condition of what used to be good graze and forest land, and now looks a great deal more drought-stricken than do drier areas further inland.

Where I lived in the SoCal desert, the water was so high in calcium that for those drinking tap water (which mostly came from deep wells), there was no such thing as calcium deficiency. It was largely a retirement community, and you never saw so many 80 year olds with ramrod-straight spines. You could actually spot older folks who drank bottled water -- by their curved spines.

And it's good-tasting water. Personally I don't like soft water, it tastes like dust.

When you get bad water in SoCal, it's usually not the water -- it's the pipes. Plastic pipes react with chlorine and the result tastes like a corpse. Let the water run til fresh stuff from the mains reaches the spigot, and suddenly you have good water again.

Now, northern plains water from shallow wells, that's nasty stuff -- too much magnesium so it tastes like Epsom salts, or occasionally like rotting plastic. Drill down to a deeper water layer, tho, and the problem usually goes away.