Buying my car took more paperwork than buying my home, which is ludicrous given the order of magnitude difference in price. In the end, I bought my condo by faxing back a piece of paper with one signature on it, while on a trip in Europe. Buying my car? I had to sign a dozen different pieces of paper, and it took far longer.

I've driven the Ford Mondeo and the European Focus... both were just as good or better than any european vehicle I've rented (though the BMW 1 series was pretty nice).

Eh, my '06 Jetta TDI was manufactured in Mexico, and has been a solid and reliable piece of equipment. VW seems to have solved most of their manufacturing issues when they moved to the MKV chassis (2005.5 through 2011 or so). Now someone will probably point out how wrong I am, but to the best of my knowledge there haven't been any significant manfacturing issues with these cars, despite being built in Mexico.

Hell, the only recalls there have been on my vehicle was to put in plastic caps so that you can't adjust the aim of the low and high beams independently (which is illegal in north america for some stupid reason... I pulled the caps right back off again after the mod) and a minor issue with the wiring harness to the passenger seat.

Ok, I'm Canadian but this theoretically holds true as well. The problem is that back in 2006 when I was looking to buy a car, the domestics weren't building anything I was interested in. I was looking for a reasonably sized sedan that had a diesel engine in it. Guess what, the only car on the market with that feature was the VW Jetta (Manufactured in Mexico from German parts). Had any of the domestics built something similar, I'd have considered it, but they were all on the huge "HEMI RWAWWWR POWAH" bandwagon.

When my Jetta eventually wears out (8 years old now, and still going strong), I'll probably replace the sedan with a wagon. Guess what, none of the domestics produce a real station wagon any more... You either have to go with those stupid crossovers or something larger. Now, if the domestics would import some of their european models into the North American market, I'd strongly consider them. Over the years, I've had a wide variety of european Fords and other vehicles that I would love to buy, but they just won't sell them to us.

Remember, the EnergyStar logo is pretty much meaningless. Heck, a few years ago a (fake) gasoline powered alarm clock received the EnergyStar logo as part of an audit.

I just wish it would come to the real Vancouver...

I see your fifty quatloos, and raise you 5 ningis.

Why are counties and states involved in party politics at all? The parties should pay for the selection process of their candidates out of their own funds, and run their selection process themselves. Want to vote to select the republican candidate? Pay your $15 membership fee to the republican party. Want to vote to select the democratic party's candidate? Pay your $15 there.

States should not be subsidizing the parties in any way, shape, or form.

All depends on the origin of the spectrum you're viewing it through. From a Canadian perspective, the Democrats are radically to the right, and the
Tea Party is somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun or Mussolini.

Actually, your typical freight train is running regenerative braking. If you look down on a locomotive going by, you can see huge fans in the top of the cab that are used to blow air over load coils. Figure a maximum sized train weighs in at 19,000 tonnes (130 car coal train), that means that when it's operating at 60km/hr it has roughly 2.6 gigajoules of kinetic energy. To stop it, that energy has to be dumped. Some of it is done by the train's air brakes, but most of it is done through regenerative braking in each of the locomotives.

This is all irrelevant when it comes to the SSC though, since it's using air resistance to drop its speed to 260kph, then slowing down with traditional brakes. The hard part is going to be making the brakes survive spinning at 10,000rpm, not dissipating the energy from slowing down.

That assumes that the police officers in question are dedicated to traffic policing. With the possible exception of highway patrol, traffic enforcement is only a way for the officers to fill time between more important calls. If a fight breaks out at a bar, it's likely that the closest officer is the one who was looking for drunk drivers.

And some of us actually enjoy driving as an activity. Heck, I don't even really mind sitting in traffic as long as I have my CBC/NPR/Podcasts.

The policy is under the auspices of the Outer Space Treaty, which has been ratified by both China and India (along with the United States). Given that the Scientists and Engineers who tend to be involved in these projects are generally rational people (even if they're doing a politician's bidding), I'd say that the chance of things being done reasonably correctly are good.

It's actually assumed that every probe that is sent will have some form of bacteria and so forth on it; life is just so pervasive on this planet that it's impossible to perfectly sterilize everything. Instead, the goal is to strongly sterilize what's critical and exposed to the environment, and reduce the probability of accidental contamination to an acceptable level (currently defined to be in the neighbourhood of 1 in 10,000 chance).

JPL actually has a highly detailed document on "Policy for Planetary Protection" that details the standards to which a probe must be sanitized to before being sent on its mission. The level of cleanliness depends on the intended mission and target; orbiters have a lesser standard than landers, for example. The policy also takes into account different parts of the spacecraft; the inside of the box containing the CPU and so forth isn't cleaned to as high of a standard as the wheels, experiments and so forth that are directly exposed to the environment. In the case of the Galileo probe, it was deliberately crashed into Jupiter at the end of mission in order to ensure it would never impact Europa, as it had not been cleaned to that high of a standard. Cassini will face a parallel fate, of crashing into Saturn to prevent a collision with Enceladus and/or Titan.

The key part here is that when you are looking for life (or might be looking for life in the near future) you don't want to discover that the life is found is something that you brought from earth yourself, or was brought by another space probe.