...unless you buy the full version of the app :)

Bonus: it screws up the analytics, since your viewer is effectively clicking on every shortened URL (in order to fetch the proper URL) even though you actually click on none.

All I see in the picture is some grotesquely obese guy with a poor fashion choice. And he looks pretty cramped in that Ford Excursion. ;)

The article actually specifically mentions that issue, at the end of the first paragraph, "Obesity has caused more people to buy larger vehicles..." I'm sure most of the increase in (non-commercial) car size is due to enormously fat people not fitting into normal cars (and bottoming out suspension, etc). That's pretty much common sense, and we've already had the "bigger cars use more gas" discussion. This article is trying to hit closer to home with the message, "your big fat ass uses more gas". Even a big, inefficient gas guzzler uses more gas hauling around a load of 300lb passengers than it does passengers 2/3 or half that size. Other wasteful behavior is pretty much irrelevant to this discussion, and doesn't negate the facts that body weight affects gas mileage. No matter how much unnecessary cargo, or sand bags, or whatever else you might have in the car (that can easily be removed if you wanted), your ass is always with you, putting additional load on the car's engine. No matter how stupid it is to go grocery shopping in a lifted H2 on 44s with a chrome winch, and an ATV on the roof rack, it still uses even more fuel if the driver is 200lb overweight.

Sure the article says its only .7% increase overall, but that increase is heavily weighted towards obese people. Skinny drivers help bring up the average MPG, so the impact doesn't seem as great. The increase in fuel consumption due to obesity affects *my* gas-mileage by about 0 percent. My 300-lb friend probably makes way more than .7% more trips to the gas station than I do, since he's carrying the burden (so to speak). That extra billion gallons of waste isn't evenly distributed across the population (though the environmental impact of burning that extra fuel to drag one's fat ass around town affects us all equally).

I'd be curious to see the study break out the numbers by weight class, or maybe have a test group of various people driving the same car (or same kind of car, and do it for several models) to see how their specific weights affect mileage. If they showed that being 50-100lb overweight actually costs you (just guessing) 10% more annually, that would have way more impact.

Interestingly, the bigger cars will show less of a performance decrease from obese drivers, since an extra 200-lb on the driver's body is a much smaller percentage of the total vehicle weight. Adding a 300-lb passenger to an 8000 SUV won't really affect much; its a drop in the bucket. Add a 300-lb passenger to a Toyota Corolla, and you can immediately tell a difference in the way the car accelerates and handles. As an obese driver of an H2 sheds weight, there will hardly be any increase in gas mileage; a 100-lb weight loss is barely more than a 1% change in total vehicle weight; mileage might increase from 11 mpg to 11.1 mpg. Drop 100-lb from your body and an econobox getting 35+mpg will gain a couple of mpg. The fact that obese people don't fit in efficient cars dilutes the real problem even more.

Yeah. WTF?

Is a "patent pool organization" kind of like an ASCAP or RIAA or MPAA, but for patents? Gee. I can't imagine how that might go wrong.

Amen!

While it is conceivable that some super-hearing audiophiles can detect a difference when listening in their acoustically perfect sound-proof rooms, that's hardly "regular listening" for most people. In any other place where there is actual ambient noise, decent mp3s are probably indistinguishable from CDs (especially newer CDs where they over-process and compress everything so it seems "louder").

CDs will continue to be the primary choice as soon as music stores stop closing down.

Digital downloads are the primary choice for the younger generations, and the rest of the population is trending that way. Convenience is king. Physical media is becoming a niche market, much in the way vinyl records and tapes gave way to CDs (even though many people continue to claim that CDs "fail on decent audio equipment for regular listening" compared to dragging a small chunk of polished rock through grooves on a plastic disc).

I would hope we're past that already. It has been tried and failed many times. Trying it again as "customer abuse with a better price point" would fail just as badly. I expect its the same product as now, just priced to sell, instead of priced to sit on shelves and boost pageviews for The Pirate Bay.

Apple chooses their price point. They don't choose what people are willing to pay for an item.

If Apple had brought it out at $1000, I doubt many people would buy them. At $500 I'm still not interested in it. If I'm in their target market (and I think I should be) then it is overpriced by at least a couple hundred dollars.

If they want me to pay more for it, then it needs to do more. A camera would be nice. Multitasking is a necessity. I hate the constant starting and stopping of apps on the iPhone (and if the next iPhone OS doesn't support backgrounding third party apps, I'm bailing on the iPhone, too). Also multiple apps sharing the big screen (instead of the lame 2x blurrification of the iPhone apps, run 4 of them on screen at a time!).

I have a "hybrid" electric bike. It has an electric motor in the hub, and regular pedals for the human powerplant. The motor works best as an assist, particularly nice on steep hills. I mainly use the electric motor to get up to speed, then can pedal to maintain. Using both at the same time gives a good quick launch from a standstill. The electric motor on mine tops out at about 15mph, which is decent. I can go faster on a normal bike, but I break a sweat. :)

It still works, just slower. There is always alternative product.

I'm not quite ready to dump my iPhone over this, but I won't be buying an iPad. I can accept these limitations on my mobile phone, since I mostly just use the stock set of apps anyway. If these sorts of limits start showing up in MacOSX, then I'll "upgrade" my MacBook Pro (and my 3 other Macs) to linux instead of the next great feline. That's not a huge ding to Apple, but once I'm off their OS, I'll stop buying their hardware. I'll stop suggesting it to my family and friends.

While it's true that data packages are expensive, I use the hell out of my data package. I'd guess the margin on data usage is nowhere near the insane margins on text messages. And I still have to pay for text messages on top of my data plan. It's not a choice of one or the other. If I could text for free via the data channel, then AT&T would lose $5/month (or whatever my text plan costs me now).

I like having a unique ringtone on my phone, but it is solely for my own benefit. When I hear my ringtone, I absolutely know that it is my phone ringing. I don't play the musical snippet as a "favor" to you. Neither do I give a crap who else hears it. Its my signal that my cellphone has a call.

Cell phones are so prevalent that using any of the default sounds ends up with too many false alarms. Go to a construction site and play the "Nextel chirp". Then watch everyone within earshot check their phone. Its pretty funny, and demonstrates a failure of the alert tone.

I agree with you that the "ringtone industry" is a huge scam, exploiting teenagers and poor people. Ringtones are not status symbols. But if you seriously have an issue with someone's choice of ringtone, get over yourself.

Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. GWB started the war with Iraq, using 9/11 as a tenuous excuse. I agree with you that we should go after those responsible, but instead we've killed tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in a war that we absolutely started.

Guantanamo was a disgrace, IMHO. Throwing away our principles and embracing those of our enemies makes me ashamed of our country.

Its not information that you cannot otherwise get just about anywhere else, is it? I'm not suggesting we restrict access to the information, but we haven't had it in the car yet, and we shouldn't. Such a device does not belong where it can be a distraction to the driver. I'm sorry, but I don't want to be killed in a head-on collision with someone tweeting on their steering wheel, "OMG. I think I'm on the wrong side of the road! LOL!"

It reminds me of the LG refrigerator with a web browser built in. Sure its possible, but why? And staring at the screen while operating the refrigerator is very, very unlikely to kill anyone (unless, I suppose, you leave the door open, the food spoils, then you serve it to your family...).

I agree with you that its a very bad idea regarding safety, but completely disagree about it being a very good idea as far as anything. Its a "neat" idea, and probably implemented in a fairly clever way, but adding new, irrelevant yet more-engaging distractions to the driver is just stupid. If you are driving, you should not be reading RSS feeds, whether on a cell phone, laptop, or the freaking dashboard. If you need to be accessing information while you are driving, get a passenger to read it to you. Or let someone else drive.

Hopefully these things are implemented in such a way that they don't function (or at least don't allow you to interact with them) while the car is moving. If not, then I think the manufacturers are being irresponsible and will probably get sued (hopefully before these systems cause too many fatal accident).

In Oregon we have a similar new law this year. It should have been a more comprehensive distracted driving law, but instead it just outlaws using a hand-held cell phone or texting while driving. Systems like these will allow people to circumvent that law, since they'll be looking at their dashboard instead of the outlawed device. Either way their eyes aren't on the road.

I always tell people, "the problem isn't that *you* can't handle talking on the phone and driving (even though you really can't). Its that all of the idiots around us can't handle it, and I don't want them running into me!"

I agree with you...

Isn't the reason movies use 24 fps (and similarly TV uses ~30fps) because of historical technical limitations? That is right about the minimum rate where your eyes and brain can smooth out the annoying flicker. 30fps isn't the upper limit that the eye can process, but rather a lower limit that makes the image sequence appear as motion without causing stutter, headaches, or otherwise detract from the visual experience. Its a compromise to allow movies to fit on reasonable sized rolls of film, and for TV to have been able to fit "good enough" video quality into the available bandwidth at the time, and to not have frequency beating artifacts due to lights running on 60Hz AC power (or 50Hz & 25fps in Europe, etc).

For an easy example that 30fps isn't enough, run iTunes, play some music and turn on the "iTunes Classic Visualizer" full screen. Hit "F" to display the frame rate, then use "T" to toggle the 30fps limit on and off. Tell me you don't see a big difference.

I'm sure there's an upper threshold where you can't distinguish a difference as frame rate increases, but its much higher than 30 or 60 fps, and as the parent said it is probably higher than we can achieve in hardware for the near future.