It means you can use the same instrument cluster for the auto and manual versions of the car, saving costs.

However, the '70s and '80s with the purring V8s are gone, and the vehicles that will be the norm will either be hybrids, diesels, or electric cars.

I love the sound a VW small-car diesel engine makes, especially when it's got a modded exhaust. First of all, it sounds like your Beetle has delusions of being a big truck, which is just funny. Second, when you're accelerating quickly the turbo whine makes it sound like it has delusions of being a jet!

Clearly, this was done by the thugs at the NASA

No wonder they can't build a replacement for the Space Shuttle -- they're apparently too busy skulking around in people's back yards!

You generally do not replace a proven reliable system "just because".

So why is it reasonable for this user insist on running a trunk kernel, instead of an old branch that only gets security updates?

Climate change (global warming?) skeptics admit that humans are affecting climate, but the real question is "how much are humans changing it?".

No. The real question is "does climate change fuck us over?" If the answer is "yes" then we need to do something about it whether we caused it or not!

We get two things:

1. Use of petroleum at a faster rate (economic gain in the short term, but more global warming and faster depletion of strategic reserves in the long term)

2. Probably a net reduction in oil spills, because not having the pipeline would only force the oil to be transported on trains, not stop it.

Your argument fails because it assumes that individuals and government are somehow equivalent. They are not. In fact, quite the opposite: the burden of proof lies always lies with the government precisely because it is a government, and not an individual!

People are always innocent until proven guilty.

Government is always guilty until proven innocent.

There is zero evidence that this data is being used for advertising purposes - the article makes a lot of speculation.

Bullshit. The fact that the information gets sent at all is prima facie evidence that it's being abused. The burden of proof is on the government to justify it.

Why would a corporation care?

Because their competitor corporations might have hired a dirty FBI agent to steal their secrets.

Deep Space 9 did live up to the original (and perhaps surpassed it), and even Enterprise was better than most people give it credit for. It was only the mirror episodes, not the series they were in, that sucked.

They've only made 3 episodes, and one of them was a fucking mirror one? The DS9 ones sucked; the Enterprise one sucked, and I can only assume the TOS one sucked (I haven't actually seen it). Even the Star Trek Online mirror missions suck! Of all the things to waste their limited money on...!

Hey, Chekov was decent (mostly because he didn't get enough screen time for the demented monkeys running the show to fuck up his characterization too badly).

If its just one river that's not much more than creek being tested right next to the waste pipe of a pharma factory its still entirely unacceptable, but not quite as alarming as the statement would have us think.

The issue is not drug factories illegally dumping; the issue is that sewage treatment plants don't actually remove all contaminants from the water (just solids and bacteria, really) and that India has a whole lot of people. The drugs that are in the water got there by being prescribed to and passed through people. The only ways to fix it would be to design much more thorough (and expensive) sewage treatment, or for people to use much lower quantities of medicine.

My $263 laptop might be slow and not particularly durable, but it's fast enough (including 4GB of RAM) and light enough (with an 11" screen, not a 14" one). Besides, unless you really need a fast CPU (and most people don't, nowadays) "ultrabook-class" hardware has no advantage over "chromebook-class" hardware.

In other words, HP's 11" StreamBook is a step in the right direction (other than lack of storage space), but they should have been making things like it years ago.

For $800 you must have been looking at the Surface Pro 3. I don't think an Android tablet is an apples-to-apples comparison. The Surface Pro 3 runs a full Windows 8 OS. It is basically a laptop without a permanent keyboard.

No it's not; the last laptop I got cost $263. The Surface Pro 3 is overpriced even if you compare it to laptops!

Admittedly, a Surface Pro 3 has pretty good specs... but there's no reason why you should have to pay that much just to get "real Windows" when some $200 "celeron" or "pentium"* based tablet would be just fine.

(* Or whatever they call the Intel CPU between the Atom and the i3 these days...)