A couple of times while on a bicycle I've stopped police cars to give them descriptions of vehicles that were driving dangerously: in one case a gravel truck that almost ran us over on a narrow road and in another case a sports car coming up a winding mountain road with all 4 wheels on the wrong side of the yellow line around a blind corner. In both cases they lit up and set out after them without worrying about whether they could find me again. In both cases I could describe the vehicle, recent location, and direction, but no plate. They certainly would pull them over based on those tips, and I agree that they'd need to find some other PC to justify a search beyond what's in plain sight.

Winters in Michigan are balmy compared to Minneapolis, where I also spent 6 years commuting by bike most of the time...

If I want winter I can get on my bike a few months out of the year and ride up to 3000 ft or higher where the snow is polite enough to stay.

Add up all the people who are injured and/or die due to snow and ice related traffic accidents (or simply slipping on their sidewalks) before you call snow harmless.

I think the annual winter more than compensates for earthquake and fire risk. I grew up in the Detroit area, and I'll take the earthquake and fire risk in the hills around LA over winter, thanks.

I agree that many class action lawsuits look stupid. There is value, however, in some of them. Suppose that some company harms 1,000,000 people for $10 each. It's not worth any attorney's time or money to go after the company, so the company can continue harming millions more people with impunity. With a class action suit, there's sufficient incentive for an attorney to take the case on behalf of the millions of people harmed. It's true that none of them get much of anything (maybe a coupon for leftover toenail clippings of the CEO or something, and only after filling out a 100 page claim form), but if the attorney wins, it can (and should) create a disincentive for the company to continue harming additional people and for other companies to engage in similar harms.

Plus you'd be living in Hemet...

The patent linked in TFA shows a filing date of 2009. Unless I'm missing something.

Prius is a slug when it comes to acceleration. IIRC, the Prius V does 0-60 in in about 10.7 seconds, and that's empty. When I test drove one it felt like a slug going over a tiny bump of a hill. I live at the top of a big hill, and wanted a small wagon that I can put a lot of stuff in and carry bikes on top. Add that stuff to a V, and it's not going anywhere. I got a Cmax, and it's very well behaved-- I don't drive slow and I get 41 mpg combined without adjusting my driving style. Take your foot off the accelerator in the Cmax and it coasts along fine. If you put your foot back on, you can maintain speed in EV mode for several miles before the ICE kicks back in-- it has a larger battery than the Prius and with the current software will EV at up to 85 mph.

I have a C-max, which has the same drivetrain as the fusion. My understanding is that when it uses engine braking it basically fans the engine, using the pistons to drive air through, but doesn't run fuel. I think it only does this with the "hill assist" mode (on the side of the shifter) engaged, though it could be slightly different on the Fusion.

I agree that they did a nice job of making it behave like you expect from decades of drive ICE cars. They made the hybrid interface relatively non-distracting, and gave it enough power that you can accelerate when you need it. The general UI is also what you expect after decades of driving, unlike the Prius.

Was it really not filed until 2009? Isn't there more than 10 years of prior art on this?

I can probably dig up more than a few sites that had episodic content accessible by predetermined URLs that long predated the filing. Probably from enough different content providers to declare it obvious (in the patent sense) as well.

It was even true in the 60's and 70's-- Bell Labs funded an enormous amount of fundamental research with the money raked in by their monopoly. The cosmic microwave background (which really still has not practical value) was discovered by Bell Labs researchers. As they shut down the research they went on to populate a lot of university physics departments. IBM also funded a great deal of basic research. Xerox funded a lot of more practical stuff, but was terrible at commercializing it. Jobs at those places were at least as desirable for researchers in the 60's and 70's as faculty jobs.

The Fourier transform was a direct result of the desire to better understand heat transfer while boring cannons. You should pick a better example, though they can be hard to find. Most discoveries seem to come from an itch that needs to be scratched.

USA Cycling did the same thing back in the 90's with the "Superbike" for the '96 olympics and spent a ton of money on machines and got very little bang for the buck. Somebody still has to pedal it...

FWIW, the reality for most of cycling (i.e. most geared racing), most racers are equipped with 10 or 11 gears on the back, and 2 in front, and nearly everyone in a race will have the same set of gears. Even then, there will be variations in what gears the riders will choose to put on the front (sometimes compact vs. standard, but also larger or smaller chainrings), and occasionally in back (pyrenees vs. alps). And once you get to a reasonably high level, all bicycles can be made to be below the minimum allowed weight (6.8 kg) and riders actually have to add weight to make their machines race legal. Again, this puts smaller riders at a disadvantage because the machine is a larger fraction of the ride+machine weight, and machines for smaller riders would normally weigh less than those for larger riders.

The weight minimum is probably a bigger issue in track racing, where the minimum weight is the same, but the amount of stuff on the bike is much less-- only one gear in front and back, no freehub, no derailleurs, no shifters, no brakes. I'm not small and not a weight weenie, and have had to add weight to bikes to make weight. I know small women who had to drop lengths of chain down their seat tube to get their bikes up to the minimum.

I've seen it even worse in Burn Notice-- something like "If you're going to ditch someone chasing you in a pursuit, you need a car with a lot of acceleration, quick handling, and great braking. That means something like the [make][model] is ideal". Followed by what amounts to a car commercial of a chase, with lots of logo shots.