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Comment Re:But What About the Other 10% ???? (Score 1) 990

As a somewhat typical home owner I find that I need to haul something far more often than every few years, I have a 15 year old F-250 with about 1/4 million miles on the odometer for just such occasion. It does not get used every day, not even every week, but I do still put about 5,000 miles per year on it hauling stuff. It may be lumber to build new steps going to the side door of the house (something I plan to do in a couple of weeks), or may be a trip to the garden center to get some new plants for the yard, or it may be like last weekend where I needed to buy a new refrigerator and needed it that day after the old one died and I could not wait 2 days for the delivery truck to deliver it at a $40 charge.

Comment Re:Driving yes, but charging? (Score 1) 990

Good point, what gets me about these sorts of claims is they assume everyone lives in a high density urban population center and live within 5 - 10 miles of work and never have a need to drive more than 50-60 miles. What they need to remember is there are a whole lot of people that live in fly over country, on the extreme end you have people in places like Wyoming where towns of 5,000 people may be 40 miles apart and a trip to the nearest Wal-Mart may mean a 100+ mile round trip, and the nearest airport with commercial service may be 200 miles away.

Comment Re:the best way to lie to the public is to use % (Score 1) 990

Lets see, get someone to drive you to the local(ish) car rental location likely at least 5 miles from where you live, spend 30-40 minutes in line, going over the contract, declining all the additional options, another 10-15 minutes getting the car, driving it back to your house to load up with your stuff for the 2 hour drive to grandmother's house for Thanksgiving dinner, then 2 hours back, drop it off, get another ride home, and repeat every couple of weeks. You would likely be better off buying a separate travel can and paying $5 per day to insure it and let it sit, if you have room in your postage stamp sized drive way.

Comment Re:Funny Quote from Article (Score 3, Interesting) 247

LORAN-C had lots of limitations, range from the transmitter, the fact that it did not directly read out as a location, instead gave a pair of time delays, limited accuracy, etc. I was working around small coastal boats back in those days, and I can tell you that GPS even then when it had limited hours of daily coverage due to an incomplete constelation in the late 1980's was already revolutionary for even small craft. I still have a small handheld GPS from those days, well not small by todays standards, it read out Lat, Long, speed, heading, etc. on an LCD screen, a set of batteries lasted about 8 hours, so it was best to plug into external power, took 5+ minutes for a cold boot, and 1-2 minutes for a warm sync if you were lucky.

Comment Regulation Strikes again (Score 3, Interesting) 194

This is likely one of those cases where the manufacturer is not to blame, instead it is likely federal regulations that require these systems to be locked down and only adjusted by authorized personel, I know this is the case with many new industrial engines where emissions compliance requires that field technicians no longer be able to adjust certain parameters, instead all these settings are locked down at the factory.

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