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Comment Re:Maybe (Score 2) 420

It doesn't matter
The official figures might be perfect when every customer is driving in a suburban environment in fall near Luxembourg...

The rest of us will drive in Arizona's summer, Florida's summer, Alaska's winter, through Colorado passes, or more often, 1 mile at a time on a cold engine to ferry kids to school...

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS TYPICAL DRIVING across the US. So you get arbitrary number, which gives you a ballpark for comparison.
Be happy that it's usually pretty close to the real thing.

Comment Re:What they really need (Score 4, Insightful) 394

You're supposed to factor in the money saved in traffic jams, road repairs, accidents, road plowing, pollution, stress, old-people-off-the-road, parking...
The point is NEVER for the public transit system to "break even". It's a quality of life investment which as lots of hard-to-quantify returns.

Comment Re:So basically 1-track MOD tracker (Score 1) 55

Old engineering question:
  - Why did you spend three days writing that PERL script?
  - Because it saved me half an hour of copy-pasting.

Perfect example here. I calculated the frequencies using the math formula, and it was a lot simpler to translate every note (using search/replace on the score's text file) than to write a program to do it for me or even worry about the exact syntax to get the math done at runtime.

Comment Re:So basically 1-track MOD tracker (Score 3, Funny) 55

I remember writing down the frequencies of every note so that we could encode a song into an HP48.
Then the resident Uber-geek added that to an unrelated piece of code that we gave to the idiot who had erased a couple of our calculators "for fun". Essentially started playing the song in the middle of class at full speed, then looping ever so slower, and nothing short of pulling the batteries or the physical reset button could stop it for about 2 or 3 loooong minutes.
The teacher had to turn around so we wouldn't see him laugh, but when we could still hear it from the depths of the backpack, I saw him lose it.

Comment Re:Nissan the next Volkswagen (Score 1) 140

> surveys with the younger generation that came to the conclusion that, according to Nissan, young people
> "feel that time spent in a car should be time for connecting and sharing experiences with friends."

It's kind of obvious, since these young people ARE IN THE BACK SEAT, texting and sharing with friends.

Comment Re:Wait til the kids start putting Telsa doors (Score 1) 323

> Most garage doors are at least 7 foot tall, and 8 foot & taller are becoming far more common.

A good example of US-centric thinking on your part.
While most people who can afford a Tesla probably have a decent garage (not even all, in historic centers), I've been in many Asian and European public parkings where headroom was severely limited.

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