Uhhh, have you heard the news?(*)

There are tons of Android phones that are supported very well by such things as Cyanogenmod.

(*) That support will be abandoned by its maker at some point is an eventuality. Whether or not it remains useful after that time, however, is a completely different topic.

Since 1994:

Common cars handle (as in: stop and turn, in that order) far better: Brakes are generally much bigger, drum brakes are far less common, OEM tire compounds have improved, and the FWD layout has grown from the pile of mush that it was into something commonly capable of going 'round a corner (or a person, or an out-of-place vehicle, or...) properly and without undue drama.

ABS has become a normal function instead of an extra-cost item.

Stability control systems have become very common, along with traction control.

Airbag systems have shifted from being somewhat optional to overbearingly-complete during that time.

Crumple zones have improved with advances in applied finite element analysis, CAD, and (I dare say) metallurgy.

Side impact beams have become required equipment.

So, there's lots of things that correlate well with the reduction in fatalities in the timeframe you specified. The obvious rise in cell phone usage over that same period is another data point, to be sure, but I feel that it is pretty weak compared to all that I've listed.

If you've got one hand on the wheel and one hand is holding a cell phone, are you going to be using turn signals?

Yes. I can reach the turn signal stalk just fine with a single finger on my left hand while still clutching the wheel securely using the remaining appendages of that same hand, on all of the cars that I drive regularly (which span 23 years and two continents).

I mean, seriously: It's not like driving one-handed steering/signalling is a new thing. Folks have been doing it for as long as there have been turn-signal equipped cars with manual gearboxes.

What if you need to honk at someone who's moving into your lane?

Honking at people never helps stop someone else in another vehicle from doing something stupid, in my experience: It's like shouting at a deaf cat.

We're all probably safer if instead of ineffectually blaring the horn, we simply assume that the wayward driver is actively trying to kill us...and plan accordingly.

Sure, you can drop your cell phone or use your hand with the cell phone in it, but I doubt most people do that.

I've done that. I'll do it again. I don't really care if most people would do the same, since I already assume that they're trying to kill me.

Wow, that's a lot of steps.

First, I looked at the options (it was multiple-guess, after all), and intuitively deduced that 208.80 was the correct answer.

To prove it before moving on, I just divided Maureen's 288 dollars by the 40 hours it took her to earn them last week, and multiplied that by 29 hours that she worked this week.

The process for getting this done was very simple: I pressed alt-space to bring up my calculator, entered "(288/40)*29" and got 208.8 as a result.

That is why I don't want an engineering degree from a world class university.

Well, sure. Just because it has a carb doesn't mean it's going to automatically stall just because you engage a gear and let the clutch out...

I think my main point, which I didn't spell out very well, is that these new-fangled engines (like the M50 in my not-so-new 325i) control idle speed automatically with a feedback loop, whether fueled by gasoline or diesel.

My BMW wants to idle at around 600 RPM when properly warmed up, and it has extra parts which allow air to bypass the throttle body in order to get that done. If things vary from 600 RPM, it either opens or closes the Idle Air Control in an attempt to stabilize engine speed.

The IAC isn't very big, so the amount of air it allows into the intake manifold is rather limited, but it's enough to keep moving even up a bit of an incline without touching the loud pedal.

On newer-fangled engines with such things as fly-by-wire throttle, or a modern diesel (which has no throttle) the feedback loop can be implemented completely in software.

A carb doesn't act like that. It's got a couple of fixed idle settings, at most, and no feedback loop to allow allow those settings to directly relate to engine speed.

I can tow myself along in traffic in my gas-fired car just by lifting the clutch, too.

It's not a function of available torque, but rather of the reluctance of the computer running the show to allow the engine to stall.

The diesel engine's management does this by increasing fuel, and the gasoline engine does it by increasing both air and fuel, but the end result to the user is the same: Pick an appropriate gear, ease out on the clutch, and the car goes forward.

Meanwhile: Here, diesel fuel costs more than gasoline. When I bought gas a couple of days ago diesel was at posted at $3.78 and gas at $3.12.

I'll leave it to you to make your own cost-per-mile comparison between your own turbo diesel minivan and a similar gas-powered model.

But just to pick an example, here's what I can glean from VW's American website:

Jetta TDI 2l turbo diesel: 42MPG highway
Jetta GLI 2l turbo gas: 33MPG highway

The TDI has more torque, the GLI has more horsepower. Peak torque is in about the same spot on the powerband. They both should behave similarly in normal road-going duties, and they both cost roughly the same to buy.

According to these numbers, the TDI costs $9.00 to go 100 miles down the highway, while the GLI costs $9.45. So the diesel is a bit cheaper, but not by much.

Things look slightly worse when comparing to a lesser engine, such as the perfectly-adequate 2-liter normally-aspirated gasoline 4-banger in the Jetta S, which burns $9.17 every 100 highway miles and costs $5k less than the TDI.

The diesel will go further on a tank of fuel, but then it might also have to go further because not every gas station here offers diesel.

So, yeah. Modern, small diesel engines are awesome little things -- there's no doubt about that. I'd love to have a TDI engine in something, just to tinker with and satisfy my hacker curiosity.

But in terms of saving money, where I stand? It's really not so clear-cut.

Firstly, you have no idea what my position is, or even if I have one at all: I've only discussed your verbiage, and the facts of the world -- not my own opinions. Stop with the red herrings, kid -- it's disingenuous.

Meanwhile, seeing 7,500 different items for sale is not my understanding of a "limited selection".

Moreover, it certainly does not meet any possible interpretation of "nobody sells them anymore."

Are you done yet? Or are you still thinking that you're right, even after you've been shown to be wrong?

But they're not selling them when they were released -- they're selling them today.

I look at the date on my calender and it says it's the 6th of December, 2011. (Do you agree that this is "today"?)

I look at the website I linked and I see SACDs for sale right now.

Please learn to make a point that's accurate, or at least try to understand when an absolute statement is inappropriate.

(You were wrong. It's time to get over it and go mindlessly rant about something else, kid. And get off my fucking lawn.)

Poorly.

The PSX (as we called it) just read the bar code from the inner ring of the disc. If the data therein matched what the machine expected, it happily executed whatever code that might happen to be located on the rest of the disc.

And I haven't actually tried, but I'm willing to bet that a bone-stock PSX (as we called it) will gleefully read burned games with an appropriately-burned bar code.

And if such an ancient machine is capable of focusing ~1mm closer than usual, I'd even be willing to bet that it'd be happy to launch a burned game even if the bar code were printed on sticky tape.

But the rest of us just put a simple mod chip into our PSX (as we called it) to emulate this bar code-reading behavior, after which things generally worked fine for all manner of discs.

They did not remove SACD playback. SACD playback was no longer available in new models, because there is no market at all for SACD titles, so it wasn't seen as a useful feature anymore. But your PS3 will keep playing SACD titles forever. Assuming that you really have SACD titles at home, since nobody sells them anymore.

Nobody sells them? At all?

Weird.

There's like 7500 matches for SACD music on Amazon.

Are all of these in error?

Yes! And the Playstation Portable can't read PS1 discs (but is smaller)!

Also, too: The original PS3 had a multi-format memory card reader and rear-facing USB ports! It could also play PS2 games mostly without emulation due to an included Emotion Engine! The later versions had no card reader, no PS2 support and only front-facing ports (but were far cheaper), ruining everything!

And. AND. and. (Hrmm. Yeah. Nevermind.)

(Really, truly: Given that I can take an unsupported third-party adapter, plug my unsupported first-party PS1 controller into it, attach the conglomeration to my PS3 and play PS3 games with it tells me that for all of their faults, Sony seems to give at least half a shit about backward-compatibility. They'll fuck it up from time to time, sure, but then so does everyone else.)

(Oh. And is this the same FFXI that had limited compatibility with the original PS2s that actually existed in the real world? Hard drives and gaming consoles (Net Yaroze notwithstanding) didn't really properly cross-breed until the original Xbox, which appeared somewhat later. I blame the publisher.)

They won the battle but lost the war. They managed to secure a good chunk of the professional market, but the real money was in the consumer market due to the sheer size. There might have been thousands of stations buying Betacam equipment and tapes, but there were hundreds of millions of consumers buying VHS equipment and tapes.

You're almost right, I think: The real losers in the battle were us. Sony's Beta format was always better than VHS in a variety of different ways (except playtime, which they later fixed), but we consumers were stuck with VHS if we wanted inexpensive/readily-available media and compatibility with our friends and neighbors.

So, the way I see it is as such: By losing the videotape format war, Sony lost some potential cash, which allowed JVC to make some cash. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of us lost a couple of decades (or more) of improved video fidelity which was easily discernible on all but the most mediocre TV sets of the time due to their ineptitude.

(How many thousand-million man-hours of lower-quality video does that represent?)

Agreed, pretty much, on all points.

One small addition:

In theory, MiniDisc could have been something akin to a proto-MP3 player almost a decade before (worthwhile versions of) the latter became commonplace. Some sort of very basic filesystem- just enough to let music files be copied to and from the device- would probably have been doable without increasing the technological complexity of the MiniDisc that much. Given that most people didn't have computers with enough storage to benefit from that back then, perhaps that was an understandable omission.

Sony's MiniDisc did serve as a short-lived data format in the early(ish) 90s. It was called MD-Data, and I only recall ever seeing it for sale on high-end laptops in rags like Computer Shopper, and never on a desktop or as a standalone device (and certainly never in person).

There's no good* reason why they could not have simply resurrected that format, stuffed a common FAT filesystem on it, and let folks use it for MP3s on portable devices when the revolution happened a few years later.

MiniDisc is/was a rather fine magnetro-optical format, and was well ahead of its time in terms of both form factor, availability, and cost. There's a lot of reasons for its failure (*cough* proprietarity *cough* SCMS *cough*), but there's certainly a lot of things they could've trivially done with it and simply didn't.

*: Yeah, Sony loves ATRAC. And well-implemented ATRAC is OK. But it didn't win, it hasn't won, and it won't win. MP3 isn't going anywhere, as has long been obvious, and asking folks to re-encode their MP3s to ATRAC to play on their portable MD player (as Sony once did) was -- at very best -- insulting.

Somewhat amusingly: In these modern times I have a solid-state digital recorder from Sony. It works well, lasts forever on one AAA battery, and is happy to natively record high-quality stereo MP3 directly to flash in real time. If Sony weren't a decade late, and MD and ATRAC weren't already being nailed into the coffin by the time they started making devices like this, they'd have been spot-on with the concept...

re-imaged

You mean re-imagined. Or maybe re-invented. Or maybe a lot of things, but not "re-imaged."

It's things like this that form the reasons we are loosing our language.

Fact is: They sold you a phone with a rootkit installed that could record and transmit anything without your notice or your consent.

My phone was not purchased from Carrier IQ.

I think he meant "they" as in "The Man," not as in "Carrier IQ."