All of these features have been around for the past 20 years. I drive a 2005 Volvo S60R. It power windows, automatic headlights, automatic mirrors, door locks, lights, memory seats, fuel injection,ABS, traction control, self-leveling suspension, stability control, all wheel drive . The car is 21 years old. It also has full manual controls in the dash and I even managed to add an aftermarket head unit without the car freaking out. I can also turn a wrench on the car when it breaks, and I'm hardly a mechanic. People love technology in their vehicle, but still want the ability to service it themselves or take it to be serviced by someone aside from the dealer. However, many manufacturers seem to want to increasingly lock repair and service behind proprietary controls, requiring pin codes or access to their servers for updates. That's what people have a problem with. In the past, these features were self contained and did not require constant connection or pin codes to operate.

I understand the cheating aspect, but why not simply ban them for online gameplay? I don't give a flying shit about multiplayer and I suspect there are other games who don't either. Let me cheat on singleplayer in peace and disable unauthorized devices for online play. This reads more like a cashgrab than trying to stop cheating.

I wonder how the clutch pedal simulation will work. A large part of the advantage of a manual car is the ability for the driver to precisely modulate engine torque according to the actions of both feet. Modern electric motors can very precisely apply torque, so having an additional set of inputs controlling the motor could mean a new type of driver involvement for EVs. This is an interesting example of skeuomorphism

We call those unsynchronized gearboxes (crash boxes). You have to double clutch between each shift and they're noisy....

Driving manual is a lot like using terminal. Most will prefer a gui, because it gets them where they need to go, but some prefer a "to the metal" experience that only a manual (er terminal) can give. Depending on driving conditions, it can be faster, more efficient and safer, plus the additional engagement it offers to the enthusiast is simply more fun. The same for those that enjoy linux, and find windows utterly boring and complicated.

According to car and driver, the stopping distance for a 2012 Volvo s60, a pretty average car is 164ft from 70mph. This is a 10 year old car. You're about 100ft off on stopping distance. Thanks to the advent of ABS, most cars have. Even able to stop in a distance of less than 200ft since the late 90s, with performance cars returning even shorter distancesess than 150ft thanks to wider tires.

The weedwhackers are fine for home use but they won't cut it for contractors. I love my Ryobi 40v 4a blower, wheed whacker and chain saw but the mower doesn't cut it (pun intended). I bought some rural land and I'll most likely have to fall back to a gas mower as the 40v with 6a battery barely would cut my 1/4 acre lot I had before, and that was only after I picked up pinecones and it would only work days when the lawn was dry. I get it, but this is asinine.

You seemed to have left out the Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs, which went a long way towards splitting the parties.

Conveniently towards the end of your timeline, Nixon during his 1968 campaign appealed to many dixiecrats who were upset about the passage of the civil rights act, stating it was a form of government encroachment on their lives. This in turn led to a party shift where former dixiecrats turned republicans and in time, the former republicans turned progressive. Once the parties flipped, you've got the War on Drugs for the 1970s and 1980s that heavily criminalized communities of color and anti-war liberals. Or as John Erlichman said it "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news,"

Blacks, who were outright demonized by the right, turned to the left, which accepted them because who would not turn down the free vote. The left still treats black voters in a passive-agressive manner, knowing they can reliably count on the black vote, but the relationship is not as antagonistic as what is seen on the right.

So many right wing people love to crow about how Republicans freed the slaves and were responsible for most progressive legislation early on in this country. All that is true, but the conveniently leave out the part where Nixon and Lee Atwater flipped the parties, and when both Reagan and Bush used race based fear mongering to further drive the republican base whiter and more conservative.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/...

Trump saying Judge Curiel's inability to impartially judge him in a court of law is the very definition of racism. It was a direct quote from Trump himself. You can also cite the many cases against Trump's properties unfairly discriminating against potential black tenants and the ad he took out in the paper himself calling for the death penalty of the central park 5. He's pretty racist.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/do...

Get a phone with cyanogenmod and privacy guard. You can disallow individual security permissions to an app. Some apps don't like them and crash, but most ask for them but chug along perfectly fine with those permissions disallowed. Privacy guard is a real game changer.

Heh. I won't say they never work, but my job regularly has me doing 100-150 mile trips *daily*, some cases 200 miles. The cheaper EVs would not work, but a vehicle with a range like the Tesla 100d would suffice...If i charged it almost nightly. For the record, I am a roving network engineer that covers an area with the landmass roughly half the state of Rhode Island (around 550ish miles). I drive a 96 volvo station wagon that averages mid 20's mpg, going as high as 31 MPG on the highway and as low as 20ish in the city. It costs almost nothing to run besides tires, brakes, oil changes and suspension and I do my own maintenance. I love what Tesla is doing, but probably won't buy one until I can get it for less than $5000, I can do my own maintenance and it can haul me, plus all my gear comfortably. I'd imagine for a niche case like this, it may take awhile..

Plus, I wonder how long it will take to trickle to those who simply cannot afford new cars. To those outside of the new car market, there exists an entire underclass of used vehicles and the industries that spurs along. Think shadetree mechanics, places like autozone that sell parts and places that refurbish used parts and sell to the consumer or mechanic. I wonder how EV battery life will look after 10 years. The cottage industries that will no doubt arise selling refurbished batteries and/or doing in-car cell replacement for those who cannot afford to swap the whole unit. As a guy who swapped his own transmission over two weekends, I"m more excited about the prospects of how cheaply I can own and purchase a car, rather than the mass market $35k unit.

Not particularly. For many, many years one would get a disproportionately higher sentence for the drugs people of color used despite the fact that they were less damaging to the body physiologically. Obama was the first president that tried to make all sentences for all illegal substances uniform. Furthermore the original laws put in place banning marijuana were sponsored by the robberbarons of the early 20th century who used white fear of images of crazed blacks and brown people to garner support state by state for prohibition in order to sell their own product. Finally its a great way to control a populace by shipping non violent people to jail and keep them paying parole/ probation fees etc. This entire war on drugs was a farce. Also the white drug of choice would be methamphetamine rather than alcohol which had a very different public reaction and laws attached. When the supposed crack epidemic of the 80s occurred one never saw actual useful products like baking soda or gasoline banned or regulated. Instead more folks were put in jail. I write this painfully aware of the difference in laws as actually medicines previously available that helped people through sinus and chest infections are no longer on the market due to changes in law thanks to meth. That's the difference.

My car may not be very new; a 2001 audi with twin turbo v6, but has ABS, Fuel Injection, MP3 player, central locking, indicators, electric windows, front/rear heated seats and aircon, Blue-tooth for cell phone and is capable of 240km/h(stock...mine is modified to do nearly 270km/h). I work on it myself quite regularly, recently replacing the A-arm and suspension bushings in the front. I also installed my own transmission (with front/rear diffs and drive shaft in my back yard). The knowledge is still there for those who seek it, but it is not as widely distributed as it used to be.

That is the "fun" car, with the daily driver being a 95 volvo T5/r that will also do nearly 270km/h but it takes a little longer to get there :)

The article is quite valid and other countries, specifically the ones that seem to be above the European debt crisis (germany, finland, sweden) seem to still value craftsmenship. I"ll agree that nostalgia is rubbish, but the ability to work with one's hands is still a very valuable trait. The meteoric rise of economies in the far east can be evidenced if this, as well as those previously mentioned European countries. If we are to remain a superpower, we will have to stop the secret war we are waging on skilled workers and/or those who work with their hands.

QFT. I was a serious online FPS gamer back in college, to the tune of Q3, halflife and counterstrike, but after graduating, starting a business and working a 9 to 5, I find I simply don't have the same amount of time that I used to. I still make time to game, but online games don't strike my fancy like they used to. these days, I find myself playing adventure games, first person and third person action games with lengthy single player campaigns. If a game has a good story, decent graphics and controls, I'll load it up and play it a few hours a week at a time, often whittling it down in a few months. I picked up Crysis 2 in january, conquered it in march. I picked up Metro 2033 on steam back in jan, but the lengthy time between save points, and no quicksave has put me off it.

I think such a technology would be very useful for the early detection of math learning disabilities. I went through grade school, middle school and high school with high grades in all subject areas with the exception of any sort of maths. It took 6 years to pass basic algebra. I was later tested and diagnosed with dyscalculia and had to give up a long dreamed career of engineering.

Such a tool would be useful to help get students the help they need early and not have them either waste time, or languish in school beating their head against a wall.