This article is nothing more than a propaganda piece for a culture that is soaked in petroleum. There is a significant portion of the US population that hates the idea of driving anything that doesn't threatens the complete domination of the internal combustion engine. I've had "discussions" with these kind of people and it's not "fear" per se but more of a deep seated ignorance and an environment hostile to technological progress. To those people, anything that gets more than 40mpg is a threat to everything they believe in and they viciously attack anything and everything that challenges their oil-based ideology.

The article plays on this undercurrent of hatred; the title demonstrates that the author is more interested on stoking the fires of the regressives' political ire than the fact that one test car caught fire after an accident. I'm glad they're looking into it, but ANY car has the potential for catastrophic failure after crashing. A leaky fuel line here, a loose wire there and POOF... up in flames.

Heddy was a cutie. Interesting note; The seven million that she raised in one night for offering a kiss is worth $116,599,299.52 in 2010 dollars...

Until we have to start paying $15.00 for a pound of bananas that is... $200.00 for a fruit cup is just too much!!

Probably several reasons. Just see who Google's primary competitors are, then crosstab that with a list of Republican donors. In addition, Google has announced that they will be hiring in 2011. That just doesn't kosher with the Republicans' plans to squash the economy in order to help their election chances in 2012.

1) It's the RIAA's fault
2) They're most likely lying.

The RIAA is a dinosaur that is slowly dying. It's their own fault. They've spend unknown millions of dollars fighting the digital age instead of embracing it. By fighting it so feverishly like they did, they forced people to come up with solutions and as we know in the digital age, when people want something, it happens. If the RIAA would've embraced the potential digital revenue, they would have feature rich and mature delivery systems available that they control. Instead, they are running around trying to put out little fires. So instead of capitalizing on a potentially lucrative environment, they decided to attack their fan base. In addition, the changing of the model has led to a huge increase in competition for the relatively short attention span of their usual cash cows. Video games, unlimited on-demand movies, hundreds of TV channels, texting, social networking in general - the RIAA's cut of a dollar has shriveled in the past 20 years.

The RIAA seems to be very shortsighted and making a series of VERY bad moves. Now the ball is rolling downhill and they may not be able to stop their demise. I say good riddance. It's not like it's going to affect ACTUAL music that much. God forbid we lose a few autotuned teen friendly beat mixes!

As for the lying part, I doubt that I have to go into detail about that. I'm sure everyone knows that the RIAA has never been fully upfront about their true profit streams. They'll cry about how "Sales are decreasing" when it only refers to one outmoded part of their revenues. It's another reason why nobody takes them seriously anymore.

For instance, even though digital sales have skyrocketed, you hardly even hear the RIAA mention them:

http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/08/global-digital-music-sales-to-overtake-physical-by-2016.ars

I hear this all the time, that the US has the best healthcare in the world. If you do a little research, the ONLY area that we lead in is cost of care. Our infant mortality rates are an embarassment, our life expectancy is dismal, and satisfaction is ranked low. We don't have the best healthcare in the world. We rank pretty far down on nearly everything. Regardless of the actual quality of our healthcare system, what use is even the most mediocre of services if you can't afford them? The majority bankruptcies in the US are medically related. The majority of those declaring bankruptcies due to medical reasons had health insurance before the bankruptcies. Our healthcare system is broken but we're afraid to take it to the emergency room because we can't pay for it. Meanwhile little babies and children die.