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Comment Re:only use less gasoline if you actually charge t (Score 4, Informative) 112

by Autonin (#65733454) Attached to: Plug-in Hybrids Pollute Almost As Much As Petrol Cars, Report Finds

PHEV's also use some fuel at highway speeds even when there is still battery power available.

Not a valid blanket statement. Only SHITTY PHEV's use fuel at highway speeds.

My 2024 Rav4 Prime has a mode where it will stay in EV until the battery hits 25-30% (what it calls "empty"). I drive at freeway speeds and the ICE never engages. At times I'm doing 80+ mph (which admittedly reduces range) but I'm rarely at a loss for power. I can get anywhere from 35-45 miles on a charge, and work is 40 miles away with free charging for the trip home.

I gas up maybe once a month, at most. If I had to guess, I'm about 90% EV to 10% petrol.

Comment Went CVT a decade ago and never looked back (Score 1) 315

by Autonin (#64996245) Attached to: Do Electric Cars Offer 'Fake Shifting, Real Fun'?

I honestly hated shifting, and when CVT became available immediately got an ICE car with one and loved it.

EV vendors attempting to lure luddite consumers with simulated ancient functionality are absolutely misguided and should stop wasting their R&D money on pointless features that don't add to the reliability, safety, efficiency, or ease-of-use of massive metal boxes that can kill people when misused.
First Person Shooters (Games)

Black Mesa Nearing Completion, Trailer Released 103

Posted by Soulskill from the silencing-naysayers dept.
Today, the Black Mesa Team released an impressive trailer for their remake of Half-Life . The remake is a total-conversion mod for Half-Life 2, bringing the updated graphics and AI of the Source engine to the original game. The team has been dropping hints lately that the project, which began in 2004, is almost done, and the trailer confirms that it will be out in 2009. They also recently announced that they've "dropped Counter-Strike: Source as a requirement for Black Mesa, and from now on, the only thing you'll need to play the mod is a Steam account with any Source engine game installed! Black Mesa is now running completely off of our own content and base Source shared content, and we felt the vastly increased user base more then [sic] justified creating all the extra assets needed to make this switch."
Space

Riding an Ion Drive to the Asteroid Belt 141

Posted by samzenpus from the to-infinity-and-beyond dept.
Iron Condor writes "JPL is now close to embarking on another of its trademark, one-of-a-kind missions, this time to the heart of the asteroid belt: The Dawn mission is being prepared for launch this summer from Kennedy Space Center. Dawn will explore Ceres and Vesta, the two largest known asteroids in our solar system, which lie in the vast expanse between Mars and Jupiter. In the process, the mission will make history on several fronts. Besides being the first spacecraft to orbit a main-belt asteroid and the first to ever orbit two targets after leaving Earth, Dawn will be the first science mission powered by electric ion propulsion, the world's most advanced and efficient space propulsion technology."
Education

Submission + - Encouraging Students to Drop Mathematics

Submitted by
Coryoth
Coryoth writes: "The BBC is reporting that students in the UK are being encouraged to drop math at the senior levels. It seems that schools are seeking to boost their standing on league tables by encouraging students not to take "hard" subjects like mathematics, in favour of easier subjects in which they are assured good grades. The result is Universities being forced to provide remedial math classes for science students who haven't done math for two years. The BBC provides a comparison between Chinese and UK university entrance tests — a comparison that makes the UK look woefully behind. Is the UK slipping behind in science education?"
Software

Source Control For Bills In Congress? 300

Posted by kdawson from the real-subversion dept.
grepya writes "An article in Slate talks about the sneaky way a major change in the Patriot Act reauthorization bill was made by (possibly) a Congressional staffer without even his boss knowing about it. (The change increased the power of the Executive at the expense of the other two branches of government.) Now, I write software for a large and complex system containing millions of lines of code and I know that nobody could slip a single line of code into my project without my knowledge. This is because everything that goes into the build goes into a source control system, and email notification is generated to interested parties. This is for a body of work that affects perhaps a few hundred thousand people at most (our company and the combined population of all our customer organizations). Shouldn't the same process be applied to bills being debated in national legislatures that affect potentially hundreds of millions of people?"
Science

Jeff Hawkins' Cortex Sim Platform Available 126

Posted by kdawson from the build-a-brain-at-home dept.
UnreasonableMan writes "Jeff Hawkins is best known for founding Palm Computing and Handspring, but for the last eighteen months he's been working on his third company, Numenta. In his 2005 book, On Intelligence, Hawkins laid out a theoretical framework describing how the neocortex processes sensory inputs and provides outputs back to the body. Numenta's goal is to build a software model of the human brain capable of face recognition, object identification, driving, and other tasks currently best undertaken by humans. For an overview see Hawkins' 2005 presentation at UC Berkeley. It includes a demonstration of an early version of the software that can recognize handwritten letters and distinguish between stick figure dogs and cats. White papers are available at Numenta's website. Numenta wisely decided to build a community of developers rather than trying to make everything proprietary. Yesterday they released the first version of their free development platform and the source code for their algorithms to anyone who wants to download it."
Security

Submission + - Remote Control To Prevent Aircraft Hijacking

Submitted by
Snad
Snad writes: "The UK's Evening Standard is reporting that Boeing plans to roll out aircraft remote controls systems in a bid to eliminate the threat of terrorist hijackings, and prevent any repetition of the events of September 11 2001.

"Scientists at aircraft giant Boeing are testing the tamper-proof autopilot system which uses state-of-the-art computer and satellite technology. It will be activated by the pilot flicking a simple switch or by pressure sensors fitted to the cockpit door that will respond to any excessive force as terrorists try to break into the flight deck.
Once triggered, no one on board will be able to deactivate the system. Currently, all autopilots are manually switched on and off at the discretion of pilots. A threatened airliner could be flown to a secure military base or a commercial airport, where it would touch down using existing landing aids known as 'autoland function'.""
Censorship

In France, Only Journalists Can Film Violence 531

Posted by kdawson from the possibly-intended-consequences dept.
BostonBTS sends word that the French Constitutional Council has just made it illegal to film violence unless you are a professional journalist (or to distribute a video containing violence). The law was approved exactly 16 years after amateur videographer George Holliday filmed Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King. The Council was tidying up a body of law about offenses against the public order, and wanted to ban "happy slapping." A charitable reading would be that the lawmakers stumbled into unintended consequences. Not according to Pascal Cohet, a spokesman for French online civil liberties group Odebi: "The broad drafting of the law so as to criminalize the activities of citizen journalists unrelated to the perpetrators of violent acts is no accident, but rather a deliberate decision by the authorities, said [Cohet]. He is concerned that the law, and others still being debated, will lead to the creation of a parallel judicial system controlling the publication of information on the Internet."
Music

Major Broadcasters Hit With $12M Payola Fine 222

Posted by kdawson from the pay-for-play-no-no dept.
Gr8Apes writes with a just-breaking AP story reporting that the FCC is wrapping up a settlement in which four major broadcast companies would pay the government $12.5 million and provide 8,400 half-hour segments of free airtime for independent record labels and local artists. The finish line is near after a 3-year investigation. An indie promoter is quoted: "It's absolutely the most historic agreement that the independent community has had with radio. Without a doubt, nothing else comes close."

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