@Vavon: It looks nice finished, but the 356 is pure sex when it's all beat to hell.
@Slave2anMG: This. Also, everyone should also keep in mind any info you've got stored in your "fun" accounts that might be used to answer security questions on your financial or email accounts.
Email accounts are the real ticking bombs, since if you're like me, ALL your personal info could be extracted from there eventually. It wouldn't take a genius to fool a bank into turning over my account using stuff that's in my gmail archive.
Email accounts are the real ticking bombs, since if you're like me, ALL your personal info could be extracted from there eventually. It wouldn't take a genius to fool a bank into turning over my account using stuff that's in my gmail archive.
Detroit would be higher if the population density hadn't been cut in half by white flight.
Not that I don't love it for what it is (60 miles away, source of political amusement, delicious cheap food, great architecture, hockey and colorful characters), but I can't really imagine a city in worse shape than D-town.
@The_Gas_Man: And let's not forget the long list of high profile Democrat politicians who were at the top of the receiving end of these deals (#1 Chris Dodd, #2 Barack Obama, etc).
Interesting. What reward did Obama get from what deals?
"Blaming this on capitalism is dangerous and naive -- and backwards"
Any time anyone says "blaming X is dangerous, naive and backwards" my bullshit/fascism detector goes off. Part of the problem with your line of 'reasoning' is that we don't know what would have happened had the government completely stayed out of the markets.
Anyone who believes in pure free markets (or pure socialism or any other philosophy) is wearing a big pair of blinders.
I've had tire shops refuse to mount tires over 6 years of age. Which is fine by me, because even if they don't have cracks in 'em, old rubber doesn't grip as well as new rubber.
@nataku83: Just because you haven't had a tire blow out because of unseen damage, doesn't mean you won't have it happen at some point. Punctures are one thing, but full-on blowout of a front tire at speed is no fun.
That said, heh, I think the tires on my old BMW are probably about 8 or 9 years old. ;)
Do track bikes at the Paralympics have multiple gears? I figured they were fixed gears like every other track bike on the planet.
"The most scary one was when a 5 yr. old boy was hallucinating and having seizures from a child's anti-biotic."
Isn't it possible that the kid had, like, an infection that was causing these things?
Part of the problem is that people who take medications are sick. It's very hard to figure out which things are caused by the medication and which are just part of being sick. Adverse event reporting is notoriously difficult to interpret.
It takes a lot of data to figure out whether 1 in 10,000 people taking drugs for Obscure Condition X (OCX) are getting sweaty palms because of the medication or because sweaty palms is an unknown symptom of OCX or because, well, 1 in 10,000 healthy people have sweaty palms. Once you start asking people to report "anything unusual" they start reporting a lot of stuff.
That doesn't mean that there's nothing to worry about, though. :)
@Firax: iView Media Pro (er, Expression Media 2 now) is what I use. IMO, it's still the best digital asset manager from a purely functional standpoint anytime you're trying to deal with single catalogs of thousands of images at once. You still need multiple catalogs if you've got a hundred thousand images, but you need a lot fewer catalogs. Definitely the best for dealing with metadata, too.
P.S. Wheat beers are awesome when it's 90 degrees. A slice of lemon, a tall glass of coriander-y hefeweizen and a hammock in the shade....my idea of heaven.
Dare I say, Dogfish 120 Minute is uh, kind of meh. It's so sweet I can't finish one in under two hours. The 90 and 60 minutes, on the other hand, are works of art.
@thelushie: When you're 75 years old and need a seat on a crowded bus or need a hand doing something your ancient body can no longer handle, I hope someone takes the same sort of attitude as you: "stinky old fart should just die if they aren't able to do X by themselves."
What goes around, comes around. Part of living in a society, rather than as a hermit in a cave, is making a few sacrifices for the comfort and well-being of others...even those who may have chosen to put themselves in a situation where they have a different set of requirements than others. And even if you have no compassion for parents, you're a jerk if you think the kid in this case deserved what she got.
Sorry if this post makes you all angry and stuff, 'cause it sounds like you've already got some shit to deal with.
Seems to me it _never_ makes sense to buy a new car. The $5-$8K price range seems about the best, financially speaking. You can get just about anything your heart desires... looking on craigslist here, I see a '98 V12 BMW 750i for $7K (hahah, that'll be cheap to maintain!) and a '97 Camry for $6K.
Cars in that price range probably have ~100K-150K on 'em, which means the drive trains will last a lot longer. That's close enough to the bottom of the depreciation curve that you're not going to lose your shirt. Sure, you'll be shoveling large amounts of money at it from time to time, but that's nothing compared to $4K a year in payments for a new car.
@vr6john: "the dealer pointed out to me that the during a service check that they could tell that I wasn't running the correct octane and that if there was any engine problems due to the lower octane they wouldn't cover my service warranty"
How in gods' names could they tell you were running lower octane fuel? I call BS.
In my understanding and estimation, there probably aren't any new cars that can't handle lower octane fuels. Pinging is the only problem you might experience, and any modern fuel injection system can deal with that.
That said, any older cars that call for it, or anyone running an aftermarket chip, might want to stick to the high grade stuff. Older cars weren't nearly as smart, and you never know well how an aftermarket tuner has programed things...
@ViperBorg:
I've never seen snow on the ground that a good AWD car with snow tires couldn't get through...and where my parents live, they get 130+ inches of snow per year. My old Audi 4000 could chug through stuff over the bumper.
I've never seen snow on the ground that a good AWD car with snow tires couldn't get through...and where my parents live, they get 130+ inches of snow per year. My old Audi 4000 could chug through stuff over the bumper.
I don't think that most people should be driving AWD vehicles. Everyone I know who has gone off the road in the winter, over the last 5 or 10 years, has been driving an AWD vehicle. Unless you know what you're doing, you've got no sense of how slippery the road is when you're in something that powers all four wheels. Then, of course, AWD doesn't help you when it comes time to slow down or turn a corner. A FWD car with snow tires is fine for 95% of the US population.
Not quite sure what any of this has to do with ambulances, though.
@Rusted: "True hybrids will be the way to go. They will store electricity for short trips and use chemical energy for long trips."
Um, what do you call gasoline if not chemical energy? I think any predictions of the future we make should be based on the current status quo, then modified. I suspect dinosaur juice will be the fuel of choice for quite some time.
Turbo Esprit FTW.
My first car was a 924, and my pops owned three of them. The Porsche's are BETTER cars, but the Esprit is undeniably cooler, if only because it's a pure toy rather than something that can be driven daily.
The 924/944/968 cars are all still beautiful, though. One thing about zee germans is that their cars tend to age really well to my eyes. It's hard to find a 10, 20 or 30 year old Porsche, Mercedes, BMW, Audi or VW that doesn't look pretty damn good today...though some need a little help in the wheels+trim department
Agreed. Our 1yo is much more interested in playing with pots and pans and the broom and buckets and whatnot than in his toys. As he should be! I want him to figure out the real world, rather than mastering some magical world of multi-colored plastic.
I'll rarely tackle anything that involves individually peeling chickpeas or almonds.
I won't make my own puff pastry or phyllo dough.
Speaking of egg whites and cream whipping, I used to be solidly in the electric beater camp. However, ours died and I got a nice whisk on a whim and it was a vast improvement. Once you've got the motion down, beating egg whites or cream by hand doesn't take any longer, and is much less likely to over-whip something. I think it lets you get more air in per stroke, which abuses the eggs/cream a bit less and keep 'em from breaking down prematurely. I know how ridiculous that sounds, but it's true.
P.S. I can't even believe people would blame the mother or child or the shoes. Equipment that people use in department stores and airports should not be capable of taking off a foot under ANY circumstance. This is kind of the equivalent of having an open pits full of snakes with no guardrails and a small warning sign reading "don't go in the pit of snakes".
Everyone's attention slips from time to time, which is why dangerous equipment should always have MULTIPLE fail-safes.
Sorry, but this is _clearly_ a problem with escalators. No moving object should be built so that it can EAT A HUMAN'S FOOD. Elevators have all sorts of automatic interrupt switches. Even industrial machines have interlocks all over creation.
The engineer in me wonders why there isn't some sort of automatic kill switch that detects foreign objects getting into the teeth of the escalator, in addition to better guards to prevent stuff from getting in there in the first place. Thinking of the cross section of an elevator's end, it seems like there could be a photobeam detector just under the teeth that watches for any foreign matter, or something along those lines. Hell, they're making table saws now that can shut down in an instant if a finger comes in contact with them.
I drive a 20 year old BMW 5-series with 230K miles on it. I drive like an asshole. I get 15-20mpg and it only takes premium. It runs so rich that backing out of the garage on a cold morning will give you a good contact high.
On the other hand, I only drive it about 50 miles a week, don't commute by car, bought it $1800 and insurance very little...So, I come out way ahead financially compared to someone who drives a Prius 500 miles a week. And I have more fun.
Walk or bike to work. If you're too far from work, move or get a new job. You don't have to live in NYC to commute by person power. Any small city will do. Think of it as an investment: gas will get to the point where a long commute will be prohibitively expensive, even in a car that gets 50mpg. Yeah, it sucks to change your way of life, but not as much as having the gas pump bleed you to death.
Eliminating one commute by car in a 2-person household is probably the biggest single money saver out there. Americans spend ~13-15% of their income on transportation. Much of that spending is elective.
