These days the combatants in the horsepower wars seem to have taken the gloves off. This is apparently the new SSC Ultimate Aero II.
Well, they certainly seem to have moved away from the "kit car" mantle that the Veyron fanboys were all too happy to jab the original car with.
The new Aero, sporting some 1,350 horsepower, aims to beat the latest Veyron with a top speed of 275 horsepower.
Why I like it: It's light, nearly half the weight of the Veyron. It uses a relatively modest V8 with a pile of turbochargers. It has a real gearbox with few of any electronic nanny gadgets.
Now all that remains to be seen is if the rumored $900,000 price tag of insanity is for real, or if they've smartly built a car that'll be sold for a fraction of the Veyron's price tag, while eating its lunch, in the finest American motorsport tradition. posted by Mr. Lion
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22:31 EST | comments
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| Saturday, July 17 2010 |
Dear Adobe,
For breaking everything that is great about the PDF integration within OS X, eff you.
For publishing price lists in this reprehensibly broken PDF format, you have ensured that I will never purchase a single item from you, ever. posted by Mr. Lion
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21:25 EST | comments
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The U.S. Department of Transportation has ... found that at the time of the crashes, throttles were wide open and the brakes were not engaged, people familiar with the findings said.
The results suggest that some drivers who said their Toyota and Lexus vehicles surged out of control were mistakenly flooring the accelerator when they intended to jam on the brakes...
The findings by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration involve a sample of reports in which a driver of a Toyota vehicle said the brakes were depressed but failed to stop the car from accelerating and ultimately crashing.
It's a bit late to get back into the game of making cars for people who actually care about the act of driving, Toyota. But, y'know, maybe not such a bad idea.
So apparently Tesla managed to con convince a number of investors to part with some $226 million in their IPO.
Perhaps it's a good economic sign that enough people are willing to part with their hard-earned to support a company that has never turned a profit, probably never will turn a profit, and produces cars that are generally useless and targeted to an extremely small and whimsical niche.
It's worth noting that said IPO, heralded by the usual suspects as de-facto evidence that people want electric cars, is but a mere fraction of the $465 Million ponied up by Uncle Sam a short while ago.
As it goes, the only thing stupider than someone buying a useless item for a given sum, is a government buying one at twice the price. posted by Mr. Lion
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| Friday, June 25 2010 |
One wonders.
Exactly how prevalent is the theft of My First Borg Baby child car seats at Target to necessitate one of those stupid security-rope devices?
I mean, really. CDs, DVDs, video games, electronics-- I can see the average shop lifter having those items relatively high on the list of things to nab. But car seats?
The improvements to Safari with version 5 are nice and all-- it's much faster, has rather good HTML5 support, and a host of other tweaks-- However, there is one utterly stupid, monstrously annoying "feature" you've decided to add which makes me want to eat glass.
And that, friends, is the same thing that makes me want to draw and quarter as many FireFox developers as I can find whenever I'm forced to use that mismashtastic hell of a browser: Title matching in the URL input bar.
Do. Not. Do. That.
My brain speaks domain names. When I want to go somewhere, I start typing domain names. I do not start typing titles, and your insistence that they be included in autofill matches, and in fact given preference, is about the stupidest thing I've seen since... well, FireFox doing exactly that same bloody thing.
If you've suddenly decided the majority of users' brains operate that way-- fine. Mine, however, does not, so give me an option to turn the goddamn thing off. posted by Mr. Lion
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| Sunday, May 30 2010 |
It'll be nice when...
The NYT finally goes tits up and ceases foisting this kind of nonsense on otherwise calm people.
The cliffs notes:
1) College student takes on ~$100,000 in student loans, so she can go to a "good school" and achieve a basket weaving degree with no real job prospects, and hence "has trouble" paying back the loans.
2) This is somehow the fault of Citibank for giving her the money.
The relevant blood-boiling excerpts:
Sallie Mae gets a pass here, in my view. A responsible grownup co-signed for its loans to the Munnas, and the company eventually cut them off.
But what was Citi thinking, handing over $40,000 to an undergraduate who had already amassed debt well into the five figures? This was, in effect, a “no doc” or at least a “low doc” subprime mortgage loan.
Right. So we're clear: Government run loan company giving unqualified borrowers tens of thousands of dollars: No problem.
Private (mostly) bank giving unqualified borrowers tens of thousands of dollars: Exploitation!!!111oneone.
Now let us review exactly why it is so difficult for this poor, exploited student to repay her loans:
Her mother can’t help without selling her bed and breakfast, and then she’d have no home. She could take her daughter in, but there aren’t good ways for her to earn a living in Alexandria Bay, in upstate New York.
Cortney could move someplace cheaper than her current home city of San Francisco, but she worries about her job prospects, even with her N.Y.U. diploma.
She recently received a raise and now makes $22 an hour working for a photographer. It’s the highest salary she’s earned since graduating with an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women’s studies.
Yeah, can't go live somewhere cheap, because evidently there are no photographers outside of San Francisco. Can't make more money, because the "super-mega-awesome degree from a prestigious university" is in Basket Weaving and carries with it absolutely no marketable skill set what so ever.
And all of this, mind you, is the fault of the eeeevil bank for giving her the loans, and the eeeevil university for not managing her finances for her.
Well, I have a suggestion: If you want to repay your debts, Ms. Basket Weaver, try journalism. It turns out they'll cut a check to just about any moron who can string together a thousand words on the eeeevils of capitalism over at the NYT. For a while, anyway. All you need to do is find some naive idiot like, say, yourself, and you can run the fabricated cause du jour up the flag pole for fun and profit!
posted by Mr. Lion
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| Thursday, May 27 2010 |
Huh.
I've often lambasted just about everyone who makes a car these days for failing to get it, primarily because the companies in question are largely not run by car people.
Evidently someone at Dodge finally figured out how to make a good ad, at least. Not much, but I'll take it.
