Stickers on cars that make me want to do something violent:
Obviously, anything pro-W, or pro-conservative idiocy, racist, anti-gay, anti-environment, anti-evolution, etc. I won't post images for fear of causing rage.
Others that make me think about running the person off the road.
But this may actually be the king of them all. Nothing says "I'm a douchebag" like this one:
That's unacceptable. I can understand it on somebody who works in bull or horse breeding as massive nads are practically a symbol of their profession and probably haunt their dreams, but for anyone else, it's just a stupid, gross macho gesture.
Thankfully the nads seem to have fallen out of fashion in my area, and I don't see them that much anymore. I remember seeing some bright blue ones once--do you want to go around bragging that you have blue balls? Besides the shiny plastic "Bumpernuts," I've also seen homemade ones--two tennis balls put in pantyhose.
Reed not nailing the Mini "The SUV Backlash Starts Here" issue, but nailing the bumper sticker on pickup issue.
FF- This is what enviornmentalists have been hoping for years, a market reason for the end of gas-powered vehicles. With the Chevy (100mpg) Volt around the corner, we're slowly starting to see the end of the gas age.
The next big thing is how to lift an airplane off the ground carrying payload. NASA figured out how to lift a jet off the ground with no passengers or luggage. Once that's figured out, we should really start making progress.
With OPEC saying $7 a gallon gas is around the corner, that could be the best market-based impetus to solve this problem.
The next big thing is how to lift an airplane off the ground carrying payload. NASA figured out how to lift a jet off the ground with no passengers or luggage. Once that's figured out, we should really start making progress.
Bigger wings might help. Sure they increase drag, but they also increase lift, thereby requiring less power. Or maybe larger fans in the turbines would help. I'm not really up on my physics, but if I'm thinking correctly, a larger fan would produce the same amount of thrust as a smaller fan, but with fewer revolutions and therefore, needing less fuel.
Or maybe jets could be fitted with big solar panels that look kind of like the AWACS radar pod.
Reed, you're forgetting about FedEx, DHL, etc., etc. People will benefit from cheaper flight costs because these companies won't have to increase their prices for shipping stuff.
Solar power would only work for ultra light planes with huge wings that don't carry any load and just float there, blimp-like. Very limited practical applications in air transport.
I was reading an article on small-car fuel efficiency and started noodling some figures. The Toyta Yaris uses 7.0 litres/100 km. The VW City Golf (Canada-only model) gets 9.7 lites / 100 km. If you drive 20,000 km year, at $1.20 a litre, that's roughly an extra $700 in fuel a year. Keep it 10 years, which I tend to do, and you're blowing $7,000 in extra fuel costs.
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