Shout-Out: My Belt Sander Can Beat Your Circular Saw

Thanks to the rube goldberg fellows at the New York Times for this one:

A Night (or day) at the power tool drag races. The premise is simple: Take a hand-held power tool. Rebuild it into a racing machine.

Will it run? Maybe. Will it crash? Could be. Will it entertain? Most definitely.

Since a pair of San Francisco Bay area artists held the first power tool drag races six years ago, technophiles have exported the tradition to three continents, holding similar competitions in Sacramento, Seattle, Canada, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Israel.
They’ve raced everything from power drills and grinders to upright vacuum cleaners, leaf blowers, chain saws and even the occasional fire extinguisher.

“It’s a lot of zip ties, bailing wire, and clamps. It’s pretty lo-fi,” a racer said after a race in May at the Maker Faire, an annual summit of tinkerers and their inventions. But that’s what he likes about these races: “The ingenuity of it all, it’s kind of a MacGyver sort of thing, a lot of bubble gum and duct tape.”

Take the simplest racing tool of all: the humble belt sander. Out of the box, it’s a ready-made racer. Put it on a flat surface with the belt facing down, lock the trigger into the on position, and your tool will automatically propel itself forward like a tiny tank. (For belt sanders that don’t have trigger locks, you could make MacGyver proud by cinching down the trigger with a zip tie.)

Another gentleman raced a can opener, which set the record for slowness. In five minutes, it crawled about a foot and a half, delighting the audience.

When the power tool drag races ran at Kinnernet, a creative technology gathering in Israel, one of the most unusual entries wasn’t a speedster. Yedidia Vardi, a tinkerer, and Michal Levy, a musician, combined a cordless drill, roller skates, and a couple of mallets. They lined the racetrack with about 100 wine bottles filled with different levels of water. As their racer paraded down the line, it struck each bottle in turn, pinging out the tune of “Oh! Susanna.”

Here's the Oh Suzannah Video follows:



And what did WIFEy have to say to this?

(as I was about to tell her this looked like a nice safe hobby for me to take up???

Some people have all the time in the world to waste...)00


+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
OK, you wanted a Political discussion: Here goes.

The background I believe that:
* We're HEADING into a DEPRESSION.
* It's going to be as BAD as the last one.
* According to Robert Reich (former Sec'y of Labor under Clinton): The only number that he EVER saw, defining the
depression was that the unemployment rate hovered around 25%.
* We need a new deal.
* After 58 years of NO Health Care Reform (since 1950!) it will FINALLY be coming soon...
* We've managed to WASTE a FULL generation (from Zero to thirty) with decaying social, educational, and interpersonal skills.
* Our nation is no longer DOING (producing) anything.
SO, from these few premises, I have extrapolated a great deal of items to FIX our society...

But....
We need to make sure that a number of issues are resolved ALL at once.
If we don't do them ALL at once, its like juggling three RUNNING chain saws, but dropping one!

Here's what I came up with:

We need to do the FOLLOWING to FIX our Society:
* Create A Living Wage
* Create a National Single payer Healthcare
* Create a National 3-4 year draft (or alternate service)
* Create a Federally paid Day Care starting at six months
* Implement Tax Reform on the ULTRA Rich
* Lobbying (Political Reform)
* Education
* Infrastructure (road /bridge/Systems repairs)
* Lack of Training/futures
* Truth and Reconcilliation Commission
* A new "Manhattan" project, focusing on Energy INDEPENDENCE

See my other blog: http://sos-newdeal.blogspot.com for more details.

Tech: OMG. I want ONE... My next Robot!

I can't believe it. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created a real product I desperately want. The device above attaches snugly to almost any standard digital camera.

The robot is called GigaPan, named “giga” for the billion or more pixels it can marshal for a typical panorama.

It creates the huge, high-resolution vista by extending its robotic finger and repeatedly clicking the camera shutter, taking tens, hundreds or even thousands of overlapping images, each at a slightly different angle, that are then stitched together by software to create one gigapixel shot.

Preparing to shoot the pictures is straightforward. The photographer attaches the mount to an ordinary tripod, attaches the camera and decides on the breadth of the scene. Then the robot goes to work, dividing the total vista into segments and clicking away.

One main advantage of the system, he said, is that users can use a telephoto lens rather than a wide-angle one, providing more detail and depth to the image.

“That means that when you zoom in to look at the images, you are viewing them just as you would if you were looking through a pair of binoculars” with powerful magnification, he said. “You can take panoramas from video, but you won’t have a still image that you can stop and look at in this high detail.”

One favorite image— of Hanauma Bay on the coast of Oahu in Hawaii — has 1,750 total frames, 25 rows by 70 columns.

Most popular images here: The exposures and number of frames were calculated automatically by the computer inside the GigaPan.

It took about an hour and a half for the robot to shoot the scene in a fairly silent process, with only “a low hum, and the steady click of the camera,” he said.

The photographer too, was busy, too, during the shoot. The robotic device attracted a lot of attention from bystanders as it captured the scene, and he ended up protecting it from them, lest they overturned it.

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
OK, you wanted a Political discussion: Here goes.

The background I believe that:
* We're HEADING into a DEPRESSION.
* It's going to be as BAD as the last one.
* According to Robert Reich (former Sec'y of Labor under Clinton): The only number that he EVER saw, defining the
depression was that the unemployment rate hovered around 25%.
* We need a new deal.
* After 58 years of NO Health Care Reform (since 1950!) it will FINALLY be coming soon...
* We've managed to WASTE a FULL generation (from Zero to thirty) with decaying social, educational, and interpersonal skills.
* Our nation is no longer DOING (producing) anything.
SO, from these few premises, I have extrapolated a great deal of items to FIX our society...

But....
We need to make sure that a number of issues are resolved ALL at once.
If we don't do them ALL at once, its like juggling three RUNNING chain saws, but dropping one!

Here's what I came up with:

We need to do the FOLLOWING to FIX our Society:
* Create A Living Wage
* Create a National Single payer Healthcare
* Create a National 3-4 year draft (or alternate service)
* Create a Federally paid Day Care starting at six months
* Implement Tax Reform on the ULTRA Rich
* Lobbying (Political Reform)
* Education
* Infrastructure (road /bridge/Systems repairs)
* Lack of Training/futures
* Truth and Reconcilliation Commission
* A new "Manhattan" project, focusing on Energy INDEPENDENCE

See my other blog: http://sos-newdeal.blogspot.com for more details.

TooMuchTime; Monty Python video

Thanks to Froth Slosh, for the link!

LEGO (yes, the building block company)

Introduced a video camera recorder set that lets you use your legos as a stage, and makes creating masterpieces EASY!.

I wonder what PES would say (www.eatpes.com) Hmmm. will let him see this...

This could be VERY VERY interesting combined with the lego mindstorm (programmable) ROBOT kits!

------------
2008 Haiku: Impeach Cheney; Pelosi Pardons ; Democracy Restored-- Pass it on

TecH: RFID Passports HACKED again! (2nd yr in row)

I've really gotta hand it to this overweight, German hacker (eats too much western junk food too!)

Lukas Grunwald, an RFID expert who has served as an e-passport consultant to the German parliament, says a security flaw with his German RFID enabled passport can allow him to CRASH the passport reader.

In "Geekspeak",

The security flaws allow someone to seize and clone the fingerprint image stored on the biometric e-passport, and to create a specially coded chip that attacks e-passport readers that attempt to scan it.

Grunwald says he's succeeded in sabotaging two passport readers made by different vendors by cloning a passport chip, then modifying the JPEG2000 image file containing the passport photo. Reading the modified image crashed the readers, which suggests they could be vulnerable to a code-injection exploit that might, for example, reprogram a reader to approve expired or forged passports.

"If you're able to crash something you are most likely able to exploit it," says Grunwald, who's scheduled to discuss the vulnerabilities this weekend at the annual DefCon hacker conference in Las Vegas.

Last year at the BlackHat security conference he showed how he could extract the data on a read-only passport chip and clone it to a read-write chip that appears the same to an e-passport reader. Now Grunwald says he was able to add data to the cloned chip that would allow someone to attack the passport reader.

Buffer-overrun vulnerabilities occur when coding errors in software allow an attacker to overflow a section of memory dedicated to storing a fixed amount of data. Carefully exploited, they often permit the hacker to execute his own instructions on the vulnerable computer, essentially taking over the device.

Now HERE's the scary part!
If a (rfid-passport) reader could be compromised using Grunwald's technique, it might be reprogrammed to misreport an expired passport as a valid one, or even -- theoretically -- to attempt a compromise of the Windows-based border-screening computer to which it is connected.


Or even worse, take over the computer, infect a brand new unknown virus into the network
AND SHUT DOWN THE ENTIRE AIRPORT
*** WHICH FOR STUPID COMPETITIVE REASONS all RUNS Microsoft WINDOZE!
Now it's time to be AFRAID.
Be REALLY afraid

Scenario one:
Al Queida:
Terrorist network hacker develops new virus/worm (see the Morris worm Here)
which will use the RFID reader to insert code allowing the terrorists into the country, and (say) 1/2 hour later take down the entire AIRPORT, then take down the
internet (the MICROSQUISH internet that is...) a section at a time

Remember " we presume that the terrorists have written a brand new, never before seen virus, that has NEVER been seen, so that ALL virus programs DONT recognize it to stop it!"
SO EVERY single darn WINDOWS box in the WORLD gets infected, and taken down...

(oh and the terrorists are NOW in the country, but their information was also erased from the network before it was blown away (erased).


AUGH... I can't even continue to a use attacking the food supply...

BTW, I AM available for hire... for the right price!!!

TecH: Error Messages from HELL

ERROR MESSAGES from Hell

or

WTF were you THINKING, using WINDOWS for a display this size!

The WTF blog (No, you dirty people, it stands for "Worse then Failure!" shows this DOOZIE of a few ERROR Messages: Original story HERE:

Do you recognize the "Windows BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH??" SCREEN??

How about this one...Great advertising for the Paris Hotel by the way!

Voting Machines: The TRUTH about the LAST FL. Election!

Ah. It starts to get interesting again.
Despite the Register's Dislike of The Cringe (The REAL PC industry Gossip columnist for the past 20 years...)---{WAY before the REG was created of course!}

Robert Cringely reports (from HERE) that The 2006 election which lost 18,000 votes WAS CAUSED by a SECURITY lapse that was FOUR YEARS old of the SLAMMER SQL worm.

Note to self: Don't give TMI (too much information-- look HERE )
The slammer worm was essentially a security breach on servers, which quickly takes a network down!

At any rate, the VOTER IMPACT of the SCANDAL is OBVIOUS:

Republican Vern Buchanan was ultimately certified as the winner over Democrat Jennings by just 369 votes.

An ongoing investigation by state officials has been unable to determine the cause of some 18,000 so-called undervotes (votes that were reportedly cast but not recorded) registered only on Democratic-leaning Sarasota's touch-screen voting systems.

Gee. Can you SAY REPUBLICIAN monkey business???

TECH: Jesus ALBERTO JUST SAY NO NO NO

Oh WHAT a FU**ING ASSHOLE

Stop the ATTORNEY GENERAL

Wired Covers the FULL STORY HERE

What did he do NOW, you ask?

He caved in to the MEDIA GIANTS... AND those GREAT folks who brought you the
DCMA

To quote Wired:
Proposed Crime of the Century: Attempted Copyright Infringement

**RIAA and MPAA are enthusiastic of course **

The Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007, proposed to Congress on Monday by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales,

would amend current U.S. copyright law to:

• give the government far more power to investigate and prosecute cases,
• would expand the scope of what constitutes a criminal act,
• would stiffen penalties
• including adding a life term for those whose activities cause death.
  

If the attorney general has his way, copyright law will work more like drug laws:

• The government could seize your personal property,
  
• wiretaps in counterfeit cases would become legit,
  
• violators could face lifetime prison sentences,
  
• and, in an ambiguous and far-reaching provision,
  
• the mere attempt to violate a copyright would become a crime.
  

JESUS fu*king CHRIST...

ALL THIS from a man WHO ALREADY broke the LAWs of the UNITED STATES by:

• AUTHORIZING WIRETAPPING against US CITIZENS.
• Authorized and Promoted BREAKING the Geneva Convention against TORTURE.
• FIRED 9 US Attorneys because of POLITICAL interference of the WHITE HOUSE.
• HAS shown CONGRESS he has NO idea what is legal
• Has shown Congress HE isn't in charge of his OWN department
• HAS shown that he can't/won't accept responsibility for his own actions.
  

More:
Among the proposed changes:

The bill would:

• add stronger penalties for repeat offenders
• make it easier to charge someone as a repeat offender.
  
• Expand forfeiture provisions
  
• would allow the government to seize any property used in the commission of a crime -- like
  
• a PC,
  
• a home,
  
• cash on hand -- making copyright law similar to drug laws.

• make it a criminal act to export pirated materials
• as opposed to merely importing it.
  
• Allow the government wiretapping authority when investigating copyright and trademark cases, a power the government does not currently have.
  

• A new "attempt" provision:
• It wouldn't require the actual commission of a violation:
• , the bill could conceivably be expanded, in an extreme case,
• to interpret a computer full of music next to a spindle of blank CDs as an act of piracy.

** An RIAA representative said the organization had not had time to review the bill yet, and could not yet comment on the proposed legislation.

Gayle Osterberg, VP of communications for the MPAA, says that organization is also still going through the bill and hasn't had time to fully analyze it yet. However, she did offer boilerplate support for the process, if not the bill itself.

Tech/Food : Now I KNOW I'm crazy.

OH. or Oy...

I dont know whether to laugh or cry.

I was updating my del.icio.us bookmarks when I came across this.

You may have heard of CAD (computer Aided Design) used by architects.
This link tells us of a CAM project (takes a CAD design and actually MANUFACTURES it in 3-D

However, THIS project is a homemade CAM machine which creates it's models in SUGAR!

That's right! the screw is made of SUGAR...


This is a picture of the SCREW being taken out of the bed of sugar, before it is dug out of the sugar!

Visible on the bottom right, is the "print head", or a heat gun!

In this project, the heat "melts" a 2-Dimensional picture (just like a printer) onto the layer of sugar.

In this specific case, instead of dots, being laid down on the paper, the layer of sugar (in certain spots) is FUSED to the previous layer of sugar, , or the first layer.


this is what the sugar looks like when first melted! Note again you can see the "print head" or heater element here, as it is heating the sugar.

Notice the shallow lines?? the Author says, "Because the hot air gun blows air continuously, it leaves a shallow trail wherever it goes, indicating the toolpath of the heater over the sugar surface."


Here is the finished version of the coil pictured in the above two pictures:

And here is the screw in partial fabrication..

Now I need to make a donut run!

TecH: Do You back up YOUR work regularly?

Ok, so EVERYONE tells you to do BACKUPS, right?

Do you?

Guess what? The June (2007) Issue Of Business 2.0 was Deleted Before Going To Print

(to quote my daughter...) Heh. Heh.


TechCrunch reports that somebody goofed, and deleted the issue fromtheir servers...

Oh hell, Here's ONE Source:

A 2003 article (in Business 2.0) likened backups to flossing - everyone knows it's important, but few devote enough thought or energy to it.

According to an article in the International Herald Tribune (a NY Times company),
says:

Last week, Business 2.0 got caught forgetting to floss.

On the night of Monday, April 23, the magazine's editorial system crashed, wiping out all the work that had been done for its June issue. The backup server failed to back up.

Good thing the magazine, based in San Francisco, is a monthly. "If it had happened a week later, we would have been in trouble," said Josh Quittner, the editor.

Until the night of the crash, the magazine had never had to rely on its backup server, Quittner said, so no one had noticed that its programming was either obsolete or dysfunctional, or both. Just last November, the magazine had listed off-site backup as being among "the usual precautions."

So they lucked out, they DID have a backup of the DATA, even though they needed to RE-DO the entire Layout of the June issue.

Do YOU have backups???

I admit, I've been caught in the past! (not recently though!)

2004 Elections-- THE SMOKING GUN??

Wow. if this is true this blows my mind. ENGLISH translation (from the tech-ese) at bottom!

The 2004 Ohio elections seems to have been SERIOUSLY tainted by REPUBLICIANS. From
slashdot has this GREAT story, (if it's TRUE of course!)

"Netcraft is showing that an event happened in the Ohio 2004 election that is difficult to explain. The Secretary of State's website, which handles election reporting, normally is directed to an Ohio-based IP address hosted by the Ohio Supercomputer Center. On Nov. 3 2004, Netcraft shows the website pointing out of state to a server owned by Smartech Corp. According to the American Registry on Internet Numbers, Smartech's block of IP addresses 64.203.96.0 – 64.203.111.255 encompasses the entire range of addresses owned by the Republican National Committee. Smartech hosted the recently notorious gbw43.com domain used from the White House in apparent violation of the Presidential Records Act, from which thousands of White House emails vanished. Can anyone suggest a good explanations for this seemingly dubious election-eve transfer?"

IN english?

The ADDRESS for the Ohio Secretary of state CHANGED during ELECTION day 2004.

The servers at netcraft monitor (or CAN monitor) pretty much the entire internet.
here's a screen shot, showing what the story above is discussing:


Here's the deal in ENGLISH....

THE last ENTRY in the picture seems to say that that on Nov 3rd, 2004, the website changed it's owner, and WHERE the domain {election....oh.us} was HOSTED at.

and the paragraph seems to say that it was run by Smartech, which also runs the Republican National Committee email (and web sites).

Lookie HERE:
This is my system clock, and what
Nov-3-2004 looked like.
Now election day (According to wikipedia) occurs on the Tuesday following the first Monday of November every year.

That would make the change as the elections were being tallied???!!!!


I see the problem here!!!





I think we need to start articles of impeachment against the ENTIRE administration, including the two Supreme court appointees, by this ILLEGAL administration...


SO.
Lets see:

WMD-NONE
Albert0 "torture allowed" Gonzales
Dick " I shoot Friends" Cheney
Dick " Water-boarding is NOT torture" CHeney
George "I did coke, but it was SO LONG ago" Bush
George "I drove DUI/DWI, so what?!!!" Bush
Paul "I started 3 wars" Wolfowitz
Paul "My World bank honey makes more money then Connie Rice" Wolfowitz
Alberto "Yes, I fired the 8, but don't know why, but it's legal, so there, " gonsales

It's times like this we need to impeach:

Dick Cheney (first)
George Bush
Alberto Gonsalves

Then we need to remove the following from OFFICE:

Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts
Supreme Court Justice Allito

AND YES, WE need to START NOW!!! no waiting until the ELECTION!!!

TecH: Get Google (2)

(1)

A Google April Fool's product. The new Google Tisp
Make sure you click the GET started Link so you can see the installation instructions...

(2) GOOGLE "Easter EGGS" (hidden Google sites)

(3) and the killer... A REAL Google Easter Bunny HERE

PoliticS/tech: NOT Bush- but Republican (UPDATE)!

OK. John McCain (Rep.) has to have his friends at MYSPACE be more careful
BTW, don't bother searching for ME at myspace. You wont find me.

Oh, and JOHN Stewart Covered this on the Daily show Yesterday


OK to quote the article at techcrunch: his website was hacked.

and it was because the staffer who wrote the site used a template, and that template
called photos from the writer's website.

techcrunch says:

McCain’s staff used his template, but didn’t give (the original person who wrote the files) credit. Worse, he says, they use images that are on his server, meaning he has to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site.

Not a good neighbor policy...

But the guy got even...

He decided to play a small prank on the campaign this morning as retribution. Since he’s in control of some of the images on the site, he replaced one that shows contact information with a statement saying:

Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage…particularly marriage between two passionate females.

OMG. ROTFLMAO..

don't know what that means? ROTF. Google it. Heh heh.

TecH: Netvibes.com -- Recommended

Hey Guy (and gal) [does anyone even READ my blogs? I WONDER?]

Gotta tell you about a great new way to read "RSS" enhanced blogs (like this one)

http://netvibes.com

It's a newsreader aggreator.

Essentially you feed it a list of your favorite blogs and it spits out a page that shows them all.
it does a lot more stuff but that's what I'm using it for now.

Will try and find some time to do a review in the future

IronY: How He became a Pirate (ARGUH, Me Matey)

The Consumerist has a great feature on How a normal geeky Guy wound up a FULL FLEDGED PIRATE of music.

to quote the most succinct parts:

...snip...I sit ...snip...with a house filled with over 1000 vinyl records and around 800 CD's. If you figure about $12 per recording as an accurate average, that's somewhere around $20,000. Not a bad chunk of change for the music business, I say.

So I headed to Rhino's online store, purchased the music, and downloaded the files.

and the Customer Service person says...

"You don't understand," I said, "These files were not copied or pirated, I
actually purchased them."

"Well" (CSR air head) responded, "You didn't actually purchase the files, you
really purchased a license to listen to the music, and the license is very
specific about how they can be played or listened to."

Mark says
BULLSHIT. I purchased the Right to LISTEN to the music. BS that my vinyl needs to replaced.

I will replace it however I choose to...

(BTW, this was not me writing this article, but I totally agree with this guy!

Oh and HERE's the KICKER:

"Imagine the consumer response if Coke could only be consumed from specific Coke-approved equipment, and then only in the specific ways that the folks at Coke wanted the product to be consumed. "drinking Coke with fast food is no problem, but we must warn you that your license forbids the mixing of Coke with any alcoholic beverages..."

And YET, the Patent office (US PTO) has the "BALLS" to "release" the following BS report which sound JUST like the "COMPANY" line that the RIAA claims about file-sharing...

Gee, sounds like some folks need to understand the REAL reason why RIAA is dying!

Tech: Anamoty of an E-Bay scam

The reg (one of my favorite spots) has this great dissection of a SCAM.

Now. I need to tell you I might have fallen for this too.

Essentially, someone stole a ebay account with a good rating, and is trying to get people
to send him cash...

If you're interested, Better to read the emails by yourself, and try and understand it:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/21/ebay_fraud_anatomy/

Markb in NJ

TecH: The Google phone -

Google phone - it's for real | The Register

Some interesting snippets:

"...Rubin was a veteran ...snip...but is best known for leading WebTV and subsequently Danger Inc. Danger produced one of the most-photographed phones of recent years, thanks to Paris Hilton: its Hiptop is marketed by T-Mobile as the Sidekick....

Also on the team are Apple veteran and Graphics expert Mike Reed worked on the ill-fated QuickDraw GX and on font technology at Apple. Google acquired his start-up Skia, which produced a vector graphics suite for resource constrained devices. ahem... starting to get hotter

Reqwireless, based in Waterloo, Canada, (west coast!) will be providing the applications. (Google already offers a well-received, Java-based email client for mobiles, and a similar application for Google Maps).


Very interesting, and a no-brainer if it's almost free!

TecH: IE 7 Urgent BUG Report (hee hee)

OK. SO I am a FIREFOX phreak.
(go here) to be updated in future-- to learn how to get firefox and
STOP using Microsoft's IE 6 or (IE 7)...

Oh, and Microsoft LIED when they said in 2001, that windows 2000 was the preferred corporate solution and would be Supported till 2010.

They Lied because I can't RUN IE7, because I have windows 2000
They lied because they DIDN't provide FREE daylight savings time Fixes for the bug last week
They lied because EVERYTHING about IE has been a lie.

Am I angry? Nah...

the REG reports that a slimy exploit exists that will replace a local (on your pc) page, with one that says, please click to retry (originating from a foreign site)

Ah the wonders of IE7.

Bet you can't remove it from your pc, either!

TecH: Intel sez NO to VISTA till SP1

The Register Does it again!

I love the REG.

Vista on hold at ALL of Intel till service pack one (aka bug fix 1) is relaased.

Also the US Department of Transportation has forbidden VISTA for the next six months too

TecH: GetHUMAN

This is much better then my normal reaction... normally just SCREAM "HUMAN" into the phone at the top of my lungs! Hee hee.

Courtesy of LifeHacker from the source,
GETHUMAN.com

Mind you, if you use Firefox OR IE, type Control and F (CNTRL-F) to bring up a SEARCH window. type the name of the company you want, and zip. You're done.

DetroiT: Energy Efficient vs. SUV's (continued)- updated 4-1-09

Updated 4-1-09 about GM and the streetcars at end...

OK. Wired asks a valid question:

Why is it there are Clean Cars Aplenty Outside U.S. but only 2 available in USA?

Automakers are producing more than 100 fuel-efficient vehicles, but you can't buy them in the U.S.

A study by the Civil Society Institute and 40MPG.org says there are now 113 vehicles rated at 40 mpg or higher available internationally, but just two (the Toyota Prius and the Honda Civic Hybrid) here.

Oooh... This is MY blog, so I get to pontificate...

Reasons we don't have better fuel(ed) cars in the USA

1. Detroit Lobbies and pays the Senate/House HUGE campaign contributions, therefore no increase in the CAFE fuel stands in 25 years
2. The OIL industry has also lobbied the Senate/House, witness the TERRIBLE (I don't own oil stock- so it IS terrible for me) profits of EXXON/MOBIL this year..
3. Assholes Idiots who claim that global warming isn't real.
4. Assholes Idiots who think that CORN based ETHANOL is the way to go in this country.
5. Supid-*ss Presidents who think that 500 Billion dollarsspent on a WAR is money well spent.
6. Our congress has never looked into the concept of alternative sources of energy, such as solar, wind, THERMAL, (and SUN based "free") energies.
7. Our COLLECTIVE stupid-ness at using SUV's to go to get a gallon of milk

ANd my Number one reason why we have problems???

THE Car companies themselves..

Until the 1940's there were local trollies/light rail companies in MOST towns in this country.
UNTIL GM and a consortium of the BIG oil companies CONSPIRED to put them all out of business, so that GM could SELL BUSSes to replace them...

This is the reason we have NO mass transit left in this country. IT is the BIGGEST SCANDAL of the 20th century.

And a subject of a FUTURE post (anyone care to research?)

4-1-09 update (has it really been three years???(As usual I answer myself...)

See HERE for a post in my OThER blog regarding Detroit, the decline thereof, and the great streetcar scandal here