Owning a hybrid

"Owning a hybrid is all about saying 'Look at what I'm doing for the world,'" says auto analyst John Wolkonowicz of Global Insight. "If you can't say that, the whole purchase is a waste of time."

Grist

Sexuality bad for kids, violence OK

Put simply, the United States Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution as allowing states broad leeway in regulating minors' access to sexually explicit material. That is why it is illegal around the country to sell pornography to children. Courts have not, however, said that states have a similar right to regulate media based on violence. (NY Times)

I guess that answers my question. Kind of.

600 nudes pose on glacier

Here's hoping they purchased carbon offsets for all the fuel it took to get 600 people to the site.

Oldest VW diesel

Volkswagen of America, Inc. announced that, as part of its diesel heritage search, it has located the oldest operating Volkswagen diesel vehicle in America, a 1977 Rabbit owned by Clint Wilson of Tehachapi, Calif.

[...]

In recognition [...], Volkswagen has provided Wilson with a new Touareg V10 TDI to drive for six-months. (VW Vortex)

Wow, that'll be a change. 50 horsepower to 310? Granted, the Touareg is a wee bit heavier, but still.

AppleWorks RIP

So AppleWorks is officially dead. Good riddance. I've never liked its interface, ever since I got my first Mac in 2000 with OS 9. It got left further in the dust with the migration to OS X.

I like a word processor that gets out of the way. I want to be able to turn most everything off, including the rulers, how the text is going to lay out against the margins on the printed page, everything. I just want to see the text with minimal interruption. AW didn't let you do that.

I've picked up a copy of the latest Pages. Here's hoping it lets you do something like that in its word processor mode.

Dollar coin MIA

So has anyone actually seen one of these coins? It's been six months since the release of the Washington coin and I haven't. The Madison coin was released in May. The Jefferson coin will be released tomorrow.

By having a rotating design on the new dollar coins, the Mint is hoping to keep interest high and avoid the famous flops of two previous dollar coins - the Susan B. Anthony, introduced in 1979, and the Sacagawea, introduced in 2000.

Yeah, right.

When worms attack

Gotta love this article title: "New Worm Attacks Mac OS X".

The first sentence of the piece? "An anonymous hacker claims to have created a worm that targets Intel versions of Mac OS X."

Anyone else see a disconnect?

Hybrids wane, diesels gain

the number of customers considering buying a hybrid has declined over the past year, partly due to a realization of the actual mileage that hybrid cars are likely to achieve. [...] J.D. Power also attributes the drop in hybrid interest to an increase in the number of clean diesel vehicles; the study found that the number of new car buyers considering a diesel had nearly doubled over the past year.

With fleets of new diesel cars bound for the U.S. over the next few years and the demise of some hybrid models, is this the beginning of a gear-change in the alternative-fuel economy? (Crave)

One's gotta hope! I think hybrids are fine, but the enthusiasm given to ethanol ("flex-fuel") vehicles at the expensive of infinitely more flexible and efficient diesel automobiles here in America has been an absolute crime.

Eco prizes

There's something wrong with an eco contest that has an SUV as the prize.

I don't care if it's a hybrid. SUVs still pollute more than autos. Which pollute more than a bus.

Eliminating trialware

Dell on Tuesday became the first big computer maker to try to address customer frustration and anger over “trialware” – the often superfluous and frequently unwanted software that comes pre-installed on most PCs. (Financial Times)

You mean the first big computer maker other than Apple? There are usually a couple trials on a new Mac, like Microsoft Office or iWork, but it's not the mess that the common PC buyer has to put up with. It seems at least one Windows PC maker is waking up to the fact that the out-of-the-box experience matters.