Gas shortage UK

[Commander Kinsey]

Cars serve a purpose, they are not meant to look pretty. Do you own an Apple device by any chance?

[Commander Kinsey]

I buy the cheapest car which is in working order, keep it for 5 years, then scrap it when it won't go. This means nobody steals it, I pay virtually nothing in depreciation (especially as the scrap value is often a third of the original purchase price, and I can often take parts out of it to sell first). My current car doesn't even lock. Nobody has ever stolen anything out of it, despite leaving satnav, mobile phone, and several tools in the back.

Don't get me started on electric cars, they just aren't worth the expense. If you can charge them for free (certain government run car parks, but how long will that last?), you can save money, but you still have a huge initial outlay.

[Commander Kinsey]

My dad's petrol Volvo was at 260K when he sold it, with the engine running perfectly.

[John Larkin]

Often the path to a great idea is through a region of crazy ideas. Rejecting ideas too soon blocks that path. The issue is, how do you explore a basically infinite solution space? You sure can't do that consciously, one idea at a time.

This is cool,

presenting the concept that our frontal cortexes are prissy censors of new ideas. Stop thinking and invent something!

No. I have very brief, a second or two, extremely brilliant and beautiful and colorful still images, usually a place (a little english village for example) or a woman's face. One reason I like them is because I have mediocre vision, but the hallucinations are optically perfect. I wish I had more.

I've read that over 20% of the population has hallucinations, but most people have acoustic ones.

[John Larkin]

Some are designed to be agressively ugly. There seems to be a niche market for ugly.

None.

[rbowman]

Miles or kilometers? Which leads to the question of how you can put 260K on anything on a little island.

[rbowman]

They screwed up and showed an Audi rather than the Golf R, but that's the sort of treatment my latest Yaris has. I had a second generation that looked decent. This is a third generation that started getting ugly. The fourth and final restyling attempt was worse. Topping them all for sheer ugly was the GR Yaris.

A 1500cc engine doesn't need a grille the size of a barn door.

[rbowman]

I lean towards epiphenomenalism. All that fancy inner dialogue is noise from the real work. The trace on an o-scope isn't the signal.

As far as alcohol, I once got into a barroom conversation with a tech rep who was calling on a local defense contractor. During the course of the evening I roughed out a design for an electronic ignition system for something live the Vulcan. It must have been good because he contacted me the next day and offered to set up an interview. I passed since I only had the vaguest idea of what sort of smoke I'd been blowing.

It would have been an interesting project. Electrical primers are nothing new. Germany was using them during WWII in aircraft weapons but there still is the mechanical component of the 'firing pin' making contact with the primer.

[Vir Campestris]

I was crap at anything athletic at school. My first problem was having a birthday late in the year; and I was small for my age. I avoided it like the plague.

When they got to about 16 everyone else stopped growing.

I went on a summer camp after I'd finished school, and there was an orienteering competition. Which if you don't know is a cross-country run with a map. I came second. Then had to explain that yes, I knew I was that fit, but no, I did not want to spend my Saturdays representing the school, I wanted to go sailing instead.

I still go sailing 40-odd years later. It's a complicated sport which has kept my interest, and at small boat level not as expensive as people think. Not as expensive as for example going to away matches with your local football team.

Andy

[SteveW]

I loved badminton, pirates and murder ball. Pirates involved one person having to tig the rest of the class, with all the gym equipment out and no-one allowed to touch the floor. Murder ball was the best, one mat at each end of the gym, a medicine ball in the middle, the class split in two and each half had to get the ball onto the opposing teams mat ... there were *NO* other rules. The latter two were banned by the council, but we still did them at the end of each term.

I played badminton most lunchtimes for years.

Unfortunately, the school was only interested in football - to the extent that when the pitch was frozen solid and we were at risk of injury, they kept those on the school team in the gym to keep them fit for the weekend's match and made the rest of us do football outside!

The result was that I pretty well loathed PE and was very glad when, for

18 months or so, I had ingrowing toenails and could not do sport. The PE teacher used to send all those unfit for sport out picking litter from around the pitch, but I could not do that, as bending down put weight right on my toes. I took great delight in telling him that I could not do so, why and that "I was going to go over to the Engineering workshop and do something *USEFUL*."

[Commander Kinsey]

Indeed. Central Scotland to South England (me to my Aunt's house) is 460 miles, so almost 1K miles round trip.

And lo and behold, that Volvo went right round France.

[Commander Kinsey]

I don't think I have any. I can hear voices but I think it's just blood going through my ears with too much wax, the voices are not intelligible.

[Commander Kinsey]

I don't see any ugly ones, but I do see plain ones. BMW for instance all look the f****ng same.

Then why are you so obsessed with looks?

[Commander Kinsey]

Those 4 look ok to me. Top left and bottom right are beautiful, the other two are perfectly fine.

Same company. Same car really.

That one does look ridiculous. In fact it's so square you'd think it lacked aerodynamics and would fail the health and softy test for ramming pedestrians.

[Commander Kinsey]

Are they still making petrol cars?

Why did you delete two thirds of the newsgroups?

[Commander Kinsey]

By my calculations, if you take care of it, you could run an electric vehicle for 630,000 miles, then only have to buy a new battery which is $6000.

[Commander Kinsey]

Oh, one of those. You lot are fun to beat up.

Scuba diving is more fun. Another world under there.

[Commander Kinsey]

I shall be going skiing. I have two feet, I prefer one device for each. People don't understand me not wearing a shirt in winter though.

My school concentrated too much on ball games. I'm not co-ordinated enough to be good at those (although my reaction speed is apparently 3 times faster than average), and they're boring.

[farter]

And sharks.

[John Larkin]