China 'aims to lead world' in eco-friendly cars

From: China 'aims to lead world' in eco-friendly cars - Yahoo! News

China is drawing up a new plan to become a leader in eco-friendly cars that could include forcing foreign automakers to share key technologies for access to its market, a report said Friday.
The draft suggests China could force the technology transfers by requiring overseas firms enter into joint ventures in which they would be limited to a minority stake, The Wall Street Journal said.

Maybe the Chinese are onto something. Their economy is obviously booming, and embracing the green movement gives them a good PR boost. Sure, the foreign car companies are going to bitch and moan about it, but we are talking about an insane potential for profit, so they will at the end go for it. It’s all about the money, they won’t really bitch much about it as long as they make boatloads of cash in the Chinese market.

This of course can’t happen here because we allow any car company in the world to come to the US and build and sell cars here as long as they meet safety testing guidelines. We wouldn’t throw things at these companies like force them to hand over their technology to local carmakers because that would be considered un-American.

There is a trap of course: by licensing this technology, the Chinese car industry can keep pace with the rest of the world without spending money on R&D, which gives them a competitive advantage when you look at things 10-20 years down the road. These companies that out of greed decide to agree with their terms, may end up being crushed 20 years from now when China starts producing luxury cars of similar or higher quality than what Hyundai is selling to us this year. The people that make these deals will probably be rich and retired by the time this becomes a problem, but there is nothing stopping the Chinese from doing such a thing.

On sleep deprivation and Incan Monkey Gods

From: Dilbert comic strip for 08/03/1992 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive. I was trying to show this strip to a coworker who is dangerously toying with the harsh mistress that is Insomnia. What shocked me is how quickly I was able to look up the strip, which was published when he was just 11 years old, and two weeks before my just-out-of-college ass shipped out to US Army Basic Training.

The Black Hole

If this was a minigolf hole, you can't reach B from A. Ever. If this was a room lined with mirrors, and you lit a candle at point A, you can't see it from B, not even reflected. Update: I guess I didn't explain this all the way through. You can't reach B from A with just one stroke, there's no direct line between them, and there is no way to bounce the ball (assuming perfect conditions). Thanks to Ben for pointing this obvious error.

Add custom speed settings to your ifit map workout

Ifit.com allows you to build a workout walk/race/bike route simply by clicking on a Google Maps interface. You can then use a compatible ifit-enabled workout machine to recreate the route automatically. The problem is that the user interface still isn't final, so there are features in place that aren't exactly obvious. For example, if you create a workout your machine starts at 1 MPH, because that's the default. But how to set it to start at say, 3 MPH? Easy, just switch from map view to graph view: That button switches from the Google Maps interface to a chart that allows you to visualize and control effort: You can't change the elevation, this is fixed due to the geography that you selected. But you can drag the yellow (speed line) to change the speed of your device. What if you want to have segments at different speeds? Easy, just click and drag and it will break the line, and you can drag each segment of the line independently: ...

The Insomniac Coder

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