seen elsewhere

[unixronin]

So you thought hybrid cars were a new idea?

Comments

[jmkelly.livejournal.com]

There is nothing new under the sun. The first automobile was electric.

I'm a little uncomfortable with the article's "See, this is what happens when the government gets involved" slant. The "government" in this case was one jerk at the EPA. The same government put both Voyager spacecraft and both Mars landers out there. Would it be fair of me to note that this happened under a Republican administration? Maybe not -- I don't remember that Gerry Ford was as hostile to science as George W. Bush was-- but it would probably be fair to note that a person of that time, or this time, might well reason that a gasoline-electric hybrid still burns gasoline, no matter how efficiently, and if we really want to cut pollution we need to get gasoline out of the mix entirely, which means improved batteries or ideally fuel cells, (which are running neck-and-neck with atomic fusion for the "Happening Real Soon Now" prize), not another way to burn gasoline. So Stork while was obviously wrong from today's perspective, he could have been more outrageously wrong -- say, by insisting on corn-derived ethanol.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I read it more as "this is what happens when an obstructive bureaucrat gets involved" than "this is what happens when the government gets involved".