Farhad Manjoo has issues with reading for comprehension. Where he says:

"And in online forums, some people report getting better gas mileage after installing such devices"

The thread that comment is from is here, and clearly shows the comment he linked to is about using acetone and *not* a hydrogen booster.

Wait, I just looked at the site again, they want $62 EACH? That is just insane. I could but a real wood dollhouse kit for that sort of money.

"Highly detailed"?

It looks to me like they printed off a photograph for the front, and a generic brick background for the sides, they didn't even use multi-color printing. Then they hacked out squares in the same general area & size as some of the windows. And since when do NYC firehouses have giant flap doors hacked out of a large swath of the front?

They are cute, but they are far from "highly detailed", and they are *very* far from worth $62 (though since that includes shipping it does make it closer to reasonable).

I agree with #1, give a kid an old box and some crayons any they'd have about as much fun for a lot less money (and without the pollution of shipping these from Sweden.

Or alternately the company could provide a printable PDF with templates, the front & side images and instructions for a reasonable price. Then the parents could print it out, cut & assemble it and build the same thing out of whatever leftover cardboard they had, which would be much cheaper, more ecologically sound, and take probably less than 20% more time then assembling these from the flat-pack kits.

For all of you talking about "waste" from scrapping the cars, they are goign to get recycled. They aren't just dumping the cars in a landfill. Where do you think a lot of the metal, rubber, plastic, etc for new cars comes from? Old scrapped cars!

For those suggesting that parts should have been sold off rather than destroyed, what makes you think that if the whole car is considered defective that the individual parts wouldn't be?
Consider the radios, they spent a long while tipped up on one side, in the middle of a salt-water ocean. How can they be sure that this didn't damage them somehow? They'd have to remove all the radios from the car (a very labor-intensive task) and test a decent sample size to see if they seem damaged before they could reuse them. Then if 4 years from now Mazda has a rash of radio failures in the cars those were put in and the buyers discover their new car got a radio from a scrapped car? Major lawsuit time.
Or doors. Again the logistics of removing, testing and storing them. Then it turns out that a 60deg list and that time in salt air causes the hinge mounts to weaken and someone is killed when their door sheers loose in an accident. Again lawsuit time.

Or suggesting the cars should be used for tech schools, or firefighter training or whatnot. How can they ensure that *not one piece* of those cars would get out into the general parts stream? What if a student at the school needs a brake caliper for his Mazda and snags one off the school's donated car, and that caliper is damaged from the sea air and fails causing that student's death? Once again, lawsuit time (and if you think the parents wouldn't win, look at cases of burglers suing homeowners for injuries sustained during a burglary).

The only way Mazda could ensure there wouldn't be lawsuits down the line, and ensure these cars/parts couldn't hurt someone was to destroy them. So they used the same essential process as any car being sold for scrap. The only difference being that they took extra diligence to keep the potentially compromised parts out of the parts stream. So now those cars are goign back to be made into more Mazdas, the great circle of life and all that.

Oh and #13, your comment about hazardous waste & India/Bangladesh just shows your great ignorance of the auto recycling industry.

@Antinous

The fact it has reached $120/barrel does not negate my earlier statements. If anything the fact that oil demand has not risen noticeably in the months since it hit $100/barrel and it is now at $120/barrel seem to lend weight to the claim that it is speculators and not true demand that is driving up prices.

That plus the record profits from oil companies. If oil was truly so expensive to acquire & refine now vs a few years ago the oil companies would be making the same profits they were back then. Instead they are making insanely higher profits now that the cost of oil & gas has gone up.

Oh, and the US government still subsidizes the oil industry.

@Gainclone

The Nitrogen Oxides it produced are not the same as Nitrous Oxide (N20).

http://www.allpar.com/mopar/turbine.html
has a bunch of info on the turbine cars, including a section at the end on the feasibility of making a turbine car today.

High fuel consumption at idle & in general is one of the biggest drawbacks. As such trying to get better economy out of one isn't likely to happen.

They are great engines in certain applications, but they are far from being the magic bullet solution.

according to an NPR article about $89/barrel of the current oil price is based on actual demand. Everything beyond that is the result of speculators in the commodities market driving the price up to turn a profit.

All those people who invested heavily in the real estate market needed a new place to put their cash when that market collapsed. Oil speculation was the new hot ticket.

When oil went over $100 for the first time, it wasn't because of demand, it was because some trader wanted to be the first one to buy for over $100/barrel.

This is why OPEC hasn't increased production, they are producing enough oil to meet demand, but people are speculating on it and jacking up prices anyway.

Yes we need to develop technology to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, however we also *really* need to get rid of the system that allows people to speculate on oil pricing and line their pockets at the expense of everyone else.

Hmmm, I may have to get a set of these. I wear combat boots almost exclusively, so when I try to go barefoot I have virtually no callouses. And I have rare enough opportunities to go barefoot that I never manage to develop said callouses.

Hmmm, I wonder if you need a motorcycle license for that or not? It is under 49cc.

[pedantic]
Actually it reads:

"PLEASE DO NOT BLOCK THESE DOORS UNLESS WE SAY: 'OH ALRIGHT THEN JUST THIS ONCE"
[/pedantic]

I've already emailed him about the paypal error, and he is working to fix it.

MY roommate got some movie tickets in one of these from their parents a few years back.

She kept planning to use the puzzle box to give someone else a gift, but didn't feel like re-solving the puzzle to open it and put the gift in.

another photo of the statue being hit by lightning.

http://www.photographersdirect.com/buyers/stockphoto.asp?imageid=715131

Is there a regular vending machine next to it to cure the resulting munchies?

I've been watching these since someone posted a link to his Psychonauts review (which caused me to hunt up a used PS2 copy and play it for two days straight).

If you're work doesn't appreciate wonderfully vivid vulgarity, the reviews get extra bonus surreal without the audio track.

When this story broke initially, it hit every car blog, mailing list & forum I'm on. They have been full of rampant Ford bashing, speculation and hyperbole, and several of these are lists for Ford fans.

What bothers me most is that I can guarantee you that the followup that states this is a Cafepress issue more than a Ford issue, and that Ford has done their best to clarify the problem and fix it will *NOT* appear on at least 80% of the places the initial story appeared. In fact I would put even money on the ranting uninformed discussion continuing beyond this announcement on at least one of them.

People seem to love a chance to rant and rail against the failings on the part of any major corporation, even (or possibly especially) one they feel some sort of connection to or affinity for.

"Distinguish" the fire? "That! That over there, is the fire."

Ditto on getting the hell out of the car as fast as possible.

As for the center punch, they work, but only if you have a good heavy-duty one. I tried a cheap one on a junk Subaru door I had laying around, and it did nothing but leave a tiny punch mark in the glass.

What creeps me out most is wondering how you "Scent it with your own scent".

I mean, I know how animals leave their scent on things...

The website claims this is so popular that there are "So called Faun-Clubs" where only pointy-eared people are allowed in.

However the only G-hits for "Faun Club" are copies of the website text, and one misspelled myspace page.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Faun+Clubs+%22&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=MiT&start=10&sa=N&filter=0

http://www.snopes.com/photos/signs/pregnant.asp

Since the link in my last comment seems to be malfunctioning.

Snopes has a page about this

What exactly is "one-of-a-kind" about a '65 Falcon convertible?

That particular Falcon convertible is a 4-door sedan with the roof whacked off. I'm on a Falcon message board and remember that particular car showing up on ebay. The general consensus was "seems well built structurally, but done damn weirdly constructed."