I just found my first prime larger than 100000 digits.

1759*230563#+1

Thanks to the creators of NewPGen and PFGW.

my new baby
 

2012 Prius

[QUOTE=petrw1;342514]2012 Prius[/QUOTE]
Yeaaahh! That baby is beautiful to drive! Self driving? Self parking? (I know the self parking module was not approved to sell in US, "it is not safe when a child jumps in front of the car during there is no driver in the car".

[QUOTE=LaurV;342536]Yeaaahh! That baby is beautiful to drive! Self driving? Self parking? (I know the self parking module was not approved to sell in US, "it is not safe when a child jumps in front of the car during there is no driver in the car".[/QUOTE]

Sorry no parking assist. Self driving? Cruise control, yes.

Very nice! Do you have any experience as yet of in-town versus highway fuel economy? One of the features I love in newer cars is the screen which can show on-the-fly fuel usage rate, potential range for the remaining fuel, etc. etc.

[QUOTE=petrw1;342543]Sorry no parking assist. Self driving? Cruise control, yes.[/QUOTE]
I wasn't talking about cruise control, but about those features enabling the car to recognize the road signs, to "read" traffic around and the white/yellow lines on the street and keep the car in between those lines, etc. The system was approved for US too (as it still requires a driver to be present in the car, I am not talking about Google's self driving Prius - which has a big laser "cannon", not gun, on top, spitting a thousands rays per second and mapping the environment around the car, making the car able to drive without any driver - but even that one was also approved in California and few other states), contrary to self-parking system which was not approved, because the driver was not required to be in the car when the car parks, which is "not legal" or whatever. :smile:

[QUOTE=kladner;342565]Very nice! Do you have any experience as yet of in-town versus highway fuel economy? One of the features I love in newer cars is the screen which can show on-the-fly fuel usage rate, potential range for the remaining fuel, etc. etc.[/QUOTE]

No highway numbers but my on the fly in town rates have varied from 4.2 to 6.8 litres/100 KM. Anywhere from 45 to 70 MPG Canadian. 80% of that if you need US. Its only 6 days old.

[QUOTE=LaurV;342567]I wasn't talking about cruise control, but about those features enabling the car to recognize the road signs, to "read" traffic around and the white/yellow lines on the street and keep the car in between those lines, etc. The system was approved for US too (as it still requires a driver to be present in the car, I am not talking about Google's self driving Prius - which has a big laser "cannon", not gun, on top, spitting a thousands rays per second and mapping the environment around the car, making the car able to drive without any driver - but even that one was also approved in California and few other states), contrary to self-parking system which was not approved, because the driver was not required to be in the car when the car parks, which is "not legal" or whatever. :smile:[/QUOTE]

Sorry none of that high tech stuf. My next car will have it once perfected and our local roads are set up for it. Our winters tend to erase or cover te lines for example.

[QUOTE]Self parking? (I know the self parking module was not approved to sell in US, "it is not safe when a child jumps in front of the car during there is no driver in the car".[/QUOTE]Our Escape has [URL="http://media.ford.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=29625"]automated parallel parking[/URL] but we have never been able to get it to work. (We have not tried too hard, though. There aren't many opportunities to parallel park in Arkansas and we certainly don't want to experiment with the system under stressful circumstances.

The Escape's steering is electrically powered, which is neat in a way because it can offer more "throw" at slower speeds and less at higher speeds, but you definitely feel "disconnected" from the road.

Our Corvette has speed-sensitive steering as well but it is much less pronounced. That said, we have not tested it above 163MPH, either. In the parking lot the steering is very heavy and at slow speeds at full lock the front tires "skip" badly because they are so wide they almost act like a locked differential, or maybe the [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ackermann_steering_geometry"]Ackermann[/URL] angle isn't optimal, or something like that.

(One other cool feature on the Corvette is speed-sensitive windshield wipers. They even have an aerodynamic foil on them to keep them planted on the windshield at lose-your-driver's-license speeds.)

[YOUTUBE]s7XlS6efazY[/YOUTUBE]

Part 1 of 3

Spring has sprung so we decided to mix things up a bit.

We ride a lot but our current stable of two 1800cc power cruisers is a bit wearisome. They weigh over 800 pounds apiece, have no windshields or fairings and are very loud.

So they look cool and sound awesome but they are too big for short trips and too uncomfortable for long trips.

What to do?

Part 2 of 3

Obviously we need a small bike for short trips. Something that gets good mileage. A scooter would probably work, but Arkansas does not feel like a scooter-friendly place.

You may (or may not) remember that we have a brain abnormality in that the part of our brain that calculates risk and things like that shuts down at speed. We have fortunately been able to, so far, keep out of jail and we have not killed anyone or ourselves. But as our transgressions increase we find we are developing a tolerance to speed and acceleration and the only fix is more. It has gotten so bad that we do not drive the Corvette anymore, ever. The CFO uses it to commute to work.

With this in mind we thought about countries that have tiered licensing systems and the thought process they used in making these systems. We wondered if any bikes that meet these requirements are available in the USA?

Apparently a few are, and one of them looks like a kick-ass replica road race bike!

It goes at most 80MPH but it is most happy around 55 to 60MPH. It is only 250cc and has 22HP. Now that sounds like a recipe for boredom but we have come to find that riding a slow bike fast is way more fun than riding a fast bike slow. Our first tank of fuel netted us 70MPG even though the tachometer rarely was below 7,000RPM!

Ergonomically it fits very well. Of you look close you can see that the handlebars are riser bars and not clip-ons. It has disc brakes front and rear, liquid cooling, fuel injection and all the cool modern goodies that "real" bikes have.

Hindsight being 20/20 and all that, this probably should have been our first motorcycle.