Wyndtroy2012

It was a terrible car in some (many) respects, but it definitely is not "the worst car ever built". The Trabi has a lot of things going on for it.

1. It is very light. The motor is tiny, the whole thing is like 600 kilos (not absolutely sure, but I know for a fact that 4 normal men can pick it up to move it to the side a bit).

2. Given its size, there is quite a bit of space inside

3. Since it is so small and light, it is very easy to drive. You literally don't need the clutch: there is a clutch pedal, but you don't need it -- you can switch gears as long as you are not pressing the gas pedal. (The gears, btw, are very light, and the "stick" is not a stick, it is on the wheel -- you can operate it with one finger without taking your hands off the wheel.)

4. With electronic ignition (it can be installed easily on top of the stock model) the motor behaves quite well.

5. It is cheap, not only because it is bad, but also because it is just cheap. Not many moving parts, nothing fancy in it, you get the point. I don't know how accessible spare parts are nowadays of course (this was the problem back in the day as well; finding spare parts was a bitch).

It isn't a "good" car, given what we expect from cars these days, but for a city car it is quite OK. Still not as dirty as a diesel ;-)

PS: there is an old Trabant joke that goes like this: a car collector from the US hears about it and wants to have one. He orders it and has it shipped over. On arrival, he looks at it in confusion, then writes back to the sender: "I wanted the car, not the toy model!"

Given the other applications you chose to look at, I'm surprised you didn't also look at Audacity. It uses wxWidgets, which is a nice C++ cross-platform GUI framework. It wraps native controls on each platform it supports, and also has a "Generic" variant where it draws its own. It's not very heavy as these things go, and has a nice python binding called wxPython.

I'd check it out before rolling my own :)

Only the BBC's deliberately emotive headline to this story suggests that 'penguin chicks have died'. The facts behind it are that BAS scientists have reported that one colony site has been abandoned and that another nearby has increased in size. The probability is that the abandoned site had become vulnerable to storm damage and the colony moved to a less risky location. No panic, no disaster.

I find Wikipedia tremendously useful and have made modest acknowledgement of that financially. That said, I tried to get them to correct/augment something they had based on a thesis from the 1970's at a top US school. The matter could have been verified but instead it was rejected out of hand and so the content on Wikipedia is less than it might have been. I had a sense the matter was handled with great dispatch and finality.

Remember the Mac OS and MacWrite fit on a single LOW-density 3.5″ floppy in 1984.

How come all of us people that drive cars and are not in the car production business ,all knew the predictions Hackett and the rest made was loony?

Good article. The land tax is probably the preferred tax of libertarians, and it does make sense in many cases. But in the case of cities with vastly higher municipal costs than its neighboring jurisdictions, the land tax would still be high enough to ward off new residents, which would just work to keep rents too low, etc. The city will have to see where its costs are, get them under control if possible, and grow its "brand." There are a lot of things that are attractive to a city as opposed to the suburbs, but the negatives would need to be dealt with, too.