smccrory

You're all just a bunch of Bubble Witching, FarmVilling, Candy Crushing freaks

Wow, yea, glad you guys are OK!

How much highway do you traverse to work? If it's a modest amount, then a 250 would be fine, plus it gets much better MPG and gives you the option for lightweight hooligan/dirt play.

Cool!

No 250 will be "as good" as a 650, except that they're lighter, easier to throw around, transport and pay for. Depends on what you want to do with it really - a 650 will get you there more comfortable, but a 250 will be easier once you're there. I have a 2009 CRF230L and it lacks the oomph of the fuel-injected CRF250L. I'd gladly trade up to the slightly bigger Honda or Yamaha if I could.

Romney's use of it made it an easy meme, and the meme sticks because Citizens United (a horrible whitewash of a name) protects companies who want to use their targeted financial might to shape the law without transparency via Super-PACs. This allows wealthy individuals and collectives/companies to profoundly manipulate politics (and thus the law) in ways that would have shaken the founding fathers to their cores. Essentially we say that government must be separate from religion, but Citizens United says it's perfectly OK mixing business agendas with it. Those of us who oppose Citizens United believe that the political process must be transparent and it must not overly grant people and companies with big cash piles control. It's about a fair democracy vs. corporatocracy. As it stands at the moment, I believe that's true, but lower courts will use the ruling as precedent to grant closely-held private companies exemption from federal (and potentially state and local) laws on the basis of religious objection much more broadly than before. It's just a matter of time. At that point, there will be broader constitutional questions about religion and government.

I 100% agree - it's a stupid charge. It would be like calling GMO-free advocates who happen to incidentally own Monsanto stock in their retirement funds hypocrites. Even if a person (or company) examined every last holding of their funds (which almost nobody does), they often don't have workable choices to avoid what they don't like unless they get into non-mainstream lifestyle funds that have questionable performance histories. OK ,fair enough - it wasn't clear to me on first read that you 1. understand the different IUD forms and 2. distinguish abortion from the termination of a legally-protected life (aka murder). Most don't seem to.

There's a dangerous thunderstorm warning issued for quite a few counties.

Tonic you should read up on how IUDs work. I thought the same thing but but there are multiple classifications of IUDs and at least one class blocks fertilization to begin with. Also, I'd advise extreme caution against classifying life as starting with fertilization because if you apply existing personhood laws to a 1-day old egg person that aborts itself due to any reason than can be traced to a man or woman's knowing endangerment of the egg, they could justifiably be charged, fined and jailed.

That's the winningest vote so far if my informal count is right. Take your gal with you to a dealer who has one and test the ergos.

Indeed. If you're willing to consider a scoot, you could do a lot worse than Suzuki's Bergman 400 or the larger Honda Silverwing 600. Sometimes they even come up for sale on Craigslist, but people tend to hold onto them. Also like CBBaron said, there's Honda's CB500X/F/R but I don't think DCT is available for it, so you'd wantto look to their NC700/750 or CTX line if auto-shifting is important. They'll be even harder to find used.

I agree about the V-Strom 650 (aka "Wee-strom" or "Glee" with the Gladius engine). I own one, am completely in love with it solo, my GF really digs it for 2-up and I couldn't recommend it enough as an all-arounder but still would be pretty tall for anyone under 29-30" inseam. An FZ6 would be a great choice if set up with a backrest or top box and a pad.

I just applied this to a raised portion of my concrete patio last week. It's $69 for about 3 gallons and it's as thick as cake batter. You power-wash and apply it thick with a special roller, ideally using a solvent first to boil out any oils so it can really grip. So far I like it but we'll see how it hold up to winter. Anyway... ;-)

Or public buildings.

At that point, I'd just get an IC bike.

And he kind of already has that one in the form of a Gen-2 V-Strom 650. The gen-1 "wee-strom" used a SV650 engine detuned for more torque down low, and the gen-2 adopted a refined Gladius engine with the same detuning treatment. I know it's a little stretch, but it does speak to Hoblick's upgrade afliction ;-).

Happy wife, happy life!

They discontinued a laptop we standardized on without telling us, leaving us 40+ orders unfulfillable. That means 40 new employees without laptops, having to make due with tiny VDI terminals for several months. Then they agreed to price-match and loan resources to accelerate testing of a newer model but couldn't get test machines to kick-start the process. We're talking to their competitors again. :-( Anyway, I think we're going to see a lot more purpose-build processors in the future. The generalized architectures are awesomely flexible, but a lot of I.T. Is traunching into categories, especially with for-purpose Cloud and Big Data making waves. They won't replace everything, and probably not even a majority, but they will bridge vertical and horizontal scalability. More opinion than you wanted, but that's how I roll... :-D

I'm the same way. To each his own, but I'd rather take an extra few seconds to wake up and be really sure that noise is an intruder than to shoot the wrong person, even if that makes me a little more vulnerable to an out-of-the-blue threat. I guess that might make me "sheeple" to the hard-core, but that's my ethical dial to turn, not theirs.

I think electric dirt bikes could vastly increase the number of places to ride then - they're so much quieter than 2-strokes and even 4-stroke engines. You could have dirt tracks less than a half mile from residences and hear nothing except trucks and trailers coming and going.

This one had nice paint

Same here - for some reason the smaller displacement bikes attracted my attention more.

Truth is, I'm rooting for new power source, but the cost of these electric bikes makes it all academic for me. For the $10-15k these things cost, one could buy a used dual-sport as a commuter and dirt bike, another track bike and a another long-distance sled. I'd gladly test ride one though!

No worries, have fun and be safe!

Brian, I might be headed the TomTom Rider route as well. Why? Well, I picked up a Nuvi 2597LMT for half its price this week and tried it out in the car - everything went great, the speaker was plenty loud to not need to be bound to my car's audio, and I rather enjoyed voice commands and most of its routing decisions. Traffic representation kinda sucked, but everything else seemed pretty smart. I even ordered a specialized RAM cradle. Alas, I tried it on the bike in the garage tonight and guess what - it doesn't support Bluetooth speaker/headset functionality! Total deal-killer - I'll never hear the speaker at highway speed wearing a helmet and earplugs. It's going back to Microcenter tomorrow. Anyone want a free Nuvi 2557/2577/2597 RAM cradle? Scott