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Your Google skills are weak young Jedi...

'A Chevrolet S-10 pickup is equipped with two rear wheel electric motors that improved torque by 60 percent and added another 70 horsepower, GM says.'
http://www.detnews.com/2003/autosinsider/0308/12/b 02-242629.htm

Another article about GMs new wheel hub motors
http://www.saturnfans.com/Cars/Future/motorinwheel s.shtml

Unsprung weight is a term used to describe that part of a vehicle's mass that is directly connected to the wheels, and not isolated through the suspension. Unsprung weights typically consists of the weight of the wheels, tires, brakes (if within the wheels), spindles, bearings, and a portion of weight of the half-shafts, springs, and suspension links.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsprung_weight

In conclusion, if carmakers are never going to be integrated into the wheels, you better get on the horn with them fast, since most of them are funding the R&D for the wheel hub motors.

You may also want to read about how Porsche used wheel hub motors:

http://www.rockcrawler.com/features/newsshorts/01d ecember/cayenne.asp

'Porsche used his latest development: the wheel hub motor, praised in the contemporary press as an "epoch-making innovation", to power his first all-wheel-drive automobile. Porsche's wheel hub motor functioned without gears and driveshafts because the wheel, which was connected directly to the rotor of the direct current motor, rotated around the stator which was attached to the wheel suspension. The drive mechanism therefore worked without friction losses to an extraordinary efficiency level of 85 percent. This Porsche invention was even employed by NASA when its moon car explored the surface of the moon. Today, international car manufacturers are using this technology for the development of future emission-free vehicles.'

I shall consider you schooled for the evening.

The rest of the money goes to pay for corporate mistakes.

Msr. Francois in France browses a Nazi site and Google happily provides the content to him via the handy web accelerator. Can the French go after Google now? (as if they're not already).

Chinese government demands that Google strip out offensive content and replace any references to Li Hongzhi with "<insert insult here>". Will Google comply? Has such a demand been made before ?

Plus, what about copyrights and such? Will Google be held liable for pushing out outdated pages? How will the servers (from where Google is grabbing pages) get their statistics? And since Google will be sort-of screen-scraping, why does Google object to it themselves?

Just some questions that come to mind.

Ummmm where has all this info about production coming up here to Canada? For all intents and purposes, it is a wrap on the series. They say on the website that there is nothing planned at present. http://www.detnews.com/2005/screens/0504/16/scree- 152160.htm

A smooth uncluttered interface that works as expected with a minimum of tweaking, and features like graphics accelerated Exposé rank a bit higher than just theming, don't they?

I challenge you to show evidence that the OS X interface is significantly "better" in any quantifiable sense than Windows, Gnome, or KDE.

It's like saying a Mercedes is just about having fancier trim.

I dunno, what do you think Mercedes is about? Their quality is below industry average, and they cost a premium for the performance and features they offer.

So, yes, your analogy seems apt: Mercedes, like Macintosh, is a premium-priced status symbol. If you want value, quality, functionality, or innovation, there are better choices.

The same things were said when Japan made a move to dominate the car industry, so what happened?

The US manufacturers have steadily lost market share. Toyota passed Ford to become the #2 automaker (based on worldwide sales) and is steadily gaining on GM for #1. Further Toyota is about to pass Chrysler in the US market (~11% vs ~12% market share respectively) Chrysler nearly went bankrupt and was eventually bought by Daimler-Benz. Lexus (Toyota again) passed Cadillac and Lincoln to become the #1 selling luxury car brand in the US. US automakers sell nearly every small/compact car for a loss because of inefficient manufacuturing and high labor/pension costs. Toyota and Honda are leading the charge into hybrid automobiles, well ahead of US auto firms. Hybrids are very likely to be the next dominant technology in autos. The light auto segment the US manufacturers have held onto is pickups/SUVs that have accounted for the majority of their profits in recent years, and they are starting to lose their death grip on that segment too. Recent gas prices won't help SUV sales either.

While I'm painting a bit more bleak picture than it actually is for Ford and GM but if you think nothing happened in the industry due to the Japanese, you simply don't understand the industry. I wouldn't say the Japanese or US manufacturers dominate (no one does) but I can say that Japanese automakers have had a HUGE impact on the industry, largely at the expense of the US manufacturers. Most of the recent innovations in manufacturing processes (Just-in-time, lean manufacuturing, etc) were pioneered by Japanese manufacturers. I'm a manufacturing operations engineer and I've been to and conducted statstical analysis of plants for most of the big auto companies and the Japanese simply are better manufacturers overall. You don't even have to take my word for it, there is plenty of evidence out there to support me. But I've been there and I can tell you that Ford & GM are playing catch up. The reason they haven't lost (read gone-bankrupt/aquired) is that auto manufacuturing isn't strictly a price game. Styling, dealer/sales networks, and historical buying preferences matter. And the US manufacturers aren't complete incompetents. But if it were strictly a matter of price/performance GM and Ford would already be gone.

I sort of agree with you, but I think Xbox is probably a bad example. Doesn't MS sell Xboxes at a loss, with the thought of gaining revenues back in game sales? This article says, "Microsoft loses about $70 on each Xbox it sells," but it's admittedly an older piece. If they really do sell units below cost, then people who buy them and then use them to, for example, run Linux instead are still screwing MS. The only thing they get out of the deal is inflated sales numbers, but they get no actual profit.

Seems that remark resembles comments made by Henry Ford and GM's Alfred P. Sloan...

• "They make a nice story, but they're not a good business story yet because the value is lower than their cost," Ghosn said. "The same is true for fuel cells. The cost to build one fuel cell car is about $800,000. Do the math and you figure out we'll have to reduce the cost of that car by 95 percent to gain widespread marketplace acceptance.
• 
  
  "Nissan is a profit-driven company," he said. "If volume growth is antagonistic to profit, we don't want to go there. We don't want to build or sell cars that don't make a profit."

While General Motors is busy destroying its last EV1-s and getting people arrested over it, the French have debuted a new electric vehicle concept at Geneva Motor show.
Here is the press kit and images of the BlueCar, designed by Philippe Guedon and sponsored by Vincent Bolloré.
In other EV news, Commuter Cars Tango is reportedly close to producing its first vehicles, one of the first ones sold to George Clooney

UN WIPO are biased - even the USPTO admit this.

Quote: Lois Boland, director of international relations for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, said that open-source software runs counter to the mission of WIPO, which is to promote intellectual-property rights.

"To hold a meeting which has as its purpose to disclaim or waive such rights seems to us to be contrary to the goals of WIPO," she said.

http://www.detnews.com/2003/technology/0308/22/tec hnology-250851.htm

This is not only in relation to open-source software but also with domain names in their UDRP.

The informed /.er will know this is the rules they made to help corporations overreach with their trademarks.

There is no doubt in my mind - the people at WIPO are corrupt.

Please visit http://wipo.org.uk/ - nothing to do with the United Nations WIPO.org !

>> Just have the IRS enable us submit the tax forms electronically without any middlemen for starters.

They do this already. Well, they still redirect through middlemen, but it is completely free. (This is new as of this year.) It only works if you have a certain set of income|income type|deductions|etc. but this covers most of the population. Why have the IRS develop it if they can convince third parties to give it away instead?

"Imagine living on a planet where you get tax breaks for driving big inefficient vehicles that produce greenhouse gases."

Um, we ALREADY DO.

SUV, truck owners get a big tax break
CONs of the SUV Tax Break

Just because there isn't any room in the budget for them to fix Hubble, that doesn't necessarily mean the end. Congress approval has nudged NASA's priorities before, so prehaps the little telescope that could still has a chance.

Anheuser-Busch, the largest advertiser with 10 of the 30-second ad slots on Fox's Feb. 6 broadcast, produced a humorous spot that purports to show what really caused Janet Jackson's infamous "wardrobe malfunction" in last year's Super Bowl halftime on CBS.

From my AQFL site.

The one problem I have had \w PVRs is getting the digital channels to work correctly. My old tivo wouldnt do this (maybe series 2 does?).

Anyways, I recently joined the beta program for the Comcast PVR. It is actually running a stripped-down version of windows media center. Now, I hate comcast, but I have to admit this device solves all the problems I had \w my Tivo. 1) the digital channels work 2) the recommendations are less silly 3) it only cost 4 dollars a month extra. I would *much* rather give my money to tivo, but comcast will have them beat once this device goes public.

Ford (mercury) is apparently coming out with a diesel-electric hybrid in 2007, and it qualifies for near-zero emmissions.

Have you ever considered that maybe those foreign workers are simply *better*? If words like "carrers", "inherient" and "priviledge" appear in a resume, it will be dumped in the trash. If at the end of the day all of the American-written resumes end up in the trash, the employer will conclude that there are no qualified American workers, and will start looking elsewhere.

...just demonstrates how unworkable the hub-and-spoke system of flight scheduling is

Get help somewhere.

...Chris Stone, a respected open source advocate and the man often sited...

tr.v. sited, siting, sites
To situate or locate on a site: sited the power plant by the river.

tr.v. cited, citing, cites
To quote as an authority or example.

Do it now, before it's too late.

Yes, it's the problem of correlation verses causation . If you found in a survey that 90% of all serial killers chew gum, you may have found a correlation. However, this does not necessarily mean you can use causation to say that gum-chewers are more likely to become serial killers.

For the statistically inclined, the relationship is exellently explained by the wikipedia entry. Basically the theory goes that there may be some hidden or lurking variable that was not tested.

So in this case it could be that some violent criminals play CS, and many who play CS are violent. There may be some other factor involved though. I could even conjecture that perhaps crazy people do violent things a lot, and sometimes this includes video games.

Hmm. Nah, maybe it's the gum thing.

How much armor protection is enough? M1A2's side armor can't stop all RPG rounds used in Iraq. Do you have any idea how much extra weight additional armor creates? Or how much it costs to add additonal armor layers to every military vehicle? Maybe somebody should add a 120mm cannon on 5 ton trucks in case they are ambushed by enemy tanks?

5 ton trucks are supposed to be protected by other units, not to be some kind of independent battle fortresses. For troop carrying needs in combat zone there are armored APCs.

20 tons or more of extra armor makes it just an easier target.

I do NOT think, however, that restrictive regulation how to go about it

in the United States, it is out of the purview of the Federal Government-- it's not an enumerated power.

Yes, there's evedince that the environment is changing, but the causality has not been proven.

Hey, I'm in the same boat - there are a lot of things I'd rather the gov't not pay for, especially including the exhorbitantly expensive U.S. military, oh and also the idiotic tax rebate we'll all be paying back for the next couple of decades.

Any channels they want. They're the government, they're here to help :/.

Shifts allmost every local Highway to Toll Roads.

Uses Billions of our tax dollars to finance the Toll Roads. In the past Toll Roads were built with 80% bonds...these toll roads are built with 80% of our tax dollars.

Seizes over $100 Million of our tax financed roads/projects in Austin and converts them to Toll Roads. See .pdf

It's not a transportation solution, it's a "Revenue Generator", a Boondoggle for special interests.

TxDOT's plan to FORCE us on to Toll Roads (see page 10 of TxDOT internal presentation)

Information Highway: "People should be concerned if they are concerned about the privacy of their location" - Lee Tien, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Rick Perry, Special Interests and The Austin Toll Plan

Where is the Money?

hey wow some of us don't have a DVD player

I personally have a VHS VCR and a 13inch mono TV from 1980.
and I don't have the kind of money required to goto the movies...
you need to get some prospective dude.

Genoside in Darfur
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNew s/1096222386043_58/?hub=World/

disparity between the rich and poor
http://www.detnews.com/2002/census/0212/19/a06-583 123.htm/

sigh....sorry about that

END RANT

#2. If we're willing to trade US troop's lives for oil, then it's time we got off the oil addiction. It may be hard and it may be expensive, but it will completely remove the "threat" of someone denying us oil. And because of #1, there will always be that threat.

Two things:

1) AFAIK, no politician since FDR has really asked the American people as a whole to make any sort of real sacrifice, although JFK made the famous statement, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." In FDR's case, there was a war on, and people expected that they'd make small personal sacrifices and suffer inconvenience while they were asking others to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Today, it would seem that asking for Americans to make any sort of material sacrifice is politically unthinkable. While a small part of the population, say military families, might be asked to sacrifice their spouses, sons, or daughters, it would be political suicide to ask the people as a whole for anything that might inconvenience them or limit their materialist perogatives in any way whatsoever. In fact, since 9/11, we've been given tax incentives to buy bigger gas guzzlers, while tax breaks for hybrids have shrunk and are set to expire in 2006.

2) This gives us some understanding that the phrase "War on Terror" is a lie. It's a propaganda campaign, plain and simple. I'm not suggesting that there isn't a threat from terrorists, obviously there is. However, this "War on", as illustrated by the way it is being waged today, is merely a pretext for domestic and international power grabs.

Furthermore, because the war in Iraq is based on falsehoods, the politicians are further barred from asking Americans to make the sacrifices that could alleviate our oil addiction.

There are, of course, exceptions. Americans seem perfectly content to sacrifice civil liberties in exchange for security. We've also learned to deal with the inconvenience of beefed up airport checkpoints and random screening.

I wonder if America could rise to the challenge, if any politician were to have the balls to ask us to make sacrifices in our oil consumption. I guess it would depend on the politician, if there are any left that are also leaders.

Yeah, it's not like they ever do that.

There are several "logistical" problems to this which all stem from our countries backwards way of approaching anything. "How will it be profitable, and if its not on paper then why do it?"

We are loosing jobs to oversees companies and we can't rollout new services he because our infrastructure is horrible. Politicians, people on forums like this one always tell you what's wrong or give some broad notion of how to make things better. They never give how they would solve the problem.

Example: "Reduce the cost of oil per barrel to stabilize the cost of gas." Well if anyone would lookup info (Detnews.com) on the matter instead of trusting any other media outlets they would find that the cost of a barrel of oil really doesn't matter as much as the number of refineries and the number of different gases we use. Build new refineries and/or reduce the number of gases the U.S. needs and you will see gas prices around 10 cents a gallon. You will never here this from out candidates because they don't really give a damn.

Anyway, here is one solution I think might work to benefit everyone.

Commission a new public works project to rollout fiber and new power lines simultaneously. More jobs, if we found $70 billion laying around to rebuild someone else's country we should be able to do the same for ourselves.

This would kill two birds with one stone and allow any premises with power, access to a fiber speed connection. Service providers could focus on their services and the lines and infrastructure would be the ownership of the "people."

The mere grandiosity of this is mind-boggling but its time this country gets back on track and does something big for itself. That's just my two cents.

http://www.detnews.com/2003/autosinsider/0308/12/b 02-242629.htm/

I wonder if you could eliminate the transmission and do this with 2-4 Hub motors.

100kw would move most cars quite smartly with the low end capabilities of electric motors.

Use

http://www.freedom-motors.com/

in one of the 75 HP configurations weiging in at 80 pounds driving a DC generator with essentially a bigger battery/capacitor pack where the capacitors handle the heavy loads and acceleration. The motor provides LD sustained crusing capacity and keeps a minimal battery pack charaged up for a sustained power expenditure ( like climbing a mountain ).

Figure a battery pack would need to be able to sustain say 50kw ( in addition to the motor energy generation) for 5-10 minutes without going under 50% charge. Capacitors capable of sustainting max for 1-2 minutes similar to this device. Not that you would accelerate this long but that would allow for numerous stop and go cycles before you could deplete the charge.. esspecially with regenetarive breaking.

You eliminate the transmission and transaxel. Might be able to break even on weight and your connections (exception of steering most likely) becomes cabling rather than mechanical linkages.

Toss in the magnetic suspension from the other story on here and you could make a very interesting car.

Those figures seem a little low, especially if you consider the Bush family together. But even Bush himself is worth more than that since one deal got him some $13 million. But the Bush family is likely worth a whole lot more. Perhaps it's not as much as the Kerry's (estimated assets of $1 billion), but if you consider the Bush family ties to the Carlyle Group and the many other business relationships from which they benefitted, then their combined wealth would be much more comparable than a paltry $6mill.
And Cheney is definitely on the high end of that range that you stated, especially if you include his continued stock holdings and options in Halliburton.

Showing your ID at the gate along with a ticket with your name on it allows the airline to tell your family that yes, you boarded the plane that is currently burning, sinking, or that shattered into a million pieces, but no, we haven't found the body yet. Nor do we expect to, since the largest piece of that particular plane is about the size of a tire. Which, incidentally, is still burning, having been doused by 24,000 gallons of airline fuel that covered it when it fell apart 1/2 hour ago. Sorry. We'll of course pay you for your loss, instead of ... I don't know... making you wait a month or two for us to find the pocket in which your family members stored their ID card, which of course will survive the fire.

What any of this has to do with your freedom, right to privacy or anything else is completely secondary to the reason the airlines started recording who was on which flight.

many librarians have been very active in the destruction of the historical record they are supposed to be preserving, in their active efforts to badly microfilm, then pulp, historical newspaper collections.

Cites?

Didn't think so.

Well, it's probably more library administrators (some of who are librarians) fighting to deal with inadequate budgets and space, and the demand for (and sexiness of) newer technologies (Internet access, CDs, etc.) that enroach on existing physical space. You want cites?

Do we want to keep our newspapers?
Novelist buys and saves old papers to avert their destruction

It's just similar enough that it's worth paying a licensing fee; Toyota is not supplying anything to Ford for this vehicle. Detroit News article

http://www.detnews.com/2004/insiders/0407/31/c01-2 15227.htm

"Case in point: Toyota Motor Co.p. and Ford Motor Co.'s new Escape Hybrid SUV. Last March, the companies said they had concluded "licensing agreements for hybrid systems and emissions purification patents" -- lawyerly language that soon gave way to talk that the first hybrid SUV from an American automaker was actually powered by Toyota.

Even if it wasn't. "

Launching into space, then crashing on Mars with just some air bags for cushions. THAT IS ABUSE! And yet they made it work!

It's not the first cell lawsuit and it's not the first Verizon cell lawsuit.

Guess who they dealt with in the past?
Ralsky. Want proof?

This is not some UL/FOAF story - Google "Ralsky Verizon" and you'll get tons of hits...

Unlike stealing a vase, a bicycle, or a car, violating a copyright does not deprive a person of physical property. Your ability to make use of a copyrighted work you created may or may not be inhibited by copyright violations, but decreasing its value is in no way stealing. Diminishing the value of something through illegal means is an illegal act, but it is considered a different crime from theft because no party is deprived of physical property in the process. Vandalism would be a more appropriate comparison to copyright violations because it reduces the value of a work illegally without necessarily depriving anyone of property.

Near the end of February, Detroit's infamous sculpture dedicated to Joe Louis was defaced with cans of white paint. The perpetrators were charged with vandalism rather than theft. Care to guess why? It was because no party was deprived of physical property due to the act, yet the value of the sculpture was diminished.

Mainstream? Like Forbes, BusinessWeek , Ziff-Davis (and here and here too), CBS News, USA Today, and most have heard of PC Magazine, plus a lot of papers like The Houston Chronicle, The Detroit News, the Syracuse Post-Standard, The Baltimore Sun, and the St. Louis Post-Standard. I have all those links plus others in a list I just send to people. I keep adding to it as I find more. Usually gets the message across that I'm not making stuff up.

A year ago I finally got to see one of these face to face just in time to hear the owner say "Did you know the company just went out of business 2 days ago ?". What a bummer !
So now its back and I'm not sure I want one anymore...
These days I'm thinking more about converting an old car for vegetable oil or using biodiesel

Their motivation is to be doubted in the first place; why would a think tank that aligns itself with SMALL businesses care about SUV?

I doubt that Microsoft created these so-called "think tanks" (I haven't seen much evidence of thought in much of their material), but they have found organizations whose opinions jibe with their own and amplified their voices by giving them funding. The interesting thing to note is that the "pro-Microsoft" voices are moving to the periphery. As a result, Microsoft is funding less mainstream material and more from "think tanks" which support extreme points of view. I wonder how long it will take for the pro-Microsoft stance to be associated primarily with these fringe viewpoints.

Aye, that link is commercial flights. Not only are you a bit of an ass, but you are also wrong- NASA does not buy insurance on scientific missions. COMMERCIAL payloads on NASA missions are insured, however.

For actual facts you can see this or this or even this.

Never greet your friend Jack when on an airplane". There's a deleted scene in the movie Airplane! that had this exact gag. Sort of similar, except what the restaurant guy said can't be misconstrued as anything else.

The reason for the higher prices in Europe is predictable: taxes. When currency and measurements are converted, the $5.38 that Britons were paying for gas last week included $4.16 in taxes. Rates are similar across Europe.

In the United States, each gallon is taxed 18.4 cents by the federal government, and with state taxes added on, Americans pay an average of 27 cents extra.

True dat. It's still far far cheaper than most other countries. http://www.detnews.com/2004/autosinsider/0404/18/a 10-126083.htm

It's no coincidence that this research is happening in the UK; they have a much more research-friendly policy.

There is a Christopher Chung in Detroit in this story.

He looks a bit like a spammer, but let's not assume anyone is guilty until they are proven so. Anyone in the area care to swing by his antique store and see if they also sell "nutritional supplements"?

The problem is that Companies have tried to patent genes, if not whole cells. While a year old, they are the top hits on google (so they must be right!) you should look at Organic Consumers Association and The Detroit News

...and that the CEO was a thieving bastard and swindled the .gov.uk out of so much money. But yeah, the DMC-12 is nice :-).

Plus, what if the accelerator sticks? The black box evidence would just show that you didn't release the accelerator. If fact, that could have happened in this case. It happens more often than you'd think.