Lead acid batteries (the most common battery used in EVs today) are the most recycled product on the planet. The only thing sometimes discarded without recycling are the plastic shells.
As to pollution from the source of your electricity? As others have noted pollution is lessened by the greater efficiency of these centralized power sources. In addition at a later point in time you can swap out the central power plant (far more easily than forcing millions of people to change their cars' individual power plants) for cleaner renewable sources. And if you're living in an area already using a large amount of renewable energy than you are more than just significantly ahead of the game, you have become essentially a zero polluter.
1) Lead batteries are the most recycled product on the face of the earth. No kidding. The only part not always recycled is the plastic shell. The lead and electrolytes are all reused.
2) There are plenty of them (and tons that drive more like the gas econoboxes that are more common than the gas sports cars). You can see some here, here, here, here, and here. Or peruse the entire album of EVs great and small, ugly and beautiful, slow and fast at the EV Photo Album.
3) I'm sorry when did you get a muscle car with a 400 mile range? Generally (even with an oversized gas tank) these cars come in at the 200-300 mile range per fill-up at best. Are EV's there yet? Not quite. 150 miles per charge is about the upper limit right now. But guess what? 95% or more of most Americans driving is less than 50 miles per day.
4) Since the car is plugged into the wall every night and charges while you sleep you're not having to blow 5-10 minutes pumping gas and that's excluding any time and effort it takes you to detour to the gas station.
However, a significantly shorter recharge is easily done with higher Amperage circuits in your home (typical EV car can recharge in only a few hours anyway) and/or a battery based dump station that can recharge your pack in 10 minutes or less. The EV dragsters use such (admittedly somewhat frightening) dump packs on a regular basis.
5) Oh and most of these supposedly wimpy electric car conversions can eat your American muscle car for lunch. It's nice being able to have your full torque available through your entire power curve.
Actually EV's (even working almost entirely on home brew old technologies and sealed lead acid batteries) can already hit the price-point, speed, looks, and power that you talk about.
In fact a vehicle converted from electric to gas is frequently _more_ fun to drive (and still looks the same from the outside) as your full torque is typically available through the entire power curve. Think EV's have to be wimpy golf carts or suppository shaped? Checkout the amateur monsters that race in the National Electric Drag Racing Association or the high performance electric supercar, the T-Zero.
Now there are two points that will most likely keep Joe Shmoe from buying one.
1) Limited range - the best EV's still get only slightly over 100 miles to the charge. Despite the fact that most Americans drive less than 40 miles a day 95% of the year, people feel more comfortable knowing that they can drive for 200-400 miles on a tank of gas. Most people are also used to gas vehicles that give little or no warning (save for the questionable accuracy of a fuel low, float gauge operated, warning light) before running out of fuel. When an electric hits the end of its pack charge performance begins to lessen giving the driver ample (and definitive) warning that they need to find a place to recharge. Oh and there is no need for fancy schmancy thousand dollar connectors to be installed to recharge, that's all about the auto manufacturer's wanting to reduce liability concerns. Most of the EVers I know running custom conversions use their standard 110v or 220v connectors to charge. Also charging does not have to be an 8 hour fiasco. Even on a 15-amp 220-volt circuit you can recharge most packs in less than half that time. Happen to have access to a 50-amp circuit? The time to charge improves greatly. Plus as you plug the car in every night your fully charged every morning ready for a full day of driving. You never have leave your normal route to use a gas station again. Run out of power somewhere? Generally you can find someone with an outlet willing to let you charge up for a little while so that you can make it home. There are more places with electrical outlets than there are with cans of gasoline lying around.
2) Noise - Now this is one that I think most people adjust to (and grow to appreciate), but electrics make little or no noise beyond the sound of tires on pavement. To a lot of gear heads this is a deal breaker. They (understandably) like the roar of a V-8. The turbine like whine of a high revved electric just doesn't quite do it for them. As a fan of all high performance vehicles I know where they are coming from and know that it is futile to argue a matter of taste so I won't spend too long on this. Basically I think most people will find the quiet of an electric appealing after they give it a chance. There is something addictive about being forced back into your seat as you rocket off the line to little more than the sound of the wind rushing bye.
Erm...I'll give you that Max Payne can become very repetitive, but how exactly do you manage to segue from that to being addicted to Diablo II. I mean the Diablo games are just as (if not more) repetitive as Max Payne.
Max Paynes main drawback was that it was short. I beat it in a little over 10 hours.
CBC is a Candian channel. As I stated it was being rebroadcast on CSPAN-1 which is a US channel. The point is that the programming in question was indeed viewable on US TV, though not particularly easy to locate.
And despite reporting to the contrary these images were shown on US television. I caught them during a broadcast of the CBC program "The National" being run on C-SPAN 1.
Ages? It's certainly not as fast as filling up at the pump, but with a high amp 220 volt charger you can recharge a 28 SLA battery pack in a couple of hours. And remember you don't have go find a gas station every time you want more fuel. Just plug the EV into the wall in your garage.
Hehe, you may get tired of gross inaccuracies being spouted wildly by idiot americans about Canada, but I get just as tired of people using CanAda of an example of how the US should be run when it has a population that is slightly more than 1 tenth the population of the US. Each country is unique. Each country has issues it must work on. You can't assume that what works in one will work in the other.
The latest data I could find on Canda's population is from the 1996 Canadian Census listing which states that there are 28,846,761 people living in the country. I belive current estimates put Canada at 31 million and the US at 270 million. My remark about population size and distribution and implementing "programs" (whether it be power distribution or internet) still holds. Most of the population is clustered around major cities (as with most countries, the US included) and the smaller sized population allows large public works to be slightly more effective at reaching the majority of the population. That's an oversimplification of course as there are political and social factors as well, but the population size and distribution does play a major role.
NYC consumes a lot more power than you might think, but yeah, I was making a gross exaggeration and being abnoxiously sarcastic. My apologies both for not making that clear and for any percieved insult.
In the interest of clearing the air here are the actual stats for the relevant areas. I can't find the numbers for the city itself, but New York State consumes approximately 4.28 trillion BTUs (1.26 billion kWh unless I totally screwed the conversion up) of power a year (according to 1999 DOE data) and Canda consumes 551 billion kWh per year (according to 1998 data). The US as a whole consumes 3.36 trillion kWh. So yeah, slight exaggeration.:P
Then again so was your estimation of the size of Toronto.
According to the City of Toronto's facts guide, the city has a population of 2.48 million people. What it is has that is big is government. The same site boasts that Tornoto has, "5th largest municipal government in North America."
Here is the top 10 (including Mexico) in North America:
Pouplation (in millions) 1.) New York USA 20.2 2.) Mexico City Mexico 19.8 3.) Los Angeles USA 16.2 4.) Chicago USA 8.9 5.) Washington D.C. USA 7.5 6.) San Francisco USA 6.9 7.) Philidelphia USA 6.1 8.) Boston USA 5.7 9.) Detroit USA 5.4 10.)Dallas USA 5.1
And for the sake of completeness the world:
1.) Tokyo, Japan 28 2.) New York City, United States 20.1 3.) Mexico City, Mexico 19.8 4.) Bombay, India 18 5.) Sao Paulo, Brazil 17.7 6.) Los Angeles, United States 16.2 7.) Shanghai, China 14.2 8.) Lagos, Nigeria 13.5 9.) Calcutta, India 12.9 10.) Buenos Aires, Argentina 12.5
Actually estimations out there show that there is plenty of oil out there. The problem is that presently the demand curve is fast overtaking the production curve. Even with new drilling techniques and improved refinement, in 30-40 years the world will not be able to produce enough oil to meet the demand, despite there being plenty left trapped in the ground.
Depends on what part of the each respective country you live in. In the US there are areas where large portions of your pwoer are from clean (or relatively clean such as nuclear) sources rather than coal plants.
Canada gets away with a higher ratio of "clean" to dirty power because their power requirements are so much lower. New York City uses as much power as the entire country of Canada. A lot of programs that work in Canada do so because of the small population size and pattern of distrubution.
Well I actually didn't belong to any major clique. Instead I was more the universal oddball. I played some sports (though not the "cool" ones). I tested and scored high, but felt that homework was pointless and so wound up with a fairly average GPA. I was friends with the popular kids, the dirtballs, the nerds, the computer geeks, the band geeks, the jocks, etc. And you know what? The vast majority of the popular kids were:
A) Very low on wisdom (so called "common sense" and judgment ability)
B) Higher than most kids in the charisma department (and no, not just because a large chunk of them were more attractive than the rest of the school population).
C) Slightly above average to below average in intelligence. Intelligence not meaning ability to memorize facts or take apart a computer. Intelligence as measured by their ability to truly learn a skill, to grasp a concept or the underlying basics of a concept when described to them. An intelligent individual should be able to pickup on just about anything to some degree if it is presented to them in a logical manner. Most of these kids couldn't do that. They learned by repetition and rote memorization.
I'm not being angry or spiteful towards any group; I'm simply stating that certain cliques have common traits. One of the common traits of the "popular" clique was middle of the road intelligence. There's nothing wrong with being less intelligent than the nerd/geek population. No one should be made to feel bad simply because their mental abilities are less than someone else's. But that doesn't change the characteristics of this group.
Actually D-VHS VCRs will record at 1080i. You can pick one up for about $700.
Of course like all tape based media they degrade the more you watch and record them. Being digital they do resist this wear and tear a bit better than standard analog tapes, though.
It's an observation of the intellectual prowess of the majority of the "popular" social group.
And most folks here aren't calling the popular kids "stupid", but rather noting that in general they are significantly less intelligent than most of the nerd/geek clique. As has been noted by others; high grades are not a good measure of intelligence. Most of Junior High and High School is focused around rote memorization. If you could stand the boredom and memorize facts long enough to vomit them back up at the appropriate time you would be a straight A student. I know individuals that made it all the way through High School and College with a 4.0 GPA that are barely above "average" intelligence.
Popular kids are popular for having one or more of the following attributes:
1) They are physically attractive. 2) They are active in "acceptable" sports. (acceptable varies with gender) 3) Their families have significant amounts of money and are willing to spend this money on them and their friends.
"Anti-social" in secondary school means being different from the above "ideal" attributes. The further distanced from the above attributes you are the more ostracized and abused you are.
Intelligence is a part of the equation because kids tend to make physical ability and mental ability exculsive of one another. Athleticism and physical attractiveness are held to such a high degree that even those athletic kids capable of being very intelligent would neglect their intellect (and sometimes do everything they could to appear less intelligent) for the sake of spending time at the popularity game. Feeling self conscious about this lack of knowledge/ability (and being encouraged by adults to believe that athleticism and beauty are the most important things)these kids tend to lash out at the groups displaying prowess in an area that the popular/atheltic crowd does not have (or has neglected to exercise).
And it works in the reverse as well. Smart kids tend to look down on less mentally adept individuals within their own group.
The difference is that one group is capable of inflicting physical harm (and mental harm through intimidation)while the other has only their wit and perceptive abilities to fight with.
Actually I've found Texas to be damn evil when going after companies that violate employee rights.
If you win a case in Texas court stating that your former employer owes you income the state will take over the role of collections agent for you. If the company fails to pay within 14 days of receipt of notice their accounts are frozen and the state takes as much money from the accounts as is needed to pay the employee. If there is not enough in the account to pay the back pay than the state will take all the money and release the account. They will then issue another notice to the offending company. Once the company puts more funds into the bank account (you'd be surprised how many do this after having already had the accounts frozen once) the state will freeze the account again and remove the required funds. They repeat this as often as necessary until the former employee has been paid what the court ordered.
I've seen the above happen. One of my roommates left a company that shafted him on salary and when he won the case (mostly because the offending company kept refusing to show up in court) it became hysterical to watch the state smack that firm around until the debt was paid.
Texas also has some interesting laws I am running into just now regarding lay offs and severance package requirements that heavily favors the laid off employee.
Amusingly enough a large number of ATM's in operation actually use OS/2. This may be part of IBM's backpedaling regarding not supporting that OS anymore.
It is both spoiler filled for both those that have and have not read the books.
All info on the new film will be spoilerish for people that have not read the books (a surprisingly large group).
Information pertaining to specific changes and added scenes as well as descriptions of the flow of the narrative would be spoilers even for the crowd that has read the books.
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lol, the has a statement that says:
"a vehicle converted from electric to gas is"
It should say:
"a vehicle converted to electric from gas is"
Lead acid batteries (the most common battery used in EVs today) are the most recycled product on the planet. The only thing sometimes discarded without recycling are the plastic shells.
As to pollution from the source of your electricity? As others have noted pollution is lessened by the greater efficiency of these centralized power sources. In addition at a later point in time you can swap out the central power plant (far more easily than forcing millions of people to change their cars' individual power plants) for cleaner renewable sources. And if you're living in an area already using a large amount of renewable energy than you are more than just significantly ahead of the game, you have become essentially a zero polluter.
1) Lead batteries are the most recycled product on the face of the earth. No kidding. The only part not always recycled is the plastic shell. The lead and electrolytes are all reused.
2) There are plenty of them (and tons that drive more like the gas econoboxes that are more common than the gas sports cars). You can see some here, here, here, here, and here. Or peruse the entire album of EVs great and small, ugly and beautiful, slow and fast at the EV Photo Album.
Also see The National Electric Drag Racing Association and the electric supercar, the T-Zero
3) I'm sorry when did you get a muscle car with a 400 mile range? Generally (even with an oversized gas tank) these cars come in at the 200-300 mile range per fill-up at best. Are EV's there yet? Not quite. 150 miles per charge is about the upper limit right now. But guess what? 95% or more of most Americans driving is less than 50 miles per day.
4) Since the car is plugged into the wall every night and charges while you sleep you're not having to blow 5-10 minutes pumping gas and that's excluding any time and effort it takes you to detour to the gas station.
However, a significantly shorter recharge is easily done with higher Amperage circuits in your home (typical EV car can recharge in only a few hours anyway) and/or a battery based dump station that can recharge your pack in 10 minutes or less. The EV dragsters use such (admittedly somewhat frightening) dump packs on a regular basis.
5) Oh and most of these supposedly wimpy electric car conversions can eat your American muscle car for lunch. It's nice being able to have your full torque available through your entire power curve.
Heck some electric cars can even eat exotic sports cars for lunch.
Actually EV's (even working almost entirely on home brew old technologies and sealed lead acid batteries) can already hit the price-point, speed, looks, and power that you talk about.
In fact a vehicle converted from electric to gas is frequently _more_ fun to drive (and still looks the same from the outside) as your full torque is typically available through the entire power curve. Think EV's have to be wimpy golf carts or suppository shaped? Checkout the amateur monsters that race in the National Electric Drag Racing Association or the high performance electric supercar, the T-Zero.
Now there are two points that will most likely keep Joe Shmoe from buying one.
1) Limited range - the best EV's still get only slightly over 100 miles to the charge. Despite the fact that most Americans drive less than 40 miles a day 95% of the year, people feel more comfortable knowing that they can drive for 200-400 miles on a tank of gas. Most people are also used to gas vehicles that give little or no warning (save for the questionable accuracy of a fuel low, float gauge operated, warning light) before running out of fuel. When an electric hits the end of its pack charge performance begins to lessen giving the driver ample (and definitive) warning that they need to find a place to recharge. Oh and there is no need for fancy schmancy thousand dollar connectors to be installed to recharge, that's all about the auto manufacturer's wanting to reduce liability concerns. Most of the EVers I know running custom conversions use their standard 110v or 220v connectors to charge. Also charging does not have to be an 8 hour fiasco. Even on a 15-amp 220-volt circuit you can recharge most packs in less than half that time. Happen to have access to a 50-amp circuit? The time to charge improves greatly. Plus as you plug the car in every night your fully charged every morning ready for a full day of driving. You never have leave your normal route to use a gas station again. Run out of power somewhere? Generally you can find someone with an outlet willing to let you charge up for a little while so that you can make it home. There are more places with electrical outlets than there are with cans of gasoline lying around.
2) Noise - Now this is one that I think most people adjust to (and grow to appreciate), but electrics make little or no noise beyond the sound of tires on pavement. To a lot of gear heads this is a deal breaker. They (understandably) like the roar of a V-8. The turbine like whine of a high revved electric just doesn't quite do it for them. As a fan of all high performance vehicles I know where they are coming from and know that it is futile to argue a matter of taste so I won't spend too long on this. Basically I think most people will find the quiet of an electric appealing after they give it a chance. There is something addictive about being forced back into your seat as you rocket off the line to little more than the sound of the wind rushing bye.
It works great.
Lineage 2 from NC Soft is using the same engine and is absolutely stunning.
I've been very impressed at how well that particular FPS engine has translated into the MMPOG environment.
heh heh, good point.
;)
Actually, I think all games generate a fair bit of cursing.
The difference between a good game and a bad game is what causes the string of foul words.
Erm...I'll give you that Max Payne can become very repetitive, but how exactly do you manage to segue from that to being addicted to Diablo II. I mean the Diablo games are just as (if not more) repetitive as Max Payne.
Max Paynes main drawback was that it was short. I beat it in a little over 10 hours.
CBC is a Candian channel. As I stated it was being rebroadcast on CSPAN-1 which is a US channel. The point is that the programming in question was indeed viewable on US TV, though not particularly easy to locate.
And despite reporting to the contrary these images were shown on US television. I caught them during a broadcast of the CBC program "The National" being run on C-SPAN 1.
A perfectly valid point, and why an electric car is not as well suited for long trips.
Of course, there are towable generators that you can use to make your electric a low efficiency hybrid for the occasional long trip.
Electric cars are not the be all end all of automobile technology. They are just a fun and clean alternative to the daily driver at the moment.
Ages? It's certainly not as fast as filling up at the pump, but with a high amp 220 volt charger you can recharge a 28 SLA battery pack in a couple of hours. And remember you don't have go find a gas station every time you want more fuel. Just plug the EV into the wall in your garage.
Ok, well now I know why Atlanta's traffic is supposed to be the worst out there. That is some seriously scary sprawl.
All the more impressive.
The extra 2 million still keeps it just off the top ten list. Thoiugh as another poster noted, the amount of land taken up is seriously impressive.
hehe, damn estimates and rounding. :P
Hehe, you may get tired of gross inaccuracies being spouted wildly by idiot americans about Canada, but I get just as tired of people using CanAda of an example of how the US should be run when it has a population that is slightly more than 1 tenth the population of the US. Each country is unique. Each country has issues it must work on. You can't assume that what works in one will work in the other.
:P
The latest data I could find on Canda's population is from the 1996 Canadian Census listing which states that there are 28,846,761 people living in the country. I belive current estimates put Canada at 31 million and the US at 270 million. My remark about population size and distribution and implementing "programs" (whether it be power distribution or internet) still holds. Most of the population is clustered around major cities (as with most countries, the US included) and the smaller sized population allows large public works to be slightly more effective at reaching the majority of the population. That's an oversimplification of course as there are political and social factors as well, but the population size and distribution does play a major role.
NYC consumes a lot more power than you might think, but yeah, I was making a gross exaggeration and being abnoxiously sarcastic. My apologies both for not making that clear and for any percieved insult.
In the interest of clearing the air here are the actual stats for the relevant areas. I can't find the numbers for the city itself, but New York State consumes approximately 4.28 trillion BTUs (1.26 billion kWh unless I totally screwed the conversion up) of power a year (according to 1999 DOE data) and Canda consumes 551 billion kWh per year (according to 1998 data). The US as a whole consumes 3.36 trillion kWh. So yeah, slight exaggeration.
Then again so was your estimation of the size of Toronto.
According to the City of Toronto's facts guide, the city has a population of 2.48 million people. What it is has that is big is government. The same site boasts that Tornoto has, "5th largest municipal government in North America."
Here is the top 10 (including Mexico) in North America:
Pouplation (in millions)
1.) New York USA 20.2
2.) Mexico City Mexico 19.8
3.) Los Angeles USA 16.2
4.) Chicago USA 8.9
5.) Washington D.C. USA 7.5
6.) San Francisco USA 6.9
7.) Philidelphia USA 6.1
8.) Boston USA 5.7
9.) Detroit USA 5.4
10.)Dallas USA 5.1
And for the sake of completeness the world:
1.) Tokyo, Japan 28
2.) New York City, United States 20.1
3.) Mexico City, Mexico 19.8
4.) Bombay, India 18
5.) Sao Paulo, Brazil 17.7
6.) Los Angeles, United States 16.2
7.) Shanghai, China 14.2
8.) Lagos, Nigeria 13.5
9.) Calcutta, India 12.9
10.) Buenos Aires, Argentina 12.5
Actually estimations out there show that there is plenty of oil out there. The problem is that presently the demand curve is fast overtaking the production curve. Even with new drilling techniques and improved refinement, in 30-40 years the world will not be able to produce enough oil to meet the demand, despite there being plenty left trapped in the ground.
Depends on what part of the each respective country you live in. In the US there are areas where large portions of your pwoer are from clean (or relatively clean such as nuclear) sources rather than coal plants.
Canada gets away with a higher ratio of "clean" to dirty power because their power requirements are so much lower. New York City uses as much power as the entire country of Canada. A lot of programs that work in Canada do so because of the small population size and pattern of distrubution.
Also see Brian Stableford, Robert Charles Wilson, Bruce Sterling, and Niel Stephenson,
Remember, "hard science fiction" does not have to revolve around cosmic scale events.
Honestly I think hard sci-fi is alive and well, you just have to know where to look.
Well I actually didn't belong to any major clique. Instead I was more the universal oddball. I played some sports (though not the "cool" ones). I tested and scored high, but felt that homework was pointless and so wound up with a fairly average GPA. I was friends with the popular kids, the dirtballs, the nerds, the computer geeks, the band geeks, the jocks, etc. And you know what? The vast majority of the popular kids were:
A) Very low on wisdom (so called "common sense" and judgment ability)
B) Higher than most kids in the charisma department (and no, not just because a large chunk of them were more attractive than the rest of the school population).
C) Slightly above average to below average in intelligence. Intelligence not meaning ability to memorize facts or take apart a computer. Intelligence as measured by their ability to truly learn a skill, to grasp a concept or the underlying basics of a concept when described to them. An intelligent individual should be able to pickup on just about anything to some degree if it is presented to them in a logical manner. Most of these kids couldn't do that. They learned by repetition and rote memorization.
I'm not being angry or spiteful towards any group; I'm simply stating that certain cliques have common traits. One of the common traits of the "popular" clique was middle of the road intelligence. There's nothing wrong with being less intelligent than the nerd/geek population. No one should be made to feel bad simply because their mental abilities are less than someone else's. But that doesn't change the characteristics of this group.
Actually D-VHS VCRs will record at 1080i. You can pick one up for about $700.
Of course like all tape based media they degrade the more you watch and record them. Being digital they do resist this wear and tear a bit better than standard analog tapes, though.
No, it's not.
It's an observation of the intellectual prowess of the majority of the "popular" social group.
And most folks here aren't calling the popular kids "stupid", but rather noting that in general they are significantly less intelligent than most of the nerd/geek clique. As has been noted by others; high grades are not a good measure of intelligence. Most of Junior High and High School is focused around rote memorization. If you could stand the boredom and memorize facts long enough to vomit them back up at the appropriate time you would be a straight A student. I know individuals that made it all the way through High School and College with a 4.0 GPA that are barely above "average" intelligence.
Popular kids are popular for having one or more of the following attributes:
1) They are physically attractive.
2) They are active in "acceptable" sports. (acceptable varies with gender)
3) Their families have significant amounts of money and are willing to spend this money on them and their friends.
"Anti-social" in secondary school means being different from the above "ideal" attributes. The further distanced from the above attributes you are the more ostracized and abused you are.
Intelligence is a part of the equation because kids tend to make physical ability and mental ability exculsive of one another. Athleticism and physical attractiveness are held to such a high degree that even those athletic kids capable of being very intelligent would neglect their intellect (and sometimes do everything they could to appear less intelligent) for the sake of spending time at the popularity game. Feeling self conscious about this lack of knowledge/ability (and being encouraged by adults to believe that athleticism and beauty are the most important things)these kids tend to lash out at the groups displaying prowess in an area that the popular/atheltic crowd does not have (or has neglected to exercise).
And it works in the reverse as well. Smart kids tend to look down on less mentally adept individuals within their own group.
The difference is that one group is capable of inflicting physical harm (and mental harm through intimidation)while the other has only their wit and perceptive abilities to fight with.
Actually I've found Texas to be damn evil when going after companies that violate employee rights.
If you win a case in Texas court stating that your former employer owes you income the state will take over the role of collections agent for you. If the company fails to pay within 14 days of receipt of notice their accounts are frozen and the state takes as much money from the accounts as is needed to pay the employee. If there is not enough in the account to pay the back pay than the state will take all the money and release the account. They will then issue another notice to the offending company. Once the company puts more funds into the bank account (you'd be surprised how many do this after having already had the accounts frozen once) the state will freeze the account again and remove the required funds. They repeat this as often as necessary until the former employee has been paid what the court ordered.
I've seen the above happen. One of my roommates left a company that shafted him on salary and when he won the case (mostly because the offending company kept refusing to show up in court) it became hysterical to watch the state smack that firm around until the debt was paid.
Texas also has some interesting laws I am running into just now regarding lay offs and severance package requirements that heavily favors the laid off employee.
Wait till you see the Hulk trailer during the Superbowl.
It has already been leaked as well.
Some stills and a link to where you can see the 45 second teaser can be found here:
http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=14285
Amusingly enough a large number of ATM's in operation actually use OS/2. This may be part of IBM's backpedaling regarding not supporting that OS anymore.
Actually, yes.
It is both spoiler filled for both those that have and have not read the books.
All info on the new film will be spoilerish for people that have not read the books (a surprisingly large group).
Information pertaining to specific changes and added scenes as well as descriptions of the flow of the narrative would be spoilers even for the crowd that has read the books.