Actually; I understand way more about a lot of this than you will ever know. And that is part of what makes me an excellent parent. I actually teach my kids morals, and ethics, and personal responsibility, and lots of other things that are forbidden in public schools these days. A lot of other families and I have seen where youth has gone these days with the "gangsta" attitudes and mentality, the drugs, the sex, the male dominating attitudes, etc. It shows a lot about these people up on places like Myspace, and Facebook, etc.
My kids are well aware of what Myspace and the like are all about. We have gone there to open pages of people we know but then when we are finished, it's blocked again as my house is forever full of my kids and neighborhood kids.
Nope. Unlike a lot of households in the US anyway, we actually communicate with our kids and don't just let them run all over at night getting into drugs and trouble, and gangs.
The proof of this is the successful raising of one 19 year old step daughter already. Now the last two of my own offspring have to get raised up and off to college with all their morals and ethics intact as well.
No; I plan on blocking a lot of what I believe to be a detriment to the basic moral and ethical underpinnings of my kids' minds and hearts.
That really is funny. I just added facebook.com to the url content filtering block list on my network. I look to keep my kids safe and keep the perverts away....
Then you can expect the bot-herders will be swarming up heavily to find machines to own that are on these networks. You can do a much better job of taking down Yahoo and I forget who else is on the shit-list of some of these idiots with this kind of uplink speed! It's like having your bots all co-located at an ISP on a DS3 or bonded T1's ready to do your bidding...
Fact is that they are providing a service to you, and you are paying for that service. There is no language in the TOS that says they can restrict what you see on said internet, or where you can go and what you can upload or download, otherwise you'd likely go elsewhere because of it being too restrictive.
When you signed up for your Comcast service; did they disclose to you that there were restrictions on what you could do with your internet access?? It does not matter if you didn't ask or not. If this was not disclosed to you both verbally and contractually when you signed up, they legally cannot do it.
That said; this is the equivalent of restricting or filtering your access to the internet in contradiction to the TOS and their own agreements with you for that service you are paying for.
This speaks volumes of a lawsuit of large proportion if anyone can exactly pin any of these "filters" on Comcast's lines. If this is happening to enough people, it can easily go class-action.
By the definitions set forth in print and media by the law teams for the RIAA, just ripping a copy of a CD in a computer constitutes theft. Thats their words.
It apparently doesn't matter that the "fair use" doctrine is in play here either. They are attempting to rewrite law as they go along and waiting for someone high up to challenge them on it.
They will ultimately kill the traditional business model of the record/CD medium, and also the rights by any human to hear any of the legacy music until they decide when and where.
Your only remaining music WILL come from new artists writing and performing songs by which the RIAA cannot come by and park on.
If you look closely at the letters wording, you can definitely see a trend in this, and others that have been posted. The most glaring thing was the statement the attorney makes claiming the threat letter itself is copyright and that he reserves his rights by excluding you from posting it.
These and other such "threats" clearly demonstrate that they are making this crap up as they go to suit themselves and possibly their client. Obviously the person standing to make the most money out of this is the attorney himself and/or the law firm, and less obviously is his so-called plaintiff. This all is so bogus it isn't funny and it screams to call these bozo's to the carpet for their actions.
Not going to happen! Period. All the award money will go to pay the litigators and their support staff, and they will be damned if they won't also be getting some "fat" bonus awards for their successful win. Nope, the artists now won't see a single dime here. They only get paid for retail sales of a CD from the shelves.
The problem is that legitimately, everyone has a reason to justify a suit against Apple for this issue based on "Tying". This is a pseudo-Microsoft like tactic that tied the phone to a single provider, likely due to some back-scratching going on between them at some point. This is where you'd have to start. It's not solely the locking of the phone to AT&T, as you'd loose that issue solely on it's merits in all likelihood.
The problem is that the courts are also likely to side with Apple saying something akin to "you did not have to buy the phone in the first place, thereby putting yourselves at risk for this issue. And; you accepted the conditions of the phone when you agreed to the service agreement upon purchase." Ie; you knew you were about to contract with AT&T as the sole provider when you whipped out your credit card.
I think it safe to say that if anything, you might want to make the biggest impact to Apple by calling for the legal recourse to be returning all these phones to Apple for full refunds, and not much else. You'd likely get to do that but at some form of a loss because they'd claim that you got some use out of the device.
Then you will have been assumed to "learn your lesson" and not purchase any product that will lock in to a single provider again. Apple will also be assumed to have learned not to play monopoly with some of these other unscrupulous companies, because they'll now have all these dead phones that nobody wants solely for that reason.
The only reason it isn't any different on the market today is that you people keep patronizing these companies for these "cool" products without looking at what your getting. I suspect Apple was under the impression that in 2 years, the service contract would be up and you'd like to get a better deal which is likely to be over at T-Mobile instead of AT&T, and they'd just say "sorry; can't do that". And you'd be living with your iPhone as just a simple glorified media player that would have to be loaded from your computer. Or; if you just had to have the iPhone, you'd be patronizing them again in 2 years for the "next" model! I bet the second idea is probably it because we all know that Apple, like everybody else, loves money and money means profits..!!
Right now, unless they're legally challenged with monopolistic practices, you all have nothing really to go or stand on. Sorry but thats what it looks like from here.
and if this is true what Vivendi is doing, then aren't they technically guilty of "collusion" by conspiring with the other companies against Apple?? If they were to succeed and gain control somehow, then they'd also be guilty of collusion and RICO. I smell a very very big rat here...
I can see this coming now. People begin grabbing only the tracks they want excluding everything else and then Vivendi is now forced to start charging the price of a single track at that of an entire CD!!!
What part of "sinking ship" does the lawyers and/for the RIAA not quite understand???
You'd think that by now they'd realize that the fudge they were pushing would eventually catch up to them. This lady obviously either has some serious smarts, or has some very savvy counsel with her and I'd be surprised if there isn't someone in Washington helping this by looking up things at the Supreme courts too!
Eventually this will get overturned, and the floodgates will open to all involved with the RIAA and many of the record companies. What do you think their defense will be to the courts???
In todays world, ethics is taboo and almost forbidden given what some kids of the 80's learned in some games and some educational environments. I worked with a group of them a few years back at a short term project, and they thought nothing at all about rifling through someones files on their computer looking at files and all, searching for pictures and music files, in some instances, even personal correspondence documents such as saved emails and the like. One tech actually hooked up a portable drive and copied the customers entire catalog of MP3 files off of their computer without permission! They would also actually laugh and joke about some customer having to go in for surgery on their foot or something. Pretty disgusting to watch and overhear. Unfortunately the direct manager on the project at the time was an active participant!
I however was old-school, and we did have ethics and morals. This is not to say that many of the kids in the 80s educational circles didn't learn moral values and ethical behavior, but unfortunately a lot of them are deceptively evil. You have no way of knowing who is, and who isn't until a breach is actually discovered AND you can actually pin it on a specific individual or group of individuals. These people make it difficult for the rest of us to secure work and keep it because of the mis-trust that is out there.
What would be nice to have is a board somewhere with names and something identifiable of those involved in breaches of customer data and ethics violations that damage the customer. Many people don't understand the point that the customer is how you make your living. Many of these kids feel that if you get dumped here at this job, you just go across the street and work there for a while.
Ever notice that on TV especially, when the show stops and a commercial break happens, the volume is almost deafening! They do this deliberately and I've gotten to the point of just not watching ANYTHING on commercial TV anymore. That tactic has lost a viewer and potential customer of some of these businesses that advertised on TV. Sorry; you do stupid stuff like that to people, what did you think would happen? We'd all be banging on your door to buy your product and hope you'd turn the damned volume down??? I don't think so.
That is a big big problem in this country right now. We are congregating around a huge population of "Sheep" and various "sheep herders". These are the nincompoops that go out and buy the dribble that is produced by said RIAA. Of course these are the very same sheep that then the said RIAA goes after to make them an "example" for the rest of the sheep.
This whole thing sucks and stinks to high heaven. At some point I hope the RIAA just goes off and dies a very very painful and expensive death and ultimately goes away. They're helping to perpetuate the sheep in this nation and lack of brain matter therein.
If this is indeed happening, then the public at large should be well informed about what is going on with the music purchases they are making and I suspect that most of the buying public even the computer illiterate folks would discontinue buying CD's or find a way to obtain the music through other channels.
Further eroding of the CD medium that we all originally liked, and still do; that if it not for the rampant pimping and crapware these idiots decided to load on there with our purchased tracks, things would be more like it was in the 80's. They can't do that with Vinyl, so why isn't someone proposing bringing back the analog record??? I made copies from it cleanly all the time and still can. I bet there are hosts of them out there ready to do that.
This is just a predicate to Microsoft lining up all the ducks and get ready to induce breakage of all prior versions of Windows O/S. The setup here is to surreptitiously force you into upgrading into Vista. They don't want those updates coming from multiple locations and by locking it down to only servers they own, they control the entire deck of cards.
This was expected. Many other companies will be attempting to do this as well. The idea is that if you go into arbitration, the awards are minimal if ever, and there are no consequential awards, etc. It is; from a business sense, the most profitable way to handle customer complaints.
You are also more likely to loose in arbitration than you are with going to small claims courts. They are trying to lock you into arbitration however I wonder how long it will be before someone comes back on Comcast and says that legally you can't do that.
If it were held up to be true, then it also could be legally tested and resulted in you not being allowed to remove any and all spyware or malware, no matter who put it there.
Then the next logical step is a sanctioned operating system where the Government decides what you can have and how you will use it.
I do most of my shopping online and make a huge amount of pre-shop searching on many of the goods I purchase. None of them through "click-thru" ads placed on servers. You people as assuming an awful lot about the buying public out there, and therefore it begs this;... "When you assume, you make an ass out of you and me". I'm sorry, I'm not an ass so that leaves you... out in the cold. I will continue to use this filter called "Adblock" because I get tired of half a dozen pop-under windows laying in wait for me to have to force close some of them. Then theres the ones that pop up over an entire web site page. What happens next is that if that happens, and I can't close the ad, I close the browser window and go somewhere else. That means; "You Loose"! Why don't you try talking to your advertisers about NOT making garbage that is so "in-your-face" and let the visitor visit instead of being invaded when they come to the door.
Any site that winds up having so many ads on their site to pay for it, likely is offering almost nothing in content and therefore I have no need to go there. Simple philosophy.
Lastly; Every one I know of or speak to, (and I'm in a position of substantial daily influence to many many people) I am able to convince them to switch off to Firefox because of Internet Exploder's well known ease of hack and breakage. Even Mac users are switching man! Go ahead and cut off Firefox users. Whatever man.
If you wish to filter visitors by browser type, knock yourself out. It's your traffic loss that will be an issue not any issue for the rest of us. We just go elsewhere.
Then the simple solution is to blacklist any site that utilized that methodology on it's pages. That would be taken akin to hacking on a commercial level and even the hosting ISP's would be called to task to shut down the offending servers connections.
Nobody but nobody would stand for this on a commercial level. And once one was discovered, it would not be long before it would get taken down. So; even if a site had a "strange payload" on the page somewhere, the infection numbers would potentially be small.
Unfortunately we can't stop some of these sites from posting this kind of garbage but I don't really see it happening on a commercial level. If CNN ever did this or FoxNews plastered this on someones computer when they come to visit, it would be their last visit to that site or any site with even a similar sounding name. Period.
First off, I sure hope they got legal warrants to do that because if they start doing that to an average citizen in the US, it's a breach of constitutional protections afforded to all Americans.
I can see this if they are going after "producers"; ie people who are marketing the chips, and such especially if it's intent it to circumvent copyright protections.
But that is a big issue. Some of these manufacturers want these software mediums protected such that if it becomes non usable then you have to send it in and get it replaced. This too is an ok platform until the manufacturer begins to determine how long they will do that, and at what cost. Then what happens to a product after it's lifespan has ceased? No more replacements or updates???
"Sir; your product was discontinued last year and we have not yet seen your software disk returned to us. Send your disks back in to us now or face the penalty of the DCMA!"
There are dozens of them here in the Twin Cities area. The local police department even has at least a couple that I'm aware of. They are also seen running around some of the area lakes. They're out there man...!
This whole thing has been visited time and time again and there is plenty of evidence, anecdotal and otherwise out there that this will be killed off before it even has a chance to start. They will simply make laws in Congress to forbid ownership of these here in this country and continue the perpetuation of oil consumption and its growth. There is too much money vested and large return on investment in anything using oil and gasoline. Anyone who thinks this is phony need simply look back at our own history of electric vehicles. There must be truth to the rumors of big oil stopping this because this is where all the money is and always has been, and they can pretty much buy and sell Congress and hence laws. Remember that all they must declare is that they are not street-legal!
Segway made it because it's not a car and cannot be considered as serious and necessary transportation.
This whole issue of electric cars vs. Dell computer, is pointless since it's apples and oranges. They're two different animals.
Slashdot Mirror
My kids are well aware of what Myspace and the like are all about. We have gone there to open pages of people we know but then when we are finished, it's blocked again as my house is forever full of my kids and neighborhood kids.
Nope. Unlike a lot of households in the US anyway, we actually communicate with our kids and don't just let them run all over at night getting into drugs and trouble, and gangs.
The proof of this is the successful raising of one 19 year old step daughter already. Now the last two of my own offspring have to get raised up and off to college with all their morals and ethics intact as well.
No; I plan on blocking a lot of what I believe to be a detriment to the basic moral and ethical underpinnings of my kids' minds and hearts.
Yea; and the picture I have in my head is of Mr. Ballmer himself stooped over in complete anger with steam emanating from his ears as he says that.
That really is funny. I just added facebook.com to the url content filtering block list on my network. I look to keep my kids safe and keep the perverts away....
Then you can expect the bot-herders will be swarming up heavily to find machines to own that are on these networks. You can do a much better job of taking down Yahoo and I forget who else is on the shit-list of some of these idiots with this kind of uplink speed! It's like having your bots all co-located at an ISP on a DS3 or bonded T1's ready to do your bidding...
Fact is that they are providing a service to you, and you are paying for that service. There is no language in the TOS that says they can restrict what you see on said internet, or where you can go and what you can upload or download, otherwise you'd likely go elsewhere because of it being too restrictive.
When you signed up for your Comcast service; did they disclose to you that there were restrictions on what you could do with your internet access?? It does not matter if you didn't ask or not. If this was not disclosed to you both verbally and contractually when you signed up, they legally cannot do it.
That said; this is the equivalent of restricting or filtering your access to the internet in contradiction to the TOS and their own agreements with you for that service you are paying for.
This speaks volumes of a lawsuit of large proportion if anyone can exactly pin any of these "filters" on Comcast's lines. If this is happening to enough people, it can easily go class-action.
IMHO
Technically that statement is wrong.
By the definitions set forth in print and media by the law teams for the RIAA, just ripping a copy of a CD in a computer constitutes theft. Thats their words.
It apparently doesn't matter that the "fair use" doctrine is in play here either. They are attempting to rewrite law as they go along and waiting for someone high up to challenge them on it.
They will ultimately kill the traditional business model of the record/CD medium, and also the rights by any human to hear any of the legacy music until they decide when and where.
Your only remaining music WILL come from new artists writing and performing songs by which the RIAA cannot come by and park on.
If you look closely at the letters wording, you can definitely see a trend in this, and others that have been posted. The most glaring thing was the statement the attorney makes claiming the threat letter itself is copyright and that he reserves his rights by excluding you from posting it.
These and other such "threats" clearly demonstrate that they are making this crap up as they go to suit themselves and possibly their client. Obviously the person standing to make the most money out of this is the attorney himself and/or the law firm, and less obviously is his so-called plaintiff. This all is so bogus it isn't funny and it screams to call these bozo's to the carpet for their actions.
Not going to happen!
Period.
All the award money will go to pay the litigators and their support staff, and they will be damned if they won't also be getting some "fat" bonus awards for their successful win.
Nope, the artists now won't see a single dime here. They only get paid for retail sales of a CD from the shelves.
The problem is that legitimately, everyone has a reason to justify a suit against Apple for this issue based on "Tying". This is a pseudo-Microsoft like tactic that tied the phone to a single provider, likely due to some back-scratching going on between them at some point. This is where you'd have to start. It's not solely the locking of the phone to AT&T, as you'd loose that issue solely on it's merits in all likelihood.
The problem is that the courts are also likely to side with Apple saying something akin to "you did not have to buy the phone in the first place, thereby putting yourselves at risk for this issue. And; you accepted the conditions of the phone when you agreed to the service agreement upon purchase." Ie; you knew you were about to contract with AT&T as the sole provider when you whipped out your credit card.
I think it safe to say that if anything, you might want to make the biggest impact to Apple by calling for the legal recourse to be returning all these phones to Apple for full refunds, and not much else. You'd likely get to do that but at some form of a loss because they'd claim that you got some use out of the device.
Then you will have been assumed to "learn your lesson" and not purchase any product that will lock in to a single provider again. Apple will also be assumed to have learned not to play monopoly with some of these other unscrupulous companies, because they'll now have all these dead phones that nobody wants solely for that reason.
The only reason it isn't any different on the market today is that you people keep patronizing these companies for these "cool" products without looking at what your getting. I suspect Apple was under the impression that in 2 years, the service contract would be up and you'd like to get a better deal which is likely to be over at T-Mobile instead of AT&T, and they'd just say "sorry; can't do that". And you'd be living with your iPhone as just a simple glorified media player that would have to be loaded from your computer. Or; if you just had to have the iPhone, you'd be patronizing them again in 2 years for the "next" model! I bet the second idea is probably it because we all know that Apple, like everybody else, loves money and money means profits..!!
Right now, unless they're legally challenged with monopolistic practices, you all have nothing really to go or stand on. Sorry but thats what it looks like from here.
and if this is true what Vivendi is doing, then aren't they technically guilty of "collusion" by conspiring with the other companies against Apple?? If they were to succeed and gain control somehow, then they'd also be guilty of collusion and RICO. I smell a very very big rat here...
I can see this coming now. People begin grabbing only the tracks they want excluding everything else and then Vivendi is now forced to start charging the price of a single track at that of an entire CD!!!
Actually;
Your absolutely right. They get A LOT OF CASH whether or not anyone wins. This is another folly that someday someone will figure out a way to fix.
What part of "sinking ship" does the lawyers and/for the RIAA not quite understand???
You'd think that by now they'd realize that the fudge they were pushing would eventually catch up to them. This lady obviously either has some serious smarts, or has some very savvy counsel with her and I'd be surprised if there isn't someone in Washington helping this by looking up things at the Supreme courts too!
Eventually this will get overturned, and the floodgates will open to all involved with the RIAA and many of the record companies. What do you think their defense will be to the courts???
In todays world, ethics is taboo and almost forbidden given what some kids of the 80's learned in some games and some educational environments. I worked with a group of them a few years back at a short term project, and they thought nothing at all about rifling through someones files on their computer looking at files and all, searching for pictures and music files, in some instances, even personal correspondence documents such as saved emails and the like. One tech actually hooked up a portable drive and copied the customers entire catalog of MP3 files off of their computer without permission! They would also actually laugh and joke about some customer having to go in for surgery on their foot or something. Pretty disgusting to watch and overhear. Unfortunately the direct manager on the project at the time was an active participant!
I however was old-school, and we did have ethics and morals. This is not to say that many of the kids in the 80s educational circles didn't learn moral values and ethical behavior, but unfortunately a lot of them are deceptively evil. You have no way of knowing who is, and who isn't until a breach is actually discovered AND you can actually pin it on a specific individual or group of individuals. These people make it difficult for the rest of us to secure work and keep it because of the mis-trust that is out there.
What would be nice to have is a board somewhere with names and something identifiable of those involved in breaches of customer data and ethics violations that damage the customer. Many people don't understand the point that the customer is how you make your living. Many of these kids feel that if you get dumped here at this job, you just go across the street and work there for a while.
Sad but true.
Ever notice that on TV especially, when the show stops and a commercial break happens, the volume is almost deafening! They do this deliberately and I've gotten to the point of just not watching ANYTHING on commercial TV anymore. That tactic has lost a viewer and potential customer of some of these businesses that advertised on TV. Sorry; you do stupid stuff like that to people, what did you think would happen? We'd all be banging on your door to buy your product and hope you'd turn the damned volume down??? I don't think so.
That is a big big problem in this country right now. We are congregating around a huge population of "Sheep" and various "sheep herders". These are the nincompoops that go out and buy the dribble that is produced by said RIAA. Of course these are the very same sheep that then the said RIAA goes after to make them an "example" for the rest of the sheep.
This whole thing sucks and stinks to high heaven. At some point I hope the RIAA just goes off and dies a very very painful and expensive death and ultimately goes away. They're helping to perpetuate the sheep in this nation and lack of brain matter therein.
If this is indeed happening, then the public at large should be well informed about what is going on with the music purchases they are making and I suspect that most of the buying public even the computer illiterate folks would discontinue buying CD's or find a way to obtain the music through other channels.
Further eroding of the CD medium that we all originally liked, and still do; that if it not for the rampant pimping and crapware these idiots decided to load on there with our purchased tracks, things would be more like it was in the 80's. They can't do that with Vinyl, so why isn't someone proposing bringing back the analog record??? I made copies from it cleanly all the time and still can. I bet there are hosts of them out there ready to do that.
Luke;
Luke;...
Turn off the TV...! Turn off the TV!
There is life out there other than NBC.
Turn off the TV!
This is just a predicate to Microsoft lining up all the ducks and get ready to induce breakage of all prior versions of Windows O/S. The setup here is to surreptitiously force you into upgrading into Vista. They don't want those updates coming from multiple locations and by locking it down to only servers they own, they control the entire deck of cards.
/black helicopter
Just a hunch.
This was expected. Many other companies will be attempting to do this as well. The idea is that if you go into arbitration, the awards are minimal if ever, and there are no consequential awards, etc. It is; from a business sense, the most profitable way to handle customer complaints.
You are also more likely to loose in arbitration than you are with going to small claims courts. They are trying to lock you into arbitration however I wonder how long it will be before someone comes back on Comcast and says that legally you can't do that.
If it were held up to be true, then it also could be legally tested and resulted in you not being allowed to remove any and all spyware or malware, no matter who put it there.
:-)
Then the next logical step is a sanctioned operating system where the Government decides what you can have and how you will use it.
See;... I told you it was flame bait!
Sorry Bozo-brains!
I do most of my shopping online and make a huge amount of pre-shop searching on many of the goods I purchase. None of them through "click-thru" ads placed on servers. You people as assuming an awful lot about the buying public out there, and therefore it begs this;... "When you assume, you make an ass out of you and me". I'm sorry, I'm not an ass so that leaves you... out in the cold. I will continue to use this filter called "Adblock" because I get tired of half a dozen pop-under windows laying in wait for me to have to force close some of them. Then theres the ones that pop up over an entire web site page. What happens next is that if that happens, and I can't close the ad, I close the browser window and go somewhere else. That means; "You Loose"! Why don't you try talking to your advertisers about NOT making garbage that is so "in-your-face" and let the visitor visit instead of being invaded when they come to the door.
Any site that winds up having so many ads on their site to pay for it, likely is offering almost nothing in content and therefore I have no need to go there. Simple philosophy.
Lastly;
Every one I know of or speak to, (and I'm in a position of substantial daily influence to many many people) I am able to convince them to switch off to Firefox because of Internet Exploder's well known ease of hack and breakage. Even Mac users are switching man! Go ahead and cut off Firefox users. Whatever man.
If you wish to filter visitors by browser type, knock yourself out. It's your traffic loss that will be an issue not any issue for the rest of us. We just go elsewhere.
Then the simple solution is to blacklist any site that utilized that methodology on it's pages. That would be taken akin to hacking on a commercial level and even the hosting ISP's would be called to task to shut down the offending servers connections.
Nobody but nobody would stand for this on a commercial level. And once one was discovered, it would not be long before it would get taken down. So; even if a site had a "strange payload" on the page somewhere, the infection numbers would potentially be small.
Unfortunately we can't stop some of these sites from posting this kind of garbage but I don't really see it happening on a commercial level. If CNN ever did this or FoxNews plastered this on someones computer when they come to visit, it would be their last visit to that site or any site with even a similar sounding name. Period.
First off, I sure hope they got legal warrants to do that because if they start doing that to an average citizen in the US, it's a breach of constitutional protections afforded to all Americans.
I can see this if they are going after "producers"; ie people who are marketing the chips, and such especially if it's intent it to circumvent copyright protections.
But that is a big issue. Some of these manufacturers want these software mediums protected such that if it becomes non usable then you have to send it in and get it replaced. This too is an ok platform until the manufacturer begins to determine how long they will do that, and at what cost. Then what happens to a product after it's lifespan has ceased? No more replacements or updates???
"Sir; your product was discontinued last year and we have not yet seen your software disk returned to us. Send your disks back in to us now or face the penalty of the DCMA!"
Just a thought.
Sorry;
There are dozens of them here in the Twin Cities area. The local police department even has at least a couple that I'm aware of. They are also seen running around some of the area lakes. They're out there man...!
This whole thing has been visited time and time again and there is plenty of evidence, anecdotal and otherwise out there that this will be killed off before it even has a chance to start. They will simply make laws in Congress to forbid ownership of these here in this country and continue the perpetuation of oil consumption and its growth. There is too much money vested and large return on investment in anything using oil and gasoline. Anyone who thinks this is phony need simply look back at our own history of electric vehicles. There must be truth to the rumors of big oil stopping this because this is where all the money is and always has been, and they can pretty much buy and sell Congress and hence laws. Remember that all they must declare is that they are not street-legal!
Segway made it because it's not a car and cannot be considered as serious and necessary transportation.
This whole issue of electric cars vs. Dell computer, is pointless since it's apples and oranges. They're two different animals.