Not quite. This only works for chronic diseases or conditions, where you give the people afflicted time to move their wealth and power into fixing their problem. SARS is a transient condition - a supercold if you will. Either you get it and die, or you get it and get better. Within a few weeks, you'll know either way - not enough time to bring personal resources to bear to find an actual cure, as opposed to boosting your personal immune system so you can fight the bug off by yourself. Once you're a survivor, you should have immunity, so that removes the immediate threat of re-infection, which then moves SARS to the bottom of your list of global concerns...
While much of the public fears of SARS is definitely overplayed in the short term, in the long term there is a justifiable fear of the risks posed by a fast-spreading, lethal, and poorly understood pathogen. Especially one that coincides with the cold and flu season (thus masking the symptoms of a more severe disease), and may share similar traits in terms of easy transmission via airborne droplets. Remember, highly infectious pathogens are much more dangerous to the world population than they were prior to the jet age (think Ebola...)
magnetic tape, depending on what you use, can last for a decade or more when stored properly.
It can, but I wouldn't bet my job on it. Neither would I bet my job on CDR or DVDR, since the manufacturers continually change the formulation of the dye recording layer, which may eventually cause problems with the drives you're currently using to write (ie, writing with an 8x drive to media now designed for 48x.) The best bet is not to keep your eggs in one basket - I routinely archive data to CD-R from 3 different manufacturers, and store them in 3 different locations. I also run tape on a regular basis and store copies onsite and offsite. I'm also setting up a big-bad-raid to sit on the network and serve as the nearline repository for all local backups, as well as all the archived CD's I've got stored for the last 7 years.
And, this is just for my network at home.:) Gotta beef up the raid now that I have a ReplayTV...
Just a clarification, most progressive frame cameras will allow variable speeds (ie, 60fps, 30fps, 15fps, or in the case of PAL cameras, 50fps, 25fps, 12fps).
Re:Interesting idea, but will it work?
on
Foiling Cinema Pirates
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I would think that adding some sort of latency in a video camera to emulate that of the human eye would render such protection schemes useless.
That would be true only if the protection scheme relied solely on varying the projection flicker. My impression from the blurb was that Sarnhoff was going to target strengths of video cameras (greater light range sensitivity) and turn that into a liability. For example, many CCDs can see infrared wavelengths (train a consumer video camera at a IR remote and you can see the diode flashing.) If you wanted to screw with the recording, just overlay the projection with a high-wattage IR pulse, preferably in a shifting moire pattern to really mess up the viewer.
However, if you're dedicated enough, all of these protection schemes can be nullified - with a progressive frame camera, shifting refresh rates can be ignored, with the appropriate filters extraneous IR/UV interference can be screened out. And, of course, none of these protection schemes can defend against a projectioninst collaborating with a pirate to telecine a print directly to video, bypassing the need to skulk in dark corners with a handycam...
It's about publicity and prestige. Of course, $10M doesn't hurt as a bonus after sinking in so much of your own money in design, construction and infrastructure. The larger intent is to spur a lot of private risk taking that would never be considered by a monolitic private or government-supported effort. Even if you don't end up winning the $10M, you may be far enough along in your own effort to field a worthwhile competitor once a market is established and funded, presumably by investors who are willing to put up money once working tech is demonstrated.
True, there's a retro-future feeling that combines the organic styling of the present with the rocket designs of the late 50's and 60's. Ironic that a basic design first proposed by private enterprise for the government (a manned booster/spaceplane competitor/forerunner of the US shuttle system), needed to wait for half a century before it could be built - not by government, but by private enterprise.
Tom Swift would no doubt be proud of the resumption of US (and other world) efforts to open up space to everyman.
I don't know if it is because of variability in the capacitors, age, or unstrength batteries, but in my Pilot 5000 (yes, an original USR Pilot 5000, upgraded with the 2mb IR card), I often lose my main memory if I swap batteries at the 2.3v-2.4v level.
So, while some palms may successfully hold their charge while you swap batteries, don't count on it. Always remember to hotsync your unit before changing batteries...
Forget the DDOS on the spammers. Target the routers that allow them to peer instead. Find those IPs, add them to a global blocking table (a voluntary one, of course), and just drop their packets like mad.
It's less resource intensive than trying to ping them to death, and it's more satisfying to let them scream when nobody can hear them...
Re:Hold those who host spammers responsible
on
AOL Sues Spammers
·
· Score: 1
The whole point of collateral damage is to cripple an ISP so severely that they have no choice but to address the problem. When you start losing new and existing customers because your netblocks have become useless, it becomes easier to do the math that results in kicking spammers off of your feed.
Of course, I'd rather that the black hats just go under - taking the spammer's pre-paid deposits with them.:)
Bertelsmann, one of the biggest publishers in the world, and owner of BMG (Bertelsmann Music Group) is a German corporation, and stands to benefit greatly from these "proactive taxes" (ie, corporate tithes). Don't neglect to give credit where credit is due.
Well, if someone managed to drop one of these boxes off at the local police station, I think leechers would be inclined to just access the data via wireless, rather than try and make off with the box. Of course, some people rented cherrypickers and went around pulling Metricom boxes off of power poles after they went under, so I wouldn't underestimate anyone...
I'm sure some enterprising blackhat will try creating a "reverse honeypot" by putting one of these boxes right up to some big corporation, and configuring it to look like additional disk space...
Antibiotics are sometimes needed to treat secondary infections caused by a weakened immune system (like one trying to fight off or recover from a viral infection.) If you're already fighting off a viral pneumonia, and in your weakened state you manage to catch a bacterial pneumonia that's resistant to drugs, your chances of survival drop quite a bit...
All that we'll see happen is a separate release of non-cripped discs for radio airplay stamped 'NOT FOR RESALE, PROMO USE ONLY' or whatever, like they do with singles.
You mean, the ones I can buy at the local used CD store that say "NOT FOR RESALE, PROMO USE ONLY" with the hole drilled through the case? Seriously, what the hell do you think all those reviewers and stations do with the promo copies they get? They give em away, and eventually they get out into the open market. It'd be the same situation where Newline sent out DVD's of The Two Towers prior to the DVD release, and the black market used those as the master for copies...
Over in the US, they stick an anal probe in you for everything you do - school, banking, job, driving, housing, that is except for voter registration.
That's correct. The anal probe that normally would accompany voter registration is held in reserve for when you, as a registered voter, are called in for jury duty. If you live in a state with one-day jury service, you can get out of jury duty faster if you aren't picked (one day and you're out), but now they won't take any excuses for not showing up for jury duty, since they need a fresh crop of jurors every single day.
So, when the lawyers interrogate you, and all your answers are recorded by the court reporter, think about why you decided to register to vote. Voting don't come for free. And before you decide to give false information, keep in mind that carries a hefty fine and civil penalty (or at least in California it does.)
The truely sucky part is if you get selected for an actual jury trial, and you don't get paid for jury service by your employer (or if you're self-employed.) $15 a day is what you get here in California, plus mileage. No meal voucher. On a civil trial that should have been sent to a judge instead of wasting jurors. Blah.:P
On average, each user has years of experience, probably has taken courses in using Photoshop's advanced features, and may have a considerable investment in plug-ins on which they rely to do their job. They would sooner switch personal computers before they would switch image processing software.
If this were really true, then Adobe wouldn't screw users over by releasing "upgrades" that completely f*ck up everything you know about the program, from short cuts to menu commands, to tool behavior. Face it, the reason that professionals have to keep taking courses on Photoshop is because they keep changing Photoshop - and not necessarily for the better.
Anyways, you could allow photoshop plugins if you wrote the appropriate framework into Gimp - programs such as After Effects and Premiere can use Photoshop plugins. In fact, such a plugin has been discussed on the codeweavers site...
Face it, Adobe makes money by selling software (like Microsoft.) If the current tool does the job, nobody's gonna upgrade, hence these "improvements". If GIMP does the same job without having to keep changing and throwing users off stride, and without having to keep charging upgrade fees, AND supports Photoshop-style tools, behaviors, and plugins... well hell, why use Photoshop?
I don't recommend beginning a game of EV Nova unless you have a whole weekend ahead of you. It's just too easy to lose track of time upgrading/customizing your ship(s), skirmishing, making big profits on trading routes, and trying to figure out what to do next to get the story (or stories, depending on how many threads your pilot has gotten on) to the next level.
You keep thinking to yourself... I'll just finish this set of hyperjumps and dock, then I'll save and quit. Oh, wow a new ship, well, let me just try it out. Jeez, a new weapon, and I only need a few million credits more to get it. If only I could capture a derelict Leviathan to carry all those biological weapons from Codec to that other star system...
Next thing you know, it's 18 hours later, you haven't eaten or slept, and you're still just a little bit away from putting it down. Damn thing is insidious... and worth the $30 I paid for it. The only thing missing is a network/team play mode. Now that would be cool - inter-system real-time warfare. 8)
I'd argue the whole temporal war subplot is a big clue that the universe that Archer and co. inhabit is not the same universe that begets classic Star Trek, TNG, DS9, and Voyager.
If they bring the Borg into it, that'll be the final straw - we're talking about a parallel timeline... maybe one spawned after the crew of the Enterprise E (and their Borg hitchikers) interfere with Cochrane and first contact. Remember, the Queen was trying to contact the Borg of that era - who's to say she didn't succeed?
Anyways, that's how I treat Enterprise - as a non-canonical spinoff. Makes it much easier to accept all these anachronisms they keep introducing.
Loral has some birds in the area (essentially Europe), but at $.33 a share, I don't think you want to buy into it. Looks like few people are making money in satellites these days, and I doubt that a short-term spike in usage is going to change that.
Apple's TTS technology is pretty old... and it shows. I've been waiting for them to release voice upgrades since the original PowerPC macs came out, but after they axed their (basic) research section, the likelyhood of that happening decreased dramatically. The IBM approach is also pretty old, but the voice quality is slightly better, probably because there are more voice samples/higher quality.
No matter how good these phoneme-based techniques are, they're limited to the original timbre of the recorded speaker - you cannot synthesize a brand new voice (with on the fly inflections that were never recorded, etc.) with that TTS method. There has been research into modeled speech synthesis, where a mathematical model of lungs, windpipe, vocal cords, and mouth/tongue/lips, are manipulated in order to generate speech. Given the extreme amount of computing power today, you'd expect more people to use that type of TTS, since it's inherently more flexible. However, the biggest problem so far is nobody really has a good model for how all the various fleshy parts within the human speech apparatus interact together. Any open source people want to tackle this problem and start implementing some of these modeled synthesis speech algorithms?
I haven't read the rules, but are hunter-killer pairs allowed? In other words, deploy your truck, but have a set of smaller (disposable) scout vehicles move ahead and transmit telemetry back to the main vehicle.
Load your truck with about 20 scouts, and have them deployed on a half hour basis in sets of 3 about 10-20 miles ahead in order to map terrain and establish an optimal path for straight line, maximum speed movement. Scouts that fail to make it back before the truck guns it are considered casualties... And mind you, you don't need to use ground scouts - aerial scouts (helo with refuling boom) with ground mapping radar/camera would work as well.
After looking at the article a bit, it's very interesting to note that the main reason the car was being discontinued was not sales nor popularity issues, but rather CHARGING issues! Apparently CARB (California's nazi regime of pollution control) mandated a new charger system that basically requires a redesign of the EV1 in order to be compatible. Hopefully with these new standards now set, we'll see electric cars back on the market soo.
Some points:
#1. The EV-1 program has been dead for several years. To my knowledge, no new units have been leased (they lease, never sell) to consumers, and they've been steadily retiring their entire EV-1 fleet as they come off lease (scrapping them, as it were.) At the present time, the only major auto manufacturer to EVER sell EVs to the general public is Toyota (the RAV4EV, at over $40k, only in California.)
#2. The inductive MagnaCharger design was very expensive, proprietary, inefficient, and was forced upon the EV industry by GM at the time (about 5-6 years ago) as a defacto method of charging. Unfortunately, GM was really the only one who used it - there were several variants, including a mini-magnacharger used by Honda (or was it Ford?), but all this did was require that the free public charging spaces had to accomodate two different charging standards, so two spaces that could have two cars with two chargers could only support one of each type.
Even worse, inductive charging as a standard was viewed as an attempt at using regulations to destroy the hobbyist EV market, which used standard 3-pronged conductive chargers (plug into your wall type). By cornering and enforcing their standard, GM attempted to make their EV model the only legal one. Yes, it was possible for hobbyists to purchase magnacharger equipment (in fact, there were converters you could buy that would convert a magnacharger paddle into a 3-prong conductive for your conventional charger), all it did was add cost.
Although GM had practical saftey reasons for advocating inductive charging, the fact that they had patents on everything relating to the magnacharger design probably factored into the decision.
So, in conclusion, GM will probably NOT bring back the EV-1, except as a demonstration unit. They're scrapping every EV-1 they can get their hands on, probably to claim the depreciation for their taxes. Note, that there's nothing to prevent an EV-1 driver from carrying around an adapter unit to convert from a CARB-conductive to a Magnacharger (as leasees of the EV-1 had in their garages, in a bigger form), but I doubt that GM will ever produce one now...
Actually, we don't even need to burn the methane - we can use it as feedstock for production of methanol, or we can thermally decompose it into CO2 and H2 in order to extract the hydrogen.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite. This only works for chronic diseases or conditions, where you give the people afflicted time to move their wealth and power into fixing their problem. SARS is a transient condition - a supercold if you will. Either you get it and die, or you get it and get better. Within a few weeks, you'll know either way - not enough time to bring personal resources to bear to find an actual cure, as opposed to boosting your personal immune system so you can fight the bug off by yourself. Once you're a survivor, you should have immunity, so that removes the immediate threat of re-infection, which then moves SARS to the bottom of your list of global concerns...
While much of the public fears of SARS is definitely overplayed in the short term, in the long term there is a justifiable fear of the risks posed by a fast-spreading, lethal, and poorly understood pathogen. Especially one that coincides with the cold and flu season (thus masking the symptoms of a more severe disease), and may share similar traits in terms of easy transmission via airborne droplets. Remember, highly infectious pathogens are much more dangerous to the world population than they were prior to the jet age (think Ebola...)
magnetic tape, depending on what you use, can last for a decade or more when stored properly.
:) Gotta beef up the raid now that I have a ReplayTV...
It can, but I wouldn't bet my job on it. Neither would I bet my job on CDR or DVDR, since the manufacturers continually change the formulation of the dye recording layer, which may eventually cause problems with the drives you're currently using to write (ie, writing with an 8x drive to media now designed for 48x.) The best bet is not to keep your eggs in one basket - I routinely archive data to CD-R from 3 different manufacturers, and store them in 3 different locations. I also run tape on a regular basis and store copies onsite and offsite. I'm also setting up a big-bad-raid to sit on the network and serve as the nearline repository for all local backups, as well as all the archived CD's I've got stored for the last 7 years.
And, this is just for my network at home.
Just a clarification, most progressive frame cameras will allow variable speeds (ie, 60fps, 30fps, 15fps, or in the case of PAL cameras, 50fps, 25fps, 12fps).
I would think that adding some sort of latency in a video camera to emulate that of the human eye would render such protection schemes useless.
That would be true only if the protection scheme relied solely on varying the projection flicker. My impression from the blurb was that Sarnhoff was going to target strengths of video cameras (greater light range sensitivity) and turn that into a liability. For example, many CCDs can see infrared wavelengths (train a consumer video camera at a IR remote and you can see the diode flashing.) If you wanted to screw with the recording, just overlay the projection with a high-wattage IR pulse, preferably in a shifting moire pattern to really mess up the viewer.
However, if you're dedicated enough, all of these protection schemes can be nullified - with a progressive frame camera, shifting refresh rates can be ignored, with the appropriate filters extraneous IR/UV interference can be screened out. And, of course, none of these protection schemes can defend against a projectioninst collaborating with a pirate to telecine a print directly to video, bypassing the need to skulk in dark corners with a handycam...
It's about publicity and prestige. Of course, $10M doesn't hurt as a bonus after sinking in so much of your own money in design, construction and infrastructure. The larger intent is to spur a lot of private risk taking that would never be considered by a monolitic private or government-supported effort. Even if you don't end up winning the $10M, you may be far enough along in your own effort to field a worthwhile competitor once a market is established and funded, presumably by investors who are willing to put up money once working tech is demonstrated.
True, there's a retro-future feeling that combines the organic styling of the present with the rocket designs of the late 50's and 60's. Ironic that a basic design first proposed by private enterprise for the government (a manned booster/spaceplane competitor/forerunner of the US shuttle system), needed to wait for half a century before it could be built - not by government, but by private enterprise.
Tom Swift would no doubt be proud of the resumption of US (and other world) efforts to open up space to everyman.
I don't know if it is because of variability in the capacitors, age, or unstrength batteries, but in my Pilot 5000 (yes, an original USR Pilot 5000, upgraded with the 2mb IR card), I often lose my main memory if I swap batteries at the 2.3v-2.4v level.
So, while some palms may successfully hold their charge while you swap batteries, don't count on it. Always remember to hotsync your unit before changing batteries...
Forget the DDOS on the spammers. Target the routers that allow them to peer instead. Find those IPs, add them to a global blocking table (a voluntary one, of course), and just drop their packets like mad.
It's less resource intensive than trying to ping them to death, and it's more satisfying to let them scream when nobody can hear them...
The whole point of collateral damage is to cripple an ISP so severely that they have no choice but to address the problem. When you start losing new and existing customers because your netblocks have become useless, it becomes easier to do the math that results in kicking spammers off of your feed.
:)
Of course, I'd rather that the black hats just go under - taking the spammer's pre-paid deposits with them.
Bertelsmann, one of the biggest publishers in the world, and owner of BMG (Bertelsmann Music Group) is a German corporation, and stands to benefit greatly from these "proactive taxes" (ie, corporate tithes). Don't neglect to give credit where credit is due.
Well, if someone managed to drop one of these boxes off at the local police station, I think leechers would be inclined to just access the data via wireless, rather than try and make off with the box. Of course, some people rented cherrypickers and went around pulling Metricom boxes off of power poles after they went under, so I wouldn't underestimate anyone...
I'm sure some enterprising blackhat will try creating a "reverse honeypot" by putting one of these boxes right up to some big corporation, and configuring it to look like additional disk space...
Antibiotics are sometimes needed to treat secondary infections caused by a weakened immune system (like one trying to fight off or recover from a viral infection.) If you're already fighting off a viral pneumonia, and in your weakened state you manage to catch a bacterial pneumonia that's resistant to drugs, your chances of survival drop quite a bit...
All that we'll see happen is a separate release of non-cripped discs for radio airplay stamped 'NOT FOR RESALE, PROMO USE ONLY' or whatever, like they do with singles.
You mean, the ones I can buy at the local used CD store that say "NOT FOR RESALE, PROMO USE ONLY" with the hole drilled through the case? Seriously, what the hell do you think all those reviewers and stations do with the promo copies they get? They give em away, and eventually they get out into the open market. It'd be the same situation where Newline sent out DVD's of The Two Towers prior to the DVD release, and the black market used those as the master for copies...
Better question: How the hell do I get some of that DoD research grant money?
Over in the US, they stick an anal probe in you for everything you do - school, banking, job, driving, housing, that is except for voter registration.
:P
That's correct. The anal probe that normally would accompany voter registration is held in reserve for when you, as a registered voter, are called in for jury duty. If you live in a state with one-day jury service, you can get out of jury duty faster if you aren't picked (one day and you're out), but now they won't take any excuses for not showing up for jury duty, since they need a fresh crop of jurors every single day.
So, when the lawyers interrogate you, and all your answers are recorded by the court reporter, think about why you decided to register to vote. Voting don't come for free. And before you decide to give false information, keep in mind that carries a hefty fine and civil penalty (or at least in California it does.)
The truely sucky part is if you get selected for an actual jury trial, and you don't get paid for jury service by your employer (or if you're self-employed.) $15 a day is what you get here in California, plus mileage. No meal voucher. On a civil trial that should have been sent to a judge instead of wasting jurors. Blah.
On average, each user has years of experience, probably has taken courses in using Photoshop's advanced features, and may have a considerable investment in plug-ins on which they rely to do their job. They would sooner switch personal computers before they would switch image processing software.
If this were really true, then Adobe wouldn't screw users over by releasing "upgrades" that completely f*ck up everything you know about the program, from short cuts to menu commands, to tool behavior. Face it, the reason that professionals have to keep taking courses on Photoshop is because they keep changing Photoshop - and not necessarily for the better.
Anyways, you could allow photoshop plugins if you wrote the appropriate framework into Gimp - programs such as After Effects and Premiere can use Photoshop plugins. In fact, such a plugin has been discussed on the codeweavers site...
Face it, Adobe makes money by selling software (like Microsoft.) If the current tool does the job, nobody's gonna upgrade, hence these "improvements". If GIMP does the same job without having to keep changing and throwing users off stride, and without having to keep charging upgrade fees, AND supports Photoshop-style tools, behaviors, and plugins... well hell, why use Photoshop?
I don't recommend beginning a game of EV Nova unless you have a whole weekend ahead of you. It's just too easy to lose track of time upgrading/customizing your ship(s), skirmishing, making big profits on trading routes, and trying to figure out what to do next to get the story (or stories, depending on how many threads your pilot has gotten on) to the next level.
You keep thinking to yourself... I'll just finish this set of hyperjumps and dock, then I'll save and quit. Oh, wow a new ship, well, let me just try it out. Jeez, a new weapon, and I only need a few million credits more to get it. If only I could capture a derelict Leviathan to carry all those biological weapons from Codec to that other star system...
Next thing you know, it's 18 hours later, you haven't eaten or slept, and you're still just a little bit away from putting it down. Damn thing is insidious... and worth the $30 I paid for it. The only thing missing is a network/team play mode. Now that would be cool - inter-system real-time warfare. 8)
I'd argue the whole temporal war subplot is a big clue that the universe that Archer and co. inhabit is not the same universe that begets classic Star Trek, TNG, DS9, and Voyager.
If they bring the Borg into it, that'll be the final straw - we're talking about a parallel timeline... maybe one spawned after the crew of the Enterprise E (and their Borg hitchikers) interfere with Cochrane and first contact. Remember, the Queen was trying to contact the Borg of that era - who's to say she didn't succeed?
Anyways, that's how I treat Enterprise - as a non-canonical spinoff. Makes it much easier to accept all these anachronisms they keep introducing.
Loral has some birds in the area (essentially Europe), but at $.33 a share, I don't think you want to buy into it. Looks like few people are making money in satellites these days, and I doubt that a short-term spike in usage is going to change that.
Apple's TTS technology is pretty old... and it shows. I've been waiting for them to release voice upgrades since the original PowerPC macs came out, but after they axed their (basic) research section, the likelyhood of that happening decreased dramatically. The IBM approach is also pretty old, but the voice quality is slightly better, probably because there are more voice samples/higher quality.
No matter how good these phoneme-based techniques are, they're limited to the original timbre of the recorded speaker - you cannot synthesize a brand new voice (with on the fly inflections that were never recorded, etc.) with that TTS method. There has been research into modeled speech synthesis, where a mathematical model of lungs, windpipe, vocal cords, and mouth/tongue/lips, are manipulated in order to generate speech. Given the extreme amount of computing power today, you'd expect more people to use that type of TTS, since it's inherently more flexible. However, the biggest problem so far is nobody really has a good model for how all the various fleshy parts within the human speech apparatus interact together. Any open source people want to tackle this problem and start implementing some of these modeled synthesis speech algorithms?
No subvehicles will be allowed.
Damn!
I haven't read the rules, but are hunter-killer pairs allowed? In other words, deploy your truck, but have a set of smaller (disposable) scout vehicles move ahead and transmit telemetry back to the main vehicle.
Load your truck with about 20 scouts, and have them deployed on a half hour basis in sets of 3 about 10-20 miles ahead in order to map terrain and establish an optimal path for straight line, maximum speed movement. Scouts that fail to make it back before the truck guns it are considered casualties... And mind you, you don't need to use ground scouts - aerial scouts (helo with refuling boom) with ground mapping radar/camera would work as well.
After looking at the article a bit, it's very interesting to note that the main reason the car was being discontinued was not sales nor popularity issues, but rather CHARGING issues! Apparently CARB (California's nazi regime of pollution control) mandated a new charger system that basically requires a redesign of the EV1 in order to be compatible. Hopefully with these new standards now set, we'll see electric cars back on the market soo.
Some points:
#1. The EV-1 program has been dead for several years. To my knowledge, no new units have been leased (they lease, never sell) to consumers, and they've been steadily retiring their entire EV-1 fleet as they come off lease (scrapping them, as it were.) At the present time, the only major auto manufacturer to EVER sell EVs to the general public is Toyota (the RAV4EV, at over $40k, only in California.)
#2. The inductive MagnaCharger design was very expensive, proprietary, inefficient, and was forced upon the EV industry by GM at the time (about 5-6 years ago) as a defacto method of charging. Unfortunately, GM was really the only one who used it - there were several variants, including a mini-magnacharger used by Honda (or was it Ford?), but all this did was require that the free public charging spaces had to accomodate two different charging standards, so two spaces that could have two cars with two chargers could only support one of each type.
Even worse, inductive charging as a standard was viewed as an attempt at using regulations to destroy the hobbyist EV market, which used standard 3-pronged conductive chargers (plug into your wall type). By cornering and enforcing their standard, GM attempted to make their EV model the only legal one. Yes, it was possible for hobbyists to purchase magnacharger equipment (in fact, there were converters you could buy that would convert a magnacharger paddle into a 3-prong conductive for your conventional charger), all it did was add cost.
Although GM had practical saftey reasons for advocating inductive charging, the fact that they had patents on everything relating to the magnacharger design probably factored into the decision.
So, in conclusion, GM will probably NOT bring back the EV-1, except as a demonstration unit. They're scrapping every EV-1 they can get their hands on, probably to claim the depreciation for their taxes. Note, that there's nothing to prevent an EV-1 driver from carrying around an adapter unit to convert from a CARB-conductive to a Magnacharger (as leasees of the EV-1 had in their garages, in a bigger form), but I doubt that GM will ever produce one now...
Actually, we don't even need to burn the methane - we can use it as feedstock for production of methanol, or we can thermally decompose it into CO2 and H2 in order to extract the hydrogen.