"consumers abandon shopping carts with an ease that frustrates and often confuses online retailers"
Consumers abandon shopping carts? What about when I spend an hour shopping, have to go away for a day or so, and when I come back, my shopping cart has been deleted on the server-side? Now THAT's frustrating!
If all the Enterprise episodes were like the recent "In a Mirror Darkly" arc I think more people would be watching...
No kidding. At least there was something to watch - imperialistic backstabbing crew, desperate rebels... giving them a Constitution-class starship to play with was a nice touch. Just goes to show you (as in the Tholians) shouldn't open up rifts to other universes without making damn sure your ass is covered.
Except we never really get to vote on spending. We vote representatives into office who immediately start ignoring us in favor of special interests (pick one - environmental lobby, business lobby, pro-welfare, anti-welfare, pro-military, pro-peace, interventionalists (both liberal and conservative), isolationists, etc.
Can you imagine how little money we'd actually have to tax if they had to submit an itemized checklist to us every year as to what we actually would be willing to pay for? Instead, they treat us as piggy banks, to be shaken down on a monthly and yearly basis (quarterly if you run a business) for whatever pork barrel largesse needs to be funded.
I'd much rather donate and choose what to fund, than have somone forcibly* take the money and decide for me.
*Yes, taxes are voluntary. Up until the point where they start garnishing your wages and freezing your accounts.
I have "rabbit ears". Actually, it's a Radio Shack mast antenna from the early 1990's with a Blonder Tongue CATV distribution amp to boost the off-air signal to acceptable levels. I'm able to get away with this because I live in a metropolitan area (7 VHF stations, 8 English-language non-religious UHF stations.) The money I save on a monthly cable subscription goes to paying for Netflix and to help defray DSL costs. Having a couple of ReplayTVs helps - if there's nothing on, I can always watch a rerun of the Simpsons, or some PBS programming. Not that I have that much time to watch TV anymore (I think I catch maybe 4-5 hours a week, not counting Netflix time.)
With that said, if the changeover actually occurs, there are multiple options - from converter boxes, to cable/satellite, to IPTV, which I'm sure will be available by then (the phone companies would be fools not to take advantage of the changeover to pick up new customers for Video over IP.) I might also just stop watching off the air TV entirely, given how little there is to watch, even now.
I find it interesting that the government has chosen to impose criminal penalties for what is essentially a civil violation. Imagine, you hire Joe, who works in your duplication department, putting together promos and clips. If you have half a brain, you've signed Joe to an employment contract, which treats unreleased material as trade secret, with some pretty nasty financial penalties for breach of contract.
Three months before you release "Super Kong, the Movie", your legal department tracks down and reports that someone has illegally put up for download, a complete copy of the movie. It turns out to be Joe.
Under the terms of the contract, you can take Joe to court, and turn him into a pauper (he's pretty poor already, but you just want to make an example of him.) You get a judgment, but Joe doesn't go to jail. Under the new take on things, you CAN send Joe to jail, by handing your case over to the government, and having them handle the prosecution in the name of the People of the United States.
While I'm all for defending property rights (within reason - Copyright is a government-backed monopoly that is supposed to expire after a fixed time so that it can enter the public domain and benefit THE PUBLIC, so I'm not about to defend the continuing abuse of the intent behind US Copyright law), spending taxpayer money to impose criminal penalties in a dispute between you, the copyright owner, and Joe, the infringer, helps the People of the United States, how?
If the lawmakers feel absolutely compelled to pass laws, I'd much rather they pass a law that would impose criminal penalties on identity theft, as that would be more in line with benefiting the everyone.
I use compact fluorescent light bulb replacements extensively, and while I like the energy savings, I've found that you really need to pick your vendors carefully. For example, I've had good service life from discount compact fluorescents bought off of eBay (with no claims to duration of service life), and lousy service life from the expensive retail compact fluorescents from the local Home Depot (which claimed 7 years of operation - total bullshit.)
An nice side effect of replacing most of your incandescents is that you don't have to buy incandescent replacement bulbs for the remaining lights that use them, because you now have a surplus of bulbs that were pulled from service...
Actually, some component DVD players use a standard IDE drive. Before you toss your player, crack it open and check to see if the drive has an IDE connector on it. If it does, you might be able to sub in a replacement drive.
Depends on what kind of live action content it is. A show with talking heads (ie, talk show, news show, comedy show) can be done for fairly cheap depending on your quality level.
Doing something like a period piece or science fiction drives your costs up because then you need costuming, sets, props, effects (either cg space ships, or painting out modern buildings in a shot of an old west town), etc.
Even that isn't insurmountable given heavy use of green/bluescreen and reusable props.
The key thing with live action is that you can do it fast. If you know how to set your shots up, and you have a good crew, you can do a good program for cheap. However, if you want to make something that looks good for ultra cheap, rendered allows you to create a good product without having to invest in the facilities and equipment shooting live action would require.
Of course, nowadays, more and more people have equipment for live action - DV cameras for shooting, and iMacs for editing. Throw in some basic supplies from the nearest Staples (colored paper for bounce cards, foam-core panels for bounce boards, aluminum foil for reflectors), clamp-on reflector lights from the Home Depot (about $7.99 a piece), some light stands (about $15 per set) and a couple of aluminum stepladders to hang your lamps and boards off of, and a good mic, and you can shoot some pretty decent stuff, assuming you know what you're doing. And if you don't, well, there's no teacher like hands-on experience!
Waiting? That's where packaging a Tivo-like HD/AI comes in. The AI allows you to pre-grab shows, and based on what you've looked for in the past, pre-loads future shows as they come up. The instant-demand mindset is shortsighted, and ignores things like Netflix (you set up a queue, and wait anywhere from 24 to 48 hrs for your DVD), Moviebeam (which uses unused bandwidth in a regular TV transmission signal to stream digital bits to a pay-per-view PVR), and of course, regular TV, where you wait anywhere from a day, to a week for the next episode of your favorite show.
I had to make these same arguments to some business students who I pitched a similar idea to about a year ago - only this involved using p2p wireless as the underlying transmission medium (my ultimate goal was building a mesh wireless network, and the trojan to doing it was PVR-based TV.) I'm happy that someone has come up with working mechanics, since it absolves me from having to do it, and leaves me to just produce content instead.:)
Overwriting only works if the drive is still capable of writing. I've dealt with drives so hosed after we got the data off, that we could barely wipe the partition map. There was still a lot of data left behind on the platter that we could no longer touch because the writing heads/drive electronics were in such bad shape, the drive refused to either be recognized, or to accept commands.
In these cases, you have to decide: is it more important that you RMA the drive (in which case, you really can't do any truely destructive to the drive physically - I think degaussing falls under that, as it wipes out the underlying sector info), or do you smash up the drive and forego the drive replacement?
BTW, if it turns out that degaussing is an accepted method of clearing the drive prior to RMA, please let me know...
I'd prefer to decide for myself, thank you, and this legislation appears to be doing just that.
I'm not so sure. Consider that the studios would like nothing more than to shove their brand of DRM down your throats. Apple, so far, has played a strange game, simultaneously protecting consumers (by keeping the record labels from arbitrarialy jacking up rates, as they've tried to do in the recent past) while preserving a semblance of DRM to placate the labels.
There's only one problem - the labels aren't making enough money. Thus, you have this legislation, which attempts to open up Apple's private playground, which they have neatly tended and grown, to every bozo with a contract to sell music. Why is this a problem?
Well, currently, if you really want to sell music to play on the iPod, and you aren't Apple, you can sell non DRMed tracks. Apple likes this because they don't have to worry about DRM compatibility issues. They can just focus on selling iPods and music from the iTunes music store. The instant you start adding other DRM sources, you add complexity, and you make it more likely that Apple will get blamed if something breaks. Moreover, the instant you have other people using and relying on this DRM, the more likely that it is that they will attempt to dictate what level of restrictions are available through Fairplay. Can you imagine Napster arguing that you should only be allowed to burn a track X number of times? (at the behest of the record labels, of course)
Braga is saying it's series finale. Furthermore, he states that "nobody is surprised by this." Of course, this explains why he and Brannon bailed this season, and turned the reins over to Manny Coto, who has actually written stories that fit in the canon of the Star Trek universe, without having to rely on time travel for bloody well everything.
I hope the Trek fans manage to salvage Enterprise - they should give Coto at least another season, and some decent advertising dollars, to demonstrate whether or not he and the rest of the remaining Enterprise team can put on a better show than B&B.
The oil industry IS getting out of the oil business. BP(British Petroleum) and Shell are some of the biggest names in the solar business, and I think most, if not all of the major oil companies have got a finger in hydrogen.
The big problem is the auto industry, which has a lot of inertia, and a lot of investment and accumulated know-how tied up in the internal combustion engine. Until they switch, diesel, gasoline, etc. will continue to be in high demand.
You have to keep in mind that GM is a massive congolmeration. The research departments at GM, Ford, Toyota, Honda, and Chrysler, did amazing work with the technology at hand. They would have kept on going, but the suits upstairs told them to close up shop. Thus, nice vehicles like the Ford EV Ranger ended up being parted out, and the EV-1 got smooshed en masse.
Given GM's size and deep pockets, lawyers is a pretty credible reason to smash up the EV-1s. I'm not sure I believe that was the best choice, but I can see some Darwin Award recipient's family hooking up with the likes of Larry H. Parker & Co. to play the lottery game at GM's expense. No suit ever got axed immediately for saying no. These guys are just trying to cover their asses until they can retire with fat bonuses.
On the other hand, spinning it as though the EV-1 was unwanted by the public (the "it wasn't selling well" comment) was just pure evil. Of course it didn't sell well - it was never sold!
So it is possible to have a ZEV, discounting the waste and emissions created during the production of said panels (which can be averaged over a roughly 30 year lifespand for the panels), and the vehicle itself. The bigger problem are the batteries, which will need to be replaced on a 3-5 year schedule (hybrids suffer from this problem as well.)
pushing through legislation mandating that manufacturers sell electric cars.
Actually, it was that 3% of the fleet be Zero Emissions, which effectively required automakers to turn to electric cars, as that was the only technology available at the time that could meet the zero-emissions requirement.
The only manufacturer who actually sold cars to the general public, that I know of, was Toyota. Their RAV4EV cost upwards of 40k, list price, and very few were available, as they were all conversions done under contract by a 3rd party. All the other manufacturers leased their vehicles to commercial and governmental fleets. As part of the negotiations to get the carmakers to put EVs on the roads, the State of California financed a network of EV recharge stations throughout the state. Unfortunately, the car manufacturers couldn't agree on what kind of charging standard there should be - GM advocated using the inductive paddle system (Magnacharge), Honda and Toyota and Ford produced cars using a conductive charging system (someone correct me if I'm getting my facts wrong.)
This is why when you see an electric charging spot in California, there are usually two chargers - one Magnacharge paddle, one conductive charge jack. As a consequence, mucho dinero was spent by taxpayers to establish a charging infrastructure for vehicles which have largely disappeared from the landscape.
From the very beginning auto manufacturers argued that the battery technology just wasn't there yet to make a decent all-electric vehicle.
"It can't be done", or "it's going to cost us a lot of money." I think this has been their running argument for a lot of things - against seatbelts, airbags, lower emissions, etc. Sure, batteries are not going to deliver the same energy density as gasoline. You're not going to be driving a Suburban very far on batteries. However, as a second car, especially an in-town commuter car, electricity is IDEAL. The market for NEVs is fairly decent, and these are nothing more than glorified golf carts. Hobbyists have built very capable electric commuter cars for decades. And Chrysler, Honda, and Toyota, came up with very effective electric cars, which have served for years as part of commercial and governmental fleets. Then of course, you have the EV-1.
Keep in mind, the automakers didn't HAVE to comply with the CARB mandate. Hell, they spent millions of dollars over a number of years lobbying and suing to ease the compliance schedule, and in the case of ZEVs, discard that requirement completely. But California is a big market for them, big enough such that being forced to stop selling other autos was reason enough to subsidize the ultra-low volumes needed to meet the minimum requirements of the ZEV legislation. Even with the subsidies, due to the limited production runs, the EVs ended up costing a bundle, as opposed to their gasoline cousins, whose engines and drivetrains are built in volume and shared across platforms.
Of course, that was the same problem with the electric/gas hybrid, which looked even more impractical to build and sell, because the engineering costs were higher, at least initially. Toyota had the guts to actually build one and sell it to the public (again, because of the same mandated low-emissions schedule that the ZEV legislation was part of), and now they can't keep the damn things in stock.
The analogy here is that if Paramount decided not only it would cancel the sci-fi TV show "Enterprise", but also destroy all the films!
You do know that in the past (and possibly even now), a lot of source material has been destroyed because the company that owned the rights didn't think that the property they owned justified the cost of warehousing and preserving that material. They either let it rot, or they actively shredded it, to keep someone else from profiting from it.
Of course, this mindset is EXACTLY why compulsory copying SHOULD be allowed, and why enforcement of depositing of works with the LOC (Library of Congress), and the cost of maintaining/restoring works once deposited, should be included as part of the cost of getting copyright.
In GM's case, I think part of compacting the cars was to keep people from realizing how close they were to actually being able to release a viable production electric car. The drivetrains and controllers alone were very advanced AC propulsion units that could have fetched thousands of dollars on the open market RIGHT NOW, and as another poster pointed out, the bodies alone could have been sold for a variety of purposes, aside from being just scrap.
GM wanted to make sure that you wouldn't be able to put a zero emission EV-1 side-by-side against one of their 14 MPG fake hybrid SUVs (wow, a whole 2 extra miles of efficiency from an oversized 48vdc starter motor!) Besides, the EV-1 has served its propaganda use. The new vaporware of the day, to ward off complaints about GM's fight against higher fuel standards, is the Hydrogen Car, which like the electric car 10 years ago, is just "5 to 6 years away from being introduced to the general public."
You won't get any argument from me about what assholes GM has been over the EV-1. These are the same guys who went out in front of the public and told everyone that the EV-1 wasn't selling well, in order to justify scrapping the program (and just as they were about to begin replacing the lead-acid batteries with NiMH batteries.) Of course, they didn't actually lie - not one EV-1 was sold during the entire lifespan of the vehicle, because the EV-1 was only LEASED and NEVER SOLD.
Only 50? That's kind of hard to believe, given that there were waiting lists to lease the vehicle when it was available. I think what GM meant to say that only 50 people were capable of paying what GM wanted per vehicle in order to make it worth their while to maintain the parts inventory and service sub-contracts to keep the cars running.
Of course, nobody thinks about the millions of dollars spent in California to equip a electric-car refueling infrastructure (thank you GM, for forcing the ultra-expensive, and ultra-breakage prone magnacharge system on us) that nobody* will be using anymore.
*Other than handful of EV hobbyists with home-built cars that have charging adapters to use public recharge stations. Assuming the recharge station still works.
Actually, if you reinforced the inflatable portion with multiple layers of Kevlar, you could have near-instant defensible fortifications against small arms fire. And, if you compartmentalize, you might even provide some limited survivability against RPGs and other explosive weapons. Of course, doing this would dramatically increase the amount of weight you'd be lugging around.
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"consumers abandon shopping carts with an ease that frustrates and often confuses online retailers"
Consumers abandon shopping carts? What about when I spend an hour shopping, have to go away for a day or so, and when I come back, my shopping cart has been deleted on the server-side? Now THAT's frustrating!
If all the Enterprise episodes were like the recent "In a Mirror Darkly" arc I think more people would be watching ...
No kidding. At least there was something to watch - imperialistic backstabbing crew, desperate rebels... giving them a Constitution-class starship to play with was a nice touch. Just goes to show you (as in the Tholians) shouldn't open up rifts to other universes without making damn sure your ass is covered.
Sounds like the US government.
Except we never really get to vote on spending. We vote representatives into office who immediately start ignoring us in favor of special interests (pick one - environmental lobby, business lobby, pro-welfare, anti-welfare, pro-military, pro-peace, interventionalists (both liberal and conservative), isolationists, etc.
Can you imagine how little money we'd actually have to tax if they had to submit an itemized checklist to us every year as to what we actually would be willing to pay for? Instead, they treat us as piggy banks, to be shaken down on a monthly and yearly basis (quarterly if you run a business) for whatever pork barrel largesse needs to be funded.
I'd much rather donate and choose what to fund, than have somone forcibly* take the money and decide for me.
*Yes, taxes are voluntary. Up until the point where they start garnishing your wages and freezing your accounts.
I have "rabbit ears". Actually, it's a Radio Shack mast antenna from the early 1990's with a Blonder Tongue CATV distribution amp to boost the off-air signal to acceptable levels. I'm able to get away with this because I live in a metropolitan area (7 VHF stations, 8 English-language non-religious UHF stations.) The money I save on a monthly cable subscription goes to paying for Netflix and to help defray DSL costs. Having a couple of ReplayTVs helps - if there's nothing on, I can always watch a rerun of the Simpsons, or some PBS programming. Not that I have that much time to watch TV anymore (I think I catch maybe 4-5 hours a week, not counting Netflix time.)
With that said, if the changeover actually occurs, there are multiple options - from converter boxes, to cable/satellite, to IPTV, which I'm sure will be available by then (the phone companies would be fools not to take advantage of the changeover to pick up new customers for Video over IP.) I might also just stop watching off the air TV entirely, given how little there is to watch, even now.
I find it interesting that the government has chosen to impose criminal penalties for what is essentially a civil violation. Imagine, you hire Joe, who works in your duplication department, putting together promos and clips. If you have half a brain, you've signed Joe to an employment contract, which treats unreleased material as trade secret, with some pretty nasty financial penalties for breach of contract.
Three months before you release "Super Kong, the Movie", your legal department tracks down and reports that someone has illegally put up for download, a complete copy of the movie. It turns out to be Joe.
Under the terms of the contract, you can take Joe to court, and turn him into a pauper (he's pretty poor already, but you just want to make an example of him.) You get a judgment, but Joe doesn't go to jail. Under the new take on things, you CAN send Joe to jail, by handing your case over to the government, and having them handle the prosecution in the name of the People of the United States.
While I'm all for defending property rights (within reason - Copyright is a government-backed monopoly that is supposed to expire after a fixed time so that it can enter the public domain and benefit THE PUBLIC, so I'm not about to defend the continuing abuse of the intent behind US Copyright law), spending taxpayer money to impose criminal penalties in a dispute between you, the copyright owner, and Joe, the infringer, helps the People of the United States, how?
If the lawmakers feel absolutely compelled to pass laws, I'd much rather they pass a law that would impose criminal penalties on identity theft, as that would be more in line with benefiting the everyone.
I use compact fluorescent light bulb replacements extensively, and while I like the energy savings, I've found that you really need to pick your vendors carefully. For example, I've had good service life from discount compact fluorescents bought off of eBay (with no claims to duration of service life), and lousy service life from the expensive retail compact fluorescents from the local Home Depot (which claimed 7 years of operation - total bullshit.)
An nice side effect of replacing most of your incandescents is that you don't have to buy incandescent replacement bulbs for the remaining lights that use them, because you now have a surplus of bulbs that were pulled from service...
Actually, some component DVD players use a standard IDE drive. Before you toss your player, crack it open and check to see if the drive has an IDE connector on it. If it does, you might be able to sub in a replacement drive.
Live action content is expensive to produce.
Depends on what kind of live action content it is. A show with talking heads (ie, talk show, news show, comedy show) can be done for fairly cheap depending on your quality level.
Doing something like a period piece or science fiction drives your costs up because then you need costuming, sets, props, effects (either cg space ships, or painting out modern buildings in a shot of an old west town), etc.
Even that isn't insurmountable given heavy use of green/bluescreen and reusable props.
The key thing with live action is that you can do it fast. If you know how to set your shots up, and you have a good crew, you can do a good program for cheap. However, if you want to make something that looks good for ultra cheap, rendered allows you to create a good product without having to invest in the facilities and equipment shooting live action would require.
Of course, nowadays, more and more people have equipment for live action - DV cameras for shooting, and iMacs for editing. Throw in some basic supplies from the nearest Staples (colored paper for bounce cards, foam-core panels for bounce boards, aluminum foil for reflectors), clamp-on reflector lights from the Home Depot (about $7.99 a piece), some light stands (about $15 per set) and a couple of aluminum stepladders to hang your lamps and boards off of, and a good mic, and you can shoot some pretty decent stuff, assuming you know what you're doing. And if you don't, well, there's no teacher like hands-on experience!
Waiting? That's where packaging a Tivo-like HD/AI comes in. The AI allows you to pre-grab shows, and based on what you've looked for in the past, pre-loads future shows as they come up. The instant-demand mindset is shortsighted, and ignores things like Netflix (you set up a queue, and wait anywhere from 24 to 48 hrs for your DVD), Moviebeam (which uses unused bandwidth in a regular TV transmission signal to stream digital bits to a pay-per-view PVR), and of course, regular TV, where you wait anywhere from a day, to a week for the next episode of your favorite show.
:)
I had to make these same arguments to some business students who I pitched a similar idea to about a year ago - only this involved using p2p wireless as the underlying transmission medium (my ultimate goal was building a mesh wireless network, and the trojan to doing it was PVR-based TV.) I'm happy that someone has come up with working mechanics, since it absolves me from having to do it, and leaves me to just produce content instead.
Smart idea, except that you'd have to pay a copyright fee for each of those "songs".
No you don't. You have two ways to accomplish this:
Create a gigantic orchestral work that encompasses days, maybe months worth of music, and submit that as one work.
Or:
Submit a portfolio of works (which you can do) for registration for only the one fee.
Remember, for musical compositions, file form PA with the US Copyright Office (there is a short form as well.)
Of course, I'm not a lawyer, and the above is not to be construed as legal advice.
Overwriting only works if the drive is still capable of writing. I've dealt with drives so hosed after we got the data off, that we could barely wipe the partition map. There was still a lot of data left behind on the platter that we could no longer touch because the writing heads/drive electronics were in such bad shape, the drive refused to either be recognized, or to accept commands.
In these cases, you have to decide: is it more important that you RMA the drive (in which case, you really can't do any truely destructive to the drive physically - I think degaussing falls under that, as it wipes out the underlying sector info), or do you smash up the drive and forego the drive replacement?
BTW, if it turns out that degaussing is an accepted method of clearing the drive prior to RMA, please let me know...
My god, anybody having flashbacks to Max Headroom after reading this post?
I'd prefer to decide for myself, thank you, and this legislation appears to be doing just that.
I'm not so sure. Consider that the studios would like nothing more than to shove their brand of DRM down your throats. Apple, so far, has played a strange game, simultaneously protecting consumers (by keeping the record labels from arbitrarialy jacking up rates, as they've tried to do in the recent past) while preserving a semblance of DRM to placate the labels.
There's only one problem - the labels aren't making enough money. Thus, you have this legislation, which attempts to open up Apple's private playground, which they have neatly tended and grown, to every bozo with a contract to sell music. Why is this a problem?
Well, currently, if you really want to sell music to play on the iPod, and you aren't Apple, you can sell non DRMed tracks. Apple likes this because they don't have to worry about DRM compatibility issues. They can just focus on selling iPods and music from the iTunes music store. The instant you start adding other DRM sources, you add complexity, and you make it more likely that Apple will get blamed if something breaks. Moreover, the instant you have other people using and relying on this DRM, the more likely that it is that they will attempt to dictate what level of restrictions are available through Fairplay. Can you imagine Napster arguing that you should only be allowed to burn a track X number of times? (at the behest of the record labels, of course)
Doh, that should have said Berman (as in Rick Berman), instead of Brannon (as in Brannon Braga.)
Braga is saying it's series finale. Furthermore, he states that "nobody is surprised by this." Of course, this explains why he and Brannon bailed this season, and turned the reins over to Manny Coto, who has actually written stories that fit in the canon of the Star Trek universe, without having to rely on time travel for bloody well everything.
I hope the Trek fans manage to salvage Enterprise - they should give Coto at least another season, and some decent advertising dollars, to demonstrate whether or not he and the rest of the remaining Enterprise team can put on a better show than B&B.
Thanks for the factual corrections.
The oil industry IS getting out of the oil business. BP(British Petroleum) and Shell are some of the biggest names in the solar business, and I think most, if not all of the major oil companies have got a finger in hydrogen.
The big problem is the auto industry, which has a lot of inertia, and a lot of investment and accumulated know-how tied up in the internal combustion engine. Until they switch, diesel, gasoline, etc. will continue to be in high demand.
You have to keep in mind that GM is a massive congolmeration. The research departments at GM, Ford, Toyota, Honda, and Chrysler, did amazing work with the technology at hand. They would have kept on going, but the suits upstairs told them to close up shop. Thus, nice vehicles like the Ford EV Ranger ended up being parted out, and the EV-1 got smooshed en masse.
Given GM's size and deep pockets, lawyers is a pretty credible reason to smash up the EV-1s. I'm not sure I believe that was the best choice, but I can see some Darwin Award recipient's family hooking up with the likes of Larry H. Parker & Co. to play the lottery game at GM's expense. No suit ever got axed immediately for saying no. These guys are just trying to cover their asses until they can retire with fat bonuses.
On the other hand, spinning it as though the EV-1 was unwanted by the public (the "it wasn't selling well" comment) was just pure evil. Of course it didn't sell well - it was never sold!
This guy powers his RAV4EV using solar panels:
http://www.madkatz.com/
So it is possible to have a ZEV, discounting the waste and emissions created during the production of said panels (which can be averaged over a roughly 30 year lifespand for the panels), and the vehicle itself. The bigger problem are the batteries, which will need to be replaced on a 3-5 year schedule (hybrids suffer from this problem as well.)
pushing through legislation mandating that manufacturers sell electric cars.
Actually, it was that 3% of the fleet be Zero Emissions, which effectively required automakers to turn to electric cars, as that was the only technology available at the time that could meet the zero-emissions requirement.
The only manufacturer who actually sold cars to the general public, that I know of, was Toyota. Their RAV4EV cost upwards of 40k, list price, and very few were available, as they were all conversions done under contract by a 3rd party. All the other manufacturers leased their vehicles to commercial and governmental fleets. As part of the negotiations to get the carmakers to put EVs on the roads, the State of California financed a network of EV recharge stations throughout the state. Unfortunately, the car manufacturers couldn't agree on what kind of charging standard there should be - GM advocated using the inductive paddle system (Magnacharge), Honda and Toyota and Ford produced cars using a conductive charging system (someone correct me if I'm getting my facts wrong.)
This is why when you see an electric charging spot in California, there are usually two chargers - one Magnacharge paddle, one conductive charge jack. As a consequence, mucho dinero was spent by taxpayers to establish a charging infrastructure for vehicles which have largely disappeared from the landscape.
From the very beginning auto manufacturers argued that the battery technology just wasn't there yet to make a decent all-electric vehicle.
"It can't be done", or "it's going to cost us a lot of money." I think this has been their running argument for a lot of things - against seatbelts, airbags, lower emissions, etc. Sure, batteries are not going to deliver the same energy density as gasoline. You're not going to be driving a Suburban very far on batteries. However, as a second car, especially an in-town commuter car, electricity is IDEAL. The market for NEVs is fairly decent, and these are nothing more than glorified golf carts. Hobbyists have built very capable electric commuter cars for decades. And Chrysler, Honda, and Toyota, came up with very effective electric cars, which have served for years as part of commercial and governmental fleets. Then of course, you have the EV-1.
Keep in mind, the automakers didn't HAVE to comply with the CARB mandate. Hell, they spent millions of dollars over a number of years lobbying and suing to ease the compliance schedule, and in the case of ZEVs, discard that requirement completely. But California is a big market for them, big enough such that being forced to stop selling other autos was reason enough to subsidize the ultra-low volumes needed to meet the minimum requirements of the ZEV legislation. Even with the subsidies, due to the limited production runs, the EVs ended up costing a bundle, as opposed to their gasoline cousins, whose engines and drivetrains are built in volume and shared across platforms.
Of course, that was the same problem with the electric/gas hybrid, which looked even more impractical to build and sell, because the engineering costs were higher, at least initially. Toyota had the guts to actually build one and sell it to the public (again, because of the same mandated low-emissions schedule that the ZEV legislation was part of), and now they can't keep the damn things in stock.
The analogy here is that if Paramount decided not only it would cancel the sci-fi TV show "Enterprise", but also destroy all the films!
You do know that in the past (and possibly even now), a lot of source material has been destroyed because the company that owned the rights didn't think that the property they owned justified the cost of warehousing and preserving that material. They either let it rot, or they actively shredded it, to keep someone else from profiting from it.
Of course, this mindset is EXACTLY why compulsory copying SHOULD be allowed, and why enforcement of depositing of works with the LOC (Library of Congress), and the cost of maintaining/restoring works once deposited, should be included as part of the cost of getting copyright.
In GM's case, I think part of compacting the cars was to keep people from realizing how close they were to actually being able to release a viable production electric car. The drivetrains and controllers alone were very advanced AC propulsion units that could have fetched thousands of dollars on the open market RIGHT NOW, and as another poster pointed out, the bodies alone could have been sold for a variety of purposes, aside from being just scrap.
GM wanted to make sure that you wouldn't be able to put a zero emission EV-1 side-by-side against one of their 14 MPG fake hybrid SUVs (wow, a whole 2 extra miles of efficiency from an oversized 48vdc starter motor!) Besides, the EV-1 has served its propaganda use. The new vaporware of the day, to ward off complaints about GM's fight against higher fuel standards, is the Hydrogen Car, which like the electric car 10 years ago, is just "5 to 6 years away from being introduced to the general public."
You won't get any argument from me about what assholes GM has been over the EV-1. These are the same guys who went out in front of the public and told everyone that the EV-1 wasn't selling well, in order to justify scrapping the program (and just as they were about to begin replacing the lead-acid batteries with NiMH batteries.) Of course, they didn't actually lie - not one EV-1 was sold during the entire lifespan of the vehicle, because the EV-1 was only LEASED and NEVER SOLD.
Only 50? That's kind of hard to believe, given that there were waiting lists to lease the vehicle when it was available. I think what GM meant to say that only 50 people were capable of paying what GM wanted per vehicle in order to make it worth their while to maintain the parts inventory and service sub-contracts to keep the cars running.
Of course, nobody thinks about the millions of dollars spent in California to equip a electric-car refueling infrastructure (thank you GM, for forcing the ultra-expensive, and ultra-breakage prone magnacharge system on us) that nobody* will be using anymore.
*Other than handful of EV hobbyists with home-built cars that have charging adapters to use public recharge stations. Assuming the recharge station still works.
Actually, if you reinforced the inflatable portion with multiple layers of Kevlar, you could have near-instant defensible fortifications against small arms fire. And, if you compartmentalize, you might even provide some limited survivability against RPGs and other explosive weapons. Of course, doing this would dramatically increase the amount of weight you'd be lugging around.
$10? Man, if that's the price for a matinee in your area, then I feel for you. It's $8 in my neck of the woods, and that's already way too much. :(