This just occurred to me -- the B model almost certainly has enough guts to run a MAME emulator, making it a candidate to restore older arcade games. I have an original Tempest stand-up in the garage that bit the dust years ago... This might be an interesting project.
There may be individual episodes I'll pick up (best of both worlds, for instance) but in general I'm not anxious to watch hours of conference room meetings in high def.
Has anyone considered, I dunno... maybe spending some of that special effects budget on a new star trek series? I'd be interested in seeing what direction it would take now that Rick Berman was out of the picture.
But then, why the rush to electric cars? I currently make my own electricity with a collection of solar panels bought off Amazon. If they were concerned about taxing natural gas, let's see how well taxing sunlight works for them.
Hmm... When I looked into this in the nineties, common CNG conversions would give 100 to 150 mile range with a reasonably sized container. I've never heard of a CNG solution (or even an LNG solution) with a 600 mile range. Not to dispute your observations, but I don't think it's technically possible. It would be nice if I could fill up once at my house and drive from Portland to Sacramento, but unfortunately I don't believe it. Natural gas has a lot of advantages, but it's not magic.
It is also very common in Peru. People pay to convert their vehicles to gas and even give up trunk space for the tank, because it is so much cheaper to run. You can fill up everywhere. Not sure why the US needs a rebate system.
Perhaps because someone is making money off it?
It's a little known fact, but there are natural gas fill up stations all around this area where the fleet refuels. They're open to the public, but to my knowledge the only regular users are local taxi cabs that have made the conversion.
I used to work for the local gas company. For decades they've had a compressed natural gas conversion for cars and a small compressor setup for the home at reasonable startup cost ($2,500 at the time). The range wasn't great, (for range you need LNG) but it was better than today's all electric cars and you could fuel up at home in a much shorter time than with electric. The fleet all ran on natural gas, filling up at their own company-maintained filling stations, and besides being cheaper and having lower emissions, as a collateral benefit they were getting exceptional life from the engines of their fleet vehicles.
As I was interested in this conversion myself and only learned about it by accident, I struck up a conversation with the head of marketing asking why they weren't promoting it, since it was an existing solution that people could buy for their own vehicles if they only knew about it.
And most importantly, in most areas the distribution network is already in place, something that Electric is currently struggling with.
He said that the company was under pressure not to promote a consumer compressed natural gas solution for automobiles. He was unwilling to say where the pressure was coming from. I always wondered about that.
So, in short, the solution already exists, exactly as described, and has since at least the nineties. As far as I can see, there's nothing to develop here, just remove the roadblocks to existing solutions.
Mind you, it works best for dedicated commuter and in-town cars, because to keep the cost and complexity down, the car *only* runs on compressed natural gas, and CNG does not have the energy per volume as either LNG or gasoline. But in my opinion CNG is more practical than electric in several respects, not the least of which there are no batteries to replace/recycle.
Exactly. Film was going to die. Printing was all there was left.
They pretty much let HP take that away from them.
There is no reason Kodak could not have pushed both high-end pro-grade printers as well as home-snap-shot printers. They didn't do either with any gusto, and thereby gave up everything they had.
Photo printing, as a result, still sucks so bad that we put up with digital picture frames!! OMG, what an abomination.
That's the real tragedy in this -- Kodak had clearly superior printing technology. Had they moved the technology in their kiosks into home printers at a wide range of features/price, HP would not now own low end home printing, and Epson would not now own high end (8 cartridge, roll paper) home printing. They tried to market pixel-based inks and Kodak paper into the homes, but wayyy too late, giving HP the consumer market, and concentrated on low end home and home office, letting Epson have the home pro market they should have owned.
It seems like the upshot is that Kodak couldn't make themselves believe that film was dead. It wasn't out of ignorance -- Kodak was first with a working digital camera in the mid seventies I believe, and had digital cameras (based on Nikon bodies) available before anyone else did. They had a 13 megapixel full frame professional camera back in 2003. I remember that because there wasn't anything like it available when it came out, and the pro photo media was all agape at it. (To give you an idea of how advanced this was for the time, the Nikon D4, released in 2012, *eight years later* has virtually the same resolution.) Kodak had digital technology early and did it well. But for some inexplicable reason, they opened their hand and the bird flew away. Printing wasn't *all* that was left, but for some reason, perhaps unwillingness to move forward, they let others own the high end digital market as well.
So we're assuming that this is targeted at people too impaired to drive but not impaired enough to test themselves before they drive. I dunno, I don't see that making any measurable difference. I sure wish I had gotten the breathalyzer contract, though. It must have been like printing money.
> If a drunk pedestrian walks into the road and is killed by a car, is that included in this statistic?
It absolutely does. A few years back in California, I was trying to make a right turn onto an expressway in fast, busy traffic. I commonly look right then left find a hole, and pull out. I looked right, looked left, saw an opportunity and thump. A drunk had wandered out in the street in front of my car on my right side just exactly at the wrong moment. Posted no pedestrians allowed. Apparently he had been in this position before -- the EMTs knew him by name.
I was really shook up. The deputy kept assuring me that he was not going to cite me, and was going to follow the ambulance to the hospital and cite the drunk on two or three offenses, assuming he survived. (He did.) I'd like to say it wasn't legal issues that concerned me. There's nothing quite like the sick feeling of unintentionally injuring another human being. Although now that I write this, it occurs to me that it was probably better that I bumped him from a standing start rather than one of the other cars striking him at speed.
Anyway, the deputy had to fill out the paperwork for "alcohol related accident", and griped to me that this would go into the drunk driving statistics despite nobody having driven drunk. So yes, it still counts. At least in California.
Well, I was one, and I'm pretty sure all my male relatives were one at some point, and roughly half of my friends, except the two who didn't make it to that age. (One lost at pedestrian vs car, and the other, on a motorcycle, didn't notice that the freeway corkscrew had metal grating that probably couldn't hold traction at the speed he was going.)
Incidentally, I moved out of home and to a different state three days after my 18th birthday, got a job and an apartment and put myself through college, without ever committing a felony or causing another student to suicide. It can be done.
But the point is not whether 18 year olds are generally mature or not. I think you could make that argument up to 25 at least. The point is that on the day of their 18th birthday, they are legally adults and responsible for their actions. If you don't like that, feel free to change the law. But if you're going to make them less responsible for their actions, some curtailment of such actions is probably in order. Responsibility or supervision, pick one.
You're absolutely right, but a strike could still cause tremendous problems, and assuming the government steps in, what emerges will most likely be pretty much what we had in the old cable TV days. (If you ever were a customer of TCI, you know what I mean.) While anarchist alpha-geeks will find a way to use it for their own benefit. If the resultant undernet or darknet (whatever you want to call it) gets as popular as file sharing, the powers that be could well find that instead of partial control of something, they now have total control of nothing.
Life finds a way. It happens in corporations -- overly restrictive IT results in little "islands of IT" popping up here and there, which may even join together through tunneling or wifi or cell to become a replacement for the "official" infrastructure that isn't doing the job. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that this is much more likely to happen in a national or worldwide network.
I wouldn't use the word "appropriate", but I concede that as it's the defense lawyer's job to provide a robust defense, manipulating the media certainly comes under that heading. I was just pointing out (as the media probably would not do) that what the lawyer said was not technically correct and was indeed an attempt at manipulation.
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I'm wondering if the bug started in some early version of ms-dos and then propagated to all their other projects ever since through code re-use...
This just occurred to me -- the B model almost certainly has enough guts to run a MAME emulator, making it a candidate to restore older arcade games. I have an original Tempest stand-up in the garage that bit the dust years ago... This might be an interesting project.
What about the J.J. Abrams malware that puts annoying lens flare on all your photos and videos?
There may be individual episodes I'll pick up (best of both worlds, for instance) but in general I'm not anxious to watch hours of conference room meetings in high def.
Has anyone considered, I dunno... maybe spending some of that special effects budget on a new star trek series? I'd be interested in seeing what direction it would take now that Rick Berman was out of the picture.
But then, why the rush to electric cars? I currently make my own electricity with a collection of solar panels bought off Amazon. If they were concerned about taxing natural gas, let's see how well taxing sunlight works for them.
Hmm... When I looked into this in the nineties, common CNG conversions would give 100 to 150 mile range with a reasonably sized container. I've never heard of a CNG solution (or even an LNG solution) with a 600 mile range. Not to dispute your observations, but I don't think it's technically possible. It would be nice if I could fill up once at my house and drive from Portland to Sacramento, but unfortunately I don't believe it. Natural gas has a lot of advantages, but it's not magic.
It is also very common in Peru. People pay to convert their vehicles to gas and even give up trunk space for the tank, because it is so much cheaper to run. You can fill up everywhere. Not sure why the US needs a rebate system.
Perhaps because someone is making money off it?
It's a little known fact, but there are natural gas fill up stations all around this area where the fleet refuels. They're open to the public, but to my knowledge the only regular users are local taxi cabs that have made the conversion.
I used to work for the local gas company. For decades they've had a compressed natural gas conversion for cars and a small compressor setup for the home at reasonable startup cost ($2,500 at the time). The range wasn't great, (for range you need LNG) but it was better than today's all electric cars and you could fuel up at home in a much shorter time than with electric. The fleet all ran on natural gas, filling up at their own company-maintained filling stations, and besides being cheaper and having lower emissions, as a collateral benefit they were getting exceptional life from the engines of their fleet vehicles.
As I was interested in this conversion myself and only learned about it by accident, I struck up a conversation with the head of marketing asking why they weren't promoting it, since it was an existing solution that people could buy for their own vehicles if they only knew about it.
And most importantly, in most areas the distribution network is already in place, something that Electric is currently struggling with.
He said that the company was under pressure not to promote a consumer compressed natural gas solution for automobiles. He was unwilling to say where the pressure was coming from. I always wondered about that.
So, in short, the solution already exists, exactly as described, and has since at least the nineties. As far as I can see, there's nothing to develop here, just remove the roadblocks to existing solutions.
Mind you, it works best for dedicated commuter and in-town cars, because to keep the cost and complexity down, the car *only* runs on compressed natural gas, and CNG does not have the energy per volume as either LNG or gasoline. But in my opinion CNG is more practical than electric in several respects, not the least of which there are no batteries to replace/recycle.
Exactly. Film was going to die. Printing was all there was left.
They pretty much let HP take that away from them.
There is no reason Kodak could not have pushed both high-end pro-grade printers as well as home-snap-shot printers. They didn't do either with any gusto, and thereby gave up everything they had.
Photo printing, as a result, still sucks so bad that we put up with digital picture frames!! OMG, what an abomination.
That's the real tragedy in this -- Kodak had clearly superior printing technology. Had they moved the technology in their kiosks into home printers at a wide range of features/price, HP would not now own low end home printing, and Epson would not now own high end (8 cartridge, roll paper) home printing. They tried to market pixel-based inks and Kodak paper into the homes, but wayyy too late, giving HP the consumer market, and concentrated on low end home and home office, letting Epson have the home pro market they should have owned.
It seems like the upshot is that Kodak couldn't make themselves believe that film was dead. It wasn't out of ignorance -- Kodak was first with a working digital camera in the mid seventies I believe, and had digital cameras (based on Nikon bodies) available before anyone else did. They had a 13 megapixel full frame professional camera back in 2003. I remember that because there wasn't anything like it available when it came out, and the pro photo media was all agape at it. (To give you an idea of how advanced this was for the time, the Nikon D4, released in 2012, *eight years later* has virtually the same resolution.) Kodak had digital technology early and did it well. But for some inexplicable reason, they opened their hand and the bird flew away. Printing wasn't *all* that was left, but for some reason, perhaps unwillingness to move forward, they let others own the high end digital market as well.
So we're assuming that this is targeted at people too impaired to drive but not impaired enough to test themselves before they drive. I dunno, I don't see that making any measurable difference. I sure wish I had gotten the breathalyzer contract, though. It must have been like printing money.
Then.... I don't understand. What's the point?
I think the point is, the car won't start unless you blow under a certain BAC.
> If a drunk pedestrian walks into the road and is killed by a car, is that included in this statistic?
It absolutely does. A few years back in California, I was trying to make a right turn onto an expressway in fast, busy traffic. I commonly look right then left find a hole, and pull out. I looked right, looked left, saw an opportunity and thump. A drunk had wandered out in the street in front of my car on my right side just exactly at the wrong moment. Posted no pedestrians allowed. Apparently he had been in this position before -- the EMTs knew him by name.
I was really shook up. The deputy kept assuring me that he was not going to cite me, and was going to follow the ambulance to the hospital and cite the drunk on two or three offenses, assuming he survived. (He did.) I'd like to say it wasn't legal issues that concerned me. There's nothing quite like the sick feeling of unintentionally injuring another human being. Although now that I write this, it occurs to me that it was probably better that I bumped him from a standing start rather than one of the other cars striking him at speed.
Anyway, the deputy had to fill out the paperwork for "alcohol related accident", and griped to me that this would go into the drunk driving statistics despite nobody having driven drunk. So yes, it still counts. At least in California.
C'mon moderators, that was funny!
If you're just visiting France, would you really want to drive there?
My concern would be that the taxi driver is sober. And competent. And coherently speaks a language appropriate for his country of business.
I'll miss you.
I'm pretty sure he was mocking.
Well, I was one, and I'm pretty sure all my male relatives were one at some point, and roughly half of my friends, except the two who didn't make it to that age. (One lost at pedestrian vs car, and the other, on a motorcycle, didn't notice that the freeway corkscrew had metal grating that probably couldn't hold traction at the speed he was going.)
Incidentally, I moved out of home and to a different state three days after my 18th birthday, got a job and an apartment and put myself through college, without ever committing a felony or causing another student to suicide. It can be done.
But the point is not whether 18 year olds are generally mature or not. I think you could make that argument up to 25 at least. The point is that on the day of their 18th birthday, they are legally adults and responsible for their actions. If you don't like that, feel free to change the law. But if you're going to make them less responsible for their actions, some curtailment of such actions is probably in order. Responsibility or supervision, pick one.
.. the IT world full of contrarians...
No it's not.
Yes it is!
You're absolutely right, but a strike could still cause tremendous problems, and assuming the government steps in, what emerges will most likely be pretty much what we had in the old cable TV days. (If you ever were a customer of TCI, you know what I mean.) While anarchist alpha-geeks will find a way to use it for their own benefit. If the resultant undernet or darknet (whatever you want to call it) gets as popular as file sharing, the powers that be could well find that instead of partial control of something, they now have total control of nothing.
Life finds a way. It happens in corporations -- overly restrictive IT results in little "islands of IT" popping up here and there, which may even join together through tunneling or wifi or cell to become a replacement for the "official" infrastructure that isn't doing the job. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that this is much more likely to happen in a national or worldwide network.
Darknet.
What makes it even more delicious is that Steiner at the time wasn't aware that he was saying anything particularly profound.
Agreed.
I wouldn't use the word "appropriate", but I concede that as it's the defense lawyer's job to provide a robust defense, manipulating the media certainly comes under that heading. I was just pointing out (as the media probably would not do) that what the lawyer said was not technically correct and was indeed an attempt at manipulation.