too bad no one ever made kit car knock offs for those
Long time ago I thought about trying to do a mod to my VW bus to make it amphibious, by having two crank down pontoons on the roof, driving, they look like you are carrying two canoes, then down at the boat ramp you could just crank them down and lock them in place. Turn the thing into a sort of trimaran once it went into the water in other words. Never got past the sketching stage though.
Throw away pre paid cellphone with a camera inside the shipment. The consignee must turn it on, call the preset number, offer visual recognition of identity, along with an automatic GPS location (which should be pretty darn close to its programmed point of arrival), this recognition sequence to be determined in advance, hand signs, holding up an object, whatever, any good variable there.
The senders recognize it is *their* phone with the shipment calling them, so they know it was found, and trust or not trust the recipients based on the challenge/response agreement. If trust, after the recipients pass these bona fides, they get sent a return text message with the decode sequence so the whole shipment doesn't explode in their face. A short time window for all this to happen once the sub passes the point of locked up secure to recieved and being opened. The senders know when it should be getting there, they built and sent the thing, they know its range and speed, etc, so if they don't get any signal at all around when they should be expecting it, so they can send an "OK so far" signal, the thing is programmed to go to another location then sink and hold on the bottom or return someplace else or back to origin, whatever there.
The actual shipment can be in a pressurized container, any change of pressure sends a first radio message to the senders that the shipment is "there", there being someplace at least, it has been received by someone, and opened, so the next step determines eligibility or not. A lot of options there besides pressurized, could be a humidity sensor, heat, stuff like that, a motion sensor inside the cargo compartment maybe. Off the shelf industrial/greenhouse/agricultural/security sensors indicating a change outside of the traveling underwater normal. A glass window integrity circuit on the inside. Lot of stuff there out on the market now.
And if all of this has been MIMed/compromised anyway, the point is moot, both ends are screwed.
If operational integrity has been present though, we have trust + verify so the exchange is complete and satisfactory at both ends. Basically just a variation on pub and private key for verification, with tangibles instead of electronic data as the exchanged "stuff". the actual sub-in-hand is public of course, the challenge response to get the "not blow up" code is private. There's no crypto scrambling of content, but that's where the shipment being booby trapped comes in. If it is compromised, it is lost anyway, if it is a theft, you make sure it is lost, plus maybe take out the thief or man in the middle "interdiction" forces.
disclaimer: for academic research and hollywood amusement purposes only of course.... so ya whatever if they got james bond with Q in tow and cut into the sub while it is traveling underwater and know in advance what the pressure must be maintained at and all sorts of other jazz like that it could be stolen, but that's a pretty large amount of work plus amazing psychic powers you would need to have to steal the thing and actually get to the contents. Bomb disposal squads more just try to blow the thing safely rather than jump through all sorts of mission impossible tricks to defuse some device once it is on a fast count down timer.
Well, ya got me, maybe I am not remembering the model number correctly, although I do remember it was a three cylinder two stroke, and I remember the different exhaust sound. Wasn't my machine so I just don't recall the model number probably. (I think olden days, hippie and commune as keywords might have something to do with my recollection 0_o);)
gas was around 35-45 cents a gallon or so, something like that at the time. I personally was in between rides then, some friends had burnt up my old $100 flathead six volt '55 ford meat wagon (panel truck) trying to jump it with a 12 volt.
The snow plow race results were as I stated though, the beetle kept on going, well past what any of us thought would happen. Neither one made it all that far, the saab maybe 75 yards and the VW another 100 yards past that, and only because the road was straight right there. The snow was fairly deep and the saab built up a huge amount at the front/over the bumper and eventually couldn't crunch through it, whereas the vw rode up over the snow in the front and just kept going with the rear wheels with not much steering available at all, the front wheels weren't even touching the ground much.
The only saab I ever liked styling wise was the sonnet, but I never owned one, just used to see them tooling around.
I've only owned a handful/maybe a dozen or so sedans, I am mostly a truck and four wheel drive guy, although I have quite fond memories of my vw bus, which was another real practical vehicle, which I think of as a crossover/truck/sedan that got good, or at least pretty fair mileage, and had pretty good stock offroad capabilities with the addition of some adapters and larger real wheels/tires.
I *liked* working on the air cooled, simple, easy, no exotic tools needed other than two wrenches to make things easier, a swivel 17 for the 2 o'clock motor to transaxle bolt and a curved C shaped 13 for the pict 34 carbs. Dang..this is decades ago, so I'll add "IIRC".
The only easier to work on vehicle I ever owned was a 69 rear engine fiat spider 850, dang that was a cool little car, 50 mpg and ran like a sewing machine after I did a slick little mini hotrod rebuild. Their big flaw was cheap ass sheetmetal that rusted easily, which destroyed the body, which made the car instant junk. Too bad there..
You could pull the engine without even using a jack if you felt like it! You could grab it in the back, heft it up, and kick some wood under the pan, then unbolt it, along with the rear bumper and tin, and push the car away from the engine. They used these cheap ingenious flex joints at the drive wheels that were just stout rubber with some bolts through it. I never had to but it certainly looked like if you ever wore one out, say someplace you couldn't get parts and just *had* to fix it, you could just cut up some old tires and drill some holes and make a little stack of rubber plates the correct or close enough thickness that way and get going again. Had toggle switches for all the electrical with a fuse at each switch so it was real easy to see what was what, stuff like that to make it cheap and simple.
I didn't think a thin client was anything other than a diskless PC connected to a server. Seems like if someone needed a lot of them cheap, they could look for pallet loads of recent vintage/good enough specs off lease whatever computers from some corporation, where they remove the hard drives for destruction, and just use those. I bet you could get a bunch for fifty bucks apiece that way if you shopped around.
With that said, some company that already had full workstations could just remove the drives themselves, then add some servers, etc to achieve this thin client goal.
I guess I am just not understanding why less hardware has to cost more money, or is hard to find. Heck, my local rural town whitebox shop sells entire *bundles* of refurbed old business desktops plus crappy old monitors if you can live with a 15 inch one and keyboards, etc for 99 bucks, add 20 bucks for a 17 inch monitor. Pull hard drive, insert ethernet cable, add a server in the closet some place with some switches, etc. Just not seeing the problem here outside of the actual case might need to be tiny or something. If the guy found a deal for pallet loads with the hard drives and optical drives included, they could yank those and ebay them, then put the money towards more RAM maybe or setting up the servers, etc.
There's always barebones deals, too, for "brand new".
Back in the day at the commune
on
A Requiem For Saab
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
There was always the rivalry going on between the saab two stroke guys and the VW beetle guys over which car had the best traction in the snow. So we had the great drive off until you can't get any further contest (we had a tractor to get the cars unstuck). We got the good blizzard needed, can't recall exactly but around knee deep. Lined up the VW and the 900 next to each other on the old country gravel road and off they went.
The air cooled rear engine VW kept going around one hundred yards further, albeit with not much in the way of practical steering, it rode up on the pan as it mushed the snow underneath, changing the angle, pushing the rear wheels down even harder. At least that is how we all analyzed what happened watching this "race".
Lawn, saber toothed badgers, etc, just my recollection of the real world results with snow traction and two popular alternative cars then for all of us woods hippies.
As to winter *heat* in the cabin, well, the saab won there of course. As to overall rough road combined mud, snow etc get from point A to B day to day practicality, the VeeDubbs took it for the rural hipsters, the saabs more for the townie boys who came out to visit.
What trounced both of them was an old Model A Ford one of the guys had that still cranked and ran. I thought that was funny. They used to use that thing to drag logs out of the woods. It was the closest thing to a combined sedan/truck/tractor in functionality I have ever seen.
I agree on the he should be recognized, but disagree as to how. I'd rather guys like this were able to make a feature length film and completely bypass the normal hollywood cash skimming, over paid "star" paying and story altering facets, to just skip the whole bloated budget and higher cartel DVD and ticket prices MPAA thing and do for movies what the indy music artists are doing skipping affiliation with the RIAA crew.
If he can do this for three hundred bucks, maybe that means a full feature length movie can be done for under one million and not cost hundreds of millions. He still gets paid, but it would be all his and his crew then, not 99% going to middlemen and overpaid so called "talent", and consumers/watchers can get good films legitimately to view at much more reasonable prices.
It isn't that simplistic. A lot of the developing world agriculture goes to make foreign exchange hard currency to support the local warlord/junta and wall street fatcats and the IMF, the food production there goes to the developed world instead of feeding the local population *first*. There's much less need for "food aid" when the local agriculture has as a priority a diverse system dedicated at the first level to feeding their own people, rather than vast monoculture farms dedicated to overseas exports.
So it is actually the reverse in a lot of cases from this often alleged "common knowledge", the local population could probably live on their food production even with a lot of kids, if it stayed there more in the first place, whereas in the heavily developed nations, even with fewer kids, they would be hard pressed to feed themselves (and a lot of other basic life's necessities sustainability issues) without truly massive imports of food and energy and the still continuing "soft" exploitation going on with the connivance of their political and economic leaders.
If it isn't discussed, it must not happen or "see no evil" and get to pontificate on how superior one way is over the other. See, them dumb natives have too many kids and can't take care of themselves"! gloating. Then you look at it closer, they have been getting shafted for decades/generations and are stuck in a never ending cradle to grave foreign "debt" situation which was imposed on the bulk of the people there rather shadily in the first place.
Here is an example of one situation, the African nation of Malawi. When they used to follow the wall street/IMF western "developed nation" advice and way of doing business and running their agriculture, their nation starved constantly, using exported ag resources all the time for making money rather than first feeding their people. When they switched back to putting their own nation first-adopting those often criticized "protectionist" principles, plus just a scosh more education into some alternative ways of farming-they went back to self sufficiency a long way and built themselves back to being more diversified in ag and feeding their people a lot better. And it can change fast with actually rather simple economic and educational policy changes.
It isn't perfect, they can still have and do have problems, but they become "wealthier" faster once some priorities get shifted around back to the actual people as a whole inside some area and not focused on making the top 1% there and wall street, etc. even richer.
And just a further notation, speaking as a farmer. I will guarantee you, with 100% certainty, if *ever* there is a fast rising shortage of diesel to the "developed" world, that lasts longer than a couple weeks or months, even with "fewer kids", etc, you will see near famine or outright famine. Your best case scenario will be much less variety of foods in the stores at multiples of the current prices.
Without cheap diesel, you just ain't eating. You can ride some subway or bicycle all day long, wall off huge areas to protect the three eyed flying newt, and that isn't going to feed you. That's the *best* case with a fast loss of diesel situation, or fast rising prices of diesel due to any other reason, such as rampant uncontrolled or unregulated market speculation like we had a small taste of recently last year.
This also warrants a rather severe look at this huge push for an emergency "war on carbon" without any credible alternatives in place, in advance. Margins are really lean now with farming for a lot of places, and this is during good supp
You don't have any prepaid there? Just long term plans? I agree, those extended range expensive plans are nonsense, prepaid is where it is at now, plus phone tech changes so fast, why get locked in?
Pretty decent selection for that in the US now, from ten bucks new for a basic phone that just makes calls to over a hundred bucks with some apps and web browsers with them, etc. Plus several smartphones depending on carrier can be made to work on the pre paid networks.
I have my doubts how safe they are long run as well, I am not a big fan of cross species genetic modifications,(selective breeding I think is fine though) but GM and cloning of just selected individual trees is in use.
That's the crux of the matter, *employment*. This is hardly ever addressed when it comes to draconian "no you must stop this" laws and proposals as regards the vast rural areas of the world.
This is what I see all the time: Wealthy urbanites in the industrialized areas are all for "conservation" in areas they don't live, but they have pitiful to non existent whacko theories on what exactly the human beings who live in those other areas are supposed to do for a living. Can't cut down jungle hardwoods for lumber=evil, stop. Can't cut down the big trees to make row crop farms=evil. Can't cut down and replace trees with other species that have a globally useful economic function=evil. Can't raise stock animals because they emit methane greenhouse gas. Can't do row crops en masse because it requires spraying and artificial; irrigation, uses too much water. And so on, a HUGE list that wealthy urbanites have on the "you shouldn't do this" side.. Can't do anything at all on your property because one month out of the year there is a mud puddle that supports the breeding of the endangered three eyed flying newt-owl. all sorts of laws like that too, even if it means you are now instantly unemployed with not much in the way of immediate alternatives..yet the bills still come in every month, plus property taxes.
So, that's nice and all for all the well meaning urbanites, but a couple billion people around the planet are supposed to then live on "eco tourism"? For real, I see that thrown out by some of those folks as some sort of credible option. Nuts... Funny,speaking of nuts, I am not seeing any huge move for urbanites to exist entirely on a diet of imported wild harvested tropical exotic hardwoods nuts and berries either, which is the only other crop you can get from wild forest. But then, whoops, you are stealing the food that the animals need to eat too....so that's out...
That's about what is left if you can't harvest the trees and use them in manufactured articles and for construction lumber, or make some cropland. And forget mining anything, all of that is just instantly evil no matter what...
You just can't have it both ways, if these people want to just wall off huge forest areas of the planet and let them go wild forever, completely naturally, with no human use, they must first come up with viable, realistic and constructive alternatives for useful modern employment in areas that are currently at the bottom of the economic foodchain. Or offer a couple billion people a direct cash perpetual welfare subsidy to do nothing and just live there. Anything else is unfair, unrealistic, and practically speaking, unworkable.
Basically, I am for sustainable use, including managed forests, and I am *way* in favor of getting rid of the backward "environmental" laws that forbid use and harvest of all the fifty buzillion acres of dead forest land they let burn up for no reason every year in the western USA, said dead forest expanding rapidly from such things as the pine beetle. That's a huge waste, and contributes mightily to air pollution when it burns up from uncontrolled wildfires every year, with zero economic or practical benefit for anyone really. We could be using that wasted wood for vast biochar manufacturing facilities and for replacements for coal in some electricity plants for example, providing much needed jobs in rural areas, going to more sustainable energy sources, and also improving soil tilth with the biochar in established row crop lands. But no....can't do that, wouldn't be environmental, have to let it just burn up "naturally", while the runoff silts over all the creeks and wipes out the fish and stuff...
How about this proposal to solve all the environmental problems at one whack..it would work, too.. let all the big cities burn up "naturally", I mean fires break out there all the time, so just stop putting them out, which would greatly help to reduce the planet's population (those folks all want that as well, "too many people!"), most of humanity lives in big ci
Carbon credits and cap and trade and so on are a scheme to take trillions with a T dollars from one set of pockets and transfer it to other pockets, with a big fat wall street skim in the middle. The pro AGW folks like to say the "deniers" are in the pockets of big oil and big coal. Well, those folks can be said to be in the pockets of big wall street, the enrons and goldman sachs type boys. There are also numerous overlapping political power considerations in this debate now.
Of course there's corruption, and it already started where cap and trade is established. There's no way when discussing such *vast* mind boggling sums to even assume that there is not, that would be terribly naive and flies in the face of proven past human history. When you have that much money and power involved....
The question is, how far does the rot go and who is involved? How much have predictive models been tweaked to give a biased in advance outcome? How many dissenting voices have been ignored or shouted down? Who really is getting funded by whom, who is pushing x agenda or y agenda for financial gain and political power accumulation, hidden behind their particular set of tame scientists or orgs?
These are legitimate questions, and there is no "denying" the data of this ginormous middleman trader's skimming market they are pushing hand in hand with this "climate science consensus", there is no airgap here, those two things are rigidly locked together.
Heck, here's another, the other big "emergency" science debate, where there is "consensus" allegedly and all sorts of huge sums needed to be spent and people scared, etc. Swine flu pandemic vaccinegate maybe?
If there's big money and big power involved, corruption happens. It just does, always has. Scientists, academicians, "esteemed" journals..doesn't matter, they are all human, so we should never completely blindly trust them, or any other big business or big government, to be non corrupt.
Well, please explain then, if possible, why panels-watts per dollar, are just not getting any cheaper. People really don't care that much about watts per square meter of modules, they want watts per buck deals. Watts per square meter are more a metric for spacecraft arrays, because of launch costs, folks in suburbia couldn't care less if they have to cover half their garage roof or all of it, as long as it gets much cheaper watts per dollar.
Near as I can see, we hit a plateau of affordability around 2002 (last year I bought any myself, started in 99) and they are getting more expensive, if anything. I know all about the fabs and how they were forced to use silicon rejects for so long, the demand for microchips has been so high, etc, but seems PV demand would have increased enough by now to overcome that limitation, along with all these thin film "printable" cells we keep hearing about. Nanosolar allegedly ships some cheaper stuff, but it is pure unobtanium retail inside the nation they are manufactured in, they go to Germany last I knew because of the guaranteed grid tie pay back figures, which are really good for the owners there. That leaves everyone else with still expensive stuff as the only option.
Like I said, hundreds of articles about new amazing breakthroughs over the past *decade* but it ain't hitting retail yet, same with any amazing batteries except for real small cheap gadgets, and even those are spendy, many dollars for a replacement cheap tiny bare bones cell phone or laptop batt still.
Luckily my old golf cart lead acid batts are still doing OK, I installed a desulphator to keep them clean, etc, but if I was to go shopping today for replacements..it would still be 18th century tech level lead acid as by far and away the best deal out there for bulk storage on the cheap. All these amazing breakthroughs with PV and batteries are not translating to anything joe six pack can get retail, so that's the question "why not"?
Ten years ago I really believed that by by now we would be able to slide on down to home depot and be able to grab 100 watt panels for 100 bucks, from a variety of makers. I thought it would be a lot more common and less expensive by now. I thought we might be able to grab NiMH or whatever for around 1/4th price they are still today, yet we can't, either product. And LiIon...just outtasite, ridiculous to even think about it for a home solar battery bank unless you are rolling in cash and don't know what to do with it. All the other exotic chemistry batteries..same deal, LiFe and so on, zinc/air, all that stuff, stuck in R&D land, while we potential consumers are still waiting for next week's amazing breakthrough article. In this same ten years, computers got three times as powerful for one third the cost..or is that not a fair comparison? PV is still around five bucks a watt retail, more or less the same as it was ten years ago. You can get marginally cheaper deals than that occasionally, scratch and dents, that's it. Where's the buck a watt stuff?
If this is your specialty, then please contribute more good articles about new batteries. It's hard to sort through the "coming soon in 10 years to never" from "coming soon, works pretty dang good now, perhaps on sale as early as next year" from "on sale now, here is a link" stuff.
Battery tech to me today is sort of like solar PV tech. I've read hundreds of articles of new amazing break throughs, yet when I go check prices, the PV panels I got ten years ago are still a deal compared to what I see offered for sale today. They are marginally more efficient today, but at twice the price. Same with ancient tech lead acid batteries for bulk stationary storage, or short range urban electric vehicles, still the best deal out there. As soon as you go to anything else, zooba, whip out the platinum card and prepare to pay as much for a battery bank as a new mid range conventional car.
That's what people are looking for, the currency unit to watts or amphours deal.
Except for the smallest portable gadgets using lithium ion, I am just not seeing any affordable and practical major breakthroughs hitting the market with either solar PV or batteries, compared to say the advances in the last ten years with computers/cellphones, what you can get for the same or less dollars.
Thanks, didn't know that. But that rule negates true crowd sourcing datamining for a project, because in a real non test situation it wouldn't matter, an org and corp, an ad hoc group, whatever, would be disseminating and collating information. As this is a defense department test, I wonder what the rationale was for the exclusions?
Going further, a google run group of volunteer balloon spotters might have done even better. Or an iPhone app, see balloon, mash button that uploads "I have seen it, here is the x-y" deal.
I am one of those folks you mention, but I posted my thoughts on AGW etc up above, so I am outside your generalized description somewhat.
Nuclear is way too contentious politically today, and therefore globally dangerous, because it is part of the "package" to where weapons can be made. You can't decouple it easily if at all. Threats of wars over access and development of nuclear power are *real* and in the news daily. Heck, some places take their nuclear waste, that is still quite dangerous, package it into weapons, that they falsely claim are "depleted" therefore "safe", when they clearly are not (more junk science based on convenience and profit), then inflict those weapons on a lot of people..over access to those people's oil! How nuts is that? (of course they deny oil has anything to do with it..right.. and it sure is a handy way to get rid of tons and tons of nuclear waste and not have to deal with it)
Nuclear reactors make "hot", that's it. That's all they do. We have plenty of other ways to "make hot" in a sense that pose no threat whatsoever to anyone and aren't contentious at all really. We don't need a "Sunshine non proliferation agreement treaty" for instance. We don't have a group of nations A telling group B that they can't have access to the wind unless they control it all, give their "permission", and have 24/7 onsite inspectors. We don't have sunshine or wind or hydro power or geothermal power WMD weapons. There are no threats of international sanctions or extensive bombing campaigns (then resultant attacks back, tit for tat) against any nation that is developing such things as solar power.
I am all for nuclear power-fusion, but not fission, except in a very few limited circumstances. And right now, and probably for at least the next fifty years or more "right now", the only *practical, working already* nuclear fusion power we have is solar (PV and thermal), and related to solar, such as wind and biofuels. Those should be developed more, along with a much more intense program of vehicle and appliance efficiency, and superinsulation for all buildings, and the elimination of as much physical job commuting as can be done with more extensive broadband deployment. Whenever possible, move bytes, not people.
I also like those alternatives over fission because they scale from individual *ownership*, double plus good in my economic book, all the way to huge commercial for profit scale, which can help maintain the baseload energy industry and help to also shift away from petroleum fuels and burning coal, to lead to more diversification of sources, more national energy security (for all nations), less monopolistic accumulation of cash and political power for the already established energy cartels, less chances or excuses for war, and a cleaner environment without chancing the above mentioned negative aspects.
The whole point of all this business is how climate change effects *living things*. Therefore, those effects/observations/collections should take precedence over other data as indicators to base future conjecture on.
There's another bit that is really critical here, pro AGW side sort of always says that the anti side -the "deniers" used as a derogatory swear word- are "in the pockets of big oil and big coal". You see that criticism all the time, even here on slashdot, in every one of these energy or climate threads. Well, the pro AGW side, who want an emergency situation to radically alter the entire planet and shift huge sums of currency around from person A to B, can therefore be accused of "being in the pockets of big wall street" with their carbon credits trading scam that is pushing AGW as "proven science so we need this new skimming and trading market" to the tune of projected trillions siphoned out of the economy, mostly shifted from the developed world to the developing world with wall street et al taking a huge fat profit in the middle for this "service".
If the criticism on profit motive is good for the goose, it is good for the gander.
Myself, I am way pro cleaning the environment and offering *substantial*, all the way to 100%, personal and corporate, tax credits for developed and deployed decentralized and alternative energy sources and devices.
If that helps to moderate climate change, just frosting on the cake. If it doesn't, it is still worthwhile enough to make the planet cleaner, to help reduce the threats and practices of resource wars, and helps to decentralize the money flows and help the individual more, to get them to be at least partly energy independent.
I *really* want to see alternatives developed to petroleum because of all the wars and strife associated with same... and to coal because it is just dirty. I am also way against that scam carbon market, enriching the already bloated tick parasitical global investment banking so called "industry", and the further push to some sort of global political government, both of which seem to be joined at the hip with the pro AGW stance. Decouple that harmful nonsense from the science and I sure would be a lot happier, but it is locked together now. So I am skeptical and have to take a lot of it-from both sides- with fistfuls of salt.
In other words, some sort of middle ground would be preferable to me that isn't pandering/under the influence of ANY big corporate profits or any furtherance of the nanny state, whether a right wing or left wing overbearing nanny. Had enough of both really, and don't trust either one-including either side's tame scientists- to tell all the truth about much of anything at all if it impacts their profits or political (including academic-political) power grabs.
That's what I would carry..of course I am primeval hard core...
How about boot from a usb stick when you need to do banking, and keep that thing really buried in your pocket, so even if the notebook gets stolen, your important stuff is still on you.
How about banking from a cellphone instead, just using voice? Is that possible with your bank?
I knew that about the towers as well (looked into buying a large one a few years ago as an investment), but it is still expensive to do on a national scale even just renting space. It would cost them some serious coinage and they would have to charge for service, it wouldn't be free. However, if they had a no BS service, where all packets are created equal, tethered or not, data or voice, etc and their phones were nice, they *could* do it and would get a ton of customers.
Yes, I remember that, but I am also thinking of these things called towers. They ain't cheap and you need thousands and thousands of them along with all the cellular electronic radio doo dads (hi tech speak there). I mean, maybe google could pull it off, but it would take all their spare cash, then some to do it.
The majors let the smaller guys in on the action, but they charge them well, all the pre paid guys, but if google was cutting into their voice plan cash...I doubt they would lease space to them.
Either way though I want to see much better and cheaper phones, and google and android and linux will help push it..
Slashdot Mirror
Always thought one of these would be slick
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Schwimmwagen
too bad no one ever made kit car knock offs for those
Long time ago I thought about trying to do a mod to my
VW bus to make it amphibious, by having two crank down pontoons on the roof, driving, they look like you are carrying two canoes, then down at the boat ramp you could just crank them down and lock them in place. Turn the thing into a sort of trimaran once it went into the water in other words. Never got past the sketching stage though.
Throw away pre paid cellphone with a camera inside the shipment. The consignee must turn it on, call the preset number, offer visual recognition of identity, along with an automatic GPS location (which should be pretty darn close to its programmed point of arrival), this recognition sequence to be determined in advance, hand signs, holding up an object, whatever, any good variable there.
The senders recognize it is *their* phone with the shipment calling them, so they know it was found, and trust or not trust the recipients based on the challenge/response agreement. If trust, after the recipients pass these bona fides, they get sent a return text message with the decode sequence so the whole shipment doesn't explode in their face. A short time window for all this to happen once the sub passes the point of locked up secure to recieved and being opened. The senders know when it should be getting there, they built and sent the thing, they know its range and speed, etc, so if they don't get any signal at all around when they should be expecting it, so they can send an "OK so far" signal, the thing is programmed to go to another location then sink and hold on the bottom or return someplace else or back to origin, whatever there.
The actual shipment can be in a pressurized container, any change of pressure sends a first radio message to the senders that the shipment is "there", there being someplace at least, it has been received by someone, and opened, so the next step determines eligibility or not. A lot of options there besides pressurized, could be a humidity sensor, heat, stuff like that, a motion sensor inside the cargo compartment maybe. Off the shelf industrial/greenhouse/agricultural/security sensors indicating a change outside of the traveling underwater normal. A glass window integrity circuit on the inside. Lot of stuff there out on the market now.
And if all of this has been MIMed/compromised anyway, the point is moot, both ends are screwed.
If operational integrity has been present though, we have trust + verify so the exchange is complete and satisfactory at both ends. Basically just a variation on pub and private key for verification, with tangibles instead of electronic data as the exchanged "stuff". the actual sub-in-hand is public of course, the challenge response to get the "not blow up" code is private. There's no crypto scrambling of content, but that's where the shipment being booby trapped comes in. If it is compromised, it is lost anyway, if it is a theft, you make sure it is lost, plus maybe take out the thief or man in the middle "interdiction" forces.
disclaimer: for academic research and hollywood amusement purposes only of course.... so ya whatever if they got james bond with Q in tow and cut into the sub while it is traveling underwater and know in advance what the pressure must be maintained at and all sorts of other jazz like that it could be stolen, but that's a pretty large amount of work plus amazing psychic powers you would need to have to steal the thing and actually get to the contents. Bomb disposal squads more just try to blow the thing safely rather than jump through all sorts of mission impossible tricks to defuse some device once it is on a fast count down timer.
Well, ya got me, maybe I am not remembering the model number correctly, although I do remember it was a three cylinder two stroke, and I remember the different exhaust sound. Wasn't my machine so I just don't recall the model number probably. (I think olden days, hippie and commune as keywords might have something to do with my recollection 0_o) ;)
gas was around 35-45 cents a gallon or so, something like that at the time. I personally was in between rides then, some friends had burnt up my old $100 flathead six volt '55 ford meat wagon (panel truck) trying to jump it with a 12 volt.
The snow plow race results were as I stated though, the beetle kept on going, well past what any of us thought would happen. Neither one made it all that far, the saab maybe 75 yards and the VW another 100 yards past that, and only because the road was straight right there. The snow was fairly deep and the saab built up a huge amount at the front/over the bumper and eventually couldn't crunch through it, whereas the vw rode up over the snow in the front and just kept going with the rear wheels with not much steering available at all, the front wheels weren't even touching the ground much.
The only saab I ever liked styling wise was the sonnet, but I never owned one, just used to see them tooling around.
I've only owned a handful/maybe a dozen or so sedans, I am mostly a truck and four wheel drive guy, although I have quite fond memories of my vw bus, which was another real practical vehicle, which I think of as a crossover/truck/sedan that got good, or at least pretty fair mileage, and had pretty good stock offroad capabilities with the addition of some adapters and larger real wheels/tires.
I *liked* working on the air cooled, simple, easy, no exotic tools needed other than two wrenches to make things easier, a swivel 17 for the 2 o'clock motor to transaxle bolt and a curved C shaped 13 for the pict 34 carbs. Dang..this is decades ago, so I'll add "IIRC".
The only easier to work on vehicle I ever owned was a 69 rear engine fiat spider 850, dang that was a cool little car, 50 mpg and ran like a sewing machine after I did a slick little mini hotrod rebuild. Their big flaw was cheap ass sheetmetal that rusted easily, which destroyed the body, which made the car instant junk. Too bad there..
You could pull the engine without even using a jack if you felt like it! You could grab it in the back, heft it up, and kick some wood under the pan, then unbolt it, along with the rear bumper and tin, and push the car away from the engine. They used these cheap ingenious flex joints at the drive wheels that were just stout rubber with some bolts through it. I never had to but it certainly looked like if you ever wore one out, say someplace you couldn't get parts and just *had* to fix it, you could just cut up some old tires and drill some holes and make a little stack of rubber plates the correct or close enough thickness that way and get going again. Had toggle switches for all the electrical with a fuse at each switch so it was real easy to see what was what, stuff like that to make it cheap and simple.
I didn't think a thin client was anything other than a diskless PC connected to a server. Seems like if someone needed a lot of them cheap, they could look for pallet loads of recent vintage/good enough specs off lease whatever computers from some corporation, where they remove the hard drives for destruction, and just use those. I bet you could get a bunch for fifty bucks apiece that way if you shopped around.
With that said, some company that already had full workstations could just remove the drives themselves, then add some servers, etc to achieve this thin client goal.
I guess I am just not understanding why less hardware has to cost more money, or is hard to find. Heck, my local rural town whitebox shop sells entire *bundles* of refurbed old business desktops plus crappy old monitors if you can live with a 15 inch one and keyboards, etc for 99 bucks, add 20 bucks for a 17 inch monitor. Pull hard drive, insert ethernet cable, add a server in the closet some place with some switches, etc. Just not seeing the problem here outside of the actual case might need to be tiny or something. If the guy found a deal for pallet loads with the hard drives and optical drives included, they could yank those and ebay them, then put the money towards more RAM maybe or setting up the servers, etc.
There's always barebones deals, too, for "brand new".
There was always the rivalry going on between the saab two stroke guys and the VW beetle guys over which car had the best traction in the snow. So we had the great drive off until you can't get any further contest (we had a tractor to get the cars unstuck). We got the good blizzard needed, can't recall exactly but around knee deep. Lined up the VW and the 900 next to each other on the old country gravel road and off they went.
The air cooled rear engine VW kept going around one hundred yards further, albeit with not much in the way of practical steering, it rode up on the pan as it mushed the snow underneath, changing the angle, pushing the rear wheels down even harder. At least that is how we all analyzed what happened watching this "race".
Lawn, saber toothed badgers, etc, just my recollection of the real world results with snow traction and two popular alternative cars then for all of us woods hippies.
As to winter *heat* in the cabin, well, the saab won there of course. As to overall rough road combined mud, snow etc get from point A to B day to day practicality, the VeeDubbs took it for the rural hipsters, the saabs more for the townie boys who came out to visit.
What trounced both of them was an old Model A Ford one of the guys had that still cranked and ran. I thought that was funny. They used to use that thing to drag logs out of the woods. It was the closest thing to a combined sedan/truck/tractor in functionality I have ever seen.
I agree on the he should be recognized, but disagree as to how. I'd rather guys like this were able to make a feature length film and completely bypass the normal hollywood cash skimming, over paid "star" paying and story altering facets, to just skip the whole bloated budget and higher cartel DVD and ticket prices MPAA thing and do for movies what the indy music artists are doing skipping affiliation with the RIAA crew.
If he can do this for three hundred bucks, maybe that means a full feature length movie can be done for under one million and not cost hundreds of millions. He still gets paid, but it would be all his and his crew then, not 99% going to middlemen and overpaid so called "talent", and consumers/watchers can get good films legitimately to view at much more reasonable prices.
It isn't that simplistic. A lot of the developing world agriculture goes to make foreign exchange hard currency to support the local warlord/junta and wall street fatcats and the IMF, the food production there goes to the developed world instead of feeding the local population *first*. There's much less need for "food aid" when the local agriculture has as a priority a diverse system dedicated at the first level to feeding their own people, rather than vast monoculture farms dedicated to overseas exports.
So it is actually the reverse in a lot of cases from this often alleged "common knowledge", the local population could probably live on their food production even with a lot of kids, if it stayed there more in the first place, whereas in the heavily developed nations, even with fewer kids, they would be hard pressed to feed themselves (and a lot of other basic life's necessities sustainability issues) without truly massive imports of food and energy and the still continuing "soft" exploitation going on with the connivance of their political and economic leaders.
If it isn't discussed, it must not happen or "see no evil" and get to pontificate on how superior one way is over the other. See, them dumb natives have too many kids and can't take care of themselves"! gloating. Then you look at it closer, they have been getting shafted for decades/generations and are stuck in a never ending cradle to grave foreign "debt" situation which was imposed on the bulk of the people there rather shadily in the first place.
Here is an example of one situation, the African nation of Malawi. When they used to follow the wall street/IMF western "developed nation" advice and way of doing business and running their agriculture, their nation starved constantly, using exported ag resources all the time for making money rather than first feeding their people. When they switched back to putting their own nation first-adopting those often criticized "protectionist" principles, plus just a scosh more education into some alternative ways of farming-they went back to self sufficiency a long way and built themselves back to being more diversified in ag and feeding their people a lot better. And it can change fast with actually rather simple economic and educational policy changes.
It isn't perfect, they can still have and do have problems, but they become "wealthier" faster once some priorities get shifted around back to the actual people as a whole inside some area and not focused on making the top 1% there and wall street, etc. even richer.
refs:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/malawis-farming-revolution-sets-the-pace-in-africa-821135.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7683748.stm
And just a further notation, speaking as a farmer. I will guarantee you, with 100% certainty, if *ever* there is a fast rising shortage of diesel to the "developed" world, that lasts longer than a couple weeks or months, even with "fewer kids", etc, you will see near famine or outright famine. Your best case scenario will be much less variety of foods in the stores at multiples of the current prices.
Without cheap diesel, you just ain't eating. You can ride some subway or bicycle all day long, wall off huge areas to protect the three eyed flying newt, and that isn't going to feed you. That's the *best* case with a fast loss of diesel situation, or fast rising prices of diesel due to any other reason, such as rampant uncontrolled or unregulated market speculation like we had a small taste of recently last year.
This also warrants a rather severe look at this huge push for an emergency "war on carbon" without any credible alternatives in place, in advance. Margins are really lean now with farming for a lot of places, and this is during good supp
You don't have any prepaid there? Just long term plans? I agree, those extended range expensive plans are nonsense, prepaid is where it is at now, plus phone tech changes so fast, why get locked in?
Pretty decent selection for that in the US now, from ten bucks new for a basic phone that just makes calls to over a hundred bucks with some apps and web browsers with them, etc. Plus several smartphones depending on carrier can be made to work on the pre paid networks.
Subcontracted, but a hardware device with their branding on it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Appliance
No one is talking about it because it is is a non issue, we have plenty of forests east of the Mississippi.
I have my doubts how safe they are long run as well, I am not a big fan of cross species genetic modifications,(selective breeding I think is fine though) but GM and cloning of just selected individual trees is in use.
http://www.google.com/search?q=commercially+grown+GM+trees
That's the crux of the matter, *employment*. This is hardly ever addressed when it comes to draconian "no you must stop this" laws and proposals as regards the vast rural areas of the world.
This is what I see all the time: Wealthy urbanites in the industrialized areas are all for "conservation" in areas they don't live, but they have pitiful to non existent whacko theories on what exactly the human beings who live in those other areas are supposed to do for a living. Can't cut down jungle hardwoods for lumber=evil, stop. Can't cut down the big trees to make row crop farms=evil. Can't cut down and replace trees with other species that have a globally useful economic function=evil. Can't raise stock animals because they emit methane greenhouse gas. Can't do row crops en masse because it requires spraying and artificial; irrigation, uses too much water. And so on, a HUGE list that wealthy urbanites have on the "you shouldn't do this" side.. Can't do anything at all on your property because one month out of the year there is a mud puddle that supports the breeding of the endangered three eyed flying newt-owl. all sorts of laws like that too, even if it means you are now instantly unemployed with not much in the way of immediate alternatives..yet the bills still come in every month, plus property taxes.
So, that's nice and all for all the well meaning urbanites, but a couple billion people around the planet are supposed to then live on "eco tourism"? For real, I see that thrown out by some of those folks as some sort of credible option. Nuts... Funny,speaking of nuts, I am not seeing any huge move for urbanites to exist entirely on a diet of imported wild harvested tropical exotic hardwoods nuts and berries either, which is the only other crop you can get from wild forest. But then, whoops, you are stealing the food that the animals need to eat too....so that's out...
That's about what is left if you can't harvest the trees and use them in manufactured articles and for construction lumber, or make some cropland. And forget mining anything, all of that is just instantly evil no matter what...
You just can't have it both ways, if these people want to just wall off huge forest areas of the planet and let them go wild forever, completely naturally, with no human use, they must first come up with viable, realistic and constructive alternatives for useful modern employment in areas that are currently at the bottom of the economic foodchain. Or offer a couple billion people a direct cash perpetual welfare subsidy to do nothing and just live there. Anything else is unfair, unrealistic, and practically speaking, unworkable.
Basically, I am for sustainable use, including managed forests, and I am *way* in favor of getting rid of the backward "environmental" laws that forbid use and harvest of all the fifty buzillion acres of dead forest land they let burn up for no reason every year in the western USA, said dead forest expanding rapidly from such things as the pine beetle. That's a huge waste, and contributes mightily to air pollution when it burns up from uncontrolled wildfires every year, with zero economic or practical benefit for anyone really. We could be using that wasted wood for vast biochar manufacturing facilities and for replacements for coal in some electricity plants for example, providing much needed jobs in rural areas, going to more sustainable energy sources, and also improving soil tilth with the biochar in established row crop lands. But no....can't do that, wouldn't be environmental, have to let it just burn up "naturally", while the runoff silts over all the creeks and wipes out the fish and stuff...
How about this proposal to solve all the environmental problems at one whack..it would work, too.. let all the big cities burn up "naturally", I mean fires break out there all the time, so just stop putting them out, which would greatly help to reduce the planet's population (those folks all want that as well, "too many people!"), most of humanity lives in big ci
Carbon credits and cap and trade and so on are a scheme to take trillions with a T dollars from one set of pockets and transfer it to other pockets, with a big fat wall street skim in the middle. The pro AGW folks like to say the "deniers" are in the pockets of big oil and big coal. Well, those folks can be said to be in the pockets of big wall street, the enrons and goldman sachs type boys. There are also numerous overlapping political power considerations in this debate now.
Of course there's corruption, and it already started where cap and trade is established. There's no way when discussing such *vast* mind boggling sums to even assume that there is not, that would be terribly naive and flies in the face of proven past human history. When you have that much money and power involved....
The question is, how far does the rot go and who is involved? How much have predictive models been tweaked to give a biased in advance outcome? How many dissenting voices have been ignored or shouted down? Who really is getting funded by whom, who is pushing x agenda or y agenda for financial gain and political power accumulation, hidden behind their particular set of tame scientists or orgs?
These are legitimate questions, and there is no "denying" the data of this ginormous middleman trader's skimming market they are pushing hand in hand with this "climate science consensus", there is no airgap here, those two things are rigidly locked together.
Heck, here's another, the other big "emergency" science debate, where there is "consensus" allegedly and all sorts of huge sums needed to be spent and people scared, etc. Swine flu pandemic vaccinegate maybe?
If there's big money and big power involved, corruption happens. It just does, always has. Scientists, academicians, "esteemed" journals..doesn't matter, they are all human, so we should never completely blindly trust them, or any other big business or big government, to be non corrupt.
from further down that same page, more on topic on why no large cheap NiMH yet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_automotive_NiMH_batteries
The history of NiMH batteries in electric cars more or less revolves around these guys
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobasys
Well, please explain then, if possible, why panels-watts per dollar, are just not getting any cheaper. People really don't care that much about watts per square meter of modules, they want watts per buck deals. Watts per square meter are more a metric for spacecraft arrays, because of launch costs, folks in suburbia couldn't care less if they have to cover half their garage roof or all of it, as long as it gets much cheaper watts per dollar.
Near as I can see, we hit a plateau of affordability around 2002 (last year I bought any myself, started in 99) and they are getting more expensive, if anything. I know all about the fabs and how they were forced to use silicon rejects for so long, the demand for microchips has been so high, etc, but seems PV demand would have increased enough by now to overcome that limitation, along with all these thin film "printable" cells we keep hearing about. Nanosolar allegedly ships some cheaper stuff, but it is pure unobtanium retail inside the nation they are manufactured in, they go to Germany last I knew because of the guaranteed grid tie pay back figures, which are really good for the owners there. That leaves everyone else with still expensive stuff as the only option.
Like I said, hundreds of articles about new amazing breakthroughs over the past *decade* but it ain't hitting retail yet, same with any amazing batteries except for real small cheap gadgets, and even those are spendy, many dollars for a replacement cheap tiny bare bones cell phone or laptop batt still.
Luckily my old golf cart lead acid batts are still doing OK, I installed a desulphator to keep them clean, etc, but if I was to go shopping today for replacements..it would still be 18th century tech level lead acid as by far and away the best deal out there for bulk storage on the cheap. All these amazing breakthroughs with PV and batteries are not translating to anything joe six pack can get retail, so that's the question "why not"?
Ten years ago I really believed that by by now we would be able to slide on down to home depot and be able to grab 100 watt panels for 100 bucks, from a variety of makers. I thought it would be a lot more common and less expensive by now. I thought we might be able to grab NiMH or whatever for around 1/4th price they are still today, yet we can't, either product. And LiIon...just outtasite, ridiculous to even think about it for a home solar battery bank unless you are rolling in cash and don't know what to do with it. All the other exotic chemistry batteries..same deal, LiFe and so on, zinc/air, all that stuff, stuck in R&D land, while we potential consumers are still waiting for next week's amazing breakthrough article. In this same ten years, computers got three times as powerful for one third the cost..or is that not a fair comparison? PV is still around five bucks a watt retail, more or less the same as it was ten years ago. You can get marginally cheaper deals than that occasionally, scratch and dents, that's it. Where's the buck a watt stuff?
If this is your specialty, then please contribute more good articles about new batteries. It's hard to sort through the "coming soon in 10 years to never" from "coming soon, works pretty dang good now, perhaps on sale as early as next year" from "on sale now, here is a link" stuff.
Battery tech to me today is sort of like solar PV tech. I've read hundreds of articles of new amazing break throughs, yet when I go check prices, the PV panels I got ten years ago are still a deal compared to what I see offered for sale today. They are marginally more efficient today, but at twice the price. Same with ancient tech lead acid batteries for bulk stationary storage, or short range urban electric vehicles, still the best deal out there. As soon as you go to anything else, zooba, whip out the platinum card and prepare to pay as much for a battery bank as a new mid range conventional car.
That's what people are looking for, the currency unit to watts or amphours deal.
Except for the smallest portable gadgets using lithium ion, I am just not seeing any affordable and practical major breakthroughs hitting the market with either solar PV or batteries, compared to say the advances in the last ten years with computers/cellphones, what you can get for the same or less dollars.
Thanks, didn't know that. But that rule negates true crowd sourcing datamining for a project, because in a real non test situation it wouldn't matter, an org and corp, an ad hoc group, whatever, would be disseminating and collating information. As this is a defense department test, I wonder what the rationale was for the exclusions?
Going further, a google run group of volunteer balloon spotters might have done even better. Or an iPhone app, see balloon, mash button that uploads "I have seen it, here is the x-y" deal.
I was surprised that UPS didn't have a team and won. Seems they would have had the most people out and about and probably seeing the balloons.
I am one of those folks you mention, but I posted my thoughts on AGW etc up above, so I am outside your generalized description somewhat.
Nuclear is way too contentious politically today, and therefore globally dangerous, because it is part of the "package" to where weapons can be made. You can't decouple it easily if at all. Threats of wars over access and development of nuclear power are *real* and in the news daily. Heck, some places take their nuclear waste, that is still quite dangerous, package it into weapons, that they falsely claim are "depleted" therefore "safe", when they clearly are not (more junk science based on convenience and profit), then inflict those weapons on a lot of people..over access to those people's oil! How nuts is that? (of course they deny oil has anything to do with it..right.. and it sure is a handy way to get rid of tons and tons of nuclear waste and not have to deal with it)
Nuclear reactors make "hot", that's it. That's all they do. We have plenty of other ways to "make hot" in a sense that pose no threat whatsoever to anyone and aren't contentious at all really. We don't need a "Sunshine non proliferation agreement treaty" for instance. We don't have a group of nations A telling group B that they can't have access to the wind unless they control it all, give their "permission", and have 24/7 onsite inspectors. We don't have sunshine or wind or hydro power or geothermal power WMD weapons. There are no threats of international sanctions or extensive bombing campaigns (then resultant attacks back, tit for tat) against any nation that is developing such things as solar power.
I am all for nuclear power-fusion, but not fission, except in a very few limited circumstances. And right now, and probably for at least the next fifty years or more "right now", the only *practical, working already* nuclear fusion power we have is solar (PV and thermal), and related to solar, such as wind and biofuels. Those should be developed more, along with a much more intense program of vehicle and appliance efficiency, and superinsulation for all buildings, and the elimination of as much physical job commuting as can be done with more extensive broadband deployment. Whenever possible, move bytes, not people.
I also like those alternatives over fission because they scale from individual *ownership*, double plus good in my economic book, all the way to huge commercial for profit scale, which can help maintain the baseload energy industry and help to also shift away from petroleum fuels and burning coal, to lead to more diversification of sources, more national energy security (for all nations), less monopolistic accumulation of cash and political power for the already established energy cartels, less chances or excuses for war, and a cleaner environment without chancing the above mentioned negative aspects.
The whole point of all this business is how climate change effects *living things*. Therefore, those effects/observations/collections should take precedence over other data as indicators to base future conjecture on.
There's another bit that is really critical here, pro AGW side sort of always says that the anti side -the "deniers" used as a derogatory swear word- are "in the pockets of big oil and big coal". You see that criticism all the time, even here on slashdot, in every one of these energy or climate threads. Well, the pro AGW side, who want an emergency situation to radically alter the entire planet and shift huge sums of currency around from person A to B, can therefore be accused of "being in the pockets of big wall street" with their carbon credits trading scam that is pushing AGW as "proven science so we need this new skimming and trading market" to the tune of projected trillions siphoned out of the economy, mostly shifted from the developed world to the developing world with wall street et al taking a huge fat profit in the middle for this "service".
If the criticism on profit motive is good for the goose, it is good for the gander.
Myself, I am way pro cleaning the environment and offering *substantial*, all the way to 100%, personal and corporate, tax credits for developed and deployed decentralized and alternative energy sources and devices.
If that helps to moderate climate change, just frosting on the cake. If it doesn't, it is still worthwhile enough to make the planet cleaner, to help reduce the threats and practices of resource wars, and helps to decentralize the money flows and help the individual more, to get them to be at least partly energy independent.
I *really* want to see alternatives developed to petroleum because of all the wars and strife associated with same... and to coal because it is just dirty. I am also way against that scam carbon market, enriching the already bloated tick parasitical global investment banking so called "industry", and the further push to some sort of global political government, both of which seem to be joined at the hip with the pro AGW stance. Decouple that harmful nonsense from the science and I sure would be a lot happier, but it is locked together now. So I am skeptical and have to take a lot of it-from both sides- with fistfuls of salt.
In other words, some sort of middle ground would be preferable to me that isn't pandering/under the influence of ANY big corporate profits or any furtherance of the nanny state, whether a right wing or left wing overbearing nanny. Had enough of both really, and don't trust either one-including either side's tame scientists- to tell all the truth about much of anything at all if it impacts their profits or political (including academic-political) power grabs.
That's what I would carry..of course I am primeval hard core...
How about boot from a usb stick when you need to do banking, and keep that thing really buried in your pocket, so even if the notebook gets stolen, your important stuff is still on you.
How about banking from a cellphone instead, just using voice? Is that possible with your bank?
http://www.fon.com/en/
Maybe google should buy them out and start with that network
I knew that about the towers as well (looked into buying a large one a few years ago as an investment), but it is still expensive to do on a national scale even just renting space. It would cost them some serious coinage and they would have to charge for service, it wouldn't be free. However, if they had a no BS service, where all packets are created equal, tethered or not, data or voice, etc and their phones were nice, they *could* do it and would get a ton of customers.
Yes, I remember that, but I am also thinking of these things called towers. They ain't cheap and you need thousands and thousands of them along with all the cellular electronic radio doo dads (hi tech speak there). I mean, maybe google could pull it off, but it would take all their spare cash, then some to do it.
The majors let the smaller guys in on the action, but they charge them well, all the pre paid guys, but if google was cutting into their voice plan cash...I doubt they would lease space to them.
Either way though I want to see much better and cheaper phones, and google and android and linux will help push it..