What's humorous is that this would probably also enable a super advanced commerical skip. Most of the time, in order to support random channel access, there are i-frames every couple of seconds at most. With i-frames removed to prevent skipping, commercial skip just has to look for periods of really long iframe gaps and dump all that content (e.g., 2 seconds after last iframe to next iframe gets dropped). Won't work on clear-QAM (e.g., locals), but would work anywhere they implemented this "feature"
This is exactly the reason that many cheap things offer long warranties (or for consumables, unlimited refills [handling fees may apply]). Most people will just say screw it and buy a replacement for a $2 bulb rather than spend what might amount to only $1 for postage/packaging. Unless you're sending back a case of them, it's just not worth your time for the $1 savings.
OSX has focus follows mouse sort of. Between X applications or between terminal instances it works fine, but outside of those two instances it's (ick) click to type. You can get it to sort of work between the browser/mail clients and terminal sessions (e.g., terminal sessions behind the browser/mail can usually be typed in by mousing over them), but it's not terribly consistent. Now if only I could fix the splat-cxv for copy/cut/paste...
Switched video is already being used by the cable companies (well, Time Warner in any event). They've kind-of solved the killing non-cable company dvr's issue with a switched video adapter, which is basically nothing more than a stripped down cable box, and they'd like to kill that with 2 way cable cards. Switched video is really just an extension of the pay per view/on demand stuff, extending it to traditional channels.
IANARS, but if I had to guess, I would say that when the fueling probe disconnected, the fuel that was in the arm poured out and was ignited by the rocket as it went by. When the arm disconnects, there's a plume of white that spews out and it appears to be that which ignites a second or two later.
All you really need for this is an HDMI receiver with HDCP support but no keys and an HDMI or DVI transmitter. Wire the two chips together, add in a small microcontroller (msp430/cypress psoc class should be sufficient) to manage the link. Keyless receiver/transmitter chips use a simple I2C eeprom to store the keys externally on the assumption that you've paid the HDCP consortium for the keys (chips with built in keys require you to sign a license deal in order to purchase them). Use your pc to generate a valid sink key, program that into the eeprom, write some relatively simple code to manage the receiver/transmitter and your done. Analog Devices used to sell a dev board that would be perfect for this purpose - it contained all the necessary parts, save the microcontroller, so would need to build that part of the system. A bit of overkill for this kind of project, but it would work.
He's got an unused decimal point on each digit. That says he can get to 1,279,999,999 (use the decimal points as a 7 bit binary number). That should be more than enough. I think the writeup even mentioned using them for something.
And the number of embedded Linux systems with ludicrous boot times that could be improved by something like this is quite high. Think of that BluRay player that takes 90 seconds to open the tray from power off, or your new LCD TV that takes 30 seconds to produce a picture, or your Tivo that takes minutes to be ready to do anything. The vast majority of these devices run embedded linux and getting the boot times down to sub 10 seconds would go a long way to making customers much happier. I know I'd be much happier with consumer electronics if I didn't have to wait so much for things to boot (and sadly, since I've been doing embedded Linux for the last 8 years, I'm probably responsible for some of it...) Yeah, this demo is certainly a contrived example - I'd guess that they've stripped the kernel and u-boot to the bare minimum, loading from parallel flash instead of serial, no arbitrary delays anywhere and init is probably the application they're demoing.
Disclaimer: I work for LifeSize Communications, so I might be biased...
Anyway, in the dedicated hardware area, you've got HP and Cisco at the high end (100k++++), Polycom and Tandberg (merging with Cisco) in the middle end (10k++) and LifeSize and a host of other smaller players at the low end (<20k). If you want HD (720p30 minimum), you're not really going to find it on PC based implementations, most are limited to 640x480p15 - 30 due to the compute required to encode the stream efficiently. Polycom and Tandberg offer a mix of SD and HD products with the SD products generally being cheaper than the HD ones. Everyone in the "professional" video conferencing space is moving to HD. LifeSize offers products from 2.5k (passport - 720p30 only, point to point only) to about 17k (room 220, 1080p30/720p60, 8 way multipoint, H.323) with a variety of products in between. We pride ourselves on needing the least bandwidth to achieve certain levels of performance (e.g., we'll do 720p30 in 768kbps, 720p60 in 1mbps and 1080p30 in < 2mbps). Polycom and Tandberg offerings are generally 2x the bandwidth at the same resolution/frame rate. Cisco's telepresence stuff needs (I could be wrong here, but I think I'm in the right ball park) something like 18mbps for the 3 screen solution you've seen on 24 and a couple of other shows (that's 6mbps/screen).
There are plenty of pc clients, but truth be told, they look like a** compared to the (HD) professional ones in my opinion. Of course, I'm starting to realize that HD TV looks like crap too, so it might just be me.
Oddly, while the 8300HD does spin down the drive (though it does not spin down an ESATA connected drive), it doesn't ever turn off the video output - it just changes the video data to black (at least on the HDMI port).
Most of the CEC enabled players allow you to selectively enable or disable CEC support. And if the software is written correctly (and the path to the TV is not too deep), the source can tell if the sink is on or off, regardless of the connection topology. Of course, most of the CEC and HDMI implementations I've come across are half baked at best.
If I remember correctly, my ancient Sun 3/75 diskless workstation used to state: le0: no carrier when the (AUI -> fiber) ethernet dongle fell off the back of the box (the network is the connector was the old slam against Sun's flaky AUI network connectors of that time). Of course that was before 10baseT was popular, so I suppose it's possible that that form doesn't use a carrier.
If your Apple TV uses an HDMI + HDCP link, chances are excellent that there are still going to be reboots in your future (both of your Apple TV and your television set). Heaven forbid you put an HDMI enabled stereo in the mix too. You're just asking for it then. I don't know how many times my Samsung and Toshiba DVD players have refused to talk to my Samsung or LG TV's and shown snow or "Resolution set to 480P because the receiver does not support HDCP". And don't even think about connecting your non HDCP device to an HDCP source. After working with HDMI and HDCP at my job for the last year and a half, I think the correct slogan for HDMI and HDCP is "The end of inter-operable television as we know it". "It just works" was the last think on the mind of the folks who developed this crap.
I have an Aeron at home that's ok, but I wouldn't really consider it an "ergonomic" chair - I can never get it adjusted the way I like it - the arms don't lock in place left to right so I'm constantly have to reset them. The lumbar support isn't really useful as it's only got two positions and neither feels comfortable to me. On the plus side, since I live in Texas and keep the room relatively warm, at least I don't sweat in it like I do in a conventional chair. When it came time to purchase a chair for work since the one I was provided sucked, I ended up buying a Human Scale Liberty chair. Like the Aeron, it's got a mesh back, so I don't sweat in it, but it's got a gel seat which I find more comfortable than the mesh seat of the Aeron. The back support is provided by the fabric directly and conforms to my back well. The arm rests aren't as flexible as I'd like, but they at least lock in place. My only other nit (and this applies to the Aeron too) is that I can never get the arm rests high enough up to clear the top of the desk while still having sufficient room under the desk to clear the underside without hitting my knees/thighs.
Using surface mount leds in a 0402 package (4mm x 2mm) and assuming 1mm spacing around each led to allow for placement, and assuming you meant 800x600 single color (as opposed to RGB), you're looking at a display about 12 feet across and 5 feet tall and given that these leds cost on the order of a few cents a piece (say $.05 in quantity), you're looking at $24k for the leds alone. Triple that if you want full color. The simplest way to control it I can think of would use modules of 64x64 or so and a pic/cpld to control the leds using a row/column strobe technique. You'd connect the modules to a lan/usb and control the whole thing from a PC. Best to have local memory on each module so that you can let them run independently, but keeping each one in sync could be a pain. Oh, and don't forget the power. You'd need about 19kw of power for a single color version if all the leds are on at the same time.
If Snape could enter Grimmauld Place, then why didn't he told the Death Eaters where it was? Voldemort should be aware that wherever the Headquarter of the Order was, Snape knew it, and with Dumbledore's death Snape would become a secret keeper.
He could only do this if he was a Secret Keeper - meerly knowing the location did not give you the ability to pass that information on. He could have easily made it clear enough of them still didn't trust him enough to make him a Secret Keeper.
He was a Secret Keeper after Dumbledore's death. He simply chose not to reveal the location
How could Dumbledore best Grindenwald if the latter had the Elder Wand? also, how did he not defeat Voldemort completely with the Elder Wand when they dueled?
Wandlore in DH states that the Wand passed from wizard to wizard by force. If Harry dies of natural causes the wand will lose it's power. So everyone who has taken possesion of the wand has taken it from someone who was wielding it.
Grindenwald stole the wand without defeating it's previous owner, so, like Voldemort, it was just an ordinary wand for him.
How did Dumbledore's painting know of the plan to take Harry off Private Drive, in order to counsel Snape?
Possibly the biggest potential 'hole' this could only work if it had all been planned in advance. Well in advance, prior to Dumbledore's death.
At the end of one of the books, Dumbledore explains the protection offered by Lily's sacrifice and/or the Dursley's home and that it requires that he spend some time in the house each summer but also that it ends with his 17th birthday. It seems reasonable to assume that the Order would have planned Harry's extraction long before the event, leaving plenty of time for the Order to communicate with Dumbledore's painting (or one of it's linked paintings)
A couple of jobs ago I used a mindstorms set to debug a hardware/software bug in our network controller - every once in a while when the fiber was unplugged things would go haywire. It got really tiring unplugging the cable dozens of times to reproduce the problem so I rigged up a robot to do it for me and let me know when the error had occurred. Alas, the company went belly up before I got the chance to get them to pay for the Lego....
It's probably ok to skip buying HDCP enabled video cards for now (lest you install Vista where it's a requirement for HD content). Where you get into lots of trouble is if you have a non-HDCP compliant display and attempt to play content that "wants" to be HDCP protected. The HDCP/HDMI standards state that the source (your DVD for example) should down sample to standard definition and play back the content, perhaps displaying a message about your display not being HDCP compatible. In practice, this rarely works. I'm currently working on HDMI transmit and receive drivers for an embedded video product and since the legal department felt that the HDCP licensing was onerous at best, we decided to skip HDCP in the products. Displaying unencrypted content on HDCP compatible monitors has been relatively event free, but of the 5 HDMI DVD players I have access to, each and every one does a different thing. One displays a blue screen, two upsample DVD's to 720p, but only one produces a message about HDCP compliance (but also occasionally encrypts the signal just to spite me, requiring removal and reinstallation of the HDMI cable), one doesn't work at all and the last example (the only HD-DVD player of the bunch) either outright refuses to display video at any resolution for more than 1 or 2 seconds every minute, or gives you the first minute of the movie and then unceremoniously turns off the HDMI signal. HDMI and HDCP will officially usher in the era of TV's, stereo's and DVD players no longer working well together.
It's probably a swing at AMD who will be releasing 4 core athlons near the end of the year, which when combined with the recently announced 4x4 platform will allow 8 cores to be installed in a desktop motherboard. Intel has no plans to release a dual socket desktop motherboard (that I know of).
Not to defend BofA, but I have no problems connecting with generic 1.0/1.5 firefox on Windows, Linux or Mac. I've never connected with IE that I can remember (who trusts IE with financial info?). I've never tried messing with online account statement download (I'm still running quicken 99, so that kind of stuff died years ago). I've tried GNUCash on occasion, but always found it too frustrating to use because it doesn't work exactly like quicken (7 years of using the same version of quicken will do that to you, I guess). If I can make quicken 99 run under wine well, I'll probably just go that route though (wine, of course, is another ordeal for me).
Ah, but unless you've rewritten the BIOS to expect a (presumably non-coherent) HT device in that socket, your SOL. Any motherboard with an HTX slot should have a BIOS designed to expect a random non-coherent device in that slot. Most Opteron motherboard bios's that I've had experience with have a fixed topology that basically says that the HT link between cpus is either not connected (no cpu present) or fully coherent (cpu present). In fact, most bios's don't even allow different speed and rev levels of opterons in the sockets. It's possible that these guys have licensed coherent HT from AMD (which, last I checked, was not openly available), but developing a coherent HT device is a lot harder than a non-coherent one (just ask Newisys).
The Toyota and Lexus are both (4 cyl is Highlander only)
Hybrid 33 / 28
V6 Auto 19 / 25
I4 Auto 22 / 27
As to tailpipe emissions, granted they don't account for greenhouse gasses, but the only way to reduce those is to improve fuel economy. And in stop and go traffic, where a non-hybrid does it's worst for air quality, a hybrid does it's best.
As for the driving experience, I state that from experience - I've test driven the Escape 4 and 6 cylinders and own a Hybrid and while the hybrid will out-accellerate the 4 cylinder from a stop, it won't do so at 60mph for passing, and if you remove the electric motor, it'll be lucky to out accelerate anything. I'm happy with my car, I'm not that concerned about 0 to 60 times and I drive pretty passively. For my efforts, I get 33mpg combined in pretty hilly driving (actually, large hills at 60 are another lacking spot for the car...)
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What's humorous is that this would probably also enable a super advanced commerical skip. Most of the time, in order to support random channel access, there are i-frames every couple of seconds at most. With i-frames removed to prevent skipping, commercial skip just has to look for periods of really long iframe gaps and dump all that content (e.g., 2 seconds after last iframe to next iframe gets dropped). Won't work on clear-QAM (e.g., locals), but would work anywhere they implemented this "feature"
This is exactly the reason that many cheap things offer long warranties (or for consumables, unlimited refills [handling fees may apply]). Most people will just say screw it and buy a replacement for a $2 bulb rather than spend what might amount to only $1 for postage/packaging. Unless you're sending back a case of them, it's just not worth your time for the $1 savings.
And that's what a rental car is for....
OSX has focus follows mouse sort of. Between X applications or between terminal instances it works fine, but outside of those two instances it's (ick) click to type. You can get it to sort of work between the browser/mail clients and terminal sessions (e.g., terminal sessions behind the browser/mail can usually be typed in by mousing over them), but it's not terribly consistent. Now if only I could fix the splat-cxv for copy/cut/paste...
Switched video is already being used by the cable companies (well, Time Warner in any event). They've kind-of solved the killing non-cable company dvr's issue with a switched video adapter, which is basically nothing more than a stripped down cable box, and they'd like to kill that with 2 way cable cards. Switched video is really just an extension of the pay per view/on demand stuff, extending it to traditional channels.
IANARS, but if I had to guess, I would say that when the fueling probe disconnected, the fuel that was in the arm poured out and was ignited by the rocket as it went by. When the arm disconnects, there's a plume of white that spews out and it appears to be that which ignites a second or two later.
All you really need for this is an HDMI receiver with HDCP support but no keys and an HDMI or DVI transmitter. Wire the two chips together, add in a small microcontroller (msp430/cypress psoc class should be sufficient) to manage the link. Keyless receiver/transmitter chips use a simple I2C eeprom to store the keys externally on the assumption that you've paid the HDCP consortium for the keys (chips with built in keys require you to sign a license deal in order to purchase them). Use your pc to generate a valid sink key, program that into the eeprom, write some relatively simple code to manage the receiver/transmitter and your done. Analog Devices used to sell a dev board that would be perfect for this purpose - it contained all the necessary parts, save the microcontroller, so would need to build that part of the system. A bit of overkill for this kind of project, but it would work.
He's got an unused decimal point on each digit. That says he can get to 1,279,999,999 (use the decimal points as a 7 bit binary number). That should be more than enough. I think the writeup even mentioned using them for something.
And the number of embedded Linux systems with ludicrous boot times that could be improved by something like this is quite high. Think of that BluRay player that takes 90 seconds to open the tray from power off, or your new LCD TV that takes 30 seconds to produce a picture, or your Tivo that takes minutes to be ready to do anything. The vast majority of these devices run embedded linux and getting the boot times down to sub 10 seconds would go a long way to making customers much happier. I know I'd be much happier with consumer electronics if I didn't have to wait so much for things to boot (and sadly, since I've been doing embedded Linux for the last 8 years, I'm probably responsible for some of it...) Yeah, this demo is certainly a contrived example - I'd guess that they've stripped the kernel and u-boot to the bare minimum, loading from parallel flash instead of serial, no arbitrary delays anywhere and init is probably the application they're demoing.
Disclaimer: I work for LifeSize Communications, so I might be biased...
Anyway, in the dedicated hardware area, you've got HP and Cisco at the high end (100k++++), Polycom and Tandberg (merging with Cisco) in the middle end (10k++) and LifeSize and a host of other smaller players at the low end (<20k). If you want HD (720p30 minimum), you're not really going to find it on PC based implementations, most are limited to 640x480p15 - 30 due to the compute required to encode the stream efficiently. Polycom and Tandberg offer a mix of SD and HD products with the SD products generally being cheaper than the HD ones. Everyone in the "professional" video conferencing space is moving to HD. LifeSize offers products from 2.5k (passport - 720p30 only, point to point only) to about 17k (room 220, 1080p30/720p60, 8 way multipoint, H.323) with a variety of products in between. We pride ourselves on needing the least bandwidth to achieve certain levels of performance (e.g., we'll do 720p30 in 768kbps, 720p60 in 1mbps and 1080p30 in < 2mbps). Polycom and Tandberg offerings are generally 2x the bandwidth at the same resolution/frame rate. Cisco's telepresence stuff needs (I could be wrong here, but I think I'm in the right ball park) something like 18mbps for the 3 screen solution you've seen on 24 and a couple of other shows (that's 6mbps/screen).
There are plenty of pc clients, but truth be told, they look like a** compared to the (HD) professional ones in my opinion. Of course, I'm starting to realize that HD TV looks like crap too, so it might just be me.
Oddly, while the 8300HD does spin down the drive (though it does not spin down an ESATA connected drive), it doesn't ever turn off the video output - it just changes the video data to black (at least on the HDMI port).
Most of the CEC enabled players allow you to selectively enable or disable CEC support. And if the software is written correctly (and the path to the TV is not too deep), the source can tell if the sink is on or off, regardless of the connection topology. Of course, most of the CEC and HDMI implementations I've come across are half baked at best.
If I remember correctly, my ancient Sun 3/75 diskless workstation used to state: le0: no carrier when the (AUI -> fiber) ethernet dongle fell off the back of the box (the network is the connector was the old slam against Sun's flaky AUI network connectors of that time). Of course that was before 10baseT was popular, so I suppose it's possible that that form doesn't use a carrier.
If your Apple TV uses an HDMI + HDCP link, chances are excellent that there are still going to be reboots in your future (both of your Apple TV and your television set). Heaven forbid you put an HDMI enabled stereo in the mix too. You're just asking for it then. I don't know how many times my Samsung and Toshiba DVD players have refused to talk to my Samsung or LG TV's and shown snow or "Resolution set to 480P because the receiver does not support HDCP". And don't even think about connecting your non HDCP device to an HDCP source. After working with HDMI and HDCP at my job for the last year and a half, I think the correct slogan for HDMI and HDCP is "The end of inter-operable television as we know it". "It just works" was the last think on the mind of the folks who developed this crap.
I have an Aeron at home that's ok, but I wouldn't really consider it an "ergonomic" chair - I can never get it adjusted the way I like it - the arms don't lock in place left to right so I'm constantly have to reset them. The lumbar support isn't really useful as it's only got two positions and neither feels comfortable to me. On the plus side, since I live in Texas and keep the room relatively warm, at least I don't sweat in it like I do in a conventional chair. When it came time to purchase a chair for work since the one I was provided sucked, I ended up buying a Human Scale Liberty chair. Like the Aeron, it's got a mesh back, so I don't sweat in it, but it's got a gel seat which I find more comfortable than the mesh seat of the Aeron. The back support is provided by the fabric directly and conforms to my back well. The arm rests aren't as flexible as I'd like, but they at least lock in place. My only other nit (and this applies to the Aeron too) is that I can never get the arm rests high enough up to clear the top of the desk while still having sufficient room under the desk to clear the underside without hitting my knees/thighs.
Using surface mount leds in a 0402 package (4mm x 2mm) and assuming 1mm spacing around each led to allow for placement, and assuming you meant 800x600 single color (as opposed to RGB), you're looking at a display about 12 feet across and 5 feet tall and given that these leds cost on the order of a few cents a piece (say $.05 in quantity), you're looking at $24k for the leds alone. Triple that if you want full color. The simplest way to control it I can think of would use modules of 64x64 or so and a pic/cpld to control the leds using a row/column strobe technique. You'd connect the modules to a lan/usb and control the whole thing from a PC. Best to have local memory on each module so that you can let them run independently, but keeping each one in sync could be a pain. Oh, and don't forget the power. You'd need about 19kw of power for a single color version if all the leds are on at the same time.
He could only do this if he was a Secret Keeper - meerly knowing the location did not give you the ability to pass that information on. He could have easily made it clear enough of them still didn't trust him enough to make him a Secret Keeper.
He was a Secret Keeper after Dumbledore's death. He simply chose not to reveal the location
How could Dumbledore best Grindenwald if the latter had the Elder Wand? also, how did he not defeat Voldemort completely with the Elder Wand when they dueled?
Wandlore in DH states that the Wand passed from wizard to wizard by force. If Harry dies of natural causes the wand will lose it's power. So everyone who has taken possesion of the wand has taken it from someone who was wielding it.
Grindenwald stole the wand without defeating it's previous owner, so, like Voldemort, it was just an ordinary wand for him.
How did Dumbledore's painting know of the plan to take Harry off Private Drive, in order to counsel Snape?
Possibly the biggest potential 'hole' this could only work if it had all been planned in advance. Well in advance, prior to Dumbledore's death.
At the end of one of the books, Dumbledore explains the protection offered by Lily's sacrifice and/or the Dursley's home and that it requires that he spend some time in the house each summer but also that it ends with his 17th birthday. It seems reasonable to assume that the Order would have planned Harry's extraction long before the event, leaving plenty of time for the Order to communicate with Dumbledore's painting (or one of it's linked paintings)
A couple of jobs ago I used a mindstorms set to debug a hardware/software bug in our network controller - every once in a while when the fiber was unplugged things would go haywire. It got really tiring unplugging the cable dozens of times to reproduce the problem so I rigged up a robot to do it for me and let me know when the error had occurred. Alas, the company went belly up before I got the chance to get them to pay for the Lego....
Is living in darkness the answer to wireless security or do you just ground your aluminum screened windows and hope for the best?
It's probably ok to skip buying HDCP enabled video cards for now (lest you install Vista where it's a requirement for HD content). Where you get into lots of trouble is if you have a non-HDCP compliant display and attempt to play content that "wants" to be HDCP protected. The HDCP/HDMI standards state that the source (your DVD for example) should down sample to standard definition and play back the content, perhaps displaying a message about your display not being HDCP compatible. In practice, this rarely works. I'm currently working on HDMI transmit and receive drivers for an embedded video product and since the legal department felt that the HDCP licensing was onerous at best, we decided to skip HDCP in the products. Displaying unencrypted content on HDCP compatible monitors has been relatively event free, but of the 5 HDMI DVD players I have access to, each and every one does a different thing. One displays a blue screen, two upsample DVD's to 720p, but only one produces a message about HDCP compliance (but also occasionally encrypts the signal just to spite me, requiring removal and reinstallation of the HDMI cable), one doesn't work at all and the last example (the only HD-DVD player of the bunch) either outright refuses to display video at any resolution for more than 1 or 2 seconds every minute, or gives you the first minute of the movie and then unceremoniously turns off the HDMI signal. HDMI and HDCP will officially usher in the era of TV's, stereo's and DVD players no longer working well together.
At least until 2038 or so that is...
It's probably a swing at AMD who will be releasing 4 core athlons near the end of the year, which when combined with the recently announced 4x4 platform will allow 8 cores to be installed in a desktop motherboard. Intel has no plans to release a dual socket desktop motherboard (that I know of).
Not to defend BofA, but I have no problems connecting with generic 1.0/1.5 firefox on Windows, Linux or Mac. I've never connected with IE that I can remember (who trusts IE with financial info?). I've never tried messing with online account statement download (I'm still running quicken 99, so that kind of stuff died years ago). I've tried GNUCash on occasion, but always found it too frustrating to use because it doesn't work exactly like quicken (7 years of using the same version of quicken will do that to you, I guess). If I can make quicken 99 run under wine well, I'll probably just go that route though (wine, of course, is another ordeal for me).
Ah, but unless you've rewritten the BIOS to expect a (presumably non-coherent) HT device in that socket, your SOL. Any motherboard with an HTX slot should have a BIOS designed to expect a random non-coherent device in that slot. Most Opteron motherboard bios's that I've had experience with have a fixed topology that basically says that the HT link between cpus is either not connected (no cpu present) or fully coherent (cpu present). In fact, most bios's don't even allow different speed and rev levels of opterons in the sockets. It's possible that these guys have licensed coherent HT from AMD (which, last I checked, was not openly available), but developing a coherent HT device is a lot harder than a non-coherent one (just ask Newisys).
From the EPA (city / highway):
Escape 2WD Hybrid 36 / 31
Escape 2WD 4cyl M5 24 / 29
Escape 2WD 6cyl A4 20 / 25
The Toyota and Lexus are both (4 cyl is Highlander only)
Hybrid 33 / 28
V6 Auto 19 / 25
I4 Auto 22 / 27
As to tailpipe emissions, granted they don't account for greenhouse gasses, but the only way to reduce those is to improve fuel economy. And in stop and go traffic, where a non-hybrid does it's worst for air quality, a hybrid does it's best.
As for the driving experience, I state that from experience - I've test driven the Escape 4 and 6 cylinders and own a Hybrid and while the hybrid will out-accellerate the 4 cylinder from a stop, it won't do so at 60mph for passing, and if you remove the electric motor, it'll be lucky to out accelerate anything. I'm happy with my car, I'm not that concerned about 0 to 60 times and I drive pretty passively. For my efforts, I get 33mpg combined in pretty hilly driving (actually, large hills at 60 are another lacking spot for the car...)