I have no mod points but you are 100% correct. What I think the poster is confused about is the antenna couplers that are typically used to impedance match HF radios with their antenna. In a very layman's description the coupler could be as electrically changing the length of the antenna. However in true this is only really from the perspective of the transmitter. It doesn't really change the performance of the antenna when receiving in the sense he was suggesting.
I am not sure if you are trying to be sarcastic or not but SNR is actually very important. If you want to talk about a single figure you should possibly use discuss the overall sensitivity the receiver. You could also talk about the ability of the demodulator to discriminate the signal from the noise. The fixation on signal attenuation is a bit like the mega pixel crap on mobile phone - the pixel count is not the whole picture.;)
Having said that certain the iPhone do suffer from user induced reception loss (death grip). It also appears that other phones also suffer from this effect to some extent.
I doubt that the antenna is the actual problem. From what I remember and it has been a long time 20 years since I did any serious antenna design. You actually need longer antennas for lower frequencies eg 1/2 the wavelength for a dipole and 1/4 for a whip antenna. So the phone antenna can be quite small. Similarly I would be surprise if you couldn't make a fairly broad band antenna at for a mobile. The biggest problem with broadband antennas is impedance mismatching and hence VSWR problems mainly for TX. As you move up the frequency a given antenna can generally operate over a wider band more easily because the wavelength difference between the antenna length and the TX frequency becomes for a given TX band. A 20MHz (capital M for Mega not small for milli) TX band at 100 MHz will give you ~ a 20% variance in wavelength which is larger than the wavelength variation from 1.7 GHz to 2GHz.
Having said that I haven't done any RF design for phones so there may be some gotchas antenna wise that I am not aware of but I suspect the problem if it is a space problem may come from other front end requirements such as the high Q crystal filters, diplexer if they use one, and power amp (depending on design) but I am only guessing. Certainly there are lots of small quad band phones that seem to have solved this problem. Expense is another factor.
Unfortunately is in not just happening in the land of the brave. In Australia we have our own crack pots and looney politicians that just don't "want to believe". Fortunately they are not in power but they still do damage. This blind faith that it will be OK seems to be pretty locked up with fundamentalism and self interest. The vocal opponents either have some link to coal (our major CO2 pollution source) or are part of the vocal religious minority. While they are very much in the minority they are noisy and do receive media attention.
I do have sympathy with scientists on this issue. At some point it isn't worth wasting time arguing with someone who is so intellectually impaired by their "beliefs" that they aren't actually capable of having a rational discussion about the issue. It is like arguing with fundamentalist christians about evolution. At least on this point we are well advanced of the US, Australian is pretty secular by world standards and extremely secular by US standards, acceptance of evolution is high. Event the religious establishment generally accepts that the science is in.
Normally I would say just give them a couple of years and the loons will come around, but in this case we don't have a couple of years to waste.
I don't know a 30 second video ad every time you run the spelling checker could help the adoption of OO of G Docs. It really depends on how intrusive the ads are and going by the Zune they will be trying to get their dollars worth from you.
No the original poster is quite correct. The Prius relies on the fact that the car is stopping and starting to lower the long run (average) energy requirements of the car. Hence you can use a smaller power plant and supplement the higher instantaneous energy demands with the electric motor driven from a storage battery. However when travelling at speed the average power requirement goes up and the IC has to work harder. If you drive conservatively (ie slower and very smooth) you don't overtax the IC and run it in an inefficient mode. If you try to keep up with every other car then that small power plant coupled with heavy batteries become a significant disadvantage.
By comparison my large Citroen C5 station wagon averages 5.6l/100km on long runs in summer with the a/c running over rolling hills without me being very careful*. My C5 is a much bigger car that is well within the margin of the Prius' efficiency on highway cycle, but worse round the town ~8.2 l/100km around the city for the last 3000km. As you will notice I get a significant increase in efficiency between city and highway driving, as all IC cars do. They are designed to perform well at high speeds and do OK around the city (people like fast powerful cars). This doesn't happen with the Prius, is can actually be the other way around.
More generally, if you look at other comparable small cars they do significantly better than my car and seriously embarrass the Prius. The Prius may look good in the US when compared to a SUV, but they suck in comparison other small cars and then there is diesel.
* Remember a single persons experience does not make a data set.
My current commute is 8 mile one way. Some years ago my commute was 15 mile with hills. Once you are fit (it doesn't take long) you should easily be able to do it in an hour or less. I ride all year but that is my choice. I even pick my kids up from child care and walk them home with my bike. I know that the US (I assume that is were you live) is a car culture and can be unfriendly to bikes, but you can ride there, lots of people do. The actually reason most people don't ride is convenience it takes just a little longer so people don't ride about, 5-10 minutes for me. From the money side you do realise how much a car costs you per week. Our national motoring associations recent estimates estimate the smallest car you can buy will cost at least A$100 a week, the average car was a lot more. Just remember that second car is a small part of a mortgage. Not that I really care each to their own. If you want to fill you car at $2.00/L to drive a 15 miles to work that is your choice. However, just don't expect any of my space if you sit next to me on the plane and if we start running out of food the high maintenance people are first into the pies.
Exercise is know to suppress appetite. Additionally increased muscle mass increases you resting kJ consumption.
On a side note the interesting thing about obesity is that it has been shown that as your weight increases your sensitivity to your internal signals that tell you that you are full decreases. Hence you tend to overeat even when you are actually full.
Have you ever used Cocoa? I would really take some convincing that.NET is better. In fact I will have to wait an see what an MS Office looks like under it before I am entirely convinced that it is prime time yet.
On the other hand the are a number of substantial high quality Cocoa programs out their that show it works. The general consensus (including me) is that Cocoa is very easy to program and well thought out. You have to remember that it is also very mature. It is over 18 years old. Having said that there is very little cruft, something that you can't say about.NET yet. How many versions are there? 1, 1.1, 2? Are they compatible.NET is really a newer possibly shiner Java. Notice I didn't say better. It is still in development and certainly isn't even close to what they were originally promising. That is not to say it is a bad environment.
Personally I like Cocoa (the frameworks). They are very consistent, simple and at the same time very powerful. I also think that Objective-C is a better OO C than c++. That would not be hard though.
C# and.NET sound fine. Its just not available on the terms or the system that I want. Yeah I know about OS X locking, and a know about Mono (remember there is GNUStep as well). I have chosen my poison and the cool aid is great. By the sounds of it.NET is your.
You do realise this is exactly what Microsoft did in the late 80 and early 90 with their OEM license agreements. They forces ever manufacture to pay for Windows regardless of whether it shipped with a computer or not. This was all supposedly done to prevent piracy.
However if you don't follow the MS monopoly case this was one of the tactics they illegally used to crush competition. Despite how attractive this may appear to you. There are lots of people that would have significant problems if MS tried to return to being all out evil, instead of just bumbling incompetents.
Sure, but it is not that much of an advantage. If you watch the video it looks like the sodium vapor is a quarter of the output of their new "super product". If it was actually that much better they would have let the sodium vapor warm up. I don't know about you but if it was that much better they wouldn't have to cheat.
These lamps are actually pretty average regarding power and life. Street lamps have a much longer life span, typically achieve at least 150-160 lm/w and up to 200 lm/w at their most efficient. The main thing going for these lights is the fact that they are broad spectrum.
I found the video interesting in that they didn't allow enough time for the street lamp to warm up. Sodium vapor lamps require at least a couple of minutes to reach their operating level. This was obviously deliberate. There is not way that a 140 lm/w running at 250w is going to beat a 400 w street light at 150 lm/w.
The same thing goes for the LED. They claim that leds only achieve around 70 lm/w. That was true about a year ago, commercially available units (http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.2394 107~114lm 350mW (1w)) now achieving around 100-120 lm/w for the medium power (a 3w device operating at around 1w). It looks like they will reach around 200 lm/w at high power in a couple of year. Ultimately it is likely that leds will reach around 300 lm/w. LED life span is also way higher ~22 years as opposed to 2 years.
I am sure that this light will have its applications. However, unless its efficient and life span can be ramped up, sodium vapor lights will continue to dominate for the near term with leds dominating the world in the future.
Well I just checked and it is more expensive $1999 for the base model. It's starting weight is 2.4lb with the small small battery, no optical drive and the SSD harddrive. The low end model also had no bluetooth or wireless. The R500 is only a 12.1" screen (there is most of your weight difference) as opposed to the 13.3" on the Air. Max memory 1.5 GB for the base up to 2 GB for the top. It is.77" thick at the front 1" thick at the rear. The Macbook Air is 0.16" to 0.76" looks a lot thinner to me. Further, as you said it has one of those really slow low voltage 1.2 GHz Core 2 with a 533 MHz FSB where the Air has a 1.6GHz Core 2 with a 800 Mhz FSB.
I don't know about about you but the R500 looks to be more expensive, slower and apart from a few more ports and an internal optical drive (an external is fine by me), lacking in features.
But each to their own.
Typical crappy article about Vinyl. 15 yr old "They sound better" than my 32kbps wmas or the other guy "they are warmer" mp3 sound "tinny". Well yeah, but vinyl isn't a better medium. All you need to know is that low bit rate compressed files are crap, the loudness war is killing music and if you really want you can just add a bit of third harmonic distortion if you want that "nuanced warmer" sound. For those that don't remember when CD first came out you could buy very expensive little inline boxes that made the sound "warmer" and some CD player had valve front ends for the same reason. I suspect you can still get them, just look up $10,000 speaker cables retailers and I am sure they will be happy to sell a sound cleaning box.
Having said that I still like LPs from a physical perspective. A fold out album cover beats a 10x10cm book in an CD case and handling vinyl disc had a nice romance about it all. However, i don't miss worn records, the hissing or snap crackle and pops. I also love the portability of digital music. You can't run with a record paper and tapes just suck.
I totally agree. This VR Universe crap is a pointless mind game that gets us nowhere. It is usually based on broken logic and propagated by the media because actual reality is a little too weird for them.
It is like the one that goes if we can simulate reality then everyone would be doing it in the future and there will be thousand or millions of VR simulations hence it is by all probable that we must be in one. If that is the case why are there not virtual reality flying cars, why is the speed of light so low that I will never get to go to a galaxy far far away, weld a light sabre? Why are can't I shoot magic fire balls? Who ever designed this world surely stuffed up. It doesn't even have re-spawn!
Actually, Edison borrowed his ideas for a certain British doctor (Smith I think) who demonstrated working lightbulbs at least 10 years earlier. Edison was largely a successful business man and a great publicist. He was definitely a monopolist and not really an inventor (he largely stole ideas or paid other people to think up ideas and put them in his name). If history was fair we would have been forgotten and the greats like Tesla and others would be remembered.
Technically Firewire is better than USB particularly if you are after speed. Little point debating this. There is a good reason why Firewire is dominant on DV cameras. However, USB is cheeper and easier to implement so it does have some advantages. The price thing is something the main reason USB is king. Firewire will be around for a while yet although USB will most probably trump all until the next big thing.
I still like the VO, but I watched the original a long time before the DC can out. Maybe it just childhood memories, I haven't watched it since watching the DC, but I agree that the VO still adds some detail at various points that may actually help to the film. It's not all bad. Overall I am glad they have released all of the versions in a single box. I will finally have the opportunity to compare and choose the one I like the best.
I tend to swing to the side that Deckard is human. I tend to think that Scott was just trying be clever with the unicorn scene (its another Han shooting first edit). Harrison Ford has always claimed that Deckard was a human. If the Internet had been bigger and more accessible at the time I would suspect that Scott had read too many fan sites when he made the edit. I suspect that it just occurred to him after the fact.
In truth I don't really care either way, I just don't want Scott to change the film to remove any doubt.
The real problem I have is which box set to buy. Blu-ray. HD-DVD or just buy the DVD (although I want the extras on HD discs). I hate the disc wars and DRM that forces you must watch the bloody piracy ad every time you put it in the drive. It almost drives me to pirate my own discs so that I can simply watch the video.
How about Apple's engineers? They could always produce a Fench only version i.e. unlocked but the software locked to French. Sure there would be some American consumers that may learn to read French just to get an unlocked iPhone, but not enough to piss off AT&T.
Just what I was thinking. They never say how big the tank is. The boat could be very efficient or it could be the equivalent of a super tanker. Actually super tankers are not to bad on the efficiency stakes, long water lines, but I think the point still stands. Really it is a case of bad reporting.
It is like my friend who is working on quantum teleportation at ANU. Every couple of months the local news will pick up a story about something they will do and somehow spin it that we will be tele-porting around like Capt Kirk in 15 or so years. As he always says, assuming they can solve all the hard problems, it will work great as long as you don't mind being ripped into your component particles and then having 50% of them left behind in the process.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no mod points but you are 100% correct. What I think the poster is confused about is the antenna couplers that are typically used to impedance match HF radios with their antenna. In a very layman's description the coupler could be as electrically changing the length of the antenna. However in true this is only really from the perspective of the transmitter. It doesn't really change the performance of the antenna when receiving in the sense he was suggesting.
I am not sure if you are trying to be sarcastic or not but SNR is actually very important. If you want to talk about a single figure you should possibly use discuss the overall sensitivity the receiver. You could also talk about the ability of the demodulator to discriminate the signal from the noise. The fixation on signal attenuation is a bit like the mega pixel crap on mobile phone - the pixel count is not the whole picture. ;)
Having said that certain the iPhone do suffer from user induced reception loss (death grip). It also appears that other phones also suffer from this effect to some extent.
Back to the gimp pit monkey slave.
Love
Steve B
Yup and the have just as much interest now as they did after I got the email the 100th time reporting that they had just been announced.
I doubt that the antenna is the actual problem. From what I remember and it has been a long time 20 years since I did any serious antenna design. You actually need longer antennas for lower frequencies eg 1/2 the wavelength for a dipole and 1/4 for a whip antenna. So the phone antenna can be quite small. Similarly I would be surprise if you couldn't make a fairly broad band antenna at for a mobile. The biggest problem with broadband antennas is impedance mismatching and hence VSWR problems mainly for TX. As you move up the frequency a given antenna can generally operate over a wider band more easily because the wavelength difference between the antenna length and the TX frequency becomes for a given TX band. A 20MHz (capital M for Mega not small for milli) TX band at 100 MHz will give you ~ a 20% variance in wavelength which is larger than the wavelength variation from 1.7 GHz to 2GHz.
Having said that I haven't done any RF design for phones so there may be some gotchas antenna wise that I am not aware of but I suspect the problem if it is a space problem may come from other front end requirements such as the high Q crystal filters, diplexer if they use one, and power amp (depending on design) but I am only guessing. Certainly there are lots of small quad band phones that seem to have solved this problem. Expense is another factor.
Unfortunately is in not just happening in the land of the brave. In Australia we have our own crack pots and looney politicians that just don't "want to believe". Fortunately they are not in power but they still do damage. This blind faith that it will be OK seems to be pretty locked up with fundamentalism and self interest. The vocal opponents either have some link to coal (our major CO2 pollution source) or are part of the vocal religious minority. While they are very much in the minority they are noisy and do receive media attention.
I do have sympathy with scientists on this issue. At some point it isn't worth wasting time arguing with someone who is so intellectually impaired by their "beliefs" that they aren't actually capable of having a rational discussion about the issue. It is like arguing with fundamentalist christians about evolution. At least on this point we are well advanced of the US, Australian is pretty secular by world standards and extremely secular by US standards, acceptance of evolution is high. Event the religious establishment generally accepts that the science is in.
Normally I would say just give them a couple of years and the loons will come around, but in this case we don't have a couple of years to waste.
I don't know a 30 second video ad every time you run the spelling checker could help the adoption of OO of G Docs. It really depends on how intrusive the ads are and going by the Zune they will be trying to get their dollars worth from you.
No the original poster is quite correct. The Prius relies on the fact that the car is stopping and starting to lower the long run (average) energy requirements of the car. Hence you can use a smaller power plant and supplement the higher instantaneous energy demands with the electric motor driven from a storage battery. However when travelling at speed the average power requirement goes up and the IC has to work harder. If you drive conservatively (ie slower and very smooth) you don't overtax the IC and run it in an inefficient mode. If you try to keep up with every other car then that small power plant coupled with heavy batteries become a significant disadvantage.
By comparison my large Citroen C5 station wagon averages 5.6l/100km on long runs in summer with the a/c running over rolling hills without me being very careful*. My C5 is a much bigger car that is well within the margin of the Prius' efficiency on highway cycle, but worse round the town ~8.2 l/100km around the city for the last 3000km. As you will notice I get a significant increase in efficiency between city and highway driving, as all IC cars do. They are designed to perform well at high speeds and do OK around the city (people like fast powerful cars). This doesn't happen with the Prius, is can actually be the other way around.
More generally, if you look at other comparable small cars they do significantly better than my car and seriously embarrass the Prius. The Prius may look good in the US when compared to a SUV, but they suck in comparison other small cars and then there is diesel.
* Remember a single persons experience does not make a data set.
It seems like the term "Microsoft Open Source" is still an oxymoron.
I think you have left off three words "access to your" from the term ie it is suppose to be "Microsoft Open Access To Your Source".
Acid is a term that is often used but mainly how it can eat your data
My current commute is 8 mile one way. Some years ago my commute was 15 mile with hills. Once you are fit (it doesn't take long) you should easily be able to do it in an hour or less. I ride all year but that is my choice. I even pick my kids up from child care and walk them home with my bike. I know that the US (I assume that is were you live) is a car culture and can be unfriendly to bikes, but you can ride there, lots of people do. The actually reason most people don't ride is convenience it takes just a little longer so people don't ride about, 5-10 minutes for me. From the money side you do realise how much a car costs you per week. Our national motoring associations recent estimates estimate the smallest car you can buy will cost at least A$100 a week, the average car was a lot more. Just remember that second car is a small part of a mortgage. Not that I really care each to their own. If you want to fill you car at $2.00/L to drive a 15 miles to work that is your choice. However, just don't expect any of my space if you sit next to me on the plane and if we start running out of food the high maintenance people are first into the pies.
Exercise is know to suppress appetite. Additionally increased muscle mass increases you resting kJ consumption. On a side note the interesting thing about obesity is that it has been shown that as your weight increases your sensitivity to your internal signals that tell you that you are full decreases. Hence you tend to overeat even when you are actually full.
Have you ever used Cocoa? I would really take some convincing that .NET is better. In fact I will have to wait an see what an MS Office looks like under it before I am entirely convinced that it is prime time yet.
On the other hand the are a number of substantial high quality Cocoa programs out their that show it works. The general consensus (including me) is that Cocoa is very easy to program and well thought out. You have to remember that it is also very mature. It is over 18 years old. Having said that there is very little cruft, something that you can't say about .NET yet. How many versions are there? 1, 1.1, 2? Are they compatible .NET is really a newer possibly shiner Java. Notice I didn't say better. It is still in development and certainly isn't even close to what they were originally promising. That is not to say it is a bad environment.
Personally I like Cocoa (the frameworks). They are very consistent, simple and at the same time very powerful. I also think that Objective-C is a better OO C than c++. That would not be hard though.
C# and .NET sound fine. Its just not available on the terms or the system that I want. Yeah I know about OS X locking, and a know about Mono (remember there is GNUStep as well). I have chosen my poison and the cool aid is great. By the sounds of it .NET is your.
You do realise this is exactly what Microsoft did in the late 80 and early 90 with their OEM license agreements. They forces ever manufacture to pay for Windows regardless of whether it shipped with a computer or not. This was all supposedly done to prevent piracy. However if you don't follow the MS monopoly case this was one of the tactics they illegally used to crush competition. Despite how attractive this may appear to you. There are lots of people that would have significant problems if MS tried to return to being all out evil, instead of just bumbling incompetents.
Sure, but it is not that much of an advantage. If you watch the video it looks like the sodium vapor is a quarter of the output of their new "super product". If it was actually that much better they would have let the sodium vapor warm up. I don't know about you but if it was that much better they wouldn't have to cheat.
These lamps are actually pretty average regarding power and life. Street lamps have a much longer life span, typically achieve at least 150-160 lm/w and up to 200 lm/w at their most efficient. The main thing going for these lights is the fact that they are broad spectrum. I found the video interesting in that they didn't allow enough time for the street lamp to warm up. Sodium vapor lamps require at least a couple of minutes to reach their operating level. This was obviously deliberate. There is not way that a 140 lm/w running at 250w is going to beat a 400 w street light at 150 lm/w. The same thing goes for the LED. They claim that leds only achieve around 70 lm/w. That was true about a year ago, commercially available units (http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.2394 107~114lm 350mW (1w)) now achieving around 100-120 lm/w for the medium power (a 3w device operating at around 1w). It looks like they will reach around 200 lm/w at high power in a couple of year. Ultimately it is likely that leds will reach around 300 lm/w. LED life span is also way higher ~22 years as opposed to 2 years. I am sure that this light will have its applications. However, unless its efficient and life span can be ramped up, sodium vapor lights will continue to dominate for the near term with leds dominating the world in the future.
Well I just checked and it is more expensive $1999 for the base model. It's starting weight is 2.4lb with the small small battery, no optical drive and the SSD harddrive. The low end model also had no bluetooth or wireless. The R500 is only a 12.1" screen (there is most of your weight difference) as opposed to the 13.3" on the Air. Max memory 1.5 GB for the base up to 2 GB for the top. It is .77" thick at the front 1" thick at the rear. The Macbook Air is 0.16" to 0.76" looks a lot thinner to me. Further, as you said it has one of those really slow low voltage 1.2 GHz Core 2 with a 533 MHz FSB where the Air has a 1.6GHz Core 2 with a 800 Mhz FSB.
I don't know about about you but the R500 looks to be more expensive, slower and apart from a few more ports and an internal optical drive (an external is fine by me), lacking in features.
But each to their own.
Typical crappy article about Vinyl. 15 yr old "They sound better" than my 32kbps wmas or the other guy "they are warmer" mp3 sound "tinny". Well yeah, but vinyl isn't a better medium. All you need to know is that low bit rate compressed files are crap, the loudness war is killing music and if you really want you can just add a bit of third harmonic distortion if you want that "nuanced warmer" sound. For those that don't remember when CD first came out you could buy very expensive little inline boxes that made the sound "warmer" and some CD player had valve front ends for the same reason. I suspect you can still get them, just look up $10,000 speaker cables retailers and I am sure they will be happy to sell a sound cleaning box. Having said that I still like LPs from a physical perspective. A fold out album cover beats a 10x10cm book in an CD case and handling vinyl disc had a nice romance about it all. However, i don't miss worn records, the hissing or snap crackle and pops. I also love the portability of digital music. You can't run with a record paper and tapes just suck.
I totally agree. This VR Universe crap is a pointless mind game that gets us nowhere. It is usually based on broken logic and propagated by the media because actual reality is a little too weird for them. It is like the one that goes if we can simulate reality then everyone would be doing it in the future and there will be thousand or millions of VR simulations hence it is by all probable that we must be in one. If that is the case why are there not virtual reality flying cars, why is the speed of light so low that I will never get to go to a galaxy far far away, weld a light sabre? Why are can't I shoot magic fire balls? Who ever designed this world surely stuffed up. It doesn't even have re-spawn!
Actually, Edison borrowed his ideas for a certain British doctor (Smith I think) who demonstrated working lightbulbs at least 10 years earlier. Edison was largely a successful business man and a great publicist. He was definitely a monopolist and not really an inventor (he largely stole ideas or paid other people to think up ideas and put them in his name). If history was fair we would have been forgotten and the greats like Tesla and others would be remembered.
Technically Firewire is better than USB particularly if you are after speed. Little point debating this. There is a good reason why Firewire is dominant on DV cameras. However, USB is cheeper and easier to implement so it does have some advantages. The price thing is something the main reason USB is king. Firewire will be around for a while yet although USB will most probably trump all until the next big thing.
I still like the VO, but I watched the original a long time before the DC can out. Maybe it just childhood memories, I haven't watched it since watching the DC, but I agree that the VO still adds some detail at various points that may actually help to the film. It's not all bad. Overall I am glad they have released all of the versions in a single box. I will finally have the opportunity to compare and choose the one I like the best.
I tend to swing to the side that Deckard is human. I tend to think that Scott was just trying be clever with the unicorn scene (its another Han shooting first edit). Harrison Ford has always claimed that Deckard was a human. If the Internet had been bigger and more accessible at the time I would suspect that Scott had read too many fan sites when he made the edit. I suspect that it just occurred to him after the fact.
In truth I don't really care either way, I just don't want Scott to change the film to remove any doubt.
The real problem I have is which box set to buy. Blu-ray. HD-DVD or just buy the DVD (although I want the extras on HD discs). I hate the disc wars and DRM that forces you must watch the bloody piracy ad every time you put it in the drive. It almost drives me to pirate my own discs so that I can simply watch the video.
Excellent post. This is why I still read Slashdot.
How about Apple's engineers? They could always produce a Fench only version i.e. unlocked but the software locked to French. Sure there would be some American consumers that may learn to read French just to get an unlocked iPhone, but not enough to piss off AT&T.
Just what I was thinking. They never say how big the tank is. The boat could be very efficient or it could be the equivalent of a super tanker. Actually super tankers are not to bad on the efficiency stakes, long water lines, but I think the point still stands. Really it is a case of bad reporting. It is like my friend who is working on quantum teleportation at ANU. Every couple of months the local news will pick up a story about something they will do and somehow spin it that we will be tele-porting around like Capt Kirk in 15 or so years. As he always says, assuming they can solve all the hard problems, it will work great as long as you don't mind being ripped into your component particles and then having 50% of them left behind in the process.