They banned handheld phones. Now they want to ban *all* cell phones even though I can't see how they're more distracting than talking to a passenger. Some stupid c*nt legislator in NJ is even pushing to ban smoking while driving (as if the smoking ban in all businesses isn't enough).
What's next - ban everything that might represent an 0.000001% daily risk to your life? No skiing. No driving. No walking in the street without a Snell approved helmet. And a $500 per day tax to cover penalties for transgressions you haven't been caught doing. You can get a waiver if you could prove that you stayed at home in bed all day, of course.
Life is dangerous, people - get over it! Oh, and screw the children and (moreover) any legislator that uses them as an excuse to restrict freedom.
... and other chains for that matter, is only that they're large, monopolistic, and limit choice in smaller markets where there's no alternative to them. It's that they drive smaller stores ('Mom and Pop' type as well as local chains) out of business. Think about it - would you rather own a hardware store and lumberyard and be able to sell it when you retire to have something to retire on, or would you rather be an underpaid middle manager in a place like Home Depot (often with no health insurance/benefits) your whole life? What the shift of power towards large corporations is doing is taking equity out of the hands of the middle class and putting it into the hands of corporations controlled by the wealthy - this causes the middle class to shrink and the ranks of the super-wealthy and moderately poor to increase.
So, before you buy your next widget, think about the kind of future you want *your* kids to have.
-b. - speaking as the owner of a small consulting business here
... not Iraq, for it is the home of the Axis of Evil (tm). After all, where else is the power to destroy the US (inevitably strategic) manufacturing base (by slashing prices and forcing production offshore) concentrated in the hands of a small oligarchical group? I can't wait until Mal*Wart starts selling cheap Chinese cars and motorcycles. Then the US auto industry and hence the economy will be in deep smeg indeed.
"The consequences of Linux not supporting DRM would be that fixed-purpose consumer electronics and Windows PCs would be the sole entertainment platforms available," Ayers said. "Linux would be further relegated to use in servers and business computers, since it would not be providing the multimedia technologies demanded by consumers."
Nah, the rest of us non-Windows lusers will just use the pirated versions of content, since it'll be easier. Fuck the recording companies with a sharp, pointy, broken-glass-studded 12" long motorized 6666 rpm dildo. This will encourage *more* piracy, not less. And artists/bands will still make money by having concerts - if you like a band these days, you'll go to one of their concerts to get the full experience anyway. Free music will just give them more exposure - I downloaded music that I'd never even *heard* before from my college's network in the 90s, and I ended up liking quite a few of those bands, and going to their concerts or buying CDs. I think that the more piracy will also encourage artists to innovate or starve, since they won't be able to make money selling recordings of their music from 25 years ago.
IBM doesn't really sell software. IBM sells professional services.
Which is a good deal for them since it keeps the money from customers coming. It's also a good deal for the customers since the upfront outlays are lower. Kind of like buying a used car for $1500 and paying $75 per month on average in mechanic's fees vs spending $20k on a new car up front or taking a loan.
Nothing seems to get a few easy votes for a politician like calling for longer prison terms for some crime or another (and there is no end in sight in the "war" on drugs).
Actually the New Jersey commission that recommends sentencing guidelines is strongly supporting a reduction in the minimum and max prison sentences under the drug laws. The current laws are increasingly viewed as unfair and unnecessarily expensive. I can only hope that the new Governor and the state assembly will have the b@lls to take the recommendations and run with them rather that laying them aside.
There's also a lot of support for doing away with the death penalty since the last execution was in (iirc) 1953, but that's a whole other issue.
It's an interesting progression. We won't give up on war, but we will go to great lengths to make ourselves less personally involved.
If it's robots killing other robots, then I'm fine with it. Of course there are the environmental consequenses to consider, but that situation would turn war into a glorified game that bankrupts the loser rather than a game of killing.
However, if it's robots vs humans from countries too poor to afford their own mechs, then that's worse. It'll be too easy for a nation with the robots to push around poorer nations without risk of repercussions at home due to casualties.
"It is well that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it." Robert E. Lee
The beauty of modern warfare is very few people die relative to former wars. We've only lost around 2,000 men and women in Iraq so far and although it is a trajedy (not the war, but the loss) it is far less than wars of the same scale in years prior. Technology makes the difference.
I don't think that we're hearing about the Iraqis and "private contractors" who are dying there every day. And, no, I'm not even talking about Iraqi "enemy combatants" or even "women and children." I'm also talking about the Iraqi police forces and troops that are supposed to be allied with us. There's a civil war going on there now, and we're only playing a small part in it.
Apart from the people dying in Iraq, let us think of the money that we're spending on the whole debacle. Wouldn't we rather be putting this money into education and keeping our country competitive with the likes of China and India (this means more *peaceful* automation technology so that a $30/hr worker can be as productive as a $5/hr worker abroad). Rather than trying to save a bunch of troglodytes, let's prepare for the next war which will very possibly be an economic struggle rather than a military one.
As far as terrorism, I think that it's best still treated as a *criminal* problem. What we need is improved human intelligence within the FBI and local investigative bodies capable of infiltrating terrorist organizations. Signals intelligence may help, but it's akin to the "needle in a haystack" exercise. There need to be competent people on the ground, listening and watching. And what to do with perpetrators (or attempted perpetrators) of terrorist plots once they are caught? Don't lock them up in Gitmo and raise public suspicions and ire. No: treat them exactly as if they were part of any other conspiracy to murder. Duly try them in a civilian court in thejurisdiction where the plot occured, put them in prison among general population, and if they survive that experience and lose their appeals, fry 'em up. Oh, and grease the electrodes with pork fat so that their 72 virgins will cringe away in Heaven:)
Actually, I'm working on just such a Linux for a building automation system. This will be a fairly low-end Intel desktop with ~512MB RAM controlling a bunch of microcontrollers networked over Ethernet. It will be able to (a) load new code into the microcontrollers (and compile it first) (b) exchange information with the microcontrollers - the microcontrollers will send the values of certain variables to the main box which will store them in a database. Certain database values will be *readable* by the controllers. The main control code in the main Linux box will interface with that database and that database only.
The file system of the main box will basically be entirely RAMdisk-based. It'll boot from a read-only USB key and create a filesystem in RAM. There will also be a small HDD or flash disk (< 10GB definitely) for saving the building *control* code periodically. Basically, the OS itself will be incorruptable - the only thing that will be 'corruptable' will be the building control code itself, which may itself run in a chroot gaol to avoid the possibility of corrupting the RAMdisk filesystem and the necessity of rebooting.
Also, the microcontrollers will be set up to default to some 'nice' behavior if the main server goes down (e.g. keep each room at ~68 degrees).
Which implies that as late as 1970, somebody was selling consumer devices designed to run off DC wall power. I wonder what they were?
Actually, most incandescent lamps (except those with Triac dimmers) and series-wound "universal" motors without speed controllers will happily run off of DC. I don't think that those outlets were *wired* in the 1970s - they were probably on the same panel at the elevators and fans and never changed over since the heavy equipment needed DC power. Probably wired in the 1920s or earlier.
I found out that Consolidated Edison still sells DC power.
Yep. My dad was the building superintendent of a church on 96th St. in NYC in the early 70s. The church building has a DC mains supply - mostly to run elevator and fan motors, but some of the outlets in the building were DC, and were identical enough to normal AC outlets that you could plug a regular plug into them. Well, before he knew better, my dad plugged an old TV into a DC outlet. Transformers don't take DC input very well - fireworks ensued.
-b.
In recent years, Microsoft has attempted to harden Windows further and reduce their exposure - in W2K3 Server, for instance, they've done a pretty good job of it.
Sorry? M$ may have done a pretty good job of providing timely patches for Windows Server 2003, but the basic system is full of holes that need constant patching. We had a freshly-installed Server 2003 box at work which had SP1 on it. We connected it to the network to download SP2 since we didn't have a copy handy. Within about 15 minutes of being plugged in, the machine started showing LSA Shell errors and rebooting unpredicatably. Turns out that it had been compromised by Sasser as well as another virus (forget the name). This on a virgin box, within a quarter of an hour of being connected!
Haha. Until 4 years ago you were still using a 486DX2/66? I can maybe understand it as a small router/mail server, but as your primary fucking machine? Un-fucking-believable. Also a 486 with a 20GB hard drive...
The hard drive had been upgraded several times. Actually, I had a Pentium laptop as well (Acer Extensa 600 150MHz Pent) but I seldom used the thing since it was very unstable and crash-prone for some reason, irrespective of what OS I was running on it. Among other problems, it would reboot itself and then hang halfway through a BIOS selftest. I think there was something wrong with the motherboard...
-b.
Until 2002, my primary machine was a 486-33 Compaq upgraded to a DX2/66 with 56MB RAM and a 20GB HDD. It ran some version of Slackware Linux, and also was the mail server for a few accounts (family, my girlfriend, a couple friends, as well as mine). I even wrote school papers on it using LaTeX and ran a basic X window system with fvwm. At no point was it horrendously slow; in fact, it was faster than most of the Win98/Win2k boxes of people that I knew. It was a sad day when the machine finally succumbed to a power supply failure that somehow fried the main board. Believe it or not, the 20GB HDD lives on as an aux disk in my current server, which is a Dell 1.5GHz Pentium. On that machine, the latest "testing" distro of Debian runs a lot faster than Win Server 2003.
-b.
I thought you were talking about an internal laptop drive
The Powerbooks and iBooks that I've seen all use standard 2.5" notebook ATA hard drives. Any good computer store (not CompUSA) should be able to sell you one for less than what Apple charges for it. Installation is a pain, but not awful if you get about $10 worth of tools and go nice and slowly.
BTW- I've successfully swapped HDDs between *books and Wintel laptops.
Not turning over the key (for any reason) is an offense punishable by a couple of years in prison anyway.
Dunno, if I were involved in a terrorist act that killed a few thousand people, and the penalty for being involved was death (doesn't the UK still have the death penalty for things like treason?), I'd gladly take a couple years in prison as an alternative.
The Uniq used no combiner gearbox, and neither do Honda's hybrids. Toyota has done a better job at marketing their hybrid drive, but Hondas are actually getting better MPG without the combiner gearbox (though a pure electric mode is not possible).
Nope, the current Prius gets better efficiency (60mpg city vs 51) than the current Civic - the Insight is much smaller than the Prius and thus isn't comparable. However, this might have to do with the fact that the Civic comes only with a belt-type CVT - belt-type CVTs are less efficient than manual gearboxes due to the fact that the belt has to be tensioned a lot so as not to slip. I wonder how the Civic would do with a manual gearbox or an automatically-shifted manual gearbox like Audi's DSG.
The Prius's system might actually be theoretically less efficient than the Honda's since it uses a generator as the fulcrum of a torque split device - this means that the generator always has to be generating power for the car to be pushed by the gas engine - this entails doing an additional energy conversion step all of the time.
BTW - there is a way to make Honda's hybrid system work in pure-electric mode. Using an auto-clutch manual gearbox, put the engine and electric motor on opposite sides of the clutch. If you want to charge at idle, have the clutch engage and the engine spin the motor with the gearbox in neutral. If you want to run in pure electric mode, shut down the engine entirely and run using the electric motor only. There doesn't need to be a clutch between the electric motor and gearbox input since the motor armature is light and doesn't have enough inertia to damage the 'box's syncros while shifting.
This all being said, I prefer the Prius' system since it's elegantly simple and has fewer parts to break - the transmission is a single planetary gearset. However, it'd be nice if they mounted it in the rear of a sports car since front-wheel-drive cars suck to drive.
Plug-in hybrids are a lame idea, especially in the US where electricity is more expensive than gasoline.
But the electricity can be made using cleaner sources - nuclear, hydro, or wind. I know that none of those methods is perfect, but they have fewer harmful effects on the environment than burning fossil fuels.
Some DC-powered electric locomotives and subway cars actually have regenerative braking, where the energy is fed back into the power grid. This is more difficult to implement with AC power distribution, which is used by a lot of electrified railroads in the US, since you'd have to convert the output of the traction motors to a waveform of the exact correct frequency but a bit out of phase with the grid.
Of course, if you're driving something as poorly built as that Jiangling nothing will help you, but that's another story. I'm surprised that Europe, with all it's regulations even allows the thing to be sold there. Then again, considering some of the things I've seen on the road there, it's not too surprising. The US is fairly strict. The ride height for the new Golf GTI was raised.5 inches to meet US bumper height regulations. And there are countless other vehicles not allowed here because of things like lacking 5mph bumpers. I guess the US government needs to make up for the fact that Americans are generally poor, irresponsible drivers.
Bumpers are actually 2.5mph now. 5mph bumpers were more of an consumer economic protection regulation than a safety rule - too many people complained about their cars getting expensively damaged in slow collisions. I think the rule was dropped because car makers lobbied for the right to do stupid things like equipping cars with quick-scratch body-color bumpers.
I *wish* the US had laxer safety standards (or at least accepted the results of Euro crash and emissions tests). That way, we could get nifty vehicles that we're missing out on, like the Land Rover Defender 90, Smart Car, and any number of French cars.
Remember that one of the main reasons that SUVs were sold was that they exploit loop holes in pollution, safety and fuel efficiency standards. They are by their very nature low quality vehicals.
Then again, it's possible to have a station wagon meet those loopholes. Look at the Subaru Outback wagon or Dodge Magnum. Neither is really tall (although the Outback does have a high suspension and actually does better off road than many taller SUVs), but both are classified as light trucks, at least for fuel economy purposes.
-b.
(who's quite happy with his 30 mpg decently-safe Volvo 240 wagon)
Then look at motorcycles and how they've embraced technology far better than any car out there.
Sort of. The ignition systems, engine designs, suspensions, and brakes of bikes are often more advanced and weight-optimized. However, many bikes still use carbs instead of fuel injection since the pollution standards for bikes are laxer and it's expensive to make a fuel injection system that works well at over 10k RPM.
Furthermore, bikes don't normally last as long as cars (100k miles is a long lifetime for a bike) so maybe their weight optimization has some negative consequences.
That being said, I ride. It's fun, my bike gets 60-65 mpg, I get to use carpool lanes alone, and I can squeeze into gaps in traffic... The downside is of course safety, but I'm willing to accept that risk to some extend.
actually, Miatas score pretty well on crash tests, or at least the old ones did. Plus, they're nimble enough to actually be able to get out of the way of that big honkin' SUV that's coming to get them.
This reminds me of when I was rear ended by an Acura in my (late) Fiat Spider. Total damage to Fiat, $100 (broken taillight and slightle dented rear). Damage to Acura: both pop-up headlights broken and nose smashed in by big 80s-style bumper of Fiat. Probably at least $500 to $1000.
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What's next - ban everything that might represent an 0.000001% daily risk to your life? No skiing. No driving. No walking in the street without a Snell approved helmet. And a $500 per day tax to cover penalties for transgressions you haven't been caught doing. You can get a waiver if you could prove that you stayed at home in bed all day, of course.
Life is dangerous, people - get over it! Oh, and screw the children and (moreover) any legislator that uses them as an excuse to restrict freedom.
-b.
So, before you buy your next widget, think about the kind of future you want *your* kids to have.
-b. - speaking as the owner of a small consulting business here
-b.
Nah, the rest of us non-Windows lusers will just use the pirated versions of content, since it'll be easier. Fuck the recording companies with a sharp, pointy, broken-glass-studded 12" long motorized 6666 rpm dildo. This will encourage *more* piracy, not less. And artists/bands will still make money by having concerts - if you like a band these days, you'll go to one of their concerts to get the full experience anyway. Free music will just give them more exposure - I downloaded music that I'd never even *heard* before from my college's network in the 90s, and I ended up liking quite a few of those bands, and going to their concerts or buying CDs. I think that the more piracy will also encourage artists to innovate or starve, since they won't be able to make money selling recordings of their music from 25 years ago.
-b.
Which is a good deal for them since it keeps the money from customers coming. It's also a good deal for the customers since the upfront outlays are lower. Kind of like buying a used car for $1500 and paying $75 per month on average in mechanic's fees vs spending $20k on a new car up front or taking a loan.
-b.
Actually the New Jersey commission that recommends sentencing guidelines is strongly supporting a reduction in the minimum and max prison sentences under the drug laws. The current laws are increasingly viewed as unfair and unnecessarily expensive. I can only hope that the new Governor and the state assembly will have the b@lls to take the recommendations and run with them rather that laying them aside.
There's also a lot of support for doing away with the death penalty since the last execution was in (iirc) 1953, but that's a whole other issue.
-b.
If it's robots killing other robots, then I'm fine with it. Of course there are the environmental consequenses to consider, but that situation would turn war into a glorified game that bankrupts the loser rather than a game of killing.
However, if it's robots vs humans from countries too poor to afford their own mechs, then that's worse. It'll be too easy for a nation with the robots to push around poorer nations without risk of repercussions at home due to casualties.
"It is well that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it." Robert E. Lee
-b.
I don't think that we're hearing about the Iraqis and "private contractors" who are dying there every day. And, no, I'm not even talking about Iraqi "enemy combatants" or even "women and children." I'm also talking about the Iraqi police forces and troops that are supposed to be allied with us. There's a civil war going on there now, and we're only playing a small part in it.
Apart from the people dying in Iraq, let us think of the money that we're spending on the whole debacle. Wouldn't we rather be putting this money into education and keeping our country competitive with the likes of China and India (this means more *peaceful* automation technology so that a $30/hr worker can be as productive as a $5/hr worker abroad). Rather than trying to save a bunch of troglodytes, let's prepare for the next war which will very possibly be an economic struggle rather than a military one.
As far as terrorism, I think that it's best still treated as a *criminal* problem. What we need is improved human intelligence within the FBI and local investigative bodies capable of infiltrating terrorist organizations. Signals intelligence may help, but it's akin to the "needle in a haystack" exercise. There need to be competent people on the ground, listening and watching. And what to do with perpetrators (or attempted perpetrators) of terrorist plots once they are caught? Don't lock them up in Gitmo and raise public suspicions and ire. No: treat them exactly as if they were part of any other conspiracy to murder. Duly try them in a civilian court in thejurisdiction where the plot occured, put them in prison among general population, and if they survive that experience and lose their appeals, fry 'em up. Oh, and grease the electrodes with pork fat so that their 72 virgins will cringe away in Heaven :)
-b.
The file system of the main box will basically be entirely RAMdisk-based. It'll boot from a read-only USB key and create a filesystem in RAM. There will also be a small HDD or flash disk (< 10GB definitely) for saving the building *control* code periodically. Basically, the OS itself will be incorruptable - the only thing that will be 'corruptable' will be the building control code itself, which may itself run in a chroot gaol to avoid the possibility of corrupting the RAMdisk filesystem and the necessity of rebooting.
Also, the microcontrollers will be set up to default to some 'nice' behavior if the main server goes down (e.g. keep each room at ~68 degrees).
-b.
Cheers,
-b.
I found out that Consolidated Edison still sells DC power.
Yep. My dad was the building superintendent of a church on 96th St. in NYC in the early 70s. The church building has a DC mains supply - mostly to run elevator and fan motors, but some of the outlets in the building were DC, and were identical enough to normal AC outlets that you could plug a regular plug into them. Well, before he knew better, my dad plugged an old TV into a DC outlet. Transformers don't take DC input very well - fireworks ensued. -b.
Sorry? M$ may have done a pretty good job of providing timely patches for Windows Server 2003, but the basic system is full of holes that need constant patching. We had a freshly-installed Server 2003 box at work which had SP1 on it. We connected it to the network to download SP2 since we didn't have a copy handy. Within about 15 minutes of being plugged in, the machine started showing LSA Shell errors and rebooting unpredicatably. Turns out that it had been compromised by Sasser as well as another virus (forget the name). This on a virgin box, within a quarter of an hour of being connected!
-b.
Haha. Until 4 years ago you were still using a 486DX2/66? I can maybe understand it as a small router/mail server, but as your primary fucking machine? Un-fucking-believable. Also a 486 with a 20GB hard drive...
The hard drive had been upgraded several times. Actually, I had a Pentium laptop as well (Acer Extensa 600 150MHz Pent) but I seldom used the thing since it was very unstable and crash-prone for some reason, irrespective of what OS I was running on it. Among other problems, it would reboot itself and then hang halfway through a BIOS selftest. I think there was something wrong with the motherboard...
-b.
Until 2002, my primary machine was a 486-33 Compaq upgraded to a DX2/66 with 56MB RAM and a 20GB HDD. It ran some version of Slackware Linux, and also was the mail server for a few accounts (family, my girlfriend, a couple friends, as well as mine). I even wrote school papers on it using LaTeX and ran a basic X window system with fvwm. At no point was it horrendously slow; in fact, it was faster than most of the Win98/Win2k boxes of people that I knew. It was a sad day when the machine finally succumbed to a power supply failure that somehow fried the main board. Believe it or not, the 20GB HDD lives on as an aux disk in my current server, which is a Dell 1.5GHz Pentium. On that machine, the latest "testing" distro of Debian runs a lot faster than Win Server 2003.
-b.
I thought you were talking about an internal laptop drive
The Powerbooks and iBooks that I've seen all use standard 2.5" notebook ATA hard drives. Any good computer store (not CompUSA) should be able to sell you one for less than what Apple charges for it. Installation is a pain, but not awful if you get about $10 worth of tools and go nice and slowly.
BTW- I've successfully swapped HDDs between *books and Wintel laptops.
-b.
Dunno, if I were involved in a terrorist act that killed a few thousand people, and the penalty for being involved was death (doesn't the UK still have the death penalty for things like treason?), I'd gladly take a couple years in prison as an alternative.
-b.
So, all else being equal, I'd expect the Civic to get better MPG, which was my point.
-b.
Nope, the current Prius gets better efficiency (60mpg city vs 51) than the current Civic - the Insight is much smaller than the Prius and thus isn't comparable. However, this might have to do with the fact that the Civic comes only with a belt-type CVT - belt-type CVTs are less efficient than manual gearboxes due to the fact that the belt has to be tensioned a lot so as not to slip. I wonder how the Civic would do with a manual gearbox or an automatically-shifted manual gearbox like Audi's DSG.
The Prius's system might actually be theoretically less efficient than the Honda's since it uses a generator as the fulcrum of a torque split device - this means that the generator always has to be generating power for the car to be pushed by the gas engine - this entails doing an additional energy conversion step all of the time.
BTW - there is a way to make Honda's hybrid system work in pure-electric mode. Using an auto-clutch manual gearbox, put the engine and electric motor on opposite sides of the clutch. If you want to charge at idle, have the clutch engage and the engine spin the motor with the gearbox in neutral. If you want to run in pure electric mode, shut down the engine entirely and run using the electric motor only. There doesn't need to be a clutch between the electric motor and gearbox input since the motor armature is light and doesn't have enough inertia to damage the 'box's syncros while shifting.
This all being said, I prefer the Prius' system since it's elegantly simple and has fewer parts to break - the transmission is a single planetary gearset. However, it'd be nice if they mounted it in the rear of a sports car since front-wheel-drive cars suck to drive.
-b.
But the electricity can be made using cleaner sources - nuclear, hydro, or wind. I know that none of those methods is perfect, but they have fewer harmful effects on the environment than burning fossil fuels.
-b.
-b.
Bumpers are actually 2.5mph now. 5mph bumpers were more of an consumer economic protection regulation than a safety rule - too many people complained about their cars getting expensively damaged in slow collisions. I think the rule was dropped because car makers lobbied for the right to do stupid things like equipping cars with quick-scratch body-color bumpers.
I *wish* the US had laxer safety standards (or at least accepted the results of Euro crash and emissions tests). That way, we could get nifty vehicles that we're missing out on, like the Land Rover Defender 90, Smart Car, and any number of French cars.
-b.
Then again, it's possible to have a station wagon meet those loopholes. Look at the Subaru Outback wagon or Dodge Magnum. Neither is really tall (although the Outback does have a high suspension and actually does better off road than many taller SUVs), but both are classified as light trucks, at least for fuel economy purposes.
-b.
(who's quite happy with his 30 mpg decently-safe Volvo 240 wagon)
Sort of. The ignition systems, engine designs, suspensions, and brakes of bikes are often more advanced and weight-optimized. However, many bikes still use carbs instead of fuel injection since the pollution standards for bikes are laxer and it's expensive to make a fuel injection system that works well at over 10k RPM.
Furthermore, bikes don't normally last as long as cars (100k miles is a long lifetime for a bike) so maybe their weight optimization has some negative consequences.
That being said, I ride. It's fun, my bike gets 60-65 mpg, I get to use carpool lanes alone, and I can squeeze into gaps in traffic... The downside is of course safety, but I'm willing to accept that risk to some extend.
Cheers,
-b.
This reminds me of when I was rear ended by an Acura in my (late) Fiat Spider. Total damage to Fiat, $100 (broken taillight and slightle dented rear). Damage to Acura: both pop-up headlights broken and nose smashed in by big 80s-style bumper of Fiat. Probably at least $500 to $1000.
-b.
Yep, I bought a Nokia 3120 last August. I actually didn't even buy it; it came free with a year of Cingular service.
cheers, -b.